How Did Japan Become A Superpower?

In the 19th century, Japan's samurai era ended, and the country transformed from a secluded feudal society into a modern industrial superpower. From sweeping political reforms to rapid industrialisation, this is the story of how Japan reinvented itself in just decades and emerged as a formidable global power. Joining us is Dr Chris Harding, a cultural historian of Japan and India from the University of Edinburgh. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player. Hi folks, welcome to the show. We're going back to 1868 and how Japan embarked on one of the most dramatic transformations in world history. After centuries of isolation, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, a group of young samurai, basically

• 0:45Dan Snow?

  sort of reformist nobles, restored imperial rule, kind of, and launched the country into a bold new era: the Meiji Restoration. They were determined to avoid the fate of all the other colonised nations around the world. And these new Japanese leaders pursued rapid modernisation. They reformed education, the tax system, they built railways, they built battleships and a national army. In just 50 years, Japan became an industrialised empire and a rising global power. They even defeated a major European empire. Joining us to unpack this really extraordinary story is the cultural historian Chris Harding.

• 1:26Dan Snow?

  He is an expert in all things Japan, India and east-west connections.

• 1:36Dan Snow?

  Chris, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Tell me about the Tokugawa Shogunate, because it's such a remarkable period in Japanese history that perhaps the cliche is that Japan is isolated, it's seen as a bit of a golden age day of Japanese identity, it's peace, whereas much of the rest of the world was enduring utter chaos and subversion. What was the reality?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I think that's actually quite fair.

• 2:01Dan Snow?

  Okay, good.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  We get to most of the reality. It's this remarkable period, two and a half centuries, so sixteen hundred to middle of the nineteenth century, of more or less complete peace in Japan, under the control, as you say, of a Tokugawa shogun based in Edo, now Tokyo. And I think people in Japan remember it as a real flourishing of the arts, of of culture, all sorts of, all sorts of things that a country can do when it's not at war with itself or its neighbours.

• 2:28Dan Snow?

  It's weird, isn't it? And stability, because that period is a time of transformation on every other continent. I mean, political upheaval, industrial revolution, political revolution, and some of the big, well, the biggest wars in history to that point.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43Dan Snow?

  And there's Japan just sailing along.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  I think Japan is quite lucky, actually, in this, but in retrospect, if you think about countries that start to be of interest to Europe, like India and then later China. Japan is known about, but it's not thought to have very much that you might want as a European, as a a trader or a or a potential colonizer. So it kind of gets left alone. It's got its own policy of seclusion that you mentioned, but also the Europeans aren't yet coming knocking. So Japan has a, yeah, a fairly relaxed time of it.

• 3:12Dan Snow?

  But there's a little bit of trade, isn't there? But again, what the Europeans are starting to sniff out, A, there's no great sort of mineral, my natural wealth, but also no weakness that they can slide in and exploit, right? Is that, is that part of it?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I think that's it, yeah. The only Europeans in Japan in this whole period, so the whole of the seventeenth century, whole of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth, are the Dutch. So they, their pitch to the Japanese basically is, we are businessmen, we're not going to get involved in your politics, we're not going to try to convert you to Christianity. And they basically live on a tiny island called Dijima, an artificial island, one street or two streets, that's it, plus their little warehouses, just off the coast of Nagasaki, joined by a tiny bridge, guarded all the time by samurais, so they can't cause any trouble. And it's funny, there are these lovely drawings, actually, of the Dutch on Dijima

• 4:02Speaker 01

  that seem to show how incurious they were about Japan. They're there, on the verge of being able to know this extraordinary culture, and they're playing tennis with each other and they're playing billiards, you know, they're just not interested. And it kind of goes both ways. If you have a sense of the Japanese also being maybe a little bit incurious, I don't want to generalize, but the Dutch were asked now and again to produce these volumes. Kind of like a report on international affairs that they were put together, take to Edo, present to the Shogun. These were found by historians a while back and they were in mint condition. And at first historians were saying, wow, they must have been treated with such reverence. Brilliant. It turns out they weren't red.

• 4:42Dan Snow?

  Just stick them in the archive.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  They're just not well-thumbed because people weren't interested. So it's a funny old period. It made sense for the Japanese to do this, to insulate themselves from particularly European interference. But all the action that you've just talked about, the Japanese had only the tiniest idea of that French Revolution, American Revolution. They were either ill-informed or they got the Dutch version, which was kind of warped to Dutch interests, I think.

• 5:07Dan Snow?

  Did the Dutch not, by the early 900s, sort of bring muskets and rifles and be like, lads, this is what you're missing out on. Was that not a sort of alarm bells ringing in Japan?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Well, this is another funny thing, I think, for Japan. So they had had firearms since the middle of the 16th century. The Portuguese brought them. But then after that, there's more or less zero innovation for two and a half centuries, which from the point of view of ordinary Japanese people is just as you might have wanted it. Because if you're not innovating, it means that you're not having to fight any wars. If you think about the speed at which drone innovation happens now, right?

• 5:43Dan Snow?

  It's not a good sign. Yeah, the British and French are innovating fast because they want to kill each other in ever-increasing numbers. Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Whereas Japan, their firearms, they're getting dusty somewhere. They might get taken out and played with. All the armour, the samurai armour now, you wouldn't have it in a place in your house where you might in a hurry put it on and rush out to fight. You just have it polished up and on display somewhere. You'd never expect to have to put it on.

• 6:05Dan Snow?

  And we talk about the Shogunate. Remind us, so there's an imperial, there's still emperors through this period.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:10Dan Snow?

  But they're just puppets.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Exactly that. So the emperors are there in Kyoto. Their job basically is to perform rituals for the gods, maybe write a bit of poetry, and that's pretty much it. They're actually watched quite carefully by the Tokugawa because if anyone was going to try and launch a rebellion against the Tokugawa, they would probably try and get hold of the emperor as a figurehead. So they keep a close eye on them, but the emperors have no real role. Most Japanese people would know more or less nothing about them. All the action is in Edo.

• 6:38Dan Snow?

  And why does this period of stability and peace come to an end? Is it? Internal or is it arrival of people from outside is it external or is it a mixture of both?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I think it's one of those classic mixture of both type situations. Um, I think if you imagine, there's lots of people in Japan growing up doing Japan at the centre of a world map. Right. In this period, you've got the Russian Empire spreading itself to its east in the direction of Japan. You've got the United States uh building up, spreading itself towards the Pacific. So California becomes the thirty first state in uh what eighteen fifty. So there's a sense in which Japan really can't hide anymore. People are interested and then of course you've got the British and others in China. So.

• 7:22Dan Snow?

  Yeah, right. Of course, along the coast, places like Hong Kong, but many more ports along the coast.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So China is having obviously a terrible time at the beginning of its century of humiliation, um as they now call it. Um. So Japan, yeah, there's nowhere to hide anymore. People are becoming really interested um in Japan. Almost uh not so much for what Japan has, but a sense of, well, as a big colonial power, if we don't claim it, someone else is going to claim it. And so the first really to have any success with knocking on the door, as it were, of Japan um are the Americans. Um eighteen fifty three, um this, by this point, so California is there as part of the US. You can now get from California to Japan across the Pacific on a steamship in about eighteen days. So for the Americans, it's their doorstep, right? They, that's how they think about Japan, I think, at this point. Um.

• 8:08Dan Snow?

  And that's the world turned upside. I mean, that's just unimaginable, right? That of through Japan's thousands of years of history, the idea that people come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, vast distances, and yet here they are.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Dan Snow?

  In eighteen days. That's crazy.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And that Japan can be thought about as their backyard. That's what technology has made possible. Um. Much to the detriment of Japan, I think. So the Americans actually send some of these extraordinary steamships. Uh. In the summer of eighteen fifty three, they arrive off Japan under the command of this guy called Commodore Matthew C Perry. Um. And the Japanese are. Maybe terrified is putting it a bit strongly, but they'd never seen that kind of technology before. These huge, great black ships spewing smoke out of their funnels. Um, and Commodore Matthew C Perry comes ashore and he's, he's an interesting guy. His mission, basically from his president, Millard Fillmore, um, is to persuade the Japanese to at least say that when, if American sailors, you know, whaling vessels, whatever it might be, end up shipwrecked in Japan,

• 9:03Speaker 01

  they'll be taken care of. Um, if they need to take on fuel, if they need to take on food, whatever it might be, that they'll be given that. Cause Japan's policy at this point is if you see a foreign ship, turn it away. Fire on it if you have to. That's how, uh, that's how strong their policy is. So the Americans at least want that and Commodore Matthew C Perry does a bit of homework on the Japanese, including in New York City Public Library. Um, and his view of the Japanese, and it's all about character at this point, because the Japanese aren't that well known to the Americans. His big generalization, I think, is the Japanese only understand action and force. Words aren't going to have much effect. He sees the Dutch at Dejima as being a bit of a doormat, I think, for the Japanese across these centuries, treated quite badly.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Um, and so he turns up two great military bands on the shore in, in Japan, not far from Edo, playing Hail Columbia. He chooses his biggest, burliest men from his ships, brings them on side with him, trying to make this big forceful impression. And he basically says, here's what we want. They are demands. It's a, it's a sort of a treaty of friendship that he would like, but it's anything but friendly. Um, he even gives them a little piece of white cloth and he says, I'm going to come back in a few months' time. Once you had a chance to, you know, think about our demands, if you don't give us what we want, there will be a war and you can have this little piece of white cloth to surrender with. Uh, and that's that. And he points out to, to Sein, he says, you know, look at those ships.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I've got lots more like that in the Pacific. I've got many more like that back in the United States. So there really is only one answer that you can possibly give us. And there's this lovely image, you know, Japan at this point, woodblock printing is a really big thing. Lovely image by a Japanese artist, we think in Nagasaki, shows one of these ships with the black hull spewing this evil looking black smoke from the top. And both the prow and the stern are given faces, these kind of malevolent demonic faces. This sense that what Japan is now facing is a turning point unwanted and that Japan may be potentially in an awful lot of trouble now.

• 11:03Dan Snow?

  And it's the guns on those ships as well. You've got Ido, Tokyo, this beautiful, incredible, wonderful city, totally exposed to these weapons. I mean, I think this is that classic UFO film where the UFO just lands on top of Washington DC and you're like, okay, wow, that's just short circuited everything we understand about security. That's what's happening here, right? These ships could lay waste to the Imperial Capital and there is not one thing you can do about it. Terrifying.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And funnily enough, some of the samurai who come out, they're sent out in a rush to go and greet Commodore Matthew C. Perry. Firearms they're holding would be in a museum back in the US or Europe. Probably most of them didn't have bullets in them. A lot of the samurai might not even know really what to do with them. So the fact that you're facing steamship technology, these incredibly powerful guns on these ships with virtually nothing, to their credit, the Japanese work out very, very quickly, I think, the depth of the trouble that they're in and their response, which we talk about in a moment, I think is motivated by the shock of that technological gap. They're not naive about it. They see it immediately.

• 12:06Dan Snow?

  In other, in other cultures where there's a, in other cultures of that, where there's been that first contact with these, in particular maritime technology, these suddenly this gaping, you are dragged into the modern world in seconds when you see these ships. That led to kind of catastrophic internal divisions, dividing groups who collaborated with outsiders, who saw advantage, who wants to double down on fighting them, whether it's in Mexico and quarters, all these other cultures and exchanges. What happens, what happens in Japan? Because Japan goes on a different journey. Japan actually seems to, well, it evolves quite rapidly.

• 12:46Dan Snow?

  It sort of ingests some of these ideas and ends up becoming a great power that can go toe to toe with these European and North American powers. What, what, what happens then over the next 50 years?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  So I think at the beginning, things looked pretty bad for Japan, you know, with that mix of internal and external. The internal part of this, I suppose, there are a couple of things going on in Japan which inform how they respond to the Americans. One is that the Tokugawa Shogunate. Born back in sixteen hundred with this epic battle at Sekigahara um in October sixteen hundred um great western army, great eastern army, eastern army is the Tokugawa army, they win. The feudal lords who make up the western army don't just go away and think, never mind, didn't work out for us, let's forget about it and move on. In parts of the west of Japan, for decades and decades and decades, mothers will put their children to sleep with their feet facing Edo as a kind of rebuke.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Others have this yearly um sort of ritual where they'll all gather, the top leaders of the domain will gather and they'll say, is it yet time to go and crush the Tokugawa? The standard response is, no, not yet. No, maybe not yet, lads. Yeah, let's, let's not. Wow, so the west remembers. Exactly, they have very long memories and I think that's one thing that's there in the background, this becomes crucially important. The other thing is that what looked like quite a good idea in sixteen hundred, which is having a very highly stratified society, samurai at the top, then merchants, uh sorry, no, samurai at the top um and then artisans and peasants, because they're producers, merchants actually at the bottom, because they're not considered to produce anything, they kind of deal in the produce um of others. That made a great deal of sense and to have that be quite rigid was smart, because Japan

• 14:23Speaker 01

  had been through so much turmoil before. Actually, what has happened by the middle of the nineteenth century is a lot of samurai, officially still at the top, but actually impoverished. Classic, yeah, penniless sort of warrior aristocracy. Yeah, exactly, they're trying to put on a good show, often the facade of their homes will look good, but if you go inside the tatami matting, this rice straw matting is, is in a terrible state, they might have sold off some armour, even a daughter to a merchant to try and make a bit of money. Um, there's one domain in Japan, I think it's Moriyoka, which actually goes as far as produces a price list for merchants, saying, for this amount of money, we'll, you'll give you, we'll give you a sword, for this amount of money, you can have a piece of armour, for more money, we'll actually give you samurai status. Oh my goodness.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Um, so it, it's sad and I think ordinary Japanese townspeople have quite a low view of them by this point, they see them as people who tell big stories about samurai dairin do, but they'd be useless in a real battle, because they've never fought one, they just go shopping, they write bad poetry, they visit geisha, they're not really. Contributing anything and yet ordinary people are paying their stipends. So I think there's an awful lot of anger there amongst ordinary people and also amongst young samurai. So these young samurai, by the time Matthew Perry arrives and in the few months after he goes and the shogun is trying to work out what to do, they see the shogun at dithering. And if you think the word shogun comes from a longer word, which means, what does it mean? It means barbarian crushing, generally similar.

• 15:50Dan Snow?

  Right.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So it's a case of you had one job.

• 15:53Dan Snow?

  Yeah, if you're not crushing, if you're not being an absolute legend crushing barbarians.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so the Americans, they seem to, not only do they dither, they then seek the opinion of other feudal lords around Japan. And again, if you're trying to promote yourselves as being the sort of wise strategists, whose job it is to look after Japan's security, to kind of seek advice, to farm out what you might do next. Again, it makes you look

• 16:15Dan Snow?

  Smells like weakness.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  It does. And so Japan, what happens really is in the course of the next few years, really from eighteen fifty-three into the early eighteen sixties, Japan steadily moves into more and more chaos with especially younger samurai who think that not only the shogun at getting things wrong, but also that their own senior samurai in their own domains are.

• 16:35Dan Snow?

  Granddad.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Granddad is too old, he doesn't want to have a fight, he's got nothing left in the tank, do you see what I mean? So a lot of these samurai will leave their domains, go to Kyoto, and some of them, especially in the west of Japan, what they want to do is take hold of the emperor as a kind of figurehead. The emperor, by the time we get to the mid eighteen sixties, he's only a teenager. Right, we'll get him as our man, as our figurehead, and we will launch a war against the top of the world.

• 17:01Dan Snow?

  Oh goodness.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  As the only way of properly responding to the foreigners.

• 17:05Dan Snow?

  So after two hundred and fifty years of peace, we're back into that more ancient Japanese tradition, which is grab the emperor and then topple, you know, warlordism, get rid of that guy and run Japan in his place.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. And it's amazing that the legitimacy of the emperor is so strong that you can do that, even when he's clearly just your puppet. But it works.

• 17:26Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

• 17:30Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 18:12Dan Snow?

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• 18:55Dan Snow?

