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Modernization in Meiji Japan

The Rise of Modern Japan from the Meiji Era

In 1985, Carol Gluck wrote, "Japan's modern ideology was a product of the Meiji period, which therefore determined the shape and direction that ideology would take."

Embedded in this statement is the pivotal idea that Japanese modernity can scarcely be understood outside the Meiji framework within which it matured. Few scholars would dissent from this view. The basic puzzle has been to interpret how Japan went from an isolated, decentralized, agricultural society to an educated, imperial nation-state with a bureaucracy centralized around military and industrial power. However, recent historical approaches have problematized notions of a singular, monolithic Meiji society that can explain this transformation to modernization.

This essay aims to analyze the difference between a traditionalist approach and a postmodernist approach to Japanese modernity. It will rely on an analysis of two texts on Meiji institutions that veer away from a traditionalist approach and demonstrate new patterns of inquiry. In addition, it will suggest that these new analytical engagements are not only fruitful but are more aligned with the complexity of historical reality. As such, the postmodernist endeavor may be seen as a corrective to certain traditionalist trends.

To frame the discussion, we can look to Hardacre for a summary of the traditionalist approach.

This perspective held sway through the 1970s and had certain common unifying features. The traditionalists tended to regard Japanese modernization as a swift, smooth process. The focus of their analyses was on macro-level change that occurred at the political level of state strategies and industrial maneuvers. Hardacre writes, "Material considered properly germane to the study of Meiji Japan was concentrated on the writings of leaders and social elites, mostly to the exclusion of other sources."

Its goal was to create from an account of "great men," diplomatic history, military chronicles, or the evolution of a doctrine a sort of master narrative that would explain everything. It produced unifying theories of modernization that depicted a virtually homogenized society marching toward progress. Social structures were often viewed as changeless and determinative forces for elites.

The waters of this traditionalist edifice have been troubled. Since the 1970s, new approaches have operated outside of master narratives. Hardacre talks of a "collective cacophony" in which all voices, including the dispossessed and stigmatized, are allowed a hearing. The new approaches resist homogenization of social attitudes, countering with examples of resistance, complicity, or manipulation from below. Emphasis is displaced from the elite onto the marginalized or colonized and their forms of agency. Attention is paid to how bodies and subjectivities are constructed, and how identities are coded. They accept the multiplicity of self-representations. These scholars destabilize all received knowledge, sources, and paradigms, without wishing to replace them with new totalizing story lines. Power and gender relations are put into greater focus. Significantly Hardacre states, "The hospital and the prison were new Meiji forms in which subjectivity was structured so as to focus awareness upon the nation, and to shape the sense of self, family, and community in relation to the state."

It is discourse around these two new sites of power that Burns and Botsman use to describe their versions of Japanese modernization. We turn to these texts to illustrate their deviation from traditionalist practices.

Susan Burns and the Meiji Hospital

Burns uses the hospital to explain Japanese modernity. She writes, "The hospital was, literally, a Meiji invention, and the birth of the Meiji state and of the modern Japanese hospital can be said to have occurred simultaneously."

Given this historical synchronicity, she analyzes the new institution for clues that show the social ambivalence surrounding it. Notably she does not turn strictly to political documents. Her tack is to explore biographical accounts that talk about the experience of illness and symbolism related to the hospital. This turn is decisively postmodern. She finds that the hospital indicates a cultural transformation in how the private sphere was defined in relation to public opinion and governmental control surrounding health.

Burns discovers the initial key in an institutional analysis of Meiji policy. With the rise of hospitals came a dissemination of discourse related to public health. Along with this were dispersed notions about the governmental control of its citizens' bodies, which impinged on previous Tokugawa notions about privacy. The government controlled the new medical establishment, running its schools and hospitals in addition to using police to enforce compliance with health regulations. The result of this system, Burns argues, was ambiguity. While people were taught concern for the public welfare in the name of nation building, the sick among them were subject to increased control in the form of forced hospitalization. There was ambivalence between the discourse on public health (the good of the state requires standards of health and hygiene in its citizens) and the discourse on poverty (the poor and vagrant are sources of disease, disorder, and threat). This system created a tension by providing free health care through methods of social coercion. In addition, there were hospitals set up for the upper class that were commercialized so that "health" became a commodity to be paid for. Quarantine hospitals multiplied, which became sites of contestation over control of the body. Burns succeeds in showing how the hospital was a "heterogeneous space, a space in which the treatment of illness, disease, and injury was ordered by contesting notions of public good and private profit."

