Japanese Imperialism?!?!?!?!?!?

Question

The Japanese did nothing different that the European powers in the effort to expand.
You must agree or disagree. Make sure to back up your rationale for the side you choose.

Answer 1

Europe and Japan: A Historical Perspective

I rather doubt whether I can tell an audience such as this anything that will be new to
you and I was not at all sure what theme I should tackle. But having an interest in
history I thought it might be worth putting together some facts about the development
of relations between Japan and Europe and considering whether there was anything
much we could learn from past experience of Euro-Japan relations.

first wondered when the Japanese began to have a concept of what was meant by
Europe, but I realized that the term Europe other than as a geographical definition of
an area is relatively recent even in Europe. I wondered when for their part the
Japanese first began to be conscious of Europe as such. According to a major
Japanese dictionary the word Europe was first used in katakana in 1592 and 1593.
One of these was a version of Aesop’s fables no doubt introduced into Japan by the
Jesuits. The Japanese scholar Arai Hakuseki in 1709 noted that Europe was vulgarly
termed ‘Yoroppa’. The first Chinese character of the three used to pronounce the
term was a character pronounced O. This led to Europe being term O-shu where
‘shu’ means territories. But I don’t think that this means that there was any real idea
in Japan of what was meant by ‘Europe’ when these terms were first used.
Portugal was practically the only European country which had a presence in Japan
up to the end of the sixteenth century. The rest of Europe hardly existed for the
Japanese in those days. The world maps introduced by the Jesuits while delineating
the general shape of Europe did not carry the names of European countries even of
France and Austria. The Japanese boys sent by the Jesuit visitor Valignano to
Europe in the years 1582-1590 had visited the Pope in Rome and other Italian cities
but Italy was not then a country.

thought that Sir George Sansom in his book The Western World and Japan
published in 1965, might have some interesting points to make about Japan and
Europe, but in his book he does not really distinguish between Europe and the
Western World. In fact until the emergence of the United States in the late eighteenth
century the Western World was Europe. Sansom, as he explained at the beginning
of his first chapter saw ‘The modern history of Japan’ as ‘in essence a record of the
clash and fusion of two cultures, the development of an Asiatic civilization under the
impact of Western habits of life and thought, the response of a crumbling feudal
system based on agriculture to the demands of industrial society.’ This was
probably a fair judgement of Japanese history up to the middle of the twentieth
century, but when we review the post-war history of Japan the record is more
complicated. Few signs remain of a ‘feudal society based on agriculture.’, although
the problems arising from a clash of two cultures have not yet been solved even if in
some respects at least there has been a fusion of cultures.

Sansom noted the ability of the Japanese to absorb and adapt other cultures and
their readiness to learn from the first westerners to reach Japan in the sixteenth
century when ‘Japan was…in the midst of civil war, which was breaking down old
institutions’. He reminded his readers that
‘The progress of the early Christian missions to Japan is of interest not only in
the history of evangelism It is of great value as presenting a clear picture of
the meeting of two cultures.’
He declared that ‘Some of the disagreements between Europeans and the Japanese
[could] be ascribed to pure ignorance.’ We might say prejudice. Buddhist priests
resented the success of the Jesuits in western Japan and no doubt stirred up
Japanese leaders against the missionaries,
But evangelism was only one element in the early meeting between Japan and
Europe. The Portuguese Jesuit missionaries were the first Europeans in Japan but
they were soon followed by Portuguese merchants from Macao. Then came Spanish
friars and Dutch and British merchants. Trade rather than evangelism soon came to
be the dominant issue in relations between Japan and the few European countries
with which they came in contact in these early days. As Sansom noted ‘The
evolution of maritime trade was… governed to an important degree by the political
development of Europe, for the Portuguese and Spaniards were by no means alone
in feeling a strong urge to expand’. The Europeans in the early history of trade
relations with Japan ‘showed a firm resolve to sell and the Asiatics a reluctance to
buy.’ (An interesting comment when we think of trade relations between Japan and
Europe in the second half of the twentieth century). The rivalry between the
Portuguese merchants at Macao and Nagasaki in the second half of the sixteenth
century and between them and the Dutch (and for a few years the English) at Hirado
at the beginning of the seventeenth century must have seemed uncivilized to the
samurai class in Japan who had been trained to despise trade. Although the Jesuits
generally behaved with sensitivity towards the Japanese this could not be said of the
merchants whose behaviour was often licentious and violent.

