Li Yongjing, Department of Political Science, Fan University, East China Normal University
Creating a New Japan: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations Since 1853, by [American] W. Raffber, translated by Shi Fangzheng, Shanxi People's Publishing House, June 2021 edition, 168.00 yuan
I. 1853: Fatal Encounter
On June 16, 1860, a Japanese diplomatic mission of seventy-seven men arrived in New York Harbor on a U.S. warship in exchange for the approval of the Treaty of Rapprochement between Japan and the United States, the second highlight of the history of U.S.-Japan relations since July 1853, when Four Warships led by General Perry of the U.S. East Indies Fleet forced Japan to open its doors. Witnessing this scene, the great poet Walter Whitman (1819-1892) was so excited that he chanted a poem: "The good-looking Manhattan man / American comrades - The East has finally come / The original woman has finally come / ... I also raise my voice and take on my mission / I sing the praises of the world in my western ocean / I sing the praises of the new empire, which is more magnificent than ever - as in fantasy / I sing of America, I sing of lovers - I sing of greater supremacy ..." But this excitement belongs only to americans, and the Japanese of the same era are worried, even angry. In Philadelphia, someone said to a U.S. Navy officer, "Is this the monkey you were accompanying?" (p. 26) This is a picture of the "conflict" that historians freeze.
The current visit of the Japanese mission is destined not to be an ordinary diplomatic activity, because they have decided to introduce the seeds of modern civilization. Following this mission to the United States, from 1862 to 1867, when the shogunate fell, the shogunate also sent five missions to European countries such as Britain, France, Russia and so on. The will of the Japanese to move from "locking the country" to "opening the country" was already clear at this time; to borrow Plato's famous metaphor, they saw the light and decided to get out of the "cave" of the old era. But they do not realize that the flame of modern civilization contains a fatal danger: it leads people to push open the mysterious door of nature, and to put the great power of creating nature unreservedly into the hands of ordinary people; people are blind to everything with the desire and conceit of reaching the pinnacle. A new "cave" awaits its prey.
In fact, on March 3 of that year, the "eldest" of the Edo shogunate, The equivalent of The Prime Minister, Inoue Naohiro, was assassinated. The beginning of the armed seizure of power by the japanese subordinate samurai accelerated the fragmentation of the feudal system established by tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Edo shogunate, and the search for a new form of integration—the pressure to centralize power from within and the pressure from the outside to the new world. The U.S.-Japan relationship at this time was like a strange nuclear reactor "designed" by the United States: fission and fusion occurred at the same time, and huge amounts of energy began to accumulate. The above-transcribed Whitman's poems, no matter how superficial and even fleshy, are manifestations of the spirit of the times—the poet's keen mind has captured the "radiation" from the East.
However, this is an unstable, or uncontrolled, nuclear reactor. The Meiji Restoration, which broke out around 1868, can be said to be a small-scale "nuclear accident": by the time the Meiji government put down the "Southwest War" in 1877, tens of thousands of soldiers had died. Since then, the reactor has barely maintained the "critical state" of work; it has continued to export energy, such as the Meiji Constitution, the Sino-Japanese War (i.e., the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War), the Russo-Japanese War, the concoction of "Manchukuo", the war of aggression against China, and so on, which have defined modern Japan. Industrial revolution, commerce, racism, colonial competition, imperial desires, civilizational missions, these material and conceptual factors in the course of history are mixed together, along with the lives of countless people, as fuel.
On the morning of December 8, 1941, the Emperor of Japan issued a declaration of war against the United States to the people. Upon hearing this news, the Japanese literary critic Takeuchi Yoshinori (1910-1977) immediately wrote an article with the following words: "History has been created!" The world changed its face overnight! We have witnessed it all with our own eyes. We shuddered with emotion... We feel some inexplicable, breathtaking shock coming from the depths of our hearts. (The Complete Works of Takeuchi, Vol. 14) Takeuchi's passion was ignited, much different from the situation when Whitman first met the Japanese mission in 1860: they all saw the moment when history was created. The difference is that Whitman's praise is imbued with infinite optimism, while Takeuchi's words are a somber battle manifesto: it is a declaration of war against the modern Western colonialist world order, against Whitman's world. However, the two did have one thing in common that belonged to that era: they were both too conceited.
