Frederick R. Dickinson

Japan and the Modern World:
Lessons from Meiji
Frederick R. Dickinson*
Abstract
From the “Japan bashing” era of the 1980s, we have entered another era of “Japan passing,”
this time even more serious than during the Clinton administration. Selling Japan was easy
when the Japanese economy was the envy of the world. In 2018, however, academics andpundits need an extra incentive to talk about Japan. How might we restore international
attention to Japan? We might do so by looking at Japan through a global prism. The historyof Meiji and modern Japan have limited relevance for those outside Japan unless wechange the fundamental focus of our examination. Investigations should aspire not simply
to explain the when, where, what, and how of modern Japan. Rather, a history of Meiji andmodern Japan should, most fundamentally, be fashioned as a history of the modern world.
A global history of modern Japan recognizes the power of Edo era Japan; talks about Meiji
as critical to the rise of modern economics, politics and empire; and understands Japanʼsvital contribution to an internationalist and integrated twentieth- and twenty-first century.
A global history of modern Japan is, in essence, a history of the modern world throughthe prism of Japan, and it indicates that continued Japanese leadership in the twenty-first
century may help sustain a world political and economic order that lacks full American
support.

I

have been thinking and teaching about Japanese histor y for thirty-five years. When I
began my academic career, Japan was a ver y different place. In 1980, while I was an
exchange student at Sophia University in Tokyo, the Japanese economy boomed, andJapan was the envy of the world. Like everyone else, I eagerly purchased the latest in audio
gadgets, a Sony Walkman, and marveled at the fax machines that had begun to revolutionize
communications among Japanese firms. A year earlier, American sociologist Ezra Vogel had
published a sensational book titled, Japan as Number One. Vogel hailed not only Japanese
economic and technological superiority, but real organizational strength, as well.1
Although intended originally for an American audience, Japan as Number One sold many
more copies in Japan. While good for the world economy, after all, Japanese economic mightraised significant anxiety in the U.S. Proud of their country as the industrial engine of the world
since World War I, many Americans saw in Japanʼs new economic power visions of a darker
national future. At the same time that Japan became the envy of the world, in other words, shebecame the source of growing fear. By 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan had ballooned to $50
billion. In 1987, a group of Republican Congressmen judged it politically advantageous to smash a
Toshiba boombox to pieces with sledgehammers on Capitol Hill.
Clearly, Japan in the 1980s and 90s did not receive the kind of publicity that Japanesestatesmen and citizens desired. But it did, at least, make the headlines. This is the great*
1

Frederick R. Dickinson is Professor of Japanese Histor y, Co-Director of the Lauder Institute ofManagement and International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Penn Forum on Japan (PFJ) at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1979).

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Japan and the Modern World: Lessons from Meiji

difference between teaching Americans about Japan in the 1990s and doing so today. Despite
its continuing centrality to world politics, economy, and culture, Japan today is largely invisible
outside the Asia-Pacific region. That is not entirely the fault of Japanese statesmen and citizens.
Geopolitical shifts have drawn the attention of policy-makers, pundits, and students elsewhere.
From a time of “Japan bashing” in the 1980s, we have entered an era of “Japan passing” moresustained than during the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
A perfect recent example was the Trump administrationʼs January 2017 decision to withdraw
from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The announcement was, of course, a reflection of a distinctly
impetuous negotiating style by the American president. But it also reflected significant changes in
American foreign policy posture under the Obama administration. Despite the powerful show of
support for Japan and Asia in Obamaʼs declaration of an “Asia pivot” in November 2011, Japanesepolicy-makers spent much of the Obama years lobbying Washington to actually live up to the
grand promises of the “pivot.”

Toward a Global Histor y of Modern Japan
Selling Japan was easy when the Japanese economy was the envy of the world. In 2018, however,academics and pundits need extra justification to talk about Japan. What can be done? Let us
begin with the Meiji era. There are two common narratives of Meiji Japan. One was popular in theimmediate postwar era. The other was a product of Japanʼs subsequent high economic growth.
The devastation of World War II moved many in Japan to ask pointed questions about thecauses of the calamity. The most influential narrative for at least three decades was the scathingcritique of the Japanese state promoted by the Historical Science Society of Japan (Rekishigaku
kenkyūkai). According to the Rekishigaku kenkyūkai, the war stemmed from the pathology of the
Meiji state. The product of an “incomplete” revolution in 1868, the state suffered from “feudal
remnants,” particularly, a triumvirate of power between the emperor, military, and bureaucracy(described as an “emperor system,” or tennōsei), which made for an oppressive, authoritarianpolity bent upon foreign conquest.2
The economic boom of the 1960s helped generate a more positive vision of nineteenth-century
Japan. In the hands of a group of conservative American scholars inspired by a new focus on“modernization” among American political scientists, the Meiji era became associated primarily
with the rise of a modern Japan.3 In a series of six edited volumes published in the 1960s, thisso-called “modernization school” gradually replaced the dark vision of Japanese militarism andimperialism with a tale of surprisingly modern Japanese political and economic development.4
As Japan became the first Asian country to host an Olympic Games in 1964, this more positive
vision of Meiji and modern Japan certainly made sense. After the 1990ʼs economic crash, however,the vision of Meiji “modernization” is no longer any more useful in luring non-Japanese audiences
than the earlier tale of a militarist/imperialist Japan.
How may we look at Meiji, therefore, in a way that makes sense for the twenty-first century?
What kind of history of Meiji is serviceable for our present circumstances and for the future? The
2

Rekishigaku kenkyūkai, ed., Kindai Nihon no Keisei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1953).

3

For a convenient introduction to and critique of this modernization school of American Japan specialists,
see John W. Dower, “E. H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History,” in John W. Dower, ed., Origins of
the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 3–108.

4

Included in this “modernization series” were Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward
Modernization (1965), William W. Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (1965), R. P.
Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (1967), Robert E. Ward, ed., Political Development
in Modern Japan (1968), Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (1971),
James William Morley, ed., The Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (1972), all published by Princeton
University Press.

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Frederick R. Dickinson

obvious answer is embodied in a term that has recently become very popular: global. Why not
produce a global history of modern Japan?
The term “global” can mean many things. It might be most useful, however, as an indicationof the principle focus of historical analysis. The history of Meiji and modern Japan have limited
relevance for those outside Japan unless we change the fundamental focus of our examination.
Investigations should aspire not simply to explain the when, where, what, and how of modern
Japan. Rather, a history of Meiji and modern Japan should, most fundamentally, be fashioned asa history of the modern world. A global history of modern Japan is, in essence, a history of themodern world through the prism of Japan.

A Global Histor y of Tokugawa
To get a sense of a global histor y of Meiji first requires analysis of its antecedent. A criticalfoundation for the narrative of a dynamic, modernizing Meiji has long been the contrasting visionof a dark, “closed” Tokugawa. The idea of a “closed” Tokugawa has, of course, been around much
longer than Japanʼs high growth era. It derives, in fact, from German naturalist and physician,Englebert Kaempfer, who spent two years in Japan as chief surgeon with the Dutch East India
Company between 1690 and 1692. Kaempfer published an account of his travels when Japan had
begun to scale back trade, a development that spelled disaster for the Dutch East India Company.
According to Kaempfer, this “closing” of Japan was counter to the will of God.5 The Japanesetranslation of Kaempferʼs idea̶the term “sakoku”̶came to circulate among shogunal counsels
in the early nineteenth century as the bakufu debated whether to allow greater trade with theoutside world.6
The idea of a “closed” Japan, in other words, had political utility for the Dutch in the earlyeighteenth century, the Japanese in the early nineteenth century, and for American modernization
scholars in the mid-twentieth century. However, most historians today reject the idea of “sakoku”
as a gross misrepresentation of reality. Tokugawa Japan systematically managed foreign trade andits borders. But it continued a vibrant trade with China, Korea, the Ainu, Southeast Asia and theWest throughout the era. The trade was mediated by a substantial Chinese merchant community
in Nagasaki, the Dutch factory in Deshima (Nagasaki), the Shimazu family of Satsuma, the Sōfamily of Tsushima, and the Matsumae domain in Hokkaido.
If we abandon our singular focus on the tale of a “modern Japan” in the nineteenth century,
we may not only avoid the ahistorical claim of “closure” in the early modern period. We may
also discover ways that Tokugawa Japan actually helped define the contours of the early modern
world. Historians typically associate the early modern era with the rise of a Western world. Thereis, of course, no denying the impressive new power of the West from the fifteenth century. But theability of the Tokugawa polity to define the terms of trade with the West until 1854 raises serious
questions about the usual tale of a “rise of the West.”
Western historians have fashioned a formidable legend of Western power by forefronting
stories of Western success and concealing evidence of dependence and failure. Thus, earlymodern history is dominated by tales of the Age of Exploration in the Americas. Modern history,
in turn, focuses on European industrialization and colonization in Africa and South Asia.
A critical component of the Age of Exploration is, of course, the over whelming allure ofriches in East and Southeast Asia. The preeminent hero of the Age of Exploration, Chritsopher
Columbus, was inspired by the great tale of riches in China found in the classic travelogue by
5

Englebert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum (Henrici Wilhelmi Meyeri,
1712).

6

Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey, ed. & trans., Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed (Honolulu, HI:
University of Hawaii Press, 1999), p. 19.

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Japan and the Modern World: Lessons from Meiji

Marco Polo.7 And we know that the Jesuit missionaries who arrived in fifteenth-century Japan
found the Japanese to be “the best heathen who have yet been discovered.”8 From the perspectiveof East Asia, in other words, the Age of Exploration is less a story about the “rise of the West,”
more a tale of the great allure of Asia.
More importantly, the experience of Western states in East Asia pales by comparison with theiractivities in the early modern Americas and in modern Africa and South Asia. While sixteenthcentury Spanish conquistadors gobbled up Central and South America, Britain colonized India in
the nineteenth century and European states carved up Africa after the 1884 Berlin Conference, noWestern state ever succeeded in colonizing China, Japan, or Korea. Western scholars have longdescribed Chinese, Japanese, and Korean resistance to Western approaches as East Asian failure
to adopt the norms of modern political and economic intercourse. From the perspective of East
Asia, however, this resistance represents enduring East Asian strength and a distinct limit on theability of Western states to control events in the Age of Imperialism. Like early modern China andKorea, Tokugawa Japan continued to control its own terms of trade and diplomacy through theearly nineteenth century. In global terms, Edo Japan represents not Japanese failure in the faceof overwhelming European strength but formidable Japanese strength in the context of enduring
European weakness.

A Global Histor y of Meiji
If Edo Japan was an era of formidable Japanese strength, we can assume that there is someremnant of that strength in Meiji, as well. Meiji, of course, typically begins with a dramatic sceneof Japanese capitulation. Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Uraga Bay in 1853 with the latest
in naval technology̶steam power̶and compels Japan at gunpoint to begin a new relationshipwith the United States. It is the beginning, moreover, of an “unequal treaty” system in Japan,
which deprives Japan until the early twentieth century of its sovereign right to set its own tariffs
and to try foreign nationals in its own courts.
Despite the indignity, however, recent scholarship emphasizes the degree to which bakufu
officials were able to significantly shape their new relationship with the intruding Westernstates. While the U.S. sought to open Shinagawa to American trade and residence, Japanesenegotiators skillfully changed this to Yokohama, farther from Edo and off the main Tokugawa
era thoroughfare, the Tōkaidō. Although the 1858 commercial treaty between the U.S. and Japan
originally called for eight ports to be opened by 1863, the bakufu pared this to six, and Edo,
Osaka, and Hyōgo remained closed through the fall of the dynasty in 1868.9
Western historians like to accentuate the idea of Japanese “ capitulation” by describing
Japanese development in the latter nineteenth centur y as “ Westernization. ” By contrast,
understanding the formidable power of Edo Japan and recognizing the significant ways in whichbakumatsu and Meiji leaders fashioned their own fate enables us to see the much broader global
significance of nineteenth-century Japan. The most interesting history of Meiji is not the tale of“Westernization” but of how much Meiji, in fact, contributed to the contours of the nineteenthcentury world.
Western historians commonly describe nineteenth-centur y Japan as a “late-developing”
state. But Japan was the first Asian state to industrialize. More importantly, like France, the U.S.,7

