What do you think?
Rate this book
To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History
The samurai radicals who overthrew the last shogun in 1868 promised to restore ancient and pure Japanese ways. Foreign observers were terrified that Japan would lapse into violent xenophobia. But the new Meiji government took an opposite course. It copied best practices from around the world, building a powerful and modern Japanese nation with the help of European and American advisors. While revering the Japanese past, the Meiji government boldly embraced the foreign and the new. What explains this paradox? How could Japan's 1868 revolution be both modern and traditional, both xenophobic and cosmopolitan?
To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global long nineteenth century during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing God Save the King, they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that ancient globalization of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.
To Stand with the Nations of the World explains the paradox of the Restoration through the forces of globalization. The Meiji Restoration was part of the global long nineteenth century during which ambitious nation states like Japan, Britain, Germany, and the United States challenged the world's great multi-ethnic empires--Ottoman, Qing, Romanov, and Hapsburg. Japan's leaders wanted to celebrate Japanese uniqueness, but they also sought international recognition. Rather than simply mimic world powers like Britain, they sought to make Japan distinctly Japanese in the same way that Britain was distinctly British. Rather than sing God Save the King, they created a Japanese national anthem with lyrics from ancient poetry, but Western-style music. The Restoration also resonated with Japan's ancient past. In the 600s and 700s, Japan was threatened by the Tang dynasty, a dynasty as powerful as the Roman empire. In order to resist the Tang, Japanese leaders borrowed Tang methods, building a centralized Japanese state on Tang models, and learning continental science and technology. As in the 1800s, Japan co-opted international norms while insisting on Japanese distinctiveness. When confronting globalization in 1800s, Japan looked back to that ancient globalization of the 600s and 700s. The ancient past was therefore not remote or distant, but immediate and vital.
328 pages, Hardcover
Published October 13, 2017
21 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
About the author
Mark J. Ravina
6 books27 followersDr. Mark J. Ravina is Professor of History at Emory University, where he has taught since 1991. He received his A.B. from Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been a visiting professor at Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities and a research fellow at Keio University and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. He has also received research grants from the Fulbright Program, the Japan Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Association for Asian Studies.
Professor Ravina has published extensively in early modern Japanese history, with a particular focus on the transnational and international aspects of political change. He has also published research on Japanese and Korean popular culture, Japanese economic thought, and the history of science. As a public intellectual, he has appeared on CNN, CNN International, NPR, and The History Channel.
A former director of the East Asian Studies Program at Emory University, Professor Ravina has also served as president of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. In addition, he is on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. Professor Ravina’s books include The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori and Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan.
Professor Ravina has published extensively in early modern Japanese history, with a particular focus on the transnational and international aspects of political change. He has also published research on Japanese and Korean popular culture, Japanese economic thought, and the history of science. As a public intellectual, he has appeared on CNN, CNN International, NPR, and The History Channel.
A former director of the East Asian Studies Program at Emory University, Professor Ravina has also served as president of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. In addition, he is on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. Professor Ravina’s books include The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori and Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 23, 2024
This is the fifth book I have read covering the Meiji Restoration, the other four being Marius Jansen’s excellent The Making of Modern Japan and Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration, Donald Keene’s Emperor of Japan, and Romulus Hillsborough's disappointing Samurai Revolution. All of these books (apart from The Making of Modern Japan) are biographical in structure because, well, it’s hard to find anything else on the Restoration in English. And it's not surprising that authors writing for people unfamiliar with the subject should tend to focus on easier to define personal narratives. The Meiji Restoration was fiendishly complex. America’s forcible opening of Japan led to an outpouring of xenophobia as the samurai (given a military role again commensurate with their status) rose up to kill or expel the barbarians. They demanded a centralized state, but when this happened they overthrew it for limiting daimyo (feudal lords) control. And, uh, then proceeded to open up Japan to foreign investment, adopted Western clothing, building, and traditions of display, built up a conscript army that made samurai irrelevant, and then disbanded the entire samurai and daimyo order entirely. That is a whole mess of contradictions.
The stated purpose of this book is to provide a clear explanation for this. How does a trained scholar do this? By creating new buzz words!: cosmopolitan chauvinism and radical nostalgia. Cosmopolitan chauvinism means that, essentially, what we generally view as Japan adopting Western ideas is not how the Japanese saw it. They saw most of these issues (such as science, political structure, economics, etc.) as universal concepts. What Japan needed to do was not convert to Westernism but modernize. And in following Western examples they were simply adopting the modern best practices. Radical nostalgia refers to a reworking of the past to service the present. Previous history is reexamined and mined for evidence that what they are going through now is just a restoration of earlier practices. The importation of Western government structures and cultural practices, for example, can be tied to Japan’s similar adaptation of Chinese structures and practices during the Heian Era. As a more extreme example, Western ideas are absorbed by attributing them to earlier Japanese writers. For example, the idea that the Earth orbits the sun is seen as the logical outcome of Japan’s focus around the sun goddess Amaterasu. The fact that the Polish Copernicus was the one to actually formulate this idea was irrelevant: Japanese had known it for all time and had simply misunderstood their ancient texts.
From the book’s description I thought that we would get a deep dive into ideological movements and changing convictions as well as an exploration of how society was reshaped. A sort of social history. What we actually get is an abbreviated summary of the Restoration with some explanatory notes and repeated references back to these buzz words. This was a little disappointing, although in retrospect, given the difficulty of finding Japanese history books in English, this was probably inevitable. You can’t write a book that will likely be most people’s introduction to the period if you don’t explain the basic background. And at just over 200 pages of text there simply isn’t room to expand these ideas further.
One thing I do like is that he goes back quite a ways in explaining this social change. This is really a history of the entire 19th century up until 1889 when the revolution was complete. He sees cosmopolitan chauvinism and radical nostalgia deep into the Edo Period as reformers try to find a way out of the trap laid by the shogunate’s locking of the social order. Like a lot of recent authors, he sees the revolution as already in progress when Perry’s fleet arrived in Tokyo Bay. America’s forcing Japan open accelerated the process and doubtless influenced its path, but the Tokugawa regime would have to either adapt or be overthrown regardless. At least that’s how I understand it: his focus on radical nostalgia and cosmopolitan chauvinism makes it a little less clear where he thinks it was heading.
Is this the best place to start with to understand the Meiji Restoration? I think that will depend what you’re looking for. This book abbreviates too many events for my taste, but the summation of what shifted is pretty accurate. It’s an easy read and provides enough of a background without getting bogged down in detail. But personally, my ideal starting place would be Jansen’s The Making of Modern Japan, which covers Japanese history from the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate right through the modern day in surprisingly good detail given its breadth. For a more in-depth dive Jansen’s Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration does a good job as it is far more than a biography. Ryoma sits right at the center of events, changing from a typical radical xenophobe who agrees to assassinate a pro-reform official to a committed reformer at the heart of events. Of course, Ryoma dies just as the imperial restoration succeeds so this is only the first part of the story. The Cambridge History of Japan’s account of the Restoration (and Japanese history more generally) is always a good place to start, although it is rather more thematic than narrative and that can be rough in a period as shifting as this.
The stated purpose of this book is to provide a clear explanation for this. How does a trained scholar do this? By creating new buzz words!: cosmopolitan chauvinism and radical nostalgia. Cosmopolitan chauvinism means that, essentially, what we generally view as Japan adopting Western ideas is not how the Japanese saw it. They saw most of these issues (such as science, political structure, economics, etc.) as universal concepts. What Japan needed to do was not convert to Westernism but modernize. And in following Western examples they were simply adopting the modern best practices. Radical nostalgia refers to a reworking of the past to service the present. Previous history is reexamined and mined for evidence that what they are going through now is just a restoration of earlier practices. The importation of Western government structures and cultural practices, for example, can be tied to Japan’s similar adaptation of Chinese structures and practices during the Heian Era. As a more extreme example, Western ideas are absorbed by attributing them to earlier Japanese writers. For example, the idea that the Earth orbits the sun is seen as the logical outcome of Japan’s focus around the sun goddess Amaterasu. The fact that the Polish Copernicus was the one to actually formulate this idea was irrelevant: Japanese had known it for all time and had simply misunderstood their ancient texts.
From the book’s description I thought that we would get a deep dive into ideological movements and changing convictions as well as an exploration of how society was reshaped. A sort of social history. What we actually get is an abbreviated summary of the Restoration with some explanatory notes and repeated references back to these buzz words. This was a little disappointing, although in retrospect, given the difficulty of finding Japanese history books in English, this was probably inevitable. You can’t write a book that will likely be most people’s introduction to the period if you don’t explain the basic background. And at just over 200 pages of text there simply isn’t room to expand these ideas further.
One thing I do like is that he goes back quite a ways in explaining this social change. This is really a history of the entire 19th century up until 1889 when the revolution was complete. He sees cosmopolitan chauvinism and radical nostalgia deep into the Edo Period as reformers try to find a way out of the trap laid by the shogunate’s locking of the social order. Like a lot of recent authors, he sees the revolution as already in progress when Perry’s fleet arrived in Tokyo Bay. America’s forcing Japan open accelerated the process and doubtless influenced its path, but the Tokugawa regime would have to either adapt or be overthrown regardless. At least that’s how I understand it: his focus on radical nostalgia and cosmopolitan chauvinism makes it a little less clear where he thinks it was heading.
Is this the best place to start with to understand the Meiji Restoration? I think that will depend what you’re looking for. This book abbreviates too many events for my taste, but the summation of what shifted is pretty accurate. It’s an easy read and provides enough of a background without getting bogged down in detail. But personally, my ideal starting place would be Jansen’s The Making of Modern Japan, which covers Japanese history from the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate right through the modern day in surprisingly good detail given its breadth. For a more in-depth dive Jansen’s Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration does a good job as it is far more than a biography. Ryoma sits right at the center of events, changing from a typical radical xenophobe who agrees to assassinate a pro-reform official to a committed reformer at the heart of events. Of course, Ryoma dies just as the imperial restoration succeeds so this is only the first part of the story. The Cambridge History of Japan’s account of the Restoration (and Japanese history more generally) is always a good place to start, although it is rather more thematic than narrative and that can be rough in a period as shifting as this.
May 12, 2022
I am going to thoroughly review this book at a later time on my blog in conjunction with another as part of a thematic comparison. For now, I will just say that this is an excellent work of state analysis focusing on the changes to the Japanese state from the Shogunate up through the modern imperial constitution of 1889.
Edit: And here it is, more detail regarding this review can be found on my blog:
https://geotrickster.com/2022/05/12/t...
Edit: And here it is, more detail regarding this review can be found on my blog:
https://geotrickster.com/2022/05/12/t...
September 25, 2021
As an undergraduate student, this monograph was a bit hard to read but overall was effective in communicating Ravina's key ideas regarding the Meiji Restoration. The writing style was better than most other similar academic books I've read which made it easier to understand, but the density of each chapter and each section within the chapter made it difficult to get through. I understand that monographs are supposed to be slightly denser, but I feel that something was missing to make it a truly memorable addition to the curriculum of the class it was assigned for.
As much as I hate to admit this, perhaps it could have been enhanced with some "fluff" (if I should even call it that); in my experience as a student, details that aren't necessarily key but add some extra depth to each topic between different figures, events, and facts makes for an easier and - dare I say - enjoyable read for this kind of material. It is hard (at least at an undergraduate level) to read straight fact after straight fact even if the chapter isn't all that long. Despite the fact that such an addition/change might make the text longer, it would make it easier for undergraduate students to get through. I wouldn't go as far as to say that this book is more for graduate students than undergraduates, but it felt like it might take more dedication to get through this than an average undergraduate might have. My favorite parts of this text were the Introduction and Conclusion because they did seem to have a slightly different style and added (what I consider) to be some extra detail and explanation that made it easier to read and a bit more enjoyable.
I by no means disliked this book. It was very informative and different from what I had experienced from other similar books and textbooks, so I would count it as a good choice on the part of my professor. There were few typos in the copy I have (I counted about 3, and they were all relatively minor such as "Korea sailors" rather than "Korean sailors" in the conclusion), and the writing was pretty good compared to other books I've read on the topic. If I were assigning this book for a class of my own (let's pretend), I might spend extra time on each chapter to allow students to really digest it and ask questions about details that might make it a bit more real and clear rather than straight cut and dry facts. It would be a good book for research and for higher-level study, but I might be hesitant to recommend it for undergraduate students (most don't read as it is, and I think they may be put off by the density).
As much as I hate to admit this, perhaps it could have been enhanced with some "fluff" (if I should even call it that); in my experience as a student, details that aren't necessarily key but add some extra depth to each topic between different figures, events, and facts makes for an easier and - dare I say - enjoyable read for this kind of material. It is hard (at least at an undergraduate level) to read straight fact after straight fact even if the chapter isn't all that long. Despite the fact that such an addition/change might make the text longer, it would make it easier for undergraduate students to get through. I wouldn't go as far as to say that this book is more for graduate students than undergraduates, but it felt like it might take more dedication to get through this than an average undergraduate might have. My favorite parts of this text were the Introduction and Conclusion because they did seem to have a slightly different style and added (what I consider) to be some extra detail and explanation that made it easier to read and a bit more enjoyable.
