Meiji Japan Research Articles

East Asian Authoritarian Modernism: From Meiji Japan’s “Prussian Path” to China’s “Singapore Model”

The significance of Meiji Japan’s “Prussian path” to authoritarian modernity has largely been ignored in the social sciences because it contradicts prevailing modernization theory. Meiji Japanese reformers, after carefully examining several Western country’s political systems, chose the German model because of its illiberal but modern politics. This argument regarding the authoritarian modernity of Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan contradicts modernization theory which claims that advanced industrialization leads to liberal democracy. Similarly, Meiji Japan’s influence on the “developmental states” of East Asia (East and Southeast Asia) has not been given much weight by modernization theories. More recently, Singapore’s successful combination of non-democratic rule with advanced capitalism has been dismissed as a (literally) small exception to the general democratizing rule, with even autocratic China expected by modernization theorists to democratize soon given its rapid economic growth over the past generation. This article explores the impact of the Imperial German model of authoritarian modernism on Meiji Japan and, in turn, Japanese influence on political development in East Asia as well as the influence of the “Singapore model” on China. It explores three forms of linkages: social structural, state formational, and ideological.

“Anarchist Beauties” in Late Meiji Japan

This article examines narrative manipulation of police violence involving journalists, the police, and activists in late Meiji Japan to explore the political potential of popular media. I scrutinize the so-called Red Flag Incident of 1908, in which fourteen socialists were arrested for fighting with policemen in the streets of Tokyo over red flags with anarchist slogans. Scholars have studied this incident as a prologue to the nationwide crackdown on socialists, which in turn led to the 1910 High Treason Incident that resulted in the execution of twelve socialists for allegedly plotting to assassinate the emperor. Immediately after the Red Flag Incident, however, newspapers highlighted the four female socialists taken into custody, embroidering their stories with a variety of theatrical metaphors. Simultaneously, the gendered narratives allowed the radical political message to circulate in the form of entertainment, eventually inspiring both intensified state persecution of radicals and women's diverse engagement in politics.

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

<i>Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan</i> by Hoi-Eun Kim

Trailblazers of Global Buddhist Networks

This paper surveys the travels and networks of several Buddhist figures early in the modernization of this increasingly global tradition. Revisiting renowned Buddhist representatives, such as Shaku Sōen and Anagarika Dharmapala, reinforces the prominence of principal nodes in this expanding network—both in terms of seminal reformers and crucial arenas of encounter, such as Meiji Japan and Ceylon at the end of the nineteenth century. This study asserts the significant and compounding effect of early cross-cultural encounters at a formative period for modern Buddhism. Although the importance of face-to-face meeting—and the subsequent publications, correspondence, and travels—spanned relationships within and beyond Asia, the paper nevertheless suggests an Asian centre of gravity for Buddhism’s modernization and global dissemination.

A tale of two SICs: Japanese and American industrialisation in historical perspective

Late‐developing countries often adopt best practice technologies pioneered abroad, facilitating convergence toward leading economies. Meiji Japan (1868–1912) is one successful example of industrial convergence, but much of the evidence relies on national aggregates or selected industries. Using historical industry data, this paper examines whether Japan adopted new technologies faster compared to the United States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, new sectors did not appear relatively sooner in Japan, however, they did grow to economic significance faster.

Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition

AbstractThis article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

Responsivity within the Context of Informal Imperialism: Oyatoi in Meiji Japan

Responsivity within the Context of Informal Imperialism: Oyatoi in Meiji JapanThe article explores ways in which diplomatic strategies within the unequal treaty system between Meiji Japan and Weste...

Civil engineering heritage: country profile – Japan

This paper is a review of Japan’s civil engineering heritage, one of the series of national profiles being published by Engineering History and Heritage. It is presented under four headings: Japan’s major civil engineering achievements; national and regional recognition of its engineering heritage; examples of conservation of engineering structures; and information sources for engineering heritage. The paper discusses engineering structures of heritage importance including the national road network constructed in the seventeenth century; the Kintai timber arch bridge near Hiroshima first built in 1673; the first railway in the 1880s including the Rokugo River Bridge built in 1878 and Ousakayama Tunnel built in 1879; as well as the Hashima artificial island in Nagasaki, constructed in 1897–1931, a component of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site Meiji Japan Industrial Heritage. The paper lists organisations in Japan active in helping to conserve its engineering heritage, including a guidance published by the Japanese Society of Civil Engineers, and the paper concludes with a short list of websites and books giving further information about Japanese civil engineering heritage.

Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms

Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura).

'Westernizations' from Peter I to Meiji: War, Political Competition, and Reform

Radical “Westernizing” transformations in extra-European countries, from Peter I’s Russia to Meiji Japan, are traditionally presented as a response to threats from the more militarily and technologically advanced European powers. This corresponds to the general tendency to view war as the driving force behind early modern state-building. Yet, how exactly did such transformations become possible? How were the rulers able to pursue policies that threaten large sections of their own military elites, from strel’tsy and mamluks to janissaries and samurais? And why did some of the extra-European states failed to ‘Westernize” in response to external threats, while others rapidly Westernized when the threats was ephemeral, at best? This article seeks to complicate this “bellicist” narrative of Westernizing transformations by shifting the focus of analysis to the rulers’ quest for political survival. It argues that when the domestic balance of power is stable, incumbent rulers tend not to embark on reform, even in the face of external military threats. Conversely, such reforms tend to occur when the domestic balance of power is disrupted to such a degree as to lead to the emergence of challengers, who launch “Westernization” as they seek to expand their power base and undermine that of their rivals. Factional political struggles accompanying such transformations are interpreted here not as a conservative reaction against reforms, but as a process that precedes and enables reforms by facilitating the creation of an alternative ruling coalition.

Falling Behind, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind Again: Thailand from 1870 to 2014

The paper argues that Thailand’s economic and social development from the late 19th century to the early 21st century presents a puzzle. For much of the period from 1870 to 1940, the country’s economic growth was slow, and the economy remained agricultural, with little diversification into modern industry or services. It was the only Southeast Asian country to escape direct colonization, and yet it did not use its relative freedom from colonial control to embark on a programme of accelerated economic, social and political modernization. The contrast with Meiji Japan has been made by several Thai and foreign scholars, but Thailand’s growth was also slow in comparison with several neighbouring countries under colonial control. Only in the late 1950s did economic growth start to accelerate and by 1996, per capita GDP was well ahead of other ASEAN countries except Malaysia and Singapore. The paper explores the reasons for the accelerated growth, looking particularly at the role of government. The paper also examines the reasons for the growth collapse of 1997/1998, and the slower economic growth since then.

The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey

Reviewed by: The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey Richard M. Jaffe The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. 330. $49.95. Writing in 1934 in Christ and Japan, Kagawa Toyohiko 賀川豊彦 (1888–1960), a well-known Christian minister, socialist labor leader, and pacifist, described his approach as a Christian to visiting state Shinto shrines. Prefacing his remarks by noting the incoherence in the Japanese [End Page 260] Department of Education's separation of religious sect Shinto from non religious state Shinto, Kagawa continues, Therefore, the department insists that these [state] shrines are not of a religious character. Nevertheless, through the existence of these monument-shrines, the forms of ancient, Asiatic Shamanism are preserved. Yet it is true that the shrines of state Shinto are the monuments and tombs of men who rendered conspicuous service for the state. In this respect they differ not at all from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the Cenotaph in London. Therefore when visiting them, I remove my hat and bow in reverence, just as I do when I visit my parents' graves.1 Kagawa makes further remarks denouncing the resistance to participation in various state Shinto rites by foreign Christian missionaries: Whenever I visit the Great Shrine of Ise I do not worship Amaterasu-O-Mikami as a goddess. I do, however, remove my hat and bow reverently. The guard on duty finds no fault with this. The educational authorities ask nothing more. Some missionaries, however, look upon this as idol worship and clashes occur. These missionaries may find satisfaction in ignoring Japan's whole past history and in destroying memorials of the nation's builders.2 The genealogy of the specifically Japanese construction of the secular and religious that underlies Kagawa's statements is carefully rendered by Trent E. Maxey in his book, The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Historians of Japanese religions, as well as those concerned with the comparative study of how the mutually imbricated secular-religious dyad was constructed around the globe during the modern era, will find much of value in Maxey's study. The book provides an indispensable guide for English readers through the legal, political, and intellectual debates that culminated with the adoption of a national constitution that, despite vigorous lobbying from Buddhists, Shintoists, and others, adhered to the principle of limited religious freedom instead of enshrining a specific state religion. With clarity, Maxey describes how Japanese officials adopted a policy of state impartiality—that is, freedom of religion—rather than a policy [End Page 261] of the "tolerant state," in which an official religion is adopted "while granting religious toleration" (p. 87). To date, Maxey's book is the most comprehensive guide in English to the plethora of rapidly changing laws, administrative offices, and attitudes involving religion in Japan. This book, which concentrates on legislative history and the construction of the governmental apparatus for administering religion, complements the analysis of the creation of religion and the sacralization of the court presented in such other works as Takashi Fujitani's Splendid Monarchy, Helen Hardacre's Shintō and the State, Jason Josephson's The Invention of Religion in Japan, James Ketelaar's Of Heretics and Martyrs, and Orion Klautau's Kindai Nihon shisō to shite no Bukkyō shigaku 近代日本思想としての仏教史学.3 Maxey begins his study of the development of state policies toward religion in Japan with his analysis of the "crisis of conversion" that the growing presence of Christianity precipitated during the Bakumatsu and Meiji eras. Maxey (chap. 1, esp. pp. 49–54) effectively utilizes conceptual tools based on Gauri Viswanathan's analysis of religion in the British Raj, where religious conversion was viewed as a grave threat to the stability of Indian colonial society.4 Fearful of the spread of Christianity and with it, "republicanism" and other pernicious foreign ideas, Japanese government leaders tried to restrict the practice of Christianity to the foreign settlement areas of the treaty ports, while prosecuting Japanese such as the Urakami Christians in Nagasaki who were bold enough openly to practice their faith during the Bakumatsu and early...

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Reviewed by: Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim James R. Bartholomew (bio) Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2014. xvi, 249 pages. $55.00, cloth; $55.00, E-book. How is one to explain the rapid and “seismic transformation … of medical science [in] Meiji Japan in just thirty years?” asks Hoi-Eun Kim. His answer is basically that from about 1870 Japanese medical authorities found German medicine an attractive model to follow and acted accordingly. In posing this question and providing this answer, Kim seems to be retelling a familiar story. But this is misleading; he gives only cursory attention to the Tokugawa background to modern Japanese medicine. The real contribution of the book is its analysis of how one country influences another and the thoughtful, nuanced account he offers of this process. He correctly emphasizes that the Japanese as protégés and the Germans as mentors each had agency. In his words, the historian of cultural borrowing should adopt a transnational perspective, consider reciprocal relations and engage in what Kim, borrowing from Lawrence Stone, has called “double prosopography” (p. 9).1 One of the first things we learn is that the drawing together of Japan and Germany in medical science was not the result of some inexorable, abstract process but rather followed the initiatives of particular people on each side (Iwasa Jun, Sagara Chian, and Guido Verbeck for Japan; Max von Brandt, Theodor von Holleben, Ernst von Bülow for the Germans). Nor did it have anything to do with some kind of constitutional affinity between the two countries, with a common tradition of rule by a military elite, or with geopolitics as commonly understood. In the field of medicine, Germany had many attractions for Japan as well as for other countries. Between 1870 and 1914, it had three times the number of universities of any other European country; thus, there were more professors of distinction than anywhere else. There was the unique German tradition of peregrinato academica that allowed students once admitted to move their enrollment easily from one institution to another. And with their systemic emphasis on research and publication as a requirement for advancement, German-speaking medical scientists led most of Europe not only in long-established fields such as pathology, anatomy, and surgery but also in the [End Page 435] vital, newly emerging specialty of bacteriology or—as the French called it—microbiology. The process of acquiring and expanding a tradition of medical expertise in Japan followed fairly predictable, straightforward channels. Two military physicians, Theodor Hoffmann and Leopold Müller, arrived from Prussia in 1870—there was as yet no Germany—while a small number of Japanese were dispatched to German-speaking institutions about the same time. Everyone had difficulty. The Germans spoke no Japanese, and even the Japanese who translated their lectures at first lacked the breadth of vocabulary needed for the purpose. Things got better eventually. In 1873 the Japanese government recalled its overseas students, and language proficiency standards were imposed after 1875. Hoffmann and Müller were succeeded by Emil Schultze and Albrecht Wernich that year; and they in turn by Julius Scriba and Erwin Baelz in 1881. The exorbitant cost of the German professors’ salaries helped to accelerate their replacement by Japanese successors. There were no more Germans after 1900. Important as the German professors were at this early stage, the contribution to modern medicine of the Japanese who studied in Germany was greater. Kim declares that we cannot establish with real certainty how many studied abroad in this period. But he is able to show that the numbers in Berlin alone could not have been fewer than 627 people, at least two of whom were women. He thinks that about 30 per cent were funded by one or another government agency. Others, who paid their own way, did so because they judged the career benefits to be worth the investment. The professional success of one of the women ryūgakusei (overseas student) makes the point: Despite many obstacles at both the Japanese...

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Reviewed by: Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim Ellen Nakamura Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, 2014. 249 pages. Hardcover $55.00; softcover $29.95. Doctors of Empire begins with an evocative scene of the unveiling of two bronze busts on the campus of Tokyo Imperial University in 1907—a lively event, attended by members of the academic and diplomatic communities, that provides an excellent entry into Hoi-Eun Kim’s study of the medical and cultural encounters between Germany and Japan. In honor of the two German physicians whose contributions were being celebrated that day—Erwin Baelz and Julius Scriba—the dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Aoyama Tanemichi, rose to give a speech in fluent German that emphasized the strength of German medicine in Japan and suggested that the relationship between Japan and Germany was a colonial one, at least as far as medical science was concerned. While some attendees were reportedly displeased by Aoyama’s assessment of Japan’s status as “colonial,” historians in recent years have found colonial and postcolonial examinations to be a productive way of considering the history of Japanese medicine.1 In this book, Kim covers well-trodden ground but with a specialized focus on German-Japanese relations. His highly readable discussion of the significance of the German model for Japanese medicine provides a welcome new addition to scholarly literature in English while also taking into account the historiography in German. Kim tries to emphasize both sides of this reciprocal yet unequal relationship, writing with a fresh eye for the multifaceted cultural encounters that it engendered. According to Kim’s research, between 1,150 and 1,200 Japanese students (he cites different figures on pages 5 and 61 of the book) learned medicine in Germany and other German-speaking regions in Europe between the years 1868 and 1914. Even larger numbers of students came into contact with German medicine in Japan through the [End Page 169] German teachers who taught in the country or their German-trained students. These teachers and physicians, the “doctors of empire” referred to in the title, were at the core of the Germanization of Japanese medicine. As outlined in the introduction, Kim explores these doctors using three analytical tools. First, he is interested in transnational history, in the flow of ideas and peoples as they cut across national borders. While acknowledging that the German physicians who were invited to Japan were modernizers, Kim emphasizes not their technical transfer of knowledge but rather the reciprocal nature of their interactions with Japan and their place within larger global processes. Second, the postcolonial aspect of his analysis seeks to place the activities of German physicians in Japan within the broader context of Germany’s colonial ambitions in East Asia. Turning to the anthropological studies undertaken by many German physicians in Japan, Kim shows how they helped to foster a new scientific racism that became influential in Japan’s own colonial expansion. Even as he claims to reject the concept of colonialism as a way of explaining the Germanization of Japanese medicine, his use of “soft power” as an alternative has much in common with the idea of “self-colonization” put forward by others.2 Kim’s third analytical tool is “double prosopography,” the collective study of the lives of doctors in two different countries, with particular attention to “the kaleidoscopic lives of ordinary or less-heroic Japanese medical students in Germany” (p. 10). Finally, interwoven into his analysis is a concern with broader issues within German-Japanese historiography. Kim is at pains to dismiss exceptionalist narratives that try to see in the German-style modernization of Japanese medicine a “fatal affinity” leading inevitably to the medical atrocities committed at Auschwitz and Unit 731. Ultimately, Kim is unable to completely fulfill his ambitious agenda within the pages of this slim volume; indeed, any one of his analytical frameworks could have formed the basis for a more detailed and perhaps more satisfying study. Nevertheless, the book contributes to an understudied area of the field and raises interesting...

