Foreign Policy
FEATURE
Why Is Japan So … Different?
A brief history of leaving China, becoming the other, and turning Japanese.

BY DAVID PILLING MARCH 17, 2014

On March 16, 1885, an editorial entitled "Leaving Asia" was published in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo. Now widely believed to have been written by Yukichi Fukuzawa, the intellectual giant of the 19th-century modernization movement that culminated in the Meiji Restoration, it argued that Japan could simply not afford to be held back by "feudalistic" China and Korea, and should therefore "leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the civilized nations of the West."

Japan's break with China, a country it subsequently invaded and humiliated, is a story of sharp relevance today. Tensions between the two nations are extremely high. Chinese and Japanese ships and planes circle disputed islands in the East China Sea, with the ever-present danger of an accident or willful escalation. Leaders in both countries have started to compare the present with 1914 and 1939, when the world stood on the brink of war.

The principal cause of animosity is Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s, an unsuccessful attempt to colonize the Middle Kingdom in which millions were slaughtered. It can also be clearly traced to 1895, when Japan fought China in a brief war and annexed Chinese territory, including Taiwan, and claimed the Senkaku islands (which the Chinese call the Diaoyu), the focus of today's territorial dispute. More subtly, however, the resentment between the two countries goes back further still, to Japan's intellectual break with China, when it threw itself into a headlong effort to modernize and Europeanize.

China was once considered the fount of all knowledge for Japan, an isolated archipelago of islands sitting like an apostrophic afterthought off the eastern edge of the vast Eurasian landmass. Kyoto, founded in the 8th century and Japan's imperial capital for a thousand years, was a replica of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang'an. Serious Japanese poets wrote in Chinese. Only women used the phonetic kana script -- a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court composed the 11th-century Tale of Genji, considered the world's first novel. For men, to be learned meant to be learned in Chinese.

But in subsequent centuries, the prestige of Chinese civilization began to slowly erode; it fell sharply in 1644 when the Ming Dynasty crumpled and the Han Chinese came under foreign control. This coincided with the early days of Japan's Tokugawa period (1600-1868), when the ruling shoguns sought to protect the state, and themselves, from foreign influence, including Chinese. Intent on preserving its monopoly and wary of competing ideologies, the shogunate banned the Japanese, on pain of death, from leaving the country and returning. Traders from China were mostly restricted to a Chinese quarter in the city of Nagasaki.

For Japan to break with China was a traumatic decision. Most of what it valued culturally had come from the Chinese landmass: wet rice cultivation, the written script, concepts of Confucian hierarchy and filial piety, and techniques in the use of both bronze and iron. The historian George Sansom wrote that Buddhism, which also arrived in Japan from China (even though it originated in India) was "a great magic bird, flying on strong pinions across the ocean, [bringing] to Japan all the elements of a new life -- a new morality, learning of all kinds, literature, the arts and crafts, and subtle metaphysics which had no counterpart in the native tradition."