International Relations and Identity: A Dialogical Approach by Xavier Guillaume

Author:Xavier Guillaume [Guillaume, Xavier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, General
ISBN: 9781136925955
Google: nXXFBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17583796
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The quest for civilization: the constitution of a political community

The 1825 edict was representative of the Tokugawa moral and cognitive landscapes, some nationalities – Chinese, Koreans, Rykyan – were fully recognized as participating in the Tokugawa’s Japan-centered framework (Toby 1991 [1984]), while the Dutch were given a special place as the sole non-Asian power to have rights to trade with the Tokugawa regime. The “Southern Barbarians and Westerners” were all associated with Christianity, hence with a dangerous and subversive thought. It was with this edict that the Tokugawa regime effectively shut off its borders to most of the outside world, the scalled sakoku [closed country] policy.12 This measure, however, was short-lived as the pressure was mounting from both within and without. The succession of domestic and international crises, most notably the Western pressure to open Japan and the signature of unequal treaties with Western powers, finally led to the downfall of the Tokugawa regime and the Meiji restoration (Jansen 1995; 2000: Chapters 9 to 11).

With the Meiji restoration came the impulse to compete with the West in order to regain the country’s lost independence by signing the unequal treatises that provided Westerners with the ability to regulate Japanese trade and with extraterritoriality (Cortazzi 1999). For many at the time, to compete with the West meant to be like the West, to become a civilized and enlightened country. At great expense, Western experts were hired to teach Western institutions, technologies and sciences, Japanese elites were send abroad to observe and learn directly from the West and efforts were made to Westernize the country’s political institutions, economy, technology and social mores. The first decades of the Meiji regime were defined under the slogan bunmei kaika [civilization and enlightenment]. This period is crucial in understanding the new conditions of possibility created through an articulation of kokutai. This articulation was in dialogical relation with the West as a resource for creating and promoting a strong and wealthy Japanese polity capable of resisting the West.

The Japanese “Westernizers” were “much more enthusiastic about translating political concepts [coming from the West] than they were about practicing them.” Indeed,

[the] Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood both as problems of language—the creation and circulation of new concepts— and as problems of action—the usage of new concepts in debates about the policies to be implemented in a Westernising Japan.

(Howland 2001: 2, my emphasis)

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