Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Restoration and Revolution

James L. Huffman

The nineteenth-century American journalist Edward H. House spent much of his

career telling and retelling the story of the 1863–4 Shimonoseki incident, in which

ships of four Western nations bombarded Cho

shu

domain, allegedly in reta liation

against earlier Cho

shu

attacks on the Westerners, then forced Japan to pay a $3

million indemnity. House had two goals: to get the United States to return its

share of the indemnity and to correct the standard recollection of the event, which

in his view laid unjustified blame on Japan and whitewashed the Western powers’

motives. He succeeded in the former goal but failed in the latter.

Getting a nation to

return loot, he found, was easier than correcting an entrenched historical narrative.

His experience bears striking resemblance to the exigencies of the last century’s

mainstream tale of Japanese development in the years surrounding the Meiji Restor-

ation. Efforts to change the narrative – both its content and its contours – have been

as endless as House’s polemics on Shimonoseki. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars on

the left attacked the Western bias of modernization theory; in the 1980s and 1990s,

theorists concerned with gender, sexuality, postm odernism, semiotics, deconstruc-

tion, cultural studies – and a host of other approaches – argued for the inclusion of

new narrative frameworks and ideological transparency. By the beginning of the

twenty-first century, the late Tokugawa–Meiji years were being examined from a

host of new perspectives; hospital patients, gays a nd lesbians, factory workers, archi-

tectural sites, fishery owners, and local bureaucrats produced more studies than

‘‘great men’’ did, as did discussions on the role of time, place, and power relation-

ships. Harvard University’s Helen Hardacre saw this ‘‘exercise of breaking down

monolithic paradigms of Japan’s modern history’’ as the precursor to a new narrative,

‘‘a substitute for a triumphalist interpretation of Japan’s modernization.’’

That these efforts have had great impact cannot be denied, as this essay will argue

below. They have complicated our understandings of the early Meiji years. They have

given us new languages and concepts for explaining the era, new understandings of

power relationships, new information about once ignored actors. But, like House, the

heralds of new history are forced to admit that changing the overall understanding of

what happened in this era is hard work. The narrative may be richer today, its

contours a bit more fuzzy, but the essential story has changed less in fundamental

form than in marginal details. This is perhaps most apparent in the harvest of new

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

English-language surveys of modern Japanese history produced early in the twenty-

first century – by members of the newer generation as well as by those more senior.

While most of these synthetic works drew on the latest scholarship, they told a story

that looked more familiar than radical, suggesting that Carol Gluck was right when

she contended that ‘‘we remain . . . conceptual prisoners of Meiji.’’

The Traditional Account

The conventional story of the Meiji years was captured in a number of works between

the 1950s and the 1970s, which drew heavily on establishment scholars in Japan (and

all of which gave short shrift to the more Marxist interpretations of E. H. Norman’s

Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State): Edwin Reischauer’s Japan, Past and Present,

George Sansom ’s The Western World and Japan, and W. G. Beasley’s The Modern

History of Japan and The Meiji Restora tion. Their publication coincided with both the

emergence of East Asia as a serious part of American university curriculums and a

political order dominated by the rhetoric of American-style capitalism and democracy.

In this milieu, Japan’s story from the 1850s through the 1880s took on an optimistic

hue filled with international tension, domestic conflict, strong leadership, and, above

all, progress.

In the telling of these writers, the Tokugawa period was peaceful and relatively

isolated, yet culturally and economically virile. Its shogunal government had become

inefficient and inept by the early 1800s

and the bakuhan system was buffeted by so

many challenges that, barring dramatic reform, eventual collapse seemed inevitable.

Into that setting came the foreigners in the 1850s, touching off a decade and a half of

intense maneuvering and fighting, both on the battlefield and in the world of politics.

