TO STAND WITH THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History. By Mark Ravina. 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.
Reviewed by Frederick R. Dickinson in Pacific Affairs, forthcoming
Correspondence from Book Author
I was disappointed and confused by Frederick R. Dickinson’s review of my book. First, Dickinson laments my endorsement of Samuel Huntington. I do briefly engage Huntington in my conclusion, but only to dismiss him as “almost comically wrong” (212). Dickinson suggests, however, that I endorse Huntington when I describe Tokugawa-Romanov relations as a “clash of worldviews.” Dickinson seems to have confused “clash of worldviews” with Huntington’s signature phrase “clash of civilizations.” The former is a generic phrase unrelated to Huntington. Indeed, a JSTOR search points everywhere except Huntington because “clash of worldviews” is absent from Huntington’s famous “Clash of Civilizations” essay (1993) and book (1996). My observation that Tokugawa and Romanov officials “clash[ed]” because they lacked a common language of statecraft builds on Japanese sources, not Huntington’s lamentable reboot of Toynbee.
Second, Dickinson faults me for the “‘Western challenge, Asian response’ framework of yesteryear.” That is mistaken. The hallmark of the “impact-response” paradigm lies not in the observation that East-Asian and Western worldviews “clashed,” nor in the quotidian noun “response,” but in Orientalism: the sense, to quote Paul Cohen, that a “dynamic and modern West” awakened a somnolent East Asia, “stuck in the past.” I reject that approach, first, by noting the dynamism of Tokugawa reforms, and second, by comparing Western imperialism to other empires. I argue that the Meiji Restoration was not a response to a uniquely dynamic Western impact but resembled Japan’s engagement with the Sui and Tang empires: “As in the 600s and 700s, statesmen were concerned with a military threat: how could Japan resist a powerful and expansionist empire?” (207). Dickinson “quotes” that sentence, but replaces China with “the West,” thereby creating the reified “Western-centric” dichotomy he then decries. Perhaps Dickinson’s argument is that any “response” to a “military threat” denies Japanese agency and invokes the “impact-response” framework. But such an interpretation would find “Western-centric visions” in strange places. When the daimyo of Mito, Tokugawa Nariaki (1800–1860), coined the influential phrase naiyū gaikan (“domestic malaise and foreign threats”) he was advocating radical reform, not 1960s American historiography.
Finally, Dickinson faults my phrase “radical nostalgia” as a “compound hybrid tailor-made for Japan.” He overlooks how I use that neologism to describe non-Japanese cases, including the early American Republic’s celebration of ancient Rome (10, n. 14). Dickinson also rejects Andrew Gordon’s “imperial democracy” because it “accentuat[es] Japanese difference.” Here I simply disagree. Terms crafted to explore a specific place and time, such as Eugen Weber’s “internal colonialism,” can enhance comparative historical research. And wouldn’t eliminating neologisms constrain our vocabulary and reinforce “Western-centric visions?”
I have learned much from Dickinson’s work, but I found his review rather strange. Is Tang China part of “the West”? Are all accounts of cultural or ideological “clash” somehow “dichotomies” or endorsements of Huntington? Perhaps Dickinson hoped to contrast my book with his own forthcoming global history. I look forward to Dickinson’s book and would welcome a comparison of global histories of Japan, but it should explore real contrasts rather than contrived differences.
Mark Ravina
Emory University, Atlanta, USA