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• 19:27Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I think the other thing that happens in that period which makes it even more chaotic for the Japanese is, of course, Matthew C Perry has come back, 1854. The Japanese have to pretty much give him what he wants. I think the logic is actually quite sound. They say, you know, either we can be proud about this, we can tell them to go away, but look at what's happening in China. That's what they did and they're not having the best time of it. Instead, what we should do is do this deal, end the policy of national seclusion, which is a big step, but nevertheless, do this deal, get the weapons that they've got.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Buy some time, yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Buy some time, exactly.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  And buy some technology, okay.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, buy some technology so that actually we can become powerful enough to maintain our own security. There's a sense of this being a really rough neighbourhood in Asia at this point.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  But they swallow their pride in a way the Chinese don't. That's interesting. They're like, let's just, let's do this. We've got to do a dirty deal, but let's make sure we get the technology.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think having the example of China actually serves them quite well because the Chinese in Japanese eyes, for centuries, they are kind of political and cultural big brother. So to see them on their knees is the most stark lesson you can possibly, I think, receive at this point. So that sort of works. The problem then is they give the Americans what they want and then, as you can imagine, the British want that deal, the French want that deal, the Russians want it. And by the 1860s, so within a few years, a lot of the big players around the world have these deals. They become trade deals, they become highly unequal trade deals. You have lots of foreigners starting to live in Japan, places like Yokohama. Now a big city go from being nothing to a kind of thriving treaty port, they call them, where foreigners are allowed to be there.

• 21:44Dan Snow?

  So very like China, Shanghai, and so worrying, worrying echoes here for the Japanese.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  It's really worrying. I think worrying for a couple of reasons. One is because trade is really unequal. Also, if you commit a crime, if you

• 21:55Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  beat someone up or god forbid even murder them as an American or as a French person in somewhere like Yokohama. You'll be tried according to your laws by your own people. And that seems like double standards, two-tier justice, a phrase of the moment. That, that makes Japanese people really angry. There's a lovely woodblock print of this period, which shows a sumo wrestler throwing this overdressed foreigner, overdressed European over his knee and onto the ground. This is how people feel. And you get the slogan, revere the emperor, expel the barbarian. So a, a, a current of thought starts to build, particularly with his younger samurai, samurai, saying, what we want to do is have the emperor back in power, the Shogunate have clearly failed on their brief.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  They need to be overthrown, got, got, got rid of entirely. And with the emperor as our figurehead, we will modernize. We will stand up to the Europeans and the Americans and others. This is what they tried to do. And by eighteen sixty-eight, eighteen sixty-nine, the Western powers, these younger samurai from some of these Western domains have got their forces together. They rebrand them, the Imperial Army, uh, under the Emperor, who's really their puppet, and they.

• 23:01Dan Snow?

  So they're saying we're, we're hyper patriotic here.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:03Dan Snow?

  This is imperial. Yeah, we're here to, we're serving the emperor.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's got to be a miserable experience being an emperor uh, in Japan. Cause you've got centuries behind you of doing whatever you're told by the person with the most weapons nearby. Um, and it's that same old story again. Plus, he's a teenager. I don't think he's the kind of person yet who has much of a, an established view on things. Although actually, no, my son has established views on things. So maybe, maybe that's not quite right. But, um, he doesn't have much gravitas yet, shall we say. Um, and if you think about Japan as being a kind of, it's an archipelago, but crescent shaped archipelago. These imperial forces basically chased the Tokugawa all the way round northwards. Past Edo, which thankfully is surrendered without a fight. That could have been an awfully bloody battle. A million people, infrastructure that's highly flammable, you know, wood and paper. Luckily, it gets surrendered by the Tokugawa.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Chased the Tokugawa forces all the way to the top of Honshu, the main island. Across the water into Ezo, now it's Hokkaido, and for a brief time you have this funny situation where the Tokugawa holdouts form a republic, because the emperor's now on the other side, right? The only time in Japan's history, uh, yet anyway, up until the present day, where it's had a tiny little republic. And it survives there for a few months and then it's wiped out. These imperial forces have much better guns, they have much better weaponry generally. In fact, British people like Thomas Glover, famous Scottish merchant, is gun-running for these young Western samurai, because he thinks they're the future, right? So they're very well supplied and they take care of the Tokugawa. And there they are, these young samurai, a small group of them, who no one's ever heard

• 24:35Speaker 01

  of, who now control a country.

• 24:37Dan Snow?

  Uh, but part of that, as you say there, is they've got this technological edge, they're using these modern European weapons, okay.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:42Dan Snow?

  So not for the first time, these weapons have completely upended the political geography of Japan.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:48Dan Snow?

  Does Japan get lucky there? Because that, that seems like a, quite a, quite a familiar story in, in, in these, in these, in this period of, of exchange between arriving Europeans and Americans and indigenous societies. Do they get lucky that sort of Americans or outside powers don't sort of intervene in that? Is it because it's so quick, it's sort of, it's a fait accompli? Because if it had gone on, then that's when typically you'd go, are the Americans going to launch a little force in here to help? And you end up with this foreign boots on the ground during a civil war, which is always, it's so, it's so many other places in the world it's going to downfall.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think the Japanese are really lucky, um, because for a while there, it looks as though the British and the French want to back different sides.

• 25:28Dan Snow?

