Meiji Restoration Book

I am sticking to my guns here: I think it is inexcusable in any book to be boring, regardless of whether it's an academic work or not. This book, like so many academic history books I have subjected myself to, takes a subject matter that could be interesting and at all points refuses to make it so. It's not just the writing, though all these fucking academics seem to have taken some kind of perverse oath to never allow a stylish phrase into their books, as though to prove they are "scholarly", but it's a weird sort of focus, a way of looking past the things that seem interesting to me as though they are an unpleasant acquaintance they are pretending not to see in a crowd. At some point while reading this, contemplating my review, I was going to accuse Beasley of a relentless focus on the trees to the point of pretending the forest didn't exist; but somehow it's worse than that, it's a focus on the spaces between the trees, looking only at the empty air.

Call me some kind of naive autodidact (I am no academic, I got an art degree, as in by painting and sculpting, from a semi-disreputable college, and have made my living in a trade, so feel free to pour your contempt on me, grad students) but to me the Meiji Restoration is interesting as an ambiguity, an ambiguous resistance to Western colonialism, an ambiguous revolution. It is strange that it was something of a bourgeois revolution (Beasley would have it not be a revolution at all, strangely, only because it doesn't particularly resemble European ones) where the revolutionists were not bourgeois or even sans-culotte-like working class, but rather disaffected "aristocrats" (that is, samurai). It is strange that all the revolutionary energy was on the side of men who wanted to "expel the barbarian" and reassert their hereditary position, but the effect was to passionately embrace Western modes of life and to completely abolish all hereditary positions. It is strange that a revolution led by people of several disconnected and scattered domains asserting their power, and who won, led to a total centralization and abolition of the domains. It is somewhat less strange, only because the history of revolutions provides many similar examples, that this revolution is called a "restoration", that the people who want to overthrow the government are called the "loyalists", etc. One might expect that some of this strangeness might be remarked upon, but, presumably due to being in dialogue with other historians about these issues (yes, grad students, I know why you write like this, but journal articles fade and disappear where books last for ages), the strangeness is studiously ignored in favor of unbelievably boring statistics about these things in some way.

Perhaps some of my issues here are simply because this book (which I have seen recommended as "getting dated but still the most recent serious study...this is what I mean by books lasting) is from the 1970s and so is far removed from our contemporary fashions, though honestly postcolonialism etc existed in the 70s, so. Two sentences only, which also happen to be the only two sentences showing any sense of humor or humanity in the book, suggest that the frequently-quoted paternalism of British ambassador Sir Harry Parkes might be problematic. It was cheering to know that this condescension was the one thing which could pierce Beasley's monolithic characterlessness, but still, I think any book written today would almost necessarily be more vocal against Western imperialism, whether "soft" or not.

I remain, honestly, having read the book, feeling like I know very little I didn't know already, but maybe that's a bit of post-boring-book bitterness speaking. What I do know now is the names of several fascinating people who were most emphatically not "brought to life" by this book -- absolutely no one gets any description of any kind, they are names and deeds only -- but who did such interesting things they must be interesting people. Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma, one of the early leaders who wanted to "restore" the emperor's power and expel the barbarian, but also had such a fascination with Western technology that he built a shipyard, put a telegraph line between buildings on his estate, and made Japan's first daguerrotype, and who was eventually deified as a Shinto kami after dying young. Iwakura Tomomi, a Court noble, who from that very conservative and anti-Western millieu became, it seemed to me, the key figure of the Restoration, and led a mission to the West. (I had to look on Wikipedia to discover that this giant of Meiji politics was barely 5 foot 2.) Sakamoto Ryoma, who despite being very low on the samurai ladder, had a very eventful career indeed: heading out to assassinate a Westernizing leader, he was instead convinced by him to join his side; failing to convince the Satsuma and Choshu domains to make an alliance he changed gears to make one indirectly through a trade agreement; for this shipping he founded the Kaientai, a modern fleet called the "first corporation in modern Japan" and also the beginning of the Imperial Japanese Navy; and finally was assassinated by the Shogun's agents just a year prior to the Restoration proper. Nothing about their personalities or them as human beings is in this book at all, but at least I have names to look up, someday.