Wk. 9 Sakutaro Fujioka, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909)

Question 1

Sakutaro Fujioka, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909)

Answer 1

Sakutaro Fujioka, Fifty Years of New Japan (1909) – Japan was one of the first non-European countries to industrialize, beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 (the return of the Emperor to full leadership of the county) in response to being “opened” to Western influence in 1853 (similar to the Opium War in China). Japan experienced many of the same types of changes as other industrializing countries, which to Japanese people seemed to be the effects of Western influence (what Fujioka called “Occidentalism”).

What types of changes occurred in Japan?

• Cultural, Technological, political (no more lords)

Why did the Japanese adopt European culture as well as economic and military techniques?

• The Japanese found Western Culture to be favorable to Japanese traditional culture. And they saw the new technologies as superior to their own. Essentially, Japan lived a very primitive lifestyle prior to opening up to the west.
• Lots of change in just 50 years. “Supposing a man born fifty years ago returned to Japan after a wandering life in a foreign country […] he would find no trace of the Shogun, the real ruler of his childhood, and no daimyo [lords], […] The castles of the daimyo, once so magnificent, would now show themselves to him as a mass of crumbling ruins; the spears, swords, and other implements of warfare, which he regarded with awe as a child, he would find preserved by amateurs as objects of historic interest.” History is swept away.
• Port towns now big. “What were then poor seashore hamlets, with only a few fishermen’s cottages lying scattered about, would now be transformed into great naval ports or prosperous towns.”
• Remarkable change – even greater than Europe. Essentially, Japan has compacted centuries of European advancement into 50 years. “The scientific progress of the nineteenth century has brought about general improvement, and produced a great metamorphosis in all European countries, but this metamorphosis, remarkable as it is, is as nothing when compared with what Japan has undergone in the past fifty years.”
• Western influence brought the change. “That Occidentalism was the main cause of the recent changes we need hardly say.”
• Japan thought that they were the mightiest but then ashamed to discover they weren’t even close. “Up to half a century ago, the nation, avoiding all intercourse with foreigners, indulged in the happy dream that the Japanese were the mightiest nation under the sun. What was their surprise, then, when they were brought face to face with the civilization of the West?”
  
  • “As a reaction from their former pride, they now passed to the other extreme, namely, a sense of humiliation, and they became keenly anxious to take in everything Western.”
• Culture Shock and progress shock. Right away the Japanese wanted to bring in what they saw in the west. “Western civilization, which was the fruit of Christianity and of the scientific progress of the nineteenth century, seemed a marvel of marvels to them. But soon wonder gave place to admiration, which, in its turn, became a desire to import this civilization into their own country. As a reaction from their former pride, they now passed to the other extreme, namely, a sense of humiliation, and they became keenly anxious to take in everything Western. Thus politics, economics, natural science, and art – everything was taken from the West with insatiable avidity, and the customs and usages of the people underwent a complete change, so complete that those alone who witnessed it can believe it.”
• Western culture was absorbed at the institutional level first and only after flowed to the average person. “Naturally most of those changes originated in Government offices, companies, and other public concerns, and then gradually found their way to the people at large.”
• Cultural occidentalism is widespread.”: European clothes were at first used by officials as ceremonial costumes; then they were found very convenient to work in, and consequently came into popular use. […] now Sunday has been made a day of universal rest. […] people, who can afford it, live in large European houses, and many in the middle class furnish one or more rooms of their Japanese houses in European style […] Foreign restaurants are met with almost everywhere, […] Indeed, there is no Japanese homestead wherein one does not find some marks of Western influence. […] the now popular use of the European style of hairdressing cannot fail to strike any observer, as also the prevalence of the hakama or skirts among school-girls.”
  
  • [Japan] had only black-and-white drawings and paintings in light colors, and they pleased their ears with the koto [harp] and samisén [three-stringed guitar]. But today foreign oil paintings and water colors have many admirers, and the piano and the violin are more fashionable than the native instruments. Formerly novelists and dramatists received no honor, while actors were despised as an inferior class of men, but now the drama is recognized as the highest form of art.”
• Technologcial advances also were adopted quickly. “Until fifty years ago people did not know that the flesh of pigs and cows was eatable, or that coal was combustible; they had no petroleum lamps and no wagons drawn by horses.”