For the latest analysis of Marco Poloʼs travels and influence, see Hans Ulrich Vogel, Marco Polo Was in
China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

8

To quote founder of the Jesuit order, Francis Xavier, who arrived in Kagoshima in 1843. Quoted in John
K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer & Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 31.

9Michael Auslin. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and The Culture of Japanese
Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 86.

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Frederick R. Dickinson

Germany and other Western states that followed eighteenth-century British precedent, Japanesedevelopment was central to and helped define the story of nineteenth-century industrialization.
Japan introduced the infrastructure of a modern state at roughly the same time that new
conventions swept Western Europe and the United States. Even before the advent of Meiji, Japanboasted four modern shipyards. Telegraph service opened between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1870,
just twenty years after a telecommunications boom in the U.S. and Europe. Just as the creationof a US postal service followed upon the heals of the American revolution, the new Meiji leadersmobilized three years after the Meiji Restoration to establish a government-operated national
postal network. Japanʼs first rail link tied Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, just three years after thecompletion of Americaʼs transcontinental railroad. Authorities adopted the Gregorian calendar on
New Yearʼs Day, 1873, several years after most of Catholic Europe and the United States, but wellbefore eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Japanʼs first public electric utility, the Tokyo
Electric Light Company, began operations in 1887, just five years after New Yorkʼs Edison ElectricCompany launched the worldʼs first public power station. Electric streetcars and hydroelectric
power arrived in Japan in 1895 and 1897, eight and nine years, respectively, after the same in the
U.S.10 Tokyo legislated compulsory education in 1872, eight years before the same in Britain.
Most importantly, Japan played a key role in defining the modern state. Appearing over a
century after the worldʼs first modern constitutions, the Meiji Constitution, nonetheless, joined
a vibrant ongoing global discussion over economic, legal, and political development. Distressedover the increasingly destructive human and environmental consequences of industrialization,
theorists such as English philosopher T. H. Green began calling in the mid-nineteenth century
for tighter state regulation.11 In constitutional theory, Rudolf von Gneist and Lorenz von Stein,with whom Itō Hirobumi had consulted during a tour in Germany in 1883, both stressed theimportance of a state structure designed to moderate the excesses of class conflict.
The Meiji Constitution thus symbolized a growing international departure from the classic
liberal faith in individualism, and laissez-faire and distrust of state power. As Itō declared in
Februar y 1889, “in the medieval period Montesquieu advanced the theor y of the separationof powers. ” But, “ according to a theor y based on careful study and on actual experienceand advanced by recent scholars, sovereignty is one and indivisible.”12 Drafters of the Meiji
Constitution viewed their project as the latest, most advanced experiment in constitutional
government, designed to moderate the excesses of classic liberalism. Western observers, in fact,
hailed the Meiji Constitution as a novel combination of internationally accepted constitutional
principles and indigenous cultural preferences. The London Times celebrated it for its “broadand catholic eclecticism, tempered by a purely native respect for the inalienable rights of the
EMPEROR.” That the emperor required ministerial consent, declared American Secretary ofState James G. Blaine, marked an improvement over the Constitutions of Europe and the UnitedStates.13
Diplomatically speaking, the “unequal treaties” marked a capitulation for Japan. But this“capitulation” was not only a great victory for the U.S. It marked a critical foundation for therise of American power. American historians tend to highlight this rise as a natural process of
10

Susan Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 191.

11

Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J. :Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 289.

12

Quotation in Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1964), vol. 2, p. 160.

13

Hidemasa Kokaze, “The Political Space of Meiji 22 (1889): The Promulgation of the Constitution and the
Birth of the Nation,” Japan Review, no. 23 (2011), p. 127.

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Japan and the Modern World: Lessons from Meiji

marshaling the impressive resources of the vast American continent (“manifest destiny”). But
without the distinction of vanquishing the well-established premodern Tokugawa state, American
power could have easily gone nowhere.
Japanʼs military defeat of Qing China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 had an even more decisive
effect on global history. The Sino-Japanese war turned the attention of the world toward Asia.
According to the grandson of American president John Qincy Adams, “Eastern Asia is the prize
for which all the energetic nations are grasping.”14 Intently searching for opportunities in the
Asia/Pacific after 1895, Washington leapt at the opportunity in 1898 to vanquish the Spanish
Empire and assume control of the Philippines. The power of the Meiji state, in other words, waspartially responsible for Americaʼs transformation into a Pacific empire.
Japanʼs defeat of Imperial Russia in 1905 marked an even greater global watershed. The
first instance in the modern era of the defeat of a Western empire by an Asian state, the RussoJapanese War forecast the rise of an Asia/Pacific Century. Asian revolutionaries such as Sun YatSen, Phan Bô.i Châu and Ho Chi Minh widely hailed the defeat of Russia as the dawn of a new age.
The most powerful significance of Meiji, in other words, is that it represents many larger
nineteenth-century global trends. Most importantly, Meiji Japan plays a critical role in actuallyfashioning global economic and political trends in the nineteenth-century. Meiji demonstrates thatboth nineteenth-century industrialization and nineteenth-century state-building were global, notjust Western enerprises. The American empire would not have emerged so dramatically in thelatter nineteenth century without the Meiji state. And Japanʼs defeat of Russia in 1905 forecast the
Asia/Pacific world in which we currently live.

A Global Histor y of Taishō
If our image of Meiji is strongly swayed by our understanding of Edo, discussions of Taishō
likewise have an enormous effect on our vision of Meiji. The Meiji-Taishō contrast is mostgraphically demonstrated by a comparison of the Meiji and Taishō emperors. As highlighted
by Donald Keeneʼs magisterial 900-page biography, the Meiji emperor remains enveloped inluminosity.15 By contrast, most scholars would echo Marius Jansenʼs complaint that the Taishōemperor “was unimportant in life and his death was irrelevant.”16 Of course, the more we decry
the Taishō emperor and his era, the more important the Meiji period becomes.
One could argue that a reevaluation of Taishō is even more critical than rethinking Edo intransforming our understanding of the importance of Meiji. After all, we see a full flowering inTaishō of what we only get a brief hint of in Meiji̶Japanese globalization. Taishō is global in atleast three important senses. First, Japan transforms from an agricultural to largely industrial
power during the Taishō era, particularly during the First World War. Second, the First World
War creates an incredible new U.S.-Japan economic interdependence. Between 1914 and 1939, theU.S. becomes the greatest source of machinery and consumer goods in Japan.17 By 1924, Japan,
in turn, becomes Americaʼs third largest trading partner, behind only Britain and Canada.18 Afterthe First World War, trans-Pacific trade becomes critical not only for the Pacific. It is essential for
14

Rupert Eric Davies, Richard J. Jensen, Jon Thares Davidan, eds., Trans-Pacific Relations: America,
Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 3.

15

Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002).

16

Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), p. 495.

17

W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 127, 211, Tables 3,9, respectively.

18

Tsuneo Matsudaira, “Some Principles of Japanese Foreign Policy,” Advocate of Peace through Justice, vol.
87, no. 7 (July 1925), p. 408.

