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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Wilson, George M. Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Main Argument: In answer to the question, "Who took part in making the Meiji Restoration?" Wilson says that "there are many answers, that many groups of agents participated" (ix). Rather than just samurai, "all of these different agents may be viewed as participants in a total set of activities, a concert of mutual interaction: it is this interaction that shaped the nature of the restoration that followed" (x).
Historiographical Engagement: All the historiography about this period, and a lot of theory too.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "This study argues that love of country was complemented by redemption as a motive for making the Meiji Restoration of 1868. My thesis is that a pervasive urge to remedy distress at home was just as compelling to most participants as the patriotic intent to elevate Japan in the international arena" (2). Wilson discusses the myth of the Meiji Restoration, noting that it is false (the oligarchs ruled in the emperor's name), but also true, because "the institution of the emperorship was in fact restored to temporal rule over the whole of Japan," and that "the myth carried enough force to justify the central government's efforts in the daring policies it undertook" because it had "established currency" (5). Japanese interpretations have rested on a Marxist conflict paradigm, while Western interpretations proceeded on "a consensus model of social change" (7). By way of structuralism, Wilson concludes that
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that the Meiji Restoration "appeared to fulfill Japan's historic destiny, graven on Japanese minds through oral and written transmission from the protohistoric past, that a sacred line of emperors descended from the mythical creators of the cosmos should rule the country. In meeting this ancient test, however, the new Meiji government ironically engaged a dilemma that has bedeviled the Japanese ever since: how to reconstruct a sense of purpose in a people whose central historical myth has come to fruition" (13-14). In Wilson's view, the modern imperial state was simply one attempted strategy to solve this problem, which failed in 1945.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson argues that the Pax Tokugawa was characterized by a multistate balance of power cloaked in a feudalistic shell, and that the social stability flowing from this arrangement and the policy of sakoku, which limited foreign influence to ideas, enabled "ample opportunities for innovation and change" in the economic and cultural spheres. By the 19thC, several intellectual strands had emerged as critics or potential critics: scholars of Western learning, "action-oriented samurai" who studied jitsugaku, "practical studies," and also of course the nativists. The realm that all three adumbrated as their field was replaced by the state after the Restoration, but the state could never attain the moral authority of the realm (tenka), which "combined state and society into a wider entity, one that encompassed all Japanese as well as all of their physical environment" (42). It was the realm, however, that people wanted to redeem in the bakumatsu period: "to restore the emperor was seen by more than one group of political actors as a way to redeem the realm, to make it whole again, and so the realm was the appropriate form of organization from the viewpoint of most informed Japanese" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson explores the confused causality of the bakumatsu period, a "liminal" period in history in which actions and events, according to one theorist, rise to the level of myth. Wilson notes that "many restorations occurred, not just one: many different experiences of the events of bakumatsu Japan took place, despite the fact that we routinely speak of 'the Meiji Restoration,' as if it were a uniform process" (48). Although most people have written the history of the period from the point of view of the winners, there were in fact four groups of actors during the bakumatsu period: Western envoys, the bakufu and the daimyo, popular revivalists, and imperial loyalists. According to Wilson, the first and third saw reality in an "integrative" way, while the other two saw it in a "dispersive" mode. The Western envoys all thought Japan needed stability, though they disagreed as to where to find it; the bakufu and daimyo had similar sentiments until 1866, when Satsuma secretly allied with Chôshû and the two domains committed themselves to the overthrow of the bakufu entirely. The bakufu could not be all things to all people, and it could not suppress the people it could not serve. The common people were motivated by hopes and fears of yonaoshi, "world renewal," exemplified by the "ee ja nai ka" flash mobs and part of the "pilgrimages, the rise of new religions, and the bitter rural and urban riots of the mid-1860s" (61). The imperialist loyalists, by contrast, were adventurers and romantics who were "willing to court anarchy if necessary to accomplish their objectives," frequently sensing from an acute sense of status deprivation related to their class reality (63). Idealists, they were also highly impatient, but those who survived "empowered themselves to make a newer world, while the popular movements could only cause after one" (73). Wilson argues, pace Hayden White's Metahistory, for writing messier narrates that better reflect the open-ended arenas in which we and our protagonists operate.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Wilson argues, speaking of narratives of the Restoration, that "what is missing is attention to the much more dynamic manifestations of the popular anxiety that permeated the very atmosphere of the tumultuous bakumatsu years" (78). Wilson sees these as forms of millenarianism, and argues that "the samurai elite and the popular movements were simultaneously groping for a new and stable order in Japan" (80). New religions such as Tenrikyô and Konkyôkyô are characterized as "salvation sects" that "embodied the need for a reintegrated community that so many ordinary people of this era seem to have felt" (86). In Wilson's view, "popular millenarianism both frightened and inspired the more daring among those samurai who were willing to act in search of a simple solution to Japan's midcentury crisis" (92). Despite their concern about popular discontent, however, the winners of the Restoration soon turned to suppressing it, as they were ultimately prisoners of their status backgrounds.