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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1970, 1974, 1981, 1990 by Edwin O. Reischauer

  Copyright 1946, 1952, © 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

  ISBN 0-394-58527-5

  Ebook ISBN 9780525659426

  Previously published under the title of: Japan: Past and Present.

  v5.4

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edwin O. Reischauer came to Harvard as a University Professor in September 1966 after serving with distinction as U.S. Ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966. That diplomatic post was the culmination of long experience and study in East Asia. Born in Tokyo in 1910, he lived in Japan until 1927. He received his A.B. degree from Oberlin College in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1939. In the interval he studied at the Universities of Paris, Tokyo, and Kyoto, as well as in Korea and China. He became an instructor at Harvard in 1939, an associate professor in 1945, and professor of Japanese history in 1950. During World War II he served in the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department General Staff. From 1955 to 1956 he was president of the Association for Asian Studies. He was director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1956 to 1961 and served as chairman of its Board of Trustees from 1970 to 1983. Among his books are The United States and Japan; Wanted: An Asian Policy; Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China; East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (with J. K. Fairbank and A.M. Craig); Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia; Toward the 21st Century: Education for a Changing World; The Japanese; My Life Between Japan and America; and The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity.

  To My Brother Bob

  The first American casualty in World War II

  Shanghai, August 14, 1937

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Preface

  PART ONE TRADITIONAL JAPAN

  1 Land and People

  2 The Adoption of the Chinese Pattern

  3 The Development of a Native Culture

  4 The Birth of a Feudal Society

  5 Growth and Change in the Feudal System

  6 The Reestablishment of National Unity

  7 The Transformation of the Late Feudal System

  PART TWO MODERNIZING JAPAN

  8 The Transition to a Modern State

  9 Constitutional Government and Empire

  10 Economic and Political Growth

  11 The Rise of Militarism

  12 World War II

  PART THREE POSTWAR JAPAN

  13 The American Occupation

  14 National Survival

  15 The First Postwar Flowering

  16 The Problems of Growth

  17 The Economic Giant

  18 Facing the Future

  Chronology

  Bibliographical Note

  PREFACE

  This book on the history of Japan has acquired quite a history itself. It had its inception in a series of four or five hours of lectures which I, as a lieutenant-colonel in the United States Army, occasionally gave to officer candidates in the army intelligence training program conducted in the Pentagon Building in Washington during World War II. It occurred to me that, if I could present a reasonably useful picture of Japanese history orally in four or five hours, I should be able to do the same in brief written form. This I undertook to do during the few weeks following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, when my intelligence activities suddenly lost their meaning and while I was waiting for a special release from the army in order to join the Department of State for policy planning work on Japan and Korea. I wrote virtually without reference to books, believing that the forgetting of minor details about Japanese history during my years of war service would help make the essentials stand out in my mind all the more clearly.

  The result was a very thin, small volume entitled Japan: Past and Present. As the years passed, however, Japan changed rapidly, and the “present” became quite different from Japan at the time of the surrender. There was clearly a need to bring the book up to date. Lengthening perspective on the war and prewar years also kept showing Japan in new lights, and I had learned more about the whole of Japanese history. As a consequence, I started on a long series of revisions and extensions of the original work.

  Japan: Past and Present appeared in revised and expanded editions in 1952 and 1964, the second written while I was recuperating in a hospital in Hawaii from an almost fatal stabbing I experienced while serving as the American ambassador to Japan. When I wrote still another updated and expanded revision in 1970, I made such extensive alterations throughout the book that I changed its title to Japan: The Story of a Nation. This I brought up to date again in revised editions in 1974 and 1981. In the 1981 revision I made the greatest changes of all, rewriting practically the whole of the book. Since 1981 the rate of change in Japan has slowed considerably while the attitude of the outside world toward Japan has changed enormously and at remarkable speed. This has necessitated in the present edition an extensive rewriting of large parts of the book as well as an addition of almost a decade of new materials.

  To attempt to thank all those who have given me aid in the many editions of this book or the host of scholars on whose work I have drawn would be quite impossible. I shall limit myself to mentioning two people who have been particularly helpful in this latest revision. They are Professor Albert Craig, who has given me several very useful suggestions, and Ms. Ellie Rutledge, who bore the brunt of typing the manuscript and checking points of detail.

  Edwin O. Reischauer

  PART ONE

  TRADITIONAL JAPAN

  1

  LAND AND PEOPLE

  Japan has long had one of the world’s most distinctive and sophisticated cultures, and today it is an economic giant—the second or third largest in the world, standing at or near the forefront of many of the great advances of human civilization. This record is all the more remarkable when one considers Japan’s smallness in size and population as compared to the United States, Soviet Union, China, and India. Japan was all but ignored by the world at large only a century and a half ago. Thus the amazing story of its rise to its current prominence must be attributed largely to the Japanese people themselves.

