Let's take a look at a different kind of Japan

"A Brief History of Japan" Author: Zhang Hongjie

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The author of the book "A Brief Reading of Japanese History" is Zhang Hongjie, a famous contemporary historian. He is known as a "person who is super good at telling history", and can write an academic work with ups and downs and full of interest, so much so that the writer Mo Yan praised his penmanship as "calm and meticulous", writing about the complexity, profundity, peculiarity, freshness and charm of human nature.

Someone once asked, "There are so many editions of the History of Japan in the bookstore, why do you want to write another one?" "Indeed, when it comes to Japan, everyone will have something to say, Japanese anime, Japanese games, Japanese songs, and further afield, there are anti-Japanese dramas such as "Mine Warfare" and "Tunnel Warfare", and many people still know about the Black Ship Incident, the Meiji Restoration, and so on.

However, in Mr. Zhang Hongjie's view, it is not enough to understand these Japanese cultural phenomena and historical events, we need to understand the reasons behind the phenomena and events, and we must know both the reason and the reason for it. What he wants to write in this book is "Therefore True", that is, the stable and unchanging riverbed under the long river of history composed of phenomena and events, and the eternal nature reflected by phenomena and events.

This is also Mr. Zhang Hongjie's style of history management - jumping out of the limitations of a single historical event and a single historical phenomenon, and sorting out the laws of the context buried under it; Through the "change" of superficial events and phenomena, we can observe the "unchanged" core of a nation's culture and national identity, so that we can understand the historical chassis and spiritual world of the Japanese nation, and only then can we truly recognize our neighbor.

Okay, so let's get into the essence of the book.

Where the hell did the Japanese come from?

This book is about the history of Japan, and the earliest sources of history are myths. There is an ancient official history book in Japan called "Kojiki", which records the story of Japan's "creation": according to legend, a long time ago, the world was still a vast ocean, and the gods lived in the heavenly "Takamagahara", and one day on a whim, they decided to send two brother and sister gods to the lower realm to create a land.

The brother and sister flew to the ground, thrust the spear in their hands into the ocean, stirred vigorously and lifted it. At this time, the muddy water at the tip of the spear slowly dripped and condensed into a small island. The brother and sister landed on it and began to get married and have children. But instead of humans, they gave birth to gods such as mountains, seas, and winds, as well as the Japanese archipelago. In other words, in the context of mythology, the Japanese archipelago was born one by one by the two brother and sister gods.

Later, the younger sister God died in an accident, and the elder brother God, in addition to grief, gave birth to Amaterasu Okami, that is, the sun god, from his left eye, and from his right eye, the moon god, gave birth to the moon god. This Amaterasu Okami is the ancestor of the Japanese emperor, so the Japanese imperial family has always been regarded as a descendant of the gods, and the emperor is regarded as a "living god", that is, a god who lives in the present world.

However, Amaterasu did not directly rule Japan after his birth, but returned to the heavens to continue to be a god. After a long time, one of her descendants came down to play, ate too much rice and sashimi in the world, lost his divine powers, and had to stay in the mortal world aggrieved, and became the first emperor of the Yamato Dynasty, that is, Emperor Jimmu. The year was 660 B.C., the period of the Spring and Autumn period of China's struggle for hegemony.

This is the story of Japan's "creation", but it is clearly not the historical truth. So, how did the Japanese come to be? According to anthropologists, in ancient times, the Japanese archipelago was connected to the mainland, and people on the mainland followed the animals while hunting and unknowingly came to the island. When the sea level rose and the island was separated by the sea, these immigrants remained on the island and became the first group of Japanese.

Other experts believe that the early Japanese may have come from southern China, arriving in Okinawa by boat and then continuing to the Japanese archipelago. This is because there are many similarities between Japanese culture and the Jiangnan region and even the ethnic minority cultures in the southwest, such as natto, glutinous rice, fish wrapping, straw shoes, clogs, dry stilt buildings, and so on.

Regardless of where they came from, the first Japanese and the mainland had almost the same level of development. In 1960, archaeologists found broken pottery shards at a site in Japan, which was determined by carbon 14 to be one of the earliest pottery of mankind, indicating that Japanese civilization was once ahead of the curve. Because of the pattern of rope pressing on these broken pottery shards, historians call this period in Japan the "Jomon Period".

But soon the situation was reversed. Humans on the continent invented agriculture, bronze and iron tools successively. These new inventions spread rapidly across the Eurasian continent, and four ancient civilizations emerged one after another. However, because Japan has long been separated by the sea, the people on the islands know almost nothing about it, so thousands of years have passed, and they have quietly stayed in the "Jomon period" without any breakthrough.

