Multi-ethnic, pan-Asian, Japanese national identity: The Meiji Restoration

The origins of the modern Japanese nation and national identity are found in the establishment of the Meiji regime which replaced the Tokugawa regime and ended the Edo period in 1868. What was to become the Meiji regime started as a domain that rebelled against and, through political alliance making and several battles, defeated the Tokugawa Shogunate (Oguma 2000: 239). The instigators of the rebellion launched their campaign because they strongly opposed the increasing engagement of the Tokugawa regime with the United States and European powers such as Britain and France.

Once gaining victory, the Meiji regime engaged in significant industrialisation and modernisation with the aid of advisors from foreign powers as well as advisors who had returned after being sent to study in the US or Europe.

The Meiji regime dismantled the Shogunate political structure, which had been in place for 265 years, and embarked on a course of nation building which consciously used the US, France and Britain as models. The ultimate motivation for nation building along these lines was to create a strong state that could prevent Japan from being colonised. Another motivation was to overturn unequal treaties between Japan and the United States and European states which “allowed the Western powers to hold extraterritorial consulate jurisdiction in Japan” and “restricted the Japanese government's power to set tariff rates” (Ikegami 1995: 196).

Eventually the Meiji government sought to be considered an equal with European states and the US. It was at this time that the idea of a Japanese nation (kokumin) “entered the popular vocabulary for the first time in Japanese history” (Ikegami 1995: 185).

In order to build a state the new Meiji government had to secure a number of objectives. Secured territorial boundaries and a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within those boundaries were immediate priorities. These priorities, which are essential for a modern state, also signalled a clear break from the position of the Tokugawa government which neither had secured and defined boundaries nor a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within its territory.

In order to establish and maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory and protect against external threats, the Meiji government required a modern standing army. During the Edo period there was great linguistic diversity and no lingua franca was spoken throughout the Japanese archipelago (Shimoda 2010: 718). It was not uncommon for people in certain positions to be bilingual or poly-lingual where the local domain speech was known, as well as those of neighbouring domains. If a person's job or status did not require communicating with people from other domains, knowledge of a single language was more likely. Knowledge of languages from distant domains was rare (Shimoda 2010: 719).

The linguistic diversity during the Meiji period was seen as a threat to national unity. A common language was considered essential and the Meiji government, with support from leading academics, established policy to create and promote a national language based on the Tokyo dialect which eventually became standard Japanese (Maher and Yoshiro 1995: 3). Unlike during the Tokugawa period, scholars, politicians and other public figures often stressed the critical importance of the national language over any local languages or dialects.

In a speech in 1893 the Education Minister, and constitutional architect, Inoue Kowashi linked the national language to the fate of the country, saying “the Japanese people must revere their distinct national language” (Inoue 1893: 434). Scholars such as Aoda Setsu, who wrote the book On Rectifying the Dialects, and linguist Ueda Kazutoshi played a major role in creating and promoting the new “standard“ Japanese (Shimoda 2010: 721). Throughout the 1890s, Ueda developed and implemented a plan, which was also generally adopted by his colleagues, which took “educated middle-class Tokyo speech” and “artificially refine[d]” it. By 1900 this national language was made a compulsory subject on the national school curriculum (Ueda 1895: 23; 56; Shimoda 2012 723-724).

The narrative that came to dominate the emerging Japanese national identity during the Meiji period was arguably inclusive in nature. European and American academics, particularly archaeologists and anthropologists, who travelled to Japan in the years after the Meiji Restoration, developed a theory that, in the language of the time, the Japanese 'nation' was a “mixed nation”, that “Japanese people” were “mongrel” (Oguma 2002: 12). This concept of a “mongrel” Japanese nation was, to an extent, appropriated and integrated into the nation building process of Meiji Japan whereby the 'Japanese nation' was cast as having “superior adaptability” and strong powers of assimilation (Oguma 2002: 12).

These 'national characteristics' allowed apparent justification for the Japanese state's forceful territorial expansion and inclusion into the Japanese nation of ethnically diverse peoples in newly acquired territories. The incorporation of new peoples and territories began with the conquest of Hokkaido when in 1869 Meiji forces defeated the combined force of the Ezo Republic and the remaining Tokugawa loyalists. Then, in 1879 the Meiji government forced out the Ryukyu royal family and established the prefecture of Okinawa on the basis that the island chain 'had always been Japanese' (Yonetani 2000: 15).

Later in 1895 Taiwan passed from Chinese to Japanese control as war reparations after the Sino-Japanese war. Southern Sakhalin was ceded by the Russian empire to Japan in 1905 and the Korean peninsula was annexed in 1910 in order to secure Japanese territorial integrity (Hudson 2006: 414).

People throughout the empire were citizens and there was a large degree of freedom of movement. Large numbers of people moved from the Japanese islands to all parts of the empire and a large number of people from the colonies moved closer to the imperial centre.

The emerging, and increasingly accepted, discourse of a singular Japanese nation during the Meiji years did not put a halt to ethnic differences. In fact, the political elites at the time chose to establish and encourage a narrative of a singular yet multi-ethnic Japanese nation.

Through its annexation of the Ryukyu Islands, Hokkaido, Taiwan, and the South Korean peninsula, Japan became a colonial state. This Japanese state was acutely aware of the two forms of colonialism practised by the British Empire and France. It was also aware that those two colonial powers and the US would react strongly if Japan appeared to pose a legitimate threat to their respective territories. It was in this context that Japanese elites debated the nature of the Japanese identity they would create and the overall nature of the emerging Japanese empire.

English advisors suggested that Japan adopt the British model of colonialism and designate people from colonial territories as subjects rather than citizens and restrict educating colonial subjects so as to not raise their “expectations” (Kirkwood nd: 24). However, the Japanese state, unlike the British Empire at the time, lacked the required military strength to impose this type of colonialism where citizenship rights are denied to large colonial populations.

The French system of colonialism also designated colonised peoples as subjects however a pathway to citizenship remained open if colonial subjects learned Friend and converted to Christianity (Meredith 2005: 58; Satoshi 2005: 269; Pitts 2005: 306). Japanese officials found this colonial chauvinism to be impractical in the Japanese case as the differences of culture, religion and economic development between the colonised and coloniser were seen to be too small.

Granting legally equal citizenship to all people within the empire, admittedly with some 'internal' distinctions between 'inner' and 'outer' territories. Encouraging a multi-ethnic, pan-Asian, Japanese national identity was decided to be the best way forward in securing the loyalty of everyone throughout Japanese territory (Satoshi 2005: 271).

To read part 1 of this series click - The Heterogeneous Nature of the Japanese Archipelago: the Edo Period

This is a section of a thesis I did during my Master’s of International Relations. For references and the full thesis click here.

Suggested citation:

Hall, Christopher, J. (2013), Japanese National Identity Narratives and Refugee Policy [Master’s thesis, UNSW], https://www.christopher-james-hall.com/japanese-national-identity-refugee-policy