Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  Japan’s 1904–1905 war against Russia enabled Meiji Japan for the first time to test itself against a Western power; both Japan’s navy and its army defeated the Russians (Plates 3.7, 3.8). That was a milestone in world history: the defeat of a major European power by an Asian power in an all-out war. By the resulting peace treaty, Japan annexed the southern half of Sakhalin Island and gained control of the South Manchurian Railroad. Japan established a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it in 1910. In 1914 Japan conquered Germany’s Chinese sphere of influence and Micronesian island colonies in the Pacific Ocean (Plate 3.9). Finally, in 1915 Japan presented China with the so-called Twenty-One Demands that would have converted China virtually into a vassal state; China gave in to some but not all of the demands.

  Japan had already considered attacking China and Korea before 1894 but drew back, because it recognized that it wasn’t strong enough and that it risked giving European powers an excuse to intervene. The only occasion on which Meiji Japan overestimated its strength was in 1895, at the end of its war against China. The concessions that Japan had extracted from China then included China’s ceding to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula, which controls the sea and land routes between China and Korea. But France, Russia, and Germany reacted by joining together to force Japan to abandon the peninsula, which Russia proceeded to lease from China three years later. That humiliating setback made Japan aware of its weakness, standing alone, vis-à-vis European powers. Hence in 1902 Japan made an alliance with Britain, for protection and insurance, before attacking Russia in 1904. Even with the security offered by that British alliance, Japan waited to issue its demands against China, until the armed forces of European powers were tied up in World War One and unable to threaten intervention, as they had done in 1895.

  In short, Japan’s military expansion in the Meiji Era was consistently successful, because it was guided at every step by honest, realistic, cautious, informed self-appraisal of the relative strengths of Japan and its targets, and by a correct assessment of what was realistically possible for Japan. Now, compare that successful Meiji Era expansion with Japan’s situation as of August 14, 1945. On that date Japan was at war simultaneously with China, the U.S., Britain, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand (as well as with many other countries that had declared war against Japan but were not actively fighting). That was a hopeless combination of enemies against which to fight. Much of the Japanese army had been pinned down for years in China. American bombers had gutted most major Japanese cities. The two atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A British/American fleet was bombarding the Japanese coast. Russian armies were advancing against weak Japanese resistance in Manchuria and Sakhalin. Australian and New Zealand troops were mopping up Japanese garrisons on some Pacific islands. Almost all of Japan’s larger warships and merchant fleet had been sunk or knocked out of service. More than 3 million Japanese people had been killed.

  It would have been bad enough if blunders of Japanese foreign policy had been responsible for Japan being attacked by all those countries. Instead, Japan’s blunders were worse: Japan itself had been the one to attack those countries. In 1937 Japan launched a full-scale war against China. It fought two brief but bloody border wars with Russia in 1938 and 1939. In 1941 Japan simultaneously and suddenly attacked the U.S. and Britain and the Netherlands, even while Japan was still susceptible to resumption of fighting with Russia. Japan’s attack on Britain automatically resulted in declarations of war by Britain’s Pacific dominions Australia and New Zealand; Japan proceeded to bomb Australia. In 1945 Russia did attack Japan. On August 15, 1945 Japan finally bowed to the long-delayed but inevitable outcome, and surrendered. Why did Japan from 1937 onwards blunder stepwise into such an unrealistic and ultimately unsuccessful military expansion, when Meiji Japan from 1868 onwards had carried out stepwise such a realistic and successful military expansion?

  There are numerous reasons: the successful war against Russia, disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of Japan’s export-led economic growth in 1929, and others. But one additional reason is especially relevant to this book: a difference between Meiji-Era Japan and the Japan of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in knowledge and capacity for honest self-appraisal on the part of Japanese leaders. In the Meiji Era many Japanese, including leaders of Japan’s armed forces, had made visits abroad. They thereby obtained detailed first-hand knowledge of China, the U.S., Germany, and Russia and their armies and navies. They could make an honest appraisal of Japan’s strength compared to the strengths of those other countries. Then, Japan attacked only when it could be confident of success. In contrast, in the 1930’s the Japanese army on the Asian mainland was commanded by young hothead officers who didn’t have experience abroad (unless in Nazi Germany), and who didn’t obey orders from experienced Japanese leaders in Tokyo. Those young hotheads didn’t know first-hand the industrial and military strength of the U.S. and of Japan’s other prospective opponents. They didn’t understand American psychology, and they considered the U.S. a nation of shopkeepers who wouldn’t fight.

  Quite a few older leaders of the Japanese government and armed forces (especially of the navy) in the 1930’s did know the strength of the U.S. and Europe first-hand. The most poignant moment of my first visit to Japan, in 1998, came when my dinner table partner one evening turned out to be a retired Japanese steel executive, at that time in his 90’s, who recalled for me his visits to American steel factories in the 1930’s. He told me that he had been stunned to discover that the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity for high-quality steel was 50 times Japan’s, and that that fact alone had convinced him that it would be insane for Japan to go to war with the U.S.

  But Japan’s older leaders with overseas experience in the 1930’s were intimidated and dominated, and several were assassinated, by young hotheads lacking overseas experience—much as shishi hotheads in the late 1850’s and 1860’s had assassinated and intimidated Japan’s leaders then. Of course, the shishi had no more overseas experience of the strength of foreign countries than did Japan’s young officers of the 1930’s. The difference was that shishi attacks against Westerners provoked the bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki Strait by powerful Western warships, which demonstrated convincingly even to the shishi that their strategy had been unrealistic. In the 1930’s there were no such foreign bombardments of Japan to force realism upon the young officers who had not been overseas.

  In addition, the historical experience of the generation of Japanese leaders who came of age in Meiji Japan was virtually the opposite of the experience of Japan’s leaders of the 1930’s. Meiji leaders had spent their formative years in a weak Japan at risk of attack by strong potential enemies. But to Japan’s leaders of the 1930’s, war instead meant the intoxicating success of the Russo-Japanese War, the destruction of Russia’s Pacific fleet in Port Arthur harbor by a surprise attack that served as the model for Japan’s surprise attack against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor (Plate 3.7), and the spectacular destruction of Russia’s Baltic fleet by the Japanese navy in the Battle of Tsushima Strait (Plate 3.8). When we discuss Germany in Chapter 6, we shall encounter another example of successive generations within the same country holding drastically different political views as the result of different historical experiences.

  Thus, part—not all, but part—of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930’s lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.

  Meiji Japan strikingly illustrates parallels to most of the dozen factors identified in Chapter 1 as affecting outcomes of individual crises. For one factor (factor #5 of Table 1.2) Japan provides the outstanding illustration among our seven countries; for another factor (#7), it provides one of the two outstanding illustrations; seven other factors (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, and 11) are also important; and one factor (#12) operated both positively and negativ
ely.

  More than any other nation discussed in this book, Meiji Japan illustrates change by borrowing from foreign models (factor #5), after careful comparison of different models in order to identify which one best suited Japanese circumstances in a particular sphere. The result was that Japan’s constitution and army came to be based on German models, its fleet on the British model, its initial draft civil law code on the French model, and its 1879 educational reforms on the American model. Even the U.S. Declaration of Independence appears to have served as a model for a government reform proposal drafted in 1870 by Itagaki Taisuke and Fukuoka Kotei, who began their proposal with a preamble stating that all men were by rights equal, from which they went on to draw many conclusions. (Think of the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” leading to many conclusions.) Itagaki’s and Fukuoka’s proposed American model of government was not adopted, but many other foreign models did get adopted.

  We discussed in the preceding section the role of realistic self-appraisal (factor #7) in Meiji Japan, rivaled only by its role in Finland. Our discussion made clear that successful national self-appraisal requires two elements. One is a willingness to confront painful truths: in Japan’s case, the truth that the hated barbarians were stronger than Japan, and that Japan could gain strength only by learning from those barbarians. The other prerequisite is knowledge. It wasn’t enough that Meiji leaders, and the shishi of the decade preceding the Meiji Restoration, possessed the willingness to confront the painful truth of Western military strength: they required knowledge of that strength from first-hand observation or experience. But Japan’s young army officers of the 1930’s lacked first-hand knowledge of Western military strength. Meiji realistic self-appraisal was linked to another of our outcome predictor factors: widespread Japanese consensus about the crisis with which Commodore Perry’s visit confronted Japan (factor #1).

  Meiji Japan illustrates well the necessity of building a fence, and of adopting change selectively (factor #3). Massive change was adopted in many spheres of Meiji society, including the economic, legal, military, political, social, and technological spheres. But other features of traditional Japan were retained in the Meiji Era, including Confucian morality, emperor worship, ethnic homogeneity, filial piety, Shintoism, and Japan’s writing system. Initially, changes were proposed for some of those features, too, such as proposals to make Japan a republic, and to adopt a Western alphabet. But Japan quickly built a fence separating traditional features to be retained from those considered in need of change. While the desire for change was strong, the desire to remain traditional was also so strong that some of the changes had to be portrayed as fictitious retentions of “invented traditions” in order to make them palatable. This coexistence of drastic change with conservative retention also illustrates the factor of situation-specific national flexibility (factor #10).

  Along with the value of foreign models, Meiji Japan illustrates the value of foreign help (factor #4). Innumerable examples include the Nagasaki-based British trader Thomas Glover, who sent a group of 19 Satsuma men to study in England already in 1864; the many Westerners in Europe and the United States who hosted Japanese visitors; the German advisors Albert Mosse and Hermann Roesler, who came to Japan in 1886 to help Ito Hirobumi devise a constitution for Japan; and the British shipyard Vickers’s construction of Japan’s first battle-cruiser Kongo, which then served as the model for the battle-cruisers Haruna, Hiei, and Kirishima to be built in Japan.

  Meiji Japan, and Japan today, illustrate strong national identity (factor #6). Japanese people and their leaders considered Japan unique, superior, and set apart from the rest of the world. That shared belief enabled Japanese to endure the stresses of the Meiji Era, sometimes differing about how best to secure Japan’s future, but never doubting their country’s value.

  Meiji Japan exemplifies patience, the willingness to tolerate initial failure, and persistence until a workable solution is found (factor #9). Japan’s initial response to the foreign threats of the 1850’s and 1860’s was to try to keep the foreigners out, then (once foreigners had been admitted at specific Japanese treaty ports) to try to expel them again. But it gradually became clear, and accepted by the bakufu and the shishi and Meiji leaders, that that approach didn’t work, and that a different approach was necessary: opening Japan to the West, learning from the West, and thereby strengthening Japan. Similarly, Meiji efforts to devise law codes, a national system of education, and a constitution took years of drafts, experimentation, and changes. In each of those three spheres the Meiji government initially tried one or more foreign models, discarded them as inappropriate to Japanese circumstances, and finally settled on a different foreign model: e.g., the civil law code, which began with French-inspired and British-inspired drafts and ended up German-inspired.

  Non-negotiable core values (factor #11) united the Japanese in their willingness to make sacrifices. High among those values was loyalty to the emperor. That was dramatically illustrated at the end of World War Two, when the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. Even after the two atomic bombs, and in a hopeless military situation, Japan still insisted on one condition: “that the said [surrender] declaration does not include any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” Without acceptance of that condition, Japan was prepared to resist the threatened U.S. invasion of the Japanese mainland. The strength of Japanese core values was also illustrated in World War Two by the willingness of large numbers of Japanese soldiers to commit suicide, far beyond the willingness of the soldiers of any other modern nation. Best-known were the kamikaze pilots of conventional aircraft and the baka pilots of rocket-powered gliders, who crashed their bomb-carrying machines into enemy warships; and the kaiten sailors who rode and piloted torpedoes launched from Japanese ships into enemy warships. The high-tech kamikaze, baka, and kaiten suicide weapons introduced only towards the end of World War Two were preceded by several years of low-tech suicides, when Japanese soldiers feigning surrender detonated hidden hand grenades to kill their captors as well as themselves. All of those forms of suicide served immediate military purposes by killing enemy troops. In addition, defeated Japanese soldiers and officers also routinely killed themselves without killing any enemy, in deference to the inculcated value of “no surrender.” For instance, of the 2,571 elite Japanese troops defending Tarawa atoll in November 1943 against invading American troops, 2,563 died, many of the last ones by suicide, leaving only eight to be taken prisoner.

  Japan, as an island archipelago without land borders, is in a relatively favorable situation with regard to geopolitical constraints (factor #12), compared to nations such as Finland and Germany, which do share land borders with other countries. We saw in the last chapter that Finland’s long border with Russia constitutes Finland’s fundamental problem. We’ll see in Chapter 6 that land borders with powerful neighbors have also been a main theme of German history. Nevertheless, powerful other nations did constitute the fundamental problem for Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, even though those other nations lay half-way around the world from Japan, separated by the world’s oceans. Already in the 19th century, and even more so in today’s modern world, technology modifies geopolitical constraints—but does not eliminate them completely.

  Let’s conclude our discussion of Meiji Japan by asking where it falls with respect to four questions arising for national crises and not for individual crises: revolution versus evolution, leadership, group conflict and reconciliation, and presence or absence of a unified vision.

  National crises may take the form of violent revolution (Chile in 1973, Indonesia in 1965) or of peaceful evolution (post-war Australia). Meiji Japan is intermediate, but closer to the latter end of the continuum. The shogunate was ended on January 3, 1868 by a nearly bloodless coup. Some supporters of the shogun, but not the shogun himself, then resisted and were eventually defeated in a civil war lasting a year-and-a-
half. But that civil war caused proportionally many fewer casualties than did the Indonesian coup and counter-coup of 1965, the Chilean coup of 1973 and its aftermath, or the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

  There was no leader who dominated the Meiji Restoration to the degree that Hitler, Pinochet, and Suharto put their personal stamps on Nazi Germany, post-1973 Chile, and post-1965 Indonesia, respectively. Instead, at any one time there were multiple Meiji leaders, and there was a gradual leadership transition in the 1880’s. The various leaders all shared the qualification of first-hand experience of the West, and they shared commitment to a basic strategy of strengthening Japan by selectively using foreign models. Japan’s emperor remained a symbolic figurehead rather than an actual leader.

  As for group conflict and reconciliation, from 1853 to 1868 there were disagreements about basic strategy within Japan. From around 1868 onwards, when the basic strategy became established, there were the normal disagreements arising in any country about policies to effect that strategy. Until 1877, some of those disagreements were resolved by violence: especially between the bakufu and the Satsuma-Choshu alliance until 1869, between shishi and Japanese moderates in the 1860’s, and between the Meiji government and dissident samurai in the samurai revolts. The level of violence was again modest compared to that in Chile and Indonesia. Subsequent reconciliation between the opposing parties of those Japanese disagreements was much more complete than in Chile and far more so than in Indonesia: in part because many fewer people had been killed; and in part because Meiji government leaders went to more effort and displayed more skill in reconciling with their opponents than did Chile’s and Indonesia’s military leaders. Among the other countries discussed in this book, Finland after its 1918 civil war offers the closest parallel to Meiji Japan in dispelling the legacies of violent conflicts.