What happened in between? Sugar. Satsuma, blessed by a warm, maritime climate, was made for cane. Once the han realized the value of sugar, it mandated increased planting and forbade all other crops on its offshore islands. Cultivation was stringently controlled, and those peasants who failed the quality test were severely punished. It was the han that set the price and then sold the sugar in Osaka at two to five times that amount. No one, on pain of death, might market sugar privately. No more need to borrow. Satsuma was soon producing one half the national sugar crop.35
Meanwhile Satsuma had a privileged position in international trade. In theory, only Chinese and Dutch vessels could come to Japan, and then only to Nagasaki. But Satsuma was the effective ruler of the nominally Chinese Ryukyu Islands, and this made possible a lucrative smuggling operation bypassing the shogunate’s controls. Again, no need for credit: the merchants were glad to pay cash for cheaper imports.
Unfortunately, these same imports hurt home industry, including manufacture of cotton goods in Satsuma itself. “Of all things Western, what do you dread most?” asked the Satsuma daimy Shimazu Nariakira of his councilors. European guns and ships, came the answer. “No,” said the daimy. “It is cotton cloth. Unless we begin preparing now, we shall soon be dependent on Westerners for our clothing.”36 In an effort to prepare, the han began to distribute better cotton seeds, purchased better spindles and looms (not yet powered), built a manufactory near Kagoshima, and set unemployed samurai to work there. The result: cotton goods costing half as much as before.
At the same time, Satsuma began to invest in war and modernity. This was a han with a disproportionate number of samurai, one in three people as against a national average of one in seventeen. Idle warriors were the makings of power; also of management; also of trouble. Nariakira chose to focus on the first two. He built up the army, bought foreign arms and vessels, and undertook a program of economic development: a research center (the Shuseikan), an iron foundry using a reverberatory furnace (the first in Japan), an arsenal, a shipyard. In 1855, Satsuma was able to put a steam vessel into the water. In 1867, it opened a mechanized cotton mill. Way to go!
A terrible irony lurked here. Satsuma, by its enterprise, contributed not only to its own development but to that of Japan as a whole. But then it turned against the new Japan. It was technicians from Satsuma, often drawn from the lowest levels of samurai (thus talent before birth), who staffed key positions in the national government of the Meiji Restoration. But it was also Satsuma that became a stronghold of reaction after 1870 and led a revolt of the old order. All those samurai could not bear their eclipse by commoners, the abandonment of old dress and ways, the usurpation of their monopoly of war by general military conscription (1872). So in 1878 the Satsuma warriors, in their gorgeous robes and terrifying armor, brandishing steel swords that could cleave a body at a blow or slice a floating, gossamer piece of silk, pranced and bragged before the impassive, stolid ranks of a disciplined, uniformed peasant army equipped with muskets. And when the smoke cleared, the flower of Japanese chivalry lay dead.
23
The Meiji Restoration
Japan had a revolution in 1867-68. The shogunate was overthrown—really it collapsed—and control of the state returned to the emperor in Kyoto. So ended a quarter millennium of Tokugawa rule. But the Japanese do not call this overturn a revolution; a restoration rather, because they prefer to see it as a return to normalcy. Also, revolutions are for China. The Chinese have dynasties. Japan has one royal family, going back to the beginning.
It was in the 1180s that Japan was first ruled, not by the emperor but by a warrior chief called a shogun (literally, leader of the army). With some interruptions and interregnums, this rule by the strongest became the normal pattern. Such is the weakness of heredity kingship: even with the help of divine ancestry, a dynasty is hard-put to maintain competence indefinitely. Weak genes, bad marriages, whatever: strong men, mayors of the palace, will rise to power and sooner or later oust the legitimate monarch.
So it was in medieval France, where the Carolingians displaced the Merovingians and were pushed aside in turn by the usurper Capetians. In Japan, however, the solution was not to dethrone and expunge the dynasty, but to immure it. The emperor, his family, and his court were confined to their palaces and temples—under the Tokugawa shogunate, in Kyoto. There the Mikado wrote poetry, performed symbolic religious acts (like planting the first rice), let himself be entertained and ministered to. That was the Japanese version of virtual divinity: ceremonial isolation and sacred haplessness.
