JAPAN’S CONFRONTATION WITH THE WEST: THE HISTORY BEHIND THE WAR
In the heyday of the West’s domination of the rest of the world, Japan was one of the few nations that was not colonized by the West. Nevertheless, Japan was forced to deal with the fact of Western leadership in the world. It had no choice but to carve out a strategy that would not only enable it to preserve its independence but also to maintain self-respect and self-confidence as a nation. Here Japan was confronted with a situation similar to that of other Asian nations, except that Japan was relatively unified and capable of developing itself economically and militarily in a short time. Therefore, Japan was somewhat successful at least until the 1930s in its dealings with the West. Notwithstanding, its people experienced psychological traumas due to accelerated change and the sudden imperative to adapt to the modern world.
Japan had kept itself apart from the rest of the world for 200 years since the first half of the 17th century. But in the earlier part of the 19th century, there were debates about the wisdom of this isolation and whether it could be realistically maintained in the face of military threat from the West. There were enthusiastic proponents of opening the country to the West, but also influential people who fiercely opposed such a policy. And then there were those who recognized the inevitability of opening the country but were firmly committed to protecting and preserving Japan’s traditional heritage as much as possible.
Among this last group, Shozan Sakuma advocated the adoption of Western military technology in order to build up the military capacity to repel any Western attempt to invade Japan. He was also noted for his slogan “Eastern ethics and Western science,” an idea that guided much Japanese thinking into the 20th century on East-West relations. This challenge of how to combine Western modernity and native tradition was faced at later times in Asian countries such as China, Turkey, and Iran as well. And in China a version of Sakuma’s slogan appeared in the 1890s when Chang Chih-tung asserted that Western learning gives technical knowledge but Chinese learning provides the moral foundation.
Japan was the first non-Western nation to effectively modernize. It embarked on a program of enthusiastic imitation of the West from 1868 to the late 1880s. The leading Japanese intellectual, Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote in 1875 that Japanese culture was fundamentally flawed due to the family system which crushed the development of individual initiative and independence. As a result, Japan was unable to develop a modern civilization based on science. He added that Japan did not excel in any area in comparison to Western nations and that there was nothing Japan could be proud of except for natural objects like Mount Fuji. His recommendation was that Japan leave backward Asia and become a Western nation.
As Japan began to catch up with the West in terms of wealth and to successfully develop modern institutions and an industrial economy, these successes were attributed to the superior qualities of Japanese people as well as their ability to incorporate the strengths of Western societies and then turn them to their own advantage. No longer were enthusiasts for westernization such as Fukuzawa at the apex of Japanese intellectual life. Instead, champions of traditional Japanese culture such as Kakuzo Okakura came to prominence.
Although the product of a Western education, Okakura, influenced by Western patrons of Japanese aesthetics, helped to initiate a revival of interest in the Japanese traditional arts. In terms of politics, he asserted the superiority of Japanese culture within Asia, while asserting the overall cultural unity of the Asian continent. For him, India and China were the two great sources of Asian civilization. Yet, Japan represented the completion and fulfillment of this great civilization through its art. He saw Japan as the leading Asian nation because it had never been conquered and possessed an unbroken tradition. Moreover, he viewed Japan as a kind of museum in which the varied treasures of Asian art were preserved and maintained. In these views, Okakura reveals himself as an early Japanese nationalist who not only believed in the unity of Asia but proclaimed that Japan was destined to bring about the restoration of Asia to its former greatness.
Still, in terms of foreign policy, Japan accommodated itself to the international order dominated by the West until the 1930s when a regionalist approach took hold. From the regionalist perspective, since Japan’s economic interests and its cultural affinities were in Asia, international cooperation and harmony must be sacrificed in order to achieve Asian regional integration. Therefore, Japan was willing to risk international isolation and the displeasure of the Western imperial powers in order to establish a regional bloc. In the early 1930s, Inazo Nitobe, once Japan’s foremost internationalist, proposed that Asia should become Japan’s sphere of influence and that Asian problems should be solved by Asians. He justified Japan’s assertion of hegemony in East Asia by pointing to the American refusal to permit foreign interference in the region of the Americas.
Japan’s regionalist policy of the 1930s marked an abrupt turn away from internationalism. Besides the Great Depression and the crisis of Western capitalism, racial factors played a role in this about-face. Japan’s commitment to the world system was weakened by the refusal of the Allied powers to insert a racial equality clause in the Versailles Peace Treaty. In addition, anti-Asian sentiment in the United States had led to the passage in 1924 of an immigration act that totally excluded Chinese and Japanese. For many Japanese, it wasn’t clear that they would ever be accepted as a leading nation in a world dominated by people of European ancestry.
World War II is often viewed solely in terms of politics and economics. But the Pacific dimension of the war clearly involved issues related to race and culture. The war between Japan and the United States was not merely an attempt to stop Japan from controlling East Asia on the part of the United States. Nor was the attack on Pearl Harbor solely Japan’s retaliation for having its oil supply cut off by the United States. In an important sense, the Pacific war was also about race. Would the predominantly white nations maintain their supremacy in the world or would Japan succeed in carving out its own empire in East and Southeast Asia? And it was also about culture. Would Japan be expected to assimilate to the dominant European culture or would there be a new plural world in which cultures coexisted or were in dialogue with each other?
