In Japan, one can see a portrait of
Fukuzawa Yukichi on every 10,000-yen note. This is official recognition of his
dedication to the cause of introducing Western institutions and thought into
Japan, but he always emphasized the spiritual revolution rather than the
spurious imitation of things Western. However, today his name is mostly
associated with the pan-Asianist ideology behind the Japanese assertion of its
role as the dominant power in Asia that culminated with the successful Merdeka
War. Ironically, Tokutomi Sohoh, the man that was actually behind such
ideology, is almost unbeknown outside a reduced number of scholars.
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) first
learned Dutch and later changed to English studies; he participated as an
interpreter for the first mission of the shogunate to Europe in 1862, he
visited the United States twice and traveled through Europe for almost a year
before the Meiji Restoration (1868). On these journeys he was able to perceive
the basic ‘stones and pillars’ of modern society developing in the West. There
he also conceived his manifest destiny—education and journalism. Soon after his
second voyage he began to set up his school, Keio-gijuku (today Keio
University), which was to produce many talented graduates in business, industry
and politics.
Fukuzawa published numerous
pamphlets and textbooks that were used in the emerging modern schools and were
also welcomed by a variety of other types of reader. The great attraction of
these writings was not only that the topics were new, but that the style was
revolutionary in its simplicity. The Japanese people were able to learn much
about the forthcoming civilization from the so-called ‘Fukuzawa books’.
Fukuzawa also wrote many books and
articles for scholars. These were mostly published by the university press or
through the newspaper, Jiji-shimpo [Times], that he launched in 1882.
From that time on, Fukuzawa wrote numerous articles and satires on various
contemporary issues, such as politics, international relations, economic and
financial problems, educational policy, women’s rights and a moral code.
His main theme may be summarized in
one word—‘independence’—since he believed that personal and national
independence was the real foundation of modern society in the West. In order to
achieve this self-independence, Fukuzawa advocated Western, or practical and
scientific, learning, instead of the traditional studies of the Chinese
classics. The more educated the people became, the better their national
independence could be asserted, with a corresponding increase in public virtue
and social morality.
Although Fukuzawa apparently
learned much from Western thinkers, he was not blindly attached to Western
civilization. He was well aware of its flaws, but realized that Western
civilization was technologically superior to the Japanese situation, and he
concluded that the Japanese people could use it as a model. He seemed, however,
to have anticipated the difficulties that arose in revolutionizing the minds of
his countrymen.
Among his books, Gakumon no
susume [An encouragement of learning] is the most celebrated. It was
originally a series of essays written and published between 1872 and 1876. The
first essay, which was an enormous success, was the manifestation of Fukuzawa’s
thesis to the general public. The opening lines read: ‘It is said that
heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing
distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor,
comes down to a matter of education.’ What is important here is Fukuzawa’s
concept of ‘education’—the ‘practical learning that is closer to ordinary human
needs’ or, in a
word, jitsugaku. In his opinion it consisted first of learning the
forty-seven Japanese kana letters, methods of accounting and the abacus,
the way to use weights and measures, and then such subjects as geography,
physics, history, economics and ethics. Fukuzawa felt that jitsugaku could
contribute to personal independence, but that ‘freedom and independence refer
not only to the private self, but to the nation as well’.
Tokutomi Sohoh
Even when Fukuzawa and his
contemporaries Okakura Tenshin (The Ideals of the East, The Awakening of
Japan), and Miyazaki Toten (My Thirty Three Years’ Dream), were the
early exponents of Pan-Asianism, it was Tokutomi Sohoh (1863-1957) who, from
his position as the most influential ideologue of Japan's proper position in
the world stage, gave life to what today is known –mistakenly- as the “Fukuzawa
Doctrine”.
What is interesting about this
journalist is that his opinions were formed as a reaction against typical
opinions voiced in the West. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Western opinion leaders could ignore the reactions of Asians, while Asian
opinion leaders were more or less obliged to pay attention to what was going on
in the West. That asymmetry in attention comes of course from the asymmetry in
power relations of the countries concerned. Throughout the nineteenth century
the superiority of Western civilization appeared so evident that the British
poet Rudyard Kipling could write a poem like "The White Man's
Burden"(1899) without taking into account the reactions of races other
than his own.