The tragedy soon culminated. At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium exploded five hundred and eighty meters over Hiroshima; historians recorded that "between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed in an instant, including 12 U.S. Navy pilots who were captured and imprisoned." "At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, another atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, claiming to have killed 70,000 people.
So, was it possible for the United States not to use atomic bombs at that time? This is not actually a subject of interest to later historians. As early as May of that year, there was a heated debate within the "Provisional Committee" (headed by U.S. Secretary of the Army Stimson), but the committee recommended the use of the atomic bomb to President Truman; in contrast, Secretary of the Navy Forrest argued that "only a blockade line and air power are needed to force Japan to submit, neither offensive nor atomic bombs." Historians analyze: "Truman and Stimson had the same pain as Forrest, but unlike Forrest, they saw the atomic bomb as the answer." For them, the pressing issue was to keep the Soviet Union as far away from the Japanese mainland as possible. The atomic bomb was the only weapon in Truman's arsenal that could quickly end the war and impress Stalin with America's might in East Asia. (p. 246) The author deliberately uses the term "pain" to paint a touch of warmth on the cruelty of history.
Truman made a decision in a political sense: he had to dismantle the Yalta Agreement between his predecessor, President Roosevelt, and Stalinda in February, which gave Stalin the rights to Northeast Asia that the tsars had dreamed of, which in turn clashed with the "open door" policy of the United States for nearly half a century. Therefore, when Truman learned that the atomic bomb had been successfully developed, he no longer had to turn to Stalin's strength with his ace in hand. The truth of the "answer" has now come to light: whether the atomic bomb is used or not depends on how the two empires of the United States and the Soviet Union settle their desires. In the collision of these desires, the Japanese Empire was the first to be destroyed.
An American writer of political humor once said of Perry's exploits in 1853: "The trouble is that after the heroic brigadier general knocked on the door, we did not go in, but they came out. The United States used the latest domesticated energy of mankind to dismantle this "nuclear reactor" of dangerous U.S.-Japan relations and drive the Japanese back to the "cave." Destruction and reconstruction went hand in hand, and this time the United States itself acted as a three-piece set of control reactors: moderator, control rod, and coolant. U.S. military bases in Japan are watching the movements from the eastern tip of Eurasia while guarding the formerly conceited and unruly enemies and seemingly obedient allies. But who is watching over the United States?
From "Far West" to "Near West": The Origin of Conflict
If there is anything special about the history of U.S.-Japan relations since 1853, it is that it concentrates on all types of "conflicts" known to mankind to date. There are some conflicts, such as wars and trade frictions, which are on the surface, and people can understand the general situation at a glance, while the "clash of civilizations", which is a clash of ideas, acts as a background and background at most times; in the minds of some people whose material interests are paramount, this conceptual thing is not even recognized. In fact, if we can realize that "matter" and "ideas" are not superficially opposing, then we can reduce these conflicts to the conflicts of people's "desires" with each other; as mentioned earlier, driven by industrial civilization and capital, people have embarked on the world stage with their own infinitely expanding desires.
Let's look at the narrative at the beginning of the book: "There are many reasons why they (i.e., Americans) are so easily subservient to the pursuit of wealth. Americans believe that they were indeed born free—that is, they were born or lived in a land that was neither feudal nor the many regulatory measures that emerged in Europe after the 13th century. Lacking a feudal history, Americans cannot understand why the peoples of Europe and Asia cannot easily break free from their shackles. Moreover, Americans in the mid-19th century held vast tracts of land that could be developed and migrated endlessly. Millions of Indians were blocking the path to development, but they were being systematically eliminated or confined to reservations. (p. 6) These seemingly understated lines give us a glimpse of a beginning in recent history; it then flows like a trickle and ends in a terrifying wave.
Setting the beginning of the U.S.-Japan relationship as an American pursuit of "wealth" may seem easy to understand, but there is a complicated side to the problem. Historically, for example, the Dutch have come to Japan with a "lust for interests," but they—historians tend to consider them "scum of the Dutch people" and "either a villain or a bunch of incompetents"—to bend their knees in front of shoguns and their officials in order to maintain trade. A Dutch writer wrote in a poignant stroke in a 1769 play: "It may be fate that a nation is enslaved / But the originally free people in Japan take the initiative to play the role of lowly slaves / In Dejima just to make money and abandon God / Such things never happened in the East until the arrival of the Dutch." (Donald King: "Japan Discovers Europe, 1720-1830") In the pursuit of wealth, Americans are no different from the Dutch, but they have very different aspects of their mental structure.
At this time, the "mentality" of the Americans was fixed in the "endless development and migration" of the vast land under their "control", that is, in the process of the so-called "westward expansion" movement. The author's next statement tells the other side of the truth: "Millions of Indians are being systematically wiped out or confined to reservations. The formation of American values that have long been praised, such as the love of liberty, individualism, and the American Dream, have been nourished in the process by the spiritual nourishment of the so-called noble "Puritan tradition." They left all the burdens of history on the Old World, and expelled the Indians from their homes in the New World, where the slave trade provided them with indispensable labor. Nothing could stop them from enjoying "freedom"; they also gave the highest reason for their actions: "Destiny of Heaven" or "Destiny of Heaven". By 1890, nearly four hundred years of "westward expansion" had come to an end, and the "frontiers" of the New World had disappeared. However, American history moves forward on a set trajectory: The Americans pushed the new "frontier" deep into the Pacific.
On May 1, 1898, the U.S. fleet destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. President McKinley immediately sent 12,000 soldiers to occupy Manila and quickly proceeded to merge Hawaii. McKinley said, "We need Hawaii so much. So, in June of that year, the Kingdom of Hawaii was annexed by the United States. In February 1899, a national movement broke out in the Philippines, firing the first shots at the colonialists. Historians record a naïve view: "For Americans, it was a contest between good merchants and evil colonists. Of course, this is only the arrogance and hypocrisy of the empire, because "this war lasted more than three years and took the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos" (p. 72). From the point of view of the weak and small peoples, the "destiny of Heaven" is the fate of their slaughter by the colonialists.
The Americans continued their "westward march" policy; in September 1899, then Secretary of State John Hay issued to his European counterparts the famous "Encyclical on the Policy of Opening the Door to Trade with China," the so-called "Open Door" policy. What they didn't realize, however, was that a fledgling Japan had become a stumbling block: the Empire of Japan, as a concubine of the modern colonial world order, also had its own "destiny to go west." In this year, the Meiji Japanese Army's "Emperor Taishang" Yamagata Aritomo proposed the so-called "line of sovereignty" and "line of interest", and began to regard the northeast region of China as its own forbidden. This constituted the direct motivation for Japan to launch the "Russo-Japanese War" in 1904. After Japan's difficult victory in 1905, then Foreign Minister Shotaro Komura declared that Japan had become a "semi-continental power" in Asia. On June 16 of that year, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was still watching from the sidelines, wrote to a British friend: "What a wonderful nation the Japanese are!" Their performance on the battlefield is as good as their performance on the mall. (p. 83) He did not realize that the "westward" policies of the old and new empires had begun to intersect. The United States and Japan have once again had a deadly encounter.
Japan was overwhelmed by the victory, and its domestic and foreign affairs began to be absurd. In October 1929, a worldwide economic crisis suddenly struck, the great powers pursued self-preservation, and civilization quickly began to regress. After the "918 Incident" in 1931, Japan openly seized northeast China for itself, and in fact delineated a forbidden area for the Americans to "go west". For the Americans with the spiritual structure of "westward expansion", it was really intolerable, and they immediately announced the "Stimson Doctrine": not recognizing the policies of the Japanese government. The fuse of the world war was ignited, and Japan entered the period of the so-called "Fifteen Years' War". By the time of Japan's defeat in 1945, tens of millions had fallen prey to imperial desires.
America's desires were largely realized: under the ensuing military occupation and post-war arrangements, the Japanese archipelago became in fact the newest "western frontier" of the United States. In the language of U.S. world policy at the time, Japan played the "West Coast" of the United States and was the "hub of the Far East Frontier" of the United States. In 1963, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Johnson proudly declared that Japan had become a "model" and a "source of modern technology" for the rest of Asia; he also stated that "from our position, the Far East, more precisely, 'Far West,' or more appropriately,' is 'Near West'" (p. 416). The reason why the United States does not hesitate to praise Japan is because China at this time is the new focus of its hostility.
