China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 Douglas Howland (bio) China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904. By Urs Matthias Zachmann. Routledge, London, 2009. x, 238 pages. $150.00. At the risk of resembling one who shouts, "But the emperor has no clothes!" I would observe that the title of this book indicates neither its contents nor its argument. There is no discussion of a "Japanese discourse on national identity" in the book; and "national identity" appears only in the index, where it features as a holder for the set of definitions of Japan that members of the Japanese political elite offer in the course of the book's narrative: Japan as civilized, as the pioneer of progress in East Asia, as the leader of the East, and more (p. 235). Is this another case of editorial interference [End Page 439] in the determination of titles? The misleading use of "discourse" is especially unfortunate because it might well impel would-be readers to ignore the book as another of those postmodern complaints informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and their ilk. To the contrary, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period is disengaged from matters of historiography and epistemology and thus unencumbered by what unfriendly readers might dismiss as "theory." In fact, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period attempts to focus on Japanese public opinion. As author Zachmann specifies in both the "Introduction" and "Conclusion," the book concerns the Japanese public's shifting opinions about China during the decade marked by the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars: 1895–1904 (pp. 3, 153). Accordingly, the two central elements of the book's argument are this choice of decade and the representation of Japanese public opinion. Zachmann's representation of the decade in question is based on the diplomatic histories narrated by William L. Langer and Shinobu Seizaburō.1 His first chapter serves as an introductory review of the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, and his subsequent four chapters follow the "great events" of the decade: the Sino-Japanese War and the Tripartite Intervention, the Far Eastern Crisis of 1897, the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, and the Boxer Incident of 1900. This period is quite familiar to readers of Sino-Japanese interactions, having been covered over the last three decades in several monographs and conference volumes by scholars such as Joshua Fogel, Paula Harrell, Douglas Howland, Marius Jansen, Noriko Kamachi, Lu Yan, Jürgen Osterhammel, Douglas Reynolds, and many, many more Japanese, Chinese, and European writers—all of whom follow the path established by the remarkable Sanetō Keishū in the 1940s. Zachmann candidly notes that these scholars have covered most of this history already, but to the reader ignorant of Sino-Japanese interactions, this new book may serve as an introduction. Upon this familiar narrative, Zachmann constructs the second element of China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: shifting Japanese public opinion. By "public opinion," Zachmann means the attitudes, opinions, observations, and editorial comments of the Japanese political elite—men in government, political parties, and the leading newspapers. The objects of their individual attentions were, first, events in China and, second, Japanese government policy toward China. Foremost among these men are the familiar Fukuzawa Yukichi, Konoe Atsumaro, Kuga Katsunan, and Ōkuma Shigenobu; but Zachmann includes other, more interesting and less familiar figures such as Hinohara Shōzō (a bank representative in London) and Nakamura [End Page 440] Shingo (an international law student in Germany), as well as a host of anonymous commentators for the Chūō shinbun, Jiji shinpō, Kokumin shinbun, Tōkyō mainichi shinbun, and other publications that putatively represent a range of political opinions in Japan during the decade. Zachmann begins by categorizing these generators of public opinion in the early Meiji period as either "realists" committed to social-Darwinist power politics or "idealists" committed to justice and a chivalric regard for the oppressed. Fukuzawa was the most outspoken representative of the former, while intellectuals involved with the People's Rights Movement and the Yorozu ch...