Abstract
As a result of World War II—that truncated version of a much longer conflict in east Asia—Japanese colonialism and its demise by nuclear weapons have come to obscure Japan’s unique accomplishments in the nineteenth century. Under the threat of invasion and in response to the territorial concessions demanded by the United States, Britain, and other European powers, a group of Japanese samurai undertook a revolution against the Tokugawa shogunate in 1867 and then a comprehensive Westernization of Japanese institutions in the four decades that followed. This modern Japanese state was constructed with the aim of asserting Japan’s sovereign equality among the family of nations. As a result, far from remaining a victim of Western imperialism, Japan became a world power and proceeded to victimize others. In so doing, Japan followed the examples of its peers within the international community. But because Japan was the sole target of nuclear weapons in the twentieth century, some Japanese now subscribe to an argument that substitutes Japanese victimhood at the hands of her enemies for Japanese aggression as a world power. At the same time, many in the United States think only of Japan’s history as an aggressor and ignore its significant achievements in the nineteenth century.
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Notes
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52–65;
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Gong declares that the “standard of civilization” was “implicit” until Wheaton articulated it in his 1846 edition (The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society, 26–27), while Anghie points to the 1866 edition of Wheaton as a major iteration of the civilized nature of the international community (Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, 53). By contrast, Martti Koskeniemmi emphasizes Lorimer’s work of 1883, in The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. See also Brett Bowden, “The Colonial Origins of International Law,” Journal of the History of International Law 7 (2005): 1–23. Recall that Edward Said’s Orientalism discusses the “othering” of orientals as a set of attributes defined as the inverse of European qualities.
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See Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, 40–55; and Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth——In the International Law of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum”, trans. G. L. Ulman (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 134.
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The records of the case are assembled in the British Foreign Office Archives, File F.O. 46/480. (Hereafter cited as F.O. 46/480). There is an excellent summary by Richard T. Chang, The Justice of the Western Consular Courts in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 99–109.
F.O. 46/480: 42–43; and de Bunsen to Rosebery, July 4, 1893 in F.O. 46/480: 33–39. On the matter of Orders in Council, see William Edward Hall, A Treatise on the Foreign Powers and Jurisdiction of the British Crown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894);
W. Ross Johnston, Sovereignty and Protection: A Study of British Jurisdictional Imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973).
Thomas Barclay, Territorial Waters: The Inland Sea of Japan (Paris: n.p., 1894), 17–18. See also “Japon: Mer interieure,” Revue générale de droit international public 1 (1894): 179–181;
and Thomas Barclay, “La mer intérieure du Japon,” Annuaire de l’Institut de droit international 13 (1894–1895): 388–390.
Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Brett Bowden, “In the Name of Progress and Peace: The ‘Standard of Civilization’ and the Universalizing Project,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29.1 (2004): 43–68 (esp. 45–46 and 61–62).
See also David P. Fidler, “International Human Rights Law in Practice: The Return of the Standard of Civilization,” Chicago Journal of International Law 2 (2001): 137–157.
See Dino Kritsiotis, “International Law and the Relativities of Enforcement,” in The Cambridge Companion to International Law, ed. James Crawford and Martti Koskenniemi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 245–268.
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© 2013 Robert J. Beck
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Howland, D. (2013). International Law, State Will, and the Standard of Civilization in Japan’s Assertion of Sovereign Equality. In: Beck, R.J. (eds) Law and Disciplinarity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318107_8
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