林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

What Japan can teach us about the future of nationalism

Robert Hellyer and David Leheny, Jan 3, 2018

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/03/what-japan-can-teach-us-about-the-future-of-the-nationalism/?sw_bypass=true&utm_term=.5d77f56571b1

accessed January 4, 2018

●今年是明治維新150週年。但是如何紀念，如何說明要紀念，日本人拿不定主意。
●這篇由兩位歷史教授所寫的回顧，冷靜的剖析主流說法下的另類史實。非常推薦。

林中斌 2018.1.4

On Jan. 3, 1868, a cadre of samurai staged a coup at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, setting Japan on a course to become Asia’s first nation-state. Japanese are not widely commemorating the event today, even though the coup, which began the dramatic transformation of the Meiji Restoration, should rank in global history alongside Bastille Day or July Fourth as a point of national origin.

Stopping to consider this anniversary’s uncelebrated relevance highlights not only the remarkable course of national creation in Japan but also, more importantly, the tenacity of the modernizing nation-state, and its accompanying zealous commitments to sovereignty, as a global political form that continues to influence geopolitics today.

The samurai who staged the coup that day toppled the nearly three-century-old Tokugawa regime. Their alliance of feudal domains from western Japan then went on to defeat an ill-organized resistance in a brief civil war. Upon their victory, they led a new government with the young Emperor Meiji at its head.

Initially, this government formed around a ruling oligarchy that “restored” the emperor’s political role, ultimately signaling a desire to govern by reviving imperial political structures employed in an ideal, ancient past.

But they soon changed course, sensing the need for even bolder change, given the rising tide of European imperialism that many feared might make Japan a European colony. A group of leaders embarked on a nearly two-year diplomatic mission to Europe and the United States to learn firsthand about the ascendant West. Seeing the industrial and military power contained in the modern nation-state, they returned keen to implement that model at home.

With breathtaking speed, the oligarchs initiated reforms that dismantled the politically diffuse feudal state in which samurai lords ruled over semi-independent domains and pledged personal loyalty to the Tokugawa shogun. Drawing inspiration from Western political structures, the leaders eliminated the domains, reorganizing Japan into regional administrative units headed by governors appointed by the new central government. They also eliminated the samurai class, who had served as the administrators of the domain governments, and instead developed an extensive central bureaucracy that acted in the name of Meiji, whose portrait was placed in schools.