East Asia and Tokugawa Japan

At the start of the nineteenth century, China under the Qing dynasty dominated East Asia and seemed secure, while Japan, a small island country, seemed shut away. Within a few decades the picture reversed: China fell into turmoil and civil war, unable to meet the colonial challenge, while Japan built a modern nation-state, an industrial economy and a colonial empire, taking Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910). It defeated China in 1894 and Russia, a European power, in 1905.

History in East Asia. Both countries had long traditions of history writing, because the past was seen as a guide for rulers. Sima Qian (145 to 90 BCE) is considered the greatest historian of early China. In Japan, one of the first acts of the Meiji government was to set up, in 1869, a bureau to collect records and write its own account of the Meiji Restoration. Rich printed sources, travellers' accounts (Marco Polo, the Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Luis Frois) and modern scholars such as Naito Konan of Japan help historians today.

Two very different lands:

• China is a vast continental country spanning many climates, centred on three great rivers: the Yellow River (Huang He), the Yangtse (Chang Jiang), the world's third longest, and the Pearl River. The Han are the main ethnic group and Chinese (Putonghua) the main language, but there are many other nationalities (Uighur, Hui, Manchu, Tibetan) and languages, and at least four distinct regional cuisines.
• Japan is a string of islands, the largest being Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Hokkaido. More than half the land is mountainous, and it lies in an active earthquake zone. Rice is the staple and fish the main protein; there was no tradition of animal rearing. Besides the Japanese, there is a small Ainu minority and Koreans brought as forced labour in colonial times.

Tokugawa Japan. From the twelfth century real power lay not with the emperor in Kyoto but with shoguns, who ruled in his name. From 1603 to 1867 the shoguns came from the Tokugawa family. Japan was divided into over 250 domains ruled by lords called daimyo; the shogun kept them in check, among other ways by requiring them to spend long periods at the capital, Edo (modern Tokyo), and controlled the main cities and mines. The samurai, the warrior class, were the ruling elite.

Three changes of the late sixteenth century shaped what followed:

• Peasants were disarmed; only samurai could carry swords. This ended the frequent wars of the previous century.
• Daimyo were made to live in their domain capitals, with a good deal of self-rule.
• Land surveys identified owners and taxpayers and graded land by productivity, giving a stable revenue.

Towns, trade and culture. The daimyo's capitals grew. By the mid-seventeenth century Edo was the most populous city in the world, Osaka and Kyoto were also large, and at least half a dozen castle-towns had over 50,000 people; most European countries then had only one big city.

• A commercial economy grew, with credit and financial systems and even a stock market in rice; merit began to count for more than status.
• Merchants patronised theatre and the arts. Reading was so popular that writers could live by writing, and in Edo you could rent a book for the price of a bowl of noodles.
• To cut costly imports of silk, the Tokugawa developed the Nishijin silk industry in Kyoto, whose silk became the best in the world.
• Scholars studied ancient Japanese literature, such as the Tale of the Genji, a fictionalised diary of the Heian court by Murasaki Shikibu, and argued that the essence of being Japanese existed before Chinese influence.