There is one other fundamental difference between the major revolutions in Europe and the Meiji Restoration. The French Revolution was, amongst other things, a response to an internal development — the rise of the bourgeoisie — whereas the Meiji Restoration was a response to an external threat, that of an expansionist West. This was the fundamental geopolitical difference between Europe and the rest of the world: Europe was the leader and, therefore, the predator, while the rest of the world was, in response, obliged to find a way of dealing with Europe ’s power and expansionist intent. This difference also helps to explain why the Restoration was instigated by a section of the elite rather than a rising antagonistic group: what obliged Japan to change course was not the rise of the merchant class but the external threat from the West.
THE LINES OF CONTINUITY
Japan was the world’s first example of reactive modernization: of a negotiated modernity in the context of Western power and pre-eminence. Japanese modernization deliberately and self-consciously walked the tightrope between Westernization and Japanization. Nonethless, compared with later examples of Asian modernization, Japan was in a relatively privileged position: it could make choices — in particular, how and in what ways to modernize — that were not open in the same way to later-comers. As a result, it is a fascinating case-study: a country whose existing elite made a voluntary and calculated decision to Westernize in order to preserve what it perceived to be the nation’s essence.
At critical junctures, notwithstanding the long period of isolation under the Tokugawa, Japan has displayed an openness to foreign influences which goes back to its relationship with Chinese civilization in the fifth and sixth centuries. This willingness to absorb foreign approaches, as and when it has been deemed necessary, has been an underlying strength of Japanese society. Instead of an outright rejection of foreign ideas, the desire to preserve the Japanese ‘essence’ has instead been expressed by attempting to delineate what the Japanese writer Kosaku Yoshino has described as ‘our own realm’, namely those customs, institutions and values which are regarded as indigenous. As Yoshino argues:
In order for ‘our realm’ to be marked, significant differences have been selected and organised not merely to differentiate between ‘us’ (the Japanese) and ‘them’ (the other countries from which cultural elements are borrowed), but, more importantly, to emphasise the existence of ‘our own realm’ and therefore to demonstrate the uninterrupted continuation of ‘our’ nation as a cultural entity. In this way, the sense of historical continuity can also be maintained. It is this cultural realm of ‘ours’ to which the Japanese claim exclusive ownership. [147]
The distinctiveness of Japan is thus defined and maintained in two ways: firstly in the notion of the Japanese realm as described, consisting of those elements regarded as exclusively and authentically Japanese; and secondly in the unique amalgam of the various foreign influences combined with those elements regarded as distinctively Japanese. As one would expect, the notion of a Japanese realm takes precedence over hybridity in the Japanese sense of self; although it embraces material objects as diverse as tatami mats, sake and sumo wrestling, Japanese uniqueness centres around how the Japanese behave differently from non-Japanese, or where the symbolic boundary between the Japanese and foreigners should be drawn. [148] The duality embraced in the juxtaposition of the indigenous and the foreign can be found in many aspects of Japanese life. Somehow the two coexist, often with little leakage between them, with the foreign influences absorbed and reformatted, blended and incorporated. [149] Japanese modernity, as a consequence, is a highly complex, incongruous and at times bizarre phenomenon. This hybridity dates back to the era of Chinese influence but has been most marked, and traumatic, during the era of Westernization. It is so deeply entrenched that it is now taken for granted as something thoroughly natural and intrinsic to Japan. Western-style clothes may be the norm, but kimonos are a common sight on Sundays, and Japanese clothes are frequently worn at home. Japanese food contains Japanese, Chinese and Western elements, with both chopsticks and cutlery commonly used. Reaching further back into history, as noted earlier, the Japanese language consists of a combination of both Chinese-derived and Japanese characters.
After periods of intense Westernization, the relationship between Japanese and Western elements in the country has been the subject of intense reflection and debate. Japan’s post-1868 history, indeed, has seen alternating phases of Westernization and Japanization. The first twenty years after the Meiji Restoration saw a furious process of Westernization on many fronts, but by 1900 this had given way to a period of introspection and an attempt to specify the nature of the Japanese essence. In this debate three characteristics were used to define Japaneseness: the emperor system, the samurai spirit, and the idea of a family society (with the emperor as father). After the defeat in the Second World War and the American occupation, there was again a frantic period of economic catch-up and Westernization followed, in the 1970s and early 1980s, by a further phase of seeking to define the nature of the Japanese realm, [150] though the conception of ‘Japaneseness’ deployed at this juncture was distinctively different from that of the early 1900s. The nihonjinron (meaning ‘discussions on the nature of the Japanese’) in the 1970s focused on Japan as a homogeneous and group-orientated society, and the Japanese as a non-verbal, non-logical people. [151] Not surprisingly, given the context of the times, these latter characteristics were essentially designed to define Japaneseness in contradistinction to the American influence that had loomed so large in Japanese life during the post-war decades.
[147] Kosaku Yoshino,
[148] Yoshino,