Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 by Donald Keene

Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 Reviews

• 
  Smiley

  Respectfully, I’ve just finished reading this remarkable book on a famous Japanese emperor and felt so awed and humble that I thought I would never write any review on this deservedly acclaimed book since it’s been authoritatively narrated, referenced and summarized by one of the great Japanologists, Professor Donald Keene who has recently been granted his Japanese citizenship and moved to live in Tokyo (
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_K...).
  
  Some might wonder why we should read his biography to better understand this unique country, one of the reasons is that his name has long been mentioned in terms of the Meiji Restoration due to his wise and diplomatic rule essentially destined to modernize Japan in crisis resulted by the influential shogunate and some powerful Western countries demanded the opening of the country. It’s interesting to read and know how the emperor had engaged in various imperial functions, for instance, we can’t help admiring his interest in visiting schools:
  
  … He visited a middle school where he observed classes and listened while pupils were questioned about punctuation, arithmetic, and foreign languages. He also visited a school that had been founded to teach boys and girls of the aristocracy foreign languages (English, German, and French) and manual arts, but now also admitted children of the commoner class. He gave audiences to the foreign teachers. Finally the emperor issued a rescript expressing pleasure over the devotion of the foreign teachers and his hope that they would encourage the pupils to work even harder at their studies. (pp. 214-215)
  
• 
  Christopher Saunders

  Donald Keene's Emperor of Japan provides an exhaustive overview of the life of Meiji, whose 45 year rule (1867-1912) saw Japan evolve from a near-feudal state to modern world power. Coming to the throne at age 14, Meiji inherited a country in turmoil: its bakufu system of shoguns and rich landowners, along with an inward-looking policy, was rapidly collapsing as the country opened to foreign trade and influence. Meiji sided with the reformers, creating Japan as a modern nation-state of (relatively) liberal government, modern industry and trade and expansive foreign policy. Though this received considerable resistance from the bakufu and samurai classes, often violent, in a series of rebellions and assassination attempts against the Emperor that continued for decades after his assumption of powers. Keene makes the case for Meiji as a liberal reformer: he and his ministers created a Western-style constitution and parliament, made education more thorough and available to the public and established freedom of religion in a country that had long oppressed Christians and other minorities. On the other hand, his sense of nationalism encouraged Japan to build its military and assert its power abroad, with imperial campaigns in Formosa, China, Korea and the Russo-Japanese War that inspired both admiration and fear from Western powers (along with the lasting enmity of the countries Japan occupied). Meiji himself never comes fully into focus as a person (the most we get are accounts of his tumultuous family life, losing most of his children early, snatches of his poetry and occasional fretting about the bloodiness of his wars), which might be attributed to the Emperor's godlike mystique preventing any but occasional anecdotes informing a biographer's portrait. But Keene establishes his legacy as complex and fraught, embodying the strengths and failings of modern Japan; the island nation of strong identity, industriousness and forward energy; the militarist empire that sought to beat the Western powers at their own bloody game. Keene's biography is thorough, sometimes dense but never less than readable; an admirable account of the first hinge point in modern Japanese history.
• 
  David

  Sometimes I am hundreds of pages into a book before you realize why I am reading it.
  
  Several chapters into this book, I realized that I was really wanted to know: How does a country become successful? In this age, we are seeing a lot of blather commentary about countries failing and becoming ungovernable, specifically here in the US, but also elsewhere. But what about success?
  
  Japan, at the beginning of Meiji's life, was a woefully backward nation in the world power sweepstakes, using ancient weapons and organizationally completely unprepared to confront the Western nations who forced it to open to the world. By the time that Meiji died, Japan had stomped two much larger nations in conflicts beyond its borders, including inflicting the first major military defeat by an Asian nation on a European power (Russia), becoming a country to be seriously reckoned with on the world stage. At the same time, the country seemed to have improved its standard of living by great leaps and bounds, and started to generate scholars at an impressive rate. How did that happen? Were they led by a great emperor?
  
  Spoiler alert: This book does not answer the question of how Japan succeeded.
  
  However, Meiji was an interesting character and I'm glad I know more about him. Strangely, he is a bit of a cipher, an unknowable entity at the center of the storm. He didn't seem to engage in high-profile acts of leadership but was obsessed with setting a good example, often to the point of mania. As a result, while alive, he put a brake (I feel) on the tendency – uniform across the globe and throughout time – of political, aristocratic, and military elites to fritter away society’s wealth while showering themselves with honors, privilege, and material wealth, usually at the expense of the rest of society. Perhaps Meiji didn't seem to lead the people into their successes, as much as he stood out of the way and let it happen.
  
  Meiji also remains a bit of a mystery as the Japanese who met him, either regularly or occasionally, were almost always extremely reluctant to commit their candid assessments of the Emperor, or even observations of the mundane details of his daily life, to paper. Maybe this was out of a genuine sense of respect for the Emperor but maybe also because if your personal written thoughts about the Emperor were insufficiently reverent and fell into the wrong hands, you and your family might face some serious trouble, and even complete ruin.
  
  This book was very interesting, but it was also tough sledding – it took months to read. I occasionally took breaks to read other books.
  
  The choice of subject matter in this book sometimes seems a little eccentric if you are coming at this book from the point of view of an interested amateur. For example, for every year of Meiji’s reign, the author explicitly points out whether or not Meiji participated in a traditional New Year’s prayer ceremony. Meiji, with increasing frequency through his reign, does NOT take part in this ceremony. I guess that I was supposed to interpret this as Meiji’s graduate drift away from imperial tradition, but it was never clear to me, for example, what I was supposed to make of the meticulously-noted information concerning which member of the royal family or leadership went in his stead.
  
  Since I know much more about Western history than Asian history, the bits of this book where Meiji crosses paths with Western leaders (e.g., Ulysses Grant, the first US President to visit Japan) were often fascinating and fun to read, wherein the parts about purely internal struggles sometimes dissolved into a puddle of difficult-to-keep-straight names and places.
  
  Donald Keene is unmatched as a scholar of Japan, as far as I know. His ability to cite, translate, and integrate Japanese-language sources is astonishing, probably without equal, at least among native-English-speaking scholars. Many footnotes refer to scholarship which, if I understand correctly, is available only in Japanese.
  
  The author had a long fascinating life as a scholar and translator of Japanese, and in his old age renounced his US citizenship to take Japanese citizenship. Read his obituary in the NY Times
  here.
  
  I bought this book when it popped up in Kindle’s “Daily Deals” for $2.99 – a steal for 700+ pages of excellent scholarship. Sometimes books that appear in Daily Deals once come back for another appearance, if you look sharp.
• 
  Terence

  Quite uncharacteristically I was unable to finish this biography. As I recall (and it's been several years) I couldn't get past about page 150. It wasn't that the subject matter wasn't fascinating; the problem was that Keene has no sense of priority. The book is loaded down with far too much detail with no concession to relevance.
• 
  Vy Nguyễn

  Respect cho công trình nghiên cứu hết sức chi tiết và khách quan của tác giả. Ơ mây dình, gút chóp.
• 
  Daniel Burton-Rose

  Keene sets out to portray Meiji the man not the era, but ends up concluding that this "almost ostentatiously impassive" (718) monarch may not have had any personality beyond his driving sense of duty and a mess tent humor. The book is best approached as a court-centered history of Japan's most dynamic period of modernization and Westernization. As such it depicts in fine detail the interpersonal register of joining in the European nation-state system, such as the Japanese royalty becoming "cousins" of their European counterparts, hosting princes and a president on their world tours and onerously observing mourning periods every time a European counterpart passed away (but not, significantly, intermarrying). Keene's command of literary sources leads to revealing embellishments, such as Meiji's ode to the smoke over Osaka as a beacon of industrial progress or an English poetess's doggerel on the Russo-Japanese war. While Japan's eager environmental despoliation and acquisition of colonies is easy to lament, it's also understandable why they chose to become predator rather than prey.
  Keene devotes a chapter to the anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui (1871-1911; pp. 680-692) and his circle, explaining how assassinating the emperor become thinkable in a Japanese context as it had in Europe and (in regards to the President) the U.S., but he himself appears to have no substantive critique of the emperor system. Rather, he reifies it by lauding Meiji's fulfillment of the ideal, cattily quipping that in contrast Czar Nicholas II of Russian and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany didn't deserve the term Emperor. (602)
  Overall, this biography is an impressive achievement, though not at all times compelling reading.
• 
  Michael Camilleri

  Keane presents the reign of Emperor Meiji in such depth that it can feel overwhelming. There's a sense that you're losing the forest for the trees, but it's in being presented the complete breadth of the Meiji Era that you come to really appreciate the scale of what was achieved. That said, Keane's singular focus on the Emperor can result in a less detailed analysis of the events themselves (particularly in respect to foreign policy), but it is what it says on the tin: a book about the Emperor and his world.
• 
  Erik Champenois

  This is quite the thorough (and long) book. Basically every significant event of every year of Emperor Meiji's reign is covered in 700+ pages of small font text. That could make the book tedious but for the most part I found the information interesting and it was a pleasant read. The main drawbacks are the length, the lack of further analysis beyond the presentation of the historical events, and the inherent difficulties with presenting a biographical portrait of the Emperor. There's not much of a textual record showing the inner life of Emperor Meiji - the formalities of his life are much clearer than his personality. Hence, this is not as much of a standard biography as it is a review of both Meiji and his world. 3.5 stars.
  
  Nevertheless, this is a wonderful book for learning about how Japan changed from being closed to the outside world to becoming one of the great powers of the world. Starting with Emperor Komei and the opening of Japan to foreign trade the book covers the Restoration and the constitutional reforms and cultural changes of the Meiji era and then ends with Japan's military endeavors overseas through the 1895 Sino-Japanese war, the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, and the 1910 annexation of Korea. This history is absolutely fascinating, covering everything from the relationship of the court to political change, the change in fortune for the samurai, how Japan experienced both xenophobia and an openness to learning and adapting governance structures from the western world, and the beginnings of a more imperial and militaristic foreign policy path. Absolutely a go-to book for understanding the origins of modern day Japan.
• 
  Facundo Castro

  "Emperor of Japan" is a gigantic biography of Emperor Meiji of Japan, by japanese Scholar Donald Keene. With more than a thousand pages and 63 chapters, this is almost a narration year by year on the life of Emperor Meiji and the times and situations he lived through.
  
  The author narrates in a clear an precise way, and with astonishing detail for every major, and minor events of this very complex and revolutionary period in the history of Japan. The book strongly benefits of, on top of Keene's expertise on Japanese studies, the author's capacity for researching Japanese sources and not merely relying on foreign accounts.
  
  Given that emperor Meiji left no personal records or memoirs, and not one of its closest aides at court would write a personal account of their relationship with Emperor Meiji, The emperor himself comes across a true confucian stoic with tamed emotions, and no personal life whatsoever. In this aspect, Keene's has to resort to speculation on Meiji's personal reactions, and dense description of the ceremonies and personalities, to enrich the narrative, which can sometimes make the reading drag a bit.
  
  In conclusion, this is a master work of, perhaps, the most revered Japanese Emperor leading his people through an incredible revolution from and isolated medieval military dictatorship to a modern global industrial empire in less than 50 years.
• 
  Damon

  I picked up this book hoping for a biography of a person who (I had assumed) played a pivotal role in Asian politics at the turn of the 20th century. Keene's volume, in its 723 pages, gives a sweep of the history of that era, while never quite approaching the threshold of biography for his subject. Keene explores Meiji's personality through his poems (numerous) and some of the anecdotes about him that are left by the visitors who were kind enough to leave their unvarnished thoughts on the Emperor behind. The result is an impressive work of scholarship, but will leave the reader wanting for a sense of Meiji's personality. I will recommend this book, nonetheless because it takes the reader from the waning days of the shogunate through to the emergence of a modern Japan. For the reader who hope sot walk away with a sense of a complex personality, this is not the volume.
• 
  Hiền Nguyễn

