Faculty of Art
Originally published on October 18, 2017
[This transcript has been edited for clarity.]
Tristan Grunow: Welcome to the Meiji at 150 Podcast. I’m your host Tristan Grunow. Today we’ll be talking with Dr. Thomas Conlan from Princeton University, where he’s professor of East Asian Studies and History as well as director of Graduate Studies. Dr. Conlan is the author of In Little Need of Divine Intervention, published by Cornell in 2001 as well as State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan published by Michigan in 2003. His most recent book is From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan published by Oxford in 2011. We’re delighted to be joined today by Tom Conlan of Princeton University. Welcome.
Thomas Conlan: Well, thank you very much, Tristan. I’m really happy to be here in beautiful Vancouver.
TG: It’s great to have you here. I asked you here because I’d really like to hear your thoughts about the place of the Meiji Restoration in Japanese history. I know a lot of your research has focused on the earlier medieval period and the Sengoku period, but I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts looking forward into the Meiji period. How exactly does this fit into your research and your own thinking?
TC: Well, thank you, Tristan. I really appreciate having the chance to talk about the Meiji period because very few people ask what a medievalist, or a person who focuses on the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would think about those later times. I find that knowing the Meiji events is quite essential as I do my research because, to a large degree, a lot of the historical and historiographical projects which shape the compilation of sources and all that happened in the Meiji period. So understanding their biases and other perspectives is quite helpful. But that being said, I find coming at it from as a medievalist and looking at the earlier patterns, sometimes I see things that aren’t really brought up and noticed.
I’ll mention one particular thing, that a lot of ways one of the defining elements of the Meiji period, obviously, is that, you know, it’s named after an emperor. It’s focused on the Meiji emperor, and arguably, the most significant political act was the fact that the emperor was moved out of Kyoto, and everyone takes this as a given, right? That just happened early on, and then we’d move and talk about other things. But I’ve been doing some research in western Japan, in the province that is now the prefecture of Yamaguchi, the Chōshū domain. I’m focusing on a family called the Ōuchi, which are arguably the most important regional magnate family of their time. And I was able to uncover some very interesting sources which suggest that in 1551 – the moment of maximum turmoil in central Japan – the Ōuchi started engineering a plan to move the emperor to their town of Yamaguchi. And we know about it because a number of courtiers were there, and they said they wanted to revitalize the sechie, and have the emperor there, and you even had low-ranking courtiers who worked with making palaces. They were all there. That didn’t happen. It was directly linked to a coup, which resulted in the destruction of the Ōuchi leader of the time, and all the courtiers there. And there’s a huge gap in the sources, but I do believe that a memory of that event remained. In fact, we know it remained because if you read some accounts of it from Hideyoshi’s time, they talk about: “Oh, the Ōuchi were about to move the emperor.” They planned on moving that. But when you look in the Tokugawa sources, they relied on the very same chronicles: three chronicles, all of which say the Ōuchi are trying to move the emperor, and then the Nochikagami – the Tokugawa compilation – doesn’t mention it at all, so we have a very clear case that they are explicitly ignoring this, and that remains. I think because the Tokugawa obviously wanted to focus on the importance of a military rule, and they didn’t want to emphasize that emperors can be moved. And I can’t prove that people in Chōshū knew this, but I’d imagine that, you know, they were very historical-minded, and so I think that surely, people were aware of something because unless it’s just a remarkable coincidence that one attempt to move the emperor and the other successful originated by people from that area in western Japan.
Now, the other thing that I found really interesting is that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel around in areas of western Japan, including Yamaguchi, which is the old Chōshū domain, and then the old Satsuma domain in the south. And one of the most remarkable things to exist in both places are reverberatory furnaces. Probably most people don’t know what a reverberatory furnace is, but it’s – and I don’t have the exact temperatures at the tip of my tongue on this one – but they basically were furnaces that could melt metals at around 1800 degrees centigrade (very high heat), and that allowed steel cannons to be manufactured – things far more powerful and stronger than the older bronze cannons. And what struck me was that these existed before the Meiji period even began, and in Satsuma in the south. I thought it was especially ironic because here you have in that domain the most advanced furnace for manufacturing heavy weaponry in the world, and it’s something that the Japanese learned through the Dutch. And the idea that the cannons that they were basing it on would be a breech-loading cannon. Particularly, there’s one called the Armstrong cannon, which the English adopt in their army in 1860, and we know that the Japanese were manufacturing these when they were attacking the Tokugawa in 1867. So I think one thing is quite remarkable is they really had up-to-date knowledge of the most advanced military technology, and this happened before the so-called “opening” of Japan by Perry. You know, when he visited and he showed electricity and trains and other things, he had no idea that specialists in these various provinces already knew all about electricity and they could make the most advanced cannons. When the British bombarded Satsuma the Japanese had good cannons, so they were able to kill the British admiral, and they were sure that they got the guns from the Russians. They’d never imagine that you know, the Japanese could manufacture such things, so that’s something I find really quite amazing. So when you have The Last Samurai film, which is set, nominally in Satsuma, and has all these people not relying on modern weapons, like no, Saigo Takamori’s revolt is where it’s basically like a Fort Sumter moment. He was trying to get hold of all the weapons the state had, and why did they end up using swords is because they ran out of bullets. But all that element has been misunderstood. So I found that keen awareness of military technology and a willingness to adopt it immediately has been really impressive, and I think that that’s a little bit underestimated in a lot of studies, so it tends to focus on other important things, but I doubt many people are aware of the fact that all these areas were making their own reverberatory furnaces in the 1850s.
TG: And if we just start the story with Perry’s arrival in 1853 then certainly, we’re not going to get that long view of history; that long understanding of military technology and developments.
TC: Exactly. Even when you just imagine these narratives started in 1840s with the reverberatory furnace building saga, it changes everything. And I think that’s a very effective way to look at the end of the Tokugawa period as not being so closed, which kind of goes against the Meiji. It’s sort of like: so in that sense, all these military technologies – there is an awareness of it, and the people that know so much about it – and this is what makes Meiji special – is that those people are then put in a position or they’ve sort of pulled themselves up to that position of authority so they can go around throughout the world, and if you know a reverberatory furnace, you’re going to know exactly what kind of information you need: what materials you’ll need, and I think that that’s why it’s so incredibly effective. You know, during Tokugawa times, people knew how to make reverberatory furnace, but the people negotiating with Perry, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had no clue, and I think that the Meiji changed that, and that’s something that you know, that for good or ill – because people talk a lot about them, and there was imperialism and lots of bad things come out of that – but another level, these young men in their 20s and 30s and 40s who were able to amass this knowledge and then change so many things is quite impressive in many ways.
TG: So in addition to talking about the place of the Meiji Restoration in your research and how that factors in, I’d also like to hear your thoughts on where the Meiji Restoration fits in the pedagogy of Japanese history, and how does it come into your classroom?
TC: Thank you, Tristan. That’s a great question because since I’m at Princeton, and I have Federico Marcon and Shel Garon – two wonderful colleagues – I pretty much cover the pre-Tokugawa, pre-1600, and then Federico Marcon does the Tokugawa and the 19th century, and then Shel Garon covers the Meiji onwards, so Professors Garon and Marcon both touch on Tokugawa. I know even Professor Marcon had a class on 1868, for example, but for myself, I really don’t have the opportunity to address it directly in my lectures because I generally, and in earlier times: the 18th century, the 17th century, 16th century – depends on the class – when I teach my graduate students about sources, actually because so many books came out of the Meiji period, I ended up talking a lot about the Tokyo Historiographical Institute and other things, so I talk about in that sense for a specialized audience, but it doesn’t make it in my lectures at Princeton. That being said, I mean, I taught at Bowdoin for a number of years, and I was the only Japanese historian. One thing I did, as I always did every year, is a sequence: the origins of Japanese culture and civilization, and then the emergence of modern Japan or something like that, and I divided the courses. You know, Hideyoshi, and my point with Hideyoshi is that I emphasize the very concept of modernity being linked to monopoly over course of force is that Hideyoshi is modern, and I know that it was very interesting to see the students because they were taken aback, and they wanted to debate this and because they always assumed that “modern” has to be recent, so we’d start off the class with a quick discussions with: “Well, what is ‘modern?’ Is it technology? Is it different things?” And so it’s very helpful in a lot of ways, and that class too: I cover from Hideyoshi to the Occupation, and I tried to almost replicate real time and the majority of the class was on the Tokugawa and it changes, because I want to get a sense of sort of some shared expectations regarding governance, society, and also the changes towards nativism and other things like that, but I would focus on those things, and then I would bring out the political events about the fall of the Tokugawa, and I would cover from Meiji to Occupation in a month. And so, I wanted to really impart upon the students the incredible rapidity of change, and it was significant, but I also wanted to give them temporally the same amount of time so they could just see how fast it changed, and how confusing it is. And I find that often, a lot of courses will focus so much on Meiji, but you spend more time talking about Meiji than existed in the whole Meiji period. Okay, I know I’m exaggerating there, but there is that tendency, and I think it’s really important to give that real sense of confusion and not knowing and debates, so that’s what I tried to do for that class.
TG: Is the question: “What is the place of the Meiji period?” even a relevant question in talking about Japanese history as a whole in the broadest sense possible?
TC: Well, I think that’s a great question because in many ways, the very, sort of, textbook understanding of Japanese history, I think, is shaped often by the various accounts from the Meiji period. You know, there was so much interest in compiling the sources, and a sort of reconstruction of the old histories that have been done in ancient times, and a lot of the scholars really sort of debated about what are the periods of Japanese history. And I do think that by the time you get to the late Meiji period, a number of works – one that came out of Waseda was most impressive – what they would have like the jidai shi, the era-history of Japan. And you have the Nara era, then you have the Heian era, then Kamakura, then Nanboku-chō, or northern and southern courts, Muromachi, and then they would go into the unifiers. Sandaku Yoshinari would even have like the history of Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, and then they would go into the Tokugawa age. And if we think about it, almost every basic understanding of Japanese history is loosely based on it. There are some exceptions, obviously, and I think one of the biggest changes was Warring States is coming in, and I think that, and I could talk more about that: Shuko, and people at Kyoto University – they were focusing on that, so now we tend to have Warring States, not just the Ashikaga era. The other thing I think you see is that the northern and southern courts – I mean a lot of my research, I’ve been talking a lot about how important that is, but it really fell from the wayside, and what we have is the Muromachi era kind of expanded. But it expanded to cover the early 14th century before the Muromachi region mattered in anyway, so in some ways, you know, it was a problem: the northern/southern courts was thought to be too emperor-centric, so we removed it, but then the rationale for that. It becomes a lot more difficult to understand the rationale for that age. And these divisions, durable as they are, are problematic. I mean Heian is problematic because you focus on where the capital’s located, and I would argue that the three centuries of the Heian period are so distinct, each should have its own age: the collapse of the early legal system, the courtly society and the rise of the retired emperors. The same thing for Kamakura: the Kamakura era is problematic because I don’t believe that the Kamakura bakufu was the dominant governing entity of Japan during this time. It was still the Heian court, but then you don’t want to have the Heian period go on that many more centuries, so that’s what caused the confusion. So I would say that’s one thing we see with the history of Japan is that yeah, the Meiji divisions remain, and the other element that is dominant is– and this is where they’re successors to the Tokugawa – they very much focus on the importance of a warrior government bakufu, and they see that as being the essential government of Japan, and so that’s why they had the Tokugawa history, the Muromachi or the Ashikaga history, and then the Kamakura history because they see that as mattering so much. And I think that’s, again, problematic because it then leads people to think that the court really didn’t matter except for the ancient parry through Heian (I guess that’s part of the title), and then Meiji again, so they make an artificial link and cause people to kind of skip over the middle period and assume that: “Oh, the courtiers of the middle times were just involved in poetic activities and nothing else.” And so I think that skips scholarship in some ways, and I also believe these categories don’t work, and that’s why it’s so difficult for people to really understand the Middle Period.
TG: Speaking about all these time periods and how we divide Japanese history into bite-sized chunks of time, it seems like many of these divisions are bookended by warfare, and this recalls something that you wrote in your book State of War that war can actually be a very transformative force in society.
TC: Thank you very much. What I find is that you know, for a long time, if we think about like the role of military history is that it became delegated to people who were focusing on tactics and I think particularly after the rise of the Annales school, where this idea that the wars and these events are just foam on the tides of change, which are these more demographic and social processes, that after the First World War, there’s a real movement away from looking at warfares being something so central. And I remember even when I was a graduate student applying for grants, some people, you know, when you go for the interview, I was pointedly asked: “Well, why should someone care about that?” And that’s when I realized that when the institutions and laws and ideals of the state are directed towards destroying another element of that, then it really does change things because power to remain must be flexed, and because of that then, anything which cannot function will just disappear. And so I do think that this focus on wars matters because there’s a very strong kinetic change, and often then what you end up afterwards is very different from what existed before. And so I think that that’s where when we go back and look at these older periodizations where we see their sort of bookmark, as you said, by warfare, that’s because in the earlier times, they might not have expressed it that way, but people understood how very different these various eras are. And so, that’s what I find. I mean, I found too, I like looking at processes, and how things unfold as opposed to just focusing on the institution because yes, institutions are important, you need to know how authority exists, how messages are transmitted, but more than that, I think sometimes, you can get sort of a very sort of, you know, legalized approach. We say: “Oh well, the emperor is the person who’s sitting on the throne,” and I would say that no, the key question is: “What is sovereign authority?” And that is something that’s demonstrated, not something which is appointed. And I think that that’s very crucial to understanding a lot of elements, either: “Who is a great leader? They have to win wars.” “Who is the sovereign?” And I think this is one thing where a lot of the debates about like the emperor versus retired emperor miss is that the person who is the chiten no kimi, the person who can enact sovereign rights, and that’s where I always thought that like you know, people talk about Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and it’s like: there’s no question from a view of the rituals he’s performing that he was the sovereign. Even though he was not of imperial blood or appointed to that position, and so I think that there’s some real help to looking at more of who is doing things? Who is the engine of history? Or what is the engine of history? And clarifying that, and that can help you then sort of get a better understanding of what is the big picture. So, coming back to looking back at these various warrior governments and all that, it’s very clear to me that particularly from the 1240s to the 1331, Kamakura is not driving things: they’re reacting. And I believe that the Ashikaga, particularly from the Ōnin War on, are not driving things as well. But then, Warring States doesn’t work because there’s all of these disparate groups and so, one of my sort of interventions is I’m going to be talking about a very powerful family in the west called the Ōuchi, and I’d like to argue that the period from around 1460 to 1550 is the age of the Yamaguchi or the age of Ōuchi dominion because I see this family in the far west as actually engaging a number of court rites: they have the strongest military force, they’re engaging in a lot of trade, and so that’s sort of what I’d like to do with my research is to come up with a much more coherent way of looking at Japanese history so that each age is really focused on either the process or the individuals or the entities which are driving that change.
TG: I want to end with a few, maybe more lighthearted, questions.
TC: Thank you.
TG: So, if you could go back to the period of time that you study, whether it’s the Meiji period or any other time in Japan, what would be one thing that you would introduce to the people of that time?
TC: Oh, “introduce.” I was thinking more as a historian, a very self-serving thing. I’d love to bring iPhones, so that they can all then take selfies and record things and do that because I remember what I saw when I was down in Kagoshima. Like I think one of the Shimazu had an early camera, and seeing what they saw as important was so different from a lot of the European photographers, and so I would love to see like okay, Ashikaga Takauji selfies or what does the monk Kenshun take pictures of? And so I think that would be great for me to get all kinds of you know, maybe they’d do podcasts or something. You know, so I wouldn’t want to introduce something. I wouldn’t give the means to reproduce the iPhone technology because who knows what that would have caused? But I think that would be so great to see you know, like a Heian courtiers, you know what kind of things would he take pictures of? And that’s what I would like to bring back, yeah.
TG: Alright, and how about another lighthearted one: what’s one place in Japan – anytime you go back to Japan, you say: “I have to go to this place” – do you have a place like that?
TC: Well, there’s a number of places that I really like, and I try to get back, but often, I travel enough, and I can’t get back to every place, but I almost invariably go back to Kyoto. And my wife’s from there. It’s just that I love Kyoto, and I do have a favourite place in that there’s, near the north, it’s a place called Demachiyanagi, and they have the best set of two things: one is there is a coffee place called Maki Coffee, and they have the best cold brew Dutch coffee that I’ve ever had, so I always have to get that, and just across from the road there, there’s a (it’s called this) mochi which is the rice cakes, and it’s mame mochi, which are these red azuki bean mochi, and the place is Tamba which is to, you know, the northwest of Kyoto. And so it’s Tamba no Mame Mochi, so as I go in, I’ll get my mame mochi. Lots of tourists are there, you’d have to wait in line a long time, and then I have my cold Dutch coffee, so when I’m there, it’s good to be in Japan.
TG: That’s a nice endorsement.
TC: I am not a stockholder in anyway.
TG: We’re not sponsoring… (Laughter)
TC: No. (Laughter)
TG: And maybe one last, more thoughtful question: if you had the chance, what character might you suggest for the next nengō?
TC: So for the next era name, that’s a tough one. That’s really tough because they usually…you need something from like ancient classics, you need to debate these things, and the problem is most of these auspicious characters were used to cover over times of real turmoil, right? So, there’s always this sort of this ironic feel about some of these. I would go with one that I know was like in the Ming times, but not in Japanese eras was it common at all, and that’s raku (tanoshimu – to enjoy) because they’ve already done hei, which is just peace, or things continuing along smoothly, which is quite a good character for one, but I think that maybe raku would be a good one because you know, it’d be fun to start it new, yeah.
TG: The Meiji at 150 Podcast is hosted by Tristan Grunow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. This podcast would not be possible without the cooperation of the UBC Centre for Japanese Research, and the technical assistance of the UBC Faculty of Arts ISIT. Find out more about the Meiji at 150 Project, including the Meiji at 150 Lecture Series, Digital Teaching Resource, and Workshop Series by visiting our website: meijiat150.arts.ubc.ca. Thank you for listening.
*Citation for this episode:
Thomas Conlan, interview with Tristan Grunow, The Meiji at 150 Podcast, podcast audio, October 18, 2017. https://meijiat150.podbean.com/e/episode-1-%E2%80%93-dr-thomas-conlan-princeton-university/.
The Meiji at 150 Podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Tristan Grunow, with editorial assistance from Joshua Linkous. Transcripts by Kelly Chan.