  Japan is not as large as France or even the single American state of California, though it is only fair to point out that it is larger than either Italy or the British Isles, the homes of the two greatest empires the Western world has ever seen. It is extremely mountainous, rising to the beautiful volcanic cone of Mt. Fuji, 12,389 feet high. Less than a fifth of its not particularly fertile terrain is level enough for cultivation. Thus it is much smaller in usable land than it appears on the map, and it is not blessed with many mineral resources either. Today it is dependent on foreign imports for more than 90 percent of its energy resources, mostly in the form of oil, almost all its minerals, and much of its food.

  Japan’s chief natural assets are its plentiful rainfall and temperate climate, which encourages an energetic way of life. In latitude, it parallels the East Coast of the United States from New England to Georgia, with most of the larger cities at about the level of North Carolina. The climate is comparable to that of the American East
Coast, except that, being located several hundred miles out in the ocean, Japan experiences somewhat less extreme temperatures in both winter and summer and receives considerably more precipitation as rain or snow.

  Making full use of this abundant water, the Japanese, during the past two millennia, have laboriously constructed an intricate system of channels to convert wherever possible every piece of cultivatable land into irrigated rice paddies. These irrigated fields, combined with a long growing season, hot summers, hard work, and great agricultural skills, have made the Japanese the most productive farmers per acre in the world. About half the country can grow two crops a year—one of rice, the other of some other grain or vegetable. This intensive agricultural pattern has permitted Japan to maintain a larger population than any Western European nation since at least medieval times. Extensive irrigation controls of large river systems, as in Mesopotamia, India, and China, are thought by some to have contributed to centralized, despotic systems of government. In Japan the river systems are small, and irrigation instead appears to have helped foster the notable Japanese propensity for cooperation and consensus decision making in small groups.

  Plentiful rainfall means that Japan is a verdant land, with a heavy forest cover on its mountains. The combination of rugged coastlines, precipitous but forested mountains, and a lush countryside makes Japan a most beautiful land wherever people and industry have not despoiled it. All this natural splendor may have contributed to the great sensitivity the Japanese have shown throughout history to the wonders of nature and to their great love of its beauty.

  Japan’s location cannot be considered to have been any great asset, particularly in early times. It lies at the extreme eastern edge of the Asian-European “ancient world” of high civilization, considerably farther out to sea than the British Isles on its western edge. Japan was no crossroads of world trade but lay at the veritable end of the earth, the most isolated of all the major countries that enjoyed a high civilization in premodern times. External influences for long came to it slowly and only as filtered through the nearby continental lands of China and Korea.

  There were important compensations, however, for this insularity. For a land cut up into small pieces by innumerable mountain ranges, the waters surrounding Japan permitted relatively easy communication between the islands and also along the coast. This was particularly true of the Inland Sea, which cut through the middle of western Japan. The sea also provided ample supplies of fish, which remain the chief source of animal protein in the Japanese diet. Their insular position also spared the Japanese from the conquests and pillage by foreign hordes inflicted on many other lands and from incessant warfare along their frontiers. Isolation thus gave the Japanese relatively greater peace and more opportunities than most peoples have had to develop their own special talents and produce a remarkably distinctive way of life.

  Japan is part of the East Asian zone of civilization, which centers around China and includes Korea and Vietnam. This is the part of the world that has derived most of its basic culture from the civilization developed in ancient times on the plains of North China. Although the home throughout history of a large part of the human race—roughly a fifth to a quarter—the East Asian cultural zone has been the most isolated of the great spheres of early civilization. It was cut off from the other centers of ancient culture in India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean Basin by the great land barrier of the mountain ranges and deserts of Central Asia and the jungles and rugged terrain of Southeast Asia. In this relatively isolated zone, Japan was the most isolated area of all. In contrast to the 20 miles of the Straits of Dover separating England from France, it is 100 miles from Japan to Korea and 500 to China.

