The Meiji Restoration: Monarchism, Mass Communication and Conservative Revolution (review)

The Meiji Restoration has been studied, restudied, then studied again. As the New Zealander Alistair Swale admits, "there would hardly seem to be any necessity to write a new history" (p. 1) of it. So why has he done just that? The reason, he says, is that many of our ideas about the Restoration need to be revised. The Restoration was less a "great leap from traditionalism to modernity" (p. 3) than most historians assume. Its context and historical unfolding demand more nuanced examination. Above all, we need to understand the conservative nature of the event—the fact that its prime movers were neither "advocates of Radical Liberalism" nor, at core, Westernizers. Most, he argues, were "conservatives, albeit conservatives of a variety of hues" (p. 9).

Swale's goal is sweeping; it also is worthwhile. Unfortunately, his product is not always as persuasive as the title and introduction might lead one to expect.

One problem lies in the use of secondary sources. More than a few of the "general interpretations" that Swale seeks to refute have already been reconsidered by historians whom he ignores or slights. His discussions of Tokugawa bakufu approaches to the West, for example, would have been improved by considering Michael Auslin's Negotiating with Imperialism (Harvard University Press, 2004); his writing about the importance of the imperial symbol would have profited from taking account of Takashi Fujitani's Splendid Monarchy (California University Press, 1996); and his treatment of mid-Meiji nationalists misses many of the points made by Kenneth Pyle's New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford University Press, 1969). These examples could be multiplied several times.

Linguistic imprecision also weakens Swale's analyses. "Conservatism" cries for clearer definition, as does the phrase "mass media," alluded to in the book's title. The latter term is particularly problematic, because the mass media, as generally understood, never actually show up in the work. Meiroku zasshi, which occupies most of the chapter on this topic, had a small circulation of 3,000. And discussions of the late-1880s "popular press" treat only elitist political papers such as Nihon, which eventually reached a peak circulation of about 20,000; there is no reference to the more popular daily papers, some of which really were mass mediums. Swale is right in suggesting that political discussions spread to ever-wider audiences; he does not, however, examine what the popular papers had to say.

The revisionist agenda is further undermined by the book's gaps. To seriously confront our understanding of a topic as big as the Meiji Restoration requires an approach that is not only sweeping but exhaustive. The work is particularly disappointing in the latter regard. In his discussion of the pre-1868 years, for example, Swale dismisses the Tokugawa regime's responses to the West with the comment that "only a few had the wit or the will" to try to create a "new intellectual outlook and a new social structure" (p. 31). The intensive, often creative, efforts of bakufu officials to construct a new order are left unexamined. Bakufu missions to the West are dismissed as ill-informed or uncurious, with no attention to the concerted attempts of numerous bakufu representatives to gain an understanding of everything from international law and Western social customs to political philosophy on their missions to Europe in the early 1860s.

Even more problematic is Swale's lack of attention to the political discussions that took place in newspapers—i.e., in the popular press—during the 1870s, the very decade with which he begins his purported discussion of the "mass media." When he dates the rise of the "dynamic" form of conservatism called "gradualism" (zenshin-shugi) to the early 1880s (p. 83), he misses the fact that the influential Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun had run more than sixty editorials on zenshinshugi in 1874-1875. Similarly, the work's assertion that "by the 1880s" the Freedom and Popular Rights movement "was increasingly...