The dizzying pace of change in Japan of the Meiji era provoked varied reactions. For some, change offered liberation and personal opportunity. For some, it offered a chance to achieve collective, national glory. For others (or for these same people at other times), change meant danger, decadence, and loss of moral virtue. Such fears broke to the surface in at least three arenas of discussion and policy: fear of political disorder, fear of gender disorder, and cultural concern to answer the question, Who are “we Japanese”?
Fear among government leaders that a restless populace might challenge their political control led to the decision for a conservative constitution modeled on Prussian lines. It sparked the push for military drills in the schools. It inspired the call for a spirit of sacrifice for the state in the Imperial Rescript on Education. Fear of gender anarchy amidst a headlong rush to modernity had surfaced early in the decision to ban women from adopting short hairstyles in 1872. It emerged again when the gov
ernment sharply restricted women’s political activity in 1890.
The third great fear in the face of the changes of the Meiji era was present before Perry’s ships appeared. It was crystallized in the phrase, “Expel the barbarians.” This was the notion that outsiders from across the seas would poison the souls of Japanese people, convert them perhaps to Christianity, and demolish their true identity. In the early Meiji years, these fears were submerged for the most part. Government leaders and many others joined a rush to modernize. The dominant view through the 1870s and early 1880s was that the essence of being a Japanese patriot was to embrace change. Loyal Japanese were told to help build the army and the state along Western lines.
But lurking behind such reforming projects—and breaking to the surface in oc
casional rebellions—was a logic that differentiated people in Japan from those else
where. It lead to the question: To what ultimate end are we making these changes?
As we build railroads and adopt a European-style constitution, do we have a unique identity as Japanese people? If so, what is it?
Many people raised such questions, especially from the mid-1880s onward. Some
of the most pointed and thoughtful early questioners included a group of young men who in 1888 formed the Society for Political Education (Seikyo¯sha) and began to publish a magazine called The Japanese. These writers feared that as the nation fol
lowed a path toward so-called civilization, it might “forfeit our national character and destroy all elements of Japanese society.” As one wrote: “What is today’s Japan? The old Japan has already collapsed, but the new Japan has not yet risen. What religion do we believe in? What moral and political principles do we favor? It is as if we are wandering in confusion through a deep fog, unable to find our way.”15
Fears of political disorder, gender anarchy, and the loss of a cultural soul resolved themselves to some degree, although never definitively, around the turn of the century.
By this time a sort of political, social, and cultural orthodoxy was articulated widely by political leaders such as Ito¯ Hirobumi and by major journalists and scholars as well.
First and foremost, these anxieties were met by a turn toward the emperor as a political and cultural anchor. The Meiji oligarchs unambiguously anchored the political order in the emperor, who invoked “the supreme power We inherit from Our Imperial Ancestors” to promulgate an “immutable fundamental law” in the form of the constitution.
The symbolic management of the imperial institution was a risky project. On one hand, the oligarchs desperately wanted to keep the emperor above politics so that their opponents could not do as they had done in the 1860s, and turn the emperor against the government. Simultaneously, they were committed to using his image and words to ensure political order, as in the Imperial Rescript on Education. And just as some in the government had feared, a small incident within months of the rescript’s prom
ulgation sparked a huge controversy. In January 1891, an “installment ceremony” for an imperially autographed copy of the rescript took place at the First Higher School in Tokyo. The principal asked all present to bow to the imperial signature. But Uchi
mura Kanzo¯, a Christian and an English teacher at the school, aware that the consti
tution guaranteed “freedom of conscience” to all subjects, refused to do so. He be
lieved that such a bow amounted to “idol worship” and violated his faith.
Within a few days, a huge storm of protest at this act of disloyalty erupted in the press. Uchimura soon repudiated his action and repeatedly made public bows to the rescript on other occasions. But the outcry eventually forced Uchimura to resign his position. The incident prompted some of the nation’s most prominent philosphers and educators to defend the forced bow to the rescript as a constitutional act. They argued that the moral essence of both documents was a public one. Obedience to the state and emperor, that is, was presented as the highest secular obligation, one that tran
scended private ethics or religious belief.
Parallel to its efforts to elevate and reinforce ultimate imperial authority, the state dealt with fears of gender anarchy and its desire for loyal subjects of both sexes by articulating an important new concept aimed at women. This was the ideal of the
“good wife and wise mother.” A member of the Meiji Six Society, Nakamura Masanao, first put forward this slogan. It had restrictive implications of course. A woman’s vocation was to be that of nurturer. Her role was to be centered on the home. Women were barred from politics, from inheritance, and from any independent legal standing in civil law.
But the idea that the primary duty of women was to serve in the twin roles of good wife and wise mother was not purely reactionary or restrictive. In some ways it was an innovative effort to change the role of women in a new era. In Tokugawa Japan, women, especially samurai women, had been seen as relatively unteachable and not much in need of formal education. They were not given any public role of importance. In the Meiji formulation, wise women needed schooling. To raise children well in a new era, the mother had to be literate. She had to know something of the world beyond the home. If her sons were to serve the state in the military, the home had to play a quasipublic role as incubator of these soldiers. The notion of “good wife, wise mother” that Meiji government officials began to promote aggressively around the turn of the century was new in that women were to be educated. It was also new in that women’s work at home, and also in the factory, was valued as a form of service to the state.
The imperial institution took part in this project to prescribe new roles for women and for men. The emperor gave the signal that men could wear Western haircuts by adopting that style himself. The empress mixed old and new styles of personal groom
ing. On one hand, her traditional hairstyle signaled to women that they should keep their hair long and braided up. On the other hand, her Westernized facial appearance encouraged women to stop shaving their eyebrows or blackening their teeth. Both raised hair and blackened teeth had been marks of beauty in the elite culture of the Tokugawa era and before, but the latter practice was changed with support from the throne in the face of Western examples and criticisms.
Beyond politics and gender, people such as Okakura, Fenellosa, and the writers in the magazine The Japanese at the turn of the century began to define “Japanese culture” as the essence of their identity. Like the ideology of “good wife, wise mother,”
this was not a purely reactionary turn. The men in the Society for Political Education agreed that Japan’s government should build national economic and military strength by using Western technology. But they also developed an idea of particular “Japanese”
values that should be cultivated in the process. Perhaps the most powerful value was said to be a unique conception of beauty, an aesthetic sense rooted in art and the natural environment. A special aesthetic and moral sense could serve as a cultural anchor in a time of great change. Such concern to defend “Japanese-ness” reinforced stereotypes of feminine virtue as well, for Japan’s traditional culture was defined by such writers in feminine terms centered on beauty and grace. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, this desire to define a Japanese essence has been a near constant concern, at times an obsession, of Japanese intellectual and cultural life.
Official orthodoxy was neither perfectly secure nor unchallenged. Despite the promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education with its stress on loyalty, and its oppressive interpretations and uses, dissenters did emerge in the following decades.
They ranged from feminists to socialists and communists. They would challenge the orthodoxy of imperial supremacy and win thousands of adherents. But it is certain that the political and cultural reactions of late Meiji restrained these trends. They defined and limited the cultural as well as social and political terms of debate, as people sought to make sense of the continuous changes that were now part of Japan’s modern condition.
The Meiji changes remain among the most controversial topics in Japanese his
tory. In 1968, the Meiji centennial set off a ferocious debate on whether one should celebrate anything at all. The shadow of World War II defined this debate, and to some extent it still does. Critics argued that an authoritarian, emperor-centered Meiji system of politics and culture combined with an economic order that impoverished the peasantry and limited the domestic market to pave the road to a disastrous war fifty years later. Since the 1960s, a more positive view of the Meiji era has become widespread in Japan and abroad. This narrative of progress stresses that in 1889 Japan became the first non-Western nation to adopt a constitutional political system, while at roughly the same time it became the first non-Western industrial, capitalist economy.
These were indeed impressive political and economic achievements. After all, much of the non-Western world at this time was subjected to increasing economic and po
litical subordination under the expanding hegemony of Euro-American nation-states.
Some of the “advanced” Western nations were no less authoritarian than the new Meiji system. But like all modern revolutions, the changes of the Meiji era left a complex legacy of progress and pain.
8
Empire and Domestic Order
The Meiji revolution transformed the domestic space of Japan. Railroads linked the countryside in newly intimate fashion to ports and urban centers such as Tokyo, Yo
kohama, Osaka, and Kobe. The Meiji revolution also transformed the relationship between Japan and the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan had shifted from a relatively marginal position to a dominant place in Asia. It was seeking control over Korea and had won colonial control over Taiwan. It gained formal equality with the Western powers by revising the unequal treaties, and it established a strategic position as junior partner to the British. It both absorbed and exported products and people, importing grain from Korea, selling textiles to China, and both sending and receiving men and women to and from Asia and the Americas as laborers and students.
People in Japan were making themselves an integral part of a broader East Asian and global system.
Just as Japan’s domestic transformation had global causes and consequences, its drive for empire had domestic roots and ramifications. The nation-building projects described in the previous chapters inspired a new patriotism among masses of Japanese people. This bolstered the assertive external agenda of the government. Nation- building projects also sparked calls for participation and reform, which struck the same rulers as threatening or even subversive. They responded with programs to shore up the domestic social and political order. They also made empire a potent symbol of the identity and unity of the Japanese people.1 In these ways, imperialism reflected and also contributed to a changed relationship of Japanese subjects to their state.