  Japan nonetheless is culturally a daughter of Chinese civilization, much as the countries of North Europe are daughters of Mediterranean culture. The story of the spread of Chinese civilization to the peoples of Japan during the first millennium after Christ is much like the story of the spread of Mediterranean civilization to the peoples of North Europe during the same period. But the greater isolation of the Japanese from the home of their civilization and from all other peoples meant that in Japan the borrowed culture had more chance to develop along new and often unique lines. One popular concept is that the Japanese have never been anything more than a race of borrowers and imitators. The truth is quite the contrary. Although geographic isolation has made them conscious of learning from abroad, it has also allowed them to develop one of the most distinctive cultures to be found in any area of comparable size. Take, for example, things as basic as their traditional clothing, their cuisine, or their domestic architecture and the manner in which they live at home. The thick straw floor mats, the sliding paper panels in place of interior walls, the open, airy structure of the whole house, the recess for art objects, the charcoal-burning braziers (hibachi), the peculiar wooden or iron bathtubs, and the place of bathing in daily life as a means of relaxation at the end of a day’s work and, in winter, as a way of restoring a sense of warmth and well-being—all these and many other simple but fundamental features of daily life in traditional Japan are unique to the country and attest to a highly creative culture rather than one of simple imitation.

  Japan’s cultural distinctiveness has perhaps been accentuated by its linguistic separateness. Although the Japanese writing system has been derived from that of China and innumerable Chinese words have been incorporated into Japanese in much the same way that English has borrowed thousands of Latin and Greek words, Japanese is basically as different from Chinese as it is from English. Its structure is strikingly like Korean, but even then it appears to be no more closely related to Korean than English is to Russian or the Sanskrit-derived languages of India. Possessing a writing system more complex than any other in common use in the modern world and a language with no close relatives, the Japanese probably face a bigger language barrier between themselves and the rest of the world than any other major national group.

  Geographic isolation and cultural and linguistic distinctiveness have made the Japanese highly self-conscious and acutely aware of their differences from others. In a way this has been a great asset to them in the modern age of nation-states, for they have faced no problem of national identity. Indeed, Japan constitutes what may be the world’s most perfect nation-state: a clear-cut geographic unit containing almost all the people of a distinctive culture and language and virtually no one else. On the other hand, extreme self-consciousness bred of isolation has become a serious handicap in the current age of international interdependence. It has made the Japanese somewhat tense in their contacts with foreigners, and they have shown relatively little sensitivity to the feelings and reactions of other peoples. At times they appear obsessed with a sense either of superiority or inferiority toward the outside world. Japan’s isolation may help explain some of the extremes in its international relations and also, perhaps, the uneasiness Japanese feel even today about their place in the world.

  The Japanese are basically Mongoloid in race, closely related to their neighbors in Korea and China; but like all modern peoples, they are the product of extensive racial mixture. Many different groups found their way into Japan, a few as early as paleolithic times. During the last ice age, which continued until about 11,000 years ago, Japan was joined by land to the rest of Asia. Since Japan was the geographic end of the line, peoples who wandered into it could not move on but stayed and mixed with those who came later.

  One interesting racial ingredient was provided by the Ainu. These may be a proto-Caucasoid people—that is, a group that split off from the white race so early that not all the characteristics of this race had as yet developed. At one time the Ainu may have occupied most of Japan, or they may have been only relatively late intruders from the north. In any case, some twelve centuries ago their ancestors lived in the northern island of Hokkaido and the northern third of the main island of Honshu. Since then they have been slowly pushed north and all but some 20,000 ha
ve been culturally and racially absorbed by the Japanese. Today they are on the point of vanishing, but they have left behind a genetic legacy that may account for the relative abundance of facial and body hair of some Japanese as compared with other Mongoloids, and possibly helps to explain the great variety of facial types among the Japanese.

  There is a popular theory that some early immigrants to Japan were carried there by the Japan Current, which flows from Southeast Asia past Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, and Japan, much like the Gulf Stream off the East Coast of the United States. Strong similarities in mythology, social customs, and early architecture between Japan and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are cited in support of this concept. There is, however, no archeological evidence to back it up. A better explanation of these similarities is that they resulted from very early waves of cultural influence and, possibly, people who moved outward from South China, some to Southeast Asia and others to Japan, perhaps by way of Korea.

  The archeological record clearly shows that a large number, if not most, of the early inhabitants of Japan came to the islands from Korea and areas farther away in Northeast Asia, and there is indisputable historical evidence that a considerable flow of people from the peninsula into Japan continued until the eighth century A.D. An early ninth-century book attributes recent continental origin to more than a third of the aristocratic families at the Japanese court at that time. By then, however, the mixing was almost complete, and the Japanese were well on their way to becoming the homogeneous people we know today. They also already occupied most of what we now call Japan. Only in the extreme north were the culturally alien Ainu still to be absorbed, and in southern Kyushu there were still some groups that may have been culturally as well as politically distinct, but were in any case on the verge of complete assimilation.