SEMINARS

Pre-Modern History

With regard to the question of how Japan became such a large economic, technological power in an incredibly short space of time, one has to remem­ber that it did not start from scratch. In fact, no country in the world starts from scratch as every country has its culture, its values, and its traditions, which it uses to facilitate change. The interesting thing about modern Japan and the key to its suc­cess is this ability it has to change without losing its identity. Whilst being very open to change and to foreign influence Japan succeeded in maintain­ing its culture and values.

Great changes took place in Japan, not once, but twice: once starting in the second half of the 19^th Century and ending in 1945, when the greatest change took place, and once after World War II and until today. The great change that occurred in the 19^th Century is very interesting. First of all, because Japan was the first non-European country to modernize at a time when the entire world was being dominated by the Western powers and the belief that only Westerners could really develop science or modern technology. The Japanese were the first to prove that non-Europeans and non-Christians were equally as capable, although there were even some Japanese who did not believe that they could do it.

Japan’s achievements at that stage are all the more remarkable in light of the country’s geographical distance from central Europe and its lack of con­tact with Western cultures. Moreover, the Japanese language had nothing in common with Western languages, which meant that it was incredibly dif­ficult for the Japanese to understand them. Thirdly, the Japanese religion was totally different to those that existed in the West, whilst a fourth disadvan­tage was the Japanese’s self-inflicted seclusion and the fact that for a very long time, they did not have any important contacts with the West. The social structure of Japan, which was not conducive to modernization, could also be added to the list of disadvantages. Japan’s was a feudal class society, in which the warriors called the Samurai were the rulers of the peasants and the middle class, and it was impossible to move up from the class into which one was born.

However, Japan also had cultural and traditional ad­vantages, including its uninterrupted independ­ence, which lasted from the 4^th or 5^th Century until the 19^th Century, and its distance from any­where else. Even the Chinese had never really tried to occupy Japan, being all too well aware of the fact that the Mongols had failed miserably in try­ing to invade Japan, whose warriors were legen­dary.

The Emperor in Japanese history never really had power because all the power was in the hands of the military – the Samurai and the Shogun. As a symbol, however, the Emperor was very important, being the point around which all the Japanese could unite. The Emperor was the descendent of a dynasty that had reigned over Japan since the very beginning. In this context it is worth mentioning that Japan is the only country in the world whose dynasty has never changed.

With regard to religion, the Japanese were far less committed than people in other Asian countries or the West, and although there was a local religion called Shinto, it was not taken very seriously. There are no prophets in Shinto, no moral code, and it is the kind of religion that is more ceremo­nial than anything else. However, Shinto was fol­lowed by Buddhism, a religion that came to Japan in the form of many different sects, hundreds of which exist until this day. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Buddhism was also not taken that seriously by many Japanese and why many follow Buddhism and Shinto at the same time. In no other country in the world could one belong to more that one religion, the reason being that religion is taken far more seriously everywhere else than it is in Japan. This, on the other hand, also explains why there were never any clashes based on religion in Japan. If a Japanese Buddhist is asked today which sect he belongs to, the answer will likely be that he is not sure because his mother belonged to one sect while his father belonged to another. In fact, the only time that it really becomes an issue is when someone dies and his family have to decide in which cemetery they should place his ashes, but even then, there is a good chance that they will simply go for the cheapest or closest.

Christian missionaries, who arrived in the 17^th Cen­tury from Portugal, succeeded in converting a fair number of Japanese to Christianity. However, often it was not a true conversion, as those who ‘con­verted’ merely added Christianity to their other religion(s). Many others rejected Christianity as easily as they had accepted it once they discov­ered that it would not allow them to pray to Bud­dha or the eight million Shinto gods, or marry cer­tain spouses, etc. Even today, the Christian popula­tion in Japan is less than one percent, not because Christianity was banned but because of the general lack of interest in religion. Many Japanese ‘Chris­tians’ were only interested in the ‘nice’ parts of Chris­tianity, such as Christmas and wedding cere­monies. In fact, many Japanese - even non-Christians - marry in a church simply because of the music. The missionaries built schools and hos­pitals in Japan, just like in the Middle East, and the best girls’ schools in Japan today are Christian schools. The Empress herself is a graduate of one of these schools, but most of the girls who attend them are not Christians.

