Changes in Society and Education

Edward Sylvester Morse

A highly pragmatic and driven man, Edward Sylvester Morse arrived in Japan to stay for only one month in June 1877. He ended up making four visits, the longest for a period of more than two years. He is considered one of America’s first experts on Japan. He is credited with establishing Japan’s first marine laboratory, First Museum of Natural History, first archeological excavation, first university press and the first generation of life scientists.

Morse began to greatly admire the attitudes and behaviours of the Japanese:

“His observations led to a startling conclusion: the Japanese practiced what Americans preached. Cleanliness of person and household, simplicity, courtesy and consideration were all part of daily life. So were a number of the Ten Commandments. Parents were honored and crime was at a minimum. Houses had no locks and owners could leave stores unattended, confident customers would pay for what they took. A traveler like Morse could absent mindedly leave a gold watch and eighty dollars on a tray at an inn and return a week later to find nothing missing. So safe was the land, so law-abiding the people and so rare the existence of "hoodlums," that one could journey to the most remote dis­tricts with no pistol for protection.”

Highlights of the culture Morse admired included its:

1) Openness: “When Morse delivered a public lecture on natural selection, the audience listened with an open mind and no opposition to the theory was raised in the name of dogma.”

2) Dedication to the aesthetic: seemed to honor a democracy of the artistic – simple, restrained and asymmetrical (gardens, homes, pottery, roof tiles, etc)

3) Manners: “the elaborate courtesy of the Japanese could seem like a carica­ture of all that was effete in the aristocratic traditions of Europe. Yet Morse loved it all, the ceremonial bowing, ritual gift-giving, the formal patterns of speech.”

Not all of the societal norms were held in wonder, however; particularly the effeminate nature of the males and the complex language. A reminder of the fierce courage of the graceful samurai eliminated his suspicions about the former, while a hope for the incorporation of English alleviated the latter.

Essay by Professor Robert A Rosenstone

Edward Sylvester Morse: Scientist and Japanologist

http://www.aap.amdigital.co.uk/introduction/content/essay.aspx?docref=essaycontent

America, Asia and the Pacific © 2008 Adam Matthew Digital.
Original images © Peabody Essex Museum

Contribution of religious background to the rapid modernization:

“Japanese religion (merging mostly of Confucianism, Shinto, Buddhism) constituted the central value system of the society. Japanese religion historically began as the ethics of the samurai warrior class; it then became so popularized through the influence of the Confucianism and Buddhism that it became the ethics of the entire Japanese population."

The Japanese shared some important qualities as a people:

Hard-working (it is one’s ethical duty)
Cheerful
Temperate under taxing circumstances
Taught that rather than take a lot, take a little

Japanese Confucianism advocated the selfless subordination of all the parts to a single collective whole – reflected in the economic ethics of the Japanese samurai – limitless obligation to his lord (devotion with no consideration for self).

The Meiji Restoration was started by the samurai in order to achieve three major goals: revere the emperor, expel the barbarians, increase the national power

Alvin Y. So. Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency, and World-System Theories © 1990 Sage Publications, Inc. (Newbury Park, California)

Japan During the Meiji Era

• Thousands of schools tied to temples, government offices, and private scholars gave Japan a literacy rate of perhaps 40 percent for boys and 10 percent for girls in the early 1800s, ranking it near the top of the world. They also provided a leadership class committed to the Confucian ideal of public service.
• American and European seaman began visiting Japan’s ports after the early 1800s, seeking an end to the country’s isolation policy.
• In this mix, the Tokugawa decision to open Japan to foreigners in 1854, in compliance with American demands, touched off one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods. With newly arrived Westerners demanding trade, showing off new customs (including the scandalous tendency of women to accompany men to public events), practicing the forbidden Christian religion, and taking sides in Japan’s political disputes, the country’s political life changed irrevocably.
• The government that came into being in 1868 had three overriding characteristics: its leaders were young; its policies were pragmatic; and its hold on power was tenuous. The emperor in whose name the new governors ruled was just seventeen years old; the major samurai power-holders from Satsuma and Choshu domains ranged in age from the upper 20s to the “senior” Saigo Takamori, who was just 41; and Iwakura Tomomi, the most important nobleman in the leadership clique, was 43. By Japanese leadership standards, these men were mere juveniles—unbound by the networks and mores of traditional leadership. This, perhaps, is what made them so pragmatic; they developed policies without the restraints of ideology or custom—or of any overriding vision of where Japan should go. Confucian tradition discouraged commerce, but they moved Japan as forcefully and quickly as possible into the world of international commerce. Whereas they once had supported the idea of national seclusion, sometimes fanatically so, now they made the West their model and pursued internationalization with a vengeance. Samurai and nobles all, they abolished the class and status systems and disbanded the feudal domains. One of their central slogans, kuni no tame (“for the sake of the country”) said it all: their overriding commitment was simply to national strength, regardless of what customs or ideologies had to be violated in the pursuit of that goal.
• Internationalization showed up in two ways. First, the new leaders studied Western models with a zeal born of deep fear that weakness might invite invasion.
• Satsuma Rebellion of 1877: With Saigo’s (a well respected traditional samurai) defeat, the country was unified as it had not been since the Restoration; the government’s legitimacy was established; the transitional decade was over.
• Though dramatically changed, Japan would not have been called modern yet in 1889 by most observers. The two post-Restoration decades had, however, planted all of those seeds that would mature into full-fledged modernity and imperialistic vigor at the beginning of the twentieth century. At least three legacies of the Restoration decades merit discussion:
  

1) Nationalism. The rise of nationalism—often called the most important feature of the late 1880s and early 1890s—showed up in many ways: in the widely-heralded pride over the constitution, in the issuance in 1890 of the Imperial Rescript on Education, a stirring document in which school students regularly recited their loyalty to country and emperor, in the increasing public discussions by young writers of Japan’s greatness. One of the most articulate vehicles for the new nationalism was a journal named simply Nihon (Japan), launched the day the constitution was promulgated, for the express purpose of reviving the “unique spirit of the Japanese people.” The seeds of the new national pride lay in the early-Meiji soil, when the government had worked so hard to make the entire populace aware of their Japaneseness, creating national holidays, making the emperor both sovereign and high priest, sending Tokyo newspapers to every part of the country, instituting compulsory education and military service. By the twentieth century, the nationalism would become worrisome, as it propelled Japan into aggressive actions abroad. At the end of the Restoration period, however, people saw it merely as an effective means of getting people to support the state’s drive to modernity and power.

2) The rising importance of military affairs in national life.
In 1894, Japan launched its first major foreign war since the 1500s (and its second foreign war ever), thrashing China in the Sino-Japanese War and beginning its experience with empire by securing Taiwan as a colony. A decade after that, it defeated Russia, one of the European powers, setting the stage for colonies in Korea and Manchuria. And with those wars, the army and navy became central actors in nearly every national decision, major factors in the country’s political and economic life. Again, the early Meiji years had set the stage. One of the earliest slogans of the Restoration era was fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong army); in 1872 Japan had begun drafting men into the army; and in 1874, it had sent 3,000 troops to Taiwan, for a short, victorious engagement with aboriginal groups who had killed some 54 shipwrecked Okinawans. The nation also had begun the acquisition of territory in these years, taking over the Ryukyu Islands to the south in 1879, three years after negotiating with Russia to gain control of the Kuril Islands to the north. All of these were relatively minor episodes, but they confirmed a fundamental approach. Convinced that military strength alone would assure respect and security in an imperialist world, the early-Meiji leaders had set the nation on a course toward military might, a course that would make war and empire central facets of national policy by the turn of the century.

3) The march to modernity. Most students agree that the period between the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars saw a genuine mass society emerge in Japan’s cities. These were the years that gave Japan its first major industrial takeoff, the period that produced mass-circulation newspapers, department stores, publicly treated water systems, social and class divisions, moving pictures, wristwatches, safety razors, increasingly popular public intellectual debates, and beer halls—all the trappings of modern, urban society. And they were the years in which commoners, called minshu, began to take an active part in the nation’s public and political life. To say that this development represented a mere speed-up of the early Meiji programs is to state the obvious. When the Charter Oath promised in 1868 to seek knowledge from around the world, it set Japan on a course of studying, emulating, adapting—and finally surpassing—peoples everywhere, a path that would bring the Restoration era to fulfillment, even as it launched Japan into the more troubling arena of colonialism and empire.

The Meiji Restoration Era, 1868-1889

James Huffman, April 21, 2008

http://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/content.cfm/the_meiji_restoration_era_1868-1889