Through The Fire
Three Things I Have Learned About Japanese History So Far
By Ryan Masaaki Yokota
Saturday, July 22, 2006

Since I’ve been studying Japanese history, I’ve been amazed at the way in which history is largely a matter open to debate. Sure there are some “facts,” such as dates of events, and other such historical details, but one thing that people do not consider much is the way in which perspectives on historical issues, even perspectives that had been considered as standards of “truth” for decades or even hundreds of years are open to reinterpretation or even outright rejection.  Japanese history is no stranger to such realities, and has actually produced some truly amazing scholarship in the last few decades. While I am still rather early in my studies, I felt that it might be of interest to people if I shared a few of these perspectives, as some folks may not have heard about these issues before. Though I lack the space to go into too much depth here, I’d like to at least touch briefly on three debates about Japanese history currently going on today:.

1. “Japan” and the “Japanese” were created terms
A lot of casual observers and even learned historians have a way of casting their eye backwards on the territory that currently makes up the nation-state of Japan, and call it “Japan.” Yet even as recently as the 19th century, the concept of Japan was very different from what we understand today, and the further back we go, the more conflicted the sense of what the “Japanese” were becomes. At the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, for example, the southern islands of the Ryukyu Kingdom comprised a separate state that had its own government and cultural ethos. In the north, almost all of present day Hokkaido was known as Ezochi, and had only a decade or so previously been brought under direct control of the Tokugawa bakufu. Additionally, many of the domains in the bakufu system exercised relative autonomy in internal affairs and used the term “kuni,” or “nation” to refer to themselves, suggesting that they often saw themselves as separate from the bakufu.

Differences between classes were very large and marked by dress, language, and cultural pursuits. Even further, the differences between far-flung regions in Japan were so stark that when people from various regions met, they couldn’t even understand the dialects that they were speaking to each other. All of these differences had to be overcome in order to create the current concept of Japan and it is very hard to argue that most people living a few hundred years ago held a personal sense of identity as “Japanese.” Even when considering the ancestors of today’s Nikkei and Okinawan populations, one can hardly say that their sense of a “Japanese” identity was free from conflict.

2. Japan was not a closed, feudal country prior to Western contact For decades, many historians have considered Japan to have been a closed feudal country prior to Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy that ended the Tokugawa bakufu and brought Japan into the “modern” era. But both the argument that Japan was “closed” and the argument that Japan was “feudal” have been reappraised in recent years. In terms of the policy of sakoku, or the idea of a closed country that excluded foreigners, this policy was supposedly in place during most of the Tokugawa period. Yet in actuality, while the Japanese had restricted trade with other European nations by this time, they still traded with the Dutch in Nagasaki, and still had significant trading relations with China, Korea, and the Ryukyu Kingdom throughout the Tokugawa period.

ADVERTISEMENT

In considering this, we can see that the idea of Japan as a closed country is a very Eurocentric position that doesn’t give enough credit to Japanese relations with other Asian countries. Through a review of these relationships historians have begun to rethink the idea that Japan was closed to foreign influence, to show that Japan, in fact, stayed quite informed about events in the rest of the world.

Indeed, even during the Tokugawa period, Japan was well on the way towards a form of modernization closer to what we would recognize today. By the time of Perry’s visit to Japan, significant strides towards a form of industrial activity had been taken in the countryside and in the cities. Significant educated and literate parts of the population engaged in social interactions in literary and cultural circles that crossed, transcended and in some ways contested rigid class restrictions. Forms of peasant rebellions served as earlier expressions of protest against unfair domainal taxation. And even further, the growth of large and complex cities presaged later patterns of development. All told, the two and a half centuries of the Tokugawa period are considered by many to be a significant period of change and complexity which many popular depictions, especially those that seek to essentialize Japan, have tended to gloss over.

3. The idea of a homogenous Japan is a recent post-war creation. For most of Japanese history, there have been significant migratory flows that helped to create the “racial” stock of what comprises the Japanese today. Many have argued that in ancient times the Jomon period people, who are considered to be the ancestors of the Ainu and Okinawan people today, were pushed north and south by the Yayoi people, who are considered to have been a different kind of people that migrated from the Korean Peninsula. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that the Japanese imperial court originally came from Korea. Even further, during the 1300s-1600s, both Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom were part of a flourishing trade network throughout East and Southeast Asia, with linkages that went as far as South Asia and the Middle East. Concurrent with these trading networks were a range of migratory movements, which brought Chinese, Koreans, and other kinds of people into Japan, many of whom settled and integrated into local communities.

Later, in the 20th century, historian Eiji Oguma has argued that the Japanese pre-1945 state had a different kind of perspective on ethnic purity than today, which allowed for the integration of colonized Asian people into a sense of a “Japanese” identity. While he argues that this perspective was used to buttress imperial efforts to colonize the rest of Asia, it does at least point out the way in which the Japanese conception of ethnicity was not static, but in fact changed over time. In the post-1945 period, however, fears that an influx of migrants into a shattered post-war economy would alter the “Japanese” character spurred new laws in 1945 that stripped Koreans and Chinese who lived in Japan of their Japanese citizenship. To this day these people have restricted rights in Japan despite having lived there for almost a hundred years. Concurrent with the passage of these laws, scholars sought to buttress the idea that the Japanese had been constituted as a homogenous single “race” from time immemorial. This nihonjinron, or theory of Japanese-ness, continues to be popular today.
These are just three of the more interesting debates that are currently being discussed in academia today, with important implications for how we see Japanese history and more importantly, for how we can see ourselves. While the truth of any position is still open to debate, I feel that history is something that we all can gain from, and hope to discuss these and similar issues with you in the future.

________________

Ryan Masaaki Yokota is a Yonsei/Nisei of Japanese and Okinawan descent born and raised in Southern California. He is currently a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in Japanese History at the University of Chicago who writes from Yokohama, Japan. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.