To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History by Mark Ravina (review)

This outstanding book fits in with the wave of conferences, workshops, publications, and podcasts commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration.¹ Mark Ravina has produced a work with strikingly original interpretations of the Restoration, placing it in the broad sweep of Japanese history from the seventh century on as well as in the larger context of global history. Views of the Meiji Restoration at least in the English-language literature continue to show the influence of classic modernization-school studies that portrayed the event as marking the transition from a "traditional" polity to a modern, Western-style nation-state. Ravina, however, argues cogently that understanding the Restoration requires going beyond "a false contrast between 'traditional Japan' and the 'modern Western world'": "It was not a clash between 'modern' and 'traditional' or between 'Western' and 'Japanese' but a struggle to transcend those dichotomies and to create new institutions and practices that could simultaneously evoke both Japanese uniqueness and Western progress" (pp. 4–5).

For specialists, some of the arguments the author makes are not new. Several decades ago, historians such as Mark Ericson and Conrad Totman noted a point suggested by Ravina that by the late Tokugawa era the shogunate had become more progressive than its opponents and that the last shogun might well have led Japan into the modern age,² and others have long acknowledged that the Meiji leaders initially looked to ancient imperial institutions in establishing the new government. The conventional view, however, is that the adoption of such institutions was a temporary expedient as the leaders worked out a more fully Western form of government. By contrast, Ravina convincingly presents the revival of millennium-old patterns as a conscious strategy of invoking past imperial tradition to support revolutionary change in the present, a phenomenon he terms "radical nostalgia." A prime example was the regime's claim that the Westernizing, modern innovation of universal military conscription was not a break with tradition but a return to the Nara-era formation of imperial conscript armies.

The author's other major contribution is to show that, when Japanese in the nineteenth century borrowed ideas and practices from the West, they tended to view them not as "foreign" or "Western" but as "universal"—as imports that could enhance Japan's own distinctive strengths in standing up to the Western powers. In one example of this tendency, which Ravina calls "cosmopolitan chauvinism," the late Tokugawa thinker Satō Nobuhiro could argue that heliocentric European astronomy, which clashed with Christian geocentrism, was more Japanese than European because of its compatibility with Japan's own creation myths and the centrality of the sun goddess Amaterasu (pp. 11, 79–80); statesmen and intellectuals would make similar claims about Japanese borrowings from the West after 1868. While emphasizing "diachronic" continuities in thought and practice between the bakumatsu and Meiji periods, Ravina also highlights "synchronic" processes of "global isomorphism" whereby the Meiji state coopted contemporary Western ideas and technologies while at the same time it drew "asynchronically" on patterns that the ancient imperial state had likewise borrowed from Tang China (pp. 9, 16).

To some extent, the author recasts views advanced by Albert Craig and others more than half a century ago that the imperial forces overthrew the shogunate in the name of traditional values and then carried out a revolution in response to the external threat of Western imperialism rather than to long-term processes of internal decay. The tradition that Ravina underscores, however, represented not so much the positive values of the Tokugawa era, which cannot fully explain the revolution that followed the overthrow of the shogunate, as the institutions of the seventh and eighth centuries, when Japan's polity and society similarly underwent a dramatic transformation. Yet, in emphasizing the change in the international environment as the factor that "destroyed the Tokugawa regime" (p...