1 Getting to the Present
INTRODUCTION
Sino-Japanese tensions have gone through several turbulent periods since the end of World War II. The Beijing government has attributed the problems to the Tokyo government’s insufficient expressions of remorse over Japan’s responsibility for the war and to politicians’ persistent refusal to foreswear visits to the Yasukuni Jinja, Japan’s shrine to its war dead. Relations will not improve, they warn, unless China receives adequate apologies and visits to the shrine cease.
The central theme of this book is that these issues are merely symptoms of an underlying problem that stretches back to the beginning of relations between the two states: the unwillingness of either China or Japan to accept the other as an equal, and the refusal of either to accept a position of inferiority to the other. The roots of this tension can be found as early as the seventh century, in some of the earliest contacts between the two cultures. China treated Japan, as it did all of its neighbors, as a cultural and political inferior. Although Japan had indeed borrowed its written language, its institutional structure, and parts of its philosophical tenets from China, this assertion of superiority engendered anger and resentment in Japan. However, in the premodern era, the ocean that separated the two, the relatively minor interest of each in trade and commerce, and the fact that when one of the two was strong the other was generally not, served to mitigate these tensions.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them, with adversarial relationships frequently outweighing ties of amity. The current Chinese government regards the period from the late nineteenth to the mid- twentieth century, when Japan was clearly stronger, as part of its “century of humiliation.” In the immediate aftermath of World War II, both sides were weak. Japan quickly developed into an economic power, but rejected concomitant military capabilities, preferring to rely on security commitments from the United States. China, after emerging from the shadow of Stalin’s Soviet Union, began a tortuous journey toward modernization hindered by ideological and leadership struggles that lasted until the death of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong in 1976.
When the Japanese economic bubble deflated at the same time as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) experienced a period of strong economic and military growth, the Beijing government again began to treat Japan in an apparently condescending manner, to the intense annoyance of influential members of the Tokyo establishment. A very different situation has taken shape. In the PRC, as communist ideology declined, Chinese nationalism became more important. At the same time, latent nationalism was rekindled in Japan. Both China and Japan are now interested in commerce. With the two currently the world’s second and third largest economic powers and possessing potent military forces, rivalries have intensified. They compete for energy sources, raw materials, markets for their goods, and both regional and international stature. Each is an important international actor. Unless China and Japan can learn to co-exist, either as co-equals or with one accepting the primacy of the other, the stability of both regional and global systems will be jeopardized.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CHINESE WORLD ORDER
The entity currently known as China, and hereafter referred to by that name, had a concept of state ( guo) from the beginning of the Zhou dynasty, which is traditionally dated from 1122–256 B.C. but actually commenced around 1000 B.C. As defined by Confucius’s disciple Mencius, the three treasures of a state ruler were land, people, and government. It was the duty of the king (wang) to align the three levels of heaven, earth, and man
through his righteous example, as can be seen in the ideograph for king of a vertical line connecting three horizontal lines. According to this tradition, a dynasty was founded by a righteous man designated by Heaven. Should his successors prove unworthy, the Mandate of Heaven would be removed and pass to another dynastic founder designated by Heaven.
A distinction was made between inner and outer realms: China was the central state, Zhongguo, with others regarded as populated by uncivilized barbarians. Properly speaking, Confucian society did not conceive of a China, or of a Chinese civilization: there was only civilization and barbarism, with one defining another. What was not civilized was barbaric. The emperor, huangdi as he was called after the founding of the Qin dynasty (221 b.c.e.), was not simply the ruler of one state among many, but the mediator between heaven and earth, the apex of civilization, and a being who was unique in the universe. As the son of heaven, the rituals he performed were not particularistic but universal. As the embodiment of virtue, the emperor carried out the rites (li) that were necessary for the continuing harmony of the universe. In this capacity, he ruled All under Heaven (tianxia). Should the rituals not be properly performed, this was an indication that the emperor had betrayed his role as the son of heaven; the result would be disharmony in the universe.1
Although Confucianism was elaborately hierarchical, it contained elements of egalitarianism as well. In theory, the Mandate of Heaven could fall on any male, depending in part on his ethical standards. Indeed, mythical sage rulers of antiquity such as Yao and Shun did not choose to pass the mandate to their own sons. And uncivilized barbarians could become civilized barbarians, with proper observance of the rites. Presentation of tribute to the emperor was the ritual appropriate to acknowledging the universality of the Sinitic world order and one’s place in it. Entry into the emperor’s presence required proper obeisance, as exemplified by the performance of the kowtow (ketou)—the three kneelings and the nine prostrations. Since this entailed not only bowing but hitting one’s head repeatedly on the floor, it can be presumed to induce the feelings of humility that were considered appropriate to the situation. Refusal to carry out this act would not have been regarded as mere lesemajesté, or an insult to the emperor’s person, as Western tradition would see it, but as an affront to the preordained order of the universe.
The proper rituals having been performed, envoys from these less civilized states presented tribute in the form of local products, and received gifts from the emperor in return. Typically, the gifts exchanged were of the
finest workmanship and often quite rare in the society of the recipient. Some scholars have speculated that the exchange constituted trade in disguise, since Confucius had great contempt for commerce, and also since it was difficult for an entity that considered itself the apex of civilization to regard the products of barbarian lands as having intrinsic value. They had interest as curiosities, but little more. It is probably more accurate to say that the tribute–gift exchange was neither purely ceremonial nor purely commercial. One analyst opines that, by the time of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the two had become so intertwined as to be separable only analytically.2
The barbarian ruler might also receive a patent of office, biao, from the emperor, thus confirming the legitimacy of his administration, and would receive a title that was deemed consonant with his status. The more important of these rulers received the title of king, wang. The enfieffment process involved acceptance of the Chinese dynasty’s calendar to date letters and official documents; this indicated that the ruler had accepted vassal status as well. During the Qing, the vassal state was required to send embassies to Beijing at regular intervals to “receive the calendar” ( fengshuo), a term that can also be translated “receiving the commands of the Son of Heaven.”3
It should not be assumed that all who participated in the tribute system did so from the same motives. The various Korean kingdoms seem to have been the most sincere in their acceptance of a position of inferiority in the Sinitic hierarchy, with Vietnam much less so. Thailand’s motivation might best be described as pragmatic. That country’s longstanding foreign policy was to accommodate to the dominant outside power in the region that, until the arrival of the West in the mid-nineteenth century, was generally China. With its civilization deriving from Indic rather than Sinitic roots, Thailand could accommodate Confucian concepts without accepting them.4 While other states may have accepted the system either sincerely or cynically, Japan, as will be seen, participated episodically, but was never entirely comfortable with, and sometimes openly defiant of, it.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE JAPANESE STATE
In contrast to the Chinese polity, with its early development of a written language, we know very little about early Japan, and much of that is contained in records compiled later using the Chinese language. These are assumed to have been influenced by Chinese categories of thought and philosophical
concepts, rather than accurate accounts of the events and conditions of the times they describe. Additionally, the narratives differ somewhat in their account of events. Even taking these factors into account, the picture that emerges is of a polity very different from China.
In contrast to the down-to-earth descriptions of early Chinese records, supernatural and cosmological features play an important part in Japanese narratives, as does the aristocratic theme.5 The Japanese islands are said to have been created through the union of the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who stand on a floating bridge of heaven. They produced the sun goddess Amaterasu, who invested Ninigi, the immediate ancestor of the imperial line, with the sacred regalia: the three treasures of the mirror, the jewel, and the sword. Amaterasu also endowed Ninigi with the explicit charge, according to some accounts, that his dynasty should endure forever.6 Ninigi, in turn, endowed his own progeny, the first human emperor, Jinmu Tennō, with the regalia and the responsibilities of office.
In this narrative, the human emperor is a direct descendant of the gods rather than, as in China, the holder of a mandate from heaven that is contingent on proper performance of his duties. While there seem to have been not one but three different Japanese dynasties, early compilers of the legends wove together the rulers thereof into one single lineage extending back from those ruling at the time they wrote to the age of the gods.7
EARLY SINO-JAPANESE CONTACTS
Archaeological evidence indicates similarities between stone tools that may have made their way from China to Japan 20,000 years ago.8 Chinese bronze culture reached Japan by about 200 B.C., modifying the existing Neolithic civilization. Bronze culture itself was soon supplanted by the Iron Age. The presumptive channel to Japan was not direct, but through Paekche, one of the three Korean kingdoms of the time. The earliest Japanese mission mentioned in Chinese records came to China in 57 A.D. According to the records of the Later Han, the Guangwu emperor presented a seal with a decorative ribbon to the envoys of a king of Wa as a token of investiture. In 1784 a peasant redigging an irrigation ditch in Shinkanoshima Island on the northwest coast of Kyushu accidentally unearthed such a golden seal inscribed to a “[Vassal of] Han,” which has been accepted as the object referred to in the Chinese record.9
Because of its proximity of access to the Korean peninsula, the northwest coast of Kyushu was a traditional contact point in that era. Some immigrants from what are now China and Korea arrived as well. Collectively known as the Toraijin, they brought cultural influence and serve as a partial refutation to later nationalist claims of Japanese racial homogeneity. What we now know as Japan was not at that time unified, but rather divided up into a number of small tribal units, each under the rule of a hereditary high priest or priestess. While it is reasonable to assume that the king of Nu was one of these, there is no way of knowing whether he was an ancestor or relative of the hereditary line of chieftains that by the fifth or sixth century had evolved into the Japanese imperial family.10
Again according to Chinese records, the next Japanese embassy arrived in 107 A.D. It is said to have presented 160 slaves. The Later Han fell in 220, after a period of disruption, and the next embassies are recorded in the first half of the third century, visiting the court of the Wei dynasty that ruled in the north of a divided entity. A mirror found in Luoyang, capital of the Wei, in 2009 confirms written records of contact between emissaries of the Wa queen Himiko and the court.11 Missions also appeared in Nanjing in the fifth century, at the court of the Liu-Song (429–479), southern dynasties that were based there. The records do not reveal which of these embassies actually represented the group that was in the process of establishing itself as the central government of Japan. Nor is it certain which, if any, were official missions at all: it was not unknown for groups of private businesspeople to represent themselves as emissaries from a foreign ruler in order to obtain the imperial recognition that would afford them better trading opportunities.
Chinese travelers also on occasion visited Kyushu, though one expert opines that it is likely that they did not see very much, and perhaps did not understand all that they saw and heard.12 Still, accounts of the strict discipline of the people, the signs of respect paid by inferiors to superiors, their impressive martial spirit, and the emphasis on cleanliness and ritual purification are all consonant with Japanese culture as it existed in later centuries.
CHINA GAINS INFLUENCE OVER JAPAN
By the time China had been reunited under the Sui dynasty in 589, missions were being recorded in Japan’s own records as well as those of China. The Japanese seem never to have been comfortable in their relations with China, resenting the subservient attitude expected of them and regarding
themselves as the center of their own diplomatic order.13 In behavior considered beyond shocking at the time, Prince Shōtoku, as regent for Empress Suiko (554–628; r. 593–628), wrote to the Sui emperor in 607 on her behalf, saying, “The emperor of the land where the sun rises sends a letter to the emperor of the land where the sun sets.”
This tacit assumption of equality between the barbarian empress and the son of heaven greatly upset the Sui emperor and his court. According to the understated language of the Sui dynastic history, “When the emperor read this he was not pleased, and he said to the President of the Court of Diplomatic Reception, ‘This letter from the barbarians contains improprieties. Do not call it to my attention again.’ ”14
Note, however, that Shōtoku is using a name for his country that could only have been bestowed by the Chinese or by orienting Japan with reference to China, given the position of the sun. Nihon (Riben in Chinese), whose ideographs signify “origin of the sun,” is still the name both countries use to designate Japan today. The Sui, however, typically referred to Japan as woguo, or “country of the dwarves,” rather than the state of Yamato, Great Peace, as the Japanese would have described themselves at the time. Despite this awkwardness, Japanese missions to China continued because they brought back material goods and, more importantly, useful information about Chinese culture. It is interesting to speculate on what Prince Shōtoku might have done had an early death not cut short his career. Not a nativist by any means, he had supported the introduction of Buddhism from Korea against the opposition of clans who did not approve of foreign ideas and wanted to adhere to indigenous Shintō practices—as well as because they wanted to preserve a certain degree of autonomy from the imperial court. Power and religion were, as is often the case in other cultures, intertwined. Additionally, while Prince Shōtoku refused to acknowledge that Japan was subservient to China, he clearly believed that his country should learn from it. There was a strongly pragmatic element to his desire to do so. The major challenge confronting Shōtoku was the establishment of the central power of the imperial court, and the teachings of Confucianism were very helpful in that regard.15
THE TAIKA REFORMS
In 645 a coup overthrew the dominant Soga clan. The coup’s leaders, a future emperor assisted by the founder of the powerful Fujiwara lineage
of future imperial consorts and regents, proclaimed direct imperial rule. 645 was designated the first year of Taika, meaning Great Transformation. Significantly, this represented the first use in Japan of the Chinese-style dating system.
