Tokugawa Shogunate vs the Empire of Japan

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

despotic, backwards and isolated feudalism vs expansionist, modernist and (eventually) totalitarian war state.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Meiji Restoration itself was largely a good thing. What happened afterwards... Not so much. Overall I'd rather deal with the backwards isolationist feudal state than the hyper-imperialist one, but I'm glad those aren't the options Japan was limited to.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Dear God, what an awful choice. Tokugawa Japan if I'm not a Christian, Imperial Japan if I am, but I wouldn't be happy with either.

The Meiji Restoration itself was largely a good thing.

A strong argument can be made that Japan had much better ways out of the doldrums of the Bakumatsu than what actually happened. There was talk of the shogunate itself democratizing.

[Antonio the Sixth]

A strong argument can be made that Japan had much better ways out of the doldrums of the Bakumatsu than what actually happened. There was talk of the shogunate itself democratizing.

How likely do you think it is that Japan would have achieved the same degree of social, economic and political modernization in such a short amount of time under continued Tokugawa rule (or under some other regime that could have arisen around the same time)? Like, the experience of Meiji Japan is so unique and baffling by historical standards that I would guess it's the sort of situation where changing any aspect of the initial conditions would lead to radically diverging outcomes. If that's a misconception I'm happy to have it corrected.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A strong argument can be made that Japan had much better ways out of the doldrums of the Bakumatsu than what actually happened. There was talk of the shogunate itself democratizing.

How likely do you think it is that Japan would have achieved the same degree of social, economic and political modernization in such a short amount of time under continued Tokugawa rule (or under some other regime that could have arisen around the same time)? Like, the experience of Meiji Japan is so unique and baffling by historical standards that I would guess it's the sort of situation where changing any aspect of the initial conditions would lead to radically diverging outcomes. If that's a misconception I'm happy to have it corrected.

I spent a few days intermittently thinking about how I wanted to answer to this before putting my finger on the key issue here, which was whether or not Japan industrializing/modernizing as fast as it did was actually an unvarnished good thing. It's true that Japan's crash industrialization is usually represented as a massive success story, but I'm not so sure, because it can't be emphasized enough how closely linked the economic project of building an independent industrial base was to the political projects of conservative nationalism at home and Great Power imperialism abroad. The Tokugawa shoguns were not interested in an expansionist or supremacist project. Intimations of Japanese cultural supremacy are present in the writing of certain philosophers and social critics of the Tokugawa era, but they are manifestly not accompanied by any desire to politically dominate other countries until the Restoration, at which point Japan--now ruled by a regime whose original rallying cry went "revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians!"--suddenly undertakes a Civilizing Mission ripped from the playbook of the other Great Powers.

It's more than possible that a democratized or semi-democratized "continuation Tokugawa" regime, probably under the cultural influence of France and the US rather than Germany and Britain, would have ended up weaker on the world stage and more dependent on the Western powers for its industrialization process than the Empire of Japan that the world actually got--but, in the long run, would that have been such a bad thing or wouldn't it? It's a #problematic question to ask, because there's an inevitable "white man's burden" connotation to the hot take that acktschyewally what Japan really needed was more French and American influence over its government*...but just because the question is problematic doesn't mean it has an immediately obvious answer. I've known too many Chinese and Korean people--and, for that matter, too many people from social or cultural groups within Japan that were losers in the Meiji state-building process (notably an old teacher of mine who came from a Buddhist as opposed to Shinto priestly family)--to be so sure.

*Fun fact: the "woke empowered POC empire" understanding of Japanese imperialism, asinine as it is, was actively fostered among American black and Chicano activists by Japanese agitprop agents in the 20s and 30s. Langston Hughes was at one point invited on a speaking tour of Japan so he could see what a wonderful place the world's only non-white-ruled Great Power was to live and work--but, since Hughes was (as the kids are saying) a real one, he spent the entire tour among Imperial Japan's massive underclass of urban drifters and working stiffs, trying to sell them on socialist revolution.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The roots in Japan going astray were not in the Meiji restoration but rather in the Russo-Japanese War and its increasingly terrible way of proceeding post-1905 (Case in point: Korea). Meiji Era Japan itself was quite good for the most part, as unequal treaties and other legacies of the 1850s and 1860s continued to undermine the country's independence and the country enjoyed the ability to get these off its back. But Japan took all the worst lessons from the Russo-Japanese War and then got progressively more drunk on victory disease, expanding and growing more and more, till they bit off more than they could chew, all while trampling on other Asians to get there. They learned colonialism from Europe and the assorted tricks and ways of doing this that came along with it and got more and more morally reprehensible in how they did it, until they made the Europeans look downright morally good by comparison. While this does not mean the Imperial project was necessarily bad in the beginning, eventually it was very clear that even by the standards of the time Imperial Japan was THE big bad of Asia despite their failure to see themselves as such. It was definitely cool that an Asian power defeated a European one in 1905 but Japan in retrospect was very likely better off losing that one in the long run both from a power perspective and from a moral one.