n the early years of the seventeenth century it was becoming clear to the Japanese
that they could do without the Portuguese trade. They reckoned that they could play
the Spaniards who were beginning to infiltrate Spanish friars into Japan against the
Portuguese run Jesuit mission. They also hoped to play the Dutch and the English
Protestants off against the Iberian Catholics. The former fanned Japanese suspicions
that the missionaries were the fore-runners of Iberian colonization and attempts to
dominate the Far East. These suspicions were enhanced by the arrogance of
Sebastian Vizcaino, who in 1611-13 obtained Japanese permission to survey the
east coast of Japan in order that Spanish galleons bound for Mexico from the
Philippines might use Japanese ports if they were blown off course. Tokugawa
Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, was irritated against the Christians by intrigues
involving the Christian daimyo of Arima in Kyushu and by warnings that Christian
doctrine enjoined the faithful to obey their spiritual leaders rather than their temporal
lords.
I
t was the fear that evangelism and trade would be followed by political and military
intervention which really disturbed Japanese leaders and led to seclusion policies
adopted by the Tokugawa shoguns in the 17th century. Sansom declared: ‘The
intense distrust which drove the Tokugawa shoguns to close their doors arose from
no ordinary conservatism. They were moved by fear, and not of the contamination of
national customs …but rather of domestic uprising against themselves.’
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The first Europeans to visit Japan in the 16th and early seventeenth centuries were
generally favourably impressed by what they saw of the people and many of the
Jesuit missionaries developed a fair understanding of Japanese civilization. Michael
Cooper’s book They came to Japan’ is a good summary of European reactions.
Sansom quotes some as follows:
St Francis Xavier (c.1550): ‘These people are the delight of my heart.’
Father Frois (1560): As gifted a nation as any in Europe.’
William Adams (1611) ‘The people of this island of Japan are good by nature,
courteous above measure, and valiant in war. Their justice is severely executed
without any partiality upon transgressors of the law. They are governed in great
civility. I mean there is not a land better governed in the world by civil police.’
Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco, Spanish Governor of the Philippines, c 1612: ‘The
streets and open places of Yedo are so very handsome, so clean and well kept that it
might be imagined no person walked in them…’ (Edo had, it should be noted only
become city a few years earlier with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate).
But information about Japan did not spread widely in Europe and when the Japanese
expelled the missionaries and the Portuguese merchants there was very little
information about Japan in Europe. Japan was remote and not a priority for any
European country except the Netherlands which had a monopoly of Japan’s foreign
trade other than that with China. England in the seventeenth century was relatively
poor and its economy was still largely based on agriculture and wool. It was also
riven by civil war. On the European continent the 17th century was marked by the
internecine conflicts of the thirty years war.
The history of European relations with Japan in the two hundred years of Sakoku
(translated as ‘closed country’) consists of two main elements. The first element
consists of the Dutch outpost on the artificial island of Deshima or Dejima in
Nagasaki bay to which the Dutch merchants were transferred and confined by the
Tokugawa shogunate in 1635. Most of the Dutch were only interested in trade, but
there were a few Dutch members of the ‘factory’ who developed an interest in Japan
such as Francis Caron in the seventeenth century and Isaac Titsingh in the
eighteenth century, but the most important observers of Japan in these centuries
were three doctors attached to the factory who developed a close interest in the
country, its flora and fauna. These were the German Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-
1716), who when he arrived in 1690 was described as a ‘yama orandajin’ (mountain
Dutchman), the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1822) and the German Philip
Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) who provided through their writings a unique insight
into Japan.
