Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations

Abstract

Americans have never been of one mind on Japan. At various times, and on occasion simultaneously, the Japanese have been either friends or enemies, westernized Asians or oriental “others,” civilized equals or racial inferiors. Joseph M. Henning's first-rate survey of American views of Japan in the late nineteenth century makes clear that American attitudes were very complex, even contradictory, from the very beginning of the relationship. According to the evolutionary doctrines of the day, Asians were viewed as “youthful races” being awakened from their precivilized torpor. Small in stature, innocent in their sexual mores, and barbaric in their social organization, the Japanese seemed ready for the vitalizing touch of Protestant missionary influence and modern industrial forms of social organization. But while Japan proved receptive to Western secular influences in the wake of the Meiji restoration, it remained for a time officially closed to Western missionary influence. The rapid industrialization of Japan came as a shock to many missionaries who had assumed that modernization could take place only under Christian auspices. American missionaries were also challenged by secular reformers who believed that social evolution owed nothing to religious influences. For Americans with romantic sensibilities, the disappearance of the old Japan—its natural beauty and exotic traditional customs—was more curse than blessing. But to many Japanese, especially those who were hell-bent on modernization and liberation from the burden of the unequal treaties imposed by the West, this romantic anti-modernism was akin to a desire to preserve Japan as a “playground or museum.” In exporting civilization, then, Americans were also sending abroad their own internal tensions.