Japan and the Wider World

From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present

Akira Iriye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317894070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Akira Iriye assesses Japan's international relations, from a Japanese perspective, in the century and a half since she ended her self-imposed isolation and resumed her place in the international community. The book is the author's own adaptation of two highly successful short studies, up to and after 1945, that he wrote for Japan. It ends with a consideration of Japan's international relations since the end of the Cold War, and her place in the world today. This is history written from within - and there could be no better interpreter of Japan to the West than this most distinguished of historians, who, himself Japanese, has long lived and taught in the United States.

Chapter 1

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN
JAPANESE DIPLOMACY

The history of modern Japanese foreign policy begins with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 which put an end to the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (since the early seventeenth century) and established a new government under the emperor whose palace was moved to Tokyo, the new capital. By then a number of treaties had been signed with Western powers to regulate trade and other matters, and the new Meiji government started out by acknowledging the validity of these treaties. The powers, on their part, extended diplomatic recognition to Tokyo. But, even though Tokugawa officials had dealt with foreign affairs, the Meiji leaders had to learn much about the conduct of diplomacy, about international affairs in general, and, most fundamentally, about the West, its people and its culture.

A good example of this learning experience may be read in Iwakura Tomomi’s exhortation to his countrymen in 1869: ‘all human beings have horizontal eyes and vertical noses. Even if their hair is red and eyes blue, they are all human, endowed with their ideas of loyalty, filial piety, and marital affection. We should not despise them as barbarians but treat them as courteously as we would friends.’ Iwakura, a court noble, was one of the young leaders of the Meiji government who, in 1871–73, led an embassy to the United States and Europe, the first official mission dispatched by the Meiji state. He, like his colleagues, was acutely aware of the need to appeal to his countrymen to overcome their anti-foreign prejudices, products of their over two hundred years’ isolation from the rest of the world (except for China and the Netherlands, with which limited trade had been carried on even before the 1850s). Iwakura and other leaders knew that not only Japan’s existence as an independent nation but also the very survival of the Meiji regime would be jeopardized if anti-foreign fanatics created incidents – as they had done during the decades preceding the Restoration – and brought about foreign intervention; that, too, had happened earlier in Japan and, as they were well aware, in China.

It is important to note that even at this early stage, Meiji leaders spoke of the need ‘to protect the independence of the imperial nation [kôkoku]’ as the fundamental objective of their foreign policy. But how could such an objective be attained? Not, any longer, by maintaining a self-righteous isolation from world affairs or indulging in anti-foreign violence but by ‘following the motions of the universe’. Diplomatic intercourse was seen as an inevitable ‘motion’ governing relations among nations, and Japan could not be excepted if it were to survive. But the Japanese knew that the ‘universe’ in this context essentially meant the Western powers. Whereas before the 1850s China had provided the mental universe in which affairs of state could be discussed, there was a quick shift of focus from China to the West. Having decided that international relations were, for all intents and purposes, those defined by the nations of Europe and North America, Tokyo’s officials from early on tried to find out what lay behind the rise and growth of these countries’ power and influence in the world.

What constituted a nation’s power? How could it be augmented? It so happened that these questions, which European statesmen and scholars had been debating since the seventeenth century, were giving rise to some fresh perspectives and novel answers in the West during the 1870s, just when the Japanese were becoming obsessed with the issue of national independence. It may be said that this fortuitous circumstance facilitated Japan’s quest for the secrets of the West’s power. Japanese leaders like Iwakura and Ōkubo Toshimichi, perhaps the most powerful politician in the early Meiji period till he was assassinated in 1878, carefully observed Western nations during their world tour of 1871–73 and became convinced that ultimately the power of the Western nations derived from their modern political and economic systems: the coalescing of people’s energies, the enhancing of their national consciousness through education, and the development of industry. Without such changes, mere military strengthening would not build national power. As they travelled to Europe and America, Iwakura, Ōkubo, and many others learned that the masses paid attenton to national political affairs, that governments took pains to promote the welfare of the people. Government and people together then cooperated to enhance the power of the respective nations. Of course, the situation varied from country to country, and many other features distinguished Western nations, but the Meiji leaders were determined that political and economic reforms must take precedence over all others.

