Westernisation and Japanese ‘Exceptionalism’: the Oddities of National Histories

Article by Ryo Yokoe. Edited and Researched by Mike Edwardson.

It has been over two decades since Francis Fukuyama declared ‘The End of History’ (1989) after a wave of revolutions swept across Eastern Europe that led to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, culminating in what he understood as a triumph of liberal democracy. After China embraced gradual market reforms starting in the 1970s, communism virtually lost its significance against capitalism, and recent reports about North Korea’s apocalyptic rhetoric remind us of the existence of a distinctly outdated Orwellian society in a region now dominated by few of the most dynamic liberal democracies at the moment.

Among these sovereign states, Japan was understood by the late historian Eric Hobsbawm as the first ‘non-white’ country that successfully joined the ‘developed world’ during the nineteenth century. Understanding Japan as the first instance of ‘westernisation’ is often taken for granted by historians when the word was, and is, associated with modernisation and industrial development. Among the Japanese, the transition from a relatively backward feudal state to a world power was identified as an evidence of exceptionalism in the nation’s path to modernity. Its enormous success is believed to have been attributed to something inherent within Japan and its people. The discourse of the ‘exceptionality of Japan’ is an assumption that permeates across everyday life, entrenched in the discourse that impacts both education and workplace discipline.

The case for this line of argument is backed up by the entire narrative of modern Japanese history. Political westernisation of Japan was achieved through a long process, replacing the hereditary dictatorship of the military class that lasted for almost seven centuries with a Prussian-style constitutional monarchy that consisted of a weak parliament and a powerful emperor. The sense of national identity was conceived by the population living in a geographically isolated, ethnically homogenous nation, despite the paradoxical coexistence of an emphasis of Japan’s cultural distinctiveness with elements of Neo-Confucian and Western influences that constitute it. The impact of the ancient Chinese philosophy has touched on various aspects of modern Japanese society, especially the sense of sacrifice for the community that one was expected to have as an antithesis to the individualist philosophy promoted by the West. Naturally, ‘community’ translated to ‘nation’ during the interwar era, leading to the eventual establishment of a quasi-fascist militarist regime by the 1930s.

One of the peculiar aspects of Japanese history is that Japan escaped European colonisation, primarily by participating in it themselves at the initial expense of Korea and Formosa (Taiwan). The expansion of Japanese hegemony reached its height before Second World War when the army continued its conquest of China through the use of unspeakable atrocities that were horrifically carried out on the local population, which eventually led to a clash of interests with the United States over the Pacific. Japan’s ability to dominate a much larger country like China is understood primarily as the result of its flexibility in accepting Western modernisation through industrial development. The preservation of national sovereignty from the threat of Western ‘barbarians’ was very much tied with the exertion its own system of tyranny across Asia.

After its defeat in 1945, the American occupiers turned the country into an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ (the words of Nakasone, a Prime Minister during the 1980s) for the maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the region. As a member of the trilateral collection of nations that compose the ‘first world’ of industrialised democracies, Japan was transformed into a dynamic export-oriented economy that competed alongside American and European manufacturer. By 1968, the country surpassed West Germany as the third largest economy in the world. It would be difficult to understand the Japanese case of the post-war economic ‘miracle’ as merely identical with Western Europe or North America because of certain differences, but both were tied together by their achievement of creating a mass consumerist society. The ‘Four Asian Tigers’ that included South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore were to follow Japan’s economic path after the 1960s, all of which eventually became high-income consumerist societies.

Japan’s status as a significant economic power stimulated discussion over whether the country is actually part of ‘the West’. In Clash of Civilizations (1996), Samuel P. Huntington categorised Japan to be a distinct Sino-Altaic culture from Western civilization in his paradigm of post-1989 global affairs. The country certainly possesses a different cultural origin from the West, especially in the absence of Christianity in much of its society, but one would find it impossible to make sense of this interpretation within Japan’s economic and geopolitical significance since it still remains largely under the umbrella of U. S. foreign policy. Despite differing cultural backgrounds, Japan shares vital political and economic similarities with the West.

So is Japan ‘exceptional’ in its historical path to westernisation? At least during the nineteenth century, a concerted effort to Westernise was taken up by Egypt through the modernisation of the cotton industry and the civil service. Unlike Japan, however, Egypt’s path to national development was halted by the intervention of European interests in the region, and the country was denied its right to self-determination when it was occupied as a protectorate of the British Empire in 1882. Another case of westernisation was the rise of nationalism in Turkey after the late nineteenth century. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent occupation of Asia Minor by the Allies after the First World War stimulated a revolutionary backlash, leading to the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The resistance was led by a war hero called Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who later made radical reforms that involved the abrupt introduction of universal suffrage, the Latinisation of the Turkish language, and the secularisation of Turkish society.

In contrast to these two cases, Japan’s path is certainly a case of success and longevity. Unlike Egypt, Japan avoided becoming a postcolonial society through the preservation of its national sovereignty. While Turkey has a history of being an imperial power itself, it would be difficult to compare its own position in the Middle East with that of Japan because of the continued existence of strong anti-modern elements in society, especially through the powerful Islamist-leaning conservative party that dominates politics today. While the country is a member of the OECD, and is currently negotiating its membership in the EU, its shortfalls in economic progress make it difficult to identify as a developed country akin to Japan. It would correct to argue that Turkish society is certainly more Europeanised than Japan, but its structural development has yet to reach the status of a ‘developed country’.

In the end, the claim of an exceptional historical path implies a certain sense of inevitability. The changes resulting in the end of isolationism in 1854 was an unpredictable event, and no one at the time would have foretold without hindsight that Japan would become a world power. Japanese society was perhaps more feudal and pre-modern than its East Asian neighbours that it went onto dominate later, and therefore to argue for the inevitability of westernisation seems to be unconvincing. Success also does not indicate exceptionalism, as the two counter-examples in the Middle East show that other nations also attempted to board on the same path.

One must also realise that Japan’s post-war economic success is attributed to the United States. Without the convenient strategic role that it played for the protection of American interests in the region, it would have been entirely possible for the country to become a third world dictatorship instead of going through a process of industrialisation and democratisation that arguably begun when Japan started producing arms for American interventions in the Far East. It is of no coincidence that the two periods of fastest economic growth was during the height of the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Despite the evidence of a more effective westernisation than perhaps anywhere else in the world, the notion that the Japanese nation and its people are somehow intrinsically exceptional ignores the decisive roles played by outside forces throughout its recent history. The peculiarity of Modern Japan is that it gained national strength primarily through transnational means of absorbing the ways of the ‘barbarians’.

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