Opium, Expulsion, Sovereignty. China's Lessons for Bakumatsu Japan

T %HE foreign invasions and massive internal rebellions that wracked Ch'ing-dynasty China in the mid-decades of the nineteenth century had serious ramifications for Japan and the Tokugawa regime. To give one example, in June 1858 China signed the Treaty of T'ientsin that temporarily halted the Second Opium War.' And in the following month, U.S. Consul Townsend Harris forced the Edo bakufu to grant him a treaty that formally permitted foreign trade and residence in Japan. By granting Harris's treaty, bakufu leaders revoked national isolation, or sakoku , a hallowed state law then generally, although mistakenly, presumed to date from the start of Tokugawa rule. Moreover, they flouted the emperor's will that called for joi 1, or 'expulsion of Western barbarians'. To a large extent, Consul Harris achieved his diplomatic coup by forcefully stressing that Japan, like China, would suffer the evils of opium trafficking and war if Edo did not consent.2 Thus, the bakufu and its supporters pledged themselves to kaikoku rJ, or 'opening the country'-at least to the Westerners. Events on the Asian mainland loomed large in the minds of late-Tokugawa thinkers and leaders, whether proor anti-bakufu. They construed China's misfortunes as a 'mirror for Yin'-a warning of what to be on guard against. As they phrased it, 'The overturned cart left tracks' for all to see. But just how clear were those tracks? Edo's prohibition of foreign travel, the key element in sakoku, remained in effect throughout the 1850s; so Japanese nationals could

Ancient history · China · Opium · Political science · Sovereignty · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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