Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiv, 312 pp. (Graphs, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-532771-7.
When Mark Ravina’s last monograph appeared in 2004 (The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), it tapped into a wellspring of public interest in nineteenth-century Japan generated by the 2003 Edward Zwick film of the same name (starring Tom Cruise). A political/intellectual history of the Meiji Restoration is unlikely to reach the blockbuster status of the Saigō biography. But To Stand with the Nations of the World is even better timed than The Last Samurai. Published just before our current sesquicentennial year of the advent of Meiji, the volume has already received recognition in numerous North American commemorations devoted to Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation. The relative dearth of English-language analyses of Meiji over the past year (compared to a plethora of publications and reprints in Japanese) will, fortuitously, guarantee a wide readership for this thoughtful study.
One of the most dramatic glimpses of a newly integrated nineteenth-century world (an era long identified as the quintessence of “globalization”), the Meiji transformation continues, surprisingly, to receive significantly less than global treatment. As Ravina aptly notes, analyses remain absorbed by tales of a nineteenth-century polity “opened” to a “modern Western world,” in stark contrast with the “isolation” and “tradition” of the Tokugawa era (4). Reflecting what Ravina describes as the “conceptual hegemony” of a Western international order (212), such characterizations maintain a stark separation between the West and the rest and valorize modernization as an almost exclusively Western invention. Modernization beyond Western borders often appears as little more than imitation. Indeed, among the more fashionable recent English-language characterizations of nineteenth-century Japanese empire-building has been the idea of “mimetic imperialism” (see, for example, Peter Duus and Robert Eskildsen).
To Stand with the Nations of the World accentuates the deep roots of reform in Japanese history while underscoring how such reformist energies have long engaged with larger global processes. According to Ravina, Meiji marked the third dramatic episode of Japanese transformation amidst extraordinary global change. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Japan fashioned a unified polity following the powerful political, economic, social, and cultural example set by Sui (581–618 CE) and Tang (618–907 CE) China. From the 1400s to early 1600s, a remarkable projection of Japanese commercial (pirates and traders) and military power (Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, 1592–1598 CE) joined new expansionist energies in the West to define the Age of Discovery. In the nineteenth century, Meiji statesmen constructed a modern polity as part of a larger global shift from multi-ethnic empires to a new era of nation-states.
To challenge the artificial distinction between “traditional” Tokugawa and “Western” Meiji, Ravina devotes equal attention to both eras, accentuating Tokugawa innovation while underscoring Meiji conservatism. Chapters 1 through 3 describe how Ieyasu and his successors achieved over two centuries of peace through elaborate new domestic institutions and a sophisticated network of ambiguous borders. When challenged by a technologically superior West in the nineteenth century, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, introduced an array of modern, centralized systems of administration that largely anticipated Meiji reforms.
Chapters 4 through 6 highlight how the dramatic changes of early Meiji were grounded in earlier innovations and well-established, principally Chinese, practices. The early Meiji regime, Ravina argues, was surprisingly averse to conflict. And some of the most dramatic reforms—the dissolution of feudal domains, establishment of modern ministries, adoption of a civil code, and the incorporation of Hokkaido—looked to Japan’s Tang-Chinese inspired transformation of the eighth century and consciously appropriated terminology from that era.
Despite his acute understanding of the conceptual problem, Ravina’s defiance of Western-centric visions of the Meiji transformation remains timid. He perceptively notes that late Tokugawa and early Meiji leaders were “strikingly untroubled” by imagined contradictions between “Japanese” and “Western” convention, or by the apparent “hybridity” of nineteenth-century life (8). Yet dichotomies abound in this volume. In a surprising nod to Samuel Huntington, Ravina characterizes Japan’s nineteenth-century confrontation with Western power as a “clash of worldviews” (62). And he invents the hybrid compounds “radical nostalgia” and “cosmopolitan chauvinism” to describe Japanese reform. Like other compound hybrids tailor-made for Japan (“Taisho democracy,” “imperial democracy,” etc.), these have the unfortunate effect of accentuating Japanese difference. Added to Ravina’s conviction that Meiji statesmen were most fundamentally “concerned with a military threat” from the West (207), we have clear echoes here of the “Western challenge, Asian response” framework of yesteryear.
To Stand with the Nations of the World does not obliterate enduring Western-centric visions of the Meiji transformation. But by accentuating a robust history of Japanese reform and global engagement, Ravina offers important clues to how a truly global history of change in nineteenth-century Japan might look. We get the distinct sense here that Japan was intimately involved with the nineteenth-century global project to define a new political entity—the nation-state. And we look forward to learning from future studies just how important Japan’s contributions were to this momentous global enterprise.
Frederick R. Dickinson
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA