Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

This came about thanks to a group of clear-sighted men who saw that Japan’s only hope lay in dismantling its isolationist policy, engaging in international trade, and transforming as quickly as possible into a modern nation-state. Once again, geographic location helped. Situated at the extreme eastern end of the world (from the Western perspective), Japan was far removed from the West, including the United States, whose maritime route to Asia at the time went through the Indian Ocean.

The neighboring Qing dynasty (1644–1912) had resisted the West, only to end up fighting the disastrous Opium Wars, a fate that Japan observed with horror. In the years leading up to the wars, the British treated China in a way they would never have dared to treat any Western country, illegally exporting large amounts of opium they grew in India in an effort to acquire Chinese silver. The First Opium War started in 1839 when the Qing emperor, understandably alarmed at opium’s rapid spread, banned the underground traffic. Britain countered with military force. Lacking a modern army, China was quickly defeated and subjected to humiliating conditions: concession of Hong Kong, large indemnities, unequal treaties. Then in 1856, Britain found a pretext to wage the Second Opium War. This time, the other European powers got in the act, and China was half colonized. Alert patriots in Japan saw all too clearly what the consequences would be if their country did not voluntarily open its doors to the West and modernize, but fast.

Along with geography, history worked in Japan’s favor, or else the patriots’ goal might have remained elusive. Japan was indeed a tempting country to colonize: it was conveniently located for maritime trade; it produced copper, silver, tea, silk, and porcelain that the Western importers coveted; and it had a large population and a developed capitalism that made it a good market for Western exporters. The Western powers could have tried to grab some of its land for lease or tried to divvy it up; even worse, one of them could have colonized it outright. The vastness of China limited their ambitions to obtaining concession territories along the coast and sharing prerogatives, but Japan was an easy target.

None of this happened, however. Commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron entered the port of Uraga in 1853, surprising the Japanese with four huge navy vessels known forever after to the Japanese as “black ships” and demanding that the country open its doors. Perry came back the following year to Yokohama, this time with nine vessels, making the same demand. Faced with cannonballs for the first time in their history, the Japanese had no choice but to agree to supply American ships with fuel, water, and food; then the Europeans joined in, all demanding more concessions. Things looked dark for Japan, but history soon intervened as a series of wars broke out among the Western powers. The Crimean War, fought by Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia, took place between 1853 and 1856. The American Civil War began in 1861 and lasted until 1865. The Franco-Prussian War was fought in 1870 and 1871. These wars debilitated the Western powers for a while; in the meantime Japan began to turn itself into a modern nation-state, complete with a modern military.

What if Japan had become a Western colony? Today, nearly a century and a half after the Meiji Restoration, the possibility may appear all too distant and far-fetched. Yet for Japanese living at the time, the possibility was all too real. In his celebrated and wonderfully funny autobiography, published in 1899, Fukuzawa Yukichi, the aforementioned best-selling writer and one of the key figures in Japan’s modernization, reflects back on the tumultuous years immediately following the Restoration from the perspective of an “old man” (he was sixty-four) and reveals how precarious Japan’s independence actually was.

Through many an intrigue and skirmish between the Edo shogunate and the rebels who favored restoring imperial rule, the shogunate finally fell. Yet the situation was a complicated one. Often the very ones who worked to bring about the Restoration were incensed by the shogunate’s weak-kneed dealings with the West and yearned to rid the country of Western influence once and for all. Those in favor of opening up the country were initially in the minority. Fukuzawa writes that he was unsure if the new Meiji government was willing to embrace change, which he knew was the only way that the country could maintain its independence: “In truth I could see that the officials of the government knew nothing better than the dregs of the Confucian philosophy with which to guide their actions. They were simply lording it over the people with arrogance and pretense.” 7He further writes that Western diplomats who initially favored Japan’s self-governance turned skeptical on arriving in the country and seeing its people firsthand, citing the example of Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, who asserted that “after seeing the condition of things, he could not say much more in commendation of Japan. He was sorry, he said, but Japan with her inflexible nature could hardly be expected to keep her independence.” Fukuzawa knew that unless the country opened in the true sense of the word, there was a good chance that it would be colonized even after the Restoration.

Fukuzawa reflects:

I have never told anyone of the dire, helpless state of my mind at that time. But I am going to confess it now. Watching the unfortunate condition of the country, I feared in reality that we might not be able to hold our own against foreign aggressiveness. .. If in the future there should come signs of foreign aggression and we were to be subjected to insult from foreigners, I would probably find some way to extricate myself. But when I thought of my children who had longer lives to live, again I was afraid. They must never be made slaves of foreigners; I would save them with my own life first. At one time I thought even of having my sons enter the Christian priesthood. 8

This last was an outlandish idea, since Fukuzawa himself was a nonbeliever — a thorough rationalist. Whether having his sons “enter the Christian priesthood” would have spared them humiliation at the hands of foreigners remains an open question. For Fukuzawa’s fears did not materialize: fortunately the new government, once in power, quickly grasped the course it had to take and began implementing drastic reforms. Fukuzawa concludes, “As I look back today — over thirty years later — it all seems a dream. How advanced and secure the country is now! I can do nothing but bless with a full heart this glorious enlightenment of Japan today.” 9

Let us here consider the “what ifs” that Fukuzawa feared.

To start with, what if the American Civil War had not broken out so soon after Perry’s squadron entered the port of Uraga? Japan could have become a United States colony. Preposterous, one might scoff, but not if one exercises an imagination informed by modern history. At the time, every non-Western country was up for grabs. Itself a former British colony, the United States was divided over whether to join European countries in colonization — but that did not stop it from taking the Philippines from Spain.

What if Japan had become a United States colony like the Philippines — what would have happened to the Japanese language? Like all other colonized countries, Japan would surely have become a bilingual society where the languages of the colonizer and the colonized were used side by side. Unlike that previous bilingual era when Japan belonged to the Sinosphere and people’s access to the Chinese language was more or less limited to written texts, a colonial power would have exercised far more direct and extensive influence. Americans would have arrived in person and trod all over Japan, whether in muddy military boots or shiny civilian shoes, controlling everything from foreign relations to internal governance, including the three branches of government as well as businesses and, of course, higher education. Naturally, English would have become the official language. Under such conditions, as is always the case with colonized countries, the best upward path for locals would have been to excel in English and serve as liaisons, relaying orders from above and claims from below. If the system for selecting such liaisons were fair, it would have attracted the brightest minds from all over the country, encouraging more and more people to become bilinguals and receive higher education in English. The best Japanese minds would have been absorbed into the library of English.