Assembling Civilisational and Cultural Nation-States in East Asia: The Case of Japan

Abstract

Understanding nation-state formation in East Asia is often divided between what I term as ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ explanations. The former observes that East Asian polities modelled their nation-states by replicating a catalogue of external ideologies and institutions. The latter emphasises instead pre-existing cultural elements that conditioned distinctive nation-state formation. Presupposing nation-state formation with external/internal bounded categories obscures complex interactions while hardening and reifying such boundaries. To overcome this divide, this article follows nation-state builders and observes how they imagined and actualised complex external/internal boundaries for their nation-state formation projects. More importantly, to map their dynamic interactions, I develop two specific patterns, namely ‘defining the global’ and ‘designing the local’. The former shows how nation-state builders visualised different global boundaries with corresponding nation-state identities and interests. The latter, in turn, shows how they modified local complexes to legitimate what was specifically defined. Because they were configured through these interactive patterns, emergent global and local boundaries were intertwined, rather than polarised. For empirical demonstrations, I focus on Civilisational and Cultural nation-state projects in 19th-century Japan that emerged out of the ‘defining’ and ‘designing’ patterns.

In mainstream International Relations (IR), understanding nation-state formation in East Asia is often divided between what I call ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ explanations. The former observes nation-state formation as emulations of settled, externally bounded institutions and ideologies. In this scenario, nation-state formation appears as isomorphic processes through which early modern polities in East Asia all converted towards a similar, externally bounded entity with specific attributes. The latter emphasises instead that it was local, internally bounded, cultural attributes that conditioned distinctive nation-state formation trajectories. How do we overcome this external/internal divide in studying nation-state formation in East Asia? I argue that this division occurs because relevant literature often conceives the nation-state as a settled entity that can be characterised by pre-existing bounded substances with different attributes and boundaries, rather than something that is contingently assembled and reassembled over time. Because of this ‘attributional’ ¹ or more broadly ‘substantialist’ preoccupations, understanding nation-state formation in East Asia appears as contradictory determinist contours ² either replicating externally or perpetuating internally bounded attributes. Over time, ongoing processes of diverse actor-driven interactions that shape diverse boundaries of nation-statehood receive less attention, while substantialist external and internal attributes are further polarised, hardened and possibly reified.

To overcome this divide, this article moves away from presupposing nation-state in East Asia as settled entities and pays close attention to ongoing interactions through which nation-state builders imagined diverse nation-state boundaries. And to map such formative interactions, I develop two interrelated interactive patterns, namely ‘defining the global’ and ‘designing the local’. ‘Defining’ is a pattern through which nation-state builders weaved together their experiences to contextualise different global boundaries with necessary nation-state identities and interests. ‘Designing’, in turn, shows how they interacted with and modified local complexes to legitimate what was ‘defined’. Novel nation-state boundaries were rarely socialised in a purely coercive manner. Instead, nation-state builders had to rely on local relations, gradually modify them while not losing sight of emerging nation-state building purposes. Designing novel nation-statehood through such modifications provide legitimacy because they generate collective sensibilities of becoming ‘modern’ and yet retaining (modified) ‘traditions’.

These patterns of interaction help overcome the external/internal divide in the following ways. First, because ‘defining’ led to the emergence of different global boundaries with corresponding nation-state identities and interests, it relaxes the ‘globalist’ ideas that their interactions were ultimately predetermined by a catalogue of external attributes. Second, because ‘designing’ purposively modified local relations to legitimate specifically defined nation-state identities and interests, local social landscapes were constantly changing, rather than continuing. More importantly, if nation-state formation is studied with less-bounded substances and attributes, and through these interconnected patterns of ‘defining’ and ‘designing’, nation-state formation appears as sites wherein emergent global images are deeply intertwined with modified local relations.

To provide empirical demonstrations, I focus on late-19th century Japan, where there were at least two specific nation-state building projects existing within respective nation-state builder’s imaginations, namely civilisation and culture. The necessity of civilisational nation-state formation came out from nation-state builders’ visualisation of ‘the global’ as a universally becoming civilised space in which there were hierarchical boundaries between progressive identities (civilised, uncivilised and so on). Defining the global as such, nation-state builders identified their core national interests with a public mission of becoming civilised. This mission was actualised through designing civic combinations of independent rights-bearing citizenship and representative constitutional statehood. The contingency of civilisational nation-state building was that the collective interest of becoming civilised was prioritised over individual rights. It was because Japan came to be defined as not only ‘uncivilised’ but also ‘static’ in the emerging order of civilisation. In the process, while political rights and representative constitutional government both emerged, rights were given not to everyone, but specific local constituencies who were deemed as the most capable people for the public mission of becoming civilised.

The necessity of cultural nation-state building came out from a different global image. Unlike civilisational, cultural nation-state builders conceived a plural global that accommodated equally distinctive cultural resources for individual nation-state self-evolutions. Collective necessities of cultural nation-state building for them were less about appropriating civilisational manifestations, but more about recuperating and socialising what was considered valuable traditional resources. With these cultural boundaries, local people were subjected to an additional public boundary. They were not only required to contribute to the interests of becoming civilised but also to perpetuate what came to be defined as equal cultural traditions. Actualising this boundary could be seen as the process of designing ethnocultural nation-statehood. What is often ignored is that the search for cultural traditions was to sufficient extents genuine desires for strengthening Japan.

Designing civic and ethnocultural nation-statehood both involved modifications of local relations before nesting them within emerging nation-statehoods. With the incorporation of modified local complexes, emergent nation-state projects appeared sufficiently old and recognisable, hence legitimate. I should reiterate here that civilisational and cultural nation-state building were specific nation-state builders’ projects; they were not totalised phenomena encompassing entire local populations and modern histories.

‘Defining’ and ‘designing’ are my conceptual contributions to historical IR with a focus on nation-state formation. These tools are not based on polarising pre-given global or local boundaries. They are not blank rejections of such boundaries. Rather, I try to show how these boundaries were assembled by different situated or contextually bounded actors who ‘defined’ and ‘designed’. In other words, defining/designing are processual tools to help navigate diverse actor-driven interactions that shape contingent and contradictory nation-state boundaries. With defining/designing patterns, nation-state formation in East Asia looks less like a determinist unifolding movement either replicating a unified set of global or perpetuating pre-existing local attributes. Nation-state formation in East Asia, in my understanding, were diverging and manifolding with different global and corresponding local boundaries. In the process, emergent global and local boundaries were co-figured and intertwined, rather than polarised, through nation-state builders’ interactions. The space that today we call Japan thus was not a monolithic entity with settled boundaries, but a place organising overlapping, pluralistic or, in a recent terminology, ‘pluriversal’ ³ nation-state formation projects along different globalising worldviews such as civilisation and culture.

To proceed, this article is divided into four sections. The first section critically looks at ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ literature to show how presupposing different, and often incompatible, external and internal sets of nation-state attributes, often leads to polarised determinisms. The second section specifies more analytically the interactive patterns of ‘defining’ and ‘designing’. The third and fourth sections empirically show these patterns by focusing on civilisational and cultural nation-state building in Japan.

There are two reasons for looking at 19th-century Japan. On the one hand, the country is often thought of as an ‘island nation’ with ‘little infusion of other ethnic groups’. In Louis Hayes’s words, Japan is ‘fundamentally homogenous’. ⁴ On the other hand, Japan is also regarded as the most active country in terms of adopting Western nation-state institutions. With these contradicting images, Japan remains a fruitful venue for understanding ongoing nation-state formation.

‘Globalist’ and ‘Localist’ Determinisms

‘Globalist’ understanding of nation-state formation often appear as adoptions of external attributes and productions of like units. These attributes can be grounded within coherent arrangements such as ‘international society’ and ‘world polity model’.

The first generation of English School scholarship, with Bull’s and Watson’s The Expansion, ⁵ formulated ‘international society’ with well-articulated norms, rules, values and institutions. This ‘society’ was then universalised worldwide with little substantive change, only the incorporation of like units through institutionalising not only the relations between but also the internal organisations of nation-states.

Recently, Buzan and Goh provide a reminiscence of this argument. In the late 19th century, they argue, faced with the opportunity to acquire wealth and power that modernity offered, Japan and China ‘borrowed extensively from the West in their pursuit of modernisation’ and appropriated their statuses within Western ‘international society’, ⁶ which is understood as a settled, deeply institutionalised, entity. ⁷ Meanwhile, ‘nationalism’ was to seek unity ‘against a previously prevailing ideology’. ⁸

This argument is certainly not a mere replication of the original ‘expansion’ narrative in which non-Western countries reconstituted themselves to conform or please European states. ⁹ Taking insights from Yongjin Zhang ¹⁰ and Shogo Suzuki, ¹¹ ‘borrowing’ was an instrumental process. There were plenty of calculations and practical emulations of the more successful practices in order to maximise efficiency. ¹²

The issue here is not only the well-criticised Eurocentric normativity of the early ‘expansion’ arguments but also the perpetuation of settled, substantialist components of ‘international society’ and its units. In this theoretical setting, interactions, be it consensual imitations or rational calculations, were processes of bringing rules, norms and institutions from an external into internal spheres. Interactions, in other words, function as a process of replacing one set of bounded substances with another. Suzuki certainly notices complex interactions in Japan and China emulating the best practices. But instead of mapping patterns of diverse interactions, he situates his story with bounded points of departure and destination where best practices lie. Early modern era was characterised with a boundary of ‘East Asian international society’, wherein polities were organised by the principle of cosmic ‘social harmony’, political arrangement of ‘sovereign hierarchy’ and ‘diplomatic’ practices of ‘ritual justice’ and ‘tribute system’. Meanwhile, modern states are made of specific attributes including ‘augmentation of individual purposes and potentialities’, ‘sovereign equality’ and international social contracts. ¹³ In this setting, nation-state formation in East Asia occurred through rational emulations replacing ‘East Asian’ with ‘European’ international society.

One can criticise how much Japan or other East Asian polities fit squarely in those boxes. The larger point here is that once researchers fixate ‘tradition-modernity’ trajectories like this, nation-state formation becomes a determinist straitjacket. There is no alternative pathway nor dynamic material to re-explore state transformation where the past may live in the present. Interactions become ‘inter-actions’, rather than interpenetrative reorganisation, as an effect of substantialism:

It postulates that ‘entities no longer generate their own action, but rather, relevant action takes place among the entities themselves. Entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such inter-action, each independent of the existence of the others, much like billiard balls or the particles of Newtonian mechanics’. ¹⁴

Precisely because the English School’s arguments operate within substantialist orbits, they obscure diverse interactions through which situated, and contextually bounded actors were in fact more creative in organising heterogenous social experiences to assemble novel social environments. At the same time, bounded substances and attributes become hardened and reified, ¹⁵ while the ‘expansion’ narrative lingers on. ‘International society’ keeps getting bigger, in different ways, without having its components reconstituted and/or becoming more complex. ¹⁶

Another ‘globalist’ perspective is the World Polity Model. John Meyer (and a large corps of followers) presupposes the nation-state with a globally unified model that diffuses its institutional attributes across the globe. These attributes are seen as a collection of nation-state-building ‘scripts’, like an encompassing encyclopedia for emulation. ¹⁷ It is not equated with ‘Western’ nor ‘European’, but it did transcend Western state building first. ‘In the West, since at least the seventeenth century, nation-states have claimed legitimacy in terms of largely common models’, he argues, ‘this commonality led them to copy each other more freely than is usual in systems of interdependent societies’. These mimetic processes were then replicated globally and infiltrated various social layers, not only administrative organisations. They penetrated ‘to the level of daily life’. ¹⁸

Similar difficulties in explaining nation-state formation arise when scholars identify local ‘world models’ in East Asia, such as Buddhist and Confucian cultural scripts. ¹⁹ Without sufficient attentions to interactions, the world polity model offers few clues for studying transitions between models, other than a complete abandoning of the past in order to look alike. Preoccupied with external legitimacy, no country wants to be a hermit kingdom. ²⁰ Nation-state formation, in this setting, thus also headed towards the same direction; an external world model in a determinist manner. Interactions remain as inter-actions.

These globalist images are often criticised by local-oriented arguments. The latter are pushed forward by many who have local expertise and languages. They help excavate more nuance of local complexities, which are potential resources for understanding non-determinist divergences. But it could be ‘localist’ in case local complexities are treated too much as durable, locally bounded, cultural attributes. Amitav Acharya’s argument is an important example. His mechanism of ‘localisation’ describes ‘local actors’ having sufficient ‘cognitive priors’ to domesticate external elements, like sovereignty, ‘which results in the former developing significant congruence with local beliefs and practices’. ²¹ ‘Cognitive prior’ is grounded on Kissinger/Huntington’s understanding of culture, which is a self-causal and auto-accumulative entity, ²² such as the tianxia worldview in China. It acts like an autonomous ice-cube tray, freezing external infiltrations into predetermined shapes. With these powerful prior cultural attributes, ‘international society’ or ‘world model’ is no longer universal but a ‘multiplex’ plurality preserving cultural diversity.

Again, this is an important argument as it incentivises the breakdown of contingent norm diffusions, but it drives our attention only to locally bounded ‘cognitive priors’, which were the determinist attributes and remained intact throughout localising processes. ‘Localisation’ thus is a kind of ‘inter-action’ with culture as the main agency, not actors themselves. In the process of ‘localisation’, it is specific cultural attributes that perform the acting.

Understanding ‘the local’ with internally bounded cultural attributes, in Acharya’s argument, misses fruitful debates about culture. The concept is understood less as a constitutive entity but more like, in Ann Swidler’s terms, heterogenous repertoire of ‘symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems’. ²³ Through interactions, culture can be extended, modified and politically reorganised to cope with varying problem situations. Put differently, politicising culture is no less important than culture localising politics. Normatively, while characterising culture as civilisational continuities establishes sensibilities of equality between West and non-West, it would complicitly support and eventually reify nationalist selections and risk marginalising others. This effectively obscures a more pluralistic ‘local’ in which different actors could have produced different boundaries.

Defining and Designing

To overcome the divide between globalist and localist arguments, and to observe more diverse emergences of external/internal boundaries, I relax substantialist preoccupations and determinisms in understanding nation-state formation. My solution is to focus instead on patterns of interactions wherein situated nation-state builders assembled fragmentary experiences to define and design different boundaries of nation-statehood.

Interaction here is not ‘inter-action’ but aggregated interactive processes that are ‘logically prior’ to what came to be seen as substantialist attributes. Over time, they ‘produce a change in the complexion of reality’. ²⁴ In this sense, ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ external/internal boundaries with innate substances and variant attributes are not pre-given, but emergent complexities or assemblages, with each fabric collected at different interaction sites. ²⁵ This allows us to study changes that occur within diverse interactions themselves that possibly produce different boundaries for nation-state formation, like civilisational hierarchy and cultural equality.