The second element was the development in Japan of Dutch studies. Japanese
interpreters of Dutch, which gradually replaced Portuguese in the 17th century as
practically the only foreign language studied in Japan, began to absorb information
from their study of Dutch language works. Their interest was initially in military and
defence subjects but soon spread to science including anatomy and medicine as well
as art techniques such as the use of perspective. Such knowledge was not, however,
widely disseminated and even in the nineteenth century Japanese world maps did
not reflect western knowledge. Nor did they suggest that the Japanese were able to
distinguish correctly between the various countries and languages of Europe. As
Donald Keene in his pioneering study The Japanese Discovery of Europe, (1952)
points out the interpreters and scholars faced enormous problems. ‘They had no
dictionaries save for rough-and ready lists of words and phrases, no grammars and
no competent teachers…It was not only a matter of learning a language with a totally
dissimilar grammatical structure, but also of attempting to pronounce complicated
series of consonants and vowels with the simple open Japanese syllables.’
Moreover the Japanese way of life was so different from that of the Dutch and as
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they could not go to the Netherlands they had no way of experiencing how the Dutch
lived except by observing them in their Deshima cage. Keene thought that Dutch
interpreters did not make the most of their opportunities. ‘Their attitude was one of
extreme inquisitiveness mixed with a fondness for the exotic’. This was reflected in
the way the biannual embassies (bearing presents or ‘tribute’) made by the Dutch
from Nagasaki to Edo were treated. They were expected to perform like monkeys in
a zoo for the amusement of the shogun and his vassals. Dutch learning or Rangaku
has rightly attracted much research both in Japan and in the West. In the
circumstances and under the restrictions imposed on them by the Japanese
authorities it is in fact remarkable how much the scholars learnt.
A number of desultory attempts were made in both the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to persuade the Japanese authorities to open Japan to intercourse with
Europe, but they were easily rebuffed. Japan was, however, too important to be
ignored by western explorers and cartographers. Two names stand out among those
from western Europe namely those of the British naval captain William Broughton
who in 1797 surveyed the south coast of Kyushu and the coast of Honshu from the
Kii peninsula as far as the Tsugaru straits and the French navigator La Perouse who
explored the Japanese coast around the Noto peninsula on the Japan Sea, the west
coast of Sakhalin and the Southern Kuriles. French geographical interest in Japan
began in the seventeenth century. An interesting if inaccurate map of Japan was
published in Paris in 1679 by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier who included some amusing
comments. For instance he noted of Ocasaqui (Okasaki) ‘c’est où sont les plus belles
femmes du pays.’
More important was the development of Russian interest in Japan as Russia
expanded into the Far East. Alexander Lensen’s scholarly work on Russia’s
expansion towards Japan has been followed up by Professor William McOmie who
has done a detailed study of Russian materials not hitherto generally available to
western scholars.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Japanese knowledge of Europe was even
more limited than European knowledge of Japan although the bakufu demanded that
the Dutch provide them with annual reports on developments in the world outside
Japan and particular in Europe. These were called fūsetsugaki. These were quite
detailed and informative. Donald Keene in his recent biography of the painter and
intellectual Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841) (Frog in the Well )records that in his
Shinkiron (‘Exercising Restraint over Auguries’) Kazan devoted a fairly long section,
based on the fūsetsugaki to Poland, a country of minor interest to Japan in those
days.
The bakufu authorities in Edo and the leaders of the domains were alerted by the
Dutch to European incursions into China and by Russian explorers to Russian
expansion to the north of Japan. They were also made aware of the American
whalers in the North Pacific by shipwrecked sailors. The American and British ships
which tried to prise open the door were rebuffed until the arrival of the American,
British and Russian expeditions in 1852-1854. As Professor McOmie in his recent
study on The Opening of Japan has pointed out the assertion that Perry opened
Japan is a gross exaggeration if not a myth even if he played an important part in the
process. The Russians under Admiral Putiatin were a significant element in the
process of opening the country. The Dutch and the British also contributed.