The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey

The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan by Trent E. Maxey

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History by Jason G. Karlin

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History by Jason G. Karlin

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz

Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō by Isomae Jun’ichi

Reviewed by: Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō by Isomae Jun’ichi Jolyon Baraka Thomas Religious Discourse in Modern Japan: Religion, State, and Shintō. By Isomae Jun’ichi. Translated by Galen Amstutz and Lynne E. Riggs. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 501 pages. Softcover $209.00. When I was a visiting research student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tokyo between 2006 and 2007, Isomae Jun’ichi’s 2003 monograph Kindai Nihon no shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu: Shūkyō, kokka, shintō was indispensable reading. In that Japanese-language predecessor of the book under review here, Isomae refreshingly traced the adventitious process whereby shūkyō came to be the default translation for the English word “religion.” He also showed how the discursive structures of the religious studies field—including the assumed naturalness of the very word “religion”—shape the research questions scholars have been inclined to ask. Isomae’s willingness to critically examine religious studies was a stimulant for the field in general, and it would be no overstatement to say that his treatment of the political effects of the “R word” provided inspiration for my own current research on religious freedom in modern Japan. The sharp critiques that follow must be read with this indebtedness and profound respect for Isomae’s pathbreaking work in mind. Although the titles are similar, the English-language edition departs in significant ways from Isomae’s 2003 work, incorporating several new sections that reflect his voluminous output in the intervening years. While its topic is of indisputable importance to those of us who professionally study “Japanese religions” (a phrase I use here out of convenience), frankly the book would have benefited from some ruthless editing, a clearer framing of the argument, and a more rigorous chronological presentation. The introduction, for example, is a literature review of the sort one expects to find in some doctoral dissertations but cannot be justified in an academic monograph. Subsequent chapters are redundant, retracing the same material several times rather than providing a cogent presentation from start to finish. Translators Galen Amstutz and Lynne E. Riggs deserve congratulations for rendering Isomae’s text with fidelity to his idiosyncratic tone. Isomae habitually writes in the passive voice or—when using more active verbs—speaks of objects or institutions as if they were agents: “Shinto succeeded in prescribing its acts of religiosity as the public [End Page 186] duty of all the people of the state regardless of what beliefs they might hold as private individuals” (p. xix). He also speaks unhesitatingly about what Japanese people felt or believed without offering any evidence to support his claims. This creates the unavoidable impression that Isomae’s rigid binary between “the West” and “the non-West” and his sharp division of Japanese history into pre- and post-“religion” are premised on a rather naïve assumption that premodern Japanese people were somehow more noble or pure for lacking the modern concept of religion. Indeed, in Isomae’s telling the concept of religion becomes a sort of polluting agent or irritant. It is the small foreign body around which modern Japanese identity, the field of religious studies, and the religion/secular distinctions of the modern Japanese state cohered. This last claim that the foreign category of religion constructed modern Japanese governance is not dissimilar to Trent Maxey’s recent argument in The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014). In contrast with Maxey’s stolid historical approach, however, Isomae advances an activist project that aims to recuperate a romanticized Japanese past while dreamily idealizing a different future for the study of religion. Isomae is on slightly firmer ground when he turns to actual historical data in part 1, “The Formation of the Concept of ‘Religion’ and Modern Academic Discourse.” Chapter 1 provides a sweeping overview of the introduction of the category “religion” to Japan and the diplomatic difficulties and domestic policy implications it engendered. Isomae sees the introduction of religion as a problem of the imposition of “Western logic” on Japan. But because he never clearly defines the “Japanese logic” against which he juxtaposes this (similarly undefined) “Western logic,” the reader...

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan by Laura Nenzi

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan by Laura Nenzi