A Short Introduction to Japanese History

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Table of Contents

Copyright Notice	3

History of This Document	3

Introduction	5

Setting the Stage: Geography	5

The Earliest Times	9

Pre-History	9

Jomon and Yayoi Periods	9

The Yamato Period	11

Early History	13

Intellectual Influences	15

The Nara and Heian Periods	17

The Nara and Heian Periods	17

The Rise of the Samurai	19

The Kamakura Period	21

The Kamakura Period	21

The Warring States Period	23

The Nutshell Version	23

Oda Nobunaga	23

Hideyoshi	23

The Europeans and Their Guns	23

Tokugawa Ieyasu	25

The Warring States Period	25

The Decline of the Ashikaga	25

The Daimyo Families	25

Matters Martial	25

The Battles	25

Strategy and Tactics	25

Weaponry	25

Alliances	27

The Europeans	27

The Unification of the Country	27

Cultural Influences	29

The Tokugawa Period	31

The Tokugawa (Edo) Period in a Nutshell	31

Prelude: The Unification of Japan	31

Tokugawa Ieyasu and his Bakufu	31

Interlude: Bushido	35

Ieyasu's Grandson Iemitsu	35

Interlude: Old Books, National Learning and Other -isms	35

My Koku is Bigger than Your Koku	37

Interlude: No Women on the Stage	39

Introverts, Extroverts and Black Ships	41

The End of “Feudal” Japan	43

The Meiji Restoration	45

Background to the Meiji Period	45

Unequal Treaties	45

The Meiji Leadership	47

Hard Work, Luck, and Lots of Suffering	47

Demise of the Han	49

Good Luck	49

Hard Work	51

Schools	51

Industrialization	53

Learning from the West	53

The Payoff: Foreign Affairs	55

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95	55

The Triple Intervention	57

Treaty Revision	57

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance	57

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05	59

The Home Front: We Did It! Now What?	61

Intellectual Influences	63

Shinto	63

Buddhism	63

Confucianism	65

The Meiji Period, Part 2	69

The Taisho Period	71

The Early Showa Period	73

World War Two	75

The Pacific, December of 1941	75

The Occupation of Japan	79

The Economic Miracle and The Later Showa Period	81

Japan After Hirohito	83

The GNU Free Documentation License	85

PREAMBLE	85

1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS	85

2. VERBATIM COPYING	87

3. COPYING IN QUANTITY	87

4. MODIFICATIONS	89

5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS	91

6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS	91

7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS	93

8. TRANSLATION	93

9. TERMINATION	93

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE	93

11. HOW TO USE THIS LICENSE FOR YOUR DOCUMENTS	95

Copyright Notice

Copyright © 2001-2004 Chris Spackman

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

History of This Document

I started this document several years ago as a series of articles to introduce Japanese history to JETs. It is continually under construction. Please check for a more recent version before reporting any mistakes. The newest version should always be available from www.openhistory.org or from me directly at the address below.

Please send any comments, corrections, or suggestions to me at jhdp@openhistory.org

Chris Spackman is currently the only contributor. Anyone is welcome to contribute.

Introduction

First, a note about the required division of Japanese history into “Periods.” Reality alert: Just because you can divide your own life into periods – such as childhood, high school, and middle-age for example – does that mean that who and what you are / were changed drastically on the first day of your college career? Probably not. Did puberty overtake you in a day and suddenly you were an adult? My condolences if it did. The point is that even though historians love to divide the past into all sorts of periods, that doesn't mean that anything changed suddenly for the majority of the people. Nor does it mean that nothing changed. Periods are conveniences; ways of breaking several thousands of years into easily digested pieces. For that reason, I have elected to divide the chapters in this book along lines of generally recognized periods of Japanese history. This is, of course, not the only way this could be done.

Setting the Stage: Geography

Anyone interested enought to find and read a book like this is probably already aware that Japan is an island nation. Big surprise. It is composed of four main islands (NE to SW, they are: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) and hundreds of smaller ones, all formed through volcanic activity. Of the four main islands, northern Kyushu and western Honshu are the closest to the Asian continent.

Illustration 1The Japanese Islands and Parts of the Asian Mainland Korea is about 130 miles from Japan. China is a bit farther. This distance is something like four times the width of the English channel. The effect is that for much of its history Japan has been close enough to benefit from continental culture, but isolated enough to avoid being overwhelmed by it. This has been of enormous importance in the development of Japanese culture. While Europe and China suffered repeated invasions by steppe nomads and other Eurasian barbarians, Japan was spared each time (save two, the Mongols invaded twice but lost both times).

The barbarians who ravaged Eurasia did not share the cultural assumptions of the people they conquered and thus could greatly threaten or damage the subjected culture. This was not the case in Japan – although they had centuries of civil war, it was civil, that is, it usually stayed inside the bounds Japanese culture set for warfare. Of course, it was also violent, as war tends to be, so although holy places were important for all sides they were sometimes destroyed. But with the important exceptions of temples and shrines that were active participants in the wars, those that were destroyed were usually rebuilt soon after the war ended because they were just as important to the victor as to his enemies. 'Barbarians' who ravaged Europe and China saw no reason to treat churches or monasteries as anything other than convenient concentrations of gold and other wealth. This isolation is one reason that Kyoto is full of temples and shrines dating back many hundreds of years.

Most (over 75%) of Japan is hilly or mountainous, meaning extremely limited room to live and grow crops. Only about 14% of Japan's land is arable. For comparison the figure for the U.S. is 20%, and for the United Kingdom, 29%. [ADD CHART: comparative stats for various countries] The Japanese love to dwell on how small their country is, and although several countries in Europe are in fact smaller, Japan is by no means a large country. America's arable land alone is more than twice as large as the whole of Japan. An unfortunate consequence of steep mountains is that Japan's rivers are short, swift, and shallow; they cannot be used for transportation. Everyone and everything has to walk or be carried over the mountains.

Japan's rivers do serve one purpose: they are used to irrigate the plains. However, all these mountains don't leave a whole lot of room for plains. What flat areas there are have to serve the dual functions of agriculture and providing living space. It is no accident that the three largest plains in Japan are home to five of the largest cities. Tokyo occupies much of the Kanto plain, Nagoya is situated on the Nobi plain while Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe share the Kinai plain. These three account for over 15 million people in a combined space a little smaller than Connecticut. Not a whole lot of room left for growing rice. When all the math is done, Japan has to try to feed 125 million people crammed into a mountainous country about the size of California with precious little farmland.As if this weren't bad enough, Japan lacks almost every mineral and resource needed by industrialized countries in the modern world. Oil is a good example: Japan imports 99% of it's oil and petroleum products.

One fact remains to be addressed. Japan, a small island nation, has a longer total coastline than China, a huge continental power. Practically since day one, geography has forced, or at least encouraged, the Japanese to look out to the oceans for food and transport. Aquatic plants that in English are labeled “weeds” are important items in the Japanese diet. The Japanese have a long history of sea trade with East and Southeast Asia. Japanese pirates were the scourge of Asian seas for centuries. Until the 1600's, there were sizable Japanese communities scattered throughout East and Southeast Asia. It was only under the Tokugawa Bakufu (1600 to 1867) that the Japanese were forced to turn their collective back on the open seas.

The Earliest Times

Pre-History

No one knows exactly where the Japanese came from. Despite what some people claim, they are not a homogeneous race. (There is no such thing.) Although there is a fair amount of controversy about their origins, the people described as “Japanese” are related to mainland East Asians and thought to be related to South East Asians and South Pacific Islanders as well. There has in the past been quite a bit of immigration from, and through, Korea.

The Japanese language is thought to be related to the Polynesian and Altaic language families. What this all boils down to is that the “Japanese” are in fact quite a mixed group. However, there hasn't been any large scale immigration in centuries. So, the Japanese might not be the mongrols that many modern Americans are, but in the long duree, there is no such thing as a pure race and the Japanese are as impure as everyone else.

Jomon and Yayoi Periods

Long, long ago, some stone age types lived in Japan. They shared the islands with a proto-Caucasian group of people known today as the Ainu. Why either of these groups were here no one really knows. What is known is that someone other than them was making pottery decorated with intricate cord markings sometime around 8,000 B.C. These people, whoever they were, lived in pit dwellings and very inconsiderately didn't bother leaving any written documents for the historian to understand them by. Since they couldn't read or write this isn't all that surprising. What they left us instead was lots of those pots with the really neat cord markings, which is why some archeologist somewhere decided to name this stone age hunter-and-gatherer culture the “Jomon” culture and their day of supreme rulership of the sacred islands as the “Jomon Period.” Jomon, as you might have guessed, means “cord markings.” The Jomon period lasted until a wave of immigrants from the Asian mainland arrived around 250 BC with better technology and took over from the Jomon people. Quite logically, this new period from about 250 BC to about 250 AD is known as the “Yayoi Period.”

Actually, the only reason this period is called “Yayoi” is because that is where the first artifacts of the culture were found. Soon after these new folks arrived iron and bronze tools and weapons made their first appearance in Japan. Around 100 BC the rice culture of South East Asia entered Japan. This was to define the Japanese way of life until industrialization in the late nineteenth Century.

Despite the presence of iron and rice, we are still not into historic times yet – these people didn't write anything down either. Lucky for us that the Chinese did. Chronicles from the third century A.D. tell us that a queen named Pimiku (or Himiko) united “Japan” (it wasn't called that yet) after a period of civil warfare. No one really knows exactly where Himiko's queendom was since the Chinese directions are rather vague. It is also unknown whether Himiko's family is the same one that emerges into the light of history as the imperial family (the one that has continued as the ruling house until the present day – they even were allowed to govern once or twice, but more on that later).

You may have noticed how young the 'ancient' Japanese nation is. Here we are, about to embark on the fourth century after the death of Jesus and Japan barely exists. Rome was well past its prime before the “Japanese” were advanced enough to qualify as barbarians. Compared to the USA, civilization in Japan may indeed be old, but much of European, African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese civilization is older still. The reason for this is simple – being basically at the end of the world, the Japanese had to wait a long time for civilization to reach them. When it finally did, it was Chinese and it came to Japan through Korea.

The Yamato Period

The Yayoi period lasted until another wave of immigrants came in and started building big tombs for their (dead) leaders. It was during this, the Yamato Period, (about 300-710 A.D.) that Chinese and Korean culture came flooding into Japan, bringing the benefits of civilization with them. Prince Shotoku is the big name to know here. He was instrumental in bringing in elements of Chinese culture, including political institutions and Buddhism. The Chinese writing system was imported and Japan was finally literate. As some of you might know, however, the Japanese and Chinese languages have almost nothing in common. Chinese is monosyllabic and not inflected (no verb endings and things of that sort) while Japanese is polysyllabic andmost definitely inflected. Imagine trying to write English in kanji - that's what the literate Japanese of this time were doing with their own language. No surprise then that literacy was severely limited and highly prized.

