was expanded originally to meet these national
defence needs before a single railway line was con-
structed. National defence never lost this primacy
of concern in Japan, at least not until after the
Second World War. Its population lived in com-
pact territories which made arousing a sense of
national consciousness and patriotism easier than
in the vast area of China. The revolution which
overthrew the shogunate and started the Meiji era
was a turning point in this respect too, as in other
aspects of the modernisation of Japan. The great
feudal domains were abolished and the people
were now subject to the imperial government,
which strengthened its central authority in many
ways in the 1870s and 1880s.
The rapid progress achieved by Japan had its
origins, nevertheless, in the period before 1868.
There already existed large groups of educated
people – the former warriors (the samurai), mer-
chants and craftsmen, who had obtained some
Western technological knowledge through con-
tacts at the port of Nagasaki, where the Dutch
merchants were allowed to remain under rigid
supervision – they formed a reservoir of people
with a capacity to learn and adapt to new Western
skills. The revolution of 1868 brought to power a
remarkable group of samurai statesmen. They
restored the monarch to his ancient pinnacle; the
emperor was no mere figurehead. He was advised
by a small group, later a council of elders, or genro,
who wielded enormous power. He listened to
their advice, but at times of differences between
the genrohis own views were decisive, and at
critical moments of Japanese history the emperor
actively used his prerogative as final arbiter. Below
the emperor and the genrocouncil, which had no
formal place in the constitution, a Western struc-
ture of government with a prime minister, Cabinet
and an elected parliament was set up in the last
decades of the nineteenth century. Despite the
outward style of Western government, Japan was
not democratic but was ruled by a few prominent
leaders. The Meiji Restoration was no social
revolution but a revolution from above.
By the turn of the century, the young reform-
ers of the 1860s had become elder statesmen. Pre-
eminent among this small group were Ito
Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomu. Ito was Japan’s
elder statesman and the best-known Japanese in
the West. He had travelled and studied in the
West and was responsible for Japan’s representa-
tive constitution. Field Marshal Yamagata had cre-
ated the modern Japanese army, which proved
victorious in the wars with China in 1894–5 and
with Russia in 1904–5. He was opposed to Ito’s
policies at home, and Ito’s more pacific approach
to foreign affairs. In 1909 Ito was assassinated in
Korea; soon Yamagata’s influence also weakened
when after 1914 the surviving genrogrew old and
were replaced by new power groups.
In foreign relations 1895 is a year of great import-
ance for Japan. During the period from the first
diplomatic contacts down to 1894 the Japanese
had preserved their independence from the West.
Indeed, a start was made in negotiating treaties
with the European powers that would lead in due
course to the abrogation of the wounding special
treaties. The treaties had placed the Europeans in
Japan beyond Japanese authority on the grounds
that the Japanese lacked the civilisation to be
entrusted with applying their laws to Europeans.
But one reason why the West did not attempt to
carve out spheres of interests or colonies in Japan
as in China is to be found in the fact that the
Europeans were impressed by Japanese progress
in adopting Western ways and by their conse-
quent growing strength. But what was more
important during these critical early decades was
that the West did not regard the commercial pos-
sibilities and the market of Japan as nearly as
important as China’s for the future. Japan’s
neighbour, tsarist Russia, deliberately rejected a
policy of penetrating Japan in favour of the
exploitation of China. The same was true of the
other Western powers. At the turn of the century
the scramble for European concessions was reach-
ing its height in China, and Britain’s place as the
paramount power in eastern Asia was being chal-
lenged. The colonial secretary, Joseph Chamber-
lain, declared, ‘our interests in China are so great,
our proportion of the trade is so enormous and
the potentialities of that trade are so gigantic that
I feel no more vital question has ever been
presented for the decision... of the nation’. The
West’s image of China protected Japan and
1
THE EMERGENCE OF JAPAN, 1900–29 81
