Episode 8 – Dr. David Howell (Harvard)

Originally published on December 1, 2017
[This transcript has been edited for clarity.]

Tristan Grunow: This is the Meiji at 150 Podcast. I’m Tristan Grunow. My guest on this episode is Dr. David Howell, Professor of Japanese History, and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Dr. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery, published by the University of California Press in 1995 as well as Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan, published by Princeton University Press in 2005. Dr. Howell, thank you for being here.

David Howell: Thank you, Tristan. It’s great to be here.

TG: A lot of your publications have looked at Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries. How does the Meiji Restoration appear in your research?

DH: Throughout my career, I’ve been interested in the process by which Japan went from a pre-industrial, mostly isolated from the West country to a full player in the modern world, the first non-Western country to become a major industrial and military power. Certainly, the process of transformation has been a constant fascination in my research, but I’ve wanted to do so in a way that treats the period before 1868 as being as important as the period afterwards, and then also to try to capture at what I guess we would now call a granular level (when I started doing research, I didn’t know that word yet), a kind of lived experience of what it was like for people to go through that transformation. I think probably even as dramatic a transformation as Japan saw over the course of the 19th century, as a matter of living through it day by day, year by year, of course, it was much more gradual, much more natural, I think, in an odd kind of way. And so, somehow trying to find a way to capture the drama, the utter transformation of Japan while at the same time, seeing how it might have been for real people living in real time, and I got interested in the idea of looking at Japan in the 19th century as a whole when I was in graduate school.

My dissertation advisor Marius Jansen I think was the first person that I knew of who advocated looking at the 19th century as a unit. I happened to be doing my PhD work at Princeton University at about the time that Professor Jansen was editing Volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan, entitled The Nineteenth-Century, where he and his fellow contributors tried to make a case for looking at the 19th century as a unit rather than severing Japanese history at 1868 or thereabouts and treating them as they’re two completely unrelated periods. So I got interested, in general, in that approach in graduate school but I think in some ways, it was actually the late 1980s, early 1990s as the Soviet order fell apart, the Berlin Wall came down, the common sense goal (though not necessarily desirable), the natural order of the world as I had understood it in my life up until that period with the Soviet Union on one side and the U.S and its allies on the other side unravelled in a way that I think is still very difficult to explain.

Even in the late ‘80s with the solidarity movement in Poland and the changes in the Soviet Union, I don’t think that I thought the Soviet Union would collapse. I didn’t think that that would be a thing until pretty much the time it happened. So of course, I wasn’t interested in that as a matter of research, but just as a citizen living his daily workday life watching the news and reading newspapers. It made me think about how for people in Japan at the time, it might have been a similar kind of experience, that all kinds of stuff are going on. You know that big things are happening, but the idea that the old order might end and that a new order might come in, I thought, probably didn’t really occur to people, and so to try to capture that feeling…

Then after the old order fell apart, how the continuities of life after the old order, rather than the changes, might have appeared and played out to people. Just to give one very small example: when I was working on my book Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan, I was reading quite a few things on the so-called “period of civilization and enlightenment, the so-called “bunmei kaika,” especially the early 1870s and how the organization of villages, the administrative organization of rural villages had been completely transformed instead of being pretty autonomous units that paid their taxes as a community and were mostly left alone by the higher authorities so long as they pay their taxes and the façade of social order was maintained.

They became much more centrally controlled, but in the bunmei kaika/civilization and enlightenment literature, there were fake dialogues written to try to explain what was going on to people at the time. There’s a dialogue between an old peasant man who sees the village headman go by, and he calls him nanushi-san, the Tokugawa term for village headman. The guy (who is a much younger guy) said: “No, no I’m not the nanushi now. I’m the mayor.” And the old guy says: “Okay yeah, whatever.” The younger man was the nanushi, and now he’s the mayor. He’s wearing Western clothes, he’s not really so much the representative of the community as the lowest level representative of the central government.

And so the dialogue is mostly talking about the things that have changed, but the old guy doesn’t really get it, it appears, and he just can’t get beyond seeing the mayor as the old village headman. Although it was meant to be funny and didactic at the same time for the people trying to understand the changes that were going on around them, it also seemed to me the kind of thing where there were probably actually a lot of real people like that who absorbed the changes or dealt with the changes, but went on with their lives nonetheless even though to us, looking at it with a bit of hindsight, we would see this huge rupture that starting today, the old world is over and the new world has begun. That’s a long-winded way of saying that in my work, I’ve been trying to capture change and continuity as they co-exist in people’s lives.

TG: As you were describing, looking at the 19th century as a whole is a good way to talk about these continuities and locate some of those antecedents of modernity that really set the stage for a lot of the modernization of the Meiji period.

DH: Yes.

TG: With that in mind, with this whole idea of Meiji at 150, the kind of umbrella of this whole project, are we making too much of 1868?

DH: That’s a good question. The short answer is probably yes, that we are making a bit too much of it because the process of change was very gradual. And yet, I think there’s no doubt that without 1868, there is no 1871, 1877, 1889, the other sorts of landmark dates that you might think of. Certainly, the symbolism of the shōgun abdicating and the emperor nominally taking over rule of Japan is very important. People saw it as a very important milestone at the time even if it took a while for it to really register with them. So in that sense, I think there’s no doubt that 1868 is important. That’s the date I always choose in my own teaching because although you can make a case for other dates, 1868 really is big, and I think that I’ll continue to use it even if the effects weren’t felt for a much longer time.

TG: One of my previous guests was Christina Yi who’s a literary scholar, so I asked her the same question of whether 1868 is a useful date. I mean maybe we as historians tend to fetishize years.

DH: Yes.

TG: Whereas people in other disciplines point to other markers of the advent of modernity: new types of literary devices that were used, the beginning of modern literature until the 1880s. But I guess it really emphasizes looking at different things and coming up with different answers.

DH: Yes, that’s certainly true. I found doing my own archival research that because it’s often the same men in the post of village headman or mayor, the kinds of responsibilities that they had didn’t change right away. It is several years before the format of documents, the content of documents really changes noticeably, or the calligraphy changes noticeably. In the Tokugawa period, people wrote with a standardized style of calligraphy. So, there are two things you can argue: one could argue that 1868 isn’t such a dramatic moment, yet at the same time, the way that the new order seeps in even though the forms of the documents, and even though the attitude of the man writing the documents is the same, the contents are changing, and the changes become more obvious and dramatic later on. But they really do start, more or less, in 1868.

I’ve also done research on the Ainu people of Hokkaidō, and I was in the archives last year looking at how the Meiji Restoration may have been received by the Ainu. I don’t really have an answer to that so much, but I did come across a copy of an announcement that was made read to all Ainu communities. Apparently, it was supposed to be read to all Ainu communities in Hokkaidō and also in Sakhalin. And it’s really interesting that the officials who wrote up the documents said: “Okay well, up until now, you’ve been under the control of the samurai. Now, a much more important authority has taken over. That’s the emperor. And unlike the previous rulers, the emperor is benevolent, he cares about you, he’ll be looking after you, and in fact, commemorate this change for giving you these gifts of tobacco and sake and other commodities. So, a new era in that case is literally beginning now that you are subjects of the emperor.” In their case too, I think the material changes in Ainu lives probably didn’t begin for a few more years. But still, as a marker of an announcement of change, it means the document is very dramatic, whether it’s received with the same drama or not I’m not sure.

TG: Yes, I think we do fetishize 1868 as a year too much, and maybe at the risk of conflating the Meiji Restoration with all the changes that occurred during the Meiji period, but there is still a pointing back to 1868. All of those reforms are done, you say, in the spirit of 1868.

DH: Yes.

TG: The Charter Oath gets put, and that sets the tone for the rest of the period: so all of the modernization efforts, reforms of customs, process of state formation that is carried on after 1868. Like you said, without 1868, there is no 1871…

DH: Yes.

TG: …there’s no 1877, 1889.

DH: I think there though, you’ve certainly hit on one of the classic problems of writing the history of the 19th century, that the changes of the Meiji period were without a doubt revolutionary, but the coup d’état itself doesn’t seem revolutionary to us as historians. Perhaps the men who installed the emperor thought that what they were doing was revolutionary in a way, but on its own, that doesn’t seem like a revolutionary moment. Yet, I think even the fact that as soon as they took control, they implemented changes that changed the fundamental logic that underlay politics and institutions in Japan at the time.

So although they probably didn’t foresee the extent of the changes that they would eventually preside over, there were things that had to change. I’ve always been interested in the social status system and the institutions surrounding the social status system in the Tokugawa period, and then the way that they fell apart in the Meiji period. My understanding of the way that the Tokugawa system worked is that it was basically a set of institutions designed to ensure the military preparedness of the regime. And so, it was military government that the different obligations of members of different status groups were conceived in terms of helping the Tokugawa state marshal men, material, weapons, horses and all that for the purposes of making war even though the country was at peace for most of the time. The ostensibly military purposes of the obligations fulfilled by different status groups quickly lost any kind of direct and obvious connection to the military.

But still, the idea of a government based on military preparedness that people’s social groups have an obligation to provide services or labour that helps ensure that preparedness in exchange for the benevolent rule of the shōgun or his proxies I think still, as an ideology, was very much there. And so, if you get rid of the shōgun (and at that moment, it may just be a coup d’état in that you don’t want the shōgun anymore, you want to put a figurehead emperor into place), but even that act meant that the logic of all the institutions of the state somehow contributing to the military preparedness of the Tokugawa house falls apart because the Tokugawa house is no longer in control. The logic of imperial rule is not the logic of maintaining military preparedness. It’s a different kind of logic and so, although it took a while and it was a very difficult process, the samurai as a class lost their institutional reason to be. The relationship between the peasantry and the state also changed because instead of self-governing peasant villages paying their taxes, fulfilling their “feudal” obligations to the state as a community, they became individual subjects of the emperor, paying taxes to the emperor so that the imperial state can rule over the people. And I think if you go down the line, all the different status groups basically lost their purpose in 1868 even if no one involved at the time saw it or intended it to be that way.

TG: Speaking of the changing relationship between the peasant farmers and the state, in my classes, I always illustrate how central the emperor system became in the Meiji period with two quotations. One’s from a peasant farmer in 1868 who says: “Oh I’ve heard that the emperor is going to be reinstated. I wonder what the emperor’s like. I wonder if he wears red robes and a wears crown like you see on the kyōgen (stages in Kyoto).” It just really illustrates that the emperor, for most people, was somebody who lived off in Kyoto, and really had no position in their lives whatsoever. Maybe you heard a poem by him every once and again. In 1881, after an imperial procession goes through a village, there’s an account of how the peasants would go and try to collect all the pebbles that the emperor’s carriage had passed over because they thought this would bring prosperity because they were so lucky, right?

DH: Yes.

TG: I mean that really illustrates how these reforms that the state introduced and this idea of bringing the emperor down from the clouds and showing him to the people and trying to construct a state around him. It also illustrates how successful that really was and how much the position of the emperor changed for the average Japanese person.

DH: Yes.

TG: You mentioned how the Restoration might look from Hokkaidō, and especially from the Ainu population. Can you offer a few more examples on that?

DH: So when the emperor goes to Hokkaidō, his Ainu subjects are put on display for him, and I suppose, in a sense, he’s made visible to them as well. There’s a really interesting thing that occurs. Just in 1868, there was a grant of money and goods to all Ainu apparently. There was another grant when the imperial procession came to Hokkaidō, but I calculated the amount, and it comes out to well under 1 yen per person, so it’s purely symbolic, and certainly purely nominal.

So then, it made me think that there’s a kind of tension there, where the Meiji state wants the Ainu to see themselves as subjects of the emperor and maybe to incorporate the emperor into their worldview, and of course view themselves as part of a broader Japanese national community. But at the same time, there’s no denying that the Ainu really weren’t that important to the Meiji state’s project. By the time the emperor goes to Hokkaidō, Japanese sovereignty over the island of Hokkaidō is pretty secure so that idea of making the Ainu feel “Japanese” so that the Russians won’t come and take over Hokkaidō has mostly faded. Of course, there’s still Sakhalin, the Kurils, there are reasons to be worried about the Russians, but the Ainu, I think, have lost their role as important symbols of Japanese sovereignty there.

In a sense then, it’s a kind of half-heartedness I think, which may or may not apply more broadly throughout Japanese society, I’m not sure. Certainly, the idea of getting people to feel themselves connecting to the emperor, as evident in that anecdote you had about the people eagerly collecting the pebbles that his carriage passed over, which is really striking, I’ve heard other similar sorts of stories, and then the imperial portraits in schools and all that sort of thing, and the imperial processions around the country.

But at the same time, I wonder about the emperor versus other state institutions as a way of making people feel a part of that interaction. I was going to say that I’m a bit wary of latching onto the emperor as opposed to the other institutions like the military or the school system because of a sense of reluctance to actually use resources to follow through on projects to re-orient the Japanese people’s lives at that level of custom and practice. For example, in the early 1870s, there was a brief attack on “superstition.” So, there were attempts to prohibit the Obon like bon odori and things like that because they were superstitious, they were backward, they were Buddhist, and it’s part of the attack on Buddhism. There were prohibitions and maybe a little bit of enforcement, but then they stop doing that pretty quickly, and there were other examples like that.

So, if the Meiji government were really all into the idea that getting to the ordinary people were the most important thing, I’m surprised they didn’t actually spend more money on it, but rather left it to the accommodation of popular religion, but also other institutions like the military and schools. Then if you ask me what they might have done otherwise, I’m not quite sure about that.

TG: You mentioned that when you teach the Meiji Restoration, you start with 1868, and maybe continue to do so. So, when you’re teaching this, what kinds of themes do you use? How do you approach it as a topic?

DH: So, you mean 1868 per se or the broader Meiji changes?

TG: That’s the big question, right? (Laughter)

DH: Oh, yes. So when I teach the Meiji Restoration, I first look at the years leading up to 1868, and one of the questions that I address is the question of inevitability, or when was the “handwriting on the wall?” When was the beginning of the end? And I say that one can make a case (with the benefit of hindsight) that the Tenpō Famine and changes in the political economy that began much earlier but became quite evident in the 1830s and ‘40s was the beginning of a period of increasing stress on the system – not dooming it, but at least assigning stress. At the same time, I think that it probably wasn’t until 1866 that the collapse of the Tokugawa regime was really inevitable. I think the failure of the second Chōshū Expedition when the shogunate just couldn’t rally people to do its bidding was the moment in which it became obvious that the Tokugawa regime just didn’t have the authority, and it lost the legitimacy.

But up until that point, I argue to my students that nothing was inevitable. Looking at the period after 1868, I talk about themes including resistance to the new order, but at the same time, the way that even quite radical changes could be presented as or interpreted as being signs of continuity with the past. So when I talk about the so-called “period of civilization and enlightenment,” I make the point that no one was against enlightenment. Kaika was the term used most. Everyone’s in favour of it. No one’s against kaika, but it was such a flexible term that they could advocate for whatever they were advocating for, and say that that’s an example of kaika.

So in thinking about, say, men’s hairstyles, men are encouraged to cut their hair in the early 1870s. Some people, not surprisingly, interpreted this as changing from Japanese to Western style hairstyles. But conservative advocates of kaika could say: “No, no, no. It’s not Western. It’s just going back to ancient Japanese practice so that you can be a good imperial loyalist.” Somebody who thinks of the Meiji changes as going back to the past and still cuts their hair might very much look like the guy next to him who’s doing it because he thinks Japan is going to embrace Western style modernity.

There’s a flexibility of interpretation, but because everybody was in favour of kaika, it provided a kind of impetus from moving away from the practices of the immediate past. And that’s the other thing that I always emphasize, that even though many people resisted the changes, even people who were in favour of radical change often vehemently disagreed on what those changes ought to be and how they ought to be implemented. You don’t see anyone saying: “Let’s bring the shōgun back. Let’s go back to the old order.” And we see the finality of the end of the Tokugawa order and even men who wanted to keep their samurai privileges were still not talking about going back to the old political order.

That’s another theme that I emphasize and then connecting to that, I also often say that Japan was very lucky that the Tokugawa regime fell so quickly and so cleanly. When you look at, say, China from somebody born in the year of the First Opium War who could have more or less died of old age by the time the 1911 Revolution occurs, it was during this period when the Qing was forever on the verge of collapse. And yet, the Qing was so incredibly resilient. It survived a 20 year war that was the deadliest war in all of human history up until that point (the Taiping Rebellion) and still kept on going. Whatever problems China may have had are reflective of the strength and the resilience of the old order. I mean, in a way, right? If the right answer is to become more like the Western powers, then that explains why China didn’t change so quickly because the Qing was strong and resilient. The Tokugawa was not strong or resilient. I mean, it lasted a long time, but once the linchpin was taken out, the whole edifice came down pretty quickly, so no one’s looking back. Although now, historians of the Meiji period, especially now that the sesquicentennial is coming up, do emphasize the violence and the bloodshed and the deaths of the Bōshin War. But still, compared to other big ticket revolutionary moments in modern history, it’s still pretty short, relatively bloodless.

TG: Like you were saying, the Meiji period may have instituted revolutionary changes to Japanese society, politics, culture, everything, but the Meiji coup d’état itself wasn’t very revolutionary. It’s no storming of the Bastille, it’s no French Revolution, for example. But there was, like you mentioned, some bloodshed in the Bōshin Rebellion, and actually I think that my students are fascinated by that because there’s such this idea that the Meiji Restoration was a bloodless revolution…

DH: Yes.

TG:…where everyone must have been on board because they saw how clearly the writing was written on the wall, where if Japan wants to stay independent, it’s going to have to open up. But then you point out that there was the Battle of Ueno Hill, where people were holding out, the Battle of Hakodate, where people were holding out, even up until 1869.

DH: So, when I talk about that in my classes, I say that on the one hand, by this time, even the people fighting in Tōhoku against the so-called “Imperial Army” were not doing so on behalf of the Tokugawa house, and they too realized that big changes were inevitable. But they were more concerned about who might be directing those big changes. So in that sense, everybody realizes that the old order is over, and a new order is coming, but they’re not sure that they want the men from Satsuma and Chōshū to be in the driver’s seat. There are political disputes even as thousands and thousands of people are dying.