I by no means disliked this book. It was very informative and different from what I had experienced from other similar books and textbooks, so I would count it as a good choice on the part of my professor. There were few typos in the copy I have (I counted about 3, and they were all relatively minor such as "Korea sailors" rather than "Korean sailors" in the conclusion), and the writing was pretty good compared to other books I've read on the topic. If I were assigning this book for a class of my own (let's pretend), I might spend extra time on each chapter to allow students to really digest it and ask questions about details that might make it a bit more real and clear rather than straight cut and dry facts. It would be a good book for research and for higher-level study, but I might be hesitant to recommend it for undergraduate students (most don't read as it is, and I think they may be put off by the density).
February 17, 2022
I enjoyed this book and its focus on the early Meiji period. Ravina focuses heavily on the early genrou which he divides into roughly two sides: the eager "liberal" caretaker government under the leadership of Okubo and more cautious, state-centrist members of the Iwakura mission. In revisiting these big men of the Meiji restoration and their struggles to create a stable and viable nation in a dog-eat-dog world of international competition, Ravina adds two insightful concepts which provide more nuance to the classic triumphalist narrative of the Meiji period. The first of which is radical nostalgia, the invocation of the (distant) past to promote radical change in the present. The second he names cosmopolitan chauvinism, which refers to the strategy [or tendency] of integrating Japanese cultural distinctiveness with cross-cultural norms. These two conceptual tools - and tendencies, as I am not convinced all uses of these two conceptual tools were planned in a cohesive manner or even consciously constructed as such - were key in the transformation which took place in the early Meiji period, lubricating the gears of social, political and ideological change which otherwise might've stalled rather quickly. Another strength of Ravina's book is his insistence that though particular characteristics of the changes during this period and the specific forms of radical nostalgia and cosmopolitan chauvinism are specific to this modern period, such tendencies are not exclusive to the modern period. Rather, this is a common thread of political and social change throughout (Japanese) history, which he elucidates in his first couple of chapters. This is a position which I happily echo, where it is important not to get sucked in by the rhetoric of these modern ideologues and revolutionaries and acknowledge the historical continuities with the discontinuities and temporal specificities. In a similar vein, it is important to identify the geographic specificities together with the global, transregional trends at the time. However pernicious the "catching-up" narrative is, the changes within Meiji Japan were historically isomorphic to those in other places dealing with modern challenges.
January 27, 2019
I read this book as I progressed through Professor Ravina's Great Courses course on Japanese Cultural History. I enjoyed both and though the coverage is different, found the two complementary in some way. The only complaint about the book is the occasional spelling errors, not expected in this day and age of digital proofreading, but otherwise this is an excellent piece of global history putting the Meiji restoration in context of Japan's globalisation-isolationism continuum as well as in the context of colonial enpires.
April 28, 2020
A very accessible and entertaining account of the Meiji period. I felt that the central message was the Meiji government's repackaging of Japan to be understandable to Western nations (and by doing so get on the 'right' side of the coloniser/colonised paradigm ) as being but one period in a sequence of Japan's under-reported pattern of oscillation between globalisation and isolation. I really enjoyed this book and thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the Meiji period.
February 27, 2023
Read this book for class. On the whole I thought it was informative but a little hard to follow at times. It focused very fairly on the revolutionary ideas being circulated at the time. On the whole very informative, and thought provoking. A couple common themes throughout: the notion of “cosmopolitan chauvinism” and “radical nostalgia”. A major theme of the book was Japan’s reaction to European imperialism and the resulting political movements, revolutions, and reactions.
March 9, 2023
An excellent book for contextualizing the transformations in Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ravina shows how Japanese developments reflect regional East Asian patterns and then global patterns.
March 31, 2019
An excellent summary of the Bakumatsu and early-Meiji eras.
July 10, 2022
Read this book for a class on Historical Methodology. Great holistic review of Meiji era politics and culture. Opened my eyes!
Want to read
August 26, 2024Aug 2024
Randomly found while googling - seems interesting...
Randomly found while googling - seems interesting...
November 10, 2025
A good and fairly detailed look at the Meiji Restoration and its major players. Author got a little repetitive on his major themes, which helped structure his argument but also became a little tiring.
July 15, 2023
Mr Ravina’s look into Japan was very interesting. However, I didn’t find the author’s attempt to label the actions of the early Meiji regime as interesting as the actions themselves. I think the book as a whole could have been without the constant need to describe these actions as a continuous philosophy — does it even count as a (radical?) philosophy if there is no difference to what was done before?
The full review was originally posted on my blog (post linked). An excerpt with the introduction and conclusion has been copied to Goodreads.
The full review was originally posted on my blog (post linked). An excerpt with the introduction and conclusion has been copied to Goodreads.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews