It is difficult to determine what aspects of premodern Japan were significant in shaping modern Japan and what their relative importance may have been. Certainly one significant factor was the natural isolation of an island nation, which, strengthened by more than two centuries of artificially enforced isolation, helped make the Japanese a very homogeneous people, extremely conscious of their own identity and distinctiveness. They lacked important ethnic minorities and religious cleavages, which have been the bane of many modernizing countries. In addition, they had a sense of nationalism not unlike that of contemporary European nations, but largely lacking in most non-Western lands at that time. Though maintaining feudal autonomies and bitterly divided over policies toward the West, no Japanese for a moment thought of supporting some foreign power against his own countrymen.
Why nationalism should have appeared so early and developed so fully in Japan, long before it became important in other Asian lands, is an interesting question. A sense of national identity seems to have been stirred as early as the first great period of cultural borrowing from China, probably inspired by a feeling of inferiority—the sharp contrast between a small and backward Japan and an incomparably larger, older, and more advanced China. One is reminded of the early nationalism of North Europe, which may have resulted from a similar inferiority complex toward the older and more developed cultures of the lands of the Mediterranean. This early awareness of the superiority of China had also produced a clear realization of the possibility of learning from abroad. Cultural imports to Japan had come by sea and had therefore been clearly identifiable. The Japanese, unlike most other peoples, East or West, had long been aware that much of their civilization had come from abroad. Therefore, unlike the Chinese and other non-Western peoples, they had no difficulty in realizing in the nineteenth century that there was much that not only could but must be learned from the West.
Japan’s more than two centuries of enforced isolation had also made possible an equally long period of absolute peace and order, during which the Japanese had developed an extremely advanced and complex economy and society, high levels of education, an extraordinary degree of national economic and intellectual unity, and high standards of political efficiency. It was by no means a backward nation and lagged appreciably behind the West only in technology. In group coordination and skills in cooperation, it probably was well ahead of most Western lands. Long experience with orderly and peaceful legal processes probably account for the relative lack of violence accompanying the great changes that took place in the 1860s and 1870s.
The Japanese, like the other peoples of East Asia, had a strong work ethic and a deeply ingrained drive for education, characteristics not widely shared among most currently modernizing nations. But unlike the other peoples of East Asia, who had centrally unified monarchies, they had a basically feudal political structure and, during their long period of peace, had developed an economic, social, and intellectual system that no longer fitted this political structure very well. The top feudal class was seriously in debt to the theoretically lowest merchant class. Ambitious samurai of low rank hungered for a political system that recognized ability and achievement over birth. Secure in their feudal niches, merchants and peasants enjoyed broad autonomies in running their own town or village affairs and often developed into vigorous entrepreneurs. Japanese society was riddled with inconsistencies and, unlike the monolithically solid social and political systems of China and Korea, was ripe for change. It required no prolonged period of destructive blows from the outside before it collapsed, making way for new institutions.
When Western pressures forced a change, Japan had one other advantage over most other non-Western countries—a native justification for revolution. While other modernizing nations have usually had to find such a justification in some little-understood foreign ideology, such as republicanism and democracy or, in more recent times, in socialism and communism, Japan found it in the “restoration” of the imperial rule of antiquity. Bogus though it may have been, imperial rule was a revolutionary cause that was understandable and attractive to most Japanese.
One final important factor in the success of the Meiji Restoration may have been that its leaders were able to move slowly and pragmatically, as they saw fit. There was no established ideology they had to measure up to or any pressures of great expectation among their people or on the part of foreigners. Until Japan itself had accomplished modernization, no one believed that it was possible for a non-Western country to do so. The leaders were left free to take things in logical sequence, concentrating on fundamentals first and more difficult but less essential steps later. They established law and order, developed communications, concentrated on primary education before putting broad emphasis on higher education, and nurtured agricultural growth and the development of simple industries before attempting the more difficult and costly stages of industrialization. They could also be pragmatically experimental, quickly abandoning false starts and trying new ones until they found one that succeeded.
Unfortunately, the Japanese experience has been either ignored or misread by most later modernizing nations. Though lacking many of the advantages the Japanese had when they started modernizing, these other countries have expected to achieve industrialization and democracy or communism overnight. They have often started building at the top rather than the bottom, emphasizing universities over primary and secondary education, steel mills and jet airlines over agriculture and simple industries. They have attempted to create sophisticated democratic or socialist institutions before their own people had gained the knowledge and experience to operate either. They have sought to play a role on the world stage before they had put their own countries in order. It is probably for such reasons that Japan still stands alone as the one major non-Western nation to have made the full transition to a modernized society and economy with relatively little turmoil and extraordinary success.
9
CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT AND EMPIRE
The story of Japan’s great transition from feudal rule to modern centralized government in the second half of the nineteenth century is usually told from the point of view of the small but talented leadership that guided this transformation. There is, however, another side to the story. The daring but pragmatic steps the leaders took to unify the country, reorganize its social and political system, and modernize its economy were, of course, necessary to the success of the whole venture, as was also their capacity to work together and not break up in fighting over personal power. But none of what they attempted would have really succeeded if it had not been matched by a vigorous response on the part of the Japanese people as a whole. This was as necessary for the Meiji “miracle,” as we might well call it, as the achievements of the leaders. Without it, well-meaning efforts at reform from the top down would probably have sunk into a quagmire of confusion, indifference, and stagnation.
It was basically the peasants who, on their own, aggressively took advantage of the silk blight in Europe and the possibility of producing a better quality of silk through mechanized silk reeling, and took control of the burgeoning market for silk abroad. It was the peasants, too, who seized the opportunities offered by the new conditions to expand agricultural production. Ambitious young men from all classes, wishing to learn English, modern science, and Western business methods, flocked to missionary schools, giving them their early importance in modern Japanese education. Other young men rushed to other private institutions, like Keio, which also had been set up before the government’s own educational program could get under way. The government, of course, had to create the necessary financial institutions, develop suitable economic conditions, and lead the way in pilot industries, but without the enthusiastic self-generated efforts of thousands of private Japanese, this government initiative would have produced few results. A motley crew of daring entrepreneurs, drawn mainly from the samurai class but including many peasants and some urban merchants, took advantage of Matsukata�
��s reforms to make Japanese industry pay its own way and become internationally competitive. Without this popular response, the government’s efforts at economic modernization and industrialization would have proved to be nothing but an empty shell.
It is not surprising that private citizens such as these who took such an active role in the country’s economy should begin to demand a role in its political life. The concepts of political rights and democracy had never existed in feudal Japan, but the autonomies of the feudal system had, in reality, given rights of a sort to all groups within their own specific niches of activity. The large samurai class in particular had enjoyed a place in local political leadership, and ambitious men from this class, stimulated by Japan’s rapidly changing conditions and the flood of new ideas pouring in from the West, soon began to demand a share in the new government. The leaders in power were few in number and drawn overwhelmingly from Satsuma, Choshu, and a handful of other domains of western Japan. The bulk of the samurai and other outsiders came from the shogun’s former realm or from domains that had played no part in the so-called Restoration. Many of them deeply resented or even despised the men from Satsuma and Choshu who were in political control, and it was not unnatural for them to begin to assert their own rights to a share in leadership, arguing in terms of constitutional government and parliamentary democracy that appeared to be so successful in the West.
The government leaders, too, were far from satisfied with the situation as it existed. By brilliant improvisation, they successfully weathered the first two perilous decades of the new regime, but they were still far from achieving their real objectives: winning full legal equality with the West by ending the “unequal treaties” and establishing a stable, smoothly running system at home that would be accepted by everyone without question and would therefore continue automatically after they themselves were gone. Japan remained in constant flux, and the Westerners still regarded it as semibarbarous. The leaders longed for the kind of stable order they themselves had been born into and for full recognition from the West as part of the civilized world.
Even the leaders felt that these objectives might best be achieved through a constitution of the Western type, including some sort of assembly to represent the people. Adopting such Western institutions, they felt, would win them the respect of the West, which was necessary if Japan was to be accepted as an equal. In addition, these institutions appeared from the Western experience to have inherent elements of strength, capable of creating firm bonds between the people and their government. From the start the leaders had also clearly realized it would be necessary to give a greater role in the government to the large numbers of samurai who were accustomed to having some political authority but were now totally excluded from the ruling group. Thus some form of a constitution together with a national assembly seemed to them, too, the best way to achieve a number of desirable objectives.
Concern about the samurai had induced the leaders to include in the Five Articles Oath of 1868 the statement that “deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion.” This was not a promise of democracy, of which they knew very little at that time, but an attempt to reassure the samurai class as a whole that it would not be excluded from the new regime. Early attempts, however, to create assemblies for public discussion failed miserably, because there was no understanding of the working of such institutions. By the 1880s the leadership group, instead of growing, had shrunk to a small and well-defined oligarchy, which later came to be known as the genro, or “elder statesmen.”
The government had continued to make promises to create an assembly and had made attempts at writing a constitution. In the meantime, however, some of the samurai outsiders had tried to take things into their own hands. In 1873 the leadership group had split over a proposal to send an expedition to Korea, ostensibly to retaliate for that nation’s insulting attitude toward the new Japanese government but in reality to help restore the morale of the collapsing samurai class through a military campaign. Iwakura and other moderates, who had just visited the West and seen its frightening strength, overruled the proposal, but some of the chief members of the losing group, including Saigo and Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa, who, like Saigo, had been one of the main military leaders in the Meiji revolution, then withdrew from the government.
