nese were pragmatic; they chose their Japa nese candidates carefully and
managed them closely. There is no evidence that the Chinese were disad-
vantaged in the matter of contracts or ever felt themselves to be so.
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Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
A mix of personal motives led Japa nese professionals to seek out or to
respond to recruitment offers to work in China. And relative to their
Western counter parts, they knew what they were getting into, both cul-
turally and po liti cally. For one thing, they were products of a school
system that still included China studies in the curriculum, however down-
graded its place, so they had a reading knowledge of Chinese and were fa-
miliar with the Chinese classics. For another, they were already involved
with China professionally. They were part of a network of public intellec-
tuals who followed the activities of Kano Jigoro, debated the merits of “Asia
for the Asians,” read about Common Culture Association proj ects, and even
taught Chinese students who were studying in Japan. They were well aware,
too, of the turmoil in Qing politics, the crisis of the Hundred Days’ Reform,
the summer of Boxer madness, and who among Han and Manchu politi-
cians was up and who was down in the aftermath. This was all reported in
detail in the Japa nese press. China may have had a smattering of in de pen-
dent journals that were read by coastal elites at this time, but Japan had 375
newspapers, published across the country, with an estimated readership of
200,000 in Tokyo alone.
Above all else, what made Japa nese advisers attractive to their Chinese
employers was that, either directly or indirectly, they were a source of
Western expertise. They were gradu ates of Japan’s top schools, including
Tokyo University, where they had been taught “modern” subjects by Japan’s
own foreign hires, En glish, French, German, and American. Not only that,
many had studied overseas. Watanabe Ryusei, hired by Yuan Shikai in 1902,
had a Ph.D. from Cornell University; Ariga Nagao, on Yuan Shikai’s for-
eign advisory staff in 1913, had studied law in Germany and Austria; Hara-
guchi Kaname, adviser to Zhang Zhidong on railway development, gradu-
ated from Rensselaer Polytechnic in upstate New York in 1878; and Hattori
Unokichi, hired by China’s Education Ministry in 1902, was recruited di-
rectly from Germany where he was studying at the University of Berlin.
The Chinese were getting Meiji Japan’s best and brightest.
Teacher Education and University Development
When Hattori Unokichi arrived in Beijing in September 1902, he was fresh
from Germany. His stay there had been interrupted midway by a request
. 155 .
china and japan
from Japan’s Foreign Ministry that he accept a job as adviser to China’s new
minister of education. At the insistence of the Chinese, who wanted only
top- notch candidates, he was made a full professor at Tokyo University just
before his departure. Hattori had much to recommend him. He had studied
China throughout his entire school career. He had a thorough knowledge of
Chinese philosophy, history, and traditional institutions. His father- in- law
was a noted China scholar who believed, along with many of his generation,
that the field of China studies should be modernized, and that the Japa nese
needed to improve their skills in spoken Chinese so they could talk with the
big names in Qing scholarship in person, in their own language. This line of
argument had won Hattori a government grant in 1899 to study abroad, a
year in China to be followed by a government grant intended to fund one
year of study in China followed by three years in Germany.
In other words, Hattori had been to China before his advisory stint. But
his first trip was badly timed. He had arrived in Beijing in October 1899.
By spring, the Boxers were on the rampage. The big names in Qing schol-
arship were not only unavailable but in fear of their lives, caught up in the
court’s po liti cal infighting. Hattori learned one quick lesson: Japa nese visi-
tors were as vulnerable to Boxer antiforeign vio lence as Westerners. A
summer of planned research turned into a summer under siege in the lega-
tion quarter. Hattori, a bespectacled university professor with notably weak
eyesight, was handed a rifle and put on sentry duty.
In October 1902, Hattori signed a contract with the Ministry of Edu-
cation to head the teacher- training division at the newly reconstructed
Peking University. A Japa nese colleague shared the honors with his appoint-
ment as head professor of the university’s public administration division.
The respectful welcome the new Japa nese faculty received must have been
especially gratifying to Hattori. Vivid in his mind was the university in
shambles two years earlier, when one of its top administrators was exe-
cuted as a foreign sympathizer and its buildings and equipment were van-
dalized by Rus sian and German forces in the aftermath of the siege. The
scene in China had now shifted, and foreigners were once again being asked
to play an advisory role in China’s higher education.
Hattori’s contract spelled out payments and remedies in case of termi-
nation but included no job description or scope of work. He was on his own
to come up with a program, based on his three years of experience teaching
. 156 .
Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
at Kano Jigoro’s Teachers College. Though hard- pressed to or ga nize the cur-
riculum; equip classrooms, laboratories, and dormitories; purchase books
and lab specimens; and devise a school entrance exam in a matter of weeks,
he somehow managed to sign up 130 students by mid- October as the first
enrollees in Peking University’s new teacher- training division. By the fol-
lowing year, enrollment topped 300. Thirteen Japa nese teachers were on the
education- division faculty, seven full- time. Hattori had an able staff of
teaching assistants, chosen from Chinese students who had returned from
Japan. Zhang Zhidong even attended one of Hattori’s psy chol ogy lectures,
appearing quite baffled by the subject matter. Hattori and his wife, a close
friend of Shimoda Utako, felt confident enough to approach high- level Chi-
nese contacts about making women’s education a national priority, an area
where they felt Japan had a comparative advantage.
Years later, in 1924, Fan Yuanlian, Hattori’s former teaching assistant
who was now president of Beijing Normal University, welcomed Hattori
back to the campus in a speech citing his dedicated ser vice and pioneering
role in developing teacher education in China. Only the two of them knew
the extent to which Hattori’s “dedicated ser vice” had been a matter of dealing
with constant bureaucratic headaches. As an outsider, Hattori believed all
along that he— and Japan— had more to offer in the field than he was being
asked to provide. He had wanted to be a university- wide planner, not simply
the man in charge of teacher training.
Hattori sought to move quickly to expand the
teacher-training program
and replace Japa nese hires with Chinese educators. “Teachers responsible
for at least the fundamental courses must be Chinese or the institution has
no value as a Chinese university,” Hattori said.10 With this goal in mind, he
started a program to send the best Chinese students for further training in
Japan, but it ran into mismanagement on both sides. Hattori was apol o-
getic about Japan’s shortcomings, though he also complained about China’s
overall reform approach, in par tic u lar, that students returned from Japan
were not being hired in sufficient numbers because hardliners in the cen-
tral government saw the newly trained young people as a potential po liti cal
threat.
More to the point as far as Hattori’s own future in China was concerned,
politics after 1905 took a conservative turn. The minister of education, re-
ceptive to Japa nese assistance, was sacked; Fan Yuanlian, who shared his
. 157 .
china and japan
view, quit; and Hattori and six of his teachers returned to Japan in Jan-
uary 1909. The teacher-training program at Peking University continued,
but with only Chinese administrators and faculty and with more teaching
hours devoted to moral education. Regulations were issued to prohibit
students from engaging in politics.
For all of China’s interest in Japan’s innovative capacity in educational
development, politics typically intruded when it came down to dealing with
the realities of institution building. Zhang Zhidong, identified as part of
the pro- Japan group, may have supported Hattori’s efforts (he had even
come around to funding girls’ kindergartens), but conservative Manchus did
not. Japa nese newspapers speculated that the real reason for the departure
of Hattori and his colleagues was that they had lost out to the Eu ro pe ans
and Americans in the competition for influence over the Chinese govern-
ment. Hattori as much as agreed, faulting the Japa nese government for
failing to make the necessary financial commitment to establish a first- class
Japanese- staffed college in the Beijing area. As he saw it, Western efforts to
win the hearts and minds of the Chinese had the advantage of multiple
sources of funding and aggressive tactics to promote the sale of educational
materials and equipment. He complained about the Chinese as well. He
criticized them for what he identified as their historically begrudging atti-
tude toward anything foreign and their failure to realize that, if updated,
Confucian values were entirely compatible with modernization.
The experiences of Japa nese advisers working in China were many and
varied, but they essentially encountered the same sorts of prob lems again
and again: competition from other foreigners trying to exert influence, un-
certain signals from their own government, a slow- acting, technically inex-
perienced Chinese bureaucracy, and the messiness of late- Qing politics. The
latter complication worsened in the post- Boxer years, as vari ous groups,
Han and Manchu, liberal and conservative, strug gled for power in an in-
creasingly unstable China.
Building a Public Security Force
The Japa nese adviser who navigated these late- Qing hazards with the
greatest success was Kawashima Naniwa. Kawashima was the epitome of
an old China hand, so fluent in Chinese that he could pass as Chinese.
. 158 .
Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
China was not only in his life, it was his life. Although the West was a con-
stant reference point for him, as it was for the rest of his generation, it was
so in an entirely negative sense. Whereas his schoolmates flocked to Eu ro-
pean language classes, he insisted on majoring in Chinese, and he happily
recited the classics to all who would listen. He was consistently anti- Western,
racially, culturally, and viscerally, and he took on Japan’s humiliation at the
hands of the foreign powers as his personal burden. His viewpoint was an
early expression of the emotionally charged “liberation of Asia from white
domination” version of Asia for the Asians that would inflame Japa nese
thinking in the 1930s and 1940s. Ironically, Kawashima’s obsession with
China shared something essential with Konoe’s more sophisticated, rea-
soned, soft- power arguments for a redirection of Japan’s foreign policy: the
belief that prioritizing engagement with China as a counterweight to the
West was both culturally feasible and in the best interests of both countries.