In typically postmodern fashion, this analysis emphasizes inconsistencies, power contestations, discriminations, and ambivalence between official discourse and social experience.

The texts she reverts to are popular attempts to reason out the still opaque experience of the new hospital setting. What is significant is how Burns elaborates on multiple meanings for the same experience. She refuses to give a monolithic portrait of the hospital. There is no single view that characterizes all attitudes. Nor does she point to a homogenous affirmation of the "progressive" institution and its underlying nationalist ideology of health. She chooses instead to show through examples the plurality of experiences to which the new institution gave rise.

One instance shows a reluctant and tacit complicity with the state view that disease is a social threat. She says that "Aobud? can be read as an exploration of individual complicity in the state's penetration of the body of its citizens."

At first there is distrust and the sensation of criminality: the government compels K-y? To "adopt the subject position of criminals who must be punished for the act of illness."

However, with the appearance of a "benevolent" official, this feeling dissipates. K-y? affirms the state position, but not without friction. The infected child is taken away into segregation, probably to death, as the private sphere is cleansed. The ambiguity between bureaucratic control and private concerns resolves.

Other instances show how the hospital functioned as a metaphor for sanctuary. Burns interprets the fictional accounts of Shiki (By-sh? rokushaku) and Doppo (By-sh? roku) as exemplars of the view that a hospital was comforting, not the site of death. Here modernity itself is the source of illness and self-alienation. Its education, trains, and urban life are damaging. She writes, "Implied within the image of the hospital as a source of refuge, comfort, and pleasure is the notion, articulated repeatedly in mid Meiji, that modern life itself constituted a kind of illness, chronic and debilitating."

Self-help books proliferated. "These texts negated," she says, "the state-defined notion of health as a public concern and in effect called upon the subject to 'know' his body and thereby reclaim it as a 'private' space."

Sickroom journals expressed this private resistance to modernity and to public control of bodies. The hospital became a place for self-reflection away from the modern fray and affliction. Outside society, it was where the modern subject could experience spiritual liberation despite physical deterioration.

This view of Japanese modernization is not traditionalist. It relies on no overarching plan to explain progress or sketch an evolutionary view of political history. There is attention to local reports written by politically insignificant individuals. The analysis aims to discern the conflicting metaphors, alternative symbols, and negotiated meanings that some individuals in Meiji society used to construct their new experience. Nowhere is there an attempt to universalize these experiences, except in noting that to be in the new institution "was to expose oneself to the full range of the apparatus of modernity."

These texts engage and critique this modernity. Emblematic of postmodernist approaches is Burn's stress on resistance to state-defined dogma and the ambivalence within which sickness played out in the hospital.

Botsman and the Prison

Botsman's book works analytically in much the same way. He explains the rise of modernity in Japan by reference to Western models. The prison was a new Meiji institution that surfaces after the dismantlement of the old Tokugawa punishment system. It was based on new ideas regarding the humane treatment of prisoners, although Botsman problematizes this notion. In his view, a more benevolent approach to punishment was designed to gain credibility for the new regime. Yet there was no smooth transition. Ohara designed a new penal system following the Western panopticon model in which prisoners were subject to pervasive surveillance. Botsman analyzes Ohara's "Rules" to show how the subjectivity of prisoners was constituted.

Ohara laid out careful rules for the location and living grounds for inmates down to the material details. Inside the prison, Botsman says, "complete and perfect order was to reign."

The building should be a cross design with a central watchtower, wings, and an interior clear of obstacles to enable easy inspection. There should be careful distribution of bodies, each "housed in his own separate cell."

What is important is that the "Rules" reflected broader social change. They mirror Edo's transformation through traffic flow, commerce, and clearing slums for air circulation and hygiene. Simultaneously, a new police force monitored the public. Botsman writes, "Of greatest direct relevance for Ohara's vision of space in the new prisons, however, was the dismantling of the formal structures of the old status system and the emergence of a new understanding of the people as subjects under the direct, unifying authority of the emperor."