CHAPTER FIVE

THE MEIJI RESTORATION: MENU RENOVATION ON THE ROAD TO RAMEN

Major shifts in the Japanese life-style occurred during what is called the Meiji Restoration, prececed by a period of tremendous upheaval that lasted from 1854 to 1868 and later during the Meiji era (1868–1912). In this period, Japan was transformed from being an inward-looking society to one that opened its ports (beyond Nagasaki) and adopted international standards of law, military science and diplomacy, in the same way as it had adopted many things from China almost a thousand years before. After 1868, the Japanese shed their feudal system of lords, samurai, merchants and peasants. They re-instated the emperor as head of state, supported by a legion of bureaucrats and advisors eager to embrace new European con- cepts. This new elite trumpeted many novel ideas for modernization, including the establishment of newspapers, a telegraph system and the re-education of former samurai in such fields as maritime technology and navigation. Japanese in the Meiji era had a very different relationship with China from their predecessors in the Tokugawa era (1600–1868). Japan after the Meiji Restoration turned away from most of what it had learned from China during the intense period of commercial and social exchange in the port city of Nagasaki from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, China was critical to the success of Japan’s Meiji Restoration and the new imperial government’s modernization plans, and equally cru- cial in the evolution of ramen. Without the presence and influence of the Chinese in Meiji-era Japan, ramen would never have developed as it did. Contrary to the conventional view that the West, represented by US Commodore Matthew Perry, forced open Japan’s doors in the early 1850s, the reality was a little more complicated. The process of Japan’s modern- ization cannot be explained without understanding what the Chinese were doing in Japan at the time. The Chinese played a significant role in the opening of Japan because few Westerners understood the Japanese language. Japanese sailors who had been shipwrecked and ended up resident in the US, like John Manjirō (one of the first Japanese to live in America and learn English), 90 chapter five contributed significantly as translators. But such men were rare, and when Perry first arrived on Japan’s coastline in 1853, his “black ships” received Chinese assistance. Perry chose not to employ a Dutch interpreter for his journey to Japan, even though Dutch had been the lingua franca for Japanese communicating with foreigners during the Tokugawa era. Instead, he selected Samuel Wells Williams, who did not possess a good command of Japanese, but had lived in China since 1833. Williams could read and write Chinese and was an able enough translator even though, as many did at that time, he required the constant assistance of a native scribe and helper. Williams’ first assistant on the mission was his old Chinese tutor, an incurable opium addict who died just before a high-level meeting between Perry and his Japanese counterparts was due to take place. This prompted a search for a more suitable and sober candidate.1 Perry hired a Chinese assistant for Williams named Luo Sen for his second voyage to Japan in 1854 to gauge the Japanese response. Luo hailed from Guangdong and had lived in Hong Kong for several years conducting busi- ness with foreigners. He was classically educated but “open minded,” and both the American and Japanese sides liked his demeanor and writing style.2 The Japanese flocked to meet Luo. Japan’s educated elites were well versed in Chinese poetry as well as the Confucian classics and were anx- ious to meet a real-life, breathing Chinese person who embodied their tra- ditional view of the world. Japanese intellectuals would have read about ancient China but it was still rare in those days for a Japanese to be able to actually meet a Chinese traveler. Not all Japanese were happy about their new relationship with Chinese civilization. Contact with the real thing sometimes stunned Japanese trav- elers in its difference from the idealized image they held in their minds. In 1862, one of the first passenger ships to carry Japanese travelers to China, the Senzai-maru, sailed from Nagasaki to Shanghai. During their two- month stay in the Chinese port, the Japanese recorded their shock at the grinding poverty and rampant opium usage in the city.3 The fragrant and refined culture portrayed by the Tang master painters and Song era poets was nowhