but trade with China never fully ended. Many of the leading intellectuals of the period, both at the shogun’s court in Edo (Tokyo) and at the imperial court in Kyoto, revered China as the center of an East Asian Confucian universe in a manner not much different from those of their counterparts in Korea or Vietnam. But from the late eighteenth century on, Japanese thinking slowly began to move in a more nativist direction, contrasting the naturalness, thrift, and industry of its own country’s inhabitants to the perversions, indolence, and artifice of the Chinese. After the Qing’s losses to the West and the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century, this new and more negative attitude turned into a flood of Japanese criticism of China. Having gone from being the center of the world to a country among countries, China was now represented as an horrid example of what Japan itself did not want to become: a divided, debased country, “an empire in name only,” an outcast. More and more Japanese observed that because they and the Chinese looked alike, the travails of their neighbors across the ocean diminished them too. Rescuing China from its filth and denigration became a racial task for the Japanese of the first part of the twentieth century.
Chinese views of Japan also varied widely during the period up to the 1920s. From a view of the Japanese as eastern barbarians who had voluntarily cut themselves off from proper interaction with the imperial center, and who therefore were foolish or knavish or both, the sense of what Japan represented began to change rapidly in the middle part of thenineteenth century. Now, Chinese visitors commented on the willingness of Japanese elites to make use of Western knowledge and technologies during the Meiji era. Some Chinese saw the Japanese as deserters from a correct, Confucian worldview; many commented on a society gone mad, with factories and shipyards emerging as dark blots on Japan’s pristine landscape. Others, and first and foremost those eager to see more Westernizing reform in China itself, saw Japan as an example, the example, of an Asian society transforming itself into something stronger and better. While all over China the concern about Japan’s growing power increased through war and conflicts, the admiration for their eastern neighbor’s achievements filled some Chinese with hope about what they themselves could do. It was this duality in the relationship that defined Sino-Japanese links in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that gradually made a complex association one of enmity and hatred.
In the late nineteenth century, China and Japan both went through a set of political changes that became known as restorations. The one in Japan, the Meiji Restoration, was really a revolution that changed the country’s economic, social, and political makeup forever. Under the Tokugawa regime, which, like the Qing, had ruled since the seventeenth century, Japan was an isolated society oriented toward self-sufficiency. But from the 1860s on, it commenced a profound transformation that would, within a generation, take it from international irrelevancy to the position of major regional power. The changes in Japan took place under the cloak of a restoration of direct imperial rule by Emperor Meiji, but the group of strongmen who held power after the Tokugawa collapse in 1868 wanted to take the country in new directions in response to the growing threat from the West and the unrest within Japanese society. Unlike the Tongzhi Restoration in China, which faced many of the same problems, the Meiji Restoration was headed by leaders who wanted a deliberate break with the past in order to save Japan. Frightened by the prospect of foreign control and growing instability at home, the Meiji elite set out to create a new Japan: outward-looking, industrial, militarized, and security-oriented.
It is hard to exaggerate the depth of change in Japan in the 1860s and 1870s
Chinese views of Japan also varied widely during the period up to the 1920s. From a view of the Japanese as eastern barbarians who had voluntarily cut themselves off from proper interaction with the imperial center, and who therefore were foolish or knavish or both, the sense of what Japan represented began to change rapidly in the middle part of thenineteenth century. Now, Chinese visitors commented on the willingness of Japanese elites to make use of Western knowledge and technologies during the Meiji era. Some Chinese saw the Japanese as deserters from a correct, Confucian worldview; many commented on a society gone mad, with factories and shipyards emerging as dark blots on Japan’s pristine landscape. Others, and first and foremost those eager to see more Westernizing reform in China itself, saw Japan as an example, the example, of an Asian society transforming itself into something stronger and better. While all over China the concern about Japan’s growing power increased through war and conflicts, the admiration for their eastern neighbor’s achievements filled some Chinese with hope about what they themselves could do. It was this duality in the relationship that defined Sino-Japanese links in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that gradually made a complex association one of enmity and hatred.
In the late nineteenth century, China and Japan both went through a set of political changes that became known as restorations. The one in Japan, the Meiji Restoration, was really a revolution that changed the country’s economic, social, and political makeup forever. Under the Tokugawa regime, which, like the Qing, had ruled since the seventeenth century, Japan was an isolated society oriented toward self-sufficiency. But from the 1860s on, it commenced a profound transformation that would, within a generation, take it from international irrelevancy to the position of major regional power. The changes in Japan took place under the cloak of a restoration of direct imperial rule by Emperor Meiji, but the group of strongmen who held power after the Tokugawa collapse in 1868 wanted to take the country in new directions in response to the growing threat from the West and the unrest within Japanese society. Unlike the Tongzhi Restoration in China, which faced many of the same problems, the Meiji Restoration was headed by leaders who wanted a deliberate break with the past in order to save Japan. Frightened by the prospect of foreign control and growing instability at home, the Meiji elite set out to create a new Japan: outward-looking, industrial, militarized, and security-oriented.
It is hard to exaggerate the depth of change in Japan in the 1860s and 1870s
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