“Closing” Japan
Curious Japanese watching Dutchmen on Dejima. Katsushika Hokusa. ca 1802.
In 1853 , Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of four “black ships of evil mien” opened Japanese ports to trade with the United States, a literal example of “gunboat diplomacy”. * Most historically literate Americans are aware of Perry’s expedition in broad terms, even if they don’t know any of the details. Western accounts of Perry’s success treat it as a major step for both the United States and Japan’s development as modern powers, a triumph of modernity over traditional culture, a triumph of free trade over protectionism.* Popular accounts of Japanese history treat it as the first step in the Meiji Restoration.
These accounts generally slide over the question of how, when, and why Japan was “closed”–itself an interesting episode in early east-west relationships.
As in India, the first Europeans to reach Japan were the Portuguese, who reached the islands by accident when a ship was blown off course in a storm in 1543.** Soon Portuguese merchants were trading Western firearms and Chinese silk for Japanese copper and silver . At the same time, Portuguese and Spanish missionaries converted hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including at least six feudal lords, to a form of Catholicism that was filtered through Buddhist concepts.***
The arrival of Europeans to Japan coincided with a period of political upheaval in Japan, known as the period of the Warring States. In 1600, the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals, using modern Western weapons such as cannon and muskets. He declared himself shogun, the first of the dynasty of Tokugawa shoguns who would rule in the name of puppet emperors for more than two hundred years.
Ieyasu immediately moved to consolidate his power. He disarmed the peasants and decreed that only members of the samurai warrior class would be allowed to carry swords. More important in terms of Japan’s relationship with the outside world, he ordered the country closed to Europeans.**** Christianity was outlawed and the missionaries were expelled. Tens of thousands of Japanese Christian converts were killed.***** Trade with Europe was limited to the Dutch East India Company, which was allowed to dock once a year at the man-made and closely guarded island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. After 1639, no Japanese were permitted to go abroad, Japanese ships were forbidden to sail outside Japanese waters and any Japanese sailor caught working on a foreign ship was executed.
Closing the ports against “contamination” by Western ideas is often presented as evidence of Japanese backwardness. After all, the Japanese missed the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the middle class. On the other hand, during much of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan enjoyed a period of peace and order, secure from being taken over by Western powers. And as we shall see in a future post or two, once the doors were open, Japan was quick to catch up.
*Like the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China, Perry’s expedition can also be seen as an example of international bullying if you look at it from the other end of the cannon.
**Just to give you an historical framework, Vasco Da Gama reached India in 1498.
***Estimates range from 250,000 to 500,000 thousand, making Japan the most successful of the Asian missions.
**** It is important to point out that Japan maintained contact with both China and Korea, countries with which they had long, complicated relationships.
*****This was not a simple case of martyrdom, nor is it parallel to the Roman response to Christians. In 1637, Japanese peasants in Shimbara Peninsula rebelled against heavy taxation and abuses by local officials. Because most of the peasants in the region had converted, the Shimbara Rebellion soon took on Christian overtones. In one of the ironies with which history is rife, the Japanese government called in a Dutch gunboat to blast the rebel stronghold.
In which I consider the nature of primary sources, with a little despair
Fragment of Herodotus’s Histories
My primary academic home is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,* periods in which primary sources and material artifacts are relatively abundant. As a result, the question of whether something counts as a primary source is generally clear–at least in terms of a given sources’s temporal relationship to the event/period in question.** (How we use sources and the type of sources admitted to the canon are constantly evolving topics as the subjects we consider worthy of historical consideration expand.)
Recently I’ve been playing in time periods that are definitely Not My Field and I’ve been forced to consider the question of what constitutes a credible source when written sources are limited. Here are three examples that I have struggled with over the last few weeks:
- The story of Queen Tomyris, who defeated Cyrus the Great of Persia in 530 BCE. Our principle source for this is a brief report by Herodotus, who wrote his Histories roughly 100 years later. This is equivalent to my blog post about the beginning of World War I being the only surviving source for that conflict in 5090.
- We have a little more information in the case of Queen Boadica, who led a rebellion against the Roman occupation of Britain in 61 CE: two written sources (both Roman) and some archaeological confirmation. The Roman historian Tacitus, who was born five years before the revolt, wrote two separate accounts of Boudica’s rebellion. He could at least claim second-hand knowledge of the events on which he reported: his father-in-law served as a member of the Roman governor’s staff during the revolt and there is evidence that Tacitus interviewed other veterans of the rebellion. Our only other source is part of an account written roughly a hundred years later by Dio Cassius, which appears in a selection of readings compiled by a Greek monk in the eleventh century.
- Most recently I’ve been working on Assyrian reliefs that document the Assyrian conquest of Lachish, the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, in 701 BCE. What we know about the event comes from a complicated interplay between Assyrian inscriptions, a blurb in our old friend Herodotus, the reliefs themselves, archaeological evidence from ruins that have been identified as Lachish and the accounts of the invasion, siege, and conquest in the Old Testament.***
My only conclusion: The winner may write history in the short run–if by short run you mean over the course of 300-400 years and assuming you write the kind of history in which there is a winner). But in the long run, time itself edits history with the help of nibbling rodents, grinding sand, fire, water, and the occasional military rampage. I bow my head to those who untangle the distant past from not much data.
* With occasional forays into the medieval and early modern periods, where the nature of primary sources is a little fuzzier. Possibly the most famous example of a dodgy flexible use of sources for the early modern period is the common use Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) as a primary source for the reign of Richard III, which lasted from 1483 to 1485. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a credible source for historical events that occurred when I was five to seven years old.
**Whether a given source is reliable is a different question entirely.
***I must admit, I have a hard time wrapping my head around using the Old Testament as an historical document. It stops me short every time one of the secondary sources I’m reading quotes a passage of Kings or Isaiah the same way I would quote a nineteenth century newspaper clipping.
Running on Railroad Time
I was recently reading an excellent new book on the Battle of Waterloo* in which the author made an off-hand comment about the difficulty of synchronizing accounts even when sources give exact times for events because there was no standardized time.
Until the rise of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, time was essentially local. With the exception of the few points where public institutions intersected private schedules,** most people’s lives were measured by sun time rather than clock time.*** Clocks became more important with the industrial revolution and the growth of factories; whole communities found their lives regulated by the factory whistle. But even when two places used the same calendar,**** there was no way to synchronize their clock towers. More importantly, there was no reason to. The factory in No Place In Particular had no need to match its schedule to the factory in The Town Over The Hill.
That all changed with the railroads.
Railroads were born in Britain in 1825, using technologies developed in the British mining industry. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, carried six hundred passengers over a twenty-six mile line in only four hours on its first trip. Over the next twenty years, investors formed more than six hundred rail companies that together laid more than ten thousand miles of track in Britain–transforming train travel from a novelty to a necessity. As rail travel became more common, differences in local time (sometimes as much as twenty minutes!) became a problem. In 1840, the Great Western Railroad instituted “railway time”. Other railroads soon followed. Some towns resisted bringing their public clocks into line with the railroad,***** but by 1880 all of Great Britain was using the same time standard, assuming everyone remembered to wind their watches.
The problems were bigger in the United States, where the distances involved and the potential time variations were greater and rugged individualism was the national pastime. By 1840, America had more miles of track than Great Britain. By 1860, it had more railroad track than the rest of the world combined–and was laying more. For the first time it was important for someone in Pittsburgh to know the exact time in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Pacific City. If local time differed too much from place to place, people missed trains, trains missed switches, produce rotted. At first, time was regulated on a railroad by railroad basis. Busy stations had to have a different clock for each railroad. It was confusing, It was messy. And it was dangerous.
In 1883, North American railroad officers finally adopted a plan for Standard Time, creating four zones in the United States and one in eastern Canada, based on mean sun times at set meridians from Greenwich, England. (Western Canada was apparently left to fend for itself in terms of time.) Despite some local opposition–the Indianapolis Sentinel complained that people would have to “eat,sleep, work…and marry by railroad time”(see *****)– Standard Time became the norm. The Standard Time Act of 1918 belatedly sanctioned existing practice. (I must admit, I wonder what problem required its passage. Was there a town somewhere that simply refused to reset its clocks?)
“Making the trains run on time” remains a synonym for efficiency, Amtrak not withstanding.
*David Crane’s Went The Day Well, one of a flood of new books on the subject because the bicentennial of the battle is nigh.
**Think the start of a Christian church service or the Muslim call to prayer. Both of which were publicly and loudly announced in the pre-modern world–church steeples and minarets served much the same function.
***At some gut level, we still run on sun time. Who doesn’t remember feeling outraged at the unfairness of being sent to bed while it was still light out on a summer evening? And don’t get me started on Daylight Savings Time.
****Not a given, as we’ve discussed before.
*****Someone is always ready to fight for the status quo, even if it means missing the train.
Image courtesy of ingfbruno, via Wikamedia Commons