Also during the Yamato period, the founder of the most famous aristocratic family of early Japan, the Fujiwara family, gained control of the imperial court. He kept control by marrying his daughters to emperors and princes and always providing regents for underage (and sometimes adult) emperors. Some people used to say that the emperors of the time had more Fujiwara than imperial blood. Whatever the case, the Fujiwara family remained the power behind the throne for about two centuries. They controlled more than just the emperors: with the other aristocratic families, they dominated the culture of the country until the samurai (strong men with sharp swords) decided the aristocrats were effete snobs and took control. But that is still a few hundred years in the future. Now we turn to the Nara Period – so named because the national capital was located in Nara – and the Heian Period.

Early History

Nothing here yet.

Intellectual Influences

nothing here yet.

The Nara and Heian Periods

The Nara and Heian Periods

From 710 to 784 the capital was at Nara. After a short stay in the suburbs, the capital was moved, in 794 A.D., to Heiankyo (a.k.a. Kyoto) which was to remain the imperial city until 1868. The Heian Period didn't make it that long, however. It and its culture fell victim to competing samuarai clans during the twelth century.

In many ways, the Heian period is the good old days for Japan. Culture and refinement were everything. The ability to compose a good poem and a good hand at calligraphy were essential aristocratic skills. No self respecting lady would be seen without twelve correctly coordinated and layered kimonos. Of course, letters and even food had to follow the proper form and contain the proper reference to the season and the weather. In short, form, appearance and decorum were cardinal virtues. As boring as this might sound, the Heian period was the first of several cultural high points in Japan. This is almost painfully obvious in literature. Because Chinese characters were believed to be too hard for women to learn, the women were forced to use some simplified kanji phonetically as an alphabet. These letters allowed them much more freedom than the constricting use of Chinese. Ironically, although the “superior” men did write some world-class poetry, a few women created masterpieces of world literature. The most important person to know in this regard is Murasaki Shikibu – she wrote The Tale of Genji, one of the first and longest novels in the world. She wrote it around the year 1000 AD and it is about 1,000 pages long. It deals with life at the court and the love affairs of the Prince Genji and his friends and family. Most Japanese high school students enjoy it about as much as American high school students enjoy Shakespeare.

The continental culture which came flooding in during the Yamato period, continued to come into the islands during the Nara and Heian periods. Of course, the Japanese changed it, adapted it, and generally made it their own; Chinese culture became Japanese culture. A major reason that the court aristocrats were able to so completely dominate the culture of the era is simply because they had a monopoly on it and they did little to try to spread it to other classes. The only other theoretically powerful group, the samurai, were off in the hinterlands fighting the Ainu. However, by pushing the Ainu east and north, the samurai opened up new lands which they used to build up their own power. Nobles and monasteries already possessed large estates of tax-free land and when the samurai began to acquire their own, they used their wealth not for religious purposes, but to maintain and enlarge their armies. Two families became exceptionally strong and ambitious: the Taira (also known as Heike) and the Genji (a.k.a. Minamoto). They fought for supremacy of the sacred islands during the early 1180's. Minamoto Yoritomo finally defeated his Taira rivals, but rather than overthrow the emperor, which would give everyone, friend and foe alike, an excuse to exterminate his clan, as well as removing any legitimacy he had to rule, Yoritomo compelled the emperor to accept his services as Shōgun. This was in 1185 and Yoritomo's base camp in Kamakura became the actual center of power in Japan. The era of the cultured aristocrats was over and they would never again possess any real power.

The Rise of the Samurai

Japan's elite during the Heian period were the creators and consumers of high culture. The peasants did not partake of any poem parties. Nor did they write any pillowbooks. They lived their lives within their own class culture, and most had no contact at all with anyone from the court, except indirectly, through court appointed local officials.

The samurai are a different story. At the lowest level, a samurai might be no better off than most peasants. These samurai might not own very much. A little land with a few peasants working it, providing him just enough income to maintain a few horses and his weapons and armor. Of course, he would have a family name, something most peasants would have to wait until the 19th century for. But with a family name come family aspirations. Not winning is okay, but for god's sake, don't do anything that might imperil the existence of the family name. For the highest ranking samurai were stresses were the same but the stakes larger, for they were literally the sons of emperors.

Every monarchy faces the same simple problem – ensuring an heir. The king or queen must have at least one child survive to adulthood, preferably one who is mentally fit to rule. Queens are in a bit of a bind since they have to actually produce the child. Lots of stress and effort for a maximum payoff of (roughly) one child per year. Kings have it better. Assuming no pesky religous issues about the number of wives or concubines a monarch is allowed, a king is limited only by physical constitution and the number of women he can find. Five or ten potential heirs a year is quite possible.

So you have a baby-booming king trying to literally be the 'father of his country'. Problem: You only need one heir and maybe a backup heir for insurance. Court intrigue being what it is, having too many people with royal blood running around can be almost as bad (from the monarch's point of view) as having too few. So what do you do with the rest of the king's / queen's kids after you have decided on an heir?

In Nara and Heian Japan, it was common to send young men with royal

blood off to the hinterlands, where they could set up a new [this abrupt ending not due to the untimely death of the author]

The Kamakura Period

The Kamakura Period

They may have beaten the Taira, but the Minamoto soon fell victim to the same ploy they were using on the emperor. After Yoritomo died in 1199, his widow's family (the Hojo clan) exercised power by always providing regents for the shoguns. Thus the head of the Hojo clan would tell the shogun what to do (in very polite language), the shogun would then tell the emperor what to do or sign or say (again, in very polite language). This setup lasted until 1333.

During the roughly 150 years that the shoguns lived in Kamakura, several important events took place. The most interesting were the Mongol's two attempts to invade Japan. The Mongols started their conquests in 1211 against neighboring horse peoples before joining the big league by taking on and then taking China. By 1258 they had taken Baghdad and were beginning to worry the Christian crusaders and the Middle Eastern Muslims. In September of 1260, the Mongols clashed with the Mameluke army of Egypt just outside Jerusalem and for the first time, the Mongols lost. After that battle, Mongol expansion into Europe and the Middle East was over, but they continued to go south and east. In 1274, for the first time in history, Japan was invaded, and for the second time in history, the Mongols lost. They lost again in 1282 when a typhoon destroyed their invasion fleet. The weather played a role in the repulse of the Mongols in 1274 as well, but both times the samurai had to fight and they held their own both times until the typhoons came and swept the invaders away. Relieved Japanese believed that the gods had sent the typhoons to protect their islands and this is the origin of the “kamikaze” myth which played a small but painful role in the Second World War.

Two other important events during the Kamakura period involved the imperial court. The Hojo were able to consolidate their power after an emperor attempted (with a spectacular lack of success) to regain control of his government in 1221. Then, between 1333 and 1336, the Emperor Godaigo actually managed to rule more than whatever room he was in. He did this with a lot of help from his friends – friends who didn't like the Minamoto / Hojo government. When one of these 'friends' turned against him in 1336, Godaigo fled south to the Kii mountains and set up a court there. The disloyal friend, Ashikaga Takauji, merely put another member of the imperial family on the throne and went ahead with the business of ruling in the name of the “emperor.” Eventually, the southern court was lured back to Kyoto by promises that the two branches would alternate on the throne. That was in 1392 and the southern branch is still waiting for their turn. (Actually, I think they gave up on ever getting their turn long ago.)

The Warring States Period

The Nutshell Version

Oda Nobunaga

The man who ended Ashikaga rule was Oda Nobunaga. In 1568 he took Kyoto (and therefore the Emperor) and destroyed the last Ashikaga shogun a few years later. Before Nobunaga could finish his conquest of the country and be named shogun, a treacherous general assassinated him (in 1582).

Hideyoshi

Hideyoshi stepped forward to revenge his lord. Hideyoshi soon finished conquering, subduing and / or making allies of the remaining lords. Japan had a strong centralized government for the first time in close to two hundred years. Hideyoshi then set about consolidating his power over both the daimyo and the ordinary people. In 1588, Hideyoshi commanded all commoners to turn in their weapons because he was planning to build a really, really big statue of the Buddha (we are talking bigger than the Statue of Liberty). Obviously turning over your sword so that it could be melted down to provide metal for a religious statue must be a very good thing to do, right? Maybe, if you're an idiot. Hideyoshi didn't care about building a statue, he just wanted to disarm the peasants (kind of hard to rebel without weapons, isn't it?). Around the same time, Hideyoshi also decreed that from then on, no one could change status. A boy born to a peasant was a peasant and could never change his status. Thus, a man who owed his position not to birth but to luck, skill, and achievement was forever forbidding anyone else from ever doing it again. Just to be absolutely sure about the people (and thus his tax income), Hideyoshi also carried out a nationwide land survey.

In foreign affairs, Hideyoshi showed less intelligence. In 1592, he invaded Korea with the intention of going all the way to Beijing. If this seems to border on the megalomaniac, keep in mind that Japan was brimming over with veteran troops who, after unification, suddenly had no more wars to fight. Hideyoshi sure didn't want them all hanging around making trouble in Japan. So why not ship them off to fight somewhere else? (this sort of thing was also a factor in the Spanish conquests in the Americas.) Still, even considering the danger of restless samurai at home, there was a bit of insanity in the idea of Japanese samurai conquering all of East Asia; when Hideyoshi died in 1598, the invasion was abandoned and Japan peace made with her neighbors. (They never had a chance anyway, not after the Ming Dynasty in China sent troops to help the Koreans.)

The Europeans and Their Guns

We need to backtrack just a little bit for a moment to touch on some events which had monumental results for the direction of Japanese history. In 1543 a Chinese cargo ship arrived in Tanegashima harbor (a little south of Kyushu) with about a hundred men aboard. This was not at all an unusual occurrence. The three Portuguese adventurers on board the ship, however, were very unusual - they are the first Europeans known to have visited Japan. Almost as important, the Portuguese men brought their guns with them. Within a few weeks, the lord of Tanegashima bought two of their guns for a whole lot of gold and gave them to his chief sword smith to study the weapons and make more. Soon orders were coming in from all over Japan as the more flexible daimyo sought to exploit the new weapon's power on the battlefield. After some initial adjustment to the new strategies required for musket warfare, the daimyo were using guns successfully in their battles. Also, after making some improvements to the European model, some daimyo profited from the selling of arms to the rest of Asia.

Europeans brought more than just firearms. Hot on the heels of the original three Portuguese came merchants and missionaries. The Japanese immediately labeled them barbarians, but this shouldn't be too great a surprise. Uneducated, unwashed, and rude is probably a fair description of the majority of early visitors to Japan. After all, these men were not diplomats and only a few were missionaries. Most were sailors or adventurers arriving in tiny ships after months at sea. Not the kind of guys you take home to meet the folks. However, as already mentioned, a few missionaries did go to Japan, the most famous being Fr. Francis Xavier of the Jesuits. This was the first face to face meeting between Japan and Christianity. It says something about the quality of the missionaries that they made quite a few converts (considering that the religion they were preaching was totally alien to everything in Japanese culture). At first Christianity suffered from few overt barriers, but after Spain took the Philippines, some fool Spanish man bragged that missionaries were always sent in first to soften up the enemy and that Japan would be next. Obviously, this didn't sit well with the guys in power in Japan and they issued several edicts against the missionaries, finally just expelling them all and outlawing Christianity. Later on, the ruthless suppression of Japanese converts who would not renounce their faith created a sickening number of martyrs. But that is later on.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

Hideyoshi left five of his most powerful “allies,” in charge of the country and his young son. He hoped that none of the five daimyo would be able to successfully rebel against the other four and thus the stalemate might last long enough for his son to grow up and assume power. Nice plan, but it didn't work. Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the most powerful daimyo and a member of the ruling council, defeated his enemies (all of them) and the supporters of Hideyoshi's heir at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. He did not unite the country so much as just destroy the power of the other daimyo (there were several hundred of them) to disturb the peace. Ieyasu's reward was the shogunate - that is, the emperor named him shogun in 1603. He moved the government (again, the emperor and his court remained in Kyoto) to Edo, which would be renamed “Tokyo” in 1868. Between 1600 and 1868, the Tokugawa family ruled a more-or-less feudal Japan.

The Warring States Period

The Decline of the Ashikaga

The Daimyo Families

Matters Martial

The Battles

Strategy and Tactics

Weaponry

Alliances

The Europeans

The Unification of the Country

Cultural Influences

This chapter describes some of the influences on Japanese culture.

The Tokugawa Period

The Tokugawa (Edo) Period in a Nutshell

Basically, the period of more-or-less peace from 1600 to 1867 is called the Tokugawa Period or the Edo Period (Edo was the Shoguns' capital during this period). With peace came economic and cultural development. In other words, free from the fear of random warfare, the peasants could grow more crops, the townspeople could engage in more business, and artists and intellectuals had more opportunities to do whatever they did. Thus the history of the Edo period is mostly economic and cultural. Of course there were peasant rebellions, famines, scandals, and all the other problems facing governments anywhere, and well look at a few of them here. In international relations, the Edo period is the famous period of seclusion. The government closed the country in the mid-1600s and didnt open it again until the 1850s. Only a handful of Dutch, and some Chinese and Koreans, were allowed to enter the country, and that was solely to trade (and it was a small part of the national economy). For Japanese, trying to leave the country or, conversely, trying to reenter the country were capital offenses. This anti-social behavior continued until the middle of the nineteenth century. Commodore Perry of the American Navy is credited (mostly by Americans) with finally forcing open Japan. Shortly afterwards, internal problems combined with external pressures to end the Tokugawa hold on power and initiate the age of "modern" Japan. Thats the nutshell version of Japan's Tokugawa Period. Now, on to the prelude.

Prelude: The Unification of Japan

Of the major civilizations on the planet, Europe has usually ranked as one of the most warlike. The only major culture that compares to Europe is Japan. China never had much use for warriors. Neither did Egypt. Attila the Hun did, but he wasnt very civilized. Both Europe and Japan idealized them (warriors, not Huns), and, in Japan's case, for good reason - the samurai were some of the best fighters on the planet. Just ask Kublai Khan and his army. Ask the Koreans. Unfortunately for the Japanese, Mongol invasions were rare, as were Japanese wars on mainland Asia (although Koreans might say they werent rare enough). So guess who these world class fighters got to fight against? Thats right, the samurai beat the hell out of each other. Japan was in a state of chronic warfare from about 1467 until 1600. The daimyo (local lords) fought each other and even their own families in the pursuit of power. Kyoto was destroyed more than once. Entire families were exterminated. Legendary heroes were born. It was a real exciting time if you enjoy death and destruction. Eventually however, somebody won. By making allies or vassals of defeated enemies, winners of battles got stronger and the losers got a second chance (or at least their families did). Finally, a handful of powerful lords had reestablished stable governments of sorts over the country. To become, and remain shogun, however, you needed to control the whole country, not just a large part of it. Like the movie says, "in the end, there can be only one." In the end the one was Tokugawa Ieyasu, an ally of Oda Nobunaga and then of Odas successor, Hideyoshi. After Hideyoshi died, the five major co-rulers he had appointed, (Ieyasu was one of them), quickly prepared for war. In 1600, Tokugawa and his vassals met and defeated the armies of the anti-Tokugawa coalition at the battle of Sekigahara. This is one of the most important (and famous) battles in Japanese history because for over 250 years after Sekigahara the daimyo were subordinate to the central government (with minor exceptions). In other words, peace prevailed. It was the Pax Tokugawa.

Tokugawa Ieyasu and his Bakufu

What happened at Sekigahara was that Ieyasu forced his defeated enemies to acknowledge him as their lord. As Tokugawa vassals, they could expect grants of land in fief in which they ruled. They in turn taxed the peasants who lived on the land and gave some of the rice to samurai families as stipends. Larger samurai families might then give part of their stipend to their own vassal samurai. End result is a pyramid of loyalties extending from the ruler down to the common foot soldier. Sound familiar? The system is very similar to European style feudalism. (A big difference is the stipends - in Europe vassals were given land instead.) By making everyone subordinate to him, Ieyasu completed the pacification of the daimyo which Oda and Hideyoshi had started. In 1603 the Emperor gave Ieyasu the title of shogun and thus the right to rule in the name of the Emperor. Now Ieyasu could legitimately make laws for the whole country.

And make laws he did. First he moved the government to Edo (modern day Tokyo), at that time a really small town. Although the Emperor stayed in Kyoto, the real power was with the shogun and his Bakufu (tent-government). Like Hideyoshi before him, Ieyasu outlawed all social mobility. He used the Confucian system of four classes - inserting warriors in place of scholars. The classes (from highest) were warriors, peasants, artisans, and at bottom the greedy, good-for-nothing merchants. Warriors rule and peasants and artisans make things but merchants make nothing but profit from other peoples labor (hence the “greedy, good-for-nothing” part). Of course, there was limited downward mobility. If a samurai really wanted to, he could renounce his status and become a commoner. Often this was done by artists who could support themselves without their stipends. Ieyasu did Hideyoshi one better though; he made it legal for any samurai to kill any commoner who was rude to the samurai. A bit extreme but not his most important legacy.

As shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu controlled Japans international relations, coinage, and relations between the various han. His primary concern in the early years of his shogunate was the preservation of his familys rule. Thus, although the daimyo ruled their individual fiefs independent of the Bakufu, their behavior in matters national was under Ieyasus control and the shogun had a very wide view of what constituted national matters. For obvious reasons, castle building was a very efficient method of pissing the shogun off. Building or even repairing castles required government permission. In addition, the daimyo were required to assist with public works projects such as dams, roads, bridges and the like. This was partially for pragmatic reasons (you need good roads to move troops quickly) and partially as a drain on the daimyos treasuries (since they had to pay for the work). Also, marriages between daimyo families required the Shoguns okay, lest a couple of daimyo try to seal a pact with the exchange of daughters. So, what happened to the mentally deficient daimyo who decides not to obey the shogun? For serious offenses, Ieyasu could dispossess a lord of his lands, effectively destroying that family forever. Another popular punishment was seppuku – also known as hara-kiri. The offending lord had to ritually slit (kiri) his belly (hara) open in order to make amends. This was considered to totally restore the mans honor and was also occasionally used to show sincerity or to show ones loyalty by following one's lord in death. A less drastic punishment was to move a daimyo to a smaller han. Punishments and rewards also depended on what kind of daimyo was involved.

A lord is not a lord is not a lord. In English that means that lords were divided into three groups, depending on their relationship with the Tokugawa family. The inner group was composed of branches of the Tokugawa family and were known as shimpan daimyo. Next was the daimyo who were vassals of the Tokugawa before the battle of Sekigahara. These were called fudai daimyo (hereditary lords). The final group was the tozama (outside) lords - daimyo who did not submit until after Sekigahara. Shockingly, the tozama daimyo were believed to be of unreliable loyalty and thus given fiefs far from Tokugawa lands and usually separated from each other by more reliable fudai daimyo. However, some tozama - such as the Shimazu in Satsuma han (present day Kagoshima-ken) - were strong enough that the Tokugawa left them alone as long as they didnt cause any problems.

Interlude: Bushido

Bushido was to the samurai what chivalry was to European knights: a myth created to channel and control the destructive energies of strong men with sharp weapons. During the chaos of the warring states period, myth took a back seat to the practicalities of killing one's enemies. Of course what constituted good and bad behavior for samurai had been defined long before 1600 but with the enforced inactivity of Tokugawa peace, the samurai had a lot of time to think about the moral development of their class. The samurai code of conduct they developed is known as bushido (the Way of the Warrior). Basically it combines the self-discipline of Zen Buddhism with Confucianisms emphasis on loyalty and knowing your place. According to bushido, a samurai must be ready to die at every moment and put the good of his lord above all else. In theory, the samurai must also be a medieval boy scout: compassionate, honorable, pious, etc. In reality, constantly thinking about death made many samurai rather cold-blooded. Samurai ethics were not confined to the samurai. Bushido also deeply influenced the peasant population. Townsfolk resisted this temptation by enjoying life in the cities and just saying "no" to living austere lives. Even many of the samurai forgot about self-discipline after 200 years without war, but bushido remained important even after the end of the Tokugawa era because of its firm hold on the peasant class.

Ieyasu's Grandson Iemitsu

Ieyasu died in 1616, but the continuity of Tokugawa rule was not in much doubt since he had transferred his titles - including that of shogun - to his son Hidetada in 1605. Until his death however, he continued to rule through his son. Hidetada followed this hallowed Japanese tradition by transferring formal power to his son Iemitsu in 1623 but remaining in charge until dying in 1632. Although Hidetada was no wimp, Ieyasu was a hard act to follow and poor Hidetada doesn't get much credit for anything. Iemitsu, however, does. It was his decision to close the country. He also required the individual daimyo to spend every other year in Edo and when not there, their families (wife and kids) had to be there. Somehow, I doubt that the thought of Mrs. Joe Daimyo buying it acted as too much of a deterrent, but maybe I'm just old fashioned. By the way, this alternate attendance is called sankin kotai and is very important. We will talk some more about it later. Ieyasu was fairly tolerant of Christianity until 1614 when he began enforcing a ban on foreign religions (a.k.a. Christianity). Iemitsu continued the persecution and of an estimated 300,000 Christians in 1614, between 5,000 and 6,000 were martyred by 1640. Ieyasu and Iemitsu believed that Christians were a threat to their absolute control, a not unreasonable view given Christianity's emphasis on Gods law being above human law. A peasant rebellion, the leaders of which were Christian, confirmed Iemitsus worst fears. The rebellion (in the Shimabara Peninsula) lasted from 1637-38 and it was only one year later that Iemitsu closed Japan off from the rest of the world. This policy of national isolation is known as sakoku and lasted until Commodore Perry. It included foreign (read Western) books, but that ban was lifted in 1720 for books of a non-religious nature. Of course, since nobody in Japan knew anything about European culture or religion, some books, predictably, were banned just for mentioning religion.

Interlude: Old Books, National Learning and Other -isms

As I mentioned before, some samurai had a lot of time to sit around and think. To a small degree, the government encouraged it – as long as you were thinking of ways to buttress Tokugawa power. Early on, Ieyasu made use of Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism to legitimize his rule, but as time went by, he made greater use of Confucianism. We dont need to get into all the various schools of Confucianist thought but we do know that there was not just one school and that several of these different ones were influential during the Tokugawa period. The governments official favorite was the Chu Hsi school, which placed great emphasis on duty and acting according to your station in life. Not too hard to see why the Tokugawa family liked it; Chu Hsi Confucianism was very conservative.

A rival school was the Wang Yang-ming (cool name!) school. This school stressed intuitive knowledge of right and wrong and personal responsibility. A famous, though possibly bogus, Wang Yang-ming saying is "to know and not to act is not to know." Since morality is subjective, if you think something is wrong, it is and you must act on that knowledge. Subversive thinking this. This school greatly influenced the men who destroyed the Tokugawa regime in the 1860s.

One last important school was the Ancient Learning school. These Confucianists believed that to understand Confucius' true message you had to go back and critically examine the old books. If you can separate the garbage from the original then you know what Confucius really meant. Aside from developing powerful tools of linguistic analysis, this school is important for Japan because it caused some Japanese guys look at their old books and try to separate the “pure” Japanese elements from the “corrupting” Chinese elements. Combine this regard for old Japanese books (primarily the Kojiki and the Manyusho) with Shinto (the Way of the Gods) and you get the School of National Learning. Of course no self respecting National Learning scholar would be caught dead concluding that China (or anywhere else) was better (in any way) than Japan. On the contrary, as the myths in the Kojiki were increasingly taken as facts, it became obvious that Japan was the Land of the Gods. This nationalistic version of Shinto was “taught in schools right up to 1945.” Draw your own conclusions.

There is another branch of Tokugawa scholarship which we need to look at, namely Western Learning. After the ban on western books was partially lifted, some men began learning as much as they could about what was happening in the West. Unfortunately, the only Westerners around were the Dutch and they were not always entirely honest. Several generations of Western Learning scholars spent a lot of time learning Dutch because the Dutch told them that it was the major international language of learning. Not having any evidence to the contrary, the Japanese went ahead and learned Dutch and then studied and translated Dutch books on medicine, math, and the hard sciences. Medicine was the first to really gain acceptance, since it could easily be proved more effective then Chinese medicine. Math ran afoul of the native mathematical tradition. You occasionally hear about how some Japanese mathematicians invented a calculus independently of Europe and this is true. However, it was never much more than an sophisticated toy. Unlike in Europe, math was never a tool of the hard sciences in Japan because the hard sciences did not exist. Thus, western math was viewed as just another foreign intellectual pursuit and not as a useful tool. It was not until Britain and others flexed their military muscles that the government understood the power of Western Learning and began to actively encourage it. Until then (the mid-nineteenth century) Western Learning was viewed with suspicion.

My Koku is Bigger than Your Koku

Jump (mentally) back to the 1580s. Why? Because that is when Hideyoshi did his William the Conqueror impersonation - a complete land survey of the entire country. When it was finished, all the daimyos lands could be quantified and compared, meaning it was now possible to move them to different lands with more or less value. Land was graded on how much rice it could produce, measured in koku. One koku is about equal to 180 liters. In early Tokugawa times the country produced about 30 million koku of rice a year and the Shogunate directly controlled about 7 million of it. To be classified as a daimyo, you had to control at least 10,000 koku. Most daimyo paid their vassal samurai in koku or rice rather than land. This was mentioned above but it needs to be repeated because it had very important consequences.

A huge weakness of the Tokugawa Shogunate was its Confucian disdain for commerce. The Tokugawa economy was robust and grew substantially during the prolonged peace but as good Confucianists, the government regulated the economy but did their best to avoid taking part in it. As if such a thing were possible. Usually they just got screwed by it, especially the individual samurai. He had to sell his rice stipend to the rice merchants each year so that he would have money to buy other things (“a samurai does not live by rice alone” was not a Tokugawa era proverb, in fact, I just made it up). So what happens to poor Joe Samurai when there is a bumper harvest? He loses money because the price of rice plummets like a cat thrown into a lake wearing a necklace of stones. Ok, you say, so doesnt he make a lot of money when there is a famine? Maybe, but if there is a bad crop then there is less rice for the daimyo to use to pay all his retainers and so Mr. Joe Samurai probably gets less rice than usual. Thus he loses money but, unlike the peasants, he doesnt starve to death or sell his daughters into prostitution. Lucky guy.

So what is a robust economy? Well, thanks to sankin kotai the daimyo were required to spend a large portion of their income going back and forth to Edo. They also had to maintain a house appropriate to their status in Edo. Of course the daimyo had to take many of their samurai with them as well. All these daimyo and samurai living in one place naturally had to eat and buy clothing and the such, so they supported a large number of merchants and artisans and other hangers-on. Edo was soon one of the largest cities on the planet and also, therefore, one of the largest markets on the planet. But a market for what? Well, basically, the han competed with each other and over time many became famous for a product; pottery, iron tools, sugar, or a type of fish, for example. Many areas today are still famous for products going back to the Tokugawa period or earlier.

Wajima, in Ishikawa-ken, is a good example. During the Tokugawa period, Wajima became a center of laquerware production and actively competed with one or two other areas for the laquerware market. While keeping an eye out for advances in production “technology,” the Wajima laquer artists developed their own style. Today, Wajima-nuri (Wajima style laquerware) is famous throughout Japan. Each han has a similar story for some product. This specialization helped each han increase its income and also linked the han and the country together through trade. Several merchant houses became quite rich and had to occasionally donate money to the government. Why? Becauseby the 1860s, many samurai - including many daimyo - were deep in debt to merchants. Income was fairly static since it was based on taxing the rice harvest. Outflow was not static. Natural disasters, famines, and peasant rebellions all played their part in draining the Bakufu and han treasuries. Although technically samurai were not supposed to engage in the decadent night life of the cities, most did to some degree, patronizing the theater, drinking houses and the famous geisha houses. This, plus the expense of “keeping up with the Jones” and the occasional “voluntary” reduction in stipend, put many individual samurai deeply in debt. The expansion of the economy thus benefited the merchants but in the long run bankrupt the government and their samurai because they were dependent on the agricultural sector. Farmers and townsfolk were also living in poverty and during hard times - such as periods of famine or inflation - blew off some steam by rioting and destroying the homes and factories of merchants and landlords.

Interlude: No Women on the Stage

The Tokugawa period witnessed a remarkable flowering of almost all the arts. To be sure, even during the Warring States period the arts never died: Hideyoshi, for example, was a major patron of the tea ceremony. But peace and (for some) prosperity allowed many more people to enjoy going to the theater, reading and writing poetry and novels, and drawing some really world class pictures. Unfortunately, the Confucianist Tokugawa regime was rather prudish and did their best to encourage morality, diligence, and proper thinking and actively discouraged anything that might be fun. So people (including the rulers) had fun and just didnt tell the government. Literature, theater, the fine arts, as well as more “Japanese” arts such as tea ceremony and the martial arts, all prospered and reached new heights under the Tokugawa. Pre-Tokugawa literature was mostly an upper class pursuit, but in Tokugawa times, many lower class townspeople types read and enjoyed literature written for them. Several authors made their livings from writing novels and plays for the masses. Their stories dealt with love and sex and the conflicting demands of duty versus human feeling, often in humorous fashion. Have you been to a kabuki play? Did you stay awake through it? Kabuki actually makes ballet look exciting. Many Japanese proudly and loudly boast of the refinement and “Japaneseness” of Kabuki, which can get annoying if you know it originated as a way for itinerant prostitutes to display the goods to prospective clients - mostly young samurai. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. After a fight broke out at one of the shows, the government confined the performances to certain locations. When continued attempts at moral persuasion failed to keep samurai (and others too of course) from flocking to the shows, the Bakufu finally just forbade women to appear on stage. From then on, Kabuki featured men in all the roles and therefore had to depend on the plays story to attract customers. Real distinguished origins, arent they? No matter, since once the writers got a chance to do some real scripting, some of them came up with masterpieces. Once the kabuki theater had gotten its act together, it and the puppet theater competed for the same audience and both were quite innovative in their attempts to lure the others audience away. End result was high quality theater that was very popular. (Think of the modern movie industry: some very popular movies, lots of garbage ones, and occassionally Gone with the Wind.)

East Asia had the movable-type printing press before Europe, but making all those kanji was too time consuming a task to make it worthwhile, so most printers used block printing instead. Block printing involves carving (in reverse) the entire page into a block of wood, which is then used to make prints. No one said you have to carve words into the block though. Japanese artists became very good at making prints of just about anything, from handbills for theaters to the latest best-seller to multi-colored pictures of nature scenes or the newest Kabuki star. After nature - always a favorite of the Japanese - pictures of the “floating world” were the most popular. The floating world is the world of the pleasure quarters, the areas of the major cities where everyone went to have fun. (Everyone except for the girls who were sold to the houses of prostitution. I dont know where they went to have fun.) Ukiyo-e, as these pictures are called, are generally colorful and full of life and action. Because they were carved in wood, they could be used to make prints until the wood wore down too much. This meant that even samurai or merchants of moderate means could afford to have a print from a master hanging in their house. Finally (yeah), everyone has probably heard of haiku, the 5-7-5 form of poetry. Well, it reached its final form and its zenith during this period. Matsuo Basho is without a doubt the most famous of haiku poets of this period or any other.

The Tokugawa period saw either the creation or refinement of most of the major "traditional" elements of modern Japanese culture. The tea ceremony, poetry, and literature all predate the Tokugawa era but none stagnated during it. Kabuki and ukiyo-e were new but quickly reached maturity. The most important break from the past was the role the townspeople played in new and old cultural pursuits. They were both the producers and the consumers of the culture, buying the books and prints and going to the plays. Of course many samurai did these things too, but never in the past had the regular people had such a large role in the culture of the day.

