Central Themes for a Unit on Japan
in the World Cultures Social Studies Curriculum
II. Dynamics of Change - Modernization
[Suggested time: 4-5 lessons]
- The Tokugawa period, 1600-1868, witnessed over 250 years of
peace and stability in a system of centralized feudalism. Government
was centralized under the Tokugawa shogunate but with considerable autonomy
reserved to the 260 individual domains. By avoiding total unification,
which might have proven too ambitious, and by establishing a complex
system of controls to prevent rebellion among the daimyo, the founding
shoguns sidestepped radical change in the interest of preserving political
order. The result was the Pax Tokugawa.
- A second great wave of cultural borrowing occurred in the 17th century,
with Japan adopting neo-Confucianism from China as the dominant
social, political, and intellectual values, which were in the course
of the 18th century adapted to Japanese society, so that, for example,
the Japanese structures of hereditary stratification would not be violated
by a Chinese system based on status according to merit. Each of the
four strata of Tokugawa society -- samurai, peasant, artisan,
and merchant -developed a value system that stressed its particular
role in support of the larger social order.
- The inward economy depended in theory on the peasant, but in fact
thrived increasingly because of the commerce and industry of the merchants.
The outward economy was shut off, as relations with the outside world
were broken off in the 17th century, favoring seclusion over
possible colonization and disruption at the hands of Europe. Once again
Japan experienced a period of cultural effloresence in geopolitical
isolation.
- Genroku culture, ca. 1700, represented by the puppet plays of Chikamatsu, the haiku of Basho, and woodblock prints, centered around the urban commoners, the merchants and artisans, no longer the courtiers or even the samurai. Village Japan, with its mutually dependent communal society, became the model of social closeness that remains idealized to this day.
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- Asia in the age of Western imperialism, the l9th century, presents
different patterns of experience: India, which became a British colony,
later gaining independence through a nationalist movement; China, which
experienced internal rebellions in the l9th and two revolutions in the
20th century resulting in the establishment of the contemporary People's
Republic; and Japan, which modernized on the basis of a nationalism
defensive against the threat of the Western powers. In each instance
the reasons for the patterns of response lay more in differing domestic
conditions than in the nature of the foreign intrusion. In Japan's
case the economic, social, intellectual, and political developments
of the Tokugawa period had prepared the way for modernization. A commercialized
economy, an increasingly literate population of stable size, an experienced
samurai bureaucracy on both the national and local levels, a small and
relatively well governed country, and other such factors determined
the course that Japan's modernization would take.
- Japan's modernization during the Meiji period (1868 to 1912) was thus one instance of a general phenomenon that occurred in England in the 18th century and in third world countries in the 20th. The defensive modernization of Japan took the form of intense cultural borrowing, this time from Europe and America, no longer from China. The aggressive adoption of Western ways was accompanied by the preservation of Japanese values, including the age-old imperial institution and the model of village social relations. Adaptation of Western ways to Japanese society and the sense of an island country now thrust again into the world contributed to the heightened sense of nationalism that propelled Japan's modernization in the late 19th century.
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- Political modernization consisted of the establishment of a modern
nation-state, now fully centralized and unified in the wake of the
Meiji Restoration of 1868, which saw the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.
The loyal and enterprising samurai who "restored" the emperor
to the throne then proceeded, as the new government which ruled in his
name, to implement massive modernizing reforms. Again Japan experienced
a profound change under the guise of continuity. Within five years the
feudal lords had given their lands over to the new state, the samurai
had relinquished their swords and hereditary stipends, and a peaceable
transition -- a nearly bloodless revolution -- had secured the new order.
By 1890 Japan had become a constitutional monarchy, with a parliament
and bureaucracy and a revamped imperial ideology to weld the people
into a nation.
- Economic modernization meant primarily industrialization, which
brought the inward and outward economies into interrelation once again,
the export of agricultural commodities like raw silk paying for the
development of industry. The commercial tradition of the Tokugawa period
became the entrepreneurial engine of Meiji Japan, and by 1900 Japan
was embarked on the road to full-scale industrial capitalism, financed
by domestic sources but dependent on foreign trade. A new tax system,
based primarily on land, provided the public revenues that paid for
modernization.
- Social modernization entailed the abolition of the traditional status hierarchy to make all Japanese subjects equal under the emperor. The establishment of compulsory education and universal military conscription brought both opportunity and dislocation, as youth moved to the cities for jobs and higher schooling. Urbanization, the development of a working class, the beginnings of a modern middle class-- all these phenomena wrought great changes in the social closeness that had long characterized the rural village. In ideological response to this, the village was idealized and its values, human relations, and group associations were reproduced in urban counterparts.
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Imperialism and War: 1905-1945
- Japan and the world order -- Initially disadvantaged by unequal
treaties imposed by the Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century,
Japan succeeded in gaining legal equality with the West by 1900. Having
learned the lessons of Western imperialism (cultural borrowing of a
different sort), Japan began to practice them in Asia, first in Taiwan,
then in Korea, Manchuria, and China. Never wholly accepted by the Western
powers, Japan turned its back on the West in 1930s and prepared to go
it alone as the self-appointed Leader of Asia." The result was
war against China in 1937, then Pearl Harbor and war against the United
States in 1941. For Japan World War II ended with the atomic bombs and
unconditional surrender in 1945. Japan's first attempt to enter the
modern world order had ended in catastrophic failure.
- Politics and economy in the prewar and war period -- Rapid industrialization on a still predominantly agricultural base coupled with heavy dependence on foreign trade intensified the effect on Japan of the world depression of the 1930s. Economic crisis and a rash of political assassinations brought the end of party government in 1932, replaced by bureaucratic "National unity" cabinets in which the military held increasing power against the specter of social disorder. In an atmosphere of ultra-nationalism, the government mobilized the economy and society, plunging the country into what the Japanese came to call "the dark valley" of militarism and war that lasted from 1931 until 1945. Social relations of family and community retained their primary value, contributing both to submissiveness to the state and, later, to endurance of wartime hardship without society's falling apart.
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Central Themes for a Unit on Japan
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Project
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Educators | afe.easia.columbia.edu
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