Thoughts on George Wilson's Patriots and Redeemers
George Wilson's Patriots and Redemeers asks us to think about how historians
should approach complex historical events which feature multiple groups of historical
agents and mutliple lines of thought which intersect and overlap with one another.
He is, after all, addressing a set of concerns that particularly arise in the
field of intellectual history. He sees bakumatsu Japan as a temporal
site where rival discourses intersected and were contested. His problems with
studies of the Meiji Restoration up until now is that they leave out important
players and fail to account for their motivations and how these motivations
might have interacted with other historical actors or players.
For Wilson, agency--the actors and their acts--is important, more so
than structure, "the arena in whose conditioning web the agents acted."
(1) Likewise, he would say that it is important to concentrate on the "text"
of ideas (and actions), while relegating the "context" of shaping
institutions to a secondary role. As a rule, Marxist historians would tend to
favor the opposite approach, i.e., to favor a concentration on structure or
context because they would argue that the laws of historical materialism mean
that the structure underlying and surrounding historical events is what determines
the course of history. This ususally comes down to who, what social class, owns
or is in control of the means of production. For further information on Marxism,
click here.
Wilson also notes that Western historians tend to favor a consensus model
of social change. It sees conflict not as essential to historical processes
but as that aberration that comes along once in a while and propels events forward.
Therefore, Western historians have emphasized the role of the western intrustion,
the foreign imperialist pressures on Japan which stimulated inside Japan, after
a lot of debate and tumoil, a consensus which enabled the leadership to carry
the country forward into safety amidst the tumult and uncertainty of a hostile
world environment without sacrificing national unity. In other words,
it is kind of a Western historians buy-in to the "prescient patriot"
theory.
Manay Japanese historians, much more open to Marxist ideas than American academics
are, see the Meiji Restoration as a flawed bourgeois-democratic revolution carried
out by elements of the dying feudal aristocracy in league with nouveau-riche
lower-middle-class types in rural areas and to a lesser extent, urban centers.
The result of his unholy class alliance was a bete-noire, the "absolutist
state," one that was inherently undemocratic, even, anti-democratic, and
represents the forces that pushed Japan along the road to war in the 1930s.
Where does Wilson get a lot of his ideas, his ways of conceptualizing the
Meiji Restoration? He tells us fairly clearly in Ch. 1 when he lists up his
influences, the writers from whom he borrows vocabulary and ideas:
R.G. Collingwood, Claude Levi-Strauss, Northrup Frye, Hayden White, Carl
Jung ("synchronicity"), Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah,
Mircea Eliade, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz. Also, "structuralism"
and the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
Wilson notes that we cannot really write about past events without "narrativizing"
them, and once we do that, we have some plot, some agenda. "Could we ever
narrativize" he says quoting Hayden White, "without moralizing?"
Wilson also writes, "The very act of 'fashioning' a narrative is a willful
intrusion on the part of the historian into the domain occupied by the inert
data that inform the treatment of a topic." (3) Cause and effect, and certain roles
are going to be assigned to hsitorical actors. Someone is going to be the hero, somebody else the
villain; certain things happened that caused other things to happen and then
some end results were brought about. There really is no other way to "tell" (narrativize) a story.
What especially piques Wilson's interest, though, is that "popular consciousness,"
with its dream of yonaoshi, or a millenarian remaking of the world, came
into contact with the patriotic, loyalist samurai's desire to redeem Japan from
the defilement of foreign powers and also from the social and political breakdowns
attendant on poor administration and government by the bakufu. In Chapter One,
Wilson introduces the term "sublation," from the German Aufhebung,
which has a meaning of one force negating another, but also preserving some
of the original in the new synthesis. The German term is from Hegel who developed
the important notion of history being driven by a central idea (a Thesis) which
is then challenged and contested by another idea or discourse (the Antithesis),
yielding a new Synthesis. The notion of sublation is that there is always something
of the old that hangs around and is incorporated in the new synthesis. See
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/easy.htm.
Another important ideal for Wilson is the whole idea of Millenarianism, the
notion of an imminent, total, ultimate collective Salvation, the birth of a
new day, a new kingdom. It appeals particularly to the desperate, the oppressed,
the disinherited, the wretched who assume a stance whereby they refuse to acknowledge
the rule of a superordinate class or foreign power, or simply reject the ideology
of the ruling authority. On p. 79 he quotes from Peter Worsley:
Millenarian beliefs have recurred again and again throughout history. .
.precisely because they make such a strong appeal to the oppressed, the disinherited
and the wretched.They therefore form an integral part of that stream of thought
which refused to accept the rule of the superordinate class, or of a foreign
power, or some combination of both, as in Taiping China.. . .This anti-authoritarian
attitude is expressed. . .through the rejection of the ideology of the ruling
authority. . .Millenarian doctrines often become openly revolutionary and
lead to violent conflict between the rulers and the ruled.
This final point echoes the epigraph of E.J. Hobsbawm at the outset of the
chapteer:
The essence of millenarianism, the hope of a complete and radical change
in the world. . .[appears] in all revolutionary movements of whatever kind.
Wilson also favors Yonina Talmon's writings on millenarianism and quotes her
at the end of Ch. 5 to the effect that:
It combines components which are seemingly mutually exclusive: it is historical
as well as mythical, religious as well as political, and, most significant,
it is future-oriented as well as past-oriented. It is precisely this [amalgam]
of a radical revolutionary position with traditionalism that accounts for
the widespread appeal of [millenarianism] and turns it into such a potent
agent of change. (92)
Wilson would see all the confusion and mass hysteria that accompanies the
"ee ja nai ka" movement as something "less important than the
uncertainty it implied, the disnomy it revealed" (100). This term "disnomy"
pops up frequently in Wilson, referring at a very basic level of meaning to
the "inability to recall names," but it clearly signifies a kind of
profound disorientation that occurs as a result of sociopolitical circumstnaces.
As he says, "Whatever its scope, ee ja nai ka obviously indicates
disnomy—uncertainty and anomie." The disnomy was captured in "the
happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care attitude of the dancers who expected yonaoshi--world
renewal--to arrive with the dawn. Like Satsuma and Choshu they aimed to do
away with old order and its antiquated and inadequate forms. Both the rebels
and the revelers were anxious to redeem the spate of troubles that had plagued
the realm."(117)
In this book, Wilson asks the reader to focus on the twin themes of "Patriotism
and Redemption," suggesting that we can use the two terms dialectically,
i.e., it is their interaction that shaped the nature of the Meiji Restoration..
The danger of internal chaos motivated samurai to shape national goals out of
a deep-seated concern over society’s ability to control itself. The samurai
who reacted to the crisis of naiyu-gaikan launched Japan on an era of
unprecedented change. Wilson doesn't argue that patriotism and the role of the
samurai was not important, even crucial to the Meiji Restoration; but he is
concerned with who and what gets left out of that particular historical narrative:
the common people. Great events like the MR are too vast to be attributed
solely to political elites. Traditional treatments of MR emphasize the role
of patriotic samurai elites who get the lion's share of the credit as dynamic
agents of change, which they were. But ordinary people express their feelings
about the situation their lives are caught up in, too--some kind of intentionality
shapes their attitudes and attends their activities--and this intent is too
important to leave unexamined.
Though in Japan, millenarianism was, in part, a form of protest against the
old political order, Wilson tells us that it was also a celebration such as
when abundant harvests finally returned after years of famine. As such, it can
be seen as an outgrowth of the same "millenarian" confusion that had
led people to embark on "okagemaeri" pilgrimages and to join new religions
like Tenrikyo and Konkyoko in the decades preceding the Restoration (101).
According to Wilson, "the bonds of feudal ideological sway were coming
unraveled." His evidence for this ranges from:
--samurai complaints of shogunal inccompetence (Koishikawa document)
--carnivalesque, orgiastic behavior of the common people
--new religions and frequency of pilgrimages
--mock funeral for Tokugawa bakufu held at Fujisawa
"That is one message of spontaneous carnival," he asserts,"--it
respects neither hierarchy nor power but possesses the latent force to pave
the way for a new order." (128)
Does Wilson consider the Meiji Restoration a revolution? Reflect on this observation:
After the restoration, Satsuma and Choshu promptly suppressed popular discontent,
yet that discontent had served to drive these very leaders to make a revolution.
The Meiji Restoration may have been a sublative revolution, but it was a revolution
nonetheless.
Despite being put down as a political force, the Japanese people played
a role in giving the restoration its character. . .The process may be likend
to a centrifuge, or simply to a vicious circle. Once the system began to fly
apart, the uncertainty among ordinary people crystallized into a disnomic
irreverence for the status quo. The emperor, symbol and substance of protean
Japanese mythology and the object of universal awareness if not exactly veneration,
could then enter the arena as the agent able to end the centrifugal disorder. (129)
Wilson finds that the results of the Meiji Restoration in Japan do resemble
the "great revolutions (French, Russian, Chinese) because it did appeal
"for a transvaluation of all values;" and also because, in the end,
it backed away from a total reevaluation in favor of consolidation. "But,"
as Wilson points out, "the Meiji Restoration rarely inhabits the abode
of these great revolutions. . .Why? It was insufficiently sanguinary, or it
failed to change the class base of existing power relations, or it was only
a response to the stimulus of foreign intrusion upon Japan." (129)
So he finds that these three reasons:
--1) the MR wasn't bloody enough,
--2) it did not attack a given social class and make it the enemy of the
new order, and
--3) it was only a "response" to western imperialist intrusion
are are the reasons most frequently given to "disqualify" the Meiji
Restoration as a real or genuine revolution. What do you think?