Japan was the only Asian country to begin industrialization in the nineteenth century, the only intruder in an otherwise exclusively Western club. By any standards, it was phenomenally successful in its attempt to emulate the West, industrializing rapidly prior to 1914, and then again before 1939; it colonized a large part of East Asia by 1945, and then overtook much of the West in GDP per head by the 1980s. Not surprisingly, Japan served as an influential economic model when the East Asian tigers began their economic take-off from the late 1950s. If we want to understand the nature of Asian modernity, Japan is the best place to start because it was first and because it remains easily the most developed example. Just because Japan is part of East Asia, however, does not mean that it is representative of the region: on the contrary, Japan is, as we shall see, in important respects unique.
Japan has been shaped by two momentous engagements with the most advanced civilizations of their time: China in the fifth and sixth centuries and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan ’s early history was influenced by its proximity to China, which was a far more advanced and sophisticated country. Prior to its engagement with China, Japan had no writing system of its own, but subsequently adopted and Japanized many Chinese characters and blended them with its own invented writing system. This was an extremely difficult process because the two languages were completely different and unrelated. In the process, the Chinese literary tradition became one of the foundation stones of Japanese culture. Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism entered Japan from China via Korea more or less simultaneously around the sixth century. [127] Taoism melded with Japanese animist traditions and mutated into Shintoism, while Confucianism became, as in China, the dominant intellectual influence, especially amongst the elite, and even today, in its Japanese form, still dominates the ideology of governance. [128] Confucianism was one of the most sophisticated philosophies of its time, a complex system of moral, social, political and quasi-religious thought, its greatest achievement perhaps being to widen access to education and culture, which previously had been confined to the aristocracy. The Chinese influence was to continue for many centuries, only finally being displaced by that of the West with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Japan, thus, lived in the shadow of China for some fourteen centuries, for most of that time as one of its tributary states, paying tribute to the Chinese emperor and acknowledging the superiority of Chinese civilization. This left a deep imprint on the Japanese psyche and nurtured an underlying sense of inferiority together with a defensive, and incipiently militant, nationalism. [129]