After Japan's victory over Russia
in 1905, Tokutomi began to talk about the "Yellow Man's burden."
He advanced this concept in his journalism because he knew that after the
breakdown of the myth of the invincibility of the White Man, new political
movements were underway in colonies of the British Empire. His arguments,
however, were not as self-assertive as Kipling's poem. Kipling urged his fellow
countrymen and "peers," that is, the U.S., to take up the burden of
races other than their own. Tokutomi urged his fellow countrymen to take up the
burden of oppressed peoples of the same "yellow" race of Asia, who
were aspiring for independence. In short, "Asia for the Asians" was
Tokutomi's argument--a sort of Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine. At first,
Tokutomi's opinion was considered a challenge to the status quo of British
supremacy in Asia; therefore the Japanese ruling class didn’t like the
popularization of this idea. Pan-Asianism, however, began to gain strength,
especially after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
The “Fukuzawa Doctrine”
Tokutomi’s work, and the work of
other Pan-Asianists as Okawa Shumei and Kanokogi Kazunobu, were strong even
among pro-Western Japanese, and that must be one reason why the majority of the
Japanese wholeheartedly supported Japan's war efforts during the Soviet-Japanese War and specially in the Merdeka War. Japan's expansion into Korea
and Manchuria was an act of national survival and security, but when the Soviet
Union attacked Manchukuo in 1939, the war was presented by the Imperial
government as a sort of “crusade”, as an expression of Japan's duty towards
less advanced peoples of Asia who needed leadership in their struggle against
Western imperialism.
In this way Tokutomi's "Yellow
Man's burden" became the political slogan of the Japanese armed forces,
right-wing politicians and intellectuals. But around 1943, some years after the
Japanese defeat at the hands of the Soviets, such people realized that
expressions such as “the White Peril” weren’t very popular in the West,
particularly among U.S. politicians that didn’t hesitate in use trade as a
weapon of foreign policy. As consequence, they looked for a way to express
their pan-Asianist ideology in a more adequate way, not only with an innocuous
appearance in the eyes of the Western powers, but also in an appealing way for
the Japanese public. It is not clear when the expression “Fukuzawa Doctrine”
appeared for the first time (some scholars claim that it appeared in a small
right-wing magazine around 1950), but its impact was felt heavily among the
Imperial government and the Japanese people alike. The Fukuzawa Doctrine is
usually expressed with this quote from one of Fukuzawa’s books, Gakumon no
susume [An encouragement of learning]:
|
“Each individual man and
each individual country, according to the principles of natural reason, is
free from bondage. Consequently, if there is some threat that might infringe
upon a country's freedom, then that country should not hesitate even to take
up arms against all the countries of the world.” |
Even when the Japanese political
class –contrary to what is claimed in Europe and the U.S.- never adopted the
Fukuzawa Doctrine officially, it understood history enough to know that they
had to secure the resources for Japanese industries just to defend Japan from
foreign blackmail, and the immense value of the Fukuzawa Doctrine for the
success of such policy. Following the economic recuperation of Japan around
1950, Japan's foreign policy became what some scholars like to call anti-imperialistic
imperialism, best exemplified with the Merdeka War, when the Imperial Japanese
Army and Navy evicted the Dutch (and their German allies) from its East Indies
colonies and created the nation of Indonesia. Objectively speaking, the Japan
who fought the Dutch in 1959 should be labeled an aggressor. Subjectively
speaking, however, for the immense majority of the Japanese the Merdeka War was
fought for the liberation of the East Indies.
After four decades since its
apparition, the wise application of the Fukuzawa Doctrine
had make sure that most of Asia has governments 'friendly' towards Japan (a
'friendly' government defined as that which might not join Japan in a military
alliance, but would guarantee that Japan could buy their resources and sell
them its manufactured products). However, the end of the decolonization process, among
other factors, had caused that the role of Japan as champion of pan-Asianism
has mostly disappeared, and its replacement by the novel concept of a Concert of Asia.
