Mark Ravina. To Stand with the Nations of the World

For decades historians in Japan and around the world have tried to figure out how Japan evaded subordination to the Western great powers and at the same time transformed its government from a decentralized agrarian regime to a centralized industrializing state, without losing its soul. To deal with this conundrum, Mark Ravina pays due attention to foreign pressure, but never at the expense of accepting the argument that the United States somehow “opened” Japan to Western civilization. Instead he demonstrates how officials and thinkers ransacked Japanese history for prior instances when Japan sought knowledge from abroad, and he points to its more recent early modern past for practices and ideas that could be adapted to new contexts. In To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History, his subject matter thus encompasses foreign relations, politics, economic history, and intellectual history. Ravina builds his argument through emphasizing key terms and contrasts. One such term is “global isomorphism”—the idea that “polities become more like each other during periods of intense interaction” (9). In Japan’s case, that meant selecting best practices and institutions from Western nations to apply at home, as it had done over a thousand years earlier. As for contrasts, the Northeast Asian international order functioned through obfuscation—boundaries were overlapping and vague, the Ryukyu kingdom acknowledged multiple overlords, and trade between Japan and Korea both was and was not officially sanctioned. This was not acceptable to the Western international order. Two of Ravina’s favorite phrases are “radical nostalgia” and “cosmopolitan chauvinism.” The first points to the way Japanese thinkers used diverse formulations of ancient history to criticize present practice and propose revolutionary changes. The chief example of this is the term “restoration” (ishin) or its close cousin, “returning to the past of imperial rule” (ōsei fukko), in the eighth century, when a state modeled on the Tang was centered on the emperor. The second phrase emphasizes the universality of certain Western ideas that came into Japan from abroad. Since there was nothing inherently foreign about them, these ideas could be fitted into assumptions regarding Japan’s cultural uniqueness. A Dutch anatomy textbook when used as a reference for the first dissections performed in Japan proved, for instance, that people are all alike on the inside.

Agrarian society · Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis) · Civilization · Economic history · Foreign policy · Isolationism · Meiji period · Meiji Restoration · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · World history · World War II · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies