Although Japa nese people could not go abroad during the Tokugawa
period, there was a continued demand for Chinese books in Japan, which
arrived in the country through Nagasaki. Some were Buddhist books, and
some were about Chinese history. In addition, Japa nese scholars studied
Chinese law to deepen their understanding of the role of regulations in
governance.
Japa nese monks continued to admire the high level of Buddhist schol-
arship in China. A decree issued in 1671, that all Japa nese families were re-
quired to register at local Buddhist temples, remained in force throughout
the Tokugawa period, and funeral ceremonies in Japan also remained Bud-
dhist. Yin Yuan (Ingen), the Chinese monk who came to Nagasaki in 1654,
founded the Manpukuji Temple near Kyoto in 1661 and recruited many Chi-
nese monks to teach there, and Japa nese monks went there to study under
. 62 .
Trade without Transformative Learning, 838–1862
them. Buddhist monks in Japan continued to look to China as the respected
homeland of their religion.
Nagasaki Traders
Nagasaki had been a small fishing village until 1571, when Portuguese ships
began docking there, and after 1641, when it became the only port on
Japan’s four main islands open to international trade, it quickly grew into a
cosmopolitan port city. Nagasaki’s population was about 25,000 in 1609
but it reached 64,000 by 1696.6 Although the city’s population began to de-
cline late in the eigh teenth century as the shogun placed more restrictions
on trade, it remained Japan’s key port to the outside. The spirit of Nagasaki
was commerce, an outlook that was shared by Tsushima and the Ryukyu
Islands.
Nagasaki became a center for information about the world outside of
Japan. After 1644, each ship’s captain arriving in Nagasaki had to fill out a
report that would be passed on to the shogun in Edo. Because the Nether-
lands was the only Western country allowed to trade with Japan, Nagasaki
became the win dow in Japan to introduce “Dutch learning,” which in turn
enabled the Japa nese to learn about scientific, military, and medical advances
in the West.
Yet as the Japa nese China specialist Oba Osamu said, Nagasaki trade
was really China trade, because the overwhelming majority of trade at that
time was with China. Even many of the goods that went through Tsushima
and the Ryukyu Islands were merely on their way to or from China.
Though Nagasaki officials sent detailed reports to the shogun in Edo, the
marketplace for the daily exchange of information about China was on the
front lines, in Nagasaki.
Only a handful of Chinese people lived in Nagasaki before the Tokugawa
era, but by 1618, shortly after the other ports were closed to foreign traders,
more than 2,000 Chinese were living there to ser vice the trade with China.
A small number of Chinese individuals did remain in other ports, some in-
volved in the transfer of goods that had cleared customs in Nagasaki,
others in vari ous lines of work, but the Chinese community in Nagasaki
continued to grow. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly 5,000 lived
in Nagasaki’s Chinatown.7 The Chinese residents in Nagasaki spoke a
. 63 .
china and japan
variety of dialects and kept in touch with Chinese merchants in their
homeland. In the 1620s the key groups— from Fuzhou and Zhangzhou,
both in the province of Fujian, and a group from the Yangtze delta
area— had built their own Buddhist temples, which served as gathering
spots for the diff er ent groups of Chinese living in Nagasaki. In 1678, as
more Cantonese began arriving in Nagasaki, they built their own temple
as well. And after Guangzhou was opened to trade in 1757, Nagasaki’s
trade with Guangzhou expanded. The British, after their victory in the
Opium War in 1842, forced open the Chinese ports of Amoy, Fuzhou,
Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hong Kong Island. The British and the French,
after their victory in the Second Opium War (the Arrow War) in 1860,
forced open eleven new treaty ports, providing further opportunities for
the Chinese in Nagasaki. Toward the end of the Tokugawa period, as
Japan stemmed the outflow of silver and promoted the domestic produc-
tion of silk and medicinal herbs, trade through Nagasaki declined. None-
theless, at the end of the Tokugawa period there were still some 1,000
ethnic Chinese living in Nagasaki’s Chinatown.
The Chinese in Nagasaki, in addition to servicing China’s trade with
Japan, also facilitated trade with ethnic Chinese merchants in Southeast
Asia. Thus the Nagasaki Chinese became a source of information for Japa-
nese officials about developments in Southeast Asia as well as China. As
Marius Jansen reports, the Nagasaki Chinese maintained generally good re-
lations with the Japa nese living in Nagasaki, many of whom were looking
for opportunities to serve as brokers for selling imported goods from China
elsewhere in Japan.
Despite the lively trade through Nagasaki, for more than two centuries
there were no meetings between government officials from the two coun-
tries. In 1862, Japa nese and Chinese officials fi nally met in Shanghai.