The new rulers proceeded to transform Japanese institutions along the model of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907), then at the peak of its power. While useful in consolidating the rule of the new Japanese leaders, the Taika reforms were also a response to a perceived danger from abroad. In the nineteenth century, the Meiji reforms would be impelled by a similar perception of external threat.
In this case, the threat was from the Korean peninsula, where the three kingdoms of Silla, Koguryǒ, and Paekche contended. One of these, Silla, was backed by the powerful Tang dynasty. Another, Paekche, had close ties to Japan. After a combined Silla–Tang force conquered the Paekche capital, the Japanese responded by dispatching a force whose mission was to restore the Paekche kingdom. It was decisively defeated in 663. Silla went on to conquer Koguryǒ, 16 thus creating the first unified Korean kingdom. A twentieth-century analyst deemed the sense of crisis in Japan occasioned by its defeat in the wars of Korean unification to be comparable in magnitude only to the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century and the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in the nineteenth.17
Heightening the sense of danger, the Tang sent five separate embassies to Japan in less than a decade, the last of which included over 2,000 men. It is conceivable that the missions were intended to placate Japan and perhaps gain its acquiescence to China’s control of the Korean peninsula. But it is clear from both Japanese sources and the feverish defensive preparations taken during this period that the Japanese considered their purpose to be hostile.18
Silla and its successors, the Wang dynasty Koryǒ (935–1392) and Yi dynasty Chǒson (1392–1916), adopted a deferential posture toward China that, as will be seen, enabled Korean states to call on China for assistance against Japan in the 1590s and again in the decade before 1894. Korea, in addition to its role in transmitting Chinese culture to Japan, was to continue to be the object of competition between the two for power and influence, as well as an active participant in the rivalries between them. Japan viewed a Korea unified under Silla and backed by Tang dynasty military might as threatening its own security. This was a major factor in the Japanese desire to emulate the institutions that produced Tang power.19
EIGHTH-CENTURY REFORMS
The early eighth century saw three important developments in this borrowing from China. In the first of these, in 701, the country’s first comprehensive criminal and administrative codes were promulgated. Called the Taihō ritsuryō, they were based on Chinese theories and, with minor revisions, remained the basis for civil administration for centuries to come. A seventeen-point document conceived by Prince Shōtoku was promulgated. Although generally referred to as a constitution, it would not be recognizable as such by today’s standards. Second, in 710, a new capital was built at Nara. It was laid out in accordance with the Chinese ideal of symmetrical architecture for administrative centers. A successor capital established at Heian, later known as Kyōto, in 794 also used this plan.
The third project was the compilation of Japan’s first national history, the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), according to Chinese historiographical models. Completed in 720, the Nihon Shoki was written in stylistically proper Chinese. It attempted to establish the legitimacy of the imperial family and the recently Sinified court government. By contrast, the earlier Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), completed in 712, focused more on ancient legends and was written in a hybrid language that interspersed Chinese with Japanese elements. About this time also, the Japanese began to refer to their country as Nihon, the land of the rising sun, as Prince Shōtoku had done in his sixth-century letter.
