The Challenge of Japan
Unlike most of
China’s neighbors, Japan had for centuries resisted incorporation
into the Sinocentric world order. Situated on an archipelago some
one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing,
Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in
isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic near homogeneity and
an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people’s divine
ancestry, Japan nurtured an almost religious commitment to its
unique identity.
At the apex of
Japan’s society and its own world order stood the Japanese Emperor,
a figure conceived, like the Chinese Son of Heaven, as an
intermediary between the human and the divine. Taken literally,
Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited that Japanese
Emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess, who gave
birth to the first Emperor and endowed his descendants with an
eternal right to rule. Thus Japan, like China, conceived of itself
as far more than an ordinary state.32 The title “Emperor” itself—insistently
displayed on Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese
court—was a direct challenge to the Chinese world order. In China’s
cosmology, mankind had only one Emperor, and his throne was in
China.33
If Chinese
exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire,
Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island
nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being
dominated by it. The Chinese sense of uniqueness asserted that
China was the one true civilization, and invited barbarians to the
Middle Kingdom to “come and be transformed.” The Japanese attitude
assumed a unique Japanese racial and cultural purity, and declined
to extend its benefits or even explain itself to those born outside
its sacred ancestral bonds.34
For long periods,
Japan had withdrawn from foreign affairs almost entirely, as if
even intermittent contacts with outsiders would compromise Japan’s
unique identity. To the extent that Japan participated in an
international order, it did so by means of its own tribute system
in the Ryukyu Islands (modern-day Okinawa and the surrounding
islands) and various kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula. With a
certain irony, Japan’s leaders borrowed this most Chinese of
institutions as a means of asserting their independence from
China.35
Other Asian peoples
accepted the protocol of the Chinese tribute system, labeling their
trade as “tribute” to gain access to Chinese markets. Japan refused
to conduct its trade with China in the guise of tribute. It
insisted on at least equality to China, if not superiority. Despite
the natural ties of trade between China and Japan,
seventeenth-century discussions over bilateral trade deadlocked
because neither side would honor the protocol required by the
other’s pretensions of world-centrality. 36
If China’s sphere of
influence waxed and waned along its long frontiers in accordance
with the power of the empire and the surrounding tribes, Japan’s
leaders came to conceive of their security dilemma as a much
starker choice. Possessing a sense of superiority as pronounced as
the Chinese court’s but perceiving their margin of error as far
smaller, Japanese statesmen looked warily west—to a continent
dominated by a succession of Chinese dynasties, some of which
extended their writ into Japan’s closest neighbor, Korea—and tended
to see an existential challenge. Japanese foreign policy thus
alternated, at times with startling suddenness, between aloofness
from the Asian mainland and audacious attempts at conquest geared
toward supplanting the Sinocentric order.
Japan, like China,
encountered Western ships wielding unfamiliar technology and
overwhelming force in the mid-nineteenth century—in Japan’s case,
the 1853 landing of the American Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black
ships.” But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion
as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and
overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western
powers’ rise. (In Japan, this conclusion may have been assisted by
the fact that foreign ideas were not seen as connected to the
question of opium addiction, which Japan largely managed to avoid.)
In 1868, the Meiji Emperor, in his charter oath, announced Japan’s
resolve: “Knowledge shall be sought from all over the world, and
thereby the foundations of the imperial rule shall be
strengthened.”37
Japan’s Meiji
Restoration and drive to master Western technology opened the door
to stunning economic progress. As Japan developed a modern economy
and a formidable military apparatus, it began to insist on the
prerogatives afforded the Western great powers. Its governing elite
concluded that, in the words of Shimazu Nariakira, a
nineteenth-century lord and leading advocate of technological
modernization, “If we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we
do not, we will be dominated.”38
As early as 1863, Li
Hongzhang concluded that Japan would become China’s principal
security threat. Even before the Meiji Restoration, Li wrote of the
Japanese response to the Western challenge. In 1874, after Japan
seized on an incident between Taiwanese tribesmen and a shipwrecked
Ryukyu Islands crew to mount a punitive expedition, 39 he wrote of
Japan:
Her power is daily expanding, and her ambition is not small. Therefore she dares to display her strength in eastern lands, despises China, and takes action by invading Taiwan. Although the various European powers are strong, they are still 70,000 li away from us, whereas Japan is as near as the courtyard or the threshold and is prying into our emptiness and solitude. Undoubtedly, she will become China’s permanent and great anxiety.40
Viewing the lumbering
giant to its west with its increasingly hollow pretensions to world
supremacy, the Japanese had begun to conceive of supplanting China
as the predominant Asian power. The struggle between these
competing claims came to a head in a country at the intersection of
its larger neighbors’ ambitions—Korea.