  Một cuốn sách lịch sử thú vị, kể về 1 thời kỳ bước ngoặt của đất nước Nhật Bản, với vai trò trị vì của Thiên hoàng Minh Trị. Lấy Thiên hoàng là trung tâm, sách kể về những câu chuyện nhỏ đời thường quanh Thiên hoàng xen kẽ với những sự kiện lịch sử chính trị, quân sự quan trọng của đất nước Nhật Bản thời kỳ đó. Có thể thấy Thiên hoàng giống như 1 biểu tượng hơn là 1 vị chính khách, ông không hẳn là người đưa ra những sách lược, mà là những vị quan lại xung quanh ông mới là những người có tài, và ông biết cách sử dụng họ, tin theo họ để lèo lái đất nước vượt qua giai đoạn khó khăn, phát triển ngày càng mạnh mẽ.
• 
  Keith

  A detailed account of his life
  
  There is very little of his personal life available. The last chapter emphasizes this as well as commenting on his Confucian stoic approach to life.
  
  The body of the book covers the details of what is known of his life and reign.
  
  I found interesting the difficulty of keeping capable officers in the government. He often refused to let them resign.
• 
  Steven Burnap

  Interesting biography of a man who was very hard to know. Describes not only the man, but the general history of Japan during one of the most important periods in its history during which it went from a frankly backward, closed country to first-world power.
  
  Though like everyone, he has faults, Meiji comes across as a man somewhat uncomfortable with power, a stoic driven by duty.
• 
  Xiang Li

  明治维新的起起伏伏远不是明治二字可以概括 倒幕之后的立宪 明治天皇的经历真是历代天皇中另类中的另类 另书中丁汝昌最后的过程和死亡时间与网上查到的不一致 另幸德秋水原来这么有故事 还经历了旧金山大地震……
• 
  Keith MacKinnon

  This is a chronicle. Don't expect to be entertained.
• 
  Tim Cahalan

  Bit tedious.
• 
  Henry

  7/10; book one
• 
  Jonathan

  Even though I learned a lot from this brick-sized work, I was left feeling somewhat disappointed. Professor Keene himself admits that, in spite of the plethora of source material on the Emperor Meiji, it is almost impossible to get to the real man - his official biographies list what he did or who he met, but nothing about his emotional states. Most of this work is thankfully rounded out with narratives of political, social, economic and diplomatic changes in the era of the eponymous "Restoration." But Keene often feels the need to digress into the biographies of bit characters that interest him, and we don't learn nearly enough about the important figures of that critical era. Keene also insists that a better understanding of Meiji is possible through a perusal of his poetry, which I find questionable and even tedious after a while. The book could have also used a good map or two so those of us not blessed with an intimate knowledge of Japanese geography could better follow the Emperor's travels or the military campaigns described here. However, with it all, the book is beautifully-written and will reward the assiduous reader with a much better understanding of how and why Japan carried out its modernization in the second half of the 19th century, and of the man who lead that process.
• 
  Jason Keenan

  
  https://101booksjapan.blogspot.ca/
  
  Through this set out to be a biography of the Emperor rather than the era it turned out quite different. The fact there are almost no photos of a contemporary of Queen Victoria is a sign of just how private a life this public figure led. In the end there isn't much to be said about the man - and even whether he played a major role in the era that bears his name. Or perhaps that alone was his greatest contribution.
• 
  Alex

  Good overview of Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji. Tells history of Japan during his reign and highlights the turning points that Meiji both had a role in, and the turning points that he was a mere spectator.
• 
  Erik Wirfs-Brock

  Meiji in this biography comes of as an essentially uninteresting person, conservative, unimaginative, and mostly a figurehead in the oligarchic government set up in his name. Some interesting insights into the Japanese character as they confronted modernity, but overwhelmed with minutiae.
• 
  Charles

  I didn't actually finish this book, as it turned out to be different from what I expected or wanted to read.