Another reason why the Japanese rejected Christi­anity is that they saw that the missionaries were being followed by the merchants and colonizers, and having seen what had happened in the Philip­pines, they became afraid of the missionaries, es­pecially the Catholic ones. Eventually, Christianity was outlawed and all the foreigners expelled from Japan. I would say that Japan’s seclusion from the 17^th to the 19^th Century was a major advantage when it confronted the West in the 19^th Century, as it meant that the Japanese were not hindered by any religious scruples or objections. Another ad­vantage was the high level of education in Japan.

The Japanese have a unique system of writing, which they took from China but not without add­ing some modifications. Each letter signifies a meaning and can be read in many different ways or used to indicate some sound for phonetic purposes. Consequently, when you look at the text it is very difficult to decide which symbol means something and which symbol indicates a sound, and in this regard, it is much harder to understand than Chi­nese, where there is actually a script.

Today, the first layer of the Japanese language is Japanese, the second layer a very rich layer of Chinese words, and the third layer words that were absorbed from Western culture. There is no lan­guage in the world that is ‘pure’ – in Arabic, for example, there are hundreds of words from Turkey and Persia – it being natural for languages to ab­sorb foreign influences. However, what happened in Japan was that the Japanese added the Chinese words to the local ones, which means everything in Japan had two names, the Japanese name and the Chinese name, as the Japanese pronounce it. In modern Japanese you can say almost anything in three ways: in the Japanese way, in the Sino-Japa­nese way or in the English-Japanese way.

One of Japan’s major advantages when it con­fronted the West in the 19^th Century was the fact that although it was a secluded country that no foreigner could enter and no Japanese leave, its people were very open culturally. Whereas, for example, the Japanese were familiar with Chinese culture, the Chinese had no idea about Japanese culture, and one of the reasons why the Chinese found it so difficult to modernize was that they really felt that they had the best culture in the world and that there was nothing to learn from the Japanese ‘barbarians’. The Japanese, meanwhile, were ready to absorb foreign cultures, and by the time they came into contact with the West, they had already been learning from the outside for more than 1,000 years.

In addition, because the Japanese had not been colonized by any Western power in the 19^th Cen­tury, they had developed this easygoing way of adopting Chinese culture without hating the Chi­nese; they never really liked them, but they ad­mired their culture and it was more or less the same when the Westerners came. In effect, the Japanese kind of replaced China with the West, believing that what they took from Western culture would make them stronger and more independent. One has to remember that the great fear in the 19^th Century was the fear of colonization and exploita­tion, so the Japanese had basically two options: to fight the West, or to learn from it.

Western culture arrived in two stages in Japan. The beginning of the first stage was marked by the ar­rival in Tokyo Bay of United States warships, whose commanders gave an ultimatum: “Either you open your ports or we will shoot at you.” The Japanese decided to comply, so it was a matter of force but without any bloodshed. Had it been the English, they would have fired at the Japanese, but the Americans were quite weak at that point and could not afford a war. The Japanese actually dis­played great wisdom in not fighting back but in­stead saying to themselves “We will bow our heads and accept them, but we will also make an effort to learn from them in order to become as strong as they are.” Had the Japanese refused to open their doors, there would have been a war, involving, no doubt, also the British and the French, and Japan would have been destroyed.

Also fortunately for Japan, in 1868 a group of young warriors overthrew the government, took the Emperor and made him the symbolic head of a ‘government of the Emperor’ in what came to be known as the ‘Meiji Restoration’. One result of this was that people were motivated to work harder, because now they felt that they were not being ex­ploited by members of the government, but were working for the Emperor, who was con­sidered sacred. Some people even called the Em­peror ka’mie which means god; he was not a god to wor­ship or pray to, but someone who held a very sacred position that was important enough to attract the loyalty of the people. The ‘restoration’ men created a myth that the Emperor had once ruled in Japan, only for the military people to seize power and that now, they were restoring power to the Emperor. The real motive, however, was to com­bine two things: Westernization or moderni­zation, and the strengthening of the Japanese na­tion so that it could never be absorbed by the West, which involved making loyalty to the Emperor and nation the central element of the Japanese ideol­ogy.

From 1868 onward, the whole system of Japan changed. People were told that if they did not change, the country would be lost to the enemies surrounding it, whereas if they did, learning eve­rything from those around them but whilst be­coming strong militarily and economically and developing nationalism, they would have the great advantage. One great change was the abolition of the class system, the feudalism, and the introduc­tion of a Western-style constitution that abolished all forms of special class privileges and made eve­ryone equal before the law. The other major change was to improve the education system. High standards of education had existed in Japan for hundreds of years, but the problem was that chil­dren were learning wrong things, namely the Chi­nese culture, which was totally dysfunctional in the 19^th Century. Being aware of this problem, the Japanese decided it was time to teach their chil­dren Western culture and languages but without allowing them to lose their Japanese identity and whilst teaching them to respect the Emperor and the country. Furthermore, it was decided to pro­vide equal basic education for boys and girls and high school and university education for a few, ‘a few’ not being those who were born into the right families, but those who obtained good results in the examination system, which had not existed before the ‘Meiji Restoration’ administration.

The military was also reformed. Previously it had been characterized by a class occupation of the warriors; in other words, once born into the mili­tary class one stayed in the military for life. This system was abolished, and a new military system was built on the farmers as the main source of new recruits. When the warriors complained that the farmers would make poor soldiers, the new gov­ernment responded by telling them that now that the class system had been abolished, the farmers would be motivated to become excellent soldiers and to be loyal to their country.

Another great reform was industrialization. It was very difficult in the 19^th Century to establish a modern industry. There were people who were will­ing to invest in Japan, but only with the goal of taking out the profits and controlling the Japanese economy, which is why the Japanese said no to foreign investments. In order to fund the industri­alization the government taxed the farmers very heav­ily, which was rather unfair, and paid indus­trial workers very little. In contrast to India, for example, Japan did not go back to manufacturing by hand; on the contrary, it decided to build new factories and send delegations abroad to learn from the Westerners who were flooding the Japanese market with cheap textiles and clothes. By paying their employees very low wages, the new Japanese factories were able to compete against Western products.

The way the Japanese dealt with importing the Western language is interesting. For example, they translated telephone as ‘electrical talking’ and train as ‘steam car’, which meant that by seeing two characters, one for ‘steam’ and one for ‘car’, eve­ryone could understand what a train was. Unlike other peoples that absorbed Western culture, the Japanese never changed their names to Western ones, which they considered another red line. To­day, even Christians in Japan stick to their Japa­nese names.

The way the Japanese dress, on the other hand, was one of the things that did change. In the 19^th Century, the Westerners coming to Japan made it clear that they considered anyone wearing tradi­tional clothes barbaric. The Japanese, meanwhile, wanted to be respected – respect is a very impor­tant aspect in Japanese culture – and accordingly, they changed the way they dressed, hoping to earn respect from the Westerners coming to the coun­try. One result of this is that the strictness of dress in Japan today is far greater than it is anywhere else in the world. The first delegation that went from Japan to the West in 1860, before the resto­ration, were dressed in kimono and they were hor­rified to find people in the West laughing and pointing at them, and by the time the next delega­tion set out, they were sporting Western clothes and Western hairstyles; in fact, the Samurai hair­style was outlawed. Of course, the Emperor – who was very young at the time – was used to set an exam­ple and ordered to dress in a Western manner, which for the Japanese was extremely difficult as it meant putting on shoes, which they simply were not used to.

Even the eating habits of the Japanese changed, the reason being that they believed that the Westerners who came to Japan were so tall because of what they ate and that the Japanese diet was to blame for their own short stature. The Japanese did not eat a lot of meat at that time, only fish and occa­sionally rabbit and they did not drink milk or eat dairy products; in short, their diet was much poorer than ours, consisting mainly of fish, vegetables and rice, so they decided to change it, which certainly was not easy. What did they do? They took the Emperor and got him to eat a steak in public, say­ing that he was doing it for the sake of the country and because he wanted everyone to eat meat and be strong. One interesting point is that the Chinese had always eaten meat yet, until the ‘restoration’, there were no Chinese restaurants, whereas after the ‘restora­tion’ they gradually became popular. Did this make any difference to the size of the Japa­nese? Well, it does appear that every new gen­era­tion is taller than the last, but no one knows if it is because of this change in their diet, although I per­sonally believe that food has something to do with it.

The Japanese also absorbed the Western calendar, which gradually replaced the lunar calendar, which the Japanese had used in the past. All their holi­days had been based on the traditional calendar, but instead of doing what the Jews did - namely, to say we will have two calendars and our holidays will be according to the old calendar and our busi­ness dealings according to the new calendar – they decided to move the first day of the first month from the beginning of February – the Chinese New Year, when spring begins – to January 1^st, which meant that all their holidays had to move a month and a half backwards. In any other society, relig­ious people would never allow their holidays to be played around with, but in Japan, it was not a problem, simply because the people did not take religion seriously.

Something that was not so good for the Japanese was that they copied Western imperialism, build­ing their army on the German model and their navy on the British one. They thought, rightly or wrongly, that in the world of imperialism one was either strong or weak, and that if one was not strong, the others would eat him up, which is why they wanted an empire and decided to invade some of their neighbors. Consequently, the Japanese fought a war with China in 1894-95 and succeeded in taking Taiwan from the Chinese. Next, they fought a war with Czarist Russia, with whom they had a quarrel over Taiwan, which was a real chal­lenge because Russia was a massive power. The Japanese fought the Russians for two reasons: to enlarge their country and to gain admiration and respect in the West. After this, they took Korea and later Manchuria, which they said they needed not only for their defense, but also for their econ­omy, which needed raw materials; the only trouble was, the more they got, the more they wanted.

At the beginning, Western countries looked very favorably on Japan, which they regarded as some kind of ‘bright pupil’, but when Japan started ex­panding, especially after World War I, Great Brit­ain and the United States – and also, of course China, which was scared of being conquered by Japan - started fearing Japan. It was at this stage that the West began to take an interest in China and the Chinese hatred of Japan began to be mir­rored in the West. When World War II broke out, the Japanese signed an agreement with Hitler, having the intention of occupying Southeast Asia with all its resources. The only power that was blocking the way was the United States, so the Japanese bombed the Americans in 1941 and quickly seized all of Southeast Asia. From a mili­tary point of view it was one of the greatest victo­ries in history, and the Japanese really believed that they had gotten away with it. However, be­cause they were allied with Hitler, whom the West set out to beat, the West also set out to beat Japan.

The Japanese fought heroically, but the West fought them with a vengeance, developing all sorts of new weapons, including the atomic bomb, in the process. This was the only war in which nuclear weapons have been used, with the Americans dropping two bombs on Japanese cities. Whether or not this was justified is still being debated to­day, especially since the bombs were dropped at the end of the war when Japan was already beaten. The Japanese surrendered immediately, unlike Germany, which had to be conquered before it would surrender. (In Japan, only the city of Oki­nawa was conquered.)

Japan surrendered in a very interesting way. Be­cause the government feared the army would con­tinue to fight, they got the Emperor, who had pre­viously been used to urge the people to fight, to go on the radio - for the first time ever - and tell the people to lay down their weapons. The govern­ment realized that if the people did not hear the Emperor actually tell them that Japan had surren­dered, they would never believe it.

The price of the war was enormous; all of Japan had been destroyed, the Americans having decided that the best way to make the Japanese surrender was by conducting air raids, destroying not only Japan’s military and its industries but also its population centers. It was no surprise, therefore, that at the end of the war, the Japanese felt that they were back to square number one.

Participant: If Japan had had the atomic bomb in 1945 would it have used it?