  Right, exactly.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  In this war, the French are trying to prop up the Shogunate, um, supplying them with weapons, even paying for the uniforms of their men. Um, I think if that war had gone on and had been less conclusive, then you're going to get either side piling in a little bit more, having a state, wanting something in return. And yeah, it could have become quite ugly for the Japanese, but it's, it's over quite quickly. And I think the attitude that people like the British and the Americans take is with these new people in charge, um, in, uh, Edo, which becomes now Tokyo, means eastern capital, they ship the emperor actually into Tokyo, uh, properly as their, as their figurehead. But with those people in charge. The Americans, the British and the rest can have what they want, which is that they can trade with Japan.

• 26:09Dan Snow?

  They're open for business.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I think so. So Japanese rice, tea, textiles, these sorts of things, the Japanese are able to produce quite quickly. And also, the Japanese are a really good, I think, prospect for investment. Given that they want to do this enormous national overhaul, and I think about that technological gap. An institution gap for all sorts of reasons, they are playing catch up with the West. That's a huge investment opportunity, I think.

• 26:34Dan Snow?

  They could build some railways.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is exactly, exactly what they do. So there's no need and there's no real call for a big territorial grab, I think, in Japan. Which is very lucky for the Japanese.

• 26:45Dan Snow?

  Yes, they've got a sort of, they've got a counterparty that respects the rule of law, respects trade deals. Okay, interesting. So you don't have to invade and.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:52Dan Snow?

  Secure, interesting. What do they do? What do these young, these young, um, new samurai around the emperor, what do they get up to?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So they're, they're amazing. They are so pragmatic. Um, they go, almost all of them, given that they are in a really precarious. Position, there's still that risk of, of rival parties, right, going against them, because no one's ever heard of them. And just because they've got the emperor. Um, on their side, that could quite easily change, because the other side have only got to take the emperor and then make the very same claims for themselves. They are in a vulnerable position, but what they do between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three, they go on this massive. Fact finding tour. They go all the way around the world. They go to the US, Western Europe, they go to Russia, they go to parts of Asia. Looking to see how things work. How does banking work? How does democracy work? What does a theatre look like?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  How do I run a railroad? What do your armed forces look like? And they essentially do a, a kind of pick and mix. Whoever's got the, what looks like the best example of a particular institutional bit of infrastructure, they decide to take that, basically. So the British, they have a navy built on British lines. They even have portraits of Admiral, Admiral Lord Nelson. In Japanese naval academies, um, as the kind of, you know, the, the real hero.

• 28:07Dan Snow?

  Well, they chose well there. They chose well.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  They chose well. For their army, it was going to be the French, but they're watching what's happening in Europe. You have the Franco-Prussian War, so then it makes more sense for a Prussian model.

• 28:18Dan Snow?

  Looking quite tasty.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, American banking, all these different things. In the space of two years, they they hoover up all these ideas. They employ lots of foreign experts as well to try to come into places like Tokyo and and school them on what they need to do. Internally, they're quite brutal. If you think that samurai as a class have been in charge of Japan for centuries. And that most of these young leaders are samurai themselves, they have no qualms at all about getting rid of the old feudal domains. Getting rid of the samurai as a class, they just think these things are outdated now. What they think you need in the modern world, and they're being pragmatic about, I think, their army and their technology, is conscripts who are biddable and prepared to be cannon fodder, basically, you know, the cliche of a.

• 29:03Dan Snow?

  A modern state army.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  A modern state army, exactly. I think the cliche about samurai is that they might go into battle and they'll be more worried about how they personally look on the battlefield and how they do. You can't have that kind of me-first war making anymore. So they they essentially, they they pay these people off, the samurai paid off. Instead, you've got a conscript army, everyone now paying taxes in cash to Tokyo. So you've got your tax base, you've got your conscript army. I think really importantly, what they also do is very quickly they establish primary education. Which means they gather everybody's children by the end of eighteen nineties. Everyone's children into schools where they can essentially tell their story of what Japan is going to be, you know.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And in that way, maybe the older generation don't entirely, you know, not entirely on board with what Japan's becoming. But the younger generation, they grow up and the vision of this tiny clique of leaders becomes the new normal for them. And it's incredibly successful in a very short space of time.

• 30:00Dan Snow?

  So is there no pushback? I mean, it's an astonishing revolution. This is this is hundreds of years of trial and error in other cultures, just jammed into a very particular culture in the space of just a couple of decades. Is there is there no pushback?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  There is a bit, what's interesting is a while ago historians dug up these documents all around Japan, which suggested that after these leaders took power in the late 1860s, people in Japan began to read, either in European languages or in translation, the constitutions from places like the US and France, and they worked out how politics worked in Britain as well. And they sat down and they said, okay, what kind of democracy do we want in Japan? The decision the Japanese leaders made was we want a kind of mixture of a Prussian style, you know, top-down state, of course with the emperor at the top, a mixture of that with a kind of neo-Confucian arrangement where everyone knows their place

• 30:54Speaker 01

  and they show a certain amount of respect. The idea that Japan would become a French-style democracy overnight was thought to be completely ridiculous. It's actually quite interesting to see how these models look from a Japanese point of view. If you're playing catch-up as a brand-new country in a rough neighbourhood, one of the things you can't do, as far as these leaders were concerned, is basically spaff all your energy up the wall by arguing with each other in a democratic system which involves rival parties. Everybody has to come together, singing from the same hymn sheet. If you're going to progress at the speed you need to progress at. So they said, democracy is basically for the birds. We will have a national diet, you know, a national-

• 31:36Dan Snow?

  Consultative assembly.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. So a tiny percentage of Japanese men can vote for these people. And even then, these people, it's kind of a talking shop. The way the Japanese leaders see it, they retain power as this tiny clique. The way they see it is it's a way of making people feel important. And it's a way of getting, I think, a certain amount of buy-in. So that if you're a relatively wealthy Japanese man who reads his newspaper and pays his taxes, you want to feel that your voice is heard a bit, right? And so that's a way of doing that. But the idea that you'd have democracy in a more radical sense is just- Would be, you know, giving into chaos, I think, as far as they see.

• 32:11Dan Snow?

  So no wonder they were quite attracted by the Prussian model there. So powerful emperor, powerful advisers around the emperor, a lot of decision-making power there, but but with a but with a little smidgen of representation as well.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I suppose, you know, Prussia, Germany, it's another relatively new power trying to knit itself together as Japan is doing this period. So they they kind of see, I think, a natural, a natural European reflection there of what they're what they're trying to do. But obviously, it upsets people. So across the eighteen seventies, early eighteen eighties, when these institutions are kind of being put together, you do get people in Japan who will go around giving lectures, saying, no, we want a British model, we want a French model. These leaders, they're doing, you know, generally a good job, but we want the say, you know, and how things work. I suppose the other thing these leaders do quite cleverly is they got their army, which we talked about. They've also got quite quickly a a very effective

• 33:04Speaker 01

  police force who don't mind getting a bit rough, getting a bit rough if they have to, don't mind putting people in prison if they have to. So that some of these meetings where, you know, I might go along giving a lecture, saying, you know, I think rah rah rah, we should have a French-style democracy. I might get yanked off stage by the police and put in prison. Some of these people who are advocating for democracy end up giving their lectures on houseboats in the middle of lakes so the police can't get to them. So they're doing their best, but they're slowly being clamped down on, I think. So those kind of voices more and more get whittled away.

• 33:36Dan Snow?

  How interesting that the voices are coming from that particular area. There aren't the voices of people going, no, this is all nonsense. Let's just go back. Let's get back to, you know, let's get back to the eighteenth century. We don't need any of this new stuff. I guess the the world in eighteen sixty, eighteen seventy, eighteen eighty, if you're just looking at the world, you think we are on the wrong side of history. I mean, it looked like at that point, steam and electricity and life expectancy. It just shows how powerful that must have been to any observer. It just like, yeah, I think it looks to me like the Europeans and Americans have kind of cracked it here. That must have that was that was such a dominant narrative.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  I think it was. When they had that world tour and they came back, the leaders, that tour in the early eighteen seventies. That was their dominant thought. I think they also, though, in places like London, Glasgow, Liverpool, they saw slums. So when they got back, one of the things they wanted to do with their new civil servants. So, you know, in the Tokugawa period, all the feudal lords would have these lovely mansions, right, gathered around the Tokugawa main castle in Edo. Those mansions are now turned into ministries for civil servants. So if you're an up and coming young man in this period, what you want to do is go and study law in the new Tokyo University and then get a job as a civil servant. Because, given that party politics doesn't really, you know, have much traction in Japan, the real power is as civil servants, looking at the West, saying, you know, for the most part, okay, what do we need?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  What are we gonna emulate and innovate? But they're also saying, what do we want to avoid? We need to have cities like Osaka and Tokyo become these industrial centres. But we don't want a big working class who are angry. We don't want an impoverished class living in slums who are also angry. And so these civil servants see themselves, they call themselves shepherds of the people. So they want to look at Europe and then say, okay, here's how you should organise a city. They look at London. Here's how we might organise Tokyo. Here's what we're going to avoid. Here's how we can try and forestall, right, some of the social problems that Europeans have. I think alongside that, there are, to go back to your question earlier on, there are some in Japan who do say, actually,

• 35:40Speaker 01

  maybe we need the weapons, but can we draw the line at the weapons? They say, actually, do we want to dress up in suits? You know, do we need to get rid of samurai status? There are people in various parts of Japan.

• 35:50Dan Snow?

  So boring at this point.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are people who say what we had was actually quite good. There's a lovely example of the tutor to the emperor. Steeps in Confucian ideas, he says, the Westerners only have fact gathering and technique as their values. They go no deeper as a culture, which I think is really interesting. If you think about, you know, the birth of modern science, the power of all these new technologies, the fact that someone, you know, living in Tokyo who hadn't travelled the world much, nevertheless picked on that as being a Western weakness. Because it's the beginning of this idea that gains traction in Japan, it gains traction later amongst Indian nationalists. It's the idea that. Well, everything the West has achieved has been purchased at the cost of the Western soul.

• 36:36Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Right, they're alienated from nature.

• 36:38Dan Snow?

  Where's the poetry?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, it's there in poetry, literature, and the Japanese see that. So you've got a line of thinking, which I think goes all the way through into the 20th century, which says, as Japanese people, we have to hold on to something and not entirely lose our minds and kind of become a fax, an Asian facsimile of Great Britain. That's not what we want. And I suppose one moment which really encapsulates this, which a lot of people will have seen in the lovely film, Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, right, is this great Satsuma Rebellion in 1877. A really brief sort of overview of it to give you a flavour. One of these leaders, Saegei Takamori, who is, you know, one of the young samurai in charge of, in charge of the new country,

• 37:21Speaker 01

  falls out with his friends, goes home in a huff to Kyushu, this southern island in Japan. Quite how this happens, we don't know, but in effect, he ends up raising an army, marches them towards Tokyo, where he plans to have a word with the emperor, basically, about the direction that Japan has been, being taken. But the new army, with its conscripts, with its new weaponry, with its ships that can move troops around Japan very efficiently, they just get quite literally mown down. You know, they're lovely images, for all its faults, I do quite like the film The Last Samurai. This image of some of these samurai with rusty old swords, running at these, I think they're Gatling guns, you know, these kind of rotating guns that can just, fired by a peasant with 10 minutes training,

• 38:05Speaker 01

  just take them all out. But there is that sense that by losing the samurai, you are losing a little bit of Japan's soul and that you might not be able to get it back. So I think there is that concern with Japan losing its past. And it's never really resolved. One way of putting it in a nutshell, I think, is what's the difference between modernising and westernising? Modernising, yes, westernising they want to avoid. But in practice, those two things are so, I think, interlocked that Japan really struggles.

