Roots of Samurai Rage I
Perry and the "Opening" of Japan
Like if you want using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
In the first part of the 19th Century, Japan was a place of wonder, mystery, and peril for most of the world outside of East Asia. Japanese law restricted the Dutch and Portuguese to tiny enclaves at Yedo and Nagasaki, allowing them to trade only a few token goods such as silk and bamboo for silver. Contact with Japanese without explicit permission outside these enclaves was strictly forbidden and punishable by death. The safety of sailors in the lucrative China trade—which began for Americans within weeks of the end of their war for independence against Britain—had been a cause for presidential concern for decades, as was the safety of New England whalers who ventured into the Pacific. Before 1854, the Japanese dreadfully maltreated, jailed, executed, or forced American seamen who washed ashore in Japan into anti-Christian rituals.
19th Century Japan was an insular society stuck with a medieval social structure and a somewhat primitive government
On 8 July 1853, an American naval squadron under Captain (later Commodore) Matthew Perry arrived off Japan near modern Yokosuka. His squadron pointedly refused Japanese instructions (possibly shouted in Dutch, but it is unclear) to leave for Nagasaki. Instead, Perry threatened the Japanese with violence, and presented letters (translated into Chinese and Dutch) with offers of friendship to a local representative of the Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force against the Barbarians in English, (Sei-i Taishogun, shortened to shogun in Japanese), and sailed away on 17 July, with a promise to return within a year.
Japan was aware of Perry’s mission: their Dutch contacts at Nagasaki had forewarned them of it. After watching the collapse of China for half a century at the hands of European “interests,” the Tokugawas didn’t see the Americans as any different and believed they would have forced their way onto Japanese soil regardless of their reception.
Also aware of the Perry mission, a Russian fleet arrived at Nagasaki on 12 August 1853 with letters inviting diplomatic contact. While waiting for an answer from the shogun, the Crimean War broke out on 16 October 1853. Perry returned 13 February 1854 bearing extravagant gifts (including a miniature locomotive and a few hundred yards of track) for the Komei Emperor. Perry negotiated with Tokugawa representative Hayashi Akira, and hammered out the Convention of Kanagawa, a treaty of mutual recognition that specifically forbade the Japanese abuse of shipwrecked sailors. The principals signed the treaty on 31 March 1854. Because of this turn of events and their concerns about an expanded Russian presence in Asia, the British hastily assembled a naval squadron and a few diplomats, arriving in Nagasaki on 7 September 1854. The Convention of Kanagawa took formal effect on 30 September 1855, after the US Congress ratified it and the Emperor put his chop on it.
Not that Japan was unaware of the outside world; they just wanted nothing to do with it. And in this case, the “Japanese Empire” was simply a collection of islands sort-of ruled by the leading warlord’s clan. Oh, yes, there was the Emperor who, unknown to the world outside Japan, was largely a powerless puppet of the shogun’s clan.
And that was the problem with Perry’s “opening” of Japan.
The leading strongman in the Tokugawa clan had been the shoguns for over 200 years, and the other clans were growing restive. First the Americans, then the Russians, then the British showed up with ships and diplomats and missionaries, uninvited, and the shogun failed to keep these hairy barbarians away! What an insult to the sacred soil of Japan, troubling the serene Emperor! While the other clans were aware of China’s issues, they did not all agree with the Tokugawas that more contact with the outside world was an answer…or at least, that’s what they said.
Japanese Culture Lesson #1 for Today: Omote-Ura.
Omote (the public face) and ura (the private face) are twin concepts that apply to almost any aspect of Japan or life in Japan. Because Japanese culturally don’t like to discuss unpleasant things, this is how Japanese hide their true feelings (ura) behind their public pronouncements (omote). Here, the rival clans were happy to have a pretext to complain and, perhaps, to unseat the Tokugawas. The rivalry had been simmering since the first Tokugawa shogun in 1603, at the end of a long series of civil wars and a failed invasion of Korea. The incursions of the Americans and Europeans—France soon piled on—caused both wonder and resentment. Japanese marveled at the many technological advancements shown to them and resented that feudal Japan could not achieve them without outside help. The ruling samurai, especially, both wondered and resented.