To put this in the language of rationality, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ boundaries were ‘rationalised’ through interactive processes. Being rational here is not understood in a neoclassical sense, which highlights coherent ranks of efficient means and effective ends, but more in Weberian sociology, the coming together of various learning experiences through which something becomes more complex and formalised. ²⁶

‘Defining the global’ and ‘designing the local’ are my conceptual proposals to map such aggregated interactive processes. ‘Defining’ is about nation-state builders, who through interactions weaved together different experiences to imagine specific global images with corresponding nation-state identities and interests. ‘Designing’ focuses on interactive modifications of local complexes to legitimate what was ‘defined’.

Defining the Global

Creating a nation-state in East Asia in particular and non-Western countries can be understood as processes of nationalism which, according to Pheng Cheah, is a purposive arrangement through which nation-state builders attempted to reformulate state’s structure in accordance with their nation’s images, so that the nation and the state would become congruent. ²⁷ This definition, to some extent, resembles Ernest Gellner’s conception of nationalism as ‘a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’. ²⁸ While having similar logics, Gellner’s nationalism occurs in a statist and functionalist fashion. To serve industrialisation processes, states invented national cultures to homogenise modern labour forces. This invention came with destructions of existing heterogenous cultural elements and complete reconstitutions of them. Invention, as Gellner understood it, was not only statist but also almost ‘fabrications’. ²⁹ Pheng Cheah’s conception is arguably better in a sense that it relaxes Gellner’s statism and brings actor’s creative agency back into nationalism. His nationalism does not begin with either industrialisation or the state, but nationalists’ imaginations of what the nation should be and what kind of state leadership would properly represent their nation’s images.

Such images, however, were not pre-given. They emerged out of gradual interactions, allowing nation-state builders to collect and assemble relevant knowledge fragments. Over time, nationalists could ‘define’ their nation’s images in concrete manners with specified identities and interests. It was like a critical learning process that assembled or ‘rationalised’ their visions.

Equally important, nation-state imaginations were more than having an isolated but relational nation-state. ³⁰ In their interactive ‘defining’ processes, nation-state builders expected their countries to be competitive in changing global contexts. Because of this, there were also attempts to make sense of ‘the global’ to properly position their ‘nation-state’ in it. In other words, emerging national identities and interests co-emerged with specified global images. This is why I label the whole process as ‘defining the global’, which echoes what Alexander Wendt has said about identity politics. He argues that state builders, through processual ‘interactions and learning’, gradually develop their national identities and interests, or ‘relatively stable role specific understandings and expectations about self’, within a ‘specific, socially constructed world’. ³¹ Both ‘the self’ and ‘the world’ are, in his latest argument, ‘emergent’. ³² If nation-state builders see the world as an anarchical space, they develop a nation-state with an interest in self-help, and if they see the world as a universally civilising space, their national interest would be becoming civilised.

There are three further analytical components that deserve attention. The first is how did nation-state assembling processes begin? Nation-state builders do not carry around portfolios of settled national identities and preferred interests without considering global contexts. Instead, through contextualisation, they creatively navigate and critically learn in the process of understanding and defining contemporary situations. Regarding this, Wendt suggests, which to some extent echoes John Dewey’s pragmatism, salient commitments to certain national identities/interests emerge through participations within ‘ongoing social process in which he necessarily finds himself, defines a problematic situation as calling for the performance of particular acts’. ³³ Hence, formulating nation-state boundaries does not spring out of nowhere but begins with situated actors making sense of uncertain problem situations that seem disruptive or strange to conventional experiences, and by exploring problem situations, actors are able to define them in concrete manners, effectively enabling what is to be done. ‘The function of reflective thought’, John Dewey argues, is ‘to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious’. ³⁴

With these suggestions, ‘defining’ can be specified further as a series of formative interactions through which nation-state builders who are situated within a problematic situation attempted to define it. And by so doing, they transformed uncertainty into more coherent imaginations with well-defined global arrangements and corresponding nation-state identities/interests.

An intuitive example is that if an alien civilisation lands on earth, would we instantly mobilise the entire human population for war? It depends on how we make sense of each other through mutual interactions and learnings. Likewise, to recall an example of East Asian history, in 1804, Russian Nikolai Rezanov (1764–1807) approached Japan for a trade permission. Though his request was rejected, Rezanov’s ‘naval pomp’ did leave some impressions. ‘From the moment it fired its cannon in salute’, court historian Kume Kunitake (1839–1931) confessed, ‘the peaceful dreams of the entire country were brought to a starling end’. He also added that ‘there were furious debates about revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians and about the policy of seclusion’. ³⁵ Later on, when the most cited historical event occurred, the arrival of US Captain Perry in 1853, there were profound cumulative sensibilities of problem situations, as the captain announced he would not leave until there were some major concessions. These were quite novel experiences as for many years Tokugawa Japan often had an upper hand in dealing with European agents, particularly the Dutch. A problem situation enabled desires to understand it. From here, through further interactions, nation-state builders navigated and clarified uncertainty into concrete problematic identifications such as ‘uncivilised’ and ‘static’. Such problem situations thus were not pre-given problem/solution, but rather gradual problematisation processes that over time rationalised specific external/internal boundaries.

Second, where to observe nation-state assembling processes? Interactions are often collective enterprises, with varying and uneven distributions of knowledge production. Nation-state identities/interests come into existence though knowledge productions that spread across different interactive sites, where people ‘jointly produce knowledge they could not have individually’. ³⁶ In other words, defining specific global images with corresponding local identities and interests is not monolithic trajectories, but dynamic distributions of labour with uneven participations and contributions.

To be cautious, while this incentivises a sociology connecting multiple sites of knowledge production, trying to relate too many of them would drive researchers into a fragmentary jungle where they potentially encounter diverse epistemic networks that require interdisciplinary capacities. In the limit of this article, most knowledge production that defined problematic identifications, like ‘uncivilised’, is traced mostly through diplomatic interactions and entailing debates where formative reflections occurred. Stories about Japan’s diplomatic missions and entailing reflections are my focus.

Finally, did nation-state formation end? Exploring and defining problem situations could, over time, produce stable identities and expectations. But it does not mean there is no further contestation or possibility of change. It ‘depends on whether the exigencies of certain [emerging social arrangements] leave room for actions that deviate from the prescribed script’. ³⁷ Towards the end of the 19th century, civilisational politics permeated entire nation-state formation in East Asia. But globalising civilisational boundaries, with ‘uncivilised/civilised’ identities and becoming civilised interests, were not without fierce critiques. In the emerging civilisational order of progress, histories and traditions were often rendered as imperfections while the future is always a place of betterment. Cultural nation-state builders disagreed. For them, nation-states were more than a vehicle moving within linear accumulations of civilisational achievements. Also, for them, the past should be seen as equally authoritative and integrated cultural system with each part lives for other parts, that can only be known through descriptions of its subjective achievements and self-evolutions. Each culture carries a seed of its own self-organising universalism. Thus, beside the universal linearity of becoming civilised, there was room for recuperating equal organic cultural self-definitions. There was more than one interactive ‘defining’ processes that conditioned diverging nation-state boundaries.

Designing the Local

If ‘defining the global’ comprises of formative interactions that occurred at different sites through which situated nation-state builders made sense of uncertain situations and by so doing imagined their necessary nation-statehood within specific global images, ‘designing the local’ is about actualising such imaginations for being in the specifically defined global. These processes involved purposive modifications of selected local relations for legitimation. It is a simple question of how did nation-state builders persuade their peoples that they are part of a collective national identity and should actively contribute to a common interest? More specifically, if Japan was defined not only as ‘uncivilised’ but also ‘static’, how should these problematic boundary and necessary nation-state projects as solutions be communicated to its population?

Early modern East Asia was not culturally homogenous. There were heterogenous patterns of socio-political relations, and in coping with intense permeations of civilisation towards the end of the 19th century, peoples gathered into ‘redemptive societies’ trying to preserve their customs. ³⁸ Readers of Japan’s history would remind us of the Blood Tax riots, alternatively known as the Mimasaka rebellion. It occurred after the traditional status hierarchy (mibunsei) was abruptly replaced by modern citizenships in 1873. ³⁹ Disruptive attempts that created equal rights-bearing citizens and obligations caused massive social violence during the riots when ‘redemptive societies’ isolated and murdered those who once belonged to lower socio-legal strata (eta-hinin). Thus, to ensure smooth transitions, there was always a need for legitimations that involved delicate modifications of local relations while not losing sight of the emerging necessary nation-state identities/interests. In the process, legitimations as modifications, as shown in later empirical sections, dislocated heterogenous local constituencies from their relations, re-signified them with novel identities and re-institutionalised them into emerging nation-state interests. Civilisational identities and civilising interests were new, but through legitimations, they were enriched with various modified local relations and appeared sufficiently old and recognisable.

If ‘defining’ excavates contingent national identities and interests situated within specific global images, hence, relaxing the ideas that nation-state building is determinist, ‘designing’ is an attempt to explore how local relations were modified purposively for legitimation, rather than unchanging continuations.

Finally, before moving into specific nation-state formation projects with Japan being in the universal civilisational and plural cultural boundaries, there is a question of agent and agency. Who were ‘defining’ and ‘designing’? It should be real people situated in their contexts, not a monolithic agential ‘Japan’ acting and changing by itself. But this invites another question. Would Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), a German-born advisor of the Meiji government and also head of history department of Tokyo Imperial University qualify as one of Japan’s nation-state builders? Or was he an agent of Orientalism oppressing some local authentic voice? These are difficult questions not only because knowledge cannot be independent from power but also when attaching ‘local’ to ‘actors’, there is a sense of those actors belonging to their worlds of experiences. There is no way for me to know if Ludwig Riess was ‘local’ enough, or whether he felt belonging to the subjects of his study.

But even Edward Said also avoids making absolute boundaries and relations. Normatively, he said, ‘everything they knew, more or less about the Orient, came from books written in the tradition of Orientalism. . . such an Orient was silent available to Europe for the realisation of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants’. On the other hand, Orientalism, for him, was not ‘some nefarious Western imperialist plot’, but diverse movements with an uneven ‘distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts’, ⁴⁰ hence, as he confessed later on, a ‘decentred consciousness’. ⁴¹ Thus, if we are willing to observe nation-state building with this analytical backdrop of Orientalism, there is a chance of seeing nation-state builders as transnational communities of actors who participated in different interaction sites and contributed complicitly and unevenly to the shaping of different nation-state identities/interests. Instead of assigning actors with pre-constituted boundaries, like ‘Western’ or ‘local’, they can be called (imagined) communities of practice with like-minded ‘participants’ and ‘contributors’ of contextually bounded nation-state-building projects. It was their intellectual expertise and political strategies that rationalised different Oriental boundaries (like civilisation and culture) to deal with contemporary problem situations, a kind of collective problem-solving agencies.

So far, I have outlined the two patterns of actor-driven interactions that informed relational contents of nation-statehood. ‘Defining’ are interactions through which situated nation-state builders contextualised uncertain situations. Over time, they were able to define them with coherent global images and corresponding local identities/necessities. ‘Designing’ is about modifications of local relations to legitimise necessary nation-state identities and interests. Modifications involved dislocating local constituencies from their relations, re-signifying them with novel identities and re-institutionalising them into emerging nation-state interests. The next sections show how these patterns led to the emergences of civilisational and cultural nation-state building in the 19th-century Japan. They were specific problem-solving projects, not totalised phenomenon encompassing entire Japanese populations and modern histories.

Civilisational Nation-State Building

The necessities of civilisational nation-state building came from an emergent global image in which there were uncivilised/civilised hierarchical identities and becoming civilised interests. Designing civilisational nation-state modified local relations to legitimise a civic nation-statehood with rights-bearing autonomous citizens represented by constitutional statehood. The contingency that I want to highlight, as mentioned in the introduction, was that civilisational nation-state building in Japan prioritised becoming civilised interests over the primacy-of-rights which was the original intentions of enlightenment modernity and civilisation. ⁴² It was because nation-state builders, through interactions, defined their history and tradition as ‘uncivilised’ and also ‘static’.

Defining Civilisational Global

After Perry’s aggressive diplomacy in 1853, problem sensibilities further built up when Tokugawa elites heard about the worsening situation in China. While the Nanjing Treaty (1848) ceded Hong Kong to Queen Victoria ‘in perpetuity’, the Tianjin Treaty (1858) installed extraterritoriality and forced the Qing to accept Christian residence. Such unprecedented encroachments invoked not only insecurity but also a strong demand for exploring and defining this new foreignness.

Formative explorations were pushed on different fronts. The Prussian Eulenburg Mission to Japan in the 1860s provided some of the very first clues. The Prussian plenipotentiary boasted a picture of a centralised system, which ‘apart from Austria Prussia’, there were ‘another twenty-two states [following] Prussia not only in matters of trade and taxes’ but also ‘foreign matters’. ⁴³ These descriptions were way too attractive not only because German Prussia was considered equal among European powers but also because mediating intensified rivalries among local daimyō had been a long-time issue.

This invited subsequent Bunkyū Mission to Europe in 1862, allowing important nation-state builders like Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) and Terashima Munenori (1832–93) to further observe civilisational manifestations. Watching military drills in Spandau, they confirmed the Prussian army ‘was standing out above others in Europe’ and ‘the great performance of their machinery makes this nation worthy of being called one of the civilised nations of the world’. They also thought about ‘gathering the daimyō first’ before applying German constitutional experiences. ⁴⁴ To be precise, East Asia does not lack visions for building a well-ordered society, but the wealth and technological achievements of European bourgeois politics were novel to them. In the processes of exploring and defining the situation, there were combinatory considerations yoking local with novel experiences in making sense of larger problem situations.

Later writings of key participants, such as Fukuzawa’s An Outline of a Theory of Civilisation and An Encouragement to Learning, revealed deeper reflections and began situating an uncivilised Japan within an emerging Civilisational hierarchy. An Outline perhaps was one of the first publications that gave ‘Civilisation’ a Sinitic equivalence. What he meant by ‘theory’ was positivist assumptions, which allowed humans ‘to clear away the non-essentials and get back to their sources’. And by subsuming realities under foundational ‘principles’, ‘the basis of argumentation can be even more ascertained’. ⁴⁵ This theory scaffolded Fukuzawa’s understanding of civilisation, which was a combination of civilisation (bunmei) and also enlightening progress (kaika). This process manifested through three phases, ‘the primitive stage’, ‘the semi-developed stage’ and enlightening ‘civilisation’. Japan was somewhere in the middle, a ‘semi-developed’, and, more seriously, ‘static’ country:

Throughout the whole twenty-five centuries or so of Japanese history, the government has been continually doing the same thing; it is like reading the same book over and over again. . . though there have indeed been upheavals in Asian countries, no less than Europe, in Asia, these upheavals have not advanced the cause of civilisation. ⁴⁶

While defining Japan with an uncivilised identity, Fukuzawa was also concerned about the ignorance of Japanese peoples who were, for him, divided into ‘masters’ and ‘ignorant guests’ or ‘strangers’. Out of a million people, there were 999,000 ‘strangers’ who were unconcerned about Japan’s problematic situations, and ‘relied only on their masters, without taking any initiative themselves’. In Japan, because of that, ‘there is a government, but no nation’. ⁴⁷

The nation’s image, on this occasion, was not understood as ethnocultural continuities. The past, for Fukuzawa, was an obsolete impediment that prevented people in Japan from achieving self-determined independence. ‘Orientals’, he said, ‘spit out stupid theories and do their best to bungle things, out of proportion to their intelligence’, and it was because of ‘a long-ingrained custom’, which has become ‘second nature’. ⁴⁸ His Japan was not an independent country, because the country had very few independent citizens. Thus, even though there were desires among nation-state builders to implement a constitutional state, albeit with German experiences, they also expected those who would be chosen for this kind of representative state to not only contribute to strengthening Japan but also to enlightening ‘strangers’. ⁴⁹ Fukuzawa also criticised the Meiji government for its intensive regulations of peoples’ conducts because it was not a proper solution to bring backward people out of their ‘powerlessness’ and ‘ignorance’. The state for him should be reserved for an enlightened few, ‘a place where many people of intelligence gather to carry on their work’. ⁵⁰ ‘Uncivilised’ boundary and necessity of having an enlightening nation-state began to emerge.

The Bunkyū Mission certainly was not the only diplomatic interaction that fleshed out the need to have a capable nation-state as a solution for Japan’s ‘uncivilised’ problematic situations. The Iwakura Mission in 1872 was another venue to further observe how fragmentary civilisational manifestations were further organised. This is a good venue because, unlike the Bunkyū Mission, its diary compiled by Iwakura Tomomi’s private secretary, Kume Kunitake, was not hidden, allowing researchers to follow their interactions and contingent reflections that added complexity to emerging civilisational boundaries.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan experimented a modernisation rush. It involved a series of simulations primarily seeking international recognitions rather than actively re-designing existing socio-political experiences. Tokugawa state structure (the Bakuhan) was superfluously dissolved in 1871, replacing daimyō with ‘prefecture’ (todōfuken) in title. A ‘deliberative assembly’ for ‘public consultation’ was then established with an appointed rather than elected membership. This public sphere appeared as an exclusive place for ‘talented people’, but in fact, it was designed to create new bonds among daimyō. As Itō Yahiko confirms, there was no ‘public sphere’, but deliberate sites wherein political elites reconstructed loyalty. ‘The nation’ was simulated too. ⁵¹ In 1873, the Meiji government dismantled the existing socio-legal hierarchy of mibunsei. It was this abrupt abolition that partly contributed to the violence during the aforementioned Mimasaka riot. There was a lack of legitimations in the early days of civilisational nation-state building.

In this context, many political elites led by Prince Iwakura Tomomi went to America and Europe to accomplish three missions: present a credible face to European powers after Meiji’s nation-state simulations; renegotiate unequal treaties and finally, clarify the sources of ‘enlightening Civilisation’. The first two were soon frustrated as European powers demanded substantive changes towards representative government instead of having some superficial impositions of modern institutions. The third mission, however, was central to our understanding of how the plenipotentiary defined the global and also their own country. It shed light on major issues that Japan was confronting both internationally and nationally as many political elites were more thoroughly exposed to different civilisational manifestations. Different countries that they visited produced further contextualisation for designing a civilisational nation-state.

The first destination was America, where the Japanese shared Fukuzawa’s observations. The American, for them, were ‘truly free citizens of the worlds’ and they ‘respect each other as equal without discrimination’, ‘mix easily without formality’ and were ‘unconstrained by others’. ⁵² Being free here should be understood in a sense of public-minded independent personhood, a core development of individual-rights politics in East Asia. ⁵³ While appreciating the American of this civilisational achievement, the Japanese also thought that there was a defect. American citizens made light of public authority; hence, many forms of law did not generate expected discipline. It seemed they had too much rights and no doubt the plenipotentiary also had in mind domestic instability when they asserted that if this libertarian ‘evil’ was to be translated into Japan, it could overthrow the newly established government.

Old and new experiences thus were constantly matched up and driving one of the key puzzles throughout the mission: how much rights should people have? And on the flip side of the equation, how much conformity is necessary to maintain a political community? In other words, civilising nation-state building needed a bond among rights-bearing individuals, and they found that in civil religion. While acknowledging the importance of separating education from ecclesiastical institutions, religion still occupied a significant role ‘in maintaining the customs and characters’ of American citizens. In their eyes, ‘the veneration of God. . . lies behind [people’s impulse] to work hard’ and it is this ‘Protestant ethics’ that inculcated an ‘independent spirit’. ⁵⁴

Later trips to Britain confirmed these necessities. The British lacked American religious rigour and thus the state had to be active in structuring religious sentiments. In Victorian Britain where ‘liberty is more circumscribed’, ‘British politicians regard religious faith as particularly important’ and ‘not one of many would dare to attend church services’. This was where a hypothetical equivalence was established. Confucianism, which was diminishing in Japan, could be revived and put into a ‘wiser’ use. ⁵⁵ On this occasion, Confucianism was released from its cosmological contestations and functioned more as a civic program for national coherence before having newly created citizens as part of a representative constitutional state.

Designing Civilisational Local

At this point, nation-state imaginations that emerged through defining ‘uncivilised’ problematic were not really about recuperating ethnocultural roots. If the past was not authoritative traditions but impediments or functional, it would be fair to say that the imagination of civilisational nation-state builders like those who participated in the Bunkyū and early Iwakura Mission was a civic attempt to reformulate nation-state structures. ‘Civic’ is not only about liberal attempts to create a representative state by and for rights-bearing citizens. It also draws boundaries around them with obligations and duties. ⁵⁶ In this case, it was the collective interest of escaping the ‘semi-developed’ problematics and moving up the civilisational ladder. These identities/interests were civic also because they signified attempts to design an open political space where participations and contributions were confined within present necessities and not based on primordial affinities.

Designing a civic/open nation-state was legitimated in various spheres of constitutional politics. It could be seen first in the vibrant People’s Rights Movement in Japan. Enthusiasm with the idea of Japan having rights-bearing individuals participate in representative state-building encouraged both grassroot civil activists and state officials. Key members of the Movement like Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919) actively demanded Japan to have a national assembly as early as 1874. Like Fukuzawa, he reserved this public space only for an enlightening few. ‘Our proposal to set up an assembly does not mean the universal rights for the people to choose their representatives’, he argued, ‘but allow that the former samurai and the great farmers and great merchants should enjoy the above rights for the time being’. ⁵⁷ Another participant, Ueki Amori (1857–92), provided further rationale that these elite communities represented Japan’s ‘middle class’, and in every country, the ‘middle class’ were ‘progressive persons’. ⁵⁸

These modifications are what I mean by designing a recognisable nation-state. Embedded within globalising civilisational politics, Japan was in need of an enlightening national membership and proper representative leadership – the constitutional state. However, to create such a nation-state, there was a need to identify those who were most able for the task. And this was where dynamic traditional relations were modified to appropriate novel imaginations, like equalising ‘samurai’, ‘farmer’, ‘merchant’ with ‘progressive persons’.

Before nation-state formation, proper Japan was accommodating a heterogenous geography of identities, the mibunsei. It shuffled the Sinic order of ‘scholar-farmer-artisan-merchant’ by replacing ‘scholar’, an embodiment of ‘civility’ (bun) with ‘warrior/samurai’, a more inclusive figuration with both civility and martial talents (bu). At the bottom, there was an additional layer, the eta/hinin (literally, filth/non-human). This hierarchical stratification entailed not merely social but legal frameworks sharpening differences by assigning each status with distinctive responsibilities, duties and aesthetic lifestyles. ⁵⁹ There were dynamic movements across status layers but those on top, like ‘samurai’, ‘great farmers’ or ‘great merchants’, were certainly neither ‘progressive persons’ nor ‘political-rights-bearing citizens’, the holders of the atomistic and autonomous ‘I-form’ that John Ruggie identified. ⁶⁰ In other words, traditional statuses were dislocated from their relations, re-signified with civilisational identities and pending to be re-institutionalised within practices of civic nation-state building.

As this construction of rights-bearing citizens unfolded, hierarchical, rather than equal, citizenship categories were organised. Imperial households were bestowed the title ‘royal lineage’ (kozōku); court nobilities, former daimyō and samurai obtained ‘warrior lineage’ (shizoku); and much of the lower strata were assigned ‘commoners’ (heimin). Eta-hinin were reframed as ‘new commoners’ (shin-heimin) and later ‘rural people’ (burakumin). On the one hand, this organisation of citizenship had actual impacts on political and economic practices of each status category. On the other hand, as these categories may have already suggested, they were negotiated transitional categories as much as reminders of peoples’ origins. Differentiations and entailing discriminations against burakumin remained until today.

These civic practices were not only limited to Japan Proper but extended to larger projects of imperialism and colonialism. Becoming civilised required a large population of citizens for national industrialisation. This reason, which was coupled with long-term security concerns against Russian Tsar, led to a series of colonial assimilation banning Ainu’s customs without giving them political rights. What were given instead was language, economic and other symbolic homogenisations. Similar to the situation in Ryūkyū, the Ainu were forced to study Japanese and integrate into farming practices. ⁶¹ They were made ‘farmer’, even though fishing, hunting and gathering were their main sources of livelihood, with an identity ‘reminder’, ‘former aborigines’. At the same time, many former samurai who suffered from losing their stipends were moved to Hokkaido, effectively turning the island into an asymmetric mixture of ‘elite’ and ‘pending’ citizens. ⁶²

The situation in Korea was more complicated. Building a civilisational nation-state required Japan to expand its colonial empire. But this was more than a coercive denial of sovereign functions. The opening up of Korea in 1897, in Perry’s style, was combined with the establishments of various coordinative networks of Japanese settlers and Korean collaborators. Similar to what happened in Japan Proper where Meiji government had to rely on local networks to select eligible citizens, ⁶³ in Korea, colonialism also had to depend on, in Uchida Jun’s words, ⁶⁴ transnational ‘brokers of empire’ to generate civilisational relations. While indigenous rights were severely limited, Japanese settlers in Korea were not much better. If Japanese were ‘citizen-subjects’ (following Kim Hyun Kim’s translation of kokumin) ⁶⁵ in Japan Proper, they were more ‘subjects’ than ‘citizens’ in Korea. The upshot is that there were changes within civilisational order of nation-state building, but they were no flat replacements. Early modern identities were reorganised and shadowed into delimited distributions of political and civil rights.

Along these delimited distributions of political rights, a collective boundary for Japanese citizenship was announced. Drafted first by Nakamura Masanao (1832–91), a Fukuzawa Yukichi’s colleague at the Meirokusha, Confucianism was put into a ‘wiser’ use with the Imperial Rescript of Education. Filled with Confucian moral maxims, the Rescript became the cornerstone of Meiji civic education, effectively transforming Japan into a mass Confucian nation-state, much more so than it was during the Tokugawa era. The Rescript required modern citizens: ‘to be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husband and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all. . . always respect the constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the state’. ⁶⁶

Cultural Nation-State Building

The civilisational project, which defined uncivilised problematics and designed a civic nation-state capable of becoming civilised, was not the only project. The past, for other communities of practice, could not be fixated as obsolete impediments. It must be culture.

Giving culture a precise definition is a difficult task. At the same time, this slippery term has become quite commonsensical after long developments of nation-state building and capitalism. However, in 1784, according to German theologian Mendelssohn, ‘enlightenment’ and ‘culture’ were ‘newcomers to our language’, which ‘belong merely to the language of books’ while ‘common masses scarcely understand them’. ⁶⁷ In 1936, sociologist Robert Merton was still sharpening an English equivalence, while differentiating culture from civilisation:

Civilisation is ‘impersonal’ and ‘objective’. A scientific law can be verified by determining whether the specified relations uniformly exist. The same operations will occasion the same results, no matter who performs them. . . Culture, on the other hand, is thoroughly personal and subjective, simply because no fixed and clearly defined set of operations is available for determining the desired results. . . It is this basic difference between the two fields which accounts for the cumulative nature of civilisation and the unique (noncumulative) character of culture. ⁶⁸

This distinction implies that back then civilisation was the truth in the public sphere with its positivist universality measured by linear accumulations of civilisational achievements. Culture was meandering somewhere in the ‘personal’ and ‘private’ realms where progresses of inward refinement are unmethodical. Culture thus signified a kind of ‘noncumulative’ progress actualising inner distinctive values. This distinction also implies that culture emerged within modern contexts. Wang Hui confirms that while wenhua in Chinese has ancient etymological roots, ‘the category of “culture” itself was only defined explicitly in modern history’, which ‘cannot simply be projected in its entirety onto ancient history or rationalised as a special category’. ⁶⁹ Likewise, in Japan, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki explains, bunka, while carrying ‘the karma of previous incarnations’, was not commonly used before the Meiji Restoration. If civilisation embodied universal becoming civilised progress, she adds, culture incentivised a worldview of ‘spatial difference – a world divided by the differing social mores of distinct communities’. ⁷⁰

The context of emerging cultural imaginations was somewhat confined to globalising romantic movement, a direct reaction against Enlightenment knowledge production. ⁷¹ The attack of Enlightenment positivism on traditional relations was endemic and exhilarating, with shocking impacts. Experiencing disruptions was also highly uneven. In industrial centres like France and England, disruptions were not so intense because modernity unfolded with bearable rates. If we take a closer look elsewhere, like Germany and East Asia, those experiences appeared much more acute. In an elegiac reflection on modern ‘disenchantment’, Max Weber accepted that ‘the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations’. ⁷² Likewise, in East Asia, in coping with much more intensive bombardments of civilisation, many traditional boundaries also turned inward while being reimagined and reconciled. For late Qing intellectuals, ‘the very iconoclasm of scientism, its dismissal of Confucianism’, Joseph Levenson writes, ‘was a ticket-of-leave from a Chinese world to a China in the world’, and in the process, ‘Confucianism is transformed from a primary philosophical commitment to a secondary, romantic one, and traditionalism, from a philosophical principle. . . to a psychological device’. ⁷³ The emergence of culture in Japan could be seen in a similar vent, as Stefan Tanaka puts it, an attempt to objectify a ‘hidden spirit’ that would help Japan progress along its own traditional routes. ⁷⁴

The upshot here is that even though cultural imaginations became more concrete after further interactions, it had in it, I would argue, a normative attempt to deal with ‘disenchanted’ problem situations. And in the process, cultural imaginations were assembled not only as critiques of civilisation but also existential camps for heterogenous experiences of the past, effectively producing a global image with plural ‘spatial differences’ with integrative ‘social mores’ and equal ‘distinct communities’. With this, the past, in cultural imaginations, was no longer treated as impediments but authoritative sources for self-evolutionary progress. It enabled a different identity boundary, which is often termed anthropologically as ethnocultural for nation-state building. It also activated an interest in recuperating, selecting and socialising plural and equal cultural refining essences. Thus, while ‘culture’ is often used to describe early modern ‘manner’, or ‘custom’, it is important to be aware of this cultural moment that was confined within romantic reactions against enlightening civilisation.

Defining Plural Cultural Global

The Iwakura Mission was more than an extension of the Bunkyū Mission. The plenipotentiary also travelled to other European countries, including France and Germany. They arrived in France during the winter of 1872, roughly 2 years after the Prussian army paraded through Paris. Knowing the history between the two countries, the plenipotentiary paid particular attention to German princes’ participations in a somewhat French version of sankin-kōtai at Versailles. As recorded by Kume Kunitake, the plenipotentiary asserted that the German aristocrats had no colour unless ‘they spoke French, wore French clothes and imitated French customs’. They also added that ‘there was no choice but to abandon all sense of shame and imitate French goods. . . they mistook the most laughably shallow formalities for precious knowledge and made a pastime out of deceit through their indiscriminate pursuit of decorative show’. ⁷⁵

These assessments resemble Johann Fichte’s Romantic vocabulary when he differentiated those who felt belonging to their countries from those who did not. The former constituted the ‘original’ people, and the latter were only ‘derivative’ and ‘secondary’. ⁷⁶ The Japanese plenipotentiary had the benefit of history to justify these beliefs. For them, the Franco-Prussian war changed much of German provincial subservience as it allowed people with different occupations to promote their talents. It was because they ‘have already found the confidence to start viewing French technical arts and commerce as inferior to their own’. ⁷⁷

If Fukuzawa and like-minded communities of followers investigated history to understand and define problem situations with the ‘disenchanted’ discourses of repetitiveness, some members of the Iwakura Mission added ethnocultural sensibilities and observed the past in a more authoritative manner. Strengthening Japan was not about replacing traditions with civilisational nation-statehood, but rather, it was about preserving ‘old artefacts’ in order to bring out ‘progress’. And this was not only Japan’s interests but also a global trend. Western countries seemed slow in changing their traditions because traditions were the true sources of enlightenment. Progress, the Japanese argued, means ‘innovation’, not ‘revolution’, and it is ‘the product of constant refining and polishing past successes’. ⁷⁸ I should note here that ethnocultural sensibilities were not equated with racial superiority. As the plenipotentiary confirmed, while race could be a discourse for unification, ‘it is a vulgar notion, born of narrow-minded outlooks, to suppose that other people, because of some minor difference in bone structure, are not equals. . . politics should be about education. . . surely not such trivial matters as these’. ⁷⁹ There was not an encompassing ‘German model’ for replication.

Defining a Japan in need of recuperating its own traditional resources was concretised further with intellectual exchanges. Transnational scholars were hired by the Meiji government for the task. And among them, normatively, there were those who already spoke the language of culture. Criticising the restrictiveness of Enlightenment and civilisation, Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) argued, ‘when one completely forgets one’s past, awareness disappears, in other words reasoning disappear. . . one’s understanding of oneself disappear’. ⁸⁰ Likewise, his colleague Hozumi Yasuka (1860–1912) imagined Japanese cultural solidarity based on a romantic critique of the Enlightenment social contract. ‘In enforced unity based on contracts’ he said, ‘there may be loyalty, but no respect, and in relations based on human equality, there may be fraternity, but no loyalty’. ⁸¹ From these critiques, Hozumi was able to develop two separate nation-state images: a civilisational image based on open/civic society with the participations of atomic independent citizens; and an ethnocultural image directing national loyalty towards the emperor, a Shinto figuration with primordial ethnic continuity. ⁸²

This type of ethnocultural imagination was empirically instantiated and sustained by transnational geologists and archaeologists who had already advanced scientific methods to understand tectonic developments of the earth in Japan. They produced evidence of Japan’s prehistorical natural developments. This generated serious doubts on the accuracy of classic texts, effectively necessitating historical re-evaluations. ⁸³ This reopened research channels for those who carried novel normative commitments.

In this context, historians and philosophers at Tokyo Imperial University, like Inoue Tetsujirō, Shiratori Kurakichi (1865–1942) and Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), began to re-explore their past in classic texts. The past that they discovered was not the past that should be replaced for the interests of becoming civilised, but the past that showed how native peoples had adapted and evolved to cope with changing natural conditions. This was what Leopold Von Ranke, a teacher of Ludwig Reiss, would call ‘what really had been’, or relentless marches of events that conditioned the constellations of ethnocultural nation-states. ⁸⁴ Their findings soon objectified not only an ethnocultural Japan but also a larger regional Cultural universe, ‘the East’.

First, the historians mapped out a spatiotemporal imaginary that essentialised the Asian mainland with a ‘North-South dualism’. ‘Chinese Culture’ sat in the South and ‘Euro Asian Culture’ evolved in the North. The essence of Chinese culture was ‘literate’, or bun (in bunka), the refinement of society with learning and scholarly rules. Meanwhile, in the North, culture carried distinctive martial qualifications, or bu. ⁸⁵ These cultural identities, bun and bu were not located in a linear hierarchy but as equal refining values. Altogether they generated ‘the East’ (tōyō), a bounded universe with innate cultural artefacts, effectively equalising itself with a materialistic and technological West. An oriental boundary differentiating cultural East from civilisational West began to emerge.

Second, this cultural history also enabled a regional order in which ethnocultural Japan was differentiated from China. In sharpening bun, under the influence of Ranke’s empiricism, mythical figures like the sage kings Yao, Shun and Yu, who appeared in Confucius’s Books of Documents, were seen not as real historical characters, but embodiments of scriptures, ideals or ‘signs of spirit’. This allowed an assumption that with sufficient historicism, one could excavate places where these cultural ideals were better preserved and possibly ‘more Confucian’ than China.

This begged a particular question: why could China not refine its Chinese essences but had instead fallen prey to Western imperialism? This so-called ‘China problem’ became the core question in the process of ordering ‘the East’. One answer was that Chinese culture had been barbarised as, for hundreds of years, the country was ruled by the alien Manchu. ‘Chinese conservatism is an effect of barbarians’, Kuraikichi asserted, ‘after all, any person as long as he possessed the proper virtue, could rule China’. ⁸⁶ In contrast, Japan was ethnoculturally distinctive because the Japanese were able to accommodate, combine and refine both bun and bu, making Japan stand out as the most cultured space in its Asia. With this, there was a fuller, socially constructed worldview accommodating a unique Cultural-Japan-being-in-the-East.