The existence of an emperor, however—of a legitimate ruler, then, above the real ruler—made it possible for enemies of the Tokugawa shogunate to look to an honorable alternative. In a society that valued nothing higher than personal loyalty, disaffected elites could set higher authority—the emperor (Tenno) and the nation—above their lord and the shogun above him, without being disloyal. They could make a revolution without being revolutionaries.
Meanwhile the symbols of national unity were already there; the ideals and passions of national pride, already defined. This saved a lot of turmoil. Revolutions, like civil wars, can be devastating to order and national efficacy. The Meiji Restoration had its dissensions and dissents, often violent. The final years of the old, the first of the new, were stained with the blood of assassinations, of peasant uprisings, of reactionary rebellion. Even so, the transition in Japan was far smoother than the French and Russian varieties of political overturn, for two reasons: the new regime held the high moral ground; and even the disaffected and affronted feared to give arms and opportunity to the enemy outside. Foreign imperialists were lurking to pounce, and internal divisions would invite intervention. Consider the story of imperialism elsewhere: local quarrels and intrigue had fairly invited the European powers into India.
The Tokugawa shogunate was already breaking down before the middle of the nineteenth century. The old rules of place and rank were openly flouted. Needy samurai married merchant heiresses. Wealthy peasants became local notables, the equivalent of country gentry. Obedience dissolved. The wealthier han (those of western Honshu and southern Kyushu) undertook their own foreign policy, thinking to deal with these outrageous, insolent barbarians better than the shogunate could. Hiring foreign technicians and advisers, they bought arms from abroad, built arsenals and shipyards. Some of them even conscripted peasants for military service, and the Bakufu began to do the same. In a country where peasants were forbidden to bear arms and samurai lorded it over commoners by the sword, here was a gross breach of public order and social propriety, of immeasurable consequences. But how else to arm for war? The samurai hated to fight with guns, which they saw as demeaning and dishonoring.
At this point, one short-reigned, ineffectual shogun followed another, fomenting intrigues over the succession, spawning cabals, inviting subversive appeals to Kyoto. And again and again, pressure from outside embarrassed the regime. In a society that had never admitted the stranger, the very presence of Westerners invited trouble. More than once Japanese bully-boys challenged and assaulted these impudent foreigners, the better to show them who was boss. Who was boss? Certainly not the shogunate. In the face of Western demands for retribution and for indemnities, the Japanese authorities could only temporize and, by waffling, discredit themselves in the eyes of foreigner and patriot alike.
But what was one to do? The outside powers knew they were stronger and would not yield to violence. In September 1862 a team of Satsuma warriors deliberately attacked some English merchants and a European woman; and when the Bakufu proved unwilling and unable to compel Satsuma to make reparation, the British sent a fleet in August 1863 to shell the castle town of Kagoshima. The lesson worked. Satsuma, confronted with reality, offered to establish direct trade and diplomatic relations with Great Britain—directly flouting the shogunate’s traditional monopoly of foreign affairs. The same with Chsh. On 25 June 1863, the date fixed by the imperial court in Kyoto for expulsion of the barbarians
, impatient Chshpatriots fired on an American ship passing through the Shimonoseki Straits. It took a year of palaver to come to a dead end; and then, in September 1864, a fleet of 17 British, American, French, and Dutch naval vessels with 305 cannon sailed into Shimonoseki Harbor and demolished all the forts. Choshu capitulated and like Satsuma asked for direct and friendly relations with the Westerners. And Choshu and Satsuma, traditionally antagonistic, now joined forces to get rid of the Bakufu1
The Bakufu found itself fatally discredited by its weakness and ineptitude. Once it signed treaties with Townsend Harris (for the United States, in 1854) and then with the great European powers (1858), it lost honor and legitimacy. Meanwhile Japanese honor was not Western honor. The codes were different. One man’s word was the other’s prevarication. Twist and turn, the Bakufu might. It could send subordinates to negotiate, who would then plead the need of higher confirmation. It could sign but then argue that the agreement had not received the emperor’s sanction. In short, it gave its word while withholding it; said yes while meaning no. Nothing could more envenom the conflict. The shogunate had better have succumbed to force majeure and said as much: You Westerners have the guns. All right, one day we’ll have them too.
(Compare here the misunderstanding over Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor: for the Americans, a day that would “live in infamy” for the Japanese, an unfortunate error in timing. The Americans were apparently supposed to receive notice that the Japanese were “breaking off negotiations” a half hour before the attack took place; they got it afterward. To this day, the Japanese think this the heart of the matter: previous warning, however short and oblique [but diplomats are supposed to be able to read between the lines], would justify a long-prepared surprise attack. For the Americans, such notice would in no way have diminished the infamy.)
The pretensions of the outsiders were the heart of the matter. Sonn ji, went the pithy slogan: Honor the emperor; expel the barbarians. The leaders of the move for change were the great fiefs of the far south and west, Satsuma and Chsh, once enemies, now united against the shogunate. They won; and they lost. That was another paradox of this revolution-restoration. The leaders thought they were going back to days of yore. Instead, they found themselves caught up in tomorrow, in a wave of modernization, because that was the only way to defeat the barbarians.
Now the true revolutionaries took over: the rangakusha, the technicians, the forward-looking bureaucrats. The year 1868 began with the opening of more major ports to foreign trade. On April 6 the new emperor swore a “Charter Oath” promising representative institutions and the creation of a new democratic civil society. (It proved easier to promise than to do, and this gesture may have been directed more to outside observers than to the Japanese people.) What mattered more was the transformation of the central government: the abolition of feudal institutions, the conversion of the fiefs (han) into prefectures (ken) administered by government appointees, the appropriation by the center of revenues that had gone to the old warrior elite. Here again Satsuma and Chsh set an example: in March 1869 their daimy offered their lands to the emperor, that is, to the nation. The other daimy then fell into line, because that was the right and loyal thing to do. (This gesture recalls the voluntary surrender of feudal dues by the French nobility on the fateful night of August 4, 1789.) Meanwhile Japanese peasants no longer paid dues to their daimy; they paid taxes to the imperial government.
The Japanese went about modernization with characteristic intensity and system. They were ready for it—by virtue of a tradition (recollection) of effective government, by their high levels of literacy, by their tight family structure, by their work ethic and self-discipline, by their sense of national identity and inherent superiority.
That was the heart of it: the Japanese knew they were superior, and because they knew it, they were able to recognize the superiorities of others. Building on earlier moves under Tokugawa, they hired foreign experts and technicians while sending Japanese agents abroad to bring back eyewitness accounts of European and American ways. This body of intelligence laid the basis for choices, reflecting careful and supple consideration of comparative merit. Thus the first military model was the French army; but after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870-71, the Japanese decided that Germany had more to offer. A similar shift took place from French to German legal codes and practice.
No opportunity for learning was lost. In October 1871, a delegation headed by Prince Iwakura Tomomi and including such innovators as kubo Toshimichi and Prince It chief among them Hirobumi traveled to the United States and Europe to ask for rescission of the unequal treaties imposed in the 1850s. The Japanese wanted above all to (re)gain control over their tariff, the better to protect their “infant” industries. They ran into a stone wall: the Western nations had no intention of giving up their hard-won right of entry to the Japanese market. No matter. The delegation swallowed their pride and went about their calls, visiting factories and forges, shipyards and armories, railways and canals, not returning until September 1873, almost two years later, laden with the spoils of learning and “on fire with enthusiasm” for reform.
This direct experience by the Japanese leadership made all the difference. Riding on an English train and meditating on the industrial landscape, Okubo confided ruefully that, before leaving Japan, he had thought his work done: the imperial authority restored, feudalism replaced by central government. Now he understood that the big tasks lay ahead. Japan did not compare with “the more progressive powers of the world.” England especially offered a lesson in self-development. Once a small insular nation—like Japan—England had systematically pursued a policy of self-aggrandizement. The navigation acts were crucial in raising the national merchant marine to a position of international dominance. Not until Britain had achieved industrial leadership did it abandon protection for laissez-faire. (Not a bad analysis. Adam Smith would not have disagreed.)
