Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hi folks, welcome to the show. We're going back to 1868 and how Japan embarked on one of the most dramatic transformations in world history.
After centuries of isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate, a group of young samurai, basically some reformist nobles, restored imperial rule, kind of, and launched the country into a bold new era, the Meiji Restoration. They were determined to avoid the fate of all the other colonized nations around the world. And these new Japanese leaders pursued rapid modernization.
They reformed education, the tax system, they built railways, they built battleships and a national army. In just 50 years, Japan became an industrialized empire and a rising global power. They even defeated a major European empire. Joining us to unpack this really extraordinary story is the cultural historian Chris Harding. He is an expert in all things Japan, India and East-West connections.
Chris, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Tell me about the Tokugawa Shogunate, because it's such a remarkable period in Japanese history. Perhaps the cliché is that Japan is isolated, it's seen as a bit of a golden age day of Japanese identity. It's peace, whereas much of the rest of the world was enduring utter chaos and subversion. What was the reality?
I think that's actually quite fair.
It's this remarkable period, two and a half centuries, so 1600 to middle of the 19th century, of more or less complete peace in Japan, under the control, as you say, of a Tokugawa shogunate based in Edo, now Tokyo. And I think people in Japan remember it as a real flourishing of the arts, of culture, all sorts of things that a country can do when it's not at war with itself or its neighbours.
It's weird, isn't it? And stability, because that period is a time of transformation on every other continent. I mean, political upheaval, industrial revolution, political revolution, some of the big, well, the biggest wars in history to that point. And there's Japan just sailing along.
I think Japan is quite lucky, actually, in retrospect. If you think about countries that start to be of interest to Europe, like India and then later China, Japan is known about, but it's not thought to have very much that you might want as a European, as a trader or a potential coloniser. So it kind of gets left alone.
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Chapter 2: What significant changes occurred during the Meiji Restoration in Japan?
It's got its own policy of seclusion that you mentioned, but also the Europeans aren't yet coming knocking. So Japan has a fairly relaxed time of it.
But there's a little bit of trade, isn't there? But I get what the Europeans also sniff out. A, there's no great sort of mineral, natural wealth, but also no weakness that they can slide in and exploit, right? Is that part of it?
I think that's it. Yeah, the only Europeans in Japan in this whole period, so the whole of the 17th century, whole of the 18th and the first half of the 19th, are the Dutch. So their pitch to the Japanese basically is we are businessmen, we're not going to get involved in your politics, we're not going to try to convert you to Christianity.
And they basically live on a tiny island called Dejima, an artificial island, one street or two streets, that's it, plus their little warehouses just off the coast of Nagasaki. joined by a tiny bridge, guarded all the time by samurai so they can't cause any trouble.
And it's funny, there are these lovely drawings actually of the Dutch on Dejima that seem to show how incurious they were about Japan. They're there on the verge of being able to know this extraordinary culture and they're playing tennis with each other and they're playing billiards. You know, they're just not interested.
And it kind of goes both ways if you have a sense of the Japanese also being maybe a little bit incurious. I don't want to generalise, but... The Dutch were asked now and again to produce these volumes, kind of like a report on international affairs, that they would put together, take to Edo, present to the Shogun. These were found by historians a while back and they were in mint condition.
And at first historians were saying, wow, they must have been treated with such reverence. Brilliant. It turns out they weren't read.
Stick them in the archive.
They're just not well-thumbed because people weren't interested. So it's a funny old period. It made sense for the Japanese to do this, to insulate themselves from particularly European interference. But all the action that you've just talked about, the Japanese had only the tiniest idea of that French Revolution, American Revolution.
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Chapter 3: How did Japan's isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate influence its modernization?
You've got the United States building up, spreading itself towards the Pacific. So California becomes the 31st state in 1850. So there's a sense in which Japan really can't hide anymore. People are interested. And then, of course, you've got the British and others in China.
Right, of course, along the coast, places like Hong Kong, but many more ports along the coast, right?
Yeah, exactly. China is having obviously a terrible time at the beginning of its century of humiliation, as they now call it. So Japan, yeah, there's nowhere to hide anymore. People are becoming really interested in Japan, almost not so much for what Japan has, but a sense of, well, as a big colonial power, if we don't claim it, someone else is going to claim it.
And so the first really to have any success with knocking on the door, as it were, of Japan are the Americans. 1853, by this point, so California is there as part of the US. You can now get from California to Japan across the Pacific on a steamship in about 18 days. So for the Americans, it's their doorstep, right? That's how they think about Japan, I think, at this point.
Yeah. And that's the world turned upside down. I mean, that's just unimaginable, right? Through Japan's thousands of years of history, the idea that people come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, vast distances, and yet here they are in 18 days. That's crazy.
And that Japan can be thought about as their backyard. That's what technology has made possible, much to the detriment of Japan, I think. So the Americans actually send some of these extraordinary steamships. In the summer of 1853, they arrive off Japan under the command of this guy called Commodore Matthew C. Perry. And the Japanese are...