It was not until China entered the Qin and Han dynasties that the glory of mainland civilization radiated back to Japan through immigration. "Romance of the Three Kingdoms: The Biography of Dongyi" recorded: "Chen Sheng and others, the world rebelled against Qin, and Yan, Qi, and Zhao people avoided tens of thousands of people in Korea. That is to say, during the war of the Qin, Han and Yi dynasties, many Chinese fled to the Korean Peninsula, and some of them used the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to Japan.

Relying on the new technologies brought by these immigrants, Japan quickly moved from the Jomon period to the "Yayoi period", which marked the first leap from a primitive society to an agrarian society. Ethnically, the Jomon people, the local natives, the Jomon people, began to marry these new immigrants from the mainland, and became the ancestors of most of the Japanese people today.

In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, due to the wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, many Chinese immigrants arrived in Japan through the Korean Peninsula. Some claimed to be descendants of Qin Shi Huang, who later became the "Qin clan" in Japan; Some claimed to be descendants of the imperial family of the Han Dynasty and became the "Eastern Han clan" and "Western Wen clan" in Japan. They were collectively known as the "Watarai people" and promoted the rapid sinicization of Japan.

Around the same time, the emperor decided to put the country's chaotic aristocracy in order. Why chaos? At that time, not only did the Imperial Family claim that they had divinity, but many nobles also said that their ancestors were gods, and some of them traced back to the Imperial Family, directly threatening the rule of the Imperial Family.

So the emperor organized a "hot spring fair" and asked everyone to put their hands into the pot of boiling water, and whoever was safe and sound would be the descendants of the nobles and had been protected by their ancestors. After this rectification, the emperor ordered the nobility to be divided into three categories: one was called "kobetsu", that is, the descendants of the imperial family; One is called "Shenbei", which is the descendants of other gods; The last category is called "Zhufan", which is the new immigrants we talked about earlier. With advanced technology and culture, many of them have developed into deep-rooted wealthy families.

Sending Tang envoys brought something to Japan

Although the arrival of immigrants catapulted Japan from a primitive society to an agrarian society, it was still several ranks lower than the mainland civilization. For example, in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the Japanese did not know how to make clothes, they used to cut a cut in the middle of the whole cloth and put a set of clothes around their necks. Later, following China, they learned to raise silkworms, weave silk, and make decent clothes.

In addition to learning from immigrants, Japan also received the radiation of mainland civilization through the "bridgehead" of Korea. For example, for iron tools, for a long time, the Japanese did not mine iron ore, so they had to rely on the iron resources of North Korea for weapons. Because of this, the Yamato Kingdom, Japan's early state organization, coveted Korea from the first time of its founding, and sent troops to plunder the local mineral resources and craftsmen many times, so that the country also flourished.

By the 7th century, the Korean Peninsula was divided into three states: Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo. Among them, Silla established an alliance with the Tang Dynasty and organized a coalition army to attack Baekje. The latter retreated one after another, and finally had no choice but to ask for help from Yamato. In 663 AD, China and Japan encountered a fierce naval battle at the mouth of the Baekgang River in Korea, which is now the mouth of the Geumgang River in South Korea, and Japan lost.

After this tough battle, Japan discovered the strength of the Tang Dynasty, which was incomparable to itself in terms of national strength and military technology. However, the Japanese nation has a characteristic that it can carry it clearly, and as long as it recognizes that you are powerful and better than him, it will be determined to learn from you. As a result, Japan began to send a large number of people to study abroad, learn from Datang in an all-round way and copy its system, which is known as "Dahua Reform" in history.

Before the Battle of Baijiangkou, Japan had also sent envoys to the Tang Dynasty, but at most two ships at a time, the number of people was between one and two hundred. After the naval battle, Japan expanded the scale of its envoys to the Tang Dynasty to four ships at a time, and the number of envoys also increased to between 200 and 600. The reason why so many people were sent was because the mortality rate of sending Tang envoys was too high, nearly 50%.

Then why is the mortality rate of the Tang envoys so high? Let's take Chao Heng's experience of returning to China to illustrate. Chao Heng is a Japanese student who came to the Tang Dynasty after many hardships and dangers, and decided to return to China many years later due to homesickness. As a result, shortly after he sailed out to sea, he was caught in a storm and was never heard from. People misreported that he fell into the water and drowned, and the poet Li Bai wrote a poem to mourn: "Japan Chao Qing resigned from the imperial capital, and the sail was wrapped around the tent pot." The bright moon does not return to the blue sea, and the white clouds are full of sorrow. ”

Fortunately, the ship that Chao Heng was on did not sink, but was blown by the storm to the vicinity of Vietnam. But after landing, they encountered local natives, and more than 10 people, including Chao Heng, and more than 170 people on the ship were killed. In the end, Chao Heng returned to Chang'an, where he died at the age of 72.

