What makes the legacies of the Japanese sixteenth-century encounter with Europeans so important is that it coincided with the final years of the Warring States period and the birth of the age of unification (1560–1603). During this time, three ambitious warlords sought to unify the realm. At roughly the same time that the Portuguese strengthened their hold over Nagasaki, a young warrior in central Japan began his improbable climb to supremacy. Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), first of the ‘three great unifiers’, began the process of breaking down the culture of lawlessness and medieval regionalism to unify the realm under a single, though never completely hegemonic, shogunal authority. Indeed, none of the three unifiers accomplished complete unification, as daimyô continued to assert political and economic control in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nonetheless, their achievements defined Japanese politics for generations to come. The modern Japanese nation was, to be sure, a product of modern forces that swept the world in the nineteenth century, but it was also a product of the brutal labour of the warlord unifiers, as they struggled to reassemble the pieces in the aftermath of the Warring States period and cobble together a unified realm.

Japonius Tyrannus

Oda Nobunaga was forged in the crucible of Warring States violence (Figure 10). The forging of his character began in his youth. In 1551, his father, Nobuhide (1510–51), lord of Owari domain, died suddenly of disease. When the prayers of Buddhists had failed to save his father, Nobunaga, according to the Jesuit Luís Fróis, locked the monks in a temple, encouraged them to pray harder, and shot some of them with harquebuses from the outside to provide incentive. ‘They had better pray to their idols with greater devotion for their own lives’, he reportedly said. The Jesuit’s account is surely embellished, riddled with his own prejudices about the ‘pagan’ religion, but Nobunaga’s harsh treatment of Buddhist sectarians later became infamous. At his father’s funeral, he impetuously ‘proceeded to the altar, suddenly grabbed a handful of incense powder, threw it on the altar, and left’, leading some in the Oda family to believe he was overly eccentric and unfit to rule Owari domain.

The transition from court to samurai rule permanently reconfigured Japan’s political and cultural landscape. Samurai notions of honour gave rise to a society that balanced notions of competition with collaboration, one that has detectable sociological resonances to this day. Early samurai, such as those who fought against the thirteenth-century invading Mongols, sought honour and reward through acts of heroism, while later samurai, domesticated through years of vassalage, had to discipline their pursuit of honour to concrete public needs. As with the Mongol invasions, samurai fought valiantly in order to better their personal reputations, and this established a culture of entrepreneurialism. But, countering this trend, vassalage encouraged the organizational conformity that evolved into Japan’s famous tendency towards corporatism. Throughout their centuries of rule, samurai balanced the pursuit of honour with their collective obligations, making them enduring heroic figures for many around the world.

Samurai sought documentation of their success in battle through witness reports, just as Meiji entrepreneurs sought visible financial successes. The samurai Takezaki Suenaga, before engaging Mongol ‘pirates’, reportedly exclaimed, ‘The way of the bow and arrow is to do what is worthy of reward.’ Samurai found ways of building individual reputations within a constricting vassalage system, just as contemporary Japanese have found means of individual creative expression within Japan’s stifling corporate culture. In some respects, this is one of the most enduring legacies of samurai rule in Japanese society.

In the 1930s, Japan’s culture of fascism shaped its politics, culture, and foreign affairs. Military adventurism in Manchuria and political assassinations at home led to the fall of party politics and the rise of military governance, wherein generals, admirals, and their lieutenants occupied top cabinet posts. After 1931, the Kwantung Army conquered much of Manchuria and Tokyo eventually accepted these territorial gains as fait accompli. The birth of Japan’s autarkic empire (Map 3) paralleled these military victories; incensed with irksome diplomacy, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and most of its international agreements. With a full-fledged invasion of China after 1937, Japan waged the so-called ‘Greater East Asian War’, eventually attacking Pearl Harbor (1941) and drawing the US into the conflict. For both sides, racism, cultural misunderstanding, and sheer mercilessness characterized the fighting. The historical currents that led to the dramatic collapse of party politics and the rise of militarism had their roots in imperial nationalism and the Meiji Constitution, which had isolated the military from the turgid malaise of parliamentary politics. Japan’s military always stood beyond the political fray and in the popular imagination easily transcended the corruption of liberal economics and politics, which became strongly associated with the excesses of US individualism and greed.

