Liu Gang/Wen National Independence and Civilization and Enlightenment
What is the Meiji spirit? The configuration of its concept is the trinity of statism, populism and liberalism, and its socialization is the freedom and civil rights movement.
If we understand the liberal and civil rights movement as a movement of liberalism and democracy, it will be difficult to grasp the national logic of this ideological movement.
In "The Spiritual Structure of the Meiji Era," Matsumoto Sannosuke says that the liberal civil rights movement "is more appropriate to speak of nationalism and democracy than liberalism and democracy, because the movement has strong nationalist overtones."
At the time, the leader of the movement, Sakagaki Kensuke, also believed that the liberal civil rights movement was a movement of "individual liberalism adjusted according to the concept of the state."
In his book "Neighboring Grass," Hiroyuki Kato was the first to propose that constitutionalism is a prerequisite for "armament" to the outside world and a cheap way to win "people." At that time, almost all people of insight understood the constitutional system from the perspective of national independence.
Later, Defu Sufeng also said: "At that time, the theory of civil rights and freedom was called civil rights, but in fact, it was national rights. "The freedom that the movement seeks is political freedom, not personal freedom; The goal of the movement was to achieve national independence, not the emancipation of individuality.
At that time, there were two problems that were mind-burning: one was the issue of national independence, which demanded a constitutional monarchy; The second is the issue of civilization and enlightenment, which requires capitalism.
In 1874, the Patriotic Gong Party put forward the "Proposal for the Elected House", which was the beginning of the movement, and by 1887, it was disintegrated by the official soft and hard hands, and lasted only a little more than a decade.
Since then, the movement has ceased to exist, but its demands for the opening of the National Assembly, the reduction of land taxes, and the revision of unequal treaties have all been fulfilled.
And the spirit of the movement, the so-called "Meiji spirit", was carried forward in the later socialist movement. Sakai Toshihiko said: "My socialism is still the doctrine of freedom and civil rights, and it is still Confucianism. It can be seen that the "Meiji spirit" has transcended the Meiji era.
Inspired by the "Meiji Spirit", those socialists also became people who worried about the country and the world, and became righteous people who saved the world and helped the people, and they were on the extension line of nationalism since the Meiji Restoration, and they were an extension of nationalism in the direction of socialism.
During the Meiji period, the manifestations of nationalism can be divided into two categories.
The first type, which is led by the government, with the strengthening of the government's legal, economic, and military functions as the core, requires the people to abide by their identity, silently do their best for the government's policies, and unconditionally love the country, which is the official nationalism - "top-down".
On the other hand, the people-centered movement holds that "the state is nothing more than an independent group of people," and that the essence of the liberal civil rights movement is "a people-centered state that aims to form a national state based on the people's spontaneous national consciousness." This kind of nationalism is an opposition nationalism, which can also be said to be a "bottom-up" nationalism.
These two kinds of nationalism, one for the state and the other for the people, are essentially statisms because they unconditionally emphasize self-sacrifice in the face of the interests and values of the state.
The former later developed into militarism, while the latter, combined with populism and liberalism, became the ideological basis of the opposition movement in the Meiji period.
The nationalism initiated by the opposition and the nationalism promoted by the government with power are the opposite of each other, and they are the same on two basic points: the first is that national independence is given priority, and the second is that politics decides everything.
The question of national independence is a matter of life and death for a nation.
The rise of nationalism is mostly due to external crises. Crisis is a driving force. It is precisely the sense of crisis that motivates the people and the country to be one and form a synergistic force of interaction.
No matter whether they are in the opposition for the people or in the court, without exception, they must be dominated by and driven by the crisis, and their thoughts and behaviors all carry a sense of crisis.
Moreover, the issue of independence is, first and foremost, a political issue, and the modernization related to this is also a political issue. One of the signs of modernization is the transformation of subjects under the monarchy into democratic citizens, which is the awakening of the so-called "national character".
In modern nationalism, the most important thing is the consciousness of the people.
In the final analysis, the so-called "national consciousness" means making oneself a citizen, and the key to this lies in the change of the political system, so it is natural for people to focus their attention on politics. Another reason, which should not be ignored, is that the cultural psychology of the pre-modern period before becoming a national also tended to affirm that political values were above all else and overriding everything.
The psychology of the subjects who believe that power is omnipotent and worship power makes people fascinated by politics. At that time, political value was no longer limited to the civil rights movement, but throughout modern Japan, and in its intricate form, it became an endless problem.
Nationalism has its own position on the people, the opposition and the official, one is the position of the people, the other is the position of the subjects, and the official announcement of the "Edict on Education" still adheres to the position of the subjects.
However, with the strong bond of "national independence", the two opposing positions are once again connected. Thus, the abandonment of antagonism and the pursuit of reunification brought about victory in the Russo-Japanese War and solved the problem of "national independence". So, the divergence was reopened.
Official nationalism is running non-stop along the road of militarism, while nationalism in the opposition is combined with populism and liberalism, which not only provides its spiritual backbone for the popular movement in the opposition, but also becomes the origin of the post-war democratization movement.
The modern inheritance of the spirit of Confucianism
Nationalism in opposition is also related to the classical tradition of Confucianism in many ways, and this connection is mainly manifested in the modern inheritance of the Confucian spirit.
In his book "The Scholars and the Gentlemen", Sakai Toshihiko said that no society can do without a group of scholars who regard character as their life, and that in the future, the group of gentlemen must be the backbone, and the gentlemen are by no means importers, but the successors of the scholars. The so-called bushido will still be the life of a gentleman in the future. Gentlemen, like the gentlemen of yesteryear, should be a source of morality, integrity, taste, and etiquette.
At that time, both civil rights activists and socialists emphasized the inheritance of Confucian ideals of benevolence and righteousness and moral creed, and Zhongjiang Zhaomin wrote the "Translation of the Civil Covenant" in Chinese, that is, the main theme of the original work was incorporated into the Confucian spirit, thus becoming the "Rousseau of the East". His student Kotoku Akisui also believed that "practicing socialism" was the inheritance and development of the Confucian concept of "tomorrow to the hearts of the people and maintain the way of the world", while another socialist, Sakai Toshihiko, declared that his socialism had two sources, one was the doctrine of liberal civil rights and the other was Confucianism.
The "Edict on Education" says that if there is an emergency, you should be righteous and courageous.
This is not only an official edict, but also the creed of liberal civil rights aspirants.
Based on the premise of this creed, the so-called freedom and civil rights are the timely things of the political world of "public service", not produced by the needs of the private life world, so they are nationalist political freedoms, not individual civic freedoms, just as the "even though the citizens are not free", as long as the political freedom is fine.
This connection with tradition can indeed be remarkable in creating an indomitable moral force to sweep away the political insensitivity and social lifelessness of the general public since the Tokugawa shogunate, and to create a new national image.
However, its limitations are also obvious, it despises the daily life of citizens and despises individual freedom, and these two points are precisely the starting point and support point of modern democracy. Therefore, Japan's modern democratization still adheres to Confucian people-orientedism, or "Democratic" (the transliteration of democracy), one is democracy, that is, sovereignty rests with the people; The second is people-oriented, that is, people-oriented.
The so-called "people-oriented" has two meanings: one is that the purpose of state activities is for the interests of the people; Second, the government's decision-making should depend on the people's intentions.
The centripetal movement of the Meiji people around the core of nationalism, even in their understanding of populism and liberalism, has always departed from its practical foundations, civic life and individual freedom, and has been interpreted from a nationalist standpoint.
For example, the primary issue of the Meiji people is national independence, and statism, as the guiding ideology and spiritual pillar for solving this problem, occupies the mainstream in the Meiji people's concept, while democracy and liberalism must revolve around nationalism.
When the power of the people was needed to achieve national independence, populism was adopted, and Congress came into being to advocate individual rights and independent personality. Because there is no independent personality, that is, there is no independent national character, just as Fukuzawa Yukichi said, "one body is independent, one country is independent", and in this way, populism and liberalism are packed in the basket of nationalism.
At that time, in the magazine "Modern Review", someone criticized the political fever: "If a national commentator talks about civil rights and freedom, if you ask how to achieve it? The House of Representatives, however, was founded by our generation without any desire for political power, but for the preservation of the happiness of life, such as the rights of the body, the rights of private property, and the consolidation of human rights. However, listening to the words of those who have aspirations in the world, their words are also generous, but their eyes are focused on the side of the regime, ignoring the damage to personality. ”
The limp of the state system is not caused by "internal needs", i.e., the lives of citizens and personal freedoms, but by "external needs" - the "diplomatic needs" of the government.