Prof. Shillony: I think the question is, if America had developed the bomb earlier, would it have used it against Germany? We don’t know. World War II was a very cruel war. We all know about the cruel things that the Germans did but the Japa­nese also committed atrocities in China and South­east Asia. The Soviet Union, which was fighting on the allied side, also committed many atrocities when it conquered Germany and Manchuria. I imagine that due to the cruelty of the war, yes, the Japanese would have used the bomb. However, when they bombed Pearl Harbor they attacked only the naval base and not the civilian city of Honolulu, which they could have done quite easily had they wanted to.

Interestingly, the Japanese showed a high degree of respect toward their British and American pris­oners, treating them far less harshly than the Chinese detainees, and this is but one example of the way in which the Japanese never let go of this respect for Westerners. During the war, for exam­ple, the Japanese Government decided to abolish English and there was a lot of talk about teaching Japanese children German instead, but their par­ents insisted that they wanted them to continue learning English. Moreover, when the B-22 bomb­ers came, the Japanese would say, “Mr. B-22 is coming,” which again, implies a kind of respect for Western­ers. Even the kamikaze pilots wrote letters in which they said that they hate the Ameri­cans but love their music…“so although tomorrow I am going to die, I want to listen to American mu­sic.”

During the war, the Japanese officially respected Asians and hated Americans whereas actually, they despised the Asians and respected the Ameri­cans, being frightened to identify with Asians, who were a part of the underdeveloped world. As for the Asians, they were impressed by Japan’s mod­ernity; the Koreans, for example, hated the Japa­nese, but they valued the new methods of produc­tion and education that they established.

Participant: Was the Emperor regarded in the same manner as the British Royal family?

Prof. Shillony: In a way yes, although one has to remember that the Emperor with all his titles and fancy clothing had far less power than the British monarchs. Even today the Queen is the Head of the Army, the Head of State and has one of the world’s largest fortunes. In Japan, even before 1945, the Emperor was the Head of State and the Chief of the Army but he was never involved in any of the decision-making. On the other hand, there are still people in Japan who find it hard to believe that he will just walk around in the streets, remembering, as they do, the ‘old days’ when the Emperor was so ‘divine’ that to portray him on money or postage stamps was unthinkable.

The Emperor had always been respected in Japa­nese history; even though the government had changed and Japan was divided into warring states for a very short time, all of them recognized one Emperor. Moreover, when the Meiji leaders thought about how they should reform their coun­try, they saw that in the West religion played a very important role in motivating the people, and they thought to themselves, “Okay, we do not have a strong religion, so what do we have that is im­portant?” It was then they realized that by using the symbol of the Emperor, they could rally up support for the new regime. Consequently, media and school announcements and government proc­lamations were all done in the name of the Em­peror and all public documents were signed ‘By order of the Emperor’. Even in battle the Japanese shouted ‘Banzi, banzi,’ which means ten thousand years, or rather that ‘the Emperor should live ten thousand years, even though I am going to die’.

Even though he was only a symbol, which meant that no politicians were able to become strong enough to pose a problem, all the credit for Japan’s successes went to the Emperor. If Japan is com­pared to any other country in the modern world, great dramatic change was always led by dramatic figures, but who was the Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Abdul Nasser, or Chairman Mao of Japan? There was no charismatic figure at all, because to have one, would have negated the role of the Emperor. The great problem with personality leaderships is that when the personality dies, everyone dies but in a system of collective leadership, if one leaves and one arrives, it makes little difference.

One of the disadvantages is, for instance, the question of who should be held responsible for mistakes. With regard to the war, the Americans did not know whom they should put on trial, because everyone knew that although the Emperor had signed all the paper­work, the war had not been his actual doing. Col­lective decision-making, there­fore, has it up and its down side.

Participant: Going back to names, isn’t it true that the Japanese who emigrate today do actually change their names?

Prof. Shillony: Only their first names, and only because the parents think that it will be easier for their children to fit in at school. Unlike Jews and Moslems, the Japanese living abroad never had any problem with being unable to celebrate their different religious holidays, the reason being that they are basically of little significance and what the Japanese emigrant wanted more than anything else was to fit into the host society.