It should be noted that in order to fulfill the diplomatic mission to the greatest extent, the Tang Mission would concentrate the best talents in Japan's diplomacy, academics, science and technology, crafts, music, art, navigation and other fields at that time. The fact that so many outstanding talents have taken such great risks to cross the ocean to China shows how much the Japanese are willing to pay in order to learn from advanced civilization.

And it turned out that the price was worth it. After returning to China, these envoys began to comprehensively transform Japanese society, the core of which was to elevate the authority of the emperor and strengthen the power of the imperial family. Previously, Japan was still in a period similar to the Shang and Zhou feudal systems, and the emperor was only a king with a slightly larger fief, and he was often overturned by powerful ministers; But after the reform, the emperor's status was raised to a higher level than that of the Chinese emperor.

After the Taika reform, the emperors openly referred to themselves as "Myojin Goyu" in their edicts. The so-called "Myojin" means "the god of the present world". "Myojin Yuyu" is "the rule of the gods of the present world". Later, the emperor clearly stipulated that "the emperor is a god" by means of legislation, establishing the emperor's unique supreme authority and establishing a unified centralized power system.

In addition, Japan also imitated the legal texts of the Tang Dynasty and compiled the edicts issued since the Taika Reform into a legal code, which was the first written law in Japan's history; In addition, Japan also built a new capital, Heijokyo, with reference to Chang'an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty. Although the scale is only a quarter of the size of the former, the details are meticulously copied, and even the names of streets such as Suzaku Street are copied correctly.

Through these reforms, Japan finally established a centralized system and smoothly entered the era of "Ritsury". Everything seemed to be very rosy: the emperor was in control of the situation and truly completed the unification of Japan; The aristocracy and ministers can no longer behave as before, political stability, economic development, population increase, cultural development, look around, a thriving.

It's a pity that this beauty didn't last long, and it completely collapsed after only a hundred years. The centralized system of great unification failed, and land and population were again controlled by wealthy families, large and small; New ministers appeared one after another, and the emperor was once again overthrown. If the Dahua Reform pushed Japan from the Shang and Zhou dynasties to the Sui and Tang dynasties, then a hundred years later, Japan returned to the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

The power game between the emperor and the ministers

So, why did the Dahua reform fail? The answer is that because Japan wants to leapfrog from Shang Zhou to Sui and Tang Dynasties, the span is too large, and no matter political, economic, or social factors, it will not be able to support it, so it will inevitably be out of shape. For example, the Tang Dynasty broke the rigidity of class through the imperial examination system, but after this system was transplanted to Japan, it became a new game confined to the small circle of the aristocracy.

We know that before the Sui and Tang dynasties, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties implemented the nine-grade Zhongzheng system when selecting officials, that is, the government set up Zhongzheng officials to evaluate and select talents. But these standards are all soft, the Zhongzheng officials are proud of the big families, and tend to select their own people, so "there is no poor family in the upper grade, and there is no rich family in the lower grade", and the power of the famous family has risen sharply, and even overrides the imperial power.

After the establishment of the Sui and Tang dynasties, the government began to restrict the power of the gate lord clans, so the imperial examination system was opened, so that the children of the poor family also had the opportunity to "change their fate by reading", and they could become officials if they read well. Japan borrowed from this system to establish a tribute system, and also set up universities, national studies and other schools, and regularly held "tribute examinations", and the content of the examinations, admission standards, etc., were almost completely copied from the Tang Dynasty.

However, this similarity is only superficial, and the two systems are very different from each other in their bones. In Japan, only the children of the nobility were allowed to enter universities and kokugaku, and the tribute examination was only held in schools. This means that the children of ordinary people will not even be able to enter the school gates, let alone excel in exams. It can be said that the tribute examination is not an imperial examination, but more like the nine-grade Zhongzheng system during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties.

In fact, even if the emperor wanted to implement the "imperial examination system", it was unrealistic in the society of the time. As we mentioned earlier, there are three types of nobility in Japan, one is the descendants of the emperor, the other is the descendants of the so-called other gods, and the other is the descendants of the so-called Qin Emperor and Han Zu. This means that the reason why nobles are expensive is not because of ability, morality or even merit, but because of their origin.

We knew that ability, morality, and merit could be acquired through hard work, but there was no choice in origin, so there was no opportunity for class mobility in Japan at that time. In addition, Japan also implements the shadow position system, that is, the children and grandchildren of high-ranking officials can automatically get the position of their father, and the official position becomes their own bag. In other words, the son of the prime minister is naturally the prime minister, and the grandson of the general is naturally a general.

Therefore, although the Taika reform has suppressed the old ministers, as long as the soil of this aristocratic system does not change, new ministers will emerge in an endless stream, and the emperor will be hollowed out again. The history of Japan before the Meiji Restoration can be said to be a history of the struggle between the emperor and the powerful ministers for supreme power. In order to defeat the old ministers, the emperor began to support emerging political forces, such as the samurai group.