Such perceptions produced specific programmes for Japan’s transformation. Politically, a constitutional monarchy patterned after the British and German examples was established, along with centralized systems of bureaucracy and education. These reforms could be undertaken without incurring too many diplomatic complications, but economic reforms were a different story. Without tariff autonomy, it was extremely difficult to develop indigenous industry; imported goods paid a minimum of customs duties, while exports had to be shipped abroad through the intermediary of foreign merchants residing in the open ports, where they enjoyed extraterritorial privileges. As Baba Tatsui, a political thinker who studied in Britain during the 1870s, wrote in 1876, so long as Western merchants enjoyed the unjust and improper privileges of extraterritoriality, Japan’s commerce would only be destined to weaken and national wealth would be exhausted. Treaty revision was absolutely imperative if Japan were to strengthen its economic bases, not to mention upholding its national dignity. The government, sharing such views, was determined from early on to bring about the modification and ultimate abolition of the unequal treaties. ‘Achieving equality with other nations’, in the words of Sanjō Sanetomi, like Iwakura a court nobleman who occupied high posts in the early Meiji government, was thus considered an essential part of the programme for national strengthening.

At the back of such determination was a widely shared image of the West as a group of modernized nations. If Japan were to survive as an independent nation, it must be like them, politically and economically. Of course, this implied optimism that Japanese could undertake what the Westerners had accomplished. Modernization and Westernization were interchangeable. This was what Fukuzawa Yukichi, perhaps the most influential writer at that time, meant by his call for ‘leaving Asia’; so long as Japan remained entrapped in traditional Asian ways, it could never achieve full independence. Japan could grow only if it ‘marched alongside the civilized nations of the world’, as he said. It should be noted that the West was not considered intrinsically either good or evil but was viewed pragmatically, as an object of emulation. The value lay not so much in the West as in the act of emulating the West. Westernization would not make Japan any more moral than it was, nor would it be used to oppose the West for some ulterior purposes. Modern transformation was not a moralistic proposition but rather an amoral (not necessarily immoral) prescription for national survival. Meiji Japanese diplomacy, therefore, may be said to have been characterized by realism and pragmatism, implying an absence of moralistic considerations.

That could best be seen in national security policy. To defend the homeland, it would of course be necessary to strengthen national defences, but what should be the policy towards the neighbouring countries? How much military force was necessary for possible use there? Here again, Japanese leaders were influenced by their perception of the West, that the Western powers appeared to be rapidly extending power to Southeast Asia, China, and Korea. Should they fall under the control of Western powers, Japan’s security would be compromised. Japan must, therefore, be prepared to prevent such penetration either by placing some of the areas under its own control or by other means. The incorporation of Okinawa into Japanese jurisdiction (1879) and the ‘exchange’ of South Sakhalin for the Kurile islands through a treaty with Russia (1875) were examples of such thinking. Likewise, it was considered imperative to prevent Korea and its environs (the Strait of Tsushima, the Yellow Sea) from falling under great-power control. The policy of seeking Korean ‘independence’ did not necessarily mean Japan must expand into the peninsula, but that it should not be allowed to become another power’s protectorate or colony.

All these policies required military strengthening, and systematic efforts in that direction began in the 1880s. As Sanjō noted in 1882, after the Meiji restoration it had been necessary to ‘rest the people and build up basic resources’, but it had become ‘unfortunately unavoidable, given world conditions, to strengthen our army and navy’. In the 1870s a system of conscription was instituted to produce manpower for regular forces, a General Staff was organized to serve the emperor as commander-in-chief, and a naval construction plan was drafted. And in the following decade, in order to fund these projects, while at the same time controlling inflation that had accompanied the political turmoil and economic change after 1868, a fiscal retrenchment policy was carried out under the leadership of Matsukata Masayoshi, finance minister for many years after 1881; state-owned factories were sold to private entrepreneurs, the use of inconvertible paper currencies was controlled, a central bank (the Bank of Japan) was established to issue convertible notes, and indirect taxes were increased. The Matsukata policy ultimately aimed at increasing exports and reducing imports, but such a policy could not be carried out until Japan regained tariff autonomy. So Tokyo redoubled its efforts to achieve this objective as well. In other words, there was cohesiveness and unity to Japanese political and diplomatic objectives, at least until around 1890. That is, Japanese diplomacy was interchangeable with efforts at modernization. When Inoue Kaoru, one of the principal negotiators for treaty revision during the 1870s and the 1880s, asserted that ‘we must make our nation and people into a European nation and European people’, he was expressing the widely accepted view that national independence, treaty revision, and modern transformation were all aspects of the same agenda, that of emulating the powerful and advanced Western nations. Although Meiji leaders often engaged in acrimonious debate, for instance concerning the best means of abolishing extraterritoriality, they shared essentially this same perspective on Japan’s domestic and foreign affairs.