A 1868 coup d e

tat by samurai from the southwest put the teenaged Emperor Meiji

on the throne and initiated an era of unparalleled change that brought Japan, in little

more than a generation, from isolation to the center of world politics. Under the

guidance of a smal l elite, pushed (and pulled) by rich Western nations, the Japane se

set about destroying the conservative structures of the past – the samurai class, the

domain system, Confucianism’s anti-merchant ideas – and creating a modern state

replete with compulsory education, a military draft, and, eventually, a constitution.

Inhabiting the edges of this narrative were ‘‘the people’’ or minshu

, whose lives were

changed greatly by the decisions and policies of the elite rulers. The people sometimes

became engaged in the political process, and they carried out many modernizing

projects themselves, but always they remained at the margins of the story.

Within this traditional story, several tropes emerge repeatedly. One is Hirakawa

Sukehiro’s ‘‘turn to the West.’’ In this era, he maintains, ‘‘Japan, a non-Western

nation, adopted from the West a tremendous amount of what was fundamental and

essential to modernization.’’ He sees the adoption process itself as crucial to Japan’s

survival and self-identity, arguing that without Western ‘‘ideas and institutions, the

establishment of a national identity would have been impossible, and the existence of

an independent Japan . . . could not have been maintained.’’

Wherever one looks in

the late Tokugawa, early Meiji narrative, Western consciousness is close to the surface.

Samurai terrorists kill officials because the sho

gun agreed to trade with Western

nations. Public nudity is banned so as not to scandalize Christians. Currency reform

140 JAMES L. HUFFMAN

is aimed at making Japan’s economy viable internationally. The governor of Kuma-

moto attempts to modernize by hiring an eccentric Ohioan to create a ‘‘Western

School.’’ Indeed, an entire scholarly industry – led by Nobutani Noboru in Japan and

Ardath Burks in the West – has grown up around the oyatoi gaikokujin or foreign

employees who instructed the Japanese in railroad construction, constitutional law,

and Engli sh-speaking. While even the most tradition al nar rators have come to admit,

like Burks, that the foreigners ‘‘played only a marginal or an incremental role in the

transition . . . to modernity in Meiji,’’

Westerners cast superhuman shadows in all

retellings of the traditional narrative.

The ‘‘rush to modernity’’ is the second traditional trope. Whether one looks at

government structure, the growth of schools, the advent of transportation systems,

or the emergence of political parties, the pace of change in the second half of Japan’s

nineteenth cent ury was remarkable – and has become a staple of the narrative. John

Whitney Hall introduced a set of essays from the 1960 Hakone Conference on

Modern Japan with the observation: ‘‘The modernization of Japan is a phenomenon

which cannot be viewed casually by any serious observer,’’ wheth er that moderniza-

tion was seen as ‘‘a new ‘peril from the East’ or, on the contrary, as a miraculous

example of progress from out of an Oriental Middle Ages.’’

The Hakone modern-

ization studies evoked enormous controversy because of the ideological way in which

they used conditions in the affluent Western democracies to define ‘‘modernization,’’

even as they claimed to represent value-free history. But while the term ‘‘moderniza-

tion’’ largely vanished, it had been replaced by the 1980s with ‘‘modernity.’’ And if

the two terms differed in definition and connotation, springing as they did from

different contexts, both evoked a constant in the narrative: change in the direction of

something called ‘‘modern’’ was fundamental. In the words of Kuwabara Takeo of

Kyoto University: ‘‘Japan succeeded in modernizing, and it did so with a speed

unprecedented in world history.’’

The third trope is the centrality of politics and the state. Until the 1980s, any

bibliography of key works on this era was sure to be dominated by studies of Edo or

Tokyo government. Biographies told the lives of national political figures such as

Sakamoto Ryo

ma, Yamagata Aritomo, Saigo

Takamori, and O

kubo Toshimichi.

Specialized studies focused on domain reform and revolt, the writing of constitutions,

the ideas of political thinkers, the diaries of leading officials – or, when a writer looked

outside Tokyo, the reaction of local gover nments to centralizing policies. Not long

after the Meiji Restoration, O

kuma is said to have quipped to the young finance

official (and later entrepreneur) Shibusawa Eiichi: ‘‘Those who are participating in

the planning of the new government are the myriad gods. The gods have gathered

together and are now in the midst of discussing how to proceed in building the new

Japan.’’

This was the view the establishment passed on to the era’s narrators: state-

generated politics did not merely lie at the heart of the Meiji story; they were the

story.

The fourth trope is Japan’s uniqueness – a theme articulated first by the Toku-

gawa–Meiji thinkers themselves, then repeated by a century of historians. Isolation

meant specialness to Tokugawa writers. And during the Meiji years intellectuals

commented continually on how different their land was. It was the first Asian nation

to write a constitution, the first to modernize the economy, make education com-

pulsory for all citizens, and develop an extensive railway system. That was why

RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION 141

Fukuzawa Yukichi called on his fellow Japanese in 1885 to ‘‘leave the ranks of Asian

nations and cast our lot with civilized nations of the West,’’ to ‘‘simply erase from our

minds our bad friends in Asia.’’

Meiji writers also saw themselves as different from

Westerners – tardy, perhaps, in adopting modernity but speedier in moving in that

direction once they got started. By the 1880s, national uniqueness had become an

obsession, as a rising generation grappled with what they saw as both the positive and

the negative characteristics that set them apart from other peoples. The cultural

geographer Shiga Shigetaka wrote in 1888 that Japan’s natural setting had ‘‘devel-

oped in the Japanese race . . . a unique kokusui, or national essence.’’

It was an idea

that infused nearly every account of Meiji for the following century.

The fifth trope – progress – may be the most telling, and ideological, of all.

Certainly not everyone saw the era’s changes as good. Teenagers working inhuman

hours in the spinning mills did not; neither did Tokugawa samurai who lost their

moorings after 1868, nor many women whose lives became more restricted by the

mid-Meiji family policie s. Yet, despite abundant evidence that most Japanese experi-

enced no uplift in living conditions between the 1850s and 1880s, the traditional

stories of Japanese and Western histo rians alike have focused overwhelmingly on

progress: new buildings, more rational political structures, richer literature, spreading

newspapers, the growth of capitalism. Sansom set the tone for a generation when he

wrote in 1968 that ‘‘the most striking feature of the period is not its political clashes,

but the alacrity with which the country as a whole seized upon the dogma of

perfectibility and threw itself without misgivings into the task of self-improve-

ment.’’

A major characteristic of the Tokugawa–Meiji studies produced in the 1990s and

afterward is the continuing persistence of these old themes, particularly the Western-

centrism, the idea of progress, and the preoccupation with politics. This generation of

scholars may apply fresh theories to new subjects, but the idea of Western pre-

eminence dominates a surprising number of studies, whether postcolonialists are

echoing To

yama Shigeki’s assertion that ‘‘there was a real danger that Japan would

become a colony’’ in the 1860s, or traditionalists are agreeing with Andrew Gordon’s

claim that ‘‘connectivity’’ is the key to modern Japanese history.

Indeed, works

dedicated to the Wester ners’ role continue to appear with a frequency that under-

mines talk about a new narrative: Beasley’s writings about Japanese travelers to

Europe and America; studies of French–Japanese and British–Japanese relations;

depictions of American diplomats and merchants in Yokohama and Edo/Tokyo;

work on Western contacts with Okinawa and the Ryu

kyu

s; continued monographs

on yatoi as diverse as William Smith Clark, Edward House, and Francis Hall. Many of

these works are more nuanced than earlier studies, focusing more on cultural inter-

action and less on the West-as-model idea. Peter Duus’s student-oriented Japanese

Discovery of America , for example, avoids the earlier assumptions of inequality by

concentrating on how Japanese and Americans saw each other, spending as much time

on Japanese perceptions of American ‘‘barbarism’’ as on Ame rican portrayals of the

Japanese as ‘‘uncivilized.’’ But the volume of discourse on the Western impact reveals

how entrenched the idea of Western-centrism has become.

