Meiji Restoration
Article
Meiji Restoration is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 28, 2021 and October 04, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Japan’s happened first in the Meiji Restoration”; “Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was”; “curiosity about Japan following the Meiji Restoration”. It most often appears alongside China, Germany, America.
Metadata
- Category: Events
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: June 28, 2021
- Last seen: October 04, 2021
Appears In
- Book Review: How Asia Works
- Book Review: Crazy Like Us
- Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
Related Pages
-
- China (3 shared issues)
-
- Germany (3 shared issues)
-
- America (2 shared issues)
-
- Britain (2 shared issues)
-
- Hong Kong (2 shared issues)
-
- Japan (2 shared issues)
-
- Steven Pinker (2 shared issues)
-
- Thailand (2 shared issues)
-
- United States (2 shared issues)
-
- US (2 shared issues)
-
- 1902 (1 shared issues)
-
- 1903 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow.
Despite all these benefits, land reform rarely happens. Landlords naturally resist expropriation, and no country at this stage has the money to pay them market value. The Asian countries got their land reform through convoluted pathways. Japan's happened first in the Meiji Restoration, but didn't stick; the final version was rammed through by Douglas MacArthur, who acted as a dictator and didn't care what Japanese elites thought. China's happened under communism, and South Korea's and Taiwan's happened as part of an American-led effort to defuse the appeal of communism by giving peasants and workers an unusually fair deal under capitalism.
Much more fun was the history of Japanese mental illness, which focused on neurasthensia. This was another one of those fully-generic late-1800s diagnoses like hysteria (I assume late-1800s psychiatrists just sort of flipped a coin: heads you were neurasthenic, tails you were hysteric). Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous national hero. Meanwhile, “in 1902 an article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”
So minimalist modernism in the West may actually owe more to curiosity about Japan following the Meiji Restoration than to internal factors. As the rare person who actually enjoys (some) modernist buildings and art, I think this cultural appropriation was probably a good thing.