Meiji Japan's China solution to Tokugawa Japan's China problem

Abstract

The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginary of ‘China’, Chūgoku (Zhongguo) or Chūka (Zhonghua) in the Japanese discourse up to and around the mid-nineteenth century; namely, how it was deployed to make sense of the historical situation facing the contemporaries amid the combined internal and external crises and how it structured the range of options available to them. To exemplify this, we first turn to the debate of the shape of the polity that straddled the critical decades of 1850s–1860s. The self-conscious restoration of a past political ideal was the ostensible justification of the revolutionary overhaul, but in terms of the models of polity, there existed very different versions and understandings of what past could or should be restored. In the classical conceptual language of politics, the choice was between the hōken and gunken model. While the year 1871 saw a closure that cast Meiji as a gunken revolution, the debate continued beyond and the shift of preferences from hōken to gunken needs to be explained. In arguing for Meiji as a ‘Chinese revolution’, we can further point to the surprising degree of overlap between the concerns of earlier Edo-period commentators and the actual factors of the revolution when it finally arrived. Lastly, the normative imaginary of China is shown to have served as the key mediating filter for processing and appropriating the West both before and after the Meiji revolution.

Keywords:

• Meiji Restoration
• revolution
• China imaginary
• hōken–gunken
• intellectual history
• nineteenth century

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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David Mervart

David Mervart is a Research Associate in Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe’ at University of Heidelberg and Profesor Visitante in Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He may be contacted at [email protected]