Introverts, Extroverts and Black Ships

As usually happens with hereditary rulers, the Tokugawa family did not always produce competent men for the top job. Sometimes these men were so weak or distracted that they were practically prisoners of their advisors, which tended to encourage corruption. Corruption, of course, does not help a worsening financial situation. The Bakufu and daimyo several times canceled their debts to merchants and sometimes restructured them - for example giving themselves 200 years to pay back a loan with no interest charges. The merchants were powerless to do anything about this. Of course, as North Korea proves every day, a bankrupt country can survive if there are no other catalysts to light the revolutionary fires. Fortunately, in Japan there were two major catalysts for change. First was the internal factor: the rise of the National Learning school caused men to question their loyalty to the shogun. After all, wasnt the Emperor the proper focus of loyalty? The shogun was merely the Emperors servant, supposedly working on the Emperors behalf. As you can see, this is not immediately fatal for the Tokugawa. They were still the most powerful daimyo and the appointed servants of the Emperor. Had it not been for the return of the Europeans, the Bakufu could have survived National Learning, at least for several more years. It even had the strength to survive the civil disturbances and peasant revolts. But the Europeans came back and this time they had science on their side. They were the second factor.

The End of “Feudal” Japan

The Dutch presence at Nagasaki was small and the shogunate did its best to learn nothing from them. Although several people, both Japanese and foreign (Dutch) warned of the danger posed by the West, the Bakufu for a long time turned a deaf ear. Seeing what was happening to China, however, the Japanese in the know could not help but feel on the defensive, and rightly so. But what form should the defense take? After a few "incidents" (naval bombardments of towns, raiding parties sacking towns and destroying coastal defenses) it was obvious to the people in the ports that Japan could not hope to compete militarily with the West, but the more remote and sheltered Imperial court believed (was told) otherwise and pressured the government to repel the foreigners. In the middle were the moderates who advocated learning from the foreigners in order to control them and ultimately expell them with their own technology. As more and more European and American ships entered Japanese waters and tried to enter Japanese ports, the government was put into the precarious position of having to try to keep the barbarians out with nothing but words. Finally, they could delay no longer and in 1854 gave in to Commodore Perry's demand for a treaty. This opened the door for every other country and soon the foreigners had their own areas in a handful of Japanese port cities. The enemies of the government loved this state of affairs and took full advantage of it. Two of the largest, most powerful tozama han, Satsuma and Choshu, joined forces. By manipulating the Imperial court and general anger at the treaties, they managed to force the Shogun Keiki to "voluntarily" restore power to the Emperor Meiji (a teenager at the time). Even after the Emperor accepted this show of loyalty, the Tokugawa clan was still the largest landowner and most powerful family in the country. This was not acceptable to Satsuma and Choshu (among others), who managed to heap insult upon insult until the Tokugawa finally responded with force and were branded traitors. A very short civil war followed in which the peasant conscript Imperial Army (read Satsuma-Choshu Army) armed with rifles and canon easily destroyed the Tokugawas sword-bearing samurai army. Thus did the Tokugawa period end in 1868.

The new government was composed of young samurai who “advised” the Emperor Meiji. My next article will deal with the extraordinary period of "modernization" that took place under the new government. During the Meiji period, Japan catches up with the West for the first time and becomes a major power.

The Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration is a huge and complex topic. We will only scratch the surface here.

This chapter will look at a few select aspects of one of the most amazing periods in all of Japanese history; the Meiji period. Part 2 will fill in many of the details that this article skims or skips. Although not as long as the Edo period, the Meiji period suffers an embarrassment of highly important people and events. That is why I am cutting this article in half. Please note that the cut is not temporal - I do not stop half way into the period. Rather, I subjectively chose events which I feel can help in understanding the energy and forcefulness of Meiji. This article deals mostly with the successes, although that word is open to interpretation. The most difficult choice was to leave Korea out of this article. My justification is that the modern Japan-Korea relationship requires its own article, which I intend to include next time. Of course, Korea is mentioned here if it is needed for understanding some related issue, such as the Iwakura mission or the Sino-Japanese War.

The Meiji Emperor was 'restored' to the throne in 1867-68 and it is his reign which marks the beginning of 'modern' Japan. In 1868, Japan was economically and militarily weak, semi-feudal, and divided on what should be done to remedy this dangerous state of affairs. By the time the Meiji emperor died in 1912, Japan had won two wars (one of them against a European power), industrialized her economy, and joined the ranks of the great powers. So while the Europeans and Americans were carving the rest of the planet into colonies and spheres of influence, Japan managed to remain free and, on top of that, to prosper. Unfortunately, she also acquired some of the bad habits of the other great powers - like the desire for colonies. Between 1868 and 1912, Japan strengthened her hold on the Ryukyus (aka Okinawa-ken), took Taiwan from China, and took Korea from the Koreans. Have army, will travel.

Background to the Meiji Period

Unequal Treaties

What Commodore Perry 'opened' Japan to in 1854 was the Western system of sovereign, theoretically equal nation states assumed to be in competition with one another. The states' behavior towards each other was regulated by international law and, more concretely, through treaties. This system was totally foreign to Asia, which was accustomed to treating China as the bigger brother and expansion was usually at the expense of less advanced groups such as the nomads of Central Asia or the Ainu in Japan. The Tokugawa leaders were therefore not fully aware of their position when the Western powers forced them to sign treaties of “friendship and commerce.” These treaties were heavily biased in favor of the Western powers, and came to symbolize for the Japanese their backwardness. Revision of these unequal treaties, as they are known, became one of the major goals of the Meiji government.

Why were they unequal? Three reasons: first and most galling, foreign nationals had the right of extraterritoriality. What that means is that foreigners were not subject to Japanese law and could not be tried in Japanese courts. Say for example that a British man commits a crime in Yokohama. Once Tokyo realizes who it is, they have to convince London's consulate in Japan to try him. Even if the consulate decides to try him, they do it under British law, not Japanese law, and the punishment is based on British law. Obviously the West had no faith in the merits of the Japanese legal system.

The second inequality was foreign control of Japan's tariffs. The Japanese government was not allowed to set its own tariffs and thus provided an open market for the products of industrial Europe's factories. Needless to say, this didn't make it any easier for Japan to industrialize. Finally, every Western nation made sure that it got Most Favored Nation status. All that means is that the MFN country automatically gets the same rights and privileges that Japan gives to any other country. Thus, if the U.S. has MFN status and Japan signs a treaty letting Russia use a port that wasn't included in America's treaty with Japan, then America automatically is also allowed to use that port. I probably don't need to tell you that the West did not grant Japan most favored nation status.

The Meiji Leadership

Who were the men (and they were all men) who created and governed Meiji Japan? For the most part they were middle rank samurai from anti-Bakufu han - mostly Satsuma and Choshu - who had some experience with the West. Also, most had held posts in their han and were familiar with the way a government works. They were not the violent, mindless radicals who had assassinated people left and right in the last few years of the Bakufu. Those types did not have the temperament or the experience to successfully build a new nation and thus were not accepted into the government. The most important names to know among the Meiji leaders are Kido Koin (Choshu), Ito Hirobumi (Choshu), Yamagata Aritomo (Choshu), Okubo Toshimichi (Satsuma), and Okuma Shigenobu (Saga). Although he later rebelled, Saigo Takamori (Satsuma) was also influential in the first few years of Meiji. Each of the men was an individual, usually with strong biases and opinions, but they ruled by consensus in the time-honored Japanese way. Attempts to force something through against the majority's opinion, or go behind the others' backs, was a serious offense and quickly punished.

Equally important for the success of the Restoration were the court nobles who supported the overthrow of the Bakufu and helped control the Imperial court and generally added some legitimacy to the new regime. Chief among these nobles - and among the new Meiji leadership as a whole - was Iwakura Tomomi. Originally anti-foreign, he came to play a leading role in the anti-Bakufu movement of the 1860s and was instrumental in the restoration of power to the Emperor. These then were the men who set out in 1868 to save their country. They were very patriotic and not just out to enrich themselves, although that did follow for some of them. In general, they were intelligent and capable men intent on strengthening and enriching their country. But they were also, of course, products of their times. For example, in the early 1870s, when some elements in the government advocated an invasion of Korea, the majority vetoed the idea, not for moral reasons, but because they thought the time wasn't yet right. They didn't cancel the idea, just postponed it. There was too much work to be done at home. Later, the majority said, we can acquire our colonies like the West. But first we must put our own house in order. And that is what they did.

Hard Work, Luck, and Lots of Suffering

How did Japan accomplish its first modern miracle? The answer is very simple: hard work, luck, and lots of suffering. Lets review the situation as it stood in 1868. The Tokugawa family had been forced to give up the shogunate and after a very brief civil war, the new guys took over - and ruled in the name of the Emperor, as usual. The new guys knew that they needed to learn from the barbarians in order to protect themselves from the very same barbarians. (Can you say “my ship-of-the-line has more canon than your little tiny junk that cant even sail the open seas?”) They also knew that they had to consolidate their power at home, and to do that they had to somehow get rid of Japans tradition-bound and inefficient feudal type system. The daimyo (remember them? they were the feudal lord types who were one step below the Shogun on the food chain) were the most obvious of the obstacles to the new governments plans. The common people also had to be controlled and placated. Fortunately, the Meiji leaders could look to Europe for help setting up a modern government, if they could first just get rid of the daimyo.

Demise of the Han

How did they do that? They convinced the daimyo that it is in their best interests to give their lands back to the Emperor. Sounds really naive doesnt it? But that is what happened. Four of the major daimyo (the ones involved in the overthrow of the Tokugawa) demonstrated their loyalty to the emperor by asking him to please take back his land. Of course, after these guys did it, everyone else had to too (a recurring theme in Japanese history, lemmingism). The daimyo were not as upset by this as you might think though. The emperor took over their debts as well as their land and then appointed the former daimyo as governors of their old han (=feudal estate) with a salary commensurate with what the daimyo were used to. Sweet deal isnt it? No, actually not. Possession is nine-tenths of the law and now the emperor (read central government) could claim possession of the whole country in fact as well as theory. Within a few years the han were rearranged as the ken we are all familiar with today and the daimyo were retired with pensions of government bonds. New governors were appointed - men who were loyal to the central government. Bye-bye feudal system.