While the new administrative system was in most respects a copy of that of the Tang dynasty model, there were small but important differences. The Department of Worship, for example, outranked the Council of State, such that precedence was given to the priestly functions of the sovereign over secular administrative matters. In essence, this indicated the unwillingness of the reformers to abandon their national tradition that the claim to the throne is established solely on the basis of descent, in favor of the Chinese notion that the mandate of heaven is given on the basis of moral worthiness. The hierarchy of offices also depended far more on birth than, as Chinese theory had it, talent. An edict of 682 said bluntly that, when selecting men for office, the consideration must be birth first, then character, and, lastly, capacity.20
In the educational area, the influence of Korea in the transmission of Chinese ideas was also important. Many of the professors at the Confucian academy were émigrés from the destroyed Paekche kingdom or their
descendants. So as well were many of those who sat for the civil service examinations. Japan’s first university admitted students from higher and lower ranks of noble families as well as commoners. In this sense, it was actually more egalitarian than its Chinese counterparts in the same era, since the Tang system was highly aristocratic and hereditary. However, this changed over time. As Japanese court offices became increasingly hereditary, the examination system, which had never functioned on more than a limited scale, atrophied into insignificance. Meanwhile, the Chinese examination system was evolving into the normal path for selection to high office.21
NATIVIST ELEMENTS RETURN
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Japanese court attempted to preserve its Sinified appearance, though in practice, as seen above, elements of Chinese and native culture co-existed. In poetry, which has enjoyed an honored place in Japanese culture, the Kaifusō (Fond Recollections of Poetry) was published in Chinese in 751, and the Man’yōshū (Collection for Ten Thousand Generations), containing what many Japanese consider the most pristinely pure of their native poetry, in 759. In general, for a period of two centuries, the court attempted to govern according to Chinese principles, somewhat modified by nativist ideas. Court culture was Sinified. Beginning in the mid-ninth century, the court gradually abandoned this commitment to functioning in the Chinese manner. Politically, a single lineage from the northern house of the Fujiwara family came to dominate high court offices. Lesser posts became hereditary preserves as well, in contrast to the Confucian ideal of a bureaucratically organized meritocracy. Economically, land that was supposed to be controlled by the government and distributed to peasants increasingly accumulated into large, privately managed estates known as shōen. The revenue from these shōen went to powerful court families rather than into the government treasury, thus decreasing the dependence of these families on the central government. Although the ritsuryō codes were not revoked and interest in Chinese culture remained, they gradually lost their positions of preeminence.22
Despite the slow diffusion of power away from the court, the imperial capital at Kyōto remained the unrivaled center of culture. Interest in Chinese forms declined. Japanese literature, which had almost disappeared after the
publication of the Man’yōshu, began to flourish again. When the imperially sponsored Kokinshū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Times) was compiled in 905, the native poetic tradition was given the official recognition that had previously been given to Chinese literature alone. As a general statement, during the middle and late Heian periods, from about 900 to 1185 A.D., a more noticeably Japanese culture arose. A native script that was better suited to writing the Japanese language was developed. Novels such as the still popular classic Tale of Genji employed this script, as well as exemplifying traits that later developed into a distinctively Japanese aesthetic tradition.
The divide between China and Japan should not be overstated. Certain accommodations were made by each to the other. For example, the Japanese, regarding the requirement to bring tribute and make obsequious oaths of fealty to be offensive, had taken to dispatching their embassies with gifts but not documents. This was apparently accepted at certain ports of entry where Chinese officials were familiar with Japanese customs, although not at others. The records of a court scholar named Kiyokimi state that, when he arrived at the inland Tang capital of Chang’an in 804, he found that his compatriots who had traveled on another ship were absent. His inquiries revealed that they had been detained because their ship had been blown off course and landed at a port where Japanese customs were not understood.23 And, complaints about the distasteful nature of Chinese attitudes aside, when a scholar/poet named Ono no Takamura wrote a tract attacking the whole purpose of embassies to China, he was deemed to have insulted the memories of the emperors who had dispatched them, and banished forthwith.24
However, the dispatch of embassies began to decline. The last, in 838, on which Ono no Takamura had served as second in command, is the best known, since Ennin, a Buddhist monk who participated in it and traveled widely in China over a period of nine years, kept a meticulous diary of his observations. Part of the reason for the lesser number of missions was that the Tang dynasty itself was in decline. Members of Kiyokimi’s embassy had reported unstable conditions at the turn of the ninth century; these can also be inferred from Ennin’s diary, though what is more remarkable are his descriptions of the impressive attention to organization and the observance of ritual even in a period of dynastic deterioration.25 Other reasons for the decline in embassies were their expense and the dangers inherent in the treacherous journey across the sea. But most important may have been the conviction that the purposes of the embassies could better be achieved by other means.