When it came to career choice, Kawashima rejected both military school
and business. Yet he was also not drawn to China scholarship. He wanted
real- life involvement in China, and in that re spect— that is, in becoming a
new- style China expert, a practitioner with an academic background—
he resembled Hattori, who was unlike him in almost every other way.
Kawashima spent years in China beginning in the 1880s, first as a freelance
intelligence agent for the military and then under contract as an army in-
terpreter during the Sino- Japanese War, directly followed by a brief stint
as supervisor of a drug- suppression unit in occupied Taiwan. Ever restless,
Kawashima returned to Tokyo in the late 1890s to teach Chinese language
and lit er a ture at Japan’s Military Acad emy and at Kano Jigoro’s Tokyo
Teachers College.
The Boxer Uprising was a turning point for Kawashima. As Japan put
together an 8,000- man contingent to join the British- led co ali tion marching
on Beijing, Kawashima’s unique language skills were again sought out by
the Japa nese army, and he signed on as an interpreter in late June. Once co-
ali tion troops secured Beijing, they divided it into sectors, each run by a
diff er ent national force and each force charged with ridding the city of sus-
pected Boxers and restoring order. For Japan, the role of occupier meant
proving its administrative capabilities for the first time before an interna-
tional audience, a role made all the more prominent by the fact that, as the
biggest contributor to the allied effort, Japan was given the largest area to
. 159 .
china and japan
govern. This was Kawashima’s big break. Fluent in Chinese and with an in-
sider’s view of Chinese culture and politics, he was a natu ral to work with
Japan’s peacekeepers to train the old Beijing gendarmerie in modern police
methods. Upgrading local security was a logical first step in bringing the
city that had run riot back to normal. But there were long- term implica-
tions that Kawashima was well aware of: working within a Chinese gov-
ernment agency on the vital task of creating a modern public security system
had the potential to give Japan the kind of commanding influence that the
British had enjoyed for fifty years through their control of the Chinese Mar-
itime Customs Ser vice.
Pursuit of national interest worked both ways. As the streets became
safer, Kawashima’s reputation for getting things done attracted the atten-
tion of Li Hongzhang and se nior Manchus in the transition government
who were conce
rned about keeping the city clear of terrorist ele ments after
the withdrawal of the international troops. When they established the Bei-
jing Police Acad emy in June 1901 to replace the Japa nese army’s training unit,
they asked Kawashima to stay on as director. The former army interpreter
now had the job of directing the Police Acad emy, the title of adviser to the
Chinese government, a precedent- setting (for a foreigner) second rank
within the Chinese bureaucracy, and a handsome salary, prob ably twice what
he had made at Tokyo Teachers College. Kawashima worked fast. One year
later, he had put in place at the acad emy a staff of thirty- five, including four-
teen Japa nese teachers, and 300 students enrolled annually in the acad emy’s
three- to nine- month programs in city ordinances, street patrol methods,
firefighting, and prison management. Promising students were already being
selected for yearlong training programs in Japan. During its first five years,
the Police Acad emy graduated 3,000 students, the elite core of Beijing’s new
police force. Governor Yuan Shikai contacted Kawashima about setting up a
similar police training unit in Baoding, and he quickly had a program under
way. During the 1903–1910 period, about twenty Japa nese teachers and ad-
visers worked in seven provinces to replicate the original Kawashima model.
Kawashima’s career break at the acad emy gave him entrée to an even
greater role. In 1902, China’s Grand Council authorized the creation of a
new Ministry of Public Works and Police, which was placed under the stew-
ardship of a young Manchu, Prince Su. Kawashima, the most knowledge-
able person around, was given the job of assisting Prince Su in getting the
. 160 .
Japa nese Lessons for a Modernizing China, 1895–1937
police- reform agenda moving forward rapidly. This was the start of a twenty-
year friendship between Prince Su and Kawashima that ultimately saw the
reversal of Qing fortunes as well as their own. Congenial and po liti cally as-
tute, Prince Su was not only receptive to power- sharing overtures from the
exiled constitutional monarchists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, but he
also kept channels open to anti- Qing activists like Wang Jing wei (see Bi-
ographies of Key Figures), an early associate of Sun Yat- sen in Japan, later
head of the war time collaborationist government in Nanjing. In fact, in a
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