. 64 .
chapter three
Responding to Western Chal enges and
Reopening Relations, 1839–1882
After the British defeated China in the First Opium War (1839–
1842) and Commodore Perry opened Japan in 1853, Asia could no longer
maintain a separate existence. It began the pro cess of becoming part of the
world. The immediate threat from the West to China and Japan was to their
military security and to their economic resources, which Westerners were
ready to exploit. To respond to these threats effectively, China and Japan
had to find a method for conscripting more soldiers and training them, and
they also had to create an industrial base and a communications and trans-
port network. They needed a taxation system to raise more funds, a modern
bureaucracy with new specializations to guide such efforts, an expanded ed-
ucational system to train people in new skills, and a stronger centralized
leadership structure to cope with the entrenched interests and to coordi-
nate new developments. To those who sought to preserve their old ways,
threats came not only from Westerners but also from those in their own
country who were trying to initiate change. In 1882, when China and Japan
clashed in Korea, China won the first round in their military confronta-
tion. But by 1895 Japan had proved more successful in overcoming domestic
re sis tance and implementing a comprehensive program to modernize the
country. During the following century, Japan was in the stronger position
in relations between the two countries.
Japan’s Advantages in Responding to Western Chal enges
Japan had some natu ral advantages over China that allowed it to respond
more quickly to the massive challenges from the West. It was easier to get a
unified national response in a compact territory of four small islands, and the
sea transportation available at the time ma
de it relatively easy to establish
. 65 .
china and japan
communications and transportation links among all parts of Japan. In
China, until the 1880s when the first telegraph wires were laid, it took nearly
a month for government communications to travel from one end of the
country to the other. Living on a small group of islands, the Japa nese had
long felt more vulnerable to dangers from across the sea than the Chinese
had. That sense of danger had made them eager to acquire more informa-
tion from abroad. Chinese leaders had long worried about pos si ble in-
vaders by land, coming by horse back from the north, and they were less
concerned about learning about the world across the seas. Early in the
nineteenth century, even before the Meiji Restoration, the shogun in Edo
began sending missions abroad to learn from other countries how to mod-
ernize, just as the Japa nese had done by sending missions to China in the
seventh and eighth centuries. Chinese leaders, confident of the greatness
of their rich civilization, were never eager to learn from other countries.
Japan was a smaller and more homogeneous country and therefore easier
to unify. China had a far larger population with more varied ethnic
groups— Han, Mongols, Manchus, Uighurs, Tibetans, and many others
with diff er ent languages and cultures— which made it difficult to unify na-
tional policy and maintain domestic harmony. The Qing rulers devised dif-
fer ent policies for diff er ent ethnic areas. The Hakka (“guest people”), late-
comer mi grants to certain areas, and their descendants often had a sense of
separateness from the descendants of long- established residents, and they
were more open to becoming rebels. By the nineteenth century China was
suffering from great population growth and massive food shortages. The
shortages helped spark the Taiping Rebellion, the Nian Rebellion, and the
Muslim Rebellion, devastating uprisings that took time and energy from
the government that could have been used to respond to challenges from
the West.
The Tokugawa system had encouraged more economic and educational
development in local areas than the Qing system. Although individual Chi-
nese had outstanding achievements in culture, science, and technology,
when the two countries began to open to the West in the middle of the late
nineteenth century, Japa nese local areas, on average, had a higher educational
and economic base than their Chinese counter parts.
By the late nineteenth century, an estimated half of all males in Japan
were literate, a higher percentage than in China. Japa nese youths from the
. 66 .
Responding to Western Chal enges and Reopening Relations, 1839–1882
vari ous domains who spent time in the capital and would later become
leaders of their domains tended to share a common language and culture
and to develop friendships across fief lines. The small number of Japa nese
domains provided a broader base of a common culture among the top
leaders than the common culture of Chinese youths, who were together only
in Beijing while preparing for the examinations. Thus the Japa nese young
men who would later become leaders of their domains acquired a similar
understanding of the issues facing the country.