These developments affirmed that culture was not understood as a static and unchanging but progressive and contradictory phenomenon. Culture could be refined but also decayed. Hence, it is understandable that culture is often used interchangeably with ‘civilisation’ because they both carried qualifications of progress and achievement. But in fact, their ideas of progress were defined in different manners, an outward and cumulative civilisation versus an inward and noncumulative culture. Both worldviews were often reassembled and became more complex over time through interactions.

Designing Cultural Local

Together with the emergence of cultural identities, there were also growing interests in designing a unique nation-state as an embodiment of such boundaries. Again, the question of legitimation loomed large. Who could be the most recognisable sources of culture? One of the answers was the emperor and his appointed members in the House of Peers, and this takes us back to dynamic constitutional politics where ‘the nation’ and ‘the state’ became congruent.

In 1889, the promulgation of the civic Confucian ethics and constitution was performed with excessive ceremonies. Carol Gluck describes these events as an attempt to make the constitution an imperial gift to the nation, rather than a mechanical social contract specifying the limit of state authority and duties of rights-bearing citizens. ⁸⁷ Historian Marius Jansen observes this with another attention. Emperor Meiji, who had been a ‘callow youth’ far removed from political dynamics, suddenly stood up during the moment when national consensus was highly fragile. ⁸⁸ This was peculiar because the emperor in Japan, before nation-state building, was often made central to political controversies. The emperor could be deposed, exiled or assassinated by different political factions. Chamberlain Hall confirmed this as early as in 1912: ‘the sober fact is that no nation probably has ever treated its sovereign more cavalierly than the Japanese have done’. ⁸⁹

To make Meiji a constitutional monarch, there were massive symbolic works. ⁹⁰ For years, often accompanied by large retinues, the emperor had to take part in lengthy tours across the country, so that he no longer remained an ‘abstraction’ to the population, a common image of the emperor during the early modern era. ⁹¹ At home, Iwakura Tomomi prepared primordial cultural grounds for his Emperor. Last petitions before his death in 1883 sought for the preservation of Kyoto. For him, Tokyo was only a temporal space, while Kyoto and Nara were where the benevolence of the past remained. Thanks to his efforts, mythical Emperors Kanmu and Jimmu were elevated to the role of national ancestors, effectively making Meiji a living ethnocultural artefact, while traditional Kyoto/modern Tokyo became a mnemonic journey. Likewise, in Hokkaido, the Meiji government constructed and ranked ‘public’ shrines to commemorate war dead and also to generate a sense of loyalty not only to Meiji but also to the primordial divine tradition that he represented. ⁹²

Surrounding Meiji were members of the House of Peers. Unlike the House of Representatives, where members were elected albeit in an organised manner, House of Peers members were appointed. Other than important state institutionalists, this membership was reserved for a collection of social elites who together formed a rank of kazoku (flowery lineage). Many were former daimyō, court nobles, and head priests of prominent Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. These statuses had different labels over time, but the most important interactive designing act was the vast attempts to collect kazoku’s genealogies, crests, calligraphic works, painted scrolls, etc. and re-signified as if they were representations of Japan’s national Culture. ⁹³ If victories against Qing China and Russian Tsar sharpened bushidō, the martial-ethical bu, ⁹⁴ the kazoku supplied bun or ‘men of culture’. Together, they constituted a recognisable image of a Cultural Japan.

If civic nation-state building had to rely on local dynamics to appropriate modern citizenships, the ethnocultural project was not much different. Constructing cultural essences was not about inventing something brand new but dislocating traditional constituencies from their relations, re-signifying them as signs of cultural embodiments and re-institutionalising them into ethnocultural nation-state building interests. These modifications were to create a public image of distinctive national culture, and also to reformulate representative state structure, the House of Peers, to accommodate it.

Emergent nation-state projects.

ProjectsPatterns	Civilisation	Culture
Defining the Global	Hierarchical Civilisational identities/Becoming civilised interests	Equal Cultural identities/Refining culture interests
Designing the Local	Civic nation-state	Ethnocultural nation-state

With the coming together of the two projects, if one wishes to talk about Japan’s distinctiveness, they may not need to rely on a ‘globalist’ perspective seeing Japan as the faster country (than China) in the adopting civilisational attributes. They may also not need to rely on pure cultural ‘cognitive priors’ that enabled Japan’s uniqueness. Instead, focusing on defining/designing creativities of different communities of nation-state builders, there was a contingently negotiated Japan where contradictory nation-state building projects overlapped and institutionally interlocked. One can argue that most countries went through constitutional politics, their experiences were, however, qualitatively different. In Japan, as Andrew Fraser argues, the House of Peers, an embodiment of ethnocultural boundaries, did not have overwhelming power against the House of Representatives. ⁹⁵ The Upper House mainly ‘checked and balanced’ possible radical moves of the elected. It was mainly a legitimation mechanism lending stability to Japan’s nation-state transformations. Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909) was clear on this when he said, ‘there was a danger that people might slip into the spirit of republicanism. . . the [kazoku] provided opportunity to take advantage of the fact that the last flow of feudal reverence for the Emperor has not died out’. ⁹⁶

Conclusion

This article attempts to overcome the external/internal polarisation between globalist and localist substantialist determinisms in understanding East Asian nation-state formation. It does so by focusing primarily on actor-driven interactions that generated nation-state identities/interests within corresponding specifically defined global boundaries. Interactions here are not substance-dependent ‘inter-actions’, but creative and purposive exploratory contours that over time reassemble and enhance the complexities that ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ take as settled entities and boundaries. They began with sensibilities of problem situations in which nation-state builders found themselves experiencing something new that required understanding and acting upon. ‘Defining the global’ and ‘designing the local’ are knowledge-constituted patterns that help me organise those interactive experiences. The former assembled specific global boundaries with corresponding local identities/interests, and the latter actualised these imaginations through a series of modifications of different local relations so that emerging nation-state projects appeared sufficiently recognisable.

In Japan, if ‘defining’ shows that ‘the global’ was in fact contradictory boundaries of civilisation and culture, ‘designing’ focuses on ‘the local’ where there were purposive modifications of heterogenous relations. There were different ways of visualising the global and different ways of modifying the local.

And I do not suggest ‘defining/designing’ were statist fabrications. Creating national memberships was congruent with the making of representative state leaderships. They served emerging necessities when nation-state builders participated in formative interactions coloured by civilisation and culture. The former carried an outward and cumulative progress that constituted hierarchical civilisational identities and becoming civilised interests. The latter contradicted these with an inward and noncumulative progress through which equal cultural identities and refining ethnocultural interests emerged. Nation-state building thus was diverging, manifolding, not determinist unifolding processes.

Defining/designing can be used to comparatively study other East Asian cases. In China, emergences of civilisational arrangements could be observed in various Qing diplomatic missions. Meanwhile, cultural relations could be traced through activities of situated nation-state builders like Zhang Taiyan or Zou Rong. The result may not be negotiation, as in Japan, but clash or coexistence. The second option is to follow Japan into the Taishō/Shōwa eras when Marxists and Romantics imagined neither hierarchical nor equal but exploitative have/have-not global relations. This is evident in the activities of both Marxian political economists and Kyoto School philosophers. They were not ‘great men’ but situated actors who attempted to understand and act upon specific problematics of their time. Finally, this article is by no mean an exhaustive answer to East Asia’s nation-state building. Civilisation and culture were not the only projects. One could focus instead on other emergent boundaries and relationships, such as race, gender, religion or class.