The Europeans (westerners) were hampered by their inadequate knowledge of
Japanese customs and how the country was governed. The relationship between the
Shogun in Edo (later Tokyo) and the Mikado in Miyako (Kyoto) was not understood.
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In the first few years up to about 1862 all communications between foreign missions
and the Japanese authorities had to be via Dutch interpreters. This meant that
English had to be translated into Dutch and then into Japanese and vice-versa, The
Japanese language at that time had no equivalent words for many political and
economic terms in English. It is not surprising that there were many
misunderstandings. The foreigners found the bakufu negotiators devious and
untrustworthy while the Japanese thought the foreigners arrogant and rude. Only
when Japanese began to be trained in English and foreign diplomats such as Ernest
Satow in the British Legation mastered Japanese could progress be made in clearing
up the misunderstandings.
The Japanese deeply resented the unequal treaties and the system of
extraterritoriality which the treaties imposed in the treaty ports. Japanese resentment
was understandable, but in the absence of modern civil and criminal codes
temporary extraterritoriality was needed if trade between Japan and the West was to
develop.
While the Americans had taken the lead in concluding the commercial treaties of
1858 and Americans continued to play an important role in modernization of Japan
the lead was increasingly taken by the British and in particular by their abrasive and
domineering Minister to Japan Sir Harry Parkes. One reason for the comparative
decline in American interest in Japan was the American civil war. Another was
American concentration on opening up the western part of North America. Half of the
foreign experts appointed by the Meiji Government to help to modernise the country
were British. The first railways in Japan were not only built but also run by the British.
A British engineer established the first Japanese lighthouses and the engineering
college established in Tokyo as the forerunner of Tokyo University had a British
principal and a number of senior British teachers on its staff. But the Meiji
government were determined not to be solely dependent on British experts and
deliberately set out to recruit from other European countries and from the USA.
I
n the immediate period after the first treaties of 1854/5 between Japan, the USA,
Russia, Britain and the Netherlands the only other European country with a
significant role was France. Although Japan did not seem to rank very high on the list
of priorities of the government of the Emperor Napoleon III the French government
then as later were much concerned to uphold French prestige and France was one of
the first European countries after the British and the Russians to conclude a Treaty of
Commerce with Japan in 1858. The final years of the Tokugawa shogunate were
marked not only by the insecurity in the settlements which led to a number of
assassinations particularly of British and French citizens and by attacks on European
and American ships in the straits of Shimonoseki, but also by intense personal rivalry
between the British and French ministers in Japan. The Japanese authorities not
unnaturally tried to play the French off against the British. In 1864 prior to the joint
efforts to reopen the Straits of Shimonoseki they tried to arrange a separate
settlement with France much to the anger of the British but the Japanese
concessions which this involved were repudiated by the bakufu. Léon Roches, the
French Minister, attempted to develop a special relationship with the bakufu and a
French military mission was sent to Japan. The French also did their best to alleviate
continuing Japanese persecution of Japanese Christians. The second British Minister
to Japan Sir Harry Parkes who had succeeded Sir Rutherford Alcock adopted an
overtly neutral position in the civil war which led to the overthrow of the bakufu in
1868 but his staff at least showed a partiality towards the anti-bakufu clans led by
Satsuma and eventually Chōshū. The French support for the losing side reduced
their influence initially with the Meiji government. French power also suffered as a
result of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, but while the French
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presence in the Treaty ports was considerably less than the British, French interest in
Japan was maintained. Interest in Japanese art was particularly strong in France and
Paris became a Mecca for Japanese artists. Cultural relations between France and
Japan have always been strong.
German relations with Japan date from September 1860 when a Prussian flagship
arrived in the bay of Edo and a Prussian treaty was concluded with Japan on 24
January 1861 with help from Henry Heusken, the Dutch interpreter to the American
Consul and Minister Townsend Harris. (Heusken was assassinated shortly before the
treaty was signed). The Prussian and later German Minister, Max von Brandt, stayed
from 1862-1875 and established the German presence in Japan which was
enhanced under his successor Karl von Eisendecker (1875-1882) and the visit to
Japan of the young Prince Henry of Prussia aged 17 in 1879. In this period while the
British developed their relations with the emerging Japanese navy the Japanese
army increasingly looked to Prussia. German influence was also strong in Japanese
medicine partly because of the development of medical studies in Germany but also
because the medical texts which the Japanese had studied under the Rangaku were
based on German originals.
I
cannot do more here than refer briefly to the development of relations between
Japan and other European countries. Early Japanese diplomatic missions to Europe
especially the Iwakura Mission in 1871/2 members of which travelled widely in
Europe were quickly made aware of other European powers and their relative
strengths. While as I have said British experts filled about half the posts opened to
foreigners by the Meiji government which sought the speedy modernisation of the
country experts were recruited from other European countries. Twenty-two Danes
were for instance employed as o-yatoi gaikokujin between 1868 and 1889. The first
Dane to visit Japan seems to have been a gunner on a Dutch ship in 1646 while a
Norwegian is reported to have served as a military technician to the Shogun in 1639.
When the head of the Dutch ‘factory’ at Deshima, Johannes Erdewin Niemann visited
Edo in 1838 as leader of the Dutch biannual mission he was asked about the relative
military power of various countries of Europe and whether Denmark had joined the
German confederation. The first treaty between Japan and Denmark was concluded
on 12 January 1867 following an approach via Sir Harry Parkes. This was based on
similar treaties with Switzerland, Belgium and Italy.
Belgium was fortunate in being represented in Japan in the late nineteenth century
by an able and widely respected diplomat Baron d’Anethan. His despatches have
been a valuable source for historians while the memoirs of his English wife have
provided interesting sidelights on diplomatic life in Tokyo during the last decade of
the nineteenth century.
A word must be said too about Italian influences on Japan. Antonio Fontanesi (1818-
82) and Giovanni Vincenzo Capelletti were invited to Japan to teach painting at the
newly established college of art. Vincenzo Ragusa was also invited to teach
sculpture. The Italian painter Edoardo Chiossone (1832-1898), who settled in Japan,
designed Japan’s first paper money and engraved portraits of members of the
imperial family including the Emperors Meiji and Taisho,
The main foreign policy objective of the Japanese government between 1868 and
1894 was to achieve revision of the ‘unequal treaties’ stemming from those
concluded in 1858. Understandably the Japanese tried hard to play off the Americans
against the Europeans and particularly against the British. They also tried their best
to divide the Europeans. These efforts might have been successful but for the most
favoured nations (MFN) clauses in the treaties. In the end revision was achieved by
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agreement with the British in 1894 and the entry into force of new treaties in 1899
abolishing extraterritoriality.
The Japanese government at the end of the nineteenth century inevitably
concentrated on their relations with the major European powers with interests in the
Far East. These were Britain, Russia, Germany and France. The Dutch could not be
forgotten not least because of the Dutch East Indies and Japan’s historical
connections. The Portuguese still had a presence in Macao but were hardly
significant for Japan. The Spanish presence in the Far East was much reduced by
the cession of the Philippines to the USA in 1898.
The Japanese were determined to show that they were a power to be reckoned with
and they wanted some of the spoils which the other powers were they thought
winning in China. The Sino-Japanese war of 1894/5 demonstrated that Japan had
arrived, but it did not convince the Russians, Germans and French and as a result of
the so-called triple intervention the Japanese were forced to return the Liaotung
peninsula to China. The British wisely kept out of this. The Japanese deeply resented
the intervention.
The Japanese wanted to expand in Korea and in North China. This inevitably
involved confrontation with Russia. First they had to ensure that the French and the
Germans did not support Russia in any conflict. This was the main Japanese
objective in concluding the first Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. In the Russo-
Japanese war of 1904/5 the British were almost involved in war with Russia when in
an incident in fog in the North Sea when Russian ships fired on British trawlers, one
of which was sunk and some members of the crew killed.
The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 marked the high point in
Japanese prestige and popularity in Britain and probably in the rest of Europe outside
Russia. Japanese prowess on land and sea was much admired. In the era of the
globetrotters Japan was a popular destination. Japan was famed for its cherry
blossoms, geisha and Mt Fuji and was given a romantic image which had little to do
with realities in Japan. But Europeans were now beginning to make serious studies
of Japan, its history and culture. Most of these studies have now been overtaken by
the work of specialist Japananologists but we should still recall the work of Satow,
Aston and Basil Hall Chamberlain from Britain, Karl Florenz, Netto and Wagener in
Germany and men like Bonneau in France. Unfortunately the work of this pioneering
generation of foreign scholars was inadequately followed up and when the Second
World War came European countries found themselves short of experts in Japanese
language and culture. The British Japan consular service was almost unique in
ensuring that the British outposts in Japan were manned by officers who spoke
Japanese. As far as I am aware only the Dutch attempted to emulate the British in
this respect.
This is not the place for a discussion of the way in which relations developed
between the European powers and Japan after the Russo-Japanese war. The most
significant feature was that of the increasing suspicions of Japanese intentions in
China and East Asia. Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914
the Japanese saw their opportunity and soon managed to seize German concessions
and territories in the Far East. They also saw the chance to expand in China and
made their infamous Twenty-one demands on China in January 1915. The
Japanese navy did help the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean although they refused
to participate in the fighting on land. The collapse of Russia in 1917/18 opened the
way for Japanese intervention in Siberia, but this yielded Japan no long term gains.
For the Japanese the Treaty of Versailles was a disappointment. They had to accept
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League of Nations mandate for their continued control over German possessions in
the Pacific and failed to get the League Charter to ban racial discrimination as a
result of opposition from the USA, Britain and America. This failure fed Japanese
resentment of the West in general and America and Britain in particular.
The failure to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921 was basically due to British
fear that American-Japanese hostility of which there were growing signs could
embroil Britain in conflict with the USA. The Four-Power pact of December 1921
brought in France but solved nothing. Japanese aspirations in Manchuria and the
growing power of the military in Japan led up to the Manchurian incident and the
Japanese decision to withdraw from the League. Japanese ‘fascism’ was different
from the Italian variety and from Nazism in Germany, but Japan was gradually drawn
into alliance with Germany and Italy and on 27 September 1940 a tripartite pact was
signed.
The Second World War in which Britain, France and the Netherlands were forced out
of their possessions in South East Asia by the Japanese was a traumatic blow for
them. Resentment against Japan especially in Britain and Holland was greatly
exacerbated by the ill-treatment of British and Dutch prisoners of war and the brutal
methods of the Japanese occupation forces. These factors made post-war
reconciliation with Japan much more difficult.
The European part in the defeat of Japan was limited. British forces having defeated
the Japanese in Burma were about to land in Malaya when the Japanese
surrendered. The British had to re-establish their rule in Singapore and Malaya and
disarm the Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies and in Indo-China. The Dutch
and the French returned but there was no going back to the old colonial rule. The
post war problems of South East Asia inevitably became intricately connected with
the relations of the British and the Dutch and to some extent the French with Japan.
The British Commonwealth (Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India up to partition)
had a limited role in the occupation of Japan, but the control rested with SCAP
(General MacArthur) and the Americans. After 1947 the British presence was small
and British influence on occupation policies was marginal.
The British role in the negotiations which led up to the 1951 San Francisco Peace
Treaty with Japan should not be exaggerated, but the Americans did not want the
Treaty to be seen as an American Diktat. The Treaty was more generous than some
in Britain would have wanted but with the exception of the limited provision in Article
XVI for compensation for former prisoners of war it left no permanent scars. It was
signed and ratified by Britain and the European states which had been allies in the
war against Japan. Current EU member states which signed the treaty were France,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece. Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, together with
the Soviet Union, rejected the treaty.
I
n the first few years after the coming into force of the Peace Treaty Japan was of
marginal interest to most European states. The first event to attract European
attention towards Japan was the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. The Europeans were
impressed not only by Japanese organization but also by modern Japanese
architecture and the engineering achievements shown by the Shinkansen (‘bullet
train’) and the new roads being built in Tokyo and elsewhere. Japan began to be
seen as a potential market and Europeans were impressed by Japanese economic
growth. These impressions were reinforced by Expo 70 in Osaka where a number of
European powers participated through individual country pavilions. But trade was a
major problem. European industry in many sectors was sclerotic. It had failed to
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modernize quickly enough and adapt to change in the post-war word. European
governments responded to pressures from industries in difficulties by adopting
protectionist policies. In 1955 Japan was accepted as a member of the GATT
(General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) but Britain, France, Belgium and the
Netherlands invoked Article 36 allowing them to continue discrimination against
Japanese imports. In theory Japan achieved MFN treatment when new Treaties of
Commerce and Navigation were signed with Japan (the UK-Japan Treaty was signed
in 1962) but these included a safeguard protocol allowing discrimination against
imports from Japan in exceptional circumstances. Despite pressures from industry
Britain fearing Japanese retaliation never invoked this protocol, but France did so
and applied various measures designed to slow imports from Japan including
insisting that VCRs from Japan should go through the customs post at Poitiers.
Trade friction was exacerbated by the huge increase in Japanese exports to Europe
(a tenfold increase in the 1970s compared with a fivefold increase in European
exports to Japan). Europeans began to speak of concentrated and torrential
Japanese exports (shūchū go-u-teki yushutsu) which it was feared threatened
European economies. This came to a climax in 1976 as unemployment in Europe
mounted and the trade deficit reached a new record. The problems in the 1960s had
been primarily over textiles. In the 1970s the main problem was over motor cars. The
French and the Italians were even more protectionist than the British.
Japanese industry fearing that the Japanese economy would suffer as a result of
European protectionism adopted ‘voluntary restraint’ arrangements which had been
used to mollify the United States to restrain the growth of Japanese exports to
Europe. They were also induced by investment incentives and other measures to
invest in production facilities in Europe. Britain led the way but other European
countries including France soon followed suit.
Attempts had been made to coordinate the trade policies of members of the EEC
through the 113 committee in Brussels with limited success. In 1979 a European
Commission report drafted by the late Sir Roy Denman referred to the Japanese as
‘workaholics living in rabbit hutches’. Eventually it was recognized not only in
Brussels but in the capital of EEC member states that a common EEC trade policy
towards Japan should be adopted. This led in due course to more sensible,
pragmatic and liberal trade policies towards Japan although it was almost the end of
the last century that trade in motor cars was finally liberalized.
I
n the 1970s and 1980s European governments began to recognize that Japan was
an increasingly important political power and that a political dialogue with Japan
should be developed. This led in 1991 to the Japan-EEC joint declaration of political
friendship. A framework for formal consultations was developed providing for regular
ministerial discussions and through annual meetings between the President of the
European Council, the President of the Commission and the Japanese Prime
Minister. It was hoped that these would balance the US-Japan dialogue. In practice
this has not happened not least because of European disarray. The Japanese
government have attached more importance to the bilateral dialogues with the British
Prime Minister, the French President and the German Chancellor. Like Dr Kissinger
the Japanese did not know to whom they should speak when trying to discover a
European view. This was of course hardly surprising when there often was no unified
European view.
One Japanese commentator (Mr Nishikawa Megumi of the Mainichi Shimbun)
recently (Gaiko Forum Summer 2006) asserted that Japan was similar to Europe in
that since the war both had come to understand the need for restraint on the exercise
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of national sovereignty and were actively dedicated to achieving an international
order based on multilateralism in contrast to the USA, Russia, China, India and Brazil
which continue to accord priority to national sovereignty. He noted that at the UN
Security Council Japan had voted with Europe many more times than it has with the
United States. He noted that European concerns about Asian security had lessened
since the end of the cold war, although East Asia still lives with residual effects of the
cold war. However at the fourteenth Japan-EU summit in May 2005 there had been
agreement to ‘initiate strategic dialogues on East Asia’s security environment,
especially on issues pertaining to China. Nishikawa also drew attention to the way
in which European homogeneity had been weakened by the expansion of the EU in
2004 by the accession of 10 new states in central and Eastern Europe.