Maybe terrified is putting it a bit strongly, but they'd never seen that kind of technology before. These huge, great black ships spewing smoke out of their funnels. And Commodore Matthew C. Perry comes ashore. And he's an interesting guy.
His mission, basically, from his president, Millard Fillmore, is to persuade the Japanese to at least say that if American sailors and whaling vessels, whatever it might be, end up shipwrecked in Japan, they'll be taken care of. if they need to take on fuel, if they need to take on food, whatever it might be, that they'll be given that.
Because Japan's policy at this point is, if you see a foreign ship, turn it away. Fire on it if you have to. That's how strong their policy is. So the Americans at least want that. And Commodore Matthew C. Perry does a bit of homework on the Japanese, including in New York City Public Library.
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Chapter 4: What role did the Dutch play in Japan's early foreign relations?
So it's sad. And I think ordinary Japanese townspeople have quite a low view of them by this point. They see them as... People who tell big stories about samurai derring-do, but they'd be useless in a real battle because they've never fought one. They just go shopping. They write bad poetry. They visit geisha. They're not really contributing anything.
And yet ordinary people are paying their stipends. So I think there's an awful lot of anger there amongst ordinary people and also amongst young samurai. So these young samurai, by the time Matthew Perry arrives, and in the few months after he goes and the shogun is trying to work out what to do, they see the shogun at dithering.
And if you think the word shogun comes from a longer word, which means, what does it mean? It means barbarian crushing generalissimo. So it's a case of you had one job.
If you're not being an absolute legend crushing barbarians.
Exactly. And so the Americans, they seem to, not only do they dither, they then seek the opinion of other feudal lords around Japan. And again, if you're trying to promote yourselves as being the sort of wise strategists whose job it is to look after Japan's security, to kind of seek advice, to farm out what you might do next. Again, it makes you look stupid. Smells like weakness. It does.
And so Japan, what happens really is in the course of the next few years, really from 1853 into the early 1860s, Japan steadily moves into more and more chaos with especially younger samurai who think that not only are the shogunate getting things wrong, but also that their own senior samurai in their own domains are... Grandad. Grandad is too old. He doesn't want to have a fight. He's got...
Nothing left in the tank. Do you see what I mean? So a lot of these samurai will leave their domains, go to Kyoto, and some of them, especially in the west of Japan, what they want to do is take hold of the emperor as a kind of figurehead. The emperor, by the time we get to the mid-1860s, he's only a teenager.
We'll get him as our man, as our figurehead, and we will launch a war against the Topogawa as the only way of properly responding to the foreigners.
So after 250 years of peace, we're back into that more ancient Japanese tradition, which is grab the emperor and then topple warlordism, get rid of that guy and run Japan in his place. Absolutely, yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did the arrival of Commodore Perry impact Japan's national policy?
It remains one of the very, very few places outside Europe to retain its own indigenous... I guess to have some agency in its future. Nearly everywhere else is conquered. And indeed, Japan will go on to... conquer, and even eventually take on and defeat Europeans. So in hard power terms, it's a success.
I think it really is. It's hard to argue. Decade by decade across quite a long Meiji period. So the Meiji Emperor passes away in 1912. And by the time of his death, Japan is a world power. By far and away the greatest power in Asia. I think the way Japan's leaders think about Japan quite early on, actually, just in the early part of this period, really in the early 1870s, is...
they have a sense of Asia as being partly overrun by white Western power. And they see it in quite racialized terms. And they say what Japan's job is, the first Asian country to modernize, we will build ourselves up and we will gather together a community of Asian nations. They talk about this as quote unquote pan-Asianism. Gather them together and we will lead them to steadily push back.
Because their vision, I suppose, of Japanese history going back centuries is you've got Indian culture in the form of things like Buddhism made its way through China and Korea into Japan. Lots of Chinese culture has been at the roots of building up Japan, as has Korea. But now all those countries, India, China, Korea, are having a bad time of it, right, at the hands of Western colonialism.
Korea is in a sort of a confused state. if we as Japan can be the leader of these nations, the place where all the best bits of their culture are gathered together and then combined with Western technology, we'll be unstoppable and we will raise Asia up. And I think people genuinely believe that in Japan. in the 1870s, early 1880s.
The trouble with it is that that becomes a very strong ideological basis for kind of doing whatever you want militarily in Asia. And so Japan has a victory over China, 1894 to 5, which is a big shock.
We need to fight the Chinese in order to liberate them. Yeah, exactly.
So they do that with China, a little bit inconclusive, I think. The big thing for Japan, though, I think, is the takeover of Korea, the colonisation of Korea, completed in 1910, really on the basis that we will modernise Korea. We will give them railways. We'll give them banks.
So part of our sharing all the wonderful things we've learned is now, unfortunately, we're going to have to invade you and occupy you in order to make you see these benefits.
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