So too the focus on progress. While specialized studies raise complex questions

about the darker sides of Japanese life in the nineteenth century, most narratives still

resort to ‘‘those overarching motives of n ational independence and future greatness’’

142 JAMES L. HUFFMAN

that prompted Ito

Hirobumi to boast that Meiji had brought Japan not only ‘‘pros-

perity, strength, and culture,’’ but ‘‘an equal footing in the family of the most

powerful and civilized nations of the world.’’

As careful a scholar as David Howell

still comments that ‘‘no country has been so successful at implementing mod ernity as

a matter of public policy as Meiji Japan.’’

One reason for this continuing obsession with progre ss lies in the insistence of

most historians, even today, on viewing the state as a (often, the) central protagonist

of the story. Howell may write about capitalism and the Hokkaido

fishery industry,

but he looks through a prism of national development. Gregory Pflugfelder may

examine male–m ale relationships, but one of his preoccupations is their treatment in

the law. Takashi Fujitani tells us how the state created a ‘‘splendid monarchy’’;

localists such as William Steele and Michael Lewis take the central government as a

point of departure, as does Ka

ren Wigen even when she discu sses peripheries. Even

people’s histori ans like Irokawa Daikichi focus on the interactions between the people

and state institutions. Hardacre commented after the influential 1994 Conference on

Meiji Studies that most participants, many of them cutting edge scholars who drew

‘‘their theoretical inspiration in large part from postmodernist theorists of power,’’

were concer ned primarily with ‘‘relations of power in some form.’’

Indeed, very few

writers find value in looking at farmers, housewives, prostitutes – or even politicians –

from the simple perspective of daily affairs. Life, for academic elites, holds little

interest if it is not connected to issues of power and politics; so the state stays at the

center, and progress continues its grip.

What, Then, is New?

If the broader narra tives of Japanese development in the late Tokugawa, early Meiji

years remain in the grip of old tropes, many of the era’s specialized studies, in both

Japan an d the West, brim with the kinds of new information and challenging per-

spectives that are likely, in time, to change even the traditionalists’ way of seeing

nineteenth-century Japan. Inspiring these studies are two forces: the continuing

maturation of Western scholarship on Japan, and the world of theory that has so

deeply influenced all of academia in recent decades. The former is driven by the

increasing numbers of American and European students working on Japanese history,

as well as by their improved training and language skills. Gone are the days when it

could justly be said that ‘‘Western writing has so far contributed relatively little to our

total knowledge of Chinese and Japanese history.’’

Today, as Yoshimi Shun ya of the

University of Tokyo has noted, Western students of this era have as much influence

on Japanese historians as the Japanese have long had on the Westerners.

One reason for the maturation of the Western scholarship lies in the second force,

the increasingly sophisticated way in which historians of Japan use theory. Inspired by

the ideas of Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Derrida, and

others, late-Tokugawa–Meiji historians of the last two decades have produced a

plethora of theoretically sophisticated, provocative articles and monographs, asking

hard questions, util izing a diversity of sources, interrogating people’s motives and

ideologies, and applying varied analytical frameworks. The new works have been

particularly influenced, it seems to me, by four particular concepts: Eric Hobsbawm’s

RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION 143

‘‘invention of tradition,’’ Benedict Anderson’s ‘‘imagined communities,’’ James

Scott’s ‘‘weapons of the weak,’’ and Edward Said’s ‘‘orientalism.’’ Sometimes using

these ideas consciously, sometimes unconsci ously; sometimes writing clearly, some-

times obtusely; sometimes applying theory carefully and cogently, so metimes as an

add-on to make the work appear up to date, the scholars of this era have turned their

attention increasingly to issues of space (site), time, class, and ideology, making us ask

questions that once would not even have occurred to us.