While the Tokugawas had ordered steam vessels from the Dutch before Perry arrived, it's unclear how readily a land whose mathematics lacked zero would have accepted this (for them) technological marvel. While Japan had large stocks of coal domestically, their iron industry was stuck in a pre-industrial state. They could make coke, but could not make a crucible larger than a few pounds. They made excellent steel in five-pound blooms, but no more. They knew firearms, but not fulminate of mercury percussion caps, and even flintlocks were rare, and their cannons had not advanced beyond Europe’s 15th Century standards. There was only one hard-surface road in all of Japan, and only the Emperor could use it, and there were few wheeled vehicles. The locomotive and its tracks Perry brought remained the only one in Japan for decades, because Japan simply lacked the heavy equipment needed to prepare track beds for useful trains.
Yet, the ever-increasing number of Europeans in Japan in the 19th Century only saw the omote of the Japanese, the appreciative, inquisitive fast-learners trading shellac and tea, coal and silver for steel plants, ships and, above all, training. The foreigners knew of the civil wars and riots that followed Perry’s arrival, but knew little of the why, other than this faction didn’t like the modernization that faction did. It would be the early 20th Century, when more people knew enough about Japanese language and culture to appreciate what the ura of their hosts meant: the West showed up at all the wrong and right time in Japan’s history.
Japanese Culture Lesson #2 for Today: Gekokujō.
During Japan’s Sengoku Jidai (Warring States period) between roughly 1467 and 1603, there emerged a cultural phenomenon one might expect almost anywhere except socially stratified Japan. Gekokujō—translated as “overthrowing or surpassing one's superiors,” “the lower rules the higher,” and “the low overcomes the high”—took hold in a time marked by domestic chaos, repeated famines, earthquakes, plagues and general lawlessness. Groups of farmers, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, minor nobles and ronin (masterless samurai) banded together and rose against cruel or indifferent daimyos (lords) when there simply wasn’t anyone who could stop them.
Gradually, this custom of taking power from leaders because of disputes large and small, religious and secular, economic and land-driven, somehow became something of a sacred obligation to one’s ancestors. No matter how successful these insurrections were (and many of them did what they meant to do), there was always someone waiting for a pretext to knock off whoever won the last round of bloodletting. Further, given how aloof the emperor was from everyone else, every rebellion could always be justified as a sacred obligation to the Emperor because he was being misled by his councilors.
Gekokujō gave the Western axiom “one man’s rebel is another’s patriot” real meaning. It also made governance in the archipelago an eternal and deadly game of king-of-the-hill. With gekokujō always threatening the leadership, it's difficult to imagine how Japanese leaders decided anything like foreign policy or modernization. Whenever anyone in any authority needed to make momentous decisions, gekokujō traditions caused violence to erupt in Japan…until the mid-19th Century, when Perry brought that damned toy loco for the Emperor and a few domains could afford to buy those guns from the Europeans.
Perry didn’t open Pandora’s Box; he destroyed it.
No matter how much the traditionalists resisted the coming of the steam engines and factories and electric lights the Westerners brought, and regardless of how the new agricultural methods eased famine, Japan was still a caveman being shown to a spaceship. Appreciate it some might, but understand it they did not, and would not for another generation or more. Fish and bicycle analogies don’t fit because Japan always knew that bike was out there; they simply didn’t know what to do with it until they developed not just feet and hands, but a sense of balance and direction. The former were easy compared to the latter, as the world would soon discover, and neither Japan nor the rest of the world would be the same after.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study Of Miscalculation And Folly
Japan’s coming of technological age caused a great deal of social upheaval in Japan that would culminate in a challenge to the entire world in 1941, but the seeds of Japan’s defeat were sewn in the 1850s.
Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction
This article is the first step in this book, which no one should expect to see before 2027.
And Finally...
On 12 July:
1690: The battle of the Boyne River close to the town of Drogheda takes place in Ireland. It was Stuart King James II’s last (personal) bid to reclaim the crown of England from William III of Nassau/Orange, part of the Williamite War that ended that October, and the Nine Year’s War that would last until 1697, and is considered by some to be the first global war.
1984: Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first female vice-presidential candidate for a major American political party in San Francisco, California. First elected to Congress in 1978, Ferraro and presidential candidate Walter Mondale went on to be decisively defeated by Ronald Reagan and George Bush that November. The first successful female VP candidate was Kamala Harris in 2020.
And today is ETCH A SKETCH DAY, commemorating the beginning of Etch A Sketch toys by the Ohio Art Company, in Bryan, Ohio in 1960. I remember my Etch A Sketch; could barely draw a straight line with it.