THE CULTURE OF PLAY

Japanese historiography has conventionally located the beginning of the end of the Tokugawa (bakumatsu) in the decade of the 1830s, when the regime and the several domains embarked on a series of reforms aimed at arresting economic failure and restoring public confidence. Historians who have concentrated on making sense of the signs of financial failure point to the implementation of the Tempō reforms as recognition of a gathering crisis. Some have established the revolt of Ōshio Heihachirō in Osaka in 1837 as the turning point in Tokugawa history. But regardless of the many opinions concerning the beginning of the end, most discussions of the end of the shogunate have used economic signs, political events, or a combination of both as criteria for periodization. Yet to establish the beginning of the end in the 1830s obliges us to accept a concomitant assumption that cultural events constitute a second order of activity; one that avoids organizing the world in terms of a base-superstructure dyad but still sees culture and ideas as determined by material forces. Culture is then made to appear as a dependent variable of economic and political processes, and the observer is diverted from recognizing that the production of culture may in fact possess a logic of its own, one that seeks to resolve problems belonging to an entirely different class of events and facts.

If we regard culture as something more than a pale reflection of changes detected earlier in the material realm, we will be persuaded to propose that the special culture of late Tokugawa culture did not begin in the 1830s, or even later, but probably in the late eighteenth century or the early 1800s.

On the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of the year 1830, Japan entered a new era. By coincidence, that same afternoon, in a cottage not far from Shibuya, Matsuzaki Kōdō, a Confucian scholar, observed a flock of white cranes, “skimming over the hill” (as he wrote in his diary) from the direction of Aoyama. He recorded their appearance the following morning, too, “wheeling northwards in the sunlight,” his unmistakable delight suggesting just how reassuring it was that these stately and auspicious birds should show themselves at such a time. No era could have had so propitious an opening. Matsuzaki was equally happy with the new era name itself – “Tempō,” or Heavenly Protection. It was well known that selecting era names was a delicate business, for the least carelessness – the use of Chinese characters already encumbered with unhappy associations, or those inviting ominous paranomasia – could well prejudice the prosperity of the entire nation. In this case, there seemed nothing to fear. The two characters for Tempō, as the elderly scholar construed them, paid tribute to two previous eras, the first being the Tenna era (1681–83) and the second, the Kyōhō era (1716–35). Matsuzaki did not need to remind himself that for scholars at least, both periods carried favorable overtones, suggestive of new hope, of depravity reformed, and of righteousness restored. This, too, augured well for the future.

The overthrow of the Tokugawa in 1867–68 carried implications of important changes in the political institutions of Japan, as well as in the location of power. Yet when Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki) resigned as shogun in November 1867, this did not seem by any means inevitable. He might well have been succeeded, so contemporaries believed, by some kind of baronial council, in which he would still hold a preponderant place, thereby putting the authority of the shogun into the hands of a group of great lords, of whom he would be one. The palace coup d'état of January 3, 1868, engineered by Satsuma and Chōshū, ended that prospect, at least in the sense of ensuring that the Tokugawa would be excluded from any successor regime to which those domains belonged. There followed some months of civil war, which confirmed and extended Japan's political polarization, ensuring that all the lords and most of their retainers had to commit themselves to one side or the other. After this there was no going back. Because the Tokugawa had been defeated and there had emerged no single victorious feudal lord who could aspire to the office of shogun – Satsuma came closest – the country's new rulers had then to work out an alternative framework through which authority could be exercised. Japanese tradition and recent history ensured that it must focus on the emperor, but devising institutions appropriate to it was to take a whole generation, that is, until the promulgation of the constitution in 1889 and the associated regulations concerning central and local government.

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a new phase of European expansion into the non-European world, stimulated by the mercantilist ambitions of European governments and made possible by a growing technological superiority. One consequence was a series of attempts to develop a profitable trade with the countries of East Asia, most of which, bound loosely together in a political and economic system centering on China, had shown little inclination previously to engage in commerce with other regions. Japan, committed to a policy of national isolation (sakoku) dating from the seventeenth century, gave no sign of responding to such overtures. With China, however, there grew up a trade in tea and silk that by 1800 was of considerable value. In the next fifty years or so, this trade became, first, the main focus of Western economic penetration in East Asia and, then, the raison d'être for a set of institutional relationships, known as the treaty port system, which was eventually extended to most of China's maritime neighbors. As one of those neighbors, Japan became part of it.

The nature of the treaty port system in the nineteenth century derived principally from the commercial policies of Great Britain. These, in turn, reflected a shift from the eighteenth-century doctrines of mercantilism to those of laissez faire, linked with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. In 1840, seeking above all an expanding market for the products of its factories, Britain seized the opportunity afforded by a dispute with China over the opium trade and the treatment of British merchants at Canton to demand the “opening” of China on terms of “equality,” in accordance with the principles of free trade.

Although Japan was never a “closed country” in the sense that sakoku literally implies, it did awaken from two hundred years of substantial “national isolation” in the last half of the nineteenth century to devote its full energy toward the realization of one goal – the establishment of a modern nation-state. This effort itself is better evidence of Japan's “turn to the West” than anything else, for the concept of a modern nation-state had yet to manifest itself in any non-Western country. In economic terms, a modern nation-state is a state that has experienced an industrial revolution; in social terms, it is a state with a centralized political system under which popular participation is structured through the parliamentary institutions of a constitutional order. By any measure, such characteristics of a state are thoroughly Western in nature and origin.

These distinguishing characteristics were not to be found in the Tokugawa bakuhan state. Nineteenth-century Japanese society was pre-industrial, and its economy was based on forms of production that depended on animate rather than mechanical sources of power. A large bourgeoisie did exist to carry on commercial and financial enterprise, but it was excluded from participating in political decisions. The Tokugawa political structure was composed of a bureaucracy, representing feudally privileged classes that operated within a system that reconciled theoretically incompatible elements of feudalism and absolute shogunal “monarchy.” Despite Japan's high level of cultural homogenity – or perhaps because of it – the concept of a people as a “nation” that participated actively in the affairs of a “state” was unknown.

The Meiji Restoration stands as one of the turning points of Japanese history. Although the actual events of 1868 constituted little more than a shift of power within the old ruling class, the larger process referred to as the Meiji Restoration brought an end to the ascendancy of the warrior class and replaced the decentralized structure of early modern feudalism with a central state under the aegis of the traditional sovereign, now transformed into a modern monarch. The Restoration leaders undertook a series of vigorous steps to build national strength under capitalist institutions and rapidly propelled their country on the road to regional and world power. Thus the Restoration constituted a major event for Japanese, East Asian, and world history. The process whereby this came about has inevitably become a central issue in Japanese historiography, for verdicts on its content and nature condition all appraisals of the modern state to which it led. The work of historians has been undergirded by a vast apparatus of sources preserved by a history-minded government concerned with its own origins, and the scholarship that has been produced illuminates the intellectual history of Japan's most recent century.

TROUBLES WITHIN, DISASTER FROM WITHOUT

Japan's political crisis of the 1860s was preceded by serious internal difficulties and foreign danger that brought to mind formulations of Chinese historians who habitually coupled internal decline with border incursions made possible by that decline: “troubles within, disaster from without” (naiyū gaikan). A great deal of historical inquiry has been directed to the questions of how severe the first would have been in the absence of the second.

The Meiji period bequeathed to modern Japan a powerful conservative tradition that dominated government and society in the twentieth century. Meiji conservatism took shape at the end of the nineteenth century in reaction to the sweeping reforms and Western influence that had held sway in the first two decades of Meiji. Those reforms, which brought to fruition the demands for change that had grown during the late Tokugawa, drew their inspiration from Western ideas and institutions that were the products of the Enlightenment and of the liberal philosophies that accompanied the emergence of commercial capitalism and a bourgeois class dissatisfied with traditional forms of government in Europe. The Meiji ruling group, after initially adopting many of the ideas and institutions of the Enlightenment, subsequently promoted a powerful conservative program in order to sustain its power and the social order on which it rested.

Conservatism, in the sense used here, is not simply a tendency to maintain the status quo. Rather, it is a distinctly modern phenomenon that first developed in the West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in reaction to the dominant themes of the Enlightenment and to the implications of the French Revolution. Although conservatism had distinctive features in different European countries, owing to their divergent histories and social structures, certain common features became apparent wherever it arose in the West. It is worthwhile to examine our topic in the context of European conservatism, in part because the Japanese conservatives drew inspiration from their European counterparts and in part because comparisons will prove meaningful in understanding the nature of Meiji conservatism.

This volume deals with nineteenth-century Japan. The century is usually broken in its third quarter by historians who treat the Meiji Restoration as a watershed in Japanese history, but we shall treat it as a whole. The Restoration surely marked an important divide in Japanese social history, but it is impossible to analyze its elements without a perspective of what preceded and what followed it.

The nineteenth century saw Japan transformed from a society that was divided territorially, politically, socially, and internationally. Japan's borders were still unclear, for its sovereignty over Okinawa, the Kurils, and Hokkaido was not established. Politically, Japan was still structured in the territorial divisions that had been worked out in the early seventeenth century. The Tokugawa shogun held dominion over lands that produced about one-quarter of the national agricultural yield of rice, which was the sole measure of productivity, but although he retained about half of that for his own house as tenryō, the rest he allocated to his vassals. The balance of the country was divided among some 260 feudal lords, who in turn allocated part of their holdings to their retainers. The domains were substantially autonomous in internal administration; each had its own army, its own administrative system, and its own capital city, which had grown, in the larger domains, around the daimyo's castle. The lords and their domains were not taxed by the shogun, who, as primus inter pares, was restricted to the revenue of his own holdings.

The daimyo were, however, expected to perform acts of fealty to their overlord, and in the absence of warfare, that service had become ritualized in the procedures of alternate attendance whereby they spent half their time in residence at the shogunal capital of Edo.

The first third of the nineteenth century in Japan was dominated by personalities and policies that appeared on the scene in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The reform measures of Matsudaira Sadanobu and the personal preferences of his shogun, Tokugawa Ienari, lent a considerable continuity to the Bunka (1804–18) and Bunsei (1818–30) eras.

In contrast with the devastation and famine that the crop failures of the 1780s had brought, the quarter-century that followed seemed something of an Indian summer of Tokugawa rule. The years were marked by good harvests. The long continuity of Ienari, whose half-century in office marked the longest tenure of any of the fifteen Tokugawa shoguns, was reflected in a lack of political surprises in bakufu or daimyo domains. Economic growth, both in agriculture and in the provision of materials for the great metropolis of Edo, a striking rise in the diffusion of schooling, and the impressive production of material for the growing reading public all contributed to the impression of well-being. Arbitrary status divisions laid down by the seventeenth-century founders had less relevance in a period of economic change and growth. At the top of the samurai ranks, hereditary income and privilege stood as a guarantee of continuity, but the great urban merchants lived as well as did the petty daimyo, and the lower ranks of the samurai military were considerably worse off than were the middling merchants and artisans. In the countryside a clear division between the landholding village leaders and the landless and tenants was making a mockery of the regime's “peasant” ideal.

Like all the great revolutions of the modern era, the Meiji Restoration generated intense opposition from groups and classes displaced and disadvantaged by revolutionary change. What sets the Meiji Restoration apart, however, is the apparent ease with which opposition to the revolutionary regime was defeated or co-opted. Peasant riots over the new conscription law, village protests against the land tax revision, revolts by disaffected samurai, early campaigns for representative government, and uprisings by dispossessed farmers all were contained or suppressed. The original leadership group stayed in charge and did not change its basic policies. Viewed positively, Japan enjoyed extraordinary continuity and stability in government; viewed negatively, conservative and bureaucratic politics prevailed.

Japanese and Western historians disagree sharply when explaining the failure of opposition movements to oust the ruling oligarchy or force changes in its agenda. Scholars in America and Great Britain influenced by modernization theory have generally viewed Japan as a model of peaceful transition from feudalism to modernity, a transformation in which core values of consensus and loyalty to emperor kept dissent within manageable bounds. On the other hand, most Japanese and some Western historians credit the failure of the opposition movements to the authoritarian character of the Meiji state, emphasizing the incorporation of oppressive semifeudal structures into the Meiji polity and the oligarchy's control of the new state's efficient state security apparatus.

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE

Nothing is more striking, in tracing Meiji Japan's foreign affairs, than the fact that the Meiji period coincided with the emergence of several “modern states.” The half-century before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 witnessed political, economic, social, and intellectual developments in the West that coalesced into the development of national entities, outlines of which have remained to this day. England, France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries, as well as the United States, evolved as centralized and integrated mass societies that, for want of a better term, have been called modern states. Although no two modern states were exactly alike, they were generally characterized by centralization of state authority, on the one hand, and mass incorporation into the economy and polity, on the other. These developments had, of course, been preceded by the democratic and the industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, but it was in most instances only after the 1860s that these earlier, and ongoing, revolutions conspired with other trends to create conditions for unified state systems.

The twin phenomenon of centralization and mass incorporation may be illustrated by the United States, the country that held the greatest fascination for the Japanese during the two decades after Perry. The America of Perry's days was not yet a full-fledged modern state. It was a country with serious cleavages between regions and economic interests. Although shared mythologies of the American Revolution generated a sense of common heritage, what a later generation would call a “civil religion,” and although a sense of nationhood was buttressed by economic opportunity (a theme that Alexis de Tocqueville stressed in the 1830s), there also grew an apparently insoluble dispute about the nature of the American state.

Introduction

The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the spread of an international monetary system based on gold, linking the major countries of the world with fixed international exchange rates for their domestic currencies, a system more stable perhaps than anything seen since. The system evolved; it presented many institutional contrasts; yet all monetary authorities had a common policy aim – the preservation of specie payments or of convertibility of their currencies, to which all other aims were subordinated. Why the gold standard worked successfully in the sense of eliminating balance of payments imbalances without exchange rate changes in a rapidly changing world economy has proved a challenging question for economists and economic historians. Myths, indeed, have grown up about gold and its discipline before 1914 such that in later years they have at times dominated and even perverted international economic policies. Even now gold refuses to lie down and accept its role as a barbarous relic. Besides describing and analysing the institutional and structural arrangements underlying the gilt facade, this chapter will seek to explain why and how the gold standard worked, especially for Britain, and will emphasize the importance of the particular and peculiar economic relationships of this period in providing a favourable environment within which the gold standard could flourish.

Basic gold standard elements

By the middle of the nineteenth century most countries had sought to define their domestic currencies in terms of a metallic base of silver or gold, with silver or gold coins of the appropriate weight as the basic money substance.

Introduction

The Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph I of the House of Habsburg-Lothringen, had every right to be pleased as he stood in the Hungarian capital city of Buda, atop a mound of earth gathered from every part of the country, to be crowned I. Ferencz József, King of Hungary, on 8 June 1867. Ten days earlier, the Hungarian parliament had passed the acts constituting the Compromise of 1867 which, with their counterpart laws in Austria, formally established the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as of I January 1868. Very largely the personal work of the Kaiser himself, the Compromise regulated the political relations between the two constituent parts of his Empire, at one and the same time stabilizing both the internal conditions and the international position of the Habsburg lands. Franz Joseph had rightly seen that the position of Hungary was the key both to the internal cohesion of the Empire and to the arrest and reversal of the decline of Austria as a major power, which defeat in the war with Prussia in 1866 had exposed so clearly. Under the Compromise, Hungary regained full internal autonomy and most of the status of an independent country, but remained united with Austria in the person of the common monarch and in the conduct of foreign affairs.

The Compromise established two classes of relations between the partners in the new Austria–Hungary: ‘Common affairs’ embraced the army and navy, and all aspects of international relations including the diplomatic service; a common ministry was set up to handle the financial side of these matters.

Introduction

Two traditions, apparently conflicting but having more in common than appears on the surface, have operated to make up the social and economic policy of the French state since the eighteenth century. The older one expresses the need for greater centralization and control of economic and social life inherent in the creation and consolidation of the modern state manifested first of all by the monarchy of the old regime. The other emphasizes the objective character of economic laws and demands maximum freedom for the individual, conceived as a property owner, to do what he likes with his own. Ostensibly it is the revolution of 1789 which swings the balance from the one to the other and establishes the necessary juridical bases for the full development of the free market economy. But the earlier tradition was by no means dead. The revolutionary, and more especially the Napoleonic, regimes continued the centralizing mission of the monarchy and carried it out more successfully. The theoretical basis for the exercise of state power changed from divine right to the general will; the privileges of the nobility gave way to the rights of property; but in the new system of law the state had rights superior to those of the ordinary citizen. The centralization of power in the state, the establishment of bureaucratic agencies of control having interests of their own, were characteristic of the new order. During the nineteenth century and after the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the state remained ambivalent.

War and post-war reconstruction

The First World War marked the end of an era in the history of commercial relations among countries. New boundaries set in the peace treaties, especially with Austria and Hungary, converted pre-1914 internal trade to international trade. Trade relations interrupted by war could not always be restored. Extended fighting and disruption of peacetime economic intercourse produced substantial changes in the economic capacities and interests of major trading nations. Monetary disturbance evoked responses in trade policy, especially increases in tariffs, to offset effects of exchange depreciation abroad. A loosely concerted attempt was made after the war to patch up the fabric of trade relationships, but with nothing like the fervour exhibited after the Second World War. There was virtually no planning of post-war trade policies, despite President Wilson's third of the fourteen points that called for ‘removal, as far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves with its maintenance’.

Exigencies of war led to changes in commercial policy. The McKenna budget in Britain in 1915 imposed duties of 33⅓ per cent on motor cars and parts, musical instruments, clocks, watches, and cinematographic film in an effort to reduce imports of luxuries and to save shipping space – although the point has been made that the shipping space taken by watches is minimal (Kreider, 1943, p. 13). Unlike previous luxury taxes in Britain, these duties on imports were not matched by domestic excises to eliminate the protective effect.

Introduction

When considering the industrial revolution in Europe and the labour movements to which it gave rise, it is customary to think in Anglo-European, or more precisely Anglo-French terms. Britain was master of the first industrial revolution based on coal and cotton, so tradition has it, while French thinkers such as Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Louis Blanc provided the intellectual analysis upon which the first rational critiques of the new industrialism were built. Yet an equally suggestive – if less orthodox – way of approaching the history of the labour movement, at least in the English-speaking world, can be obtained through an Anglo-American rather than through an Anglo-European form of analysis. This is partly for reasons to do with similarities in language, customs, and law. Anglo-American traditions with regard to the legality of strikes, picketing, and other trade-union practices, which differed markedly between Great Britain and the French Napoleonic Code on which most continental labour law was based, were similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

This approach is also plausible because, although quite different in other regions, the process of American industrialization as it occurred between 1815 and 1840 in New England, in the Ohio valley and to some extent in the mid-Atlantic states, was quite similar to that which had taken place in Lancashire, in Yorkshire and the English Midlands not many years before. As a result, it has been argued by one scholar that the growth and character of the American labour movement can best be seen as developing along similar lines to those adopted in Great Britain, save that major advances in the American movement followed along approximately one generation behind the British.