It is interesting to note that, in the 1870s and 1880s, precisely at the moment that Meiji leaders were developing basic principles of Japanese diplomacy, Europeans and Americans, too, were defining new conceptions of national and international affairs. It may be more correct to say that these conceptions were not so much new as reformulations of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notions of mercantilism. In the nineteenth century, anti- mercantilist perspectives, for instance stressing free trade, laissez-faire, and the primacy of economics in domestic and world politics, had been quite influential. But by the 1870s and 1880s, they had begun to be superseded by a renewed emphasis on the role of the state in economic affairs as well as broadened-conceptions of national interest and security. Earlier, national interest had been seen in terms of economic development under conditions of free trade, but now voices began advocating an expanded definition. For example, in Germany Alfred G. Schlieffen stressed the importance of maintaining stable domestic order as a requirement for national defence; in France L. H. G. Lyautey asserted that military officers must be sensitive to social issues; in Britain Joseph Chamberlain gave colonialism an emotional justification as a necessary link to the defence of the motherland; and in Russia Sergei Witte advocated the economic penetration of neighbouring lands through state initiative and support. These men believed that ‘rational’ economic development pursued under laissez-faire conditions did not necessarily protect national interests and were calling for the formation of a new national policy that viewed military and economic affairs as means for ensuring the nation’s security and other interests. Economic forces, which had been assumed to be ‘rational’ and ‘internationalized’, transcending ‘artificial’ entities such as nation-states, were now to be seen as means for the implementation of state policies.

How such a shift took place has long been debated, but clearly technological innovations were a crucial factor. Advances in manufacturing and communications technology were producing more goods for markets, shortening distances between nations, obliterating local autonomies, enabling nations to exercise greater control over different colonies, awakening people’s awareness of the world through newspapers and travels, and arousing their interest in public affairs so that their ideas, emotions, and prejudices would have to be taken seriously by governments. These developments heightened the sense that traditional economic theories, diplomatic concepts, or political ideologies were no longer sufficient and that efforts would have to be made to construct a new world view.

The reformulation of national security was a good example. Technological changes were already causing a redefinition of the concept of national defence. Schlieffen, for instance, early noted the strategic roles to be played by railways and telegrams, while Alfred Thayer Mahan in the United States advocated a new naval policy to correspond to developments in shipbuilding technology. Beyond such purely military matters, statesmen and intellectuals in the West became increasingly interested in broadening the definition of security, for instance discussing the relationship between domestic social order and national defence. The adoption of conscription and protective tariffs in most Western nations towards the end of the nineteenth century fitted into such a trend, as did the renewed expansion into Asia and Africa after the 1880s. In the so-called ‘age of Bismarck’, the European powers managed to maintain a degree of equilibrium among themselves through an intricate system of ententes so that the development of new technology led to inter-power conflicts primarily in countries outside Europe. Overseas colonies’ economic importance had been emphasized since the sixteenth century, but now their political and military significance was stressed.

These territories, in other words, came to be seen as part of world geopolitical equations, with bases in the colonies, for example, contributing to the growth of the imperialists’ naval power. Intellectually, all these views reflected an effort to incorporate the technological developments and, in particular, earth’s shrinking distances into a redefinition of national interest. Events in distant parts of the globe were seen to be of immediate relevance to national power and security. Before the 1890s, however, the powers’ primary concern was with Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, rather than East Asia. They had not yet extended their territorial control and struggles for power to that corner of the world. As if to take advantage of this relative indifference, the Ch’ing empire in China undertook a ‘self-strengthening’ movement, involving the strengthening of the navy and the encouragement of industrialization through the system of ‘official supervision and merchant management’.

This was the international environment in which Japan made its appearance in the world scene under the Meiji government. There was thus a congruence between Japan’s policies, pursuing treaty revision, military strengthening, and other programmes for modernization, and the realities of world conditions. The Japanese were determined not to be left behind in the waves of technological change and to incorporate the advanced nations’ industrial techniques, strategic concepts, and ideologies of national interest. Even with regard to treaty revision, the key to the nation’s ability to conduct modern diplomacy, it was a fortuitous circumstance that the Western powers were not yet engaged in a fierce struggle for power in East Asia. The realities as perceived by Japanese leaders and their definition of national priorities and defence strategies were closely matched, it may be said, because there was no gap between the ‘realities’ and the ‘perceived realities’. In thus perceiving the ‘realities’, Japanese leaders avoided abstract theorizing or moralizing, preferring instead to persist in a pragmatic, even a non-ideological approach to foreign affairs.

