The Meiji Restoration You Don't Know About: New Books From Japan | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations, No. 10

Only when we place the Meiji Restoration inside East Asia's situation since the West arrived, and inside the history of world civilization, can we see both its great significance and its fundamental shortcomings in full.

A year has gone by, and China's relationship with the world, society's relationship with the state, and the economy's relationship with our daily lives have all been swayed by large questions. Amid the shock, the voices of intellectuals have fallen silent or been drowned in the noise, deepening our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are all the more essential to showing us the road ahead.

So our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" sets out to introduce, as broadly as we can, books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, every book within our reach has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce it to readers in good faith.

We have also called on contributing writers to help us finish the project. They are always ahead of the curve, and their insights go deeper. Our thanks to them all.

This is the sixth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it looks at Japan's Meiji Restoration. The author, Wang Qian, is a project associate professor at the University of Tokyo's College of Arts and Sciences. His main works include 《中国が読んだ現代思想》 (How China Read Modern Western Thought), and, as co-author, 《近代日本政治思想史》 (A History of Modern Japanese Political Thought) and 《現代中国と市民社会》 (Contemporary China and Civil Society).

The Meiji Restoration stopped being a fresh topic in China long ago; Chinese interest in it goes back to before the First Sino-Japanese War. That it can still start heated arguments today obviously has to do with China's own transformation since the modern era began. Japan, whom China once regarded as its student, defeated its teacher after only two or three decades of hard reform, and it is easy even now to imagine how badly that shook the Qing court and the country at large. No wonder that soon after the war ended came modern China's first wave of students going to study in Japan. Only after defeat did many Chinese think to ask what had actually happened there, and so Huang Zunxian's A Treatise on Japan (《日本国志》), finished a full decade earlier, finally got the attention it deserved. Huang, who had served as a counselor at the Chinese legation in Japan, can be called the first person in modern China who truly understood the country. His book is an exhaustive, detailed record of the Meiji Restoration — Chinese scholars of Japan today may still not have matched the effort he put into it.

Compared With China, How Did Japan Mark the Meiji Restoration's 150th Anniversary?

A century and more has passed. How much further has our understanding of the Meiji Restoration, and of Japan as a whole, come? Further than in the days of Dai Jitao, Zhou Zuoren and Jiang Baili, certainly: since reform and opening-up, Japan has been one of China's most important sources of trade and technology. Travel between the two countries has hit record highs in recent years, and many Chinese have now seen today's Japan with their own eyes instead of relying on media reports — probably a first in Chinese history. Chinese media interest in Japan has grown a great deal too. Last year was the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, and by comparison the Chinese press seemed to discuss it more than the Japanese press did; the sheer number of articles published put Japan's own media to shame. I read no fewer than ten of them. Chinese writers on the Meiji Restoration inevitably, whether they mean to or not, compare the different roads China and Japan have taken since entering the modern era. That is understandable. The Meiji Restoration never truly finished the work of modernizing Japan, but it was still the earliest revolution toward modernity in East Asia, and in all of Asia, and it produced real results in both cultural enlightenment and the building of a rich country with a strong army.

Inside Japan things were quieter than at the Restoration's centennial, but plenty of people brought it up. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe mentioned it more than once, and senior officials called for learning from its spirit. The well-known journal Gendai Shiso put together a special issue, "The Light and Shadow of the Meiji Restoration: Questions in the 150th Year," in which a number of leading and mid-career scholars examined its gains and losses together. NHK's hugely popular year-long historical drama was Segodon, and Japanese affection for that defeated great hero shows no sign of fading. Still, next to the keen interest and commemorative enthusiasm of parts of the Chinese press and intellectual world, ordinary Japanese seem to care rather little — even though in Japan's modern history the Meiji Restoration carries symbolic weight comparable to what the French Revolution means to the French.

I read a good many articles by others, and some of them did not match the Meiji Restoration I thought I knew. A few experts even argued that Confucian doctrine, handed down from the Mito School all the way to Ito Hirobumi, laid the intellectual foundation for Japan's modernization — the more I read, the more confused I got. If Confucianism had such tremendous power, then why, in its birthplace, did Lu Xun lament how hard reform was in the China of his day? Were the May Fourth pioneers who attacked tradition simply going to extremes and prescribing the wrong medicine? The more I turned this over, the more questions piled up, so I decided to find out how Japanese scholars and journalists have actually been talking about the Meiji Restoration lately. I bought several new books and magazines, and dug out the relevant work of Shiba Ryotaro, Japan's so-called national writer, to read alongside them. Shiba was not a professional historian, but he studied Japanese history, the Meiji Restoration included, in depth and wrote a great deal about it. Some say he shaped how Japanese today see the Meiji era. NHK reissued his best-known book on the subject, This Country Called Meiji, last year — a commemoration of the 150th anniversary in its own way.

New Theory No. 1: Why the Meiji Restoration's Greatest Contributor May Have Been the Tokugawa Shogunate

I bought one of these books purely because the title amused me. Its author, Sakakibara Eisuke, once served as director-general of the Ministry of Finance's International Finance Bureau and then as Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs. He is extremely sharp — a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, a visiting professorship at Harvard, and, after leaving government, teaching posts at Keio and Waseda. I had seen him on television dissecting the economy with real bite. His title is a provocation: The Rewritten Truth of the Meiji Restoration: It Was the Tokugawa Shogunate That Created Modern Japan. It upends everything we assume. How could the Restoration's greatest contributor be the shogunate? Wasn't the shogunate always described as the obstacle to Japan's progress, the reason it had to be brought down? The text on the band around the cover is better still: "The true history of a coup carried out through terrorism and populism — stripping away the victors' interpretation and the Satcho view of history to give you the real story of the Meiji Restoration." I knew the author was not writing at a professional historian's level; I bought it to see what new readings of the Meiji Restoration are going around.

Leafing through it, I found a good deal in common with another well-known writer on modern and contemporary Japanese history: Hando Kazutoshi, husband of the great novelist Natsume Soseki's granddaughter and former editor-in-chief of both Bungeishunju and Shukan Bunshun. Hando, now well into his eighties, came up as a journalist rather than a professional historian, but his two-volume A History of the Showa Era won the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award Special Prize, no small honor in Japan, and has been printed in a cumulative 700,000 copies. The press calls it required reading on the Showa period, and Hando himself has been nicknamed "the Showa storyteller," a man who does nothing but tell the story of that era. He graduated from the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters, where Soseki once taught. He writes fluently and puts enormous effort into reading documents and interviewing the people involved, which is why his histories are so well regarded and so widely read in Japan. His Yamamoto Isoroku was made into a film a few years ago; Yamamoto's son said afterwards it was the film that came closest to his father as he really was. I have read Hando's biography of the second half of Katsu Kaishu's life, which contains his sharp insight into how modern Japan went astray. If later Japanese politicians had listened to Katsu, he argues, Japan would never have taken the road of overseas expansion that ended in defeat. He even said he wished he could "boil the grime from under Katsu Kaishu's fingernails into a soup and make the politicians and generals of the early Showa years drink it" — the Japanese way of saying one should model oneself on a worthy predecessor. Hando takes no side; he speaks from the facts and from conscience. He loves his country deeply and still sees it from the vantage point of world history, a combination that is rare.

What Was the Meiji Restoration, Really? A View From World History, written by Hando with Deguchi Haruaki, president of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, is another 2018 book I went looking for. Deguchi was a senior executive at a large insurance company, worked abroad for years, and after retiring held administrative posts at the University of Tokyo and Waseda; he has written several bestselling history books. He is said to have visited 1,200 cities around the world and read more than ten thousand books. The pairing makes for an unusual conversation. The book is not an academic work, but it struck me as genuinely perceptive, and it is the one I will mostly discuss here.

Japan has its own version of "the winner is king, the loser a bandit." The anti-shogunate camp, made up mainly of lower-ranking samurai from Choshu Domain (today's Yamaguchi Prefecture) and Satsuma Domain (today's Kagoshima Prefecture), overthrew the Edo Shogunate, set up the Meiji government and then, naturally, wrote the history from its own standpoint — a version that has shaped how later generations see the period. This is the Satcho view of history, also called the imperial-nation view. In it the shogunate is of course the root of all evil, the backward force, while Satsuma and Choshu are the loyal army of the emperor. The view has in fact been criticized for a long time. The year before last I wrote about Katsu Kaishu, a close friend of Li Hongzhang. This fascinating Japanese statesman — a senior official in the shogunate's last years and the chief decision-maker behind the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle — was consistently harsh about Satcho power-holders like Ito Hirobumi (a native of Yamaguchi). Hikawa Seiwa, his collection of pointed sayings and reflections, is full of barbs aimed at senior figures in the Meiji government.

Many Japanese writers on the Meiji Restoration and modern history have taken an anti-Satcho line in recent years, and Hando is probably the most famous of them. Ten years ago he wrote A History of the Bakumatsu Era, starting in 1853, when Commodore Perry brought the American fleet to force open Japan's closed doors, and running through to the Satsuma Rebellion — the war in which Saigo Takamori, one of the Meiji founding fathers, led his own men against the very government he had helped create — so he knows the shogunate's final years and the Restoration well. In What Was the Meiji Restoration, Really? he jokes that once the anti-Satcho view became fashionable he rather lost his appetite for discussing the Restoration further. Luckily his interlocutor, Deguchi, who knows economics and world history, was glad to go through it again from another angle, and the book came out of that. This was not a deliberate attempt to pick a fight with the orthodox account; there are deeper reasons behind it, and it is worth hearing Hando and Deguchi explain them.

Japan's opening to the outside world was not what we usually imagine, and it did not begin with the Meiji government. As the two men tell it, after Perry's fleet landed and threatened Japan, the shogunate's most powerful figure, Chief Senior Councilor Abe Masahiro (1819–1857) — a post roughly equivalent to today's prime minister — had already made up his mind to open the country, which is to say, to begin Japan's own reform and opening-up. Abe oversaw the signing of the Japan-US Treaty of Amity. He appointed reform-minded officials such as Katsu Kaishu, set up new institutions including the Institute for Military Studies, the Nagasaki Naval Training Center and the Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books (forerunner of the University of Tokyo), and began carrying out policies of opening the country, enriching it and strengthening its army. Yet the banner raised by the Satsuma and Choshu samurai who called for bringing down the shogunate, and who later founded the new Meiji government, was "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians" — drive the foreigners out. It sounds back to front, thoroughly baffling.

So how did it come to that? It has to do, of course, with the relationship between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the regional lords. The shogunate is said to have treated Satsuma and Choshu coldly, and there was friction between the emperor and the shogunate as well. Hando says most of those who fought to bring the shogunate down were descendants of the side Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated at the Battle of Sekigahara — which, if true, makes it a revenge revolution more than two centuries in the making. That is holding a grudge. There is also a view in Japanese academic circles that even without the Meiji Restoration the reformers inside the Edo Shogunate could have led Japan onto the road of opening up, perhaps done it better, and perhaps spared Japan its defeat in the Second World War. Tsuda Sokichi, the great twentieth-century Japanese historian, is said to have held this view, and scholars critical of the Restoration have recently revived it. But history cannot be run as a hypothetical; we can only look back at what actually happened. What makes history interesting is exactly that different narrators, standing in different places and looking from different angles, produce completely different accounts. Even so, I believe the truth can still be roughly grasped. Let us see how these two carry on.

Turning to the reforms of the shogunate's last years, Hando brings up the role of his favorite Japanese statesman, Katsu Kaishu.

Katsu, he says, was the first Japanese in those years to have a sense of being Japanese. What does that mean? At the time every Japanese belonged to some domain, or owed loyalty to the shogunate; no one had a sense of national identity. Katsu, you could say, was the first — an idea he may have formed through his dealings with the Dutch, whose language he spoke. When a cornered Tokugawa Yoshinobu handed him full authority over the defense of Edo Castle, Katsu laid out his defenses to build bargaining leverage while negotiating with Saigo Takamori, commander of the anti-shogunate forces, whom he admired greatly. In the end, so that Japanese would not fight Japanese, he decided to hand the castle over peacefully. For this Fukuzawa Yukichi, modern Japan's foremost enlightenment thinker, wrote an essay attacking him: Katsu's failure to stay loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate meant he was no true samurai. In Fukuzawa's view Katsu should have fought it out first and sued for peace only when he could hold out no longer. Fukuzawa wrote that essay well into the Meiji era; what the old man was thinking is hard to say.

But the fact is that Katsu's grasp of the larger picture made the Meiji Restoration — modern Japan's most important transformation and revolution — go far more smoothly. According to Mitani Hiroshi, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and today's foremost historian of the Restoration, it was the revolution with the fewest deaths in the modern world. Katsu's decision spared Edo, by then a city of more than a million people, from slaughter. His counterpart Saigo Takamori was a man of large spirit too: he accepted Katsu's proposals to treat the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, generously and to deal leniently with shogunate personnel, and together the two made an enormous contribution to Japan's shift from the shogunate system to the new Meiji order. Katsu was grateful to Saigo for it. Even after Saigo later took up arms against the new government — officially, a rebellion — Katsu in his old age pleaded Saigo's case directly with the Meiji Emperor and had a bronze statue of him put up in Ueno Park, fulfilling a long-held wish.

Hando and Deguchi both hold that Abe Masahiro and Katsu Kaishu made enormous contributions during the great change from the shogunate's last years to the Restoration: most of the policies the new Meiji government carried out had in fact already been conceived and drafted by Abe, and Katsu pulled Japan back from the brink of civil war at the decisive moment. Several senior shogunate officials at the time were urging Yoshinobu to fight to the end. Rereading Shiba Ryotaro's This Country Called Meiji for this piece, I found Shiba holds a similar view: the Restoration's greatest contributors, he says, were Tokugawa Yoshinobu and Katsu Kaishu.

New Theory No. 2: Why Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo Sowed the Seeds of Japan's Later Troubles

Anti-Satcho as he is, Hando still speaks according to the historical record and does not dismiss the Meiji founders wholesale. Those Restoration idealists and founding statesmen did a great deal for Japanese society's shift to modernity: abolishing the domains and establishing prefectures, abolishing samurai status and the rest were all accomplished in a very short time and, astonishingly, met little strong resistance — a genuinely striking efficiency. Remember that the force driving the Meiji Restoration was the samurai class itself, mainly lower-ranking samurai from Choshu and Satsuma; and once the revolution had run its course, that class, the revolution's own agent, disappeared. As cases in world history go, this one is unusual.

Hando and Deguchi both affirm the contributions of the "Three Great Nobles of the Meiji Restoration" — Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi and Saigo Takamori — and think especially highly of Okubo. He was an extremely capable statesman, and because he pushed reform so hard he was ambushed and assassinated in Tokyo by disgruntled samurai not long after the new government began work. In their eyes Okubo was a rare thing in Japanese history: a strategic thinker who could draw the grand blueprint and also get things done on the ground, full of tactical acumen. In Hikawa Seiwa, the elderly Katsu Kaishu also rates the three nobles highly, and regrets that several statesmen of his own generation died so young, to the country's cost. Hando, a Katsu admirer, feels the same. Had statesmen like Okubo stayed at the helm, he believes, Japan might never have taken the road to militarism. Their successors Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo, he thinks, were several orders below Okubo in both weight and ability, and they planted the seed of Japan's later troubles: the right of supreme command. Shiba Ryotaro raises this in his own books too, and sees it as a seed planted in the Meiji era that in time produced the military's unchecked freedom of action. Shiba returns again and again to the first twenty years of the Showa era — in his words, it was as if the whole country were under a spell, walking one road straight into the dark.

To Hando, the man who set Japan on its later course as a military state was Saigo Takamori's successor, Yamagata Aritomo. It was in his hands that a new term, "the right of supreme command," was coined for the convenience of military command: the armed forces answered directly to the emperor as generalissimo, and their leaders held the "right of direct petition," which let them report to the emperor and seek his instructions over the cabinet's head. The practice is said to have been borrowed from Germany. In the Meiji era the problem was not yet severe, since the comrades who had made the Restoration together could still coordinate among themselves; by the early Showa years, with most of the founding elder statesmen dead, it became a serious one. The right of supreme command decoupled the military from the executive branch: the prime minister, head of the executive government, could not command the armed forces, the military acquired enormous freedom of action, and the emperor could hardly be expected to look into every military matter himself.

Hando gives an example of civilian control over the military already faltering in the Meiji era. After Ito Hirobumi, who had served as prime minister, was appointed Resident-General of Korea, he asked the military, as a precaution, for command over the troops stationed there. Yamagata Aritomo, the most powerful man in the military, refused, and the two had a furious row. Ito finally appealed to the Meiji Emperor, who summoned Yamagata and told him: you are both disciples of Yoshida Shoin, so agree to it. Only then did Ito Hirobumi — a former prime minister and one of the most senior of the Meiji founders — gain command over the Japanese troops on the Korean peninsula.

Yoshida Shoin, mentioned here, is treated as the intellectual pillar of the Meiji Restoration because so many of the talented men who took part in overthrowing the shogunate and building the new order — Takasugi Shinsaku, Ito Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo and others — came out of his school. To Hando this is a myth manufactured by Ito, Yamagata and men like them. Because leaders of the movement such as Okubo Toshimichi died so early, he says, their successors Ito and Yamagata felt their own authority was thin, so they set up their teacher as the driving force behind the Restoration and thereby gave themselves legitimacy by association. Hando believes Yoshida Shoin was nowhere near as great as legend has it, and was in fact a dangerous man, since his thinking contained ideas about overseas expansion — and from the Meiji era right through to the Second World War Japan seems to have made many of its decisions along the lines of his expansionist blueprint.

In Continuing to Talk About the Shape of This Country, his own book from last year, Hando mentions a detail about Yamagata: at an imperial conference the Meiji Emperor, feeling unwell, dozed off, and Yamagata Aritomo struck the floor hard with his military saber to wake him. Perhaps, Hando says, in the eyes of a soldier like Yamagata the emperor's authority was something they had granted him, so they never really held him in awe. That may explain why, once the Showa era arrived, the military dared to act on its own and even kept major matters from the emperor rather than reporting them. As the interpretation of the right of supreme command expanded without limit and the military's interests kept expanding of their own accord, the situation finally ran out of control.

Hando also went through a set of figures with Deguchi: the birthplaces of Japan's senior army and navy officers after the Meiji Restoration. The table shows the overwhelming majority were born in Choshu and Satsuma, a pattern that held all the way to the Second World War. Hando, who knows the war well, listed the birthplaces of Japan's military leadership during it — the same as in the Meiji era, the vast majority again from Choshu and Satsuma. Deguchi said Yamamoto Isoroku was the one exception; Hando, who had written Yamamoto's biography, had the details at his fingertips: a man from Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture, of "rebel army" stock, and precisely the man who opposed war with the United States — though he was not then in the military's central command. Hando also wrote Japan's Longest Day, likewise made into a film, which tells how Emperor Showa and the prime minister of the day, Suzuki Kantaro, persuaded senior figures, the military's top brass included, to accept the Potsdam Declaration and decide on unconditional surrender. Suzuki, Hando notes, also came of "rebel army" stock. In a sense, then, it was soldiers and politicians born in Choshu and Satsuma who led the country to ruin through the Second World War, and Suzuki Kantaro, from the rebel side, who came out at the end to clear up the mess — history can even be explained by birthplace, which is fascinating. In fact many of the domains that had stood with the shogunate against Choshu and Satsuma did not even keep their own local names after the Meiji era, and their prefectural seats were moved elsewhere; these were acts of retaliation. No wonder that in commemorating the same Meiji Restoration, different places feel differently about it.

New Theory No. 3: Why America's Black Ships Really Brought an Energy Revolution — and What's Wrong With It Now

Japanese historians naturally pay attention to the Meiji Restoration, as that issue of Gendai Shiso showed. Scholars writing in it noted that recent research has moved from the older national narrative toward local narratives, and has taken on a perspective that reflects critically on modernity itself. Beyond general overviews there is work in political history, the history of foreign relations, gender studies and individual lives. Some scholars have even brought a people's-history perspective into the field, which shows how the research is diversifying.

I only began reading another of the books when this piece was half written: 150 Years of Modern Japan: The Breakdown of the Total-War Regime of Science and Technology, by Yamamoto Yoshitaka, a scholar with an unusual background. Now nearly eighty, he studied in the doctoral program of the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Science and led the university's student movement in 1968. He never entered academia afterwards, becoming a physics teacher at a cram school instead. Alongside teaching he kept up his own research and became a historian of science, publishing several books in the field, most with well-known houses. He has also translated several works by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whom I admire as well, among them The Problem of Knowledge and Substance and Function. This new title in the Iwanami Shinsho series was not written to mark the Meiji Restoration, but the questions it raises seem to me important, so let me introduce them briefly.

As a historian of science, Yamamoto looks at modern and contemporary Japan through the lens of an energy revolution. What Commodore Perry's black ships — US Navy warships — brought, he argues, was an energy revolution, and from that point Japan embarked on a state-led campaign involving the whole population, with the promotion of science and technology as its instrument: "promoting industry," "enriching the nation and strengthening the military," "building an advanced national defense state," "economic growth," "international competition." There is a prewar and a postwar, he says, but the basic pattern has not changed. In the Meiji years the West happened to be going through its Second Industrial Revolution, led by heavy and chemical industry; Japan caught up fast, learning Western science and technology with total dedication, at remarkable speed and efficiency — while paying far less attention to Western political and social thought, to ideas of liberal democracy and human rights. After the war Japan acquired a pacifist constitution, but in this historian of science's view the basic mindset never fundamentally changed: pursue an energy revolution and scientific and technological progress to drive economic growth, with a strain of great-power consciousness and nationalism running through it.

Japan now faces a shrinking population, a phenomenon new since the Meiji Restoration. The Fukushima nuclear accident, meanwhile, stands for the limits of science and technology. Together the two suggest Japan needs to think hard about the development model it has followed for the past 150 years. Close to this science historian's reflective position is The Truth Behind the Praise of Meiji, by the journalist Saito Takao, also from Iwanami Shoten. It criticizes the Abe government's praise of the Meiji Restoration as an effort to advance a twenty-first-century version of "promoting industry" and "enriching the nation and strengthening the military" — one more voice among many.

The year before last I wrote a review of Raymond Aron's Dimensions of Historical Consciousness, in which Aron also discusses Japan's modernization. Japan's industrialization resembled Germany's in many ways, he writes, but bourgeois ideas and liberal institutions did not grow alongside it. Japan inserted Western technological civilization into a hierarchical social order and kept its top-down power structure, with power in the hands of elites drawn from the samurai class. That passage describes Japan in the Meiji Restoration exactly. Aron visited Japan after the Second World War, and writes in his memoirs that he met Japanese philosophers who could discuss Hegel with him in fluent German without the slightest difficulty, and Japanese professors of French literature whose French was fluent too; both left a deep impression on him.

On the Whole: Looking Back at the Meiji Restoration 150 Years On, What Did Japan Get Right, and Where Did It Fall Short?

The Meiji Restoration had, it must be said, an extremely successful side; otherwise Huang Zunxian would never have written a whole book about it to introduce China to the upheaval in Japan. In two or three decades Japan defeated the Qing dynasty and then Tsarist Russia, and after that hard-won victory over Russia in particular it joined the club of Western powers, a huge shock to Asians everywhere, Sun Yat-sen included. In enriching the nation, strengthening the military and cultural enlightenment, Japan did achieve a great deal at the time — startling and inspiring many non-Western countries, and winning new respect from the Western powers that had once imposed unequal treaties on it. Through the hard work of Japanese statesmen such as Mutsu Munemitsu, who had taken part in the negotiations with Li Hongzhang, every power had revised its unequal treaty with Japan by the thirtieth year of Meiji, and Japan finally washed away that diplomatic humiliation.

Both Shiba Ryotaro and Hando Kazutoshi see the Meiji-era rule on the right of supreme command, mentioned earlier, as one root of the later disaster, since as the policy of enriching the nation and strengthening the military advanced, the armed forces weighed ever more heavily in Japanese politics. In principle the armed forces belonged to His Majesty the Emperor as generalissimo and swore loyalty to him, so command should have been unified. In fact the emperor never managed the military directly; that fell first to the General Staff, and was later split between the Army General Staff and the Naval General Staff. This gray zone in the chain of command was exactly what caused the trouble. Research on Japanese military history has shown that navy and army frequently blocked each other during the Second World War: on grand strategy — south or north — and on unified command in particular operations, the two services often simply could not be brought together. That failure to integrate power can hardly be said to have nothing to do with the rules laid down in the Meiji era. Maruyama Masao, postwar Japan's most famous political thinker, once called the emperor system built after Meiji a "system of no responsibility." Trace it to its source and you arrive, again, at the Meiji era.

Summing up the lessons of the Meiji Restoration at the end, Hando and Deguchi both say the greatest lesson of these 150 years, from Meiji to today, is that a country must not seal itself off and must not block the flow of information, because a country that does cannot understand the state of the world and cannot survive in international society. Hando gives an example: after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and could no longer exchange officers with Britain and the United States, the navy sent men to study in Germany. Once there the Japanese naval officers found little worth learning, and quite a few fell into German honey traps, coming home as self-styled members of the "Germany faction."

As foreigners looking at the Meiji Restoration we have no need to praise it extravagantly; what matters is to understand it coolly and objectively. That Japan's samurai class could make so momentous a decision in that era — having watched China lose the Opium War, which shook the Japanese court and society profoundly — to open the country and import Western civilization in earnest, is genuinely worth commending; it took far more nerve and resolve than the scholar-official class of contemporary China ever showed. Fukuzawa Yukichi's An Outline of a Theory of Civilization had much to criticize in China, and on a good many points it hit the mark.

The limits of that era, as the Meiji Restoration reflects them, are a fact too. With the country in danger, Japan mainly imported Western science and technology; some crucial forms of soft power it never imported at all. At the end of the twentieth century Kyoto University Press began publishing a series of Western classics, and in the foreword a Japanese classicist wrote that more than a hundred years had passed since the Meiji Restoration before Japan finally reached this point. Fukuzawa Yukichi said long ago that the material side of Western civilization was relatively easy to absorb and the true spiritual side very hard; unhappily, he was proved right. Soon after the Second World War ended, the great novelist Shiga Naoya published an essay in the magazine Kaizo arguing that Japanese was an imperfect language that had held back the development of Japanese culture, and proposing that Japan adopt French, the finest language in the world, instead. What a bitter proposal, from a great writer who had made his living by his mother tongue all his life. I suspect this Meiji-born novelist said such a thing about the language he had always used because he believed the Restoration's incompleteness had led to the Second World War, and that the whole of Japanese culture needed to be remade from the ground up.

Miyazaki Ichisada and Yoshikawa Kojiro both said that Japan could turn around quickly, where China then could not, because China was simply too large: Japan was a small boat and easy to turn. Both spent their lives studying Chinese culture, wrote abundantly, understood the history and culture of both countries deeply and had a genuinely global view. Their judgment made a deep impression on me. As for the questions the Meiji Restoration leaves later generations to think about, they include problems common to all of East Asia and ailments brought by modernity itself; there is plenty here worth deep reflection. Only when we place the Meiji Restoration inside East Asia's situation since the West arrived, and inside the history of world civilization, can we see both its great significance and its fundamental shortcomings in full.

Cover image: a still from the Japanese television drama Segodon. Source: Douban.