• 38:37Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.

• 39:30Dan Snow?

  And continues potentially to do so.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  You know, I think they do. So I'm a big fan of Japanese drama and this period, the Meiji period, is always represented as a really mixed blessing for the Japanese. You often see, and it's partly because some of the people who play foreigners in these dramas are just Westerners living in Japan, teaching English, getting a bit of a job on the side. So they are quite clunky and embarrassing people. But it gives this impression of the Westerners just blundering into Japan, having no idea about customs and behaving well, and infecting Japan with something that the body politic can never really expel. So I think for the Japanese, it really is a mixed period. For all its successes, it's a mixed period.

• 40:16Dan Snow?

  And but on in strategic terms and power terms, Japan doesn't get invaded by Europeans. It remains one of the very, very few places outside Europe to retain its own indigenous, well, I guess to have its to have some agency in its future. Nearly everyone else has conquered. And indeed, Japan will go on to conquer and even eventually take on and defeat Europeans. So in hard power terms, it's a success.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  I think it really is, it's hard to argue, um, decade by decade, across quite a long Meiji period. So the Meiji Emperor passes away in nineteen twelve. And by the time of his death, Japan is a world power, by far and away the greatest power in in Asia. I think the way Japan's leaders think about Japan, quite early on, actually, just in the early part of this period, really in the early eighteen seventies, is they have a a sense of Asia as being partly overrun by white Western power. And they see it in quite racialized terms. And they say, what Japan's job is, the first Asian country to modernize, we will build ourselves up and we will gather together a community of Asian nations. They talk about this as quote unquote pan-Asianism.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Gather them together and we will lead them to steadily push back. Because their vision, I suppose, of Japanese history going back centuries is you've got Indian culture in the form of things like Buddhism made its way through China and Korea into Japan. Lots of Chinese culture has been at the roots of of of building up Japan, as has Korea. But now all those countries, India, China, Korea, are having a bad time of it, right? At the hands of Western colonialism, Korea is in a sort of a confused state. Um, if we as Japan can be the the leader of these nations, the place where all the best bits of their culture are gathered together and then combined with Western technology, um, we'll be unstoppable. And we will raise Asia up.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  And I think people genuinely believe that in Japan, in the eighteen seventies, early eighteen eighties. The trouble with it is that that becomes a very strong ideological basis for kind of doing whatever you want militarily uh in Asia. And so Japan has a victory over China, eighteen ninety four to five, which is a big shock.

• 42:31Dan Snow?

  We need to fight the Chinese in order to liberate them.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Um, so they do that with with with China, a little bit inconclusive, I think. The big thing for for Japan, though, I think, is the the takeover of Korea, the colonization of Korea, completed in nineteen ten. Um, really, on the basis that we will modernize Korea. We will give them railways, we'll give them banks, we'll give them schools.

• 42:51Dan Snow?

  So part of our sharing all the wonderful things we've learned is now unfortunate, we're going to have to invade you and occupy you in order to make you see these benefits.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But then I suppose people who are fans of European history in this period will have heard of the Civilizing Mission.

• 43:04Dan Snow?

  They will have heard of that.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Will have heard the British and the French saying very similar things. And the Japanese do. Exactly that, they'll sort of plant their flag, they'll have a rhetoric of civilization. They even go to the extent where they send medics and even psychiatrists, right, to Korea after they colonize it. Um, in the early nineteen hundreds and some of the psychiatrists write back to Japan and they say more and more people in Korea are suffering. Anxiety and depression and the Japanese say brilliant depression or anxiety, depression and anxiety are. The sorts of maladies you suffer if you have a civilized and quite complex mind.

• 43:39Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  You become a worrier, you become a person with many thoughts, you know, um. It's proof of our, us, you know, our successful civilizing mission that more Koreans are turning up for help with depression. Um, so it's, it's amazing that I think the, the sense of mission there is really real on the part of the Japanese. The difficulty, of course, is once you get into the twentieth century and once you have a foothold in mainland Asia, where are you going to stop?

• 44:01Dan Snow?

  Right, and, and it's that conquest of Korea, well, that they fight China over sort of domination Korea, that they occupy Korea. Does that bring them into, into competition with the Russians?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, i- it does. If you think about the, the geography and if you think about the weakness of China in this period. There is a sense that this part of the world is, is very much up for grabs. And if the Russians, um, if the Russians take it, then Korea falls next, most likely to the Russians again. And as one of, um, Japan's strategists puts it, and if you think about the map, this kind of makes sense. Korea, the Korean peninsula is a dagger at the back of Japan. Um, for centuries, if you get hold of the Korean peninsula, it's a short hop to Japan. Um, it's unthinkable that anyone else would have the Korean, uh, peninsula, so that's why they worry about that. But then it's unthinkable that anyone would have Manchuria.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Other than the Japanese, because then they can get Korea. So there's that kind of, um, uh, that kind of series effect or a domino effect where. In order to be secure, you have to expand your, your, um, your interests. And this leads Japan nineteen oh four to nineteen oh five into this famous war against the Russian Empire. The first time, and it happens in quite short order, the first time that an Asian power has had a victory over a Western power, and it's it's hard to underestimate the shock, I think, that goes through Europe.

• 45:22Dan Snow?

  And it's a victory not of, you know, sort of Afghans defeating a British column by using clever guerrilla tactics and the harsh climate, it's a victory of of steel and and bat and Western-looking battleships and repeating rifles and barbed, you know, it's a it's a conventional war.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yes, which is, I think, what really worries a lot of people in Europe, because in the early days of the Major Restoration, it was it was nice and it was funny and it was quite amusing to see the Japanese steadily take on these technologies, these institutions, even to things like eating beef and nice and for pushing their food around the plate, trying to get used to these things, it was quaint and it was funny. And the Japanese, the fact that they were succeeding as a society kind of based on learning from Europe was great for Europeans, because clearly then their model is is the most civilized and effective one. But yeah, exactly as you say, to see all that used against them successfully, and with a hint, I think by this point, some Westerners have a sense of what gets called the yellow peril.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Not just that hordes of Chinese and Japanese migrants might be flooding the West, but a sense, I think for Japan in particular, that they're modernizing on the surface, right? They look like a modern country, recognizably European or Western, in their dress institutions, technologies, but they have a kind of feudal mindset still. And that if you combine this feudal mindset, which might be quite irrational, might be willing to spill blood with the latest weaponry, what you've got is potentially a very scary enemy. And I think that starts to happen with the Russians, the fact that the Japanese destroy the Russian fleet, the fact that the Japanese are prepared on mainland Asia, a place called

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Port Arthur, to sacrifice so many of their own men in a battle that, yes, they end up on top in that war, but that doesn't really establish very much, but that they will throw their men against these weapons. People start, I think, in Europe and the West to worry about the Japanese and about where they might be heading. And I think although it worries people in the West, it's also worth coming back to Japan, because, you know, we were talking earlier on about people in Japan being unhappy at the direction of travel. One thing I think people in Japan start to feel is that the Russo-Japanese War is a war too far. It's a war they didn't really need to fight. Maybe it's nice to be a colonial power. They've got Taiwan from China, they've got the Korean Peninsula.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Taking on Russia, you start to get people in Japan who are kind of left of centre in their politics, who are quite pacifist.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  One famous poet, lovely poet called Yosano Akiko, she writes this poet, writes this poem, addressed to her brother who's fighting in the war, saying, "Do not give your life." And she says this really controversial thing, captures the spirit of a lot of people in Japan, but it's something you absolutely shouldn't say, which is, "His Majesty, the Emperor himself, does not give his life," or something to that effect. Basically, you're saying that he's, he's too scared to do it, he's not going to put himself in harm's way, and yet our sons and brothers are, are doing it. And so she's absolutely persona non grata in Japan as a result. But you start to get that sense, actually, that overreach might be possible, that a period, decades of success in Japan might start to become perverted,

• 48:39Speaker 01

  and that maybe Japan's going down that track.

• 48:41Dan Snow?

  Oh, and then the 1930s happened, but let's, let's finish this episode by, by bringing Japan to it. Probably it's, when, when the, well, when, and when the future looked brightest.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:52Dan Snow?

  You win the Russo-Japanese War, you're allied to the British, British naval, you know, the Japanese officers training in the Royal Navy in Dartmouth and all this kind of stuff.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:01Dan Snow?

  Japan's on the winning side of the First World War. It get, it gets more concessions, does it, at the end of the First World War? Sort of a bit, more, a few more bits of China?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  It gets bits and pieces from the old German colonies, yeah, yeah. I think some in Europe thought Japan behaved rather badly in the First World, quite opportunistically. They didn't really need to get involved. But yeah, you're right, it gets a little bit. And so this is probably, I think if you were... A European visiting Japan in, say, the mid nineteen twenties, right? Go to somewhere like Tokyo. You're going to see somewhere that has kind of wide airy streets, trains, trams, people that wealthy. You can eat food from all around the world. You've got theatres, comedy clubs.

• 49:39Dan Snow?

  It's imperial power.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got radio, gramophone, all these sorts of things happening. And yeah, it's a proper imperial power exporting the best of its civilisation all around Asia. Um, it's probably at its peak at that point, I think, because not only has it got all that, but after the First World War, that vision of Wilsonian internationalism, a lot of Japan's diplomats really believed in that. Although at the end of the First World War, they wanted to have a racial equality clause, right, put into the um, uh, the covenant for the new League of Nations, they didn't get that. And that became a seed that would flower in rather unpleasant ways later. But other than that, they really saw themselves as a great cosmopolitan international power. And if you were an ordinary person in Japan at this point, they're steadily expanding

• 50:24Speaker 01

  the franchise, not to women, but to other men. And so there's a sense that democracy is taking root, that being in a political party starts to actually mean something in Japan. So I think that would be its, its peak in all sorts of ways. And then there's that duh, duh, duh element for then what happens next?

• 50:42Dan Snow?

  Well, join us another time. We'll be talking about that. In fact, we have talked about that many times. So, so thank you very much for coming on and taking us through how Japan rose to its, the unexpected story of Japan becoming a region, even a world power.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thank you very much.

• 51:16Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era. And you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week. And there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.