This last point, namely that abstract thinking and theory were lacking in early Meiji diplomacy, was actually to become a major characteristic of the subsequent history as well. Those in power eschewed moralism and emotionalism and sought to focus on specific problem-solving. Such a stance gave rise to criticism on the part of those outside the seat of power. They advocated an expedition to Korea right after the Meiji Restoration, condemned the slow-going treaty revision negotiations as ‘humiliating’ to the nation, denounced programmes for Westernization, and advocated active policies to encourage reforms in Korea and China. They were not satisfied with the government’s pragmatism and called for a more colourful diplomacy, a more moralistic approach to world problems, or a more emotional formulation of national policies. These attacks themselves reveal that Meiji diplomacy was indeed colourless and devoid of abstract ideology.

It may be said that the government’s approach was almost always ‘realistic’, whereas the critics were seeking a more ‘idealistic’ foreign policy. For instance, the Meiji state’s realism accepted the ‘realities’ of world politics which were, as they said, creating a situation where ‘the strong ate the meat of the weak’. In such a situation, if Japan were to survive, it had no choice but to try to become like one of the strong. Some of the opponents, on their part, argued that there was no point in merely emulating the Western powers and that Japan should try to coalesce the rest of Asia in opposition to them.

The opponents included former samurai (feudal warriors) now dispossessed of their privileges, as well as politicians, journalists, and scholars dissatisfied with the pace or direction of the Meiji state’s modernization programmes. They did not quite amount to public opinion in the Western sense; even after the constitution was promulgated in 1889, the right to vote was limited to a fraction of the male population, and numerous political parties came and went without developing anything resembling a multi-party parliamentary system. Still, an open- ended discussion of public affairs was something new in the country, and the emergence, in the early Meiji period, of divergent views on international affairs is of considerable interest, for they anticipated some of the key themes in the history of modern Japanese foreign relations.

One important theme was what may be characterized as an Asianist orientation, as against the government’s preoccupation with the West. Whether they followed the lead of Gen’yōsha (the Wide Ocean Society) advocating that Japan should make itself the leader in Asia, or of Nakae Chōmin, Ono Azusa, and other ‘people’s rights’ advocates insisting that the nation should help other Asian countries achieve freedom and independence, a number of publicists were advocating a pan-Asianist agenda which stressed the solidarity of all Asian countries and was thus diametrically opposed to the government’s policy of Westernization. The Asianists argued that Japan’s mission lay in its Asian identity. A moralistic or an emotional formulation of foreign policy would result from such a perspective, in contrast to the government’s steady refusal to listen to pan-Asianist rhetoric in order to concentrate on solving treaty, territorial, and other immediate issues. The more it succeeded in achieving results in this regard, the louder became the voices of the Asianists, some undoubtedly pursuing a vision of Asian freedom.

The opposition between realism and idealism characterizes many countries’ foreign policies, but in Japan’s case it may be said that the opposition took the form of the state’s realism and the public’s idealism, although the bulk of the ‘public’ may have stood outside such controversy. Japan did not yet have a fully developed civil society; as Fukuzawa said: ‘We have a state but no nation in Japan.’ The fact remains that while the non-ideological, no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 The Origins of Modern Japanese Diplomacy
• Chapter 2 The Emergence of Japan as a Great Power
• Chapter 3 The Road to Continentalism
• Chapter 4 Japanese Diplomacy in Transition
• Chapter 5 The Search for a New Order
• Chapter 6 The Ideology of the Chinese–Japanese War
• Chapter 7 The Road to the Pacific War
• Chapter 8 The Consequences of the Pacific War
• Chapter 9 The Resumption of Japanese Diplomacy
• Chapter 10 The Origins of Peaceful Coexistence
• Chapter 11 The Emergence of the Third World
• Chapter 12 Diplomacy in the Age of Economic Chaos
• Chapter 13 The Post-Cold War World
• Conclusion Japan and the Wider World at the End of the Twentieth Century
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index