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The Coming of the Barbarians: A Story of Western Settlement in Japan 1853-70
Nineteenth-century Japan was pristine, inviolate and feudal, ruled by the legendary Shogun and the sacred puppet-Emperor, the Mikado. Foreigners were despised and feared as 'hairy barbarians'; for more than two hundred years Dutch merchants had been the only settlers, interned on the tiny island of Decima.
The advent of a US naval force in 1853 heralded a new era of drama and upheaval as foreign consuls, merchants and travellers established a risky presence on Japan's shores, opening up a new frontier for both East and West. Pat Barr's sparkling and vivid narrative spans these twenty years and captures the excitement and wonder, beauty and adventure of Japan at its moment of entry into the modern world.
Pat Barr continues the story of Japan in an age of transition in The Deer Cry Pavilion, also reissued by Faber Finds.
The advent of a US naval force in 1853 heralded a new era of drama and upheaval as foreign consuls, merchants and travellers established a risky presence on Japan's shores, opening up a new frontier for both East and West. Pat Barr's sparkling and vivid narrative spans these twenty years and captures the excitement and wonder, beauty and adventure of Japan at its moment of entry into the modern world.
Pat Barr continues the story of Japan in an age of transition in The Deer Cry Pavilion, also reissued by Faber Finds.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionJapan
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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January 15, 2025
This is a fascinating book which presents a very interesting view of the opening of Japan. That being said, it is a very misleading book to read on its own as the book’s focus and background create a very real danger of misunderstanding what exactly is going on. I will be going into both the book’s strengths and weaknesses here, but I felt it was important to be clear at the beginning – this should
not
be your only (and probably not even your first) book on this topic. If it is you will be left with nearly as misleading a set of views and impressions as the first westerners had upon encountering Japan for the first time.
To stick to the positive things for now, the book offers a very good look at the impression of the first Westerners to encounter Japan. The book follows the most important of these early figures, starting with Commodore Matthew Perry (who opened Japan) and working through Townsend Harris (America’s first consul) and Ernest Satow (an important English diplomat). These accounts are based almost entirely on the memoirs or diaries of these figures (in Perry’s case, less the official account that he had published than the more personal letters of George Henry Preble). There is little particularly interesting analysis, but it does offer a good summary of long documents I never intend to read in full. This is a very interesting topic that often gets skipped over in the (sparse) modern accounts of the period as modern works are written by historians of Japan, who naturally find themselves more interested in understanding the Japanese viewpoint and explaining the reasons for change from within Japanese society.
The bad news is that (as you might guess from the above) the actual experience of the Japanese is pretty much ignored. No engagement is made with any Japanese sources and Western assumptions of their thought process and concerns are treated as fact. Worse still, there is an air of smug superiority in the account and while much of this comes from the sources themselves it is treated uncritically in a frustrating way. The Japanese seem childish and near inscrutable – they have little agency of their own except as people forced to adopt the superior methods of Western “barbarians”. This is not helped by the assumptions of orientalism that very much color the book (the term is even used seriously). The efforts to contextualize the Japanese background in order to explain what Western authors were seeing are among the worst and most confusing parts of the book. I noted that not a single source consulted comes from a Japanese author. Perhaps because it is pieced together from ill-informed rumor and innuendo of the time, the actual political situation is almost unrecognizable.
To give an idea of how poorly the book explains even basic things like the social order I present its paragraph on the ronin:
The problems with this paragraph are numerous. First, there is no indication, here or elsewhere, that these figures are all samurai. Every single person of importance in Tokugawa Japan was samurai, which is so crucial a point it is unfathomable that it never merits a mention. Ronin are just masterless samurai – that is, samurai who have fled or been expelled by their lord. Many ronin were advocates for expelling the barbarians, but many others were leading advocates for reform. In many cases they were the same person just at different times – a great example being Sakamoto Ryoma, who went from assassinating “traitors” to organizing an anti-shogun alliance for the purpose of military reform using borrowed western ideas. Like many such people his status as either ronin or samurai depended on the rapidly shifting circumstances. Ronin, as she describes them, did not exist and the political situation described is only barely recognizable. Both “sides” wanted the same thing – to make Japan strong enough to drive out (or at least control) the foreigners. The only difference was over how to go about doing so, whether through violence or adaptation. Violence dominated in the beginning, until those involved realized how hopelessly outmatched Japan really was, at which point adaptation and rapid reform became the dominant viewpoint. Inasmuch as there were clear sides, the side you were on depended on where you fell on that timeline and whether you supported the shogun or your local lord. The “reactionary ronin” here were actually the same people who went on to abolish the entire samurai class (including the shogun) and established a modern state. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but there is no hint of even such a basic set of factions here – just civilized and cosmopolitan “liberals” vs. backwards “ronin”. Grossly inadequate.
I have to say that, while the prejudice and sense of cultural superiority could certainly be toned down (a phrase like “traditional oriental deviousness” doesn’t exactly scream unbiased), I don’t think there was any way to capture the Western side of this encounter without producing many of the same problems here. For Westerners, Japan was a strange and alien place, and any effort to present the Japanese viewpoint alongside it would distract from this perspective. Perhaps alternating chapters or something could do the trick, but I think that as a record of the first Western perceptions of Japan this book is very strong. As mentioned above, most books don’t make any attempt to do this, being more interested in the Japanese side of things, and the Western discovery of Japan was at least as interesting as the other way round.
Is this a book worth reading? I would say yes, with qualifications. It should definitely not be anyone’s only book on the subject (see perhaps To Stand with the Nations of the World instead) and as an introduction it leaves much to be desired. It is not overly innovative or novel, but it offers a good summary of several useful sources that would otherwise be difficult to find. If you are interested in this period and able to filter out some of the prejudices, it can be a rewarding and interesting experience. I’m glad I read it and find it fleshes out some of the areas that Japanese-focused accounts leave out. I would recommend reading this alongside As We Saw Them, which gives a similarly one-sided account of the first Japanese Embassy to the United States from the Japanese point of view. For a broader, more general view The Making of Modern Japan remains the best account overall of Japan's adaptation to the modern age. More focused books on the Meiji Era are harder to find, but The Cambridge History of Japan offers a good summary from some of the best Japanese and English-language experts in the field.
To stick to the positive things for now, the book offers a very good look at the impression of the first Westerners to encounter Japan. The book follows the most important of these early figures, starting with Commodore Matthew Perry (who opened Japan) and working through Townsend Harris (America’s first consul) and Ernest Satow (an important English diplomat). These accounts are based almost entirely on the memoirs or diaries of these figures (in Perry’s case, less the official account that he had published than the more personal letters of George Henry Preble). There is little particularly interesting analysis, but it does offer a good summary of long documents I never intend to read in full. This is a very interesting topic that often gets skipped over in the (sparse) modern accounts of the period as modern works are written by historians of Japan, who naturally find themselves more interested in understanding the Japanese viewpoint and explaining the reasons for change from within Japanese society.
The bad news is that (as you might guess from the above) the actual experience of the Japanese is pretty much ignored. No engagement is made with any Japanese sources and Western assumptions of their thought process and concerns are treated as fact. Worse still, there is an air of smug superiority in the account and while much of this comes from the sources themselves it is treated uncritically in a frustrating way. The Japanese seem childish and near inscrutable – they have little agency of their own except as people forced to adopt the superior methods of Western “barbarians”. This is not helped by the assumptions of orientalism that very much color the book (the term is even used seriously). The efforts to contextualize the Japanese background in order to explain what Western authors were seeing are among the worst and most confusing parts of the book. I noted that not a single source consulted comes from a Japanese author. Perhaps because it is pieced together from ill-informed rumor and innuendo of the time, the actual political situation is almost unrecognizable.
To give an idea of how poorly the book explains even basic things like the social order I present its paragraph on the ronin:
These men, whose function in the old feudal order had been to support their lords and fight for them in time of war, understood that they had no place in the new cosmopolitan society of a modern Japan. As special clan loyalties became meaningless, they had nothing left but the last desperate loyalty to the vanishing past and, with the fanatical self-annihilating bravado of the kamikaze pilot, they intended to go down fighting. Such men were called ronin which literally means ‘wavemen’ – a descriptive term for those whom as the waves of the restless sea, tossed hither and thither from one disruptive venture to the next. And, for most of the 1860’s, that word ronin conjured in the uneasy mind of every westerner and of every open-minded, liberal Japanese, the picture of a swaggering, reckless two-sworded monster who was lithe and swift as a panther.
The problems with this paragraph are numerous. First, there is no indication, here or elsewhere, that these figures are all samurai. Every single person of importance in Tokugawa Japan was samurai, which is so crucial a point it is unfathomable that it never merits a mention. Ronin are just masterless samurai – that is, samurai who have fled or been expelled by their lord. Many ronin were advocates for expelling the barbarians, but many others were leading advocates for reform. In many cases they were the same person just at different times – a great example being Sakamoto Ryoma, who went from assassinating “traitors” to organizing an anti-shogun alliance for the purpose of military reform using borrowed western ideas. Like many such people his status as either ronin or samurai depended on the rapidly shifting circumstances. Ronin, as she describes them, did not exist and the political situation described is only barely recognizable. Both “sides” wanted the same thing – to make Japan strong enough to drive out (or at least control) the foreigners. The only difference was over how to go about doing so, whether through violence or adaptation. Violence dominated in the beginning, until those involved realized how hopelessly outmatched Japan really was, at which point adaptation and rapid reform became the dominant viewpoint. Inasmuch as there were clear sides, the side you were on depended on where you fell on that timeline and whether you supported the shogun or your local lord. The “reactionary ronin” here were actually the same people who went on to abolish the entire samurai class (including the shogun) and established a modern state. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but there is no hint of even such a basic set of factions here – just civilized and cosmopolitan “liberals” vs. backwards “ronin”. Grossly inadequate.
I have to say that, while the prejudice and sense of cultural superiority could certainly be toned down (a phrase like “traditional oriental deviousness” doesn’t exactly scream unbiased), I don’t think there was any way to capture the Western side of this encounter without producing many of the same problems here. For Westerners, Japan was a strange and alien place, and any effort to present the Japanese viewpoint alongside it would distract from this perspective. Perhaps alternating chapters or something could do the trick, but I think that as a record of the first Western perceptions of Japan this book is very strong. As mentioned above, most books don’t make any attempt to do this, being more interested in the Japanese side of things, and the Western discovery of Japan was at least as interesting as the other way round.
Is this a book worth reading? I would say yes, with qualifications. It should definitely not be anyone’s only book on the subject (see perhaps To Stand with the Nations of the World instead) and as an introduction it leaves much to be desired. It is not overly innovative or novel, but it offers a good summary of several useful sources that would otherwise be difficult to find. If you are interested in this period and able to filter out some of the prejudices, it can be a rewarding and interesting experience. I’m glad I read it and find it fleshes out some of the areas that Japanese-focused accounts leave out. I would recommend reading this alongside As We Saw Them, which gives a similarly one-sided account of the first Japanese Embassy to the United States from the Japanese point of view. For a broader, more general view The Making of Modern Japan remains the best account overall of Japan's adaptation to the modern age. More focused books on the Meiji Era are harder to find, but The Cambridge History of Japan offers a good summary from some of the best Japanese and English-language experts in the field.
November 20, 2024
I loved learning about Japanese history through the prism of the everyday lives of foreigners living in Japan at the time. Have just bought the sequel to this book, 'The Deer Cry Pavillion', and can't wait to get to reading it. Have also immensely enjoyed Pat Barr's writing - which often made me laugh.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews