A photograph of Sir George Bailey Sansom.

Sir George Bailey Sansom. (Source: Shōichi Saeki & Tōru Haga, Eds., Gaikokujin ni yoru Nihonron no meicho - Goncharov kara Pinguet made, Chuokoron-Shinsha Inc., 1987, p. 203)

Sir George Bailey Sansom was born in 1883 in London. After graduating from Palmer’s School in England, he went abroad to study at Lycée Malherbe, a government-run high school in Normandy. He later attended both the Universities of Giessen and Marburg in Germany. Sansom took a job with the British Foreign Office in 1904 and was assigned to a post in Japan in 1906, where he was given plenty of time for sightseeing and research while carrying out his duties around the consulate. In 1911, Sansom presented his English translation of Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness). While stationed in Tokyo between 1925 and 1940, he published An Historical Grammar of Japanese (Rekishiteki Nihon Bunpō) (1928) and Japan: A Short Cultural History (Nihon Bunka Shōshi) (1931). He was knighted by the British Empire for his service as a foreign diplomat. Sansom was first invited to Columbia University in 1935, where he taught Japanese culture and history for a year. He served as the British representative on the Far Eastern Commission from 1946–1947 before becoming the first director of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University, where he worked to promote Japanese studies in the U.S. the following year. The publication of The Western World and Japan (Seiō Sekai to Nihon) in 1950 earned him an invitation to the University of Tokyo, where he carried out a series of public lectures that were published as Japan in World History (Sekaishi ni okeru Nihon). Sansom, along with Sir Charles Eliot, was recommended for honorary fellowship in the Japan Academy. Sansom retired from Columbia University in 1954. He then took a position as advisory professor at Stanford, where he completed A History of Japan in three volumes while serving on the editorial team for Stanford Studies in the Civilizations of Eastern Asia. Sansom passed away 2 years later in the U.S. in 1965.

Sansom was the last and greatest of the prewar British scholar-diplomats. He went to Japan the year after the Russo-Japanese War ended. These were the days before the advent of international phone calls and telex created a harried life for foreign service personnel, and Sansom was able to immerse himself in his passion for studying Japanese literature and history while carrying out his duties at the British Consulate in Tokyo. He also had the benefit of being surrounded by luminous predecessors such as Basil H. Chamberlain, which likely made these years the foundation for Sansom’s later achievements as a Japanese scholar.

Sansom initially planned for The Western World and Japan to be a sequel to Japan: A Short Cultural History (Nihon Bunka Shōshi), a work that spans from ancient mythology to the Edo period, with the aim of providing a detailed look at the impact of Western culture on social and political life in modern Japan. However, Sansom also felt a need to address the wider context of Japan’s modern history; namely “the process by which the intrusive civilizations of the West have ... affected the life of Asiatic peoples.” In the process, it became far more of a stand-alone work than Sansom had first intended.

The contrasting image of an active, dynamic Europe meeting Eastern cultures which passively submitted to change was held for so long in the imagination of Westerners that it had hardened into a stereotype. In Part I of the book, “Europe and Asia,” Sansom cites specific examples attributing the roots of this stereotype to European explorers’ first visits to Asia in search of spices and other goods. He points out that within the history of diplomatic exchange between Europe and Asia, “the part played by pepper ... is truly astonishing.” Yet despite the fact that numerous Asian products fundamentally changed the way Europeans lived, the only thing Asian countries wanted from foreign commerce was “a means of obtaining luxuries or curiosities to satisfy the whims of courtiers and high officials.” This attitude towards foreign trade was even reflected in the names of Western monarchs. While Eastern royalty did take on proud titles like “King of Kings” or even “Ruler of the Beautiful Impregnable Metropolis of the World” there was nothing remotely like the “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of India, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia,” the title adopted by Manuel I of Portugal.

The products exchanged via trade (such as spices and silk in the case of Europe, or firearms and timepieces in the case of Asia) certainly did have the power to change people’s lives. But when Sansom examines efforts to propagate the Christian religion in Asia in order to back his claim that “the influence of ideas is at any rate slow to operate and almost invariably evokes a resistance,” he demonstrates that, with the exception of the Philippines, these efforts may be dismissed as failures.

The opposite is also true. While the Eastern concepts introduced by the Jesuits upon their return from China had a powerful impact on European philosophy for a time, it did not last forever. Still, Sansom does not overlook that fact that Eastern influences on European aesthetic sentiment persist to this day, asserting that the arts “may be dialects of some universal language.”

As mentioned before, Sansom’s intention was certainly not only to trace the impact that the West had on Japan. If anything, he was interested in how Japanese social and political life endured and did not undergo fundamental shifts despite being exposed to Western influences. In Part II of the book, “Japan and the Western World,” he adopts an extremely cautionary approach towards overstating the impact of the West or explaining modern Japanese history in terms of Western historical concepts. This attitude is most clearly expressed in the section where he covers the politics of the early Meiji period.

According to Sansom, the Meiji Restoration was not by any means a “revolution” marked by the overthrow of feudalism for the purpose of replacing it with an introduction of Western-style democracy. Instead, he claims that it would have been impossible for the Japanese people, who had lived through a long Tokugawa past in which loyalty and obedience were considered the highest virtues and no freedom of thought was allowed, to establish a political system rooted in the rights of the people.

In short, nearly all of the early Meiji policies—in particular the Council of Provincial Governors in 1875—were no more than “an attempt to dress up traditional Japanese practices in Western garments.” In other words, Sansom maintains, the leaders of the Meiji government were primarily members of the warrior class with no intention of allowing the people to participate in the new government.

Sansom offers similar commentary on the Meiji Constitution. Despite the fact that Itō Hirobumi traveled through the constitutional nations of Europe in search of the perfect model for Japan’s document, what Japan ended up with was “surprisingly like the constitution that would have emerged in Japan if, without reference to foreign example, the government had logically pursued the line of development that it had already taken ...”

It is true that, as Sansom points out, the Meiji government was far off from the democratic ideals we hold today. But that doesn’t mean he was critical of the Meiji government. The tendency to hold the Meiji administration to strict twentieth-century standards of democracy is particularly pronounced among Western historians, but Sansom avoids taking this position. Instead, he sets out to show that modern Japan was conditioned by the long traditions that preceded the Restoration, in such a way that “made the adoption of purely Western practices unnatural and indeed impossible.”

There is a tendency to think that pressure from the West was the most important factor driving the process by which Japan developed from the feudal society of the Tokugawa era into a modern nation, but Sansom instead calls attention to the surprising continuity of Japan’s social and political life. To him, Japan’s three hundred years of seclusion were “the protracted birth pangs of a modern national state” with pressure from the West doing no more than accelerating a natural process. More specifically, the eventual flourishing of the new “townspeople culture” during the Genroku era, as Edo grew into a major city, can be looked upon as the peak of a feudal society which would thereafter begin to collapse.

Sansom’s interests as a historian go beyond political and economic issues. In order to paint a comprehensive picture of the Edo period, he focuses on literature, painting, and other cultural aspects which went largely ignored by previous Western scholars. He did this because he believed that knowledge of the way people of all social classes lived—not just their political and economic systems—was essential to understanding a culture that would later come under such strong foreign influence.

He does the same when describing early Meiji society. For Sansom, a multidimensional portrait of Meiji life comes into sharp focus, complete with political novels, new forms of poetry and theater, journalism, education, religious questions—everything from the sentiments of the intellectual elite to the chaotic emotions of the common people.

The Western World and Japan was highly regarded in Sansom’s native England. Professor W. G. Beasley at the University of London praised it as “a study of the cultural relationship between Japan and the West across the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, written in splendid and readable prose.” Professor Geoffrey Hudson at Oxford counted it among the three most outstanding studies of Japan in postwar England.

But one of the most noteworthy responses was from Arnold Toynbee, who lauded the work as “a classic penned by a master of the subject.” This was significant in that, although Toynbee and Sansom were personally on good terms with one another, as historians they were, if anything, diametrically opposed. As is widely known, Toynbee’s massive body of historical research was concerned with sweeping patterns—the rise and fall of civilizations. But Sansom, who sought the true nature of enduring cultures beyond the vagaries of history, cast doubt on systems like the ones Toynbee had constructed.

Sansom’s approach as a historian is clearly spelled out in his preface. He has taken great care to avoid writing a work “based upon assumptions which experience does not confirm,” believing that when it comes to the action of civilizations upon one another or the intercourse between peoples, “we do not yet know enough about these matters to allow of laying down rules or making predictions.” Sansom, with his unfailingly cautious approach, did not take up the study of Japan after the Sino-Japanese War. But the profound knowledge and penetrating insights he reveals in The Western World and Japan: A Short Cultural History will undoubtedly inspire even casual readers for generations to come.