Ulysses S. Grant and Meiji Japan, 1869-1885

Diplomacy, Strategic Thought and the Economic Context of US-Japan Relations

Ian Patrick Austin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000022384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Ulysses S Grant, besides being the General-in-Chief of the Union armies at the time of the Union victory in the American Civil War, was also President, 1869–1878, at a time when the United States was undergoing significant transformations, both economically and strategically, and growing in confidence as a world power. At the same time, Japan, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was seeking to join the ranks of the developed, read exclusively Western, states. This book explores the interaction of Grant with Meiji Japan, compares and contrasts developments in the two countries and assesses the impact each country had on the other. It discusses the travels of the Iwakura Mission in the United States, considers Grant's 1879 visit to Japan and examines the personal relationship between Grant, the Meiji emperor and the other leaders of the Meiji government. The book argues that Grant's thoughtful consideration of the key issues of the day, issues common to many countries at the time, and his suggested policy responses had a huge impact on Meiji Japan.

1 Introduction

Of the countries he visited, the Land of the Rising Sun was Grant’s favorite.¹

None of the many foreign visitors to whom Emperor Meiji gave an audience produced as strong an impression on him as did the former American general and president Ulysses S. Grant. Perhaps the most lasting result of the emperor’s conversation with Grant was to give him greater self-confidence when in later years he had to deal with foreign statesmen.²

When we consider what has happed [the Meiji Restoration], we realize that everything was related to changes in the trend of world affairs.³

The name Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant, 1822–1885) will forever be associated with fighting and winning for the United States of America unity as General-in-Chief of the Union Army (1864–1869), and then as the securer of the political, economic and strategic legacy of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; presidency 1861–1865) during a two-term presidency (1869–1877). Far less examined is the fact that Grant’s crucial military and public policy work resonated well beyond the United States itself, and in doing so made him a global figure, for his collective body of work provided substantive answers to governance challenges faced by other national leaders at the time. Grant’s interactions with Japan’s new Meiji elite (1868–1912) during the Meiji Iwakura Embassy’s time in America (1872) and during his two-year post-presidential world tour (1877–1879), and the legacy of these exchanges, are the focal point of this study.

The work will explore the interaction between President Grant and the Meiji elite through the seminal event of the Iwakura Embassy visit to the United States in 1872, led by Embassy leader (Envoy Extraordinary Ambassador Plenipotentiary) and Prime Minister Iwakura Tomomi (1825–1883), and supported by four vice-Ambassadors: Ito Hirobumi (1841–1909), who had previously toured America; Kido Koin (also known as Kido Takayoshi: 1833–1877); Okubo Toshimichi (1830–1878); and Yamaguchi Naoyoshi (1839–1894).⁴ It will then go on to study the 1879 visit to Japan by the ex-President and the former First Lady (Julia Dent Grant, 1826–1902)⁵ as the final destination of a two-plus-year world tour as citizen diplomats (see Table A1.1). The Iwakura Embassy in terms of the original intent of its 1872 visit to America—the revision of Japan’s unequal treaty system with the United States of America—would prove to be a failure. However, in a most surprising development, the establishment of most cordial relations with President Grant and First Lady Julia would be an unqualified success. The reasons for the Grants’ and the Meiji men’s development of most harmonious relations emanated directly from two forces: the personal, and the intellectual. In relation to the personal, the president’s own personal being, one of a quiet reserved man, but one full of unrelenting intellectual and physical energy, often set him apart from a significant section of his fellow Americans and would see his detractors misread him. These characteristics would, however, endear him to not only the Meiji regime elite, but also Japanese people more broadly because they reflected their own personal and cultural milieu, and his quite reserved nature often hid deep reserves of energy. In the intellectual realm, Grant, in the decades prior to the Meiji men’s 1872 visit, had firmly affixed himself intellectually to be an American Whig, and with the onset of the Civil War (1861) as a Republican who fully advocated for the agenda of Abraham Lincoln: not least of all the comprehensive rejection of Social Darwinism (read white supremacy) as an legitimate intellectual position for himself, or as a public policy position for the nation. Further, Julia Grant, in a masterstroke of cultural diplomacy, added to the luster in which the Meiji men held her husband, by welcoming the Iwakura Embassy members to Washington D.C. with a huge bouquet of flowers in their hotel (the finest in the capital, the Arlington Hotel) room upon arrival (February 29, 1872). Given the central importance of floral arrangements within Japanese culture, and in particular the art of gift giving, this act of soft diplomacy would have resonated profoundly with the travelers so far from home.⁶ The establishment of firm relations between the leading couple of America and the Iwakura Embassy men, in turn, would open up numerous public and private institutional and enterprise doors to the very young men of Japan (ranging from their early 20s to the oldest being Iwakura himself in his late 40s).