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Frederick R. Dickinson

the world economy, setting the stage for a global world after 1945.
Taishō is global in a third sense in the establishment of the foundations of twentieth-century
internationalism. The best glimpse of this is Japanʼs participation at the Paris Peace Conference.
Despite their relative detachment from most discussions over European security, two Japaneseplenipotentiaries participated in the leadership council of the conference, the Council of Ten, as
representatives of one of the five victor powers. Historians frequently highlight US-Japan tensions
at Paris over Japanʼs proposal of a “racial equality” clause in the covenant of the new League of
Nations and over Japanese presence in the Chinese province of Shandong.19 But Japan at Parisobtained its two most cherished demands: great power recognition of its new presence in China(Shandong) and in the South Pacific (the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands).
More significant, however, was Japanʼs dramatic transformation from an initial victim of great
power imperialism in the latter nineteenth century to one of the worldʼs five great powers in
1919. This spectacular metamorphosis was possible only through Japanʼs remarkable geopoliticaladvance from the Sino-Japanese through the Russo-Japanese War and, most importantly, its
critical contribution to the allies between 1914 and 1918. Tokyo declared war in August 1914,
several weeks after initial declarations by the principal belligerents (Austria-Hungary, Germany,
Britain, Montenegro, Serbia, France, Russia) but many months prior to such important players
as the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and the United States. Between 1914 and 1918, Japan eliminatedGerman power in China and the Pacific; helped patrol Pacific sea lanes; helped escort British
imperial troops from Australia and New Zealand to the Indian Ocean; sent destroyers to help hunt
German U-boats in the Mediterranean; and supplied the allies with sorely needed arms, shipping,and loans.20
Japanʼs intimate involvement in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference became
the foundation for an indispensable Japanese role in the international construction of a postwar
culture of peace after 1918. Japan was intimately involved in evey major postwar peace initiative̶the Peace Conference; League of Nations and its many affiliated organizations such as theInternational Labor Organization and the International Court of Justice; the Washington Naval
Conference; the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the London Naval Conference.21 By contrast, the U.S.
failed to ratify the Versailles Treaty and refused membership in the League of Nations. And
France and Italy refused to abide by the terms of the London Naval Treaty.
In the 1930s, Japan would, of course, deal a serious blow to this interwar peace infrastructurethat it had so painstakenly helped to construct. But without Japan ʼ s pivotal contributions
throughout the 1920s, liberal internationalism would have imploded long before the 1931
Manchurian Incident. It most certainly would have had much greater difficulty re-emerging after
1945. Even after the Manchurian Incident, renowned Asianist Owen Lattimore recognized thepivotal role Japan had played in constructing a twentieth-century world. Japan, he wrote in 1932,is the “chief protagonist of Western civilization” in Northeast Asia.22 Japanese participation at theParis Peace Conference and in the construction of an interwar infrastructure for peace would
become a pivotal foundation for the multi-lateral and global age in which we live today.
19

See Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London:
Routledge, 1998) and Russell H. Fifield, Woodrow Wilson and the Far East: The Diplomacy of the
Shantung Question, Hamden: Archon Books, 1965), respectively.

20

For details, see Frederick R. Dickinson, “More than a ʻMomentʼ: Woodrow Wilson and the Foundationsof Twentieth Centur y Japan,” Japanese Journal of Political Science, no. 19 (Dec. 2018), pp.688-700
doi:10.1017/S146810991800035X

21

For details, see Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 2013).

22

Owen Lattimore, Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (1932).

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Japan and the Modern World: Lessons from Meiji

Conclusion
How, in the twenty-first century, might we restore international attention to Japan? We might
do so by championing a global history. A global history of modern Japan recognizes the powerof Edo; talks about Meiji as vital to the global project for economic, political, and imperial
development; and understands Japanʼs critical contribution in the Taishō era to an internationalist,
integrated, globalist twentieth- and twenty-first century. It also raises the very interesting prospectthat if Donald Trump had known this history, he might not have abandoned the Trans-PacificPartnership (TPP). Rather, he would have understood Japan as an important economic andpolitical partner for the future of Japan, the U.S., and the world.
Luckily for President Trump, the Japanese have extensive experience during the Taishō
era stepping into the leadership vacuum left by others. Japanese participation in the new liberalinternationalist order after World War I helped assuage the complications of a lack of fullAmerican participation in that order. Likewise, Japanese leadership in the twenty-first century
may very well help rescue a world political and economic order that lacks full American support.

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