Another thing, though, about “the bloodless revolution” is that it’s also partly a projection backward from the late 19th and 20th centuries. As you know, there’s been some really interesting work done recently by Hiraku Shimoda and Michael Wert and others. They have written on the fate of the losers in the Meiji Restoration, and the process of rehabilitating people from the Aizu domain and other Tōhoku domains, or the Tokugawa shogunate itself.

In the 1890s, the first decade of the 20th century, as the 50th anniversary was coming up in 1918, it has been long enough so that many of the principals are dead or very old, but their children are still very much alive. And so, a kind of moment to take stock to recall, but also to argue that we were all fighting for Japan and that we’ve all actually been imperial loyalists the whole time, that there were no bad guys. It took a while, but the whole project was for the losers to say: “We were fighting for Japan. We weren’t disloyal.”

TG: And like you said, a lot of the resistance to the regime wasn’t necessarily yearning to re-install the previous system, but like you said, it had to do with who was going to be driving the ship, so to speak.

DH: Right, right.

TG: And I think that’s also what you see in samurai rebellions in the 1870s, the Popular Rights Movement of the 1880s, where it’s all about this question of how much popular involvement is there going to be in the new government?

DH: Yes.

TG: Of course, since we’re in Canada, the great Canadian historian of Japan E.H. Norman called it “a failed revolution” for that very reason, is that there is this attempt to create a more democratic regime that then gets forced out by an autocratic Meiji government. I don’t know if we’d go that far.

DH: Well, one of the things that I find really interesting about that kind of issue is that if you look at the kinds of people, kinds of commoners who got involved in the Imperial Loyalists’ Movement in the 1860s, they are demographically very similar to the kinds of commoners in the countryside who got involved in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement in the 1870s and ‘80s. They’re captured in Shimazaki Tōson’s novel (great novel) Before the Dawn, which takes the story from the Restoration period up through the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement.

Anyways, it’s very similar types of people: community leaders, village headman types or well-to-do peasant types. And I think for them, when they were talking about democracy, or actually let me go back to their fathers who were imperial loyalists, I think they saw that their ambition for their imperial loyalism was to be part of the project of creating a new order, that they had maybe lost faith in the old order. But they saw themselves as people who should be part of building something new. They wanted to be involved in building something new, and as community leaders, they were used to being in that position.

And so, many of them got involved with things like Hirata nativism and the idea of imperial loyalism. Then after the Meiji Restoration, although they find that many of the slogans that the young radicals (who helped overthrow the Tokugawa regime) were using like sonno jōi (“revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”), were very similar, I think that the logic behind them actually quite different. And so the leaders of the early Meiji regime paid a lot of lip service to the old imperial loyalists, the nativist types, making the Ministry of Rites the highest ministry for a while and then it very quickly gets downgraded. But they weren’t really on board with the ideology behind it.

I think many of the men and women (mostly men, but some women who had been involved in the loyalist movement in the ‘60s) came to understand or came to feel betrayed that they were going to be part of this wonderful new project, but actually they get so shunted aside. And maybe the people who were creating the new regime weren’t really interested in having them participate at all. Some of them become embittered reactionaries like Matsuo Taseko in Anne Walthall’s wonderful book Weak Body of a Useless Woman. But then others, or maybe the sons of these others then get attracted to the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, which is all about being part of this nation-building project. So, the nation-building project of the Hirata nativists is 180 degrees different from the nation-building project of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, but they’re very similar in the sense of men in the countryside who are used to being community leaders wanting to feel that they’re empowered to be part of this new nation-building project. And so I think there, there’s that kind of similar longing. That’s where I would disagree with E.H. Norman, with all due respect, that for them, I don’t think it ever really was about democracy. I mean, democracy for the, but not democracy for everybody other than them. So I agree with him that they wanted to be part of this nation-building project, but I also think that in a way, the Meiji state does figure out a way to co-opt them. By the time the 19th century’s coming to an end, Japan is not very democratic, but it’s probably about as democratic as these guys actually wanted it to be. So in that sense, it’s not a suppressed revolution at all. It’s a successful co-optation of people who were willing to be co-opted.

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:

David Howell, interview with Tristan Grunow, The Meiji at 150 Podcast, podcast audio, December 1, 2017. https://meijiat150.podbean.com/e/episode-8-dr-david-howell-harvard-university/.


The Meiji at 150 Podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Tristan Grunow, with editorial assistance from Joshua Linkous. Transcripts by Kelly Chan.