However, if the tiger is driven away at the front door, the wolf will enter at the back door, and the emerging samurai group tastes the sweetness of power and soon becomes the new minister. In 1192, Minamoto Yorito, the leader of the samurai army, established the shogunate from his hometown of Kamakura, ushering in the shogunate era in Japan. After the fall of the Kamakura shogunate, the Muromachi shogunate and the Edo shogunate appeared, which lasted for nearly 700 years.

Before the advent of the shogunate, although the emperor was largely overshadowed by powerful ministers, after all, he was at the center of the power struggle, and there was still a use for "coercing the Son of Heaven to order the princes". But in the shogunate period, the emperor was left behind and ignored. In addition, the Imperial Family's domains were also taken away, and the Emperor was also in financial difficulties, and he had to sell some honorary positions to maintain his expenses.

For example, when Emperor Kashiwahara ascended the throne 1500 years later, he couldn't even scrape together the money for the enthronement ceremony, so he asked the shogunate and the daimyo under the shogun for help, and was treated with disdain by others. It wasn't until 21 years after his accession to the throne that the richly haired Emperor Go-Kashiwahara relied on donations from some temples to complete the ceremony. At that time, in order to earn some money to support his family, the emperor would even copy Buddhist scriptures for daimyo and temples.

After the establishment of the Edo shogunate, the imperial family finally had a fixed income, and although it was not as meager as an ordinary daimyo, it solved the problem of food after all. However, there is a good saying that the emperor must obey the shogunate in everything and accept the strict rules set by the latter, such as no small talk, no pets, no football, and moderation in theater.

It wasn't until 1853, the year after Emperor Meiji was born, that things took a turn for the better. On July 8 of that year, Commodore Perry of the U.S. Navy sailed four ironclad ships into Japan's Edo Bay and demanded that Japan open its treaty ports. These four huge iron ships made the Japanese intuitively feel the strength of the armed forces of Western countries, and also felt the imminent pressure of aggression.

The Egawa shogunate's response to the United States made some daimyo and low-level samurai question their ability to govern the country. They believe that Japan needs another center that unites everyone: the emperor. As a result, some people in the feudal prefectures began to shout the slogan of "respect the king" and launched a campaign to bring down the curtain. In 1868, the shogunate, which had lasted for nearly 700 years, was overthrown, and Japan entered a new era.

Also in 1868, the 16-year-old Emperor Meiji ascended the throne and promulgated the "Five Oaths", announcing the Restoration, which became known as the Meiji Restoration. Since then, Japan has smoothly embarked on the road to modernization. However, with the rise of national power, Japan also fell into a militaristic frenzy, and was reduced to a defeated country in World War II. Later, the United States occupied Japan and urged Japan to constitutionally limit the emperor's power so that it was retained only as a symbolic head of state.........

Look into the deepest depths of history

Okay, so that's all we have for the essence of "A Brief History of Japan".

Here, we focus on how the Japanese nation, when it encounters the advanced Chinese civilization and the Western civilization, promotes the leapfrog development of the whole country through the "take-it-or-leave-it" doctrine. But it is precisely this kind of "taking" and forcibly blending that makes the Japanese cultural phenomenon present a diverse, complex, and contradictory side.

Some scholars believe that Japanese culture is like fossil stratolites, which are a superposition of multiple layers of culture. The first layer is called "Rope Soul Micai". The "Mi" refers to the "Yayoi Era", which is the agricultural civilization imported from Chinese mainland. This means that during the Eastern Han Dynasty, Japan learned agricultural techniques from the mainland, while still adhering to its own native culture, the "rope spirit" formed during the primitive Jomon period.

After the development of the Yamato Kingdom, the core of Japanese culture also evolved from "rope soul" to "Japanese soul". This second layer of cultural deposition is called "Harmony Soul Hancai", that is, the reform of Dahua, on the surface, Japan is fully promoting the "Tang Dynasty", but in the bones it still insists on "Japanese characteristics". In other words, the Daika Reform only absorbed the "art" of the Tang Dynasty, while the core "Tao" was still Japan's own "peace soul".

At the time of the Meiji Restoration, the "Japanese soul and foreign talents" were the third layer of cultural deposition. The so-called Japanese soul is to say that Japan has only accepted the practical knowledge and applied techniques of Western science, and the moral and cultural aspects are the existing Japanese spirit of bushido. Although the samurai class has died out today, the spirit of bushido can still be felt in daily life and even in the workplace in Japan.

Perhaps this is the reason why the Japanese nation is incomprehensible, as former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said: "This is not an ordinary normal country, it is special." "We have to peel off the "European and American colors" on the surface, peel off the Han and Tang styles on the next layer, and finally see the unchanging "soul" in its bones, so that we can truly know it, understand it, and see it clearly.