Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change

By Marius B. Jansen

Long recognized as an authority on Japanese history, Marius Jansen synthesizes a lifetime of scholarship in this landmark book. Bringing together the series of Brown and Haley lectures delivered in 1975 at the University of Puget Sound, Japan and Its World continues to be a source of insight for anyone interested in the changing ideas the Japanese have had of themselves, the United States, and the Western world during the past two centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691242958

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The United States Bicentennial provided an inviting occasion to look back over the changes that have taken place in Japan during those centuries. Two hundred years ago Japan was a small, underdeveloped country, largely secluded from the outside world. A hundred years later, however, it had resolved to restructure its institutions on Western lines, and sent a good part of its governing elite on an extensive tour of the Western world to observe the sources of wealth and strength in other countries. For the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 Japan sent an impressive exhibit surpassed by few in size and by none in interest as notice of the nation's intent to modernize and internationalize. The exhibit was of such quality that one writer confessed: We have been accustomed to regard that country as uncivilized, or half-civilized at the best, but we found here abundant evidences that it outshines the most cultivated nations of Europe in arts which are their pride and glory, and which are regarded as among the proudest tokens of their high civilization.* Today, three decades after its crushing defeat in World War II Japan is one of the great powers in the world, and one of the small number of industrialized democracies.

It is little wonder that Japanese perceptions of the outside world have shifted sharply throughout these two centuries. The pages which follow focus on those perceptions. Japan’s emergence from isolation to international importance was an event of central importance to world history and especially to the history of the United States. In the twentieth century the transition was blurred by misunderstanding and error on both sides and punctuated by violence. The United States, no less than Japan, was emerging into international importance during the same period, and its perceptions of international society underwent changes scarcely less dramatic than those of Japan.

No part of those perceptions shifted more erratically than American views of Japan. On the shelves of our libraries, books whose titles promise a friendly, beguiling, and exotic Japan rub shoulders with others that warn against an aggressive, angry, and suspicious rival. Since the war the danger of military attack has faded from this focus, only to reappear at times as warning of a hard-working, humorless, and desperately skillful economic competitor. The prognosticators have shifted slowly from emphasis upon a Japan destined for poverty without its mainland and colonial holdings, to a Japan that was after all going to survive through hard work and modest living, to a Japan that was surely going to take over the world through its burgeoning economic growth. Postwar titles mix optimism and even dismay about the new superpower with metaphors like blossoms to indicate its fragility. It is not to be wondered at that the Japanese themselves exhibit mercurial shifts from euphoria to depression.

The intellectual and psychological aspects of the Japanese world view have deeper historical roots than the speculations of journalists and pundits, however; and it is these aspects of Japanese history that have dominated much of my work for many years. They seem to me increasingly central to an understanding of modern Japan and of modern East Asia. Until recently the Japanese have seen their world as a hierarchy, and their tendency to rank the countries in it in order of esteem and importance undoubtedly owed much to the structure of their own society and experience. I have tried in these lectures to examine changes in that ranking through the careers and views of some particularly interesting figures. The flood of recent publications and commentary makes it particularly inviting to focus the discussion in this way. It is nevertheless a field in which our study of Japan is still at a very early stage, and it is my hope that these discussions will indicate to others some of the rewards and possibilities of this kind of inquiry.

The lectures stand as they were given, although some facts, statistics, and titles have been added to make allowance for recent developments and publication.

Citations, with one or two exceptions, have been placed in the Bibliographical Note.

Princeton, 1979 M.B.J.

* Quoted by Neil Harris, in All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876-1904, in Akira Iriye, ed. Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 30.

I

Challenges to the Confucian Order in the 1770's

Anyone who titles a set of lectures Japan's Bicentennial has to begin by explaining what it is that he proposes to commemorate. Our own Bicentennial at the moment needs no defense, for the importance of 1776 is clear. A few years ago the Japanese were busy with a Centennial of their own, but in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 they too had a clearly distinguishable event. I have nothing so sharply etched for the 1770's in Japan. What I do have to discuss is the beginnings of decisive change in the way the Japanese perceived their world. Changes of this sort are not usually associated with a single great event. They are rather the fruit of a series of events in thought and in publication that prepare the way for the political events to come.

I have rather good company in claiming great importance for the 1770's. Some years ago Donald Keene wrote of men in this period that one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds . . . a new spirit, restless, curious, and receptive. And, more recently, the Tokyo University historian Haga Torn * has written that in the mid 1770’s the Japanese experienced changes in consciousness, in their way of thinking and in perception, to an altogether profound degree. The products of this included publication of a work on electricity, and another expressing pointed preference for Western approaches to physics over the explanations in traditional Chinese learning. But the shift is probably most appropriately symbolized by the celebrated decision of the doctor Sugita Gempaku to be present at the dissection of an executed criminal in 1771. Old Mother Green Tea, the subject of the inquiry, proved through the arrangement of her viscera that a Dutch book on anatomy that Sugita had acquired was correct and that textbooks of Chinese medicine were wrong. It was not true, as some had explained, that Westerners and Orientals were constructed differently. Or, as had also been suggested, that rigor mortis resulted in a rearrangement of the body’s parts. Sugita and his companion resolved, as they walked home, to translate the work; and we made a vow, he wrote later, to seek facts through experiment. In 1774 they published the volume in question, thereby beginning an age of translation of Western books into Japanese. The very next year Sugita, in a dialogue he entitled Words of a Crazy Doctor, cheerfully took on the whole Chinese cultural tradition.

This event was of profound significance for Japan’s world view. The steps in question served as symbols, but also as agents, for the demolition of a traditional view of the outside