ABSTRACT
Historians agree that international factors played an important role in stimulating national thinking in Japan. Foreign pressures inspired emulation and resistance, helping to foster one of the most striking features of Japanese nation-building: its speedy pursuit of one of the most effective programmes of ‘modernization’ ever undertaken while harking back to archaic myths and traditions as the basis for a renovated national identity. By comparison with Western national doctrines, the impact of international threats, incentives, and models on Japanese nationalism is easy to trace. Differences between indigenous ideas about politics and society and those imported by Westerners were often more conspicuous than, say, those between the French invaders of German or Italian states during the Napoleonic Wars. Even moderate Japanese nationalists expressed frank anxieties about preserving Japan’s independence in international conditions that they saw, by and large, as beyond their control. Early European and American national thinking is often couched in an idealistic language of constitutional liberties, popular sovereignty, or cultural Romanticism. If taken at face value, some authors’ reasons for defending nation-building policies may appear to have little to do with international safety and status. By contrast, concerns about ‘foreign relations’ are not hard to detect behind the diverse positive ideals – cultural integrity and continuity, technological development, political reform, social progress and justice – advanced by Japanese nationalist authors. However sharply they differed in their other ideological commitments, a wide cross-section of scholars, educators, policy-makers and publicists can be identified as ‘national’ thinkers in at least one sense. All argued that a primary goal of modern politics should be to preserve Japan’s independence, in the minimal sense of avoiding control by foreigners.