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the ee ja nai ka flash mobs of the late bakumatsu era, arguing that "public agitation set the stage for this key episode in world history" (95). Wilson (rightly, I think) sees ee ja nai ka as "a form of protest against the old order" that "heralded a major political change" and that "sudden orgiastic conduct such as ee ja nai ka may be viewed in conflictual terms as a show of dissatisfaction comparable to that which animated major peasant uprisings and urban disturbances when they hit a peak the year before, in 1866" (101). In Wilson's view, "the response of the crowds, their dancing and carousing, discloses a consciousness of change, of challenge to old values, of certainty only that tomorrow would differ from today" (ibid). Wilson argues that the Meiji Restoration sublated the energies of the bakumatsu period, so that "various forms of popular consciousness went hand in hand with the new government's proclivity to move further than the bakufu in the direction of deliberately transforming Japan from above" (116). The ee ja nai ka flash mobs sounded, however festively, the death knell of the old regime.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson argues that "the Meiji Restoration may have been a sublative revolution, but it was a revolution nonetheless" (129). Although it is not traditionally ranked with the great world revolutions, not being bloody enough or radical enough, it was in fact plenty radical and, in Wilson's phrase, "appealed for a transvaluation of all values," even if, like the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, it backed away from such calls in the end (129). In Wilson's view, "the process reflected total and systemic disorder, and its outcome, the Meiji Restouration, also had to be total and systemic" (130), and did eventually "redeem" Japan, albeit in a way that few if any could have predicted.
Critical assessment: I wish this were actually a monograph about commoners and the ee ja nai ka flash mobs in the bakumatsu period. Then it would be much better at doing its thing. As it is, this is an interesting book, but not a wholly successful one; as a wise person who shall remain nameless remarked about it, "Well, he tried."
Further reading: It's hard to even know who to recommend to read about the Meiji Restoration. The standard work is still probably Beasley, which should say something, namely that someone needs to write a new book on the subject.
Meta notes: "Everybody who writes history has a bone to pick with the past."
Main Argument: In answer to the question, "Who took part in making the Meiji Restoration?" Wilson says that "there are many answers, that many groups of agents participated" (ix). Rather than just samurai, "all of these different agents may be viewed as participants in a total set of activities, a concert of mutual interaction: it is this interaction that shaped the nature of the restoration that followed" (x).
Historiographical Engagement: All the historiography about this period, and a lot of theory too.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "This study argues that love of country was complemented by redemption as a motive for making the Meiji Restoration of 1868. My thesis is that a pervasive urge to remedy distress at home was just as compelling to most participants as the patriotic intent to elevate Japan in the international arena" (2). Wilson discusses the myth of the Meiji Restoration, noting that it is false (the oligarchs ruled in the emperor's name), but also true, because "the institution of the emperorship was in fact restored to temporal rule over the whole of Japan," and that "the myth carried enough force to justify the central government's efforts in the daring policies it undertook" because it had "established currency" (5). Japanese interpretations have rested on a Marxist conflict paradigm, while Western interpretations proceeded on "a consensus model of social change" (7). By way of structuralism, Wilson concludes that
Less a move to restore the past than to rescue the present, less an economic than a social conflict, the Meiji Restoration witnessed coincident struggles to attain goals that were not at all the same. Yet they were driven by the same redemptive motive, and their human agents necessarily interacted. What finally eventuated in the restoration after 1868 was a "revolution" that turned upon itself to erect a modern nation-state based on containment of the vast energies that had been released in the bakumatsu period. (10)
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that the Meiji Restoration "appeared to fulfill Japan's historic destiny, graven on Japanese minds through oral and written transmission from the protohistoric past, that a sacred line of emperors descended from the mythical creators of the cosmos should rule the country. In meeting this ancient test, however, the new Meiji government ironically engaged a dilemma that has bedeviled the Japanese ever since: how to reconstruct a sense of purpose in a people whose central historical myth has come to fruition" (13-14). In Wilson's view, the modern imperial state was simply one attempted strategy to solve this problem, which failed in 1945.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson argues that the Pax Tokugawa was characterized by a multistate balance of power cloaked in a feudalistic shell, and that the social stability flowing from this arrangement and the policy of sakoku, which limited foreign influence to ideas, enabled "ample opportunities for innovation and change" in the economic and cultural spheres. By the 19thC, several intellectual strands had emerged as critics or potential critics: scholars of Western learning, "action-oriented samurai" who studied jitsugaku, "practical studies," and also of course the nativists. The realm that all three adumbrated as their field was replaced by the state after the Restoration, but the state could never attain the moral authority of the realm (tenka), which "combined state and society into a wider entity, one that encompassed all Japanese as well as all of their physical environment" (42). It was the realm, however, that people wanted to redeem in the bakumatsu period: "to restore the emperor was seen by more than one group of political actors as a way to redeem the realm, to make it whole again, and so the realm was the appropriate form of organization from the viewpoint of most informed Japanese" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson explores the confused causality of the bakumatsu period, a "liminal" period in history in which actions and events, according to one theorist, rise to the level of myth. Wilson notes that "many restorations occurred, not just one: many different experiences of the events of bakumatsu Japan took place, despite the fact that we routinely speak of 'the Meiji Restoration,' as if it were a uniform process" (48). Although most people have written the history of the period from the point of view of the winners, there were in fact four groups of actors during the bakumatsu period: Western envoys, the bakufu and the daimyo, popular revivalists, and imperial loyalists. According to Wilson, the first and third saw reality in an "integrative" way, while the other two saw it in a "dispersive" mode. The Western envoys all thought Japan needed stability, though they disagreed as to where to find it; the bakufu and daimyo had similar sentiments until 1866, when Satsuma secretly allied with Chôshû and the two domains committed themselves to the overthrow of the bakufu entirely. The bakufu could not be all things to all people, and it could not suppress the people it could not serve. The common people were motivated by hopes and fears of yonaoshi, "world renewal," exemplified by the "ee ja nai ka" flash mobs and part of the "pilgrimages, the rise of new religions, and the bitter rural and urban riots of the mid-1860s" (61). The imperialist loyalists, by contrast, were adventurers and romantics who were "willing to court anarchy if necessary to accomplish their objectives," frequently sensing from an acute sense of status deprivation related to their class reality (63). Idealists, they were also highly impatient, but those who survived "empowered themselves to make a newer world, while the popular movements could only cause after one" (73). Wilson argues, pace Hayden White's Metahistory, for writing messier narrates that better reflect the open-ended arenas in which we and our protagonists operate.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Wilson argues, speaking of narratives of the Restoration, that "what is missing is attention to the much more dynamic manifestations of the popular anxiety that permeated the very atmosphere of the tumultuous bakumatsu years" (78). Wilson sees these as forms of millenarianism, and argues that "the samurai elite and the popular movements were simultaneously groping for a new and stable order in Japan" (80). New religions such as Tenrikyô and Konkyôkyô are characterized as "salvation sects" that "embodied the need for a reintegrated community that so many ordinary people of this era seem to have felt" (86). In Wilson's view, "popular millenarianism both frightened and inspired the more daring among those samurai who were willing to act in search of a simple solution to Japan's midcentury crisis" (92). Despite their concern about popular discontent, however, the winners of the Restoration soon turned to suppressing it, as they were ultimately prisoners of their status backgrounds.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the ee ja nai ka flash mobs of the late bakumatsu era, arguing that "public agitation set the stage for this key episode in world history" (95). Wilson (rightly, I think) sees ee ja nai ka as "a form of protest against the old order" that "heralded a major political change" and that "sudden orgiastic conduct such as ee ja nai ka may be viewed in conflictual terms as a show of dissatisfaction comparable to that which animated major peasant uprisings and urban disturbances when they hit a peak the year before, in 1866" (101). In Wilson's view, "the response of the crowds, their dancing and carousing, discloses a consciousness of change, of challenge to old values, of certainty only that tomorrow would differ from today" (ibid). Wilson argues that the Meiji Restoration sublated the energies of the bakumatsu period, so that "various forms of popular consciousness went hand in hand with the new government's proclivity to move further than the bakufu in the direction of deliberately transforming Japan from above" (116). The ee ja nai ka flash mobs sounded, however festively, the death knell of the old regime.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples Wilson argues that "the Meiji Restoration may have been a sublative revolution, but it was a revolution nonetheless" (129). Although it is not traditionally ranked with the great world revolutions, not being bloody enough or radical enough, it was in fact plenty radical and, in Wilson's phrase, "appealed for a transvaluation of all values," even if, like the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, it backed away from such calls in the end (129). In Wilson's view, "the process reflected total and systemic disorder, and its outcome, the Meiji Restouration, also had to be total and systemic" (130), and did eventually "redeem" Japan, albeit in a way that few if any could have predicted.
Critical assessment: I wish this were actually a monograph about commoners and the ee ja nai ka flash mobs in the bakumatsu period. Then it would be much better at doing its thing. As it is, this is an interesting book, but not a wholly successful one; as a wise person who shall remain nameless remarked about it, "Well, he tried."
Further reading: It's hard to even know who to recommend to read about the Meiji Restoration. The standard work is still probably Beasley, which should say something, namely that someone needs to write a new book on the subject.
Meta notes: "Everybody who writes history has a bone to pick with the past."