Saigo went back to Satsuma, where he eventually met his end as the leader of the great samurai rebellion of 1877, but Itagaki, returning to Tosa, organized a group of followers into an incipient political party to agitate for better treatment of the samurai and for popular participation in government. His following was at first largely limited to Tosa samurai, but soon he was joined by others, including well-to-do peasants and urban merchants, concerned with what was done with the taxes they paid. Intellectuals, inspired by Rousseau and British liberal thought, also joined the group, giving it a somewhat radical tinge, and it became known as “the freedom and people’s rights movement” (jiyu-minken-undo).
By the 1880s the original top leaders of the Restoration were gone. Saigo had been killed in 1877, and Kido died the same year. Okubo, who had emerged as the strongest leader, was assassinated by a diehard conservative in 1878 in revenge for Saigo’s death, and Iwakura followed, though by natural causes, in 1883. This left control to a new and slightly younger group from among the leaders. Prominent among them were Ito Hirobumi of Choshu, Okuma Shigenobu of Hizen, who had taken the lead in many of the economic and administrative reforms, Yamagata of Choshu, the builder of the new army, and Matsukata of Satsuma, who had led in tax reforms and the restoration of fiscal stability.
In 1879 the leaders had the emperor request each of them for their personal views on plans for a constitution. Okuma, who was quite iconoclastic by Japanese standards and something of an outsider in the government group, being from neither Satsuma nor Choshu, presented in 1881 a radical proposal for the immediate adoption of the full British parliamentary system. The others were shocked and regarded Okuma’s act as a dangerous play for popular support and increased personal influence. They decided to drop him from the government and countered his move by agreeing on a slow and cautious approach to constitutional government; in the emperor’s name, they issued a promise that a constitution would be adopted by 1890. Okuma, on leaving the government, followed Itagaki’s example by founding a political party in 1882. In the same year he also started a school to train political leaders, which grew into Waseda University, joining Keio as one of Japan’s two most prestigious private universities. Thus by the early 1880s there were two popular parties demanding a share in political leadership.
Ito took the lead within the government in drawing up the new constitution. As early as 1881 certain basic principles of a strongly conservative nature had been agreed upon, and Ito then led a study mission to observe the working of the various constitutions of Europe, visiting both England and France but concentrating on relatively conservative Germany and Austria. The greater authority of the monarchs and the limited powers of the parliaments in these two lands seemed to him to better fit conditions in Japan than the political systems of England and the other more liberal countries.
This choice of conservative German and Austrian models for the constitution coincided with a swing in the mid-1880s away from a craze for all things Western and back toward traditional Japanese values. This was the first of the swings of the pendulum that have characterized Japanese attitudes toward the West during the past century and a half and are also found in the reactions of other non-Western countries that are attempting to modernize themselves. In such swings, a period of avid borrowing from the West is followed by a reaction against it, before a new swing toward Western influence begins again. In Japan’s backward swing of the 1880s, certain unnecessary aspects of Western civilization were abandoned, such as ballroom dancing, which the Japanese leadership had been valiantly attempting to adopt. Philosophic justification for the reversion to older concepts was expressed in a d
ocument called the Imperial Rescript on Education, which was issued in 1890, the very year the new constitution went into effect. The rescript had little to say about education but extolled traditional Confucian and Japanese virtues, becoming in time a sort of revered manifesto of Japanese conservatism.
The actual drafting of the constitution did not take place until just before the promised date of 1890 and was undertaken with infinite care; German scholars were consulted so that the document would be philosophically respectable in Western eyes while still being applicable to Japanese social and political conditions. To be sure of its practicability, Ito and his colleagues first experimented with elements that were to become part of the new system. The central concern of the oligarchs was to protect the emperor’s prerogatives, because these gave them their own authority and justification for rule. Ito also saw the emperor as a spiritual force taking the place of Christianity, which he felt lay behind the constitutions of the European states. In the constitution, the emperor was described as “sacred and inviolable,” and full sovereignty and all powers were placed in his hands, at least in theory. The throne was also surrounded with institutions to bolster its strength, such as a privy council of undefined powers, created in 1888. In order to have a House of Peers to balance a popular assembly, as in the traditional British parliamentary pattern, a peerage was created in 1884. It was made up from the old court aristocracy, the former daimyo, and the new leaders themselves, who eventually promoted their most prominent members to the top ranks of prince and marquis.
In 1885 a modern cabinet system was adopted to exercise central executive control, though it was not specifically mentioned in the constitution so that the elected assembly could not, in the future, force the whole cabinet to resign as a group. Ito became the first prime minister, and the rest of the cabinet was virtually a roster of the oligarchs. For the next decade and a half the oligarchs shuffled the posts around among themselves and their leading protégés, and until 1898 they strictly followed the custom of alternating the prime ministership between men from Choshu and Satsuma.
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