8 - Some Reflections on Identity Formation in East Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Summary

A key element of Japan's present identity is embedded in the assumption that in the early modern (more precisely the Azuchi-Momoyama) period, the country was ‘open’ to foreigners and foreign influence; then, save for the Dutch and Chinese in Nagasaki and the Japanese presence in the nominally independent Ryūkyū kingdom and in Korea, the country was ‘closed’ by government diktat enabling Japan to enjoy the benefits of a ‘pax Tokugawa’. The quality of that supposedly blissful era is captured in an anti-Christian tract dating from the end of the 1630s, in words that reflect what was becoming an official Tokugawa ideology: ‘The Empire is at peace, the land in tranquillity, the reign of longevity. The people partake of the virtue of the ruler and his subject princes. Verily, our age can be called another sainted reign of Engi, a golden age indeed’. According to some scholars, the fruits of the ‘pax Tokugawa’ were inestimable, for Japan then achieved a significant level of proto-industrialisation, and by the mid-nineteenth century Japan had achieved the necessary pre-conditions for indigenous industrialisation, whether or not Perry's black ships had turned up in 1853.

The idea of an open/closed rhythm to Japanese history has its appeal. The receptiveness to foreign cultural influence during the Azuchi-Momoyama period resembles Japan's earlier flirtation with Chinese culture during the Heian period. Things Chinese were then very much in vogue before they were rejected – after the Japanese had absorbed whole chunks of Chinese culture.