Dr Tsuruoka Michito in the same issue of Gaiko Forum took up the theme of
trilateralism – US, Europe and Japan, where the weakest link has been that between
Europe and Japan. He too noted the ending of the Cold War had led to a weakening
in solidarity between Japan and\ Europe. He pointed out that with the exception of
disagreement between Japan and Europe over the proposed lifting of the EU arms
embargo against China there had been very little in the EU-Japan political dialogue
which ‘for Japanese foreign policy could be considered high-priority issues in the
political arena.’ Chris Patten, the former EU Commission for External Relations said
that ‘the problem of [EU-Japan relations] is that there is no problem.’
We should not belittle the importance of economic and political relations, but
understanding is as much dependent on the cultural dimension. This has grown
hugely in the last half century. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s the number of
Europeans resident in Tokyo who could communicate effectively in the Japanese
language was very limited there has been a huge increase not only in European
businessmen (thanks in part to a scheme adopted by the European Commission
covering the training of European businessmen in Japanese) who speak reasonable
Japanese but also of European students and scholars of Japanese. At the same time
Japanese proficiency in foreign languages especially English has also grown
significantly.
British higher education institutions providing facilities for the study of Japanese
language and culture have faced funding difficulties and are not as well supported as
they should be, but the British Association of Japanese Studies (BASJ) is active and
its journal demonstrates that there are a number of outstanding scholars in Japanese
studies in Britain. I am not in a position to comment on the particular problems of
Japanese studies in European universities but I am conscious of the work done by
the European Association of Japanese Studies and I have been impressed by
scholars of Japanese whom I have met from a number of European universities
including universities in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France.
Japanese art is well represented in museums in Europe especially in Britain, France,
Germany and Holland, but there are, I know, important collections of Japanese art in
places such as far apart as Lisbon, Krakow and Stockholm.
The Japan-EU Year of People-to People Exchanges held in 2005 boasted that it had
featured over 1,000 programmes carried out on both sides.
W
hile a good deal has been done in recent years to promote Japan’s cultural image
in Europe through special exhibitions and promotions the results have been patchy.
Many of the myths about Japan have been dissipated but the image of Japan in
Europe is a mixed one and for many Japan remains both remote and ‘inscrutable’.
11
One problem is that the Japan Foundation, Japan’s cultural organization with
responsibility for promoting Japan’s cultural image abroad has very limited funds as
compared for instance to the budgets of French, German and British cultural
organizations. The Japan Foundation has cultural centres in Paris, Rome and
Cologne, but only an office in Britain.
I
t is not easy to draw sensible conclusion from this canter through five centuries of
the history of relations between Europe and Japan except such obvious ones as:
1. For the Japanese Europe remains largely a collection of different states with
different language and cultures. Europe will only count as such with the
Japanese when it presents a united front and there is a unified European view.
As the EU has grown from 15 to 25 member states and is set to expand
further, if more slowly, it seems likely to become more difficult to reach
common European positions. This is liable to weaken the Europe-Japan link.
There is a real danger that European eyes will become too focussed on China
and that this will lessen the importance attached to Japan. WE should do all
we can to ensure that the continued importance and strength of Japan is
recognized in both the political and strategic contexts.
2. Economic relations, trade and investment are likely to remain matters of
prime concern in Europe’s relations with Japan. The European Commission
needs to ensure that the policies of EU member states do not get out of line,
but the EU also needs to ensure that these are not based on the lowest
common denominator. Japanese competition and Japanese investment are
beneficial to the EU.
3. EU relations with Japan need to be backed by a greater cultural
understanding. Japanese studies need to be further developed in European
countries. The Japanese should be encouraged to put more effort into cultural
promotion in Europe.