For the Iwakura Embassy members and the Meiji regime’s policy makers collectively, like those of any late-developing economy, many of the public and private institutions capable of undertaking the long-term economic development essential for nation-building were simply in their infancy, or, indeed absent.⁷ Human capital, those members of Japanese society with the skills to deliver modernity to domestic institutions and enterprises were a scarce resource indeed, and simply could not be spread thinly across multiple entities. The consolidation of talent, as much as the limited material resources available to the regime, had to be concentrated into as few entities as possible to deliver the maximum benefits to the nation. For late-developing economies, it is the state that must create the institutional framework within which the private sector can emerge, develop, operate and function in areas which previously did not exist or were underdeveloped.⁸ The very concept of state ‘intervention’ was a false paradigm to the members of the Iwakura Embassy and the broader Meiji regime, as they never sought to carry out activities in which the private sector was successfully operating, or, had shown a capacity to develop. They were, above all else, pragmatic beings whose ultimate goal was to re-establish Japan’s standing as a sovereignty entity.⁹ Their observations in Grant’s America were specifically designed to overcome Japanese private enterprises’ incapacity (in human, capital and technical resources) to develop enterprises and industries that would deliver strategic security and economic modernization to the nation. The loss of national sovereignty through the unequal treaties system meant that they embraced industrial-modernity lessons of value from wherever they could find them. They examined and documented the zealous application of Andrew Carnegie’s and the other American industrial titans’ (John Pierpont [J.P.] Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Cooke, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould and others) ‘ultra-modernity and efficiency through economic concentration’ combines to strategically significant Japanese state and private enterprises alike.¹⁰

Even a cursory examination of American (or British and continental European, particularly Prussian-German) developmental history makes clear that the Iwakura Embassy members as part of the Meiji elite were well and truly pursuing historical precedent; that there is absolutely nothing ‘natural’ about economic ascendancy.¹¹ For members of the Iwakura Embassy, their comprehensive study of the rapidly emerging United States delivered a primary finding: that national unity, peace and prosperity, was secured first and foremost through the development of a higher level of state capacity across the political, strategic, military, economic and societal (educational advancement) realms. And then that this state modernity in turn would open up new spaces and opportunities from which a transformed private sector, particularly the rise of corporations, capable of supporting nation building could emerge.

The Iwakura Embassy members upon arriving in America in January 1872 already knew through previously travel abroad, and, or, extensively Western affairs studies, that Grant and the broader Republican elite held the firm intellectual belief that the United States of America’s future would be defined by state activism and capacity;¹² and that the state, the federal government, in turn had to be built, developed and sustained by the concerted policy actions of the national elite. Grant, from the outset of his first term (inaugurated March 4, 1869; Grant re-elected in 1872 and once sworn into office in on March 3, 1873), had made it clear to all, both domestically and internationally, that the United States of America under his presidency would move to take its place at the top echelon of international strategic and industrial power. Nothing signaled this more to the Embassy members than the ongoing negotiations between the Grant administration—with Grant’s most trusted cabinet member, Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish (1808–1893, 1869–1877), at the forefront—and Great Britain for a treaty based on equal standing.¹³ Arriving in the United States, the Iwakura Embassy members knew Grant was effectively achieving the central goals that they themselves desired for their own nation: the establishment of a strong and effective central government; treaty equality with the British Empire through the 1871 Treaty of Washington; and the transformation of the national economy toward industry and manufactures.¹⁴ These were the very same goals they themselves had set as essential for their own new regimes survival (inclusive of their own personal survival), and for the securing of Japan’s security and prosperity.

Domestic, regional and global events had revealed to them that any political elite that failed to embrace state activism toward nation-building left their sovereign state, irrespective of its size and the resources it possessed, increasingly at the mercy of ‘others’ in possession of industrially derived military strength. They did not have to look far for empirical examples. The fall of their domestic predecessors, the Tokugawa regime (1603–1867), the fracturing of China under an ineffectual elite in the face of European power, and the defeat of the Confederate states through the industrial strength of the Northern states, all foretold of their own dire future should their governance agenda fail. It would take a considerable investment in time, effort and capital for Japan to obtain knowledge from Grant, his administration, and American public and private institutions and enterprises. There was, however, a high practical collective understanding that any failure on their part to deliver modernity across governance, strategic and industrial affairs for Japan would see the Meiji regime and its members suffer a likely quick and brutal demise.

Grant had defeated his enemies, been elevated to national leadership, and was governing his country toward increasing unity and prosperity—only Germany’s Otto von Bismarck could equal such a record and the Meiji men would seek him out in Ber...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedications
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• About the author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Literature review
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Iwakura Embassy in Grant’s America (1871–1872)
• 3 Grant, Europe and the importance of Otto von Bismarck to Grant–Meiji relations
• 4 Grant’s Pan-Asian journey and engagement with China
• 5 Grant in Japan and the breaking of new ground
• 6 Return to the United States of America and the legacy of Grant–Meiji relations
• Index