But what about the rank and file samurai? In a nutshell, they got screwed. Some became merchants or teachers, or found positions in the new bureaucracy, but most ended up as farmers, artisans, or worse. Wait a sec, these are samurai, right? They are trained in the martial arts and all that. Why didnt they just join the army or the police? At first glance it seems a very natural solution for them, but in fact neither group would have the other. Modern armies require - demand - faceless uniformity and absolute obedience from the recruits. They fight in groups for predetermined and totally unromantic goals. Samurai prefer to fight one-on-one with swords against their social equals for honor and glory, and the last thing any self-respecting samurai would do would be to practice shooting rifles or march with farmersEsons. Although a few (usually higher ranking) samurai managed to become officers, in general the army and police preferred the easily controlled farm boy to the thin-skinned, arrogant, unrealistic samurai.

The peasants were not a whole lot better off at first, but they were at least allowed to share equally in the misery. As part of their modernization program, the Meiji leaders abolished most of the feudal restrictions on non-samurai. They were allowed to take family names. It became legal to buy and sell land. Farmers were allowed to grow whatever crop they wanted, instead of being forced to grow what their lords told them to grow. On the flip side, military service was mandatory for almost all young, able-bodied, male peasants (four years active duty followed by up to seven years in the reserves). In the countryside this would eventually be known as the blood tax. Also, although the government tried to set taxes at levels similar to Edo Period levels, by implementing a modern and more efficient method of collecting taxes, they ended up taking a higher percentage than the Tokugawa government had. Result: higher taxes and fewer men to help with the farm. Also, the peasants were now at the mercy of international market forces. If the price of silk went down on the world market, many farmers lost an important secondary source of income. Likewise, competition from more industrialized countries (British cotton from India for example) could and did destroy Japanese cottage industries.

Good Luck

Ok, so that is a nutshell version of the suffering, now lets look at the good luck part. No country exists in a vacuum unless the rest of the world lets it, and in 1868 Europe and America were the rest of the world. So what was Japans position vis-a-vis Europe? Basically, Japan was, for Europe, of marginal importance. Japans population was small, she had no natural resources worth stealing, and was too far away from any rival European power to be useful as a staging area for military operations. Also, since Japan was obviously somewhat civilized (from the European viewpoint), she was a little less likely to meet the same fate as the Americas or Africa - wholesale slaughter and colonization. So why was Japan so worried? For starters, because Russia had been slowly working its way east for centuries and was now just north of Hokkaido. At the time Hokkaido was sparsely populated and no one believed they could prevent colonization by the Russians if the Russians wanted to. Secondly, although the Europeans (and Americans) were not much interested in taking over Japan, they were interested in whaling in the North Pacific and Japan is wonderfully located for refueling and repairing European whalers. Likewise, as American interests in Asia increased, Japan was a good stop on the journey from the West Coast to China. Thus, Westerners were more interested in port facilities, supply centers, and the right to reside in the country than in colonization. Why is this good luck? Because as long as the Japanese government allowed this and met its (unequal) treaty obligations, the Europeans were more than happy to leave Japan more or less in peace. So if the Meiji leaders could control the hothead anti-foreigner types, then they would be free from too much outside interference. Indeed, the West was more than happy to help the Japanese help themselves. Even with foreign help - which came mostly in the form of teachers - the Japanese had to work very hard to meet their goal: modernization and eventual equality with the West.

Hard Work

Any group of people will work much more effectively together if they all can agree on a goal and the steps necessary for reaching that goal. In the early years of Meiji the leaders were one-hundred percent united in their goals for the country. Europe, as we have seen, was the primary threat, and equality with the West, symbolized by revision of the unequal treaties, was the goal. There was also a broad consensus on how to do this: copy the West. The fact that there was less agreement on exactly which elements of Western political and social theories to copy does not take away from the amazing solidarity of the Meiji leadersEopinions. Thus, the Meiji leaders could move quickly and in unison to do what they felt had to be done. And what might that have been? First they had to create an organized and secure government. Second, the government had to control the people as it modified the social structure of society in order to de-feudalize it. The police force, conscription, and schooling were used to control the people while for de-feudalization the government hired foreign advisors and teachers and sent Japanese students overseas to study. These steps hurried the intellectual transformation of the elite in Japan. Third, the Meiji leadership assisted greatly in the industrialization of the nation.

Schools

It is well known that East Asia has a thing for education and Japan is no exception. During the Tokugawa Period hundreds of small, private “temple schools” taught commoner as well as samurai children the rudiments of reading and writing. Samurai of course usually went on to bigger and better things, but for many commoners, this was the only formal education they would get, but still, Japan under the Tokugawa was fairly well educated as pre-modern, feudal societies go. The Meiji leaders expanded the education system and brought it under the firm control of the central government. For most people, a few years of education as children was still all they would get, but now it would be more or less identical anywhere in the nation. Some better students could advance to the high schools or military schools and a fortunate few might attend one of the departments of what eventually came to be known as Tokyo Imperial University, the first, and for several years, the only university in Japan. For the most part, the goal of schooling during Meiji was not intellectual development but inculcation of patriotic devotion to the emperor. At the higher levels, original research often took a back seat to simply digesting technological and scientific information and methods from overseas. A period of apprenticeship you might call it. We'll deal with this more in the section on learning from the west. For the moment, it is enough to know that the government set up many schools to socialize the young into the new social system.

Industrialization

Unfortunately, industrialization is not as interesting as it is important. As most people probably know, costs can be reduced and quantities increased by using machines to extent human capabilities. However, by themselves, machines do not constitute an industrial revolution. Who cares if you can produce 400 tons of high quality widgets overnight if you are still using camels to carry them to the next village? Answer: no one. In order to mean much, machines need support from a good network of roads and other infrastructure as well as markets for your products. (This was one factor behind European expansion after the Industrial Revolution - they wanted markets to sell their stuff in.) Thanks to sankin kotai (the system whereby the daimyo had to stay in Edo for a year every other year), Japan already had a great system of roads linking the capital with all but the remotest parts of the country. Also, for various reasons - primary being over two hundred years of relative peace - Japan already had a national economy. Rice from all over was sold through Osaka and other goods were traded far and wide for the goods from other areas. Thus, Japan was unusually well prepared for industrialization before she even started. East Asia has usually had an overabundance of human labor (have you been to a Japanese department store recently?) which tends to inhibit the development of labor saving machinery, but that doesn't mean you can't have a Japanese Industrial Revolution. Japan did not need to invent the machinery, just adapt it to suit Japan's situation. So the government concentrated on developing certain industries that it felt were important and helped them catch up to the West in technology, usually at great loss of money. Once these industries were up and running - and a huge drain on the government's finances - they were sold at ridiculously low prices to prominent business families. These families got a great deal and some later became the infamous zaibatsu. The industries that the Meiji government helped finance included shipping, textile manufacturing, mining, and of course, ship building and other heavy industries with military applications.

Because the government was dead set on achieving equality with the West, industrialization was aimed at that goal and the living conditions of the average person took a back seat. Most people did not see substantial improvements in their living conditions until the twentieth century. At the same time however, industrialization was having many of the same negative social effects in Japan that it had had in Europe: the tyranny of the clock, peasants flocking to overcrowded cities to find work, horrible exploitation of workers and their families, and working conditions that cockroaches would object to. This eventually gave rise to various social movements which were sometimes violent but always repressed by the authorities.

Learning from the West

In its closing years, the Tokugawa Bakufu sent some young men to study in Europe as did (illegally) some of the daimyo. Also, the bakufu had French military advisors and technological aid, which all but guaranteed that the British would offer their help to the rebel daimyo, who naturally accepted. Unfortunately for the French, and more so for the Tokugawa, it was too little, too late. The Meiji leaders, however, learned the lesson and immediately began sending students overseas to study the sciences and, in lesser numbers, law. But the government did not want to wait for these men to come back several years later, so it hired - at huge expense - a large number of foreigners to come to Japan and teach the students who hadn't been sent overseas. These men were (and are) called “oyatai,” loosely translated by one scholar as "hired foreigners" and that is exactly what they were. They were brought to Japan to help “internationalize” their students as well as teach. Their posts were always temporary and their pay was always very good. Sound familiar to anyone? Unlike the JET Program, the oyatai included a number of people who were hired for their specialty (physicists, mining engineers, and the like). Like the JET Programme, some of the hired foreigners were loafers looking for a free lunch while most were dedicated people who really wanted to make a difference. There was never any thought of giving them permanent posts. They (the oyatai, not JET's) were hired to teach their own replacements and to tide the country over until the overseas students returned. Some, like Ernest Fenollosa and W.S. Clark, are still remembered fondly today. Most have been more than slightly forgotten.

Even today there are debates over what constitutes modernization so it should come as no surprise that the people living during Meiji were at times a little confused about what was needed for proper modernization. Obviously universities and shipyards were helpful, but what about art and religion? What about clothing and hairstyles? Even without addressing these deep questions, Meiji witnessed a slightly irrational craze for anything western. Everything western was, for a while, thought to be superior to its Japanese counterpart. Suits and dresses replaced hakama and kimono, top hats replaced topknots. Western-style art replaced ukiyo-e and ink drawings. There was even talk of English replacing Japanese. This enthusiasm for things foreign went a little too far at times. Fenollosa is fondly remembered because he almost single-handedly saved Japanese art from oblivion. As is the nature of fads, the backlash was not long in coming. By the late nineteenth century, western things were not exactly out of favor, but many Japanese people were rediscovering the merits of their own culture. And some of the more observant realized that you didn't need to speak English in order to shoot a canon at the enemy and the canon really didn't care what kind of music you listen to. This backlash was partly a cause of and partly a result of a growing Shinto nationalism in Japan. But more on that later.

The Payoff: Foreign Affairs

I have repeated many times that the major goal of the Meiji leaders was international recognition and revision of the unequal treaties. Obviously this is a very foreign affairs oriented goal. Much of the domestic reforms undertaken after the Meiji Restoration were aimed at convincing the foreign powers to revise the treaties. Equally important was to behave like a powerful country on the international scene, since you had to show you could survive and maybe be a worthwhile ally in the balance of power game. Toward these ends Japan took a very active role in Asian affairs, especially in Korea.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95

The Sino-Japanese War was about who would control Korea (this is a major theme in Japanese history). Since well before 1885 Japan and China had been meddling in Korean politics, but in 1884 in became violent with Japan supporting a coup to overthrow the pro-Chinese court. The coup was put down with the help of several thousand Chinese soldiers and the Japanese conspirators were forced to flee. The Japanese legation, however, was torched. This gave Japan some maneuvering room and they eventually got an apology and an indemnity from the Koreans. To prevent similar clashes between China and Japan in the future, the two countries negotiated a non-interference treaty of sorts in 1885. Nine years later Korea asked China for military help against a group of rebels and under the 1885 treaty, Japan also sent troops. Needless to say, both sides were more interested in controlling the Korean court than in suppressing the rebellion. In the summer of 1894 war broke out, although in typical Japanese fashion, it was not officially declared until later. The numerically superior Chinese were no match for the more modernized Japanese and by early 1895 the Japanese army controlled Korea and was threatening Peking. In the treaty ending the war, China gave Japan Formosa, the Pescadores, and the Liaotung Peninsula (the peninsula, with Port Arthur at its tip, just west of the Yalu river). China also recognized the independence of Korea, a diplomatic victory for Japan since Korea had been a client state of China's for so long. Now Japan was free to deal with Korea without automatically involving Peking. Also included in the peace were the opening of more treaty ports to Japanese ships, a hefty indemnity, and MFN rights for Japan as well as a few other stipulations. Does it sound to you like Japan was doing to China what the Europeans had already done to Japan (and, in all fairness, to China too)? Needless to say, China was not given most favored nation rights with Japan.

The Triple Intervention

This was a sweet settlement for Japan, too sweet in fact. Russia, Germany, and France intervened (thus the Triple Intervention) and demanded that Japan return the Liaotung Peninsula to China. They claimed that Japanese possession of the peninsula threatened Peking and invalidated Korean independence. Britain and the U.S. refused to take sides, with the result that Japan gave in and returned the peninsula in exchange for a larger indemnity. This episode naturally angered the Japanese and confirmed their belief that in international relations, might makes right. Japan had even more reason to think so when only a few years later Russia, the prime instigator of the Triple Intervention, leased the Liaotung Peninsula from China. As China was already beaten, Russia was the only real threat left in Northeast Asia to Japanese control of Korea and soon enough, Russia had indeed started courting the Korean court away from Japan. Tokyo was not amused.

Treaty Revision

The government had been trying to revise the unequal treaties since the early days of its existence. In 1871 Iwakura Tomomi led a group of officials on a mission to Europe. For two years they toured Europe, studying political and legal systems, learning about science and technology, and talking to heads of state about revising the treaties. In 1873 however, Japan had only just begun to change and no one was willing to revise anything. For the next 20 years various Ministers of Foreign Affairs tried to navigate new treaties through their governments, but nothing was accomplished accept the occasional assassination attempt. They constantly ran afoul of public opinion, which wasn't willing to give up anything or to settle for less than complete revision. Even when one country was willing to drop extraterritoriality, for example, it would not do so until Japan had convinced all the other countries to do so also.

This pattern lasted until just before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. In July 1894, Japan and Great Britain concluded a new treaty which dropped extraterritoriality and dealt with the MFN issue. It did not address the tariff problem though. However, since Britain was the most powerful power at the time, a treaty with Britain was worth a lot because British prestige enticed the other powers to get on the revision bandwagon. By the time the new treaty came into effect in 1899, all the other countries had also signed new treaties with Japan. The tariff issue was not resolved until 1911.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance

Japan was the first non-European power and as such is a wonderful ally because she is free from European threats and can provide much needed help in the event of a problem in China or anyone's colonies in Asia. Around the turn of the century she was in serious negotiations with several European powers but finally signed an alliance with Britain, effective from January 1902. Both countries had an interest in containing Russia and Japan especially wanted to prevent Russia from receiving help from France (and her colonies in Indochina) in the event of a Russo-Japanese War. To that end, the treaty stipulated that if either party (Britain or Japan) became involved in a war with one other power in the Far East, the partner would remain neutral but if the war involved two or more of the other powers then the partner would declare war and help out. Thus, if Japan ended up in a war with Russia then Britain would stay neutral but if France were to join in on Russia's side then Britain would immediately declare war on France and Russia. This was designed with the intent of keeping France out of a war and letting Russia know that it couldn't count on any help from her ally. The alliance was updated only a few years later, in 1905 and lasted until 1923.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was a major achievement for Japan. Even more than treaty revision, the alliance signaled that Japan had come of age and was now a player on the world stage. Unfortunately, the war between Russia and Japan that the alliance had hoped to prevent shortly came to pass, although France did stay out of it.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05

How did America win a war against the most powerful country on Earth in 1781? The colonists won because Britain, in addition to being far away from the fighting, had global interests and enemies and thus couldnt afford to concentrate her power in any one region for fear of losing another region. Japans war with Russia was similar in many ways. It wasnt fought in Japan, but in Korea, much closer to Japan than to (European) Russia. Also, while Japan was relatively free to throw herself fully into the war, Russia fought with one and a half eyes on Germany, England, and France. Indeed, European neutralityEhelped Japan by denying Russia access to ports and repair and supply facilities in Asia. Thus Japans small size and relative weakness were offset by Russias distance and European entanglements. The Russian bear, big though he was, fought with his claws tied behind his back. This is not to downplay the skill or determination of the Japanese Army and Navy. Although they had their share of strategic and tactical mistakes, the Army and Navy performed quite professionally in their first war against a European power. Unlike their behavior in World War Two, the Japanese military is generally given credit for fighting in the best tradition of European chivalry.

Right, so what was the war about anyway? It was about who should control Korea. The Japanese have always viewed Korea as a dagger pointed right at Japan and have thus always preferred, if possible, to be the ones controlling it. For Russia, the issues were linked to the (Asian) Continental situation. Russia wanted to protect its railways and its access to ice-free ports. Vladivostok was Russia's main port in Asia, and although there were great hopes for Port Arthur, there was not time before the war to prepare it. Vladivostok was too far away and too far north to have much influence in China, thus the need for a better port further south. Additionally, as an up-and-coming power, Japan was no longer given a free ride on the international scene. She had become a member of the balance-of-power club and Russia wanted to extend its own interests in Northeast Asia in order to limit the power of one of England's allies.

The war itself was messy and costly, both in terms of money and lives. The Japanese siege of Port Arthur foreshadowed the sickening death tolls of the First World War. At home such sacrifice seemed worthwhile only if the payoff was equally large. Newspapers in Japan began speculating on more and more outrageous outcomes for the war, such as taking the Russian Pacific coast including Vladivostok or all the Russian controlled areas north of China. Japanese newspapers speculated in this reckless fashion partly at the behest of the government. This was the ever popular device of channeling domestic discontent into foreign wars and it almost backfired when the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, ending the war. Many Japanese were unhappy with the terms because they had no realistic notion of how much the war was costing their country. Even though the Japanese Navy assured a Japanese victory by annihilating the Russian Baltic Fleet at the famous Battle of Tsushima, Russia could theoretically have prolonged the ground war long enough to seriously damage Japan's economy, not to mention kill off large numbers of her young men. Doing so however, would have weakened Russia just as much and unlike Japan, Russia had land borders in Europe to worry about. When President Theodore Roosevelt suggested peace talks, both sides were quite willing to negotiate.

What was the outcome? For the first time in several hundred years, a Western country had been humbled by a non-Western one. Granted, the winner was the most westernized country in Asia and the loser was the least Western of the European powers, the fact remained that a small Asian country had bested a large European one. So what? It demonstrated in living color to the entire world that Western power and hegemony was not due to racial, religious, nor even entirely cultural reasons. Western power was based on science, technology, and advanced political and business methods, and by adopting and applying these methods Japan had shown the world that anyone could achieve the same results as the West.

The Home Front: We Did It! Now What?

By the early 1900's, Japan had mostly met its goals and a sort of national soul searching set in. Few people had ever actually thought about what came after catching up with the West. In many ways, Meiji Japan was defined by its position in the eyes of western observers. Once those observers began treating Japan as a legitimate part of the world, the unity of purpose that characterized Meiji thinking dissolved. Although dissenting voices had always been present, they now became proportionally larger as the monolithic catch-up-to-the-West voice faded away. Also, many people born after 1868 and thus with no first hand knowledge of pre-Meiji troubles were in their late 20's and 30's. Industry and its good friends science and technology were not so much the new tools of equality as they were familiar everyday realities for these young men and, increasingly, women. So? So, and I admit that this is an unproved hypothesis of mine, increasing numbers of the well educated turned, I believe, to the social studies rather than the hard sciences when they studied European culture. Thus social darwinism, socialism, anarchism, and other -isms, began to make inroads into Japan. This is all well and good except for the fact that many of these -isms challenged the authority of the central government. Demands for worker's rights and labor unions became louder.

Thus, when Meiji died in 1912 and the new emperor decided on the reign name Taisho, Japan was modernized on the surface and in the cities, but little in the way of western culture had trickled down into the villages. There, ways of thinking had not changed so much, just ways of doing things. Internationally Japan was an undisputed Power and in the cities western ideas were everywhere, but so were the police. Democracy was slowly working its way into the political system and many activists were hopeful that since Japan had attained its international dreams maybe it could start meeting some of its citizens needs.

Intellectual Influences

Shinto

Shinto (meaning “Way of the Gods”) is the native religion of Japan. It is not so much concerned with an afterlife as it is with this life. Although that may sound similar to Confucianism, they are in fact very different. Shinto evolved from the animistic, shamanistic ideas and practices of the stone age inhabitants (and later immigrants as well) and stresses the importance of importance of nature and cleanliness. In contrast to the rules, rituals, and concern for propriety which characterize Confucianism, (and Christianity for that matter) Shinto has no well developed theology. It prefers that we just live naturally. Thus, what few rituals there are with life's important events - birth, marriage, harvests, and the such. When Buddhism was introduced into Japan, it managed to coexist religiously, if not always politically, with Shinto because the Japanese saw them as complementing each other rather than competing with one another. Shinto is for this life and Buddhism is for the next. Even today, when many Japanese today are about as religious as many Americans – that is, not very – most Japanese get married in Shinto ceremonies and buried (well, cremated) in Buddhist ones.

For the record: like most other people on the planet, the early Japanese believed that there land was created by the gods and that they were therefore special. Like many other societies, their rulers were considered descendants of those same gods - the sun goddess in the case of Japan. Unlike most other societies, however, the Japanese never had to face the spectacle of their semi-divine ruler losing the kingdom to some barbarian horde. Thus, Japan was never given a reason to doubt the divine origin of their land (at least, not until the Second World War, but that is something for a later article). Since it is a myth, and not a terribly interesting one at that, and because I don't know it that well, I will not reproduce it here. There are two good books to read if you are interested in the early Japanese version of ancient Japanese history. The first is also the first extant Japanese book, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), dated 712 AD and the other is the Nihongi (I don't remember), dated 720 AD. The dates on both books are misleading since they were compiled from oral sources and added to over hundreds of years. Both have been translated into English, so knowledge of ancient Japanese in not necessary.

Buddhism

The man known as the Buddha lived around 550 B.C. in India and before he died he started a religion whose impact on Asia cannot be measured. Although it eventually died out in its native India, Buddhism spread to Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, as well as the countries of South East Asia. Buddhism was already over a thousand years old when it reached Japan and had changed considerably in those thousand years.

