While Chinese rulers were coping with the dual problems
of external threat and internal instability, similar developments
were taking place in Japan. An agricultural
society like its powerful neighbor, Japan had borrowed extensively
from Chinese civilization for more than a millennium;
its political institutions, religious beliefs, and
cultural achievements all bore the clear imprint of the
Chinese model. Nevertheless, throughout the centuries,
the Japanese were able to retain not only their political
independence but also their cultural uniqueness and had
created a civilization quite distinct from those elsewhere
in the region.
One reason for the historical differences between
China and Japan is that China is a large continental
country and Japan a small island nation. Proud of their
own considerable cultural achievements and their dominant
position throughout the region, the Chinese have
traditionally been reluctant to dilute the purity of their
culture with foreign innovations. Often subject to invasion
by nomadic peoples from the north, the Chinese
viewed culture rather than race as a symbol of their sense
of identity. By contrast, the island character of Japan
probably had the effect of strengthening the Japanese
sense of ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. Although
the Japanese self-image of ethnic homogeneity may not
be entirely justified, it enabled them to import ideas from
abroad without the risk of destroying the uniqueness of
their own culture.
As a result, although the Japanese borrowed liberally
from China over the centuries, they turned Chinese ideas
and institutions to their own uses. In contrast to China,
where a centralized and authoritarian political system was
viewed as crucial to protect the vast country from foreign
conquest or internal fractionalization, a decentralized political
system reminiscent of the feudal system in medieval
Europe held sway in Japan under the hegemony of
a powerful military leader, or shogun, who ruled with
varying degrees of effectiveness in the name of the hereditary
emperor. This system lasted until the early seventeenth
century, when a strong shogunate called the Tokugawa
rose to power after a protracted civil war. The
Tokugawa shogunate managed to revitalize the traditional
system in a somewhat more centralized form that
enabled it to survive for another 250 years.
One of the many factors involved in the rise of the
Tokugawa was the impending collapse of the old system.
Another was contact with the West, which had begun
with the arrival of Portuguese ships in Japanese ports
in the middle of the sixteenth century. Japan initially
opened its doors eagerly to European trade and missionary
activity, but later Japanese elites became concerned at
the corrosive effects of Western ideas and practices and
attempted to evict the foreigners. For the next two centuries,
the Tokugawa adopted a policy of “closed country”
(to use the contemporary Japanese phrase) to keep out
foreign ideas and protect native values and institutions.
In spite of such efforts, however, Japanese society was
changing from within and by the early nineteenth century
was quite different from what it had been two cen
turies
earlier. Traditional institutions and the feudal aristocratic
system were under increasing strain, not only
from the emergence of a new merchant class but also from
the centralizing tendencies of the powerful shogunate.
Some historians have noted strong parallels between
Tokugawa Japan and early modern Europe, which gave
birth to centralized empires and a strong merchant class
during the same period. Certainly, there were signs that
the shogunate system was becoming less effective. Factionalism
and corruption plagued the central bureaucracy.
Feudal lords in the countryside (known as daimyo,
or “great names”) reacted to increasing economic pressures
by intensifying their exactions from the peasants
who farmed their manor holdings and by engaging in
manufacturing and commercial pursuits, such as the sale
of textiles, forestry products, and sake ( Japanese rice
wine). As peasants were whipsawed by rising manorial
exactions and a series of poor harvests caused by bad
weather, rural unrest swept the countryside.
Japan, then, was ripe for change. Some historians
maintain that the country was poised to experience an
industrial revolution under the stimulus of internal conditions.
As in China, the resumption of contacts with the
West in the middle of the nineteenth century rendered
the question somewhat academic. To the Western powers,
the continued isolation of Japanese society was an affront
and a challenge. Driven by growing rivalry among
themselves and convinced by their own propaganda and
the ideology of world capitalism that the expansion of
trade on a global basis would benefit all nations, Western
nations began to approach Japan in the hope of opening
up the hermit kingdom to foreign economic interests.
The first to succeed was the United States. American
whalers and clipper ships following the northern route
across the Pacific needed a fueling station before completing
their long journey to China and other ports in the
area. The first efforts to pry the Japanese out of their cloistered
existence in the 1830s and 1840s failed, but the
Americans persisted. In the summer of 1853, an American
fleet of four warships under Commodore Matthew C.
Perry arrived in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) with a letter
from President Millard Fillmore addressed to the shogun
(see the box above). A few months later, Japan agreed to
the Treaty of Kanagawa, providing for the opening of two
ports and the establishment of a U.S. consulate on Japanese
soil. In 1858, U.S. Consul Townsend Harris signed a
more elaborate commercial treaty calling for the opening
of several ports to U.S. trade and residence, an exchange
of ministers, and extraterritorial privileges for U.S. residents
in Japan. The Japanese soon signed similar treaties
with several European nations.
The decision to open relations with the Western barbarians
was highly unpopular in some quarters, particularly
in regions distant from the shogunate headquarters
in Edo. Resistance was especially strong in two of the
key outside daimyo territories in the south, Satsuma and
Choshu, both of which had strong military traditions. In
1863, the “Sat-Cho” alliance forced the hapless shogun
to promise to bring relations with the West to an end, but
the rebellious groups soon disclosed their own weakness.
When Choshu troops fired on Western ships in the Strait
of Shimonoseki, the Westerners fired back and destroyed
the Choshu fortifications. The incident convinced the
rebellious samurai (“retainers,” the traditional warrior
class) of the need to strengthen their own military and intensified
their unwillingness to give in to the West. Having
strengthened their influence at the imperial court in
Kyoto, they demanded the resignation of the shogun and
the restoration of the power of the emperor. In January
1868, rebel armies attacked the shogun’s palace in Kyoto
and proclaimed the restored authority of the emperor. After
a few weeks, resistance collapsed, and the venerable
shogunate system was brought to an end.
World History
