Tokugawa America

johnoreilly.info ^ | John J. O'Reilly

[B-Chan]

Food for thought.

[Monti Cello]

The origins of this country are ideological and they were wrought by war.

To deny universal ideals or the right to obtain them by violence is at odds with our existence.

Nothing more than a statement of obvious fact.

[snowsislander]

The arts of the Tokugawa period, particularly in painting, achieved a level of evocative subtlety that has rarely if ever been matched.

Japanese mathematics in particular was also in a period of strength during the 17th and 18th centuries.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

Oh goody. A suicide pact.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

Just for starters, the Japanese rulers of Tokugawa era had the ability to almost completely eliminate the importation of "subversive" ideas.

[The_Reader_David]

It would indeed by a different country. America (as to a lesser extent other English-speaking 'new world' countries like Australia) has always been the country you could decide to join. 'Tokugawa America' would be an Old World country--something Pat Buchanan evidently wants (personally I wish he'd move to the other side of the pond: he'd be right at home with the BNP and the like).

(Oddly the only real exception I know is Greece--a grad school professor of mine, of Scots birth, became Greek, not just by faith (like a lot of us), not just by citizenship, but welcomed with open arms by his wife's village! as did the noted Byzantinist Philip Sherrard--perhaps because under the outwardly clanish 'Hellenism' some remnant of 'Romanoi' nationalism still lurks: you could become a Roman even if you weren't born one, and that remained true even when the capital was at Constantinople.)

[NZerFromHK]

Yeah, and witness the decline in scholarships and thoughts in the Tokugawa-era Japan. It was only after Meiji Restoration that Japan was reforming again.

[Nick Danger]

...this culture was produced by people who unselfconsciously thought their own assumptions about beauty and virtue to be universal.

The author is one of these people. To imagine that a "Tokugawa America" is even possible — and never mind how it might turn out — one must accept the hidden assumption that the folks out in Foreign Land are rational. Or at least as rational as we are. This might be phrased directly as, "If we don't bother them, they won't bother us."

We have been warned that this is probably not true. So long as converting to Islam is left out of the package, there will exist people Out There who think we are bothering them. We are bothering them by not converting to Islam. They have it on good authority — from their God Himself — that they are not to permit this. To get to paradise themselves, they must see to it that we convert to Islam... or die.

Not caring what goes on in the rest of the world could prove catastrophic if Western Europe joins the Middle East as part of the Islamic Caliphate, as seems to be happening. At some size, these guys become a major pain to get rid of when the time comes, as it must. Western Europe has many nuclear powers, some with ICBM technology. If the Muslims inherit those, plus whatever goodies Pakistan has now and Iran will have by then, we could be facing annihilation, even though we didn't think we were bothering anybody.

So never mind Tokugawa America. Worry about Ottoman America.

[skinkinthegrass]

Food for thought.

thought you should see this.

[Rembrandt_fan]

You wrote, "Food for thought."

Only if the food is cotton candy. The argument made by the author is badly reasoned, convoluted, and vague. Figuring out the central point and supporting premises was like trying to cut soup with a knife.

[tet68]

Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns (essentially a line of hereditary prime ministers)

Hmmmm. and here I thought Shogun translated to, Barbarian subdueing generalissimo.

[BlazingArizona]

An interesting analysis, especially considering that I used to live in Japan. During the Tokugawa era, the country achieved internal stability at the cost of unknowingly and steadily falling behind the rest of the world.

One day, alien ships appeared on the horizon and introduced to a medieval society the technology of the mid-18th century. In the mad scramble to catch up with a world beyond its comprehension, Japan adopted a too-late, too-hasty variant of European resource colonialism. This is that led the nation to WW II.

[DTogo]

What nonsense!

Japan * ping * (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)

[ClaireSolt]

This argues the extreme, of course. However, visit Europe and you might conclude that it is a well-tended garden, partly at our expense, and we would do well to adjust the balance some and take time to do some edging after we mow.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Gives me a headache.

[GladesGuru]

"If" - yeah. And if pig could fly, the price of bacon would be sky high. If wishes were fishes, blah, blah.

[Nick Danger]

I thought Shogun translated to, Barbarian subdueing generalissimo.

Actually there weren't that many barbarians around at the time. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns, can be credited with "unifying Japan." That means, as it usually does, that he engaged in a series of bloody battles until he was the last thug standing, at which point everybody agreed that he was in charge. The people he defeated were other Japanese warlords though, not "barbarians."

One factoid I remember from Japanese history is that at some point during the 250-year reign of the Tokugawa Shoguns, it became illegal to invent anything new. That was done to promote "stability" and "order." Today we would use a high capital gains tax to produce the same effect.

[ASOC]

Worse than a Big Mac for the brain.

Turning inward in a technological world would be suicide.

I would also note that Japan is (and was) both an island and virtually mono-ethnic. Something the US has never been, even from the start.

In short - balderdash.

[Cacique]

btt

[Billthedrill]

My guess is that this sort of mental exercise lasts approximately as long as such a country would, which is approximately 5-8 minutes. That's the flight time of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The key to Tokugawa's ability to isolate his country was that maritime technology was little developed in his area of the world. Those countries that had it - Portugal and the Netherlands, specifically - were able to force trade agreements even in the 17th century. When it really came apart was when the technology developed sufficiently to open them up from the east, i.e. the nascent United States. By then the society was stagnant and inward-looking and in dire need of a foreign-inspired but domestically-conducted renaissance. That was the Meiji restoration.

I do not think this a very feasible model for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The cliche that the world is more interdependent and interconnected is based on intense truth - the U.S. will never be "resource independent" as long as its technology demands importation of technology-critical materials. And because of this the small wars that the author dismisses rather blithely do become significant:

The rejection of foreign sources of essential commodities would remove the Middle East, West Africa, and Latin America as possible spheres of small wars.

Well, no. Such wars might not immediately demand U.S. attention but that does not prevent them from becoming larger and more threatening. World War One certainly did so.

Large wars, or at least large wars involving the United States, would be prevented by the withdrawal of security guarantees from Europe and Japan, and indeed from everyplace east of Maritime Canada and west of Hawaii. The military could shrink to the Coast Guard, missile defense, and the Marine Corps (with the latter including its air arm).

But we had no such guarantees prior to World War One and it didn't really help.

It is, however, the use of the word "would" that betrays the author as more of a wishful thinker than a student of history. One cannot posit conditions and then state "would" because history simply isn't that predictable. One can only posit conditions. And a real student of history knows perfectly well that similar conditions give rise to dissimilar results just as often as similar ones. Marx and Hegel were wrong - there is no predictive model for history. You can bet otherwise, but you're betting your life.