Questions on the Reading

Week 11

Introduction to "Reform in Nineteenth-Century Japan."

At the close of the 19th century, Japan was a country very different from only a hundred years before. Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) had been a country in self-imposed isolation, with only limited contact to the world outside it. By the end of the 19th century, Japan was a highly centralized state with nationally appointed governors and mayors, a national police system, and a uniform school system with nationally prescribed texts. The class system of the Tokugawa had been replaced by a national citizenry. And the Confucian condemnation of mercentilism embodied in the Tokugawa class system was replaced by an energetic and nationally supported culture of capitalism.

The wholesale creation of Japan as a modern nation-state through military, legislative, and economic efforts was accompanied by another kind of creative enterprise: the construction of a modern national identity. In the Meiji period (1868-1912), Europe and the United States, rather than China and Korea, were seen as providing the models appropriate for a modern Japanese civilization, or at least as adding a new vocabulary to the terms of this debate. But there was a central ambivalence in the Meiji appropriation of modern Western institutions. For while the Restoration was a radical program of political and social modernization, it was presented as a return to a pre-historical state of affairs. It was an attempt to re-create Japan as a modern nation-state according to international (Western) standards while at the same time "restoring" Japan to the purity of its imperial origins.

1. What do the Nativists (Kada Azumamaro, Kamo Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane) identify as Japan's essence and where is it to be found? How do they attempt to distinguish Japan from China? How would you distinguish the concerns of the Mito School from those of the Nativists? How do they conceive of "the West"?

2. Compare the Charter Oath (p. 137) to the Imperial Rescript on Education (pp. 139-140). In what sense do they both represent the political priorities of the Meiji state? How would you reconcile their apparent differences?