This "frontier thinking" or "frontier desire" of the United States constitutes the "stubborn bass" of the United States' world policy. Obsessive bass, this is the famous saying of the Japanese historian of political thought Maruo Maruyama (1914-1994), which means a type of bass that appears repeatedly in various forms in the same movement, and Maruyama uses it to describe the constant, subtle elements of the concept of thought, making the movement take on its own unique characteristics. The pursuit of "freedom" is a chapter in the spirit of all nations, but the "stubborn bass" determines its color in a long-term and far-reaching sense. In 1863, the U.S. consul in Japan, Prune, wrote: "All Western power officials in Japan are sentinels of civilized outposts. We are here as if we were facing an Indian tribe. (p. 31) In the eyes of some politicians in the United States, all groups that prevent them from "moving westward" can be classified as "Indian tribes." This conceit of "civilization" is also its "stubborn bass". However, they encountered resistance in the Japanese archipelago.
What is the "lesson of history"?
The main thrust of the review of some historical facts above is not to make another critique of the historical United States or Japan, but to reproduce the deep logic and desires of the U.S.-Japan relationship—which is what we know as "modern" (or "modern") itself. This is an unpleasant fact. The great philosopher Nietzsche left a famous admonition for the world: "Those who fight monsters must be careful not to become monsters." If you look into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also looks inside you. In 1860, the Japanese "looked" at the new world, which was their first step out of the "cave" of the pre-modern era. It certainly paid off: after Japan's victory over the Qing Dynasty, it was about to swallow the Liaodong Peninsula and the Taipeng Islands, and the British Empire commented with approval and irony that Japan had become a "little beast in the far east." Nietzsche's prophecy was unfortunately fulfilled, and the "abyss" of modern times has opened the door for Japan.
The sensitive Japanese people are not without grievances in their hearts: it is the Western powers and the Americans who forcibly bring them to the "abyss" in the name of "civilization". Okakura Tenshin wrote in the Book of Tea: "When Japan was immersed in the elegant art of peace, he (i.e., Westerners) always regarded her as a barbaric and uncivilized people; since she began to kill on the Manchurian battlefield, he called her a civilized and civilized country." If we just dismiss this sentence as sarcasm and helplessness, or simply as Japan's self-justification, we miss the true face of "modern times": armed with the sharp weapons of science and technology, with naked desire, people begin to walk out of the "cave" in pairs, but are soon captured by the next "cave". The journey is surprisingly long. So, can people still learn from the previous path and from history?
Originally titled Conflict: A Complete History of U.S.-Japan Relations, the author provides a meticulous account of the relationship between the two countries from the perspective of "conflict" since the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, recognizing that this "conflict" will continue is already a lesson that people have learned. This is certainly not a new insight, and realists in international relations have always talked about "conflict" and "threat". The real lesson of history, therefore, may be that people recognize the manifestations of "conflict" determined by their own desires and the laws of history. The ancestors of the Chinese world once said: "You can't turn back, heaven is destroyed." This is perhaps the highest expression of the lesson of history.
Historians are not prophets, but they have their own judgments. Referring to the history of conflict between the United States and Japan, the author writes: "If lessons are learned from past experiences, there is a better understanding between the two peoples and, if they are lucky, the need to accept, control, and limit this conflict." The author was very cautious and used two hypothetical sentences in a row to limit his "lessons." However, the difficulty of "bringing a better understanding between the two peoples" and the fickle and impermanent fate associated with the phrase "lucky" suggest that historians have bleak expectations of this relationship, because "the roots of conflict are deeply rooted in history and cannot be safely eliminated." The authors seem to be unsatisfied, further suggesting: "The main root causes of those early conflicts about which system will dominate the century-long competition for Asia, and especially the development of the Chinese market, will continue to influence the domestic and foreign policies of the United States and Japan in the 21st century." China, which he describes in the book as a "ghost" in U.S.-Japan relations, is making another appearance. The book was published in 1997; if he had rewritten it today, there might have been another way of saying it. This can't help but make us fall into contemplation.
In our general understanding, the past recorded in publications called "history" can be regarded as fixed "facts". However, the difference in the author's creative mood, the change in the reader's reading mood, not to mention the drastic changes in the world itself, are subtly but surely changing our perception of "facts". History is not fixed, it is fundamentally a constituent of our "mind." The past is there, but it is not changing, and every observation of people, every projection of ideas and intentions on it, will make it instantly solidify into reality. In this sense, the writing and reading of history have an equal meaning: we want to let the past flow again in order to observe its potential flow.
Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng
Proofreader: Yijia Xu
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