The Buddha was concerned with just one thing - how to end suffering. Indians back then, like many today, believed that all living things are reborn in a constant cycle of birth and death. The Buddha also believed this and concluded that if we could break free from this cycle, we could end the suffering that goes with living. His Four Noble Truths sum it up better than I can:

\begin{enumerate}

\item All existence is suffering

\item Suffering is caused by desire

\item If you end desire then you end suffering

\item Following the Eight Fold Path will enable you to end desire

\end{enumerate}

The Eight Fold Path describes the proper way to live to achieve enlightenment. It is not an easy path, and in theory it could take you several lifetimes to finally transcend the cycle of birth and death. The path demands great sacrifice and discipline. Obviously such a seemingly pessimistic and difficult religion is going to have some public relations problems. Joe (and Jane) Layman doesn't have enough spare time to spend hours sitting on his butt meditating. Neither are most people real interested in giving up married life. So why has Buddhism been so popular? The answer is simple: in Tibet and China it mixed with local shamanistic ideas and practices to become a “Big Vehicle” offering rituals and prayers to comfort the common people and offer them some hope of salvation in this lifetime. The Buddha himself was deified. Eventually there were a multitude of schools (sects) in East Asia each stressing some element of the Buddha's teachings or those of popular priests after him. In Southeast Asia Buddhism was not exposed to Tibetan or Chinese practices and so has remained much closer to original Buddhism. The Buddhism which came into Japan was of the “Big Vehicle” sort. Each class found a school of Buddhism that suited its outlook and station. Thus, the imperial court was drawn to sects heavy in ritual and philosophy. Commoners generally went for the simpler sects which promised them salvation. The samurai found Zen Buddhism perfectly suited to their needs - the need to die at anytime without any hesitation.

Confucianism

Confucius lived in China about 500-and-something BC. He gave lots of thought to the proper way of living in this world. In fact he more or less invented the system of thought that has dominated Asian society until, well, today. Of course, over the last 2,600 years many people have interpreted, re-interpreted, and re-re-interpreted him, but Confucius' impact on Asia has arguably been more profound than that of Jesus on Europe. In any case, Confucius ranks up there with Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha as one of the most influential thinkers ever. Confucius, unlike the other three mentioned above, was not interested in the afterlife. He is reputed to have said that he would worry about the next world only after figuring out the proper way to live in this one.

What is the proper way to live in this one? Confucius believed that everyone had their role to play based on their relationship to others. If everyone fulfilled their duties and kept their place then society would be stable and harmonious. Obviously, this is a rather conservative philosophy. There are five basic human relationships in Confucianism: (1) ruler to ruled; (2) father to son; (3) husband to wife; (4) elder brother to younger brother; and (5) friend to friend. For Confucius and his followers, the relationship between father and son was the most important. You've no doubt heard of “filial piety” and with good reason - it is THE virtue for Confucianists. Confucius also incorporated the notion of the four classes: the scholar, the peasants, the artisans (a.k.a. craftsmen), and the lowest of the low, the merchant. Notice two things, the place of the peasant and the absence of warriors. Confucianism had no need of war, because if everyone is following their proper role then there should be no war. If there is war, then Confucianism is out the window anyway. China never glorified the warrior as much as Japan and Europe did. Also, the class order put peasants second since they provided the food that everyone else needed to live. Artisans at least make useful things, but merchants were viewed as parasites whose only purpose was to live (and get rich) off the sweat of others' labor.

Why is the father-son relationship more important than the ruler-ruledrelationship? Good question. Because the ruler is supposed to set a moral example for his people and rule with a paternalistic attitude toward his subjects. Thus, he is expected to rule like a father rules his family. If he had to use his position (rather than personal example) to keep the others in line then he obviously wasn't a worthy ruler. Here's the kicker: the Chinese came to believe that Heaven didn't recognize the right to power of an unworthy ruler. Thus, if there are rebellions and natural disasters in the land, it is because the Emperor is not fulfilling his proper duties. For Confucianists this is a much greater sin because the Emperor, as head of the household, has more responsibility in addition to more power. A second son has little responsibility and less power, so his sins are correspondingly less destructive to the family. End result: if you rebel and win then society views you as the legitimate ruler, since if the previous ruler had been fulfilling his Confucian duties properly you could never have successfully rebelled. (Kind of twisted logic, but who said human societies are logical?)

All this is really nice, but what does it have to do with Japanese history? A lot actually. After establishing his government, Tokugawa Ieyasu consciously encouraged the study and spread of Confucianism. However, in Japan a few little elements were dropped. First, the idea that a ruler could be legitimately overthrown wasn't real popular with the Tokugawa family. Also, since the samurai had a monopoly on power they inserted themselves at the top of the list of classes – “scholars” became “samurai.” However, most samurai had a decent education and during Tokugawa rule they were expected to be well educated as well as good with a sword. To accommodate the change in policy against rebellion, the most important relationship was changed from father-son to ruler-ruled. The father-son relationship was still quite important, but it became secondary. Confucianism continued to be stressed and taught to children in Japan right up to 1945.

The Meiji Period, Part 2

Nothing here yet.

The Taisho Period

Nothing here yet.

The Early Showa Period

This chapter deals with the early part of the Showa period, specifically the early 1920's to the beginnings of World War 2.

World War Two

“World War Two” is a Western term and as such doesn't fit so well into Asian history. Usually it is accepted to mean the war between Japan and America, Britain, Australia, and a few other 'Western' countries. It started in December of 1941 with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and, soon after, on various British and Dutch holdings (read 'colonies') in South-East Asia. Thus, World War Two is generally considered seperate from the Japanese war in China, although it should be understood more as an expansion of that war. In this chapter, we will follow general practice and start World War 2 in Asia with the events leading up to Pearl Harbor.

The Pacific, December of 1941

By late 1941, most people in the know anywhere, knew that war was coming soon. The Japanese army was bogged down in China, going nowhere fast. The Japanese Navy needed a dependable source of fuel and was also worried about the American embargo on scrap metal – without such things, navies are just really expensive, well-trained floating tourist attractions. It was a catch-22 for Japan:

\begin{itemize}

\item Give in to American demands and lose pretty much everything they had spent the last ten years working for.

\item Do nothing and lose everything when the Army and Navy ran out of materiel.

\item Expand the fight in hopes of getting what they need so they can then defend what they had against their now much expanded roster of enemies.

\end{itemize}

The decision to expand the fighting is really not that hard to make, given the alternatives. There is room here to argue that American diplomacy, by failing to give Japan a way out, facilitated the coming of war. There is also plenty of room for reflection on how war begets war. Regardless, the real question for Japanese planners was how to get what they needed. They could go north, into Siberia, gambling that the Russians would be too preoccupied with the German Army to react effectively. The other option was to go south, into the oil- and mineral- rich areas of South East Asia.

The admirals and generals decided to go south. They believed that, like Russia, the European nations concerned would be too busy with Nazi Germany to do much about Japan taking their colonies.

Two things of note here:

\begin{enumerate}

\item The Japanese government decided to go south for the minerals, their decision had nothing to do with respecting their non-aggression treaty with Russia, although that treaty was one factor that they considered. There is every reason to believe that had they viewed Siberia as a better place to get what they wanted, the Japanese leaders would have sent their armies to make war on Russia.

\item Despite the PR noises, the goal of Japanese leaders, especially military leaders, was not the liberation of Western colonies in Asia. Japan had its own Asian colonies that it was not about to liberate, and had been fighting for years in China against the Chinese. Although there might have been some in the government who believed that Japan should liberate Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philipines, and other Western colonies, the fact is that the military was after raw materials and those Western colonies were either where the material was or were strategically important for defending the colonies.

\end{enumerate}

The problem the Japanese military faced was how to grab the lands they wanted and then have time to entrench, prepare for possible counter-attacks, and set up governments, all the while making use of their new supplies.

The Occupation of Japan

Nothing here yet.

The Economic Miracle and The Later Showa Period

Nothing here yet.

Japan After Hirohito

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Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

PREAMBLE

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document “free” in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

This License is a kind of “copyleft'', which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.

We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does.But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book.We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.

1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS

This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License.The “Document'', below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as “you''.

A “Modified Version” of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.

A “Secondary Section” is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.

The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License.

The “Cover Texts” are certain short passages of text that are listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License.

A “Transparent” copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, whose contents can be viewed and edited directly and straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters.A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup has been designed to thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. A copy that is not “Transparent” is called “Opaque''.

Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML designed for human modification.Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output purposes only.

The “Title Page” means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, “Title Page” means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text.

2. VERBATIM COPYING

You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies.If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.

You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.

3. COPYING IN QUANTITY

If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than 100, and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover.Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies.The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible.You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.

If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.

If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material, which the general network-using public has access to download anonymously at no charge using public-standard network protocols.If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to the public.

It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.

4. MODIFICATIONS

You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it.In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:

A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document).You may use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.

B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has less than five).

C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version, as the publisher.

D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.

E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.

F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.

G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document's license notice.

H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.

I. Preserve the section entitled “History”, and its title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page.If there is no section entitled “History” in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.

J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on.These may be placed in the “History” section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.

K. In any section entitled “Acknowledgements” or “Dedications”, preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.

L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles.Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.

M. Delete any section entitled “Endorsements”. Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.

N. Do not retitle any existing section as “Endorsements” or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.

If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as invariant.To do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.

You may add a section entitled “Endorsements'', provided it contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various parties – for example, statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a standard.

You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version.Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity.If the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.

The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.

5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS

You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice.

The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make the title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.

In the combination, you must combine any sections entitled “History” in the various original documents, forming one section entitled “History''; likewise combine any sections entitled “Acknowledgements”, and any sections entitled “Dedications''.You must delete all sections entitled “Endorsements.”

6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS

You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.

You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that document.

7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS

A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version of the Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the compilation.Such a compilation is called an “aggregate”, and this License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled with the Document, on account of their being thus compiled, if they are not themselves derivative works of the Document.

If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that surround only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.

8. TRANSLATION

Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections.You may include a translation of this License provided that you also include the original English version of this License. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original English version of this License, the original English version will prevail.

9. TERMINATION

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided for under this License.Any other attempt to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.

11. HOW TO USE THIS LICENSE FOR YOUR DOCUMENTS

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page:

Copyright (c)YEARYOUR NAME.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

If you have no Invariant Sections, write “with no Invariant Sections” instead of saying which ones are invariant.If you have no Front-Cover Texts, write “no Front-Cover Texts” instead of “Front-Cover Texts being LIST"; likewise for Back-Cover Texts.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.

Which is doubly true now that so many of Japan's rivers have been dammed and reduced to little more than creeks.

The numbers are: 14,500 km for China and 29,751 km for Japan.

Compared to the rest of Eurasia, this is very late. Iron was already in use in Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC and bronze about a thousand years earlier than that.

In modern English and a normal size font (like about 12 point), that is.

95

2004-08-14T14:48:27