Conclusion: The Elusive Japanese Race

Summary

Over the centuries, the alterity of the Japanese island nation never ceased to puzzle Western observers, often in a contradictory manner: Japan was different, because exotic and remote from the West, but also different, because so fundamentally close to Western nations. More than one century after Perry's arrival, in the wake of the Second World War, scholars and laymen alike were still trying to decipher the Japanese mind, be it to understand the enemy or the economic miracle of the country. The uniqueness of Japan was also a beloved topic in Japan itself, as testified by the popularity of Nihonjinron (theory of Japaneseness) in the post-war years.

In the Meiji period, however, it was before all Japan's resemblance with the West in civilisational terms that made it truly special. According to the scientific and political logic of the time, this closeness led to a profound dissonance. Political and military achievements such as a ‘modern’ form of government might have seemed to be objective factors attainable by any nation. Yet, by the nineteenth century, racial categories were clearly overlapping with civilisational achievements, causing the racial category ‘White’ to be synonymous with ‘civilisation’ and ‘coloured’ with ‘barbarity’. That Japan, classified as ‘yellow’, could pretend to a place amongst the civilised White nations must therefore truly be seen as an anomaly.

As explained in the introduction to this work, historians of Japan today, while having the clear advantage of hindsight, find themselves facing the same dilemma as the individuals concerned with Japan's racial identity at the turn of the twentieth century: how to fit the Japanese into the ideological framework of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The idea of the Racial Middle Ground can be an answer to that question, as it not only recreates the process through which Japan escaped the usual dichotomy, but also offers a conceptual approach to understand how and why this process was launched and made possible. I hope to have shown that when considering the case of Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, thinking in binary terms of ‘White’ and ‘coloured’ is not meaningful. In addition to making the explicit formulation of the standard of civilisation necessary, Japan's modernisation along Western lines eroded the foundations of White supremacist thinking and made a compromise necessary to uphold the racial status quo. This compromise took the form of a racial middle ground.