Chinese leaders, much more confident than Japa nese leaders about their
own country’s strength, were not as afraid of foreign countries as Japa nese
leaders, and they did not feel the same urgency about importing new sys-
tems and new technology from abroad. Perhaps nothing contributed more
to Japan’s rapid modernization than its or ga nized search for information
about the outside world, its analy sis of that new information, and its readi-
ness to make changes based on what had been learned and analyzed. During
the Tokugawa period, Japan’s listening post in Nagasaki had provided the
Japa nese with experience in dealing with foreigners, as well as knowledge
about foreign affairs. Tokugawa Japan had proved more eager to acquire
information than Qing China and far more systematic in analyzing that
information to defend its national interest. Dutch officials working for the
Japa nese in Nagasaki were required to interview every ship’s captain who
arrived in Nagasaki for information about the outside world and to write a
report for the shogun government in Edo. The Chinese living in Nagasaki
provided a win dow through which to gain information about developments
in China and, when Westerners began arriving in Japan, for learning about
what Westerners were doing in China. Japan’s Tsushima Island, situated
between Kyushu and Korea, was a base for learning about Korea and,
through Korea, China. The Matsumae clan, in the northern island, pro-
vided a base for learning about Rus sia, and the Satsuma clan provided a
base for learning about the Ryukyu Islands.
In 1844 a Chinese writer, Wei Yuan, completed the book Haiguo tuzhi
(An illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms), a collection of infor-
mation about Western countries gathered at the time. It had many inac-
curacies, such as in its descriptions of Western government systems, but it
also contained much useful information. The response of the Japa nese to
the book reflected their worries about challenges from the West. Soon more
. 67 .
china and japan
Japa nese than Chinese were reading Wei Yuan’s book. In 1853, when Com-
modore Perry arrived in Japan, the U.S. officers accompanying him were
understandably surprised to find that the leaders of Japan, that “closed
country,” had a deep knowledge of world geography and of recent Western
scientific and industrial developments, such as the steam engine.
Immediately after Commodore Perry and his armada forced Japan to
open up in 1853, Japa nese leaders realized they had to learn more about how
to deal with the rest of the world than what could be provided through the
win dow of Nagasaki.
The first American consul general assigned to Japan, Townsend Harris,
arrived in Japan in August 1856. Though it had been centuries since Japan
had sent missions abroad, three months after Harris’s arrival a shogun of-
ficial told him, “The time will soon come when we will build ships like yours,
and then we can visit the United States in a proper manner.”1 In late 1857, a
high shogun official, Hotta Masayoshi, wrote that Japan’s policy should be
“to conclude friendly alliances, to send ships to foreign countries everywhere
and conduct trade, to copy the foreigners where they are at their best and
so repair our own shortcomings, to foster our national strength. . . . ”2 Chi-
nese leaders were not as convinced of their own shortcomings or as eager
to learn from the West.
Turning Points in the 1860s
The 1860s was a de cade of fundamental change that shaped the future of
China and Japan as well as their relations. Both China and Japan gained
new governing structures, and they resumed official contacts for the first
time in two centuries.
When the Tongzhi Restoration took place in 1861, the Second Opium
War was over and the Taiping were losing power; by 1864 they were thor-
oughly defeated. This gave China’s new Tongzhi leadership an opportunity
to arrest the dynastic decline and rebuild national strength. In Japan, the
shogun was overthrown in 1868 and the Meiji Restoration gave Japan a new
leadership structure to confront its prob lems. The leaders of the Tongzhi
Restoration had a very diff er ent perspective than the leaders of the Meiji
Restoration on their nation’s prob lems and on their priorities in responding
to the challenges from the West.
. 68 .
Responding to Western Chal enges and Reopening Relations, 1839–1882
In 1862, after a two- century hiatus, officials from the two countries met.
In the late 1860s they began discussions that enabled them to sign a formal
treaty in the 1870s and to establish, for the first time in history, permanent
embassies in each other’s country.
Confucian Revival and Self- Strengthening under Emperor Tongzhi
In 1861 the child emperor Tongzhi, age five, ascended the throne following
the death of his father, Xianfeng. Chinese leaders were eager to restore the
social order that had been so damaged by the Taiping Rebellion and the
Second Opium War (1856–1860). Xianfeng, who died at the age of thirty,
was considered a failed emperor because he left the country in such a di-
sastrous state, but the end of the Second Opium War and the defeat of the
Taiping provided the leadership of the new Tongzhi Restoration an oppor-
tunity to move forward.
Emperor Tongzhi died in 1875 at the age of nineteen, so he never really
held the reins of power during the Tongzhi era. Instead, his uncle Prince
Gong, Xianfeng’s brother, and his mother, Empress Dowager Cixi, who had
been brought in as an imperial concubine for Xianfeng and became Xian-
feng’s favorite when she bore him his son Tongzhi, actually held power
during the Tongzhi period. On the death of Tongzhi, the empress dowager
appointed a three- year- old, her nephew Guangxu, as emperor so that she
could continue to rule.
The empress dowager proved to be very skilled in managing court poli-
tics and was the dominant power not only during the Tongzhi but also
during the Guangxu period. Prince Gong and a number of local officials
realized that to cope with the foreigners, new skills and new technology, in-
China and Japan Page 11