Populism and liberalism, although they occupy a secondary position in the Meiji spiritual structure, are alive and full of inner vitality; Although they are moving centripetally around nationalism, they are trying to transcend the limitations of nationalism, expand and extend their own tendencies, and through struggle, realize their transformation from possibility to reality.
The result of struggle is often to form a "combined force" and to reinforce each other.
In this way, the Meiji people adjusted their spiritual structure and promoted the momentum of democratization, and even when they were dominated by nationalism, populism and liberalism continued to move forward.
This may be due to the fact that opposition nationalism is closer in temperament to populist and liberalism, and it is similar to government-run nationalism in basic points.
In fact, those thinkers in the opposition are not confined to a certain ism, and even if they are notable for populism and liberalism, they are still statists, but the degree of expression of nationalism and the ideological process of each person are different.
The diversity of Japanese culture
The Japanese are complex, and their complexity is often expressed in the softness of the spirit, and they take a conformist attitude towards things rather than opposing positions. Because its civilization has no body, it is between "Tangization" and "Europeanization", and its culture is useful and has cultivated adaptability.
Therefore, it is difficult for us to find a programmatic atomic spiritual "core" in the "isms" of the Japanese, and compatible pluralistic tendencies can be seen everywhere.
In daily life, when a Japanese person is born, he or she goes to a church for a baptism, when he gets married, he goes to a shrine for a wedding, and when he dies, he invites a monk for a funeral.
This diversity is also manifested in the Meiji people, who do not think according to the laws of logic, but proceed from reality and lead to "seeking truth from facts".
In this regard, Yukichi Fukuzawa is representative, and Tokufusu Mine said that he "should not respond to the situation on the spot", and said that he "the basis of his arguments is to apply medicine to the symptoms", so his judgment is "limited to the time and place", and only has practicality, but there is no "anything that can be applied to any time and place", which is also the common characteristic of the Meiji people.
From the ideological process of Yukichi Fukuzawa and Tokufusu Mine, we can clearly see the historical process of modern Japan from civilization and enlightenment to aggression and expansion.
In particular, Tokufu Sufeng lived through the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods until 1957, and his life can be said to be a living history book of Japan's modernization. These two people have no teacher, but their similarities are vivid.
For example, they both criticized the nationalist tendency of the liberal civil rights movement to pursue excessive political freedom, with Yukichi Fukuzawa criticizing the liberal civil rights movement from the standpoint of individual freedom, and Tokufusu Sufeng criticizing the liberal civil rights movement from the perspective of civic life.
From a populist standpoint, Defusufeng criticized the morale of the liberal civil rights movement, which he believed had a tendency to aristocratic movement, a tendency that would lead people to regard politics as the prerogative of the aristocracy, and thus detach the political world from its practical foundation, the world of the common people's lives.
Therefore, he opposes talking about politics in the abstract, disgusts the kind of empty political passion, and advocates the transformation of politics with the life world of the common people, and the common people as the masters of politics.
He believes that the Meiji period was at a turning point in the transition from an "aristocratic society" to a "plebeian society," so it was first necessary to change the phenomenon of having a government but no people in Japan, closely integrate politics with the people's life, and build a social organization based on the model of production organs, so that the entire society could realize the transformation from emphasizing armament to emphasizing production.
In the past, Japanese society was established on the model of military organization, so it was founded on the basis of force, and its state functions were super-economic coercion at home and armed force at outside. The transformation from a military-type "aristocratic society" to an industrial-type "civilian society" means, first of all, replacing the autocratic hierarchy with freedom and equality, and replacing armed struggle with economic competition.
This proposition provided a theoretical basis for "revitalizing production and revitalizing industry" and made him famous. In fact, Fukuzawa Yukichi had long put forward the idea of "turning Japan into a money country", so it can be seen that the two are the same, while Fukuzawa Yukichi is more utilitarian.
Like Fukuzawa, Su Feng also sought a paradigm for the image of a new man from modern Western liberalism, and conducted experiments in the Oe School founded by him.
He advocated the replacement of the "retro-natural" education with the "liberal" education of the West and the "eclectic" education that made a compromise between the traditional and the modern. The purpose of "liberal" education is nothing more than to familiarize people with the "law of cause and effect" and to develop a "self-disciplined personality," that is, a "spirit of self-government" that "qualifies oneself as one's own judge," and proudly regards this as "the second revolution of the intellectual circles of the mainland" after the Meiji Restoration.
Here, we see a similar trajectory to Fukuzawa's thoughts.
At this time, Su Feng was already a thorough populist and liberal, and resolutely opposed nationalism and the "theory of conquest of Korea", while more than half of the civil rights theorists at that time held the view of "conquest of Korea", which he believed was "deformed imperialism".
It is intriguing that both men later became imperialists, and examining the ideological trajectories of their metamorphosis, although each has its own peculiar form, neither of them sees this transformation as detached from their original Europeanization proposition, but, on the contrary, they both see this transformation as a further development of the Europeanization proposition, from which imperialism develops.
Towards imperialism
Fukuzawa said in his "On the Departure from Asia": "Although the territory of Japan is in the east of Asia, the spirit of the people has moved away from the solidity of Asia and moved to Western civilization. ”
Therefore, when the Western powers came to carve up China, his first reaction was that "I, Japan," of course, should not hesitate to join the ranks of the partition, treat China like the Western powers, and not be particularly polite because it is a neighbor with a strip of water.
We can say that his "Theory of Leaving Asia" is not only a complete statement of Europeanization, but also a precursor to the statement on behalf of Japanese imperialism, and that civilization and imperialism seem to be paradoxes, but in fact they complement each other, and the Europeanizers started with liberalism, but the result is that they lead to imperialism, so after the First Sino-Japanese War, they went so far as to shout that Japan's victory was "the victory of civilization over barbarism."
He not only regarded national independence as a sign of civilizational progress, but also regarded imperialism as necessary for the development of civilization. Civilization itself is a storehouse of all kinds of means, and aggression and expansion are also a form of civilization development.
As for the choice of means, the key lies in the general trend of the world, and since the Western powers have all embarked on the road of imperialism, Japan, as a completely Europeanized country, must of course not hesitate to move towards imperialism. Therefore, he believed that the line of "enriching the country and strengthening the army" in the early Meiji period was no longer in line with the general trend of the world, and that it should be changed to "strengthening the army" first and then "enriching the country", and relying on "strong troops" to "enrich the country", that is, the development of the industry must give way to aggression and expansion. It can be seen from this that Fukuzawa's imperialism has long been buried in his theory of civilization.
In his book "Japan of the Future," Tokufu Sufeng asserts: "Without the happiness of the working people 'living in thatched huts,' 'splendid armaments, vast colonies, and mighty empires,' are of no value." However, with the First Sino-Japanese War as an opportunity, his thinking changed. Before the war, he exclaimed, "It is imperative for the whole country to unite against the Qing state, and I am willing to sacrifice everything I have for this." After the war, he was subjected to a "traumatic influence" that surpassed the influence of Yokoi, Spencer, and the liberalism of the Manchester faction. He originally thought that "the world is invincible according to reason", but the incident of returning Liao made him feel the weakness of "justice", so he decided to "take refuge in the gospel of strength" and change from a "civilized gentleman" who advocated "taking equality as a fortress and freedom as a gun" to a "heroic gentleman" who advocated ruling the world with an iron fist. He himself felt that he was mentally different from the past, and from then on he appointed himself as the "vanguard of imperialism".
At that time, public opinion accused him of apostasy, but he refused to admit it, believing that his shift from populism to imperialism was in line with the general trend of the world and his thinking was logical.
In his essay "To the Mountains and Mountains," he admits that he has "developed from pacifism to imperialism," but at the same time he points out two points, saying that this kind of "development" is different from Japan's status before and after the First Sino-Japanese War, and is related to the general trend of the world becoming more and more imperialist. Therefore, he still has not lost the demeanor of a "civilized gentleman", if you don't believe it, don't you see those "civilized gentlemen" in the West, aren't they showing off their might in every corner of the world?
As a "civilized gentleman" advocating Europeanization, there is no other way than to speed up the pace and catch up with the world trend. The "gentleman of civilization" is not only a pacifist but also an expansionist, and he can make different choices at different times.
The First Sino-Japanese War brought the Japanese people to a "period of imperial self-consciousness," and he himself naturally obeyed the "will of the people" and moved from populism to imperialism. He believed that both of his isms were necessary in two different historical periods.
As a result, the Qing government of China became the first victim of Japan's "period of imperial consciousness", and the government of the Republic of China became the prey of Japanese imperialism.
(The author's recent book "Cultural Rivers and Mountains", vols. 1-8, CITIC Press)