To be sure, Japan would not have the tariff and commercial autonomy that seventeenth-century England had enjoyed. All the more vexing was European refusal to renegotiate the unequal treaties. Here, however, the German example made sense. Germany, like Japan, had only recently come through a difficult unification. Also Germany, like Japan, had started from a position of economic inferiority, and look how far it had come. Okubo was much impressed by the German people he met. He found them thrifty, hardworking, “unpretentious”—like Japanese commoners, one imagines. And he found their leaders to be realists and pragmatists: focus, they said, on building national power. They were the mercantilists of the nineteenth century. Okubo came back and gave a German orientation to the Japanese bureaucracy.2
First came those tasks ordinary to government: a postal service, a new time standard,* public education (for boys and then for girls as well),† universal military service.** The last two in particular defined the new society. General schooling diffused knowledge; that is what schools are for. But it also instilled discipline, obedience, punctuality, and a worshipful respect for (adoration of) the emperor.3 This was the key to the development of a we/they national identity transcending parochial loyalties and status lines. The nation’s calendar was homogenized around the Tenno cult. Every school had its picture of the emperor, and on every national holiday, the same ritual was performed in front of this icon throughout the country at the same time.
The army (and navy) completed the job. Beneath the sameness of the uniform and the discipline, universal military service wiped out distinctions of class and place. It nurtured nationalist pride and democratized the violent virtues of manhood. In Japan, this meant generalization of the right to fight—an end to the samurai monopoly of arms. (Not every former commoner applauded the change. War and violence had always been the business of the elite, who were duly rewarded with stipends. Many of those too old to have been formed by the new common schools asked why they were now expected to engage in such foolishness. But they would not do the fighting.)
Higher authority saw a citizen army as a
prerequisite of power, and power was the primary objective—power to be free, power to talk back to the Europeans, power to push others around the way Europeans did. In September 1871, the new Japan negotiated a treaty with China. The treaty did not accord Japan extraterritorial and commercial privileges like those already granted to the Western powers; but it was signed as between equals. A momentous “first” inequality would come after. This was followed in 1874 by an expedition to Formosa (Taiwan), which in effect affirmed Japanese sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands and laid the basis for a later claim to Formosa itself. Then, in 1876, a naval expedition to Korea extracted Chinese recognition of Korean independence. This poisoned gift removed Korea’s cover against eventual Japanese aggression, while securing for Japan extraterritorial and commercial privileges that would whet the Japanese appetite and lead to further gains. New Nippon, bursting with energy and force, knew a victim when it saw one. Great China lay wounded, and the very largeness of its earlier pretensions invited attack.
Earlier, in November 1873, the imperial cabinet had already divided between a peace party, which wanted to concentrate on modernization and reconstruction at home, and a group of hawks calling for war against Korea. Five of the new oligarchs resigned, chief among them Saig Takamori of Satsuma, one of the leaders in overthrowing the shogunate. That was not the end of the story. Now these ex-warriors, projecting their personal discontents onto the national stage, cried out against the Japan-China-Korea treaty of 1876, however advantageous. They had preferred to stay on in Korea, thereby realizing an old dream of mainland conquest.
Their disappointment was compounded by two acts of aggression against the samurai class. First, the traditional stipends, now converted to pensions, were commuted to a single payment of the capitalized equivalent. The samurai got state bonds instead of an annual revenue, and the value of the paper was hostage to monetary policy and the value of the yen. It was not long before inflation compelled the samurai to work for a living. Some did, and well indeed. Others sank into poverty and nursed their grievances. Still others tried to convert pride and sometime status into good jobs and marriages. That is what declassed aristocracies everywhere try to do: turn blue blood, patrician profiles, and grand manners into coin.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 44