The field of cultural studies has had a particularly strong impact, with writers like

Naoki Sakai and Harry Harootunian (writing too often in dense, even if provocative,

prose) pushing a new generation of researchers to ‘‘be alert and sensitive to the

political implications of knowledge.’’ Under their influence, the field has begun

seriously to look not just at rulers but at subjects, and going further, not just at

subjects but at the impact those subjects (and the processes of creating them) have on

rulers. The goal, says Sakai, is to seek ‘‘a certain reversal of the terms,’’ so that we can

understand the politics and ideology that motiv ate structures and narrators.

That

process – what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls ‘‘unpacking ‘ideologies’ ’’

– has caused a

number of historians to focus on the fact that many ‘‘familiar emblems of Japanese

culture, including treasured icons, tur n out to be modern.’’

And the consequence

has been a significant number of studies which have not only changed the specialists’

understandings of the late-Tokugawa– early-Meiji years but laid the groundwork for

an eventual change in the broader narratives.

One outgrowth of the theoretical turn has been the appearance of new groups and

individuals in the pages of history: Edo townsmen aghast or bemused by Matthew

Perry’s arrival in 1853–4, architects, ‘‘leprosy’’ patients, prostitutes, newspaper

readers. In the old rubric, Buddhists remained silent; they were not relevant to the

monolithic ‘‘modernizing’’ scheme; in the modernity story, they claim a meaningful

place, as evidenced by James Ketelaar’s study of how Buddhist leaders adapted to a

new age by attempting to create a ‘‘modern’’ faith.

Similarly, other religionists, as

diverse as travelers on the Iwakura mission, the Christian iconoclast Yamaji Aizan, and

religious pilgrims, have been examined in recent studies, as religion comes to be seen

not merely as anachronistic – or as part of government efforts to integrate the state –

but as an energetic segment of the early Meiji tapestry.

The ‘‘people’’ – that vague category of minshu

or heimin taken by various scholars

to connote almost any grou p outside the ruling elites – constitute one of the more

important categories to gain increased attention in recent years. Scholars have long

been interested in peasants as rebels, or as participants in the nationalizing scheme;

indeed, when Irokawa wrote about mountain political movements in the 1970s, he

was expanding on a topic that had interested historians for generations; the same was

true of Roger Bowen’s studies of popular rights resisters and Mikiso Hane’s work on

peasants and rebel s at the beginning of the 1980s.

In recent decades, however, the

focus has moved beyond outsiders who merely reacted to (or suffered under) an

increasingly centralized system, toward commoners as agents. Oku Takenori discusses

the way reportage on scandals spre ad modern consciousness; Stephen Vlastos shows

us the complexity of motives and approaches harbored by peasant activists; Yama-

moto Taketoshi shows an expanding populace making possible a profitable urban

press in the 1870s and 1880s; Anne Walthall weaves the private and public together –

the farming, the poetry, the activism – in the life of the ‘‘useless woman’’ Matsuo

144 JAMES L. HUFFMAN

Taseko, arguing that her life calls into question ‘‘the disti nction between public and

private, male roles and females roles and the often hazy margin between conceptual

categories that mesh into one another in practice.’’

An especially insightful study of commoner s is Scott Schnell’s The Rousin g Drum,

which shows a clash in Hida at the end of the 1860s between mountain culture and

the advocates of centralization. His work has not gained as much attention as it

merits, possibly because he is an anthropologist rather than a historian, but he

represents an expanding – and highly significant – body of work on local histories.

M. William Steele, one of those rare Westerners who publishes as much in Japanese as

in English, introduced his Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History with a

call for ‘‘another look (or looks) at modernity.’’ Local history, he says, ‘‘need not be

belittled for dealing with the particular; local men and women need not be margin-

alized for the everyday quality of their deeds. . . . Just as one can narrate Japanese

history from above, one can look from below.’’ In contrast to the center, he argues,

there is ‘‘a plethora of peripheries,’’ making ‘‘the telling of stories from below . . .

open-ended.’’

A consistent theme of those who examine localities is the variety of

experiences the Meiji government had in bringing peripheral areas into the new

‘‘nation.’’ Michael Lewis tells a story of conflict and regional resistance, showing

that even though Tokyo rulers used force and asserted a ‘‘cultural homogeneity that

probably never existed,’’ it took decades to integrate the Toyama region on the Japan

Sea coast. He sees the constant official complaints about ‘‘too much drinking, too

much gift-giving, too many celebrations of local festivals’’ as signs that real life

differed from the ‘‘idealized portraits of proper citizens of model villages.’’

Steele

finds a similar situation in Kanto

areas. Wigen sees the Shimoina area on the Japan’s

Pacific side sinking into marginality. And James Baxter tells a different tale, contend-

ing that the Ishikawa area north of the Japan Alps came fairly quickly into the

spreading national system.

People have cha llenged Baxter’s interpretations, but all

historians of the peripheries agree that the local leaders tended more to maneuver for

perks or autonomy than to rebel or resist openly. They also show a much more

complex picture, at least into the late 1880s, than the center-dominates-periphery

storyline of earlier narratives.

If the demands of theory have forced us to add new groups to our understanding,

they have also excavated topics once considered taboo or irrelevant to the story of

modernization and progress. Issues of space and temporality have entered the tale;

the beginnings of Japanese imperialism are receiving increased attention; Peter Kor-

nicki has done pioneering work on the history of the book;

and material culture

shows up in ways more varied and interesting than the time-honored depictions of

Japanese eating meat (like Westerners), Japanese building Western-style brick build-

ings, Japanese women wearing Western evening gowns, and Japanese men getting

Western-style haircuts.

One of the new topics is the growth of communication, particularly journalism.

Despite the crucial role of the printed word in creating imagined communities, in

serving as agent and definer of modernity, historians until the late twentieth century

largely left study of the press to scholars in journalism schools. That is changing,

however, as men like Ariyama Teruo, Yoshimi Shun ya, and Sasaki Takashi bring

communication studies into the mainstream of history, even as they define commu-

nication more and more broadly. My own work has attempted to demonstrate that

RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION 145

the newspaper press played a pivotal role in Japan’s move to modernity by drawing

urbanites (and some in rural areas) into the public arena, even as it served as

gatekeeper to what the public would debate. Of particular importance is the fact

that the papers with the largest circulations, even in the first Meiji decade, were

commoner-oriented sheets such as Yomiuri shimbun, which specialized in sensation

and scandal, demonstrating the existence of a large world (and market!) beyond the

respectable circles of the intellectual elites, a world that remains yet to be studi ed

adequately by historians.

The movement into mainstream history has taken press and communications

studies in new directions. Giles Richter, for example, has addressed Meiji economic

and political history with a study of print capitalism, showing that publishers became

influential enough in the Meiji years to force officials to moderate censorship policies

and allow publication of popular materials that they would have preferred to ban. The

publishers did more than shape their own industries; they changed the state, by

forcing it ‘‘into a reactive, defensive posture’’ and demonstrating that ‘‘the govern-

ment could no longer effectively regulate the content of everything that was

printed.’’

Taking a different approach to communication history, Joseph Henning

represents a growing group of scholars who examine images and representations,

both visual and written. His study of how nineteenth-century Americans imposed

narrow concept s of race and religion on Japan argues that while several early Meiji

visitors treated Japanese culture with respect, the majority made ‘‘modernization . . .

synonymous with westernization’’ and, in the process, provided support for demean-

ing American policies.

Gender and sexuality also have made their way into the late-Tokugawa–early-Meiji

narrative, with women becoming ever more visible since the appearance of Sharon

Sievers’s study of Meiji feminists early in the 1980s. Indeed, gender is one of the few

new themes that actually has begun to penetrate even the broad Meiji surveys. The

1990s brought increased complexity to our understandings of women’s roles, with

Patricia Tsurumi’s Factory Girls mining rich sources to examine both victimization

and the contributions of female textile workers, describing the contrast between the

respect afforded early Meiji workers and the abuse those workers received after the

1880s. She concluded with a workers’ song that captured the dual nature of their

roles: ‘‘Who dares to say that / Factory girls are weak? / Factory girls are the / Only

ones who create wealth.’’

Particularly influential was Recreating Japanese Women,a

1991 collection of essays that challenged stereotypes. One of the articles told the

story of the entrepreneur Tatsu uma Kiyo, who amassed a fortune in brewing;

another, by Sharon Nolte and Sally Hastings, made it clear that women’s prerogatives

actually became narrower in the Meiji era, as state power spread. The essay demon-

strated that the state ‘‘valued a woman’s prod uctive power more than her ability as a

mother’’

– and that the state itself was not a monolithic behemoth but a diverse set

of agencies that differed and fought bitterly with each other.

By the late 1990s, works on gender and sexuality represented many, varie d seg-

ments of Tokugawa–Meiji life. Walthall’s study of Matsuo Taseko made ‘‘ordinary’’

women important. Jason Karlin analyzed the role of masculinity in the creation of

Meiji nationalism. Jordan Sand looked at how the government created the sphere of

the ‘‘home as a haven and the housewife as its spiritual center.’’

Pflugfelder showed

how male–male sexu al engagement moved from respectability in Tokugawa to

146 JAMES L. HUFFMAN

condemnation in early Meiji, as ‘‘ ‘barbarous,’ ‘immoral,’ or simply ‘unspeakable’.’’

And Tsurumi and others used the pages of the U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal to discuss

the gendered nature of Meiji education and politics. One of the most important

works, theoretically, was Women and Class in Japanese History (1999), with chapters

on the nineteenth century showing both the Tokugawa origins of phenomena once

thought to have originated with the West and the growing contro l of the state over

hygiene and the female body. The contributions of these gender studies is particularly

apparent in the broader, more synthetic works on the era. The nineteenth-century

volume of The Cambridge History of Japan, which appeared late in the 1980s, does

not contain the word ‘‘women’’ in its index, and gender rarely appears in its pages;

even discussions of marriage and childbirth use a neutral language that barely sug-

gests gender as a factor. By the end of the decade, such an omission would have been

unthinkable. The McClain and Gordon histories, which appeared in 2002 and 2003,

weave gender into the story fairly seamlessly. Similarly, a 2002 collection of modern

Japanese biographies places wome n at the center of all three early Me iji chapters.

As should be apparent, the theory-based studies bring more than new subject

matter to the nineteenth-century narrative. They are helping us to conceive the period

differently, to push us to think about motives, about ideology, about power relation-

ships in more complex ways. While one groans occasionally over elitist attempts to use

language in clever (and all too often inaccessible) ways, the theorists nonetheless have

given us important new ways of understanding what was happening in the years

around the Meiji Restoration. Fujitani’s study of how the government created old-

looking-yet-new structures to foster love of the emperor is a powerful example of

how the idea of ‘‘invented traditions’’ has changed the field. Wigen’s insistence on

the conscious examination of ‘‘the interface between history and geography’’

has

influenced not just the study of regional history but the entire language of Meiji

studies (witness the title of Pflugfelder’s work on sexuality: Cartographies of Desire).

The interest in differing kinds of spaces (and their relationship to power) leads

scholars like Susan Burns of the University of Chicago and Uemori Naoyuki of

Waseda University to examine how hospitals and priso ns became sites for resistance

and subversion. And one can credit both Said’s Orientalism and Anderson’ s ‘‘im-

agined communities’’ with helping to produce Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient, which

shows the changing way in which Meiji scholars conceptuali zed the relationship

between Japan and China while exploring the ideological foundations of Japanese

imperialism.

At the heart of these studies lies a preoccupation with power: how it is exerted, how

it affects relationships, how it shapes society – with the majority of scholars inclined to

look critically at the Meiji state and to find signs of agency and resistance among the

populace. Douglas Howland, for example, uses semiotic theory to show both the

unevenness of Japanese–Western relationships and the efforts of the Meiji elites to use

Western terms such as ‘‘rights,’’ ‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘soc iety’’ to control people. He

portrays the progressive Fukuzawa interpreting terms like ken (rights) as ‘‘state

right and sovereignty’’ rather than as people’s rights – because of ‘‘the need to

maintain Japan’s autonomy in an international situation where the Western powers

were demonstrating their own willful autonomy in coloni al actions against the less

civilized.’’

Howell takes a similar tack in his important 2000 essay, ‘‘Visions of the

Future in Meiji Japan, ’’ arguing that while a number of visions competed – the

RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION 147

nostalgia of Saigo

Takamori’s followers, the democratic goals of freedom and popular

rights supporters, the moralistic dreams of rural rebels – the statist view of Meiji

officials finally won, in part because foreign threats pushed people to defer to national

strength, and in part because the state offered the concept of empire to ‘‘exponents of

the defeated visions.’’

Indeed, Japan’s international role – the country’s active grappling with Western

definitions of modernity, its efforts to resist yet emulate the West, its changing

relationship with Asia – stimulates much of the new thinking about Meiji history.

The field continues to produce a few traditional works on international affairs:

Michael Auslin’s and Louis Perez’s work on treaty revision, continuing studies of

the yatoi, a translation of Kume Kunitake’s massive records of the Iwakura mission,

and Frederik Schodt’s 2003 biography of Ranald MacDonald, a native American who

made his way to Hokkaido

in the late 1840s.

Akira Iriye also has continued to

produce influential works on the cultural underpinnings of Japan’s relationships with

the West. While these works fill in gaps in our traditional understandings, the

narrative is more likely to be stretched by several scholars who have begun asking

new questions, some of them drawn from postcolonial studies. In somewhat of a

counterpoint to Tanaka, Joshua Fogel’s exhaustive study of Japanese travelers to

China after the late Tokug awa years shows an ‘‘obsession with ‘understanding

China’,’’ based partly on the archipelago’s reside nts’ age-old fascination with China

and partly on a propensity to use China as a way to create Japan’s own identity.

Identity also is a concern of Tessa Morris-Suzuki in several works looking at how

Japanese groups saw their country within the world context. And Robert Eskildsen

looks at the early stirrings, in the 1870s, of Japan’s own imperialism through an

examination of press coverage of the Japanese expedition to Taiwan in 1874. He uses

woodblock depictions in particular to show Japanese writers exaggerating Taiwanese

stereotypes and engag ing in what he calls ‘‘mimetic imperialism.’’ ‘‘The prospect of

exporting civilization to Taiwan,’’ he argues, ‘‘provided an attractive means of resist-

ing Western imperialism.’’

There remains, however, a paucity of serious analyses, particularly in English,

of Western imperialism in these years, works that pay as much attention to the

way foreigners forced Japan into semi-colonial status as they do to the Westerners’

role as harbingers of civilization. Iriye has discussed the uneven side of the Western

incursion, and I have argued elsewhere that Western imperialism made it easy for the

Meiji government to rationalize a statist approach to the detriment of its own citizens.

Western pres sure has always formed an important part of the narrative in Japan,

drawn on by scholars and textbooks alike to explain Japan’s militarist move.

The controversial 2001 middle school text, Atarashii rekishi kyo

kasho (New

History Textbook), for example, is filled with discussions of a ‘‘harsh world in

which the powerful devour the weak’’ (jakuniku sho

shoku no kakoku no sekai).

Western historians, by contrast, have been quicker to look at the onset of Japanese

aggression than to confront its roots in European and American imperialism in Japan.

One hopes that the rising tide of postcolonial studies and the new attention to

Japan’s imperialistic turn will foreshadow fuller critiques of Western imperialism in

Japan.

The relative silence about Western imperialism is not the only omission in recent

studies of the Meiji Restoration years; indeed, several gaps tell as much about Meiji

148 JAMES L. HUFFMAN