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The Washington Quarterly 23.4 (2000) 121-124



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Asia's First Globalizer

Joseph S. Nye Jr.


Globalization is often treated by politicians and journalists as something new. Although it is true that the end of the Cold War and the information revolution accelerated interdependence at multicontinental distances, the 1990s was not the first era of globalization. As early as 1848, Marx and Engels wrote that "in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations." Five years later, the arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships off the coast signaled the end of Japan's successful effort to isolate itself from an earlier wave of globalization carried by seventeenth-century European seafarers.

Globalization is also sometimes treated as if it were synonymous with Americanization. Demonstrators around the world have protested globalization by attacking McDonald's restaurants. But globalization is more a product of modernization than of Americanization. Advances in technology and communication were creating multicontinental interdependence long before there was a United States. Indeed, the United States itself was the product of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century globalization. At the same time, because it is the country with the largest market and has harnessed the information revolution to the greatest extent, many of the forces of modernization experienced in the rest of the world take on a U.S. appearance. In addition, the openness of U.S. society to immigration has produced a culture that absorbs influences from around the world. For instance, many Asians who purchase food at a Pizza Hut probably think of pizza as American rather than Italian.

Many fear the loss of indigenous culture to "homogenization." Here, Japan [End Page 121] has something to teach the world. It was the first Asian society to open itself to globalization in the nineteenth century, and to borrow successfully from the rest of the world. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan searched broadly for the tools and innovations that would allow it to become a major power rather than a victim of Western imperialism. It sent young people to the West for education. Its delegations scoured the world for ideas in science, technology, and industry. In the political realm, Meiji reformers were well aware of Anglo-American ideas and institutions but deliberately turned to German models because they were deemed more suitable to a country with an emperor.

In some ways, by current values, Japan initially learned too much from the West. In an age of imperialism, Meiji Japan became an expansionist power at the expense of its neighbors, China and Korea. Its defeat of a European power in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War was a reassertion of Asian power that was widely respected. But the path of military conquest that accelerated with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria ultimately led to World War II, defeat, and occupation. After that war, Japan again borrowed successfully from the rest of the world, this time to implement a strategy based on economic power. Again its success was remarkable, becoming the world's second-largest economy, widely admired for its technical and industrial prowess. But the lesson that Japan has to teach the rest of Asia (and the world) is not simply that an Asian country can compete successfully with the rest of the world in military and economic power. It is rather that, after a century and a half of globalization, it is possible to adapt while preserving a unique culture. Those who fear that globalization will lead to the homogenization of the world would do well to look carefully at Japan's cultural uniqueness after a century and a half of globalization.

Ambassador Hisashi Owada writes that Japan has gone through the opening of the country twice in the past, but "each time the process was incomplete as a societal revolution, to the extent that it was a quick fix to graft new ideologies and new institutions to the old sociocultural substructure of the traditional Japanese society." In other words, preserving cultural uniqueness may have come with a price. Now he sees a third...

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