The Pacific War exacted a heavy toll on all involved. Millions died in the Pacific theatre as a result of Japanese expansionism; domestically the Japanese, though initially enthralled with the exuberant culture of total war, began suffering through the so-called ‘dark valley’ as defeat loomed on the horizon. By 1945, the US and its Allies had crippled Japan’s domestic industrial and military machinery, and with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan ‘unconditionally surrendered’. The seven-year US occupation of Japan that followed the war witnessed profound and widespread changes in Japanese political institutions, law enforcement and defence, education, economics and popular culture, the legacies of which have shaped Japanese society throughout the post-war years.

The Relevance of Japanese History

To this day, Japan’s national ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the West and why, put simply, the modern world looks the way that it does. It was not China’s great Qing dynasty (1644–1911), nor India’s sprawling Maratha empire (1674–1818), that confronted the US and European powers during the nineteenth century. Rather, it was Japan, a country, at 377,915 km2 (145,913 mi²), about the size of the US state of Montana (Map 1). Not only did this small island country hold the Great Powers of the nineteenth century at bay, it emulated them and competed with them at their own global ambitions, as contemptible as those often were. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, after the Pacific War, Japan rebuilt and became a model for industrialization outside the US and Europe, with wildly successful companies such as Honda and Toyota, now household names. Soccer mums in the US drive Toyotas, as do Jihadists in Afghanistan. But today, Japan finds itself in the eye of a different global storm. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Japan is embroiled in concerns over industrial economies and climate change because, as an island country with extensive coastal development, it has much to lose from rising sea levels and the increasing number of violent storms in the Pacific. Japan remains at the centre of the modern world and its most serious challenges.

To help us acclimatize to the pace of Japan’s history, take the lives of two prominent figures. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), a prideful samurai born in Osaka and raised on the southern island of Kyushu, exemplified many of Japan’s early experiences in the modern age. In one lifetime, he watched, not as a passive observer but as one of its principal architects, his country transformed from a hotchpotch of domains to a nation with vast military reach and global economic aspirations. As a samurai urchin patrolling the dusty streets of Nakatsu domain, Fukuzawa entertained lofty dreams of shattering the chains of backward Confucian practices and travelling the world in order to discover what made the Western world tick.

Preface

While I was writing the final chapters of this book in the autumn of 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan smashed into the Philippines with all its fury. With sustained winds at 315 kilometres per hour (195 miles per hour) and highs hitting 380 kph, many observers called it the most powerful storm ever recorded. As people in the Philippines fended for their lives, I was writing a chapter on Japan’s ‘bubble economy’ and ‘lost decade’, covering the stagnant years between 1990 and 2010. But the Pacific ‘monster storm’ changed my plans. I had seen enough. I had already decided to cover the tragic events of 11 March 2011, when Japan suffered the ‘triple disaster’ of a catastrophic mega-thrust earthquake and tsunami, and then a dangerous nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Watching Super Typhoon Haiyan throttle the Philippines made me realize that the symptoms of climate change, not tepid economic growth and disgruntled youth, or even international disputes over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, represented the most serious challenge facing East Asia. In the end, I scrapped the last chapter and drafted a new one that included a history of climate change, sea level rise, Pacific super storms, and natural disasters in the context of what many geologists have come to call the Anthropocene Epoch. It represents an important departure from the conventional manner of telling Japanese history – that is, it required fully embracing the idea that the physical islands called ‘Japan’ are geologically and historically unstable.

In January 1868, on the battlefields of Fushimi and Toba, the Edo bakufu succumbed to the Satchô alliance. After some 268 restive years, the losers at the Battle of Sekigahara (1600), the ‘outside’ domains that the shoguns had kept so carefully under their thumbs, finally exacted their revenge. If the architects of the Meiji Restoration had extolled the ‘expel the barbarians, revere the emperor’ doctrine in the early 1860s, however, the reality of governance – and the reality of the threat posed by the Great Powers and their crippling ‘unequal treaties’ – made such patriotic slogans untenable as actual policy. The radical imperial nationalism of the early nineteenth century surrendered to a realpolitik engagement with the US and Europe, in which modernization became the preoccupation of Japanese politics, culture, and society. Meiji reformers sought to thrust Japan into the modern age, with its constitutional governments, powerful steam engines, and twenty-four-hour electrically lit factories. With powerful policies and philosophies guiding them, Meiji reformers reinvented Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They moulded Japan into a country that, less than a half century later, became a world economic and military power.

Meiji State

The new leadership of the Meiji regime was, as Ôkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) described it, akin to the ‘myriad gods’ setting out to build a new state. The Charter Oath of April 1868 laid out the basic framework for the new regime. Although the first four tenets – ‘deliberative assemblies’, universal male suffrage, the abandonment of the ‘evil customs of the past’, and open access to entrepreneurial opportunities – proved slow to materialize, the new leadership vigorously pursued the fifth tenet, which stated that, ‘Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to invigorate the foundations of imperial rule.’ This international engagement transformed Japan at every level, from cultural borrowing to armed conflict.

In the first half of the twentieth century, empire stood squarely at the centre of Japanese life: competition with European and US powers in the Asia-Pacific region, the need for natural resources, working distant fishing grounds to regenerate revenue and feed hungry mouths, and other forces all drove empire building. In the end, however, Japan’s ‘China policy’ served as the spark in the dry tinderbox that eventually led to the Pacific War. Japan’s ‘special interests’ in China challenged US and European access to Chinese manufactures and markets, and placed Japan on a collision course with the Great Powers. Japan’s foreign policy was designed to protect its economic and military investments in China, the most important of which revolved around the South Manchurian Railroad, leased to Japan after the Russo-Japanese War (1905).

But other subsurface forces propelled Japan towards ‘total war’ in Asia. In the US, a half-century’s worth of racially charged immigration legislation and antagonistic foreign policy disillusioned many Japanese diplomats and policy-makers who set an increasingly autarkic course towards empire. After the dual victories of the Sino-Japanese (1895) and Russo-Japanese (1905) wars, the Great Powers conspired to deprive Japan of its war spoils, chiefly territory in northern Korea and China. Clearly, no place setting remained at the table of the Great Powers for the up-and-coming Asian nation. In this context, Japan increasingly pursued an alternative form of modern nationhood, one that wove the legitimacy of an empire in East Asia from the threads of modernization and ‘pan-Asianism’. Rhetorically, Japan sought to defend its Asian brothers and sisters from Western imperial aggression and encroachment. It is no secret that race served as a powerful driver in the events leading up to the Pacific War.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, political authority migrated outward into the provinces and away from the centre. If the Kyoto court, prior to the twelfth century, managed to consolidate authority in the ritsuryô bureaucracy, then with the advent of samurai governance influence became more decentralized and more feudal in nature. As the political authority and military might of the Ashikaga bakufu (1336–1578) waned, alliances external to the state began to take shape, between powerful samurai families, well-armed Buddhist monasteries, and even Kyoto neighbourhood associations. Under pressure from such groups, the Ashikaga bakufu eventually weakened to the point where it became ineffective and Japan descended to a socio-political condition best captured by the expression gekokujô, or the ‘low rising against the high’. In the political vacuum left by the weakened bakufu, new alliances formed as domain lords, known as daimyô, consolidated their power at the local level. The legacy of the domains and their daimyô is an important and lasting one. When the country was finally reunified at the end of the sixteenth century, many domains retained much of their autonomy, even as the Edo bakufu (1603–1868) consolidated its power in the new capital. In fact the legacy of regionalism survives to this day: even though Japan is a relatively small country, it retains a strong sense of local identity, today expressed benignly through local foods, literary traditions, and gifts. In the medieval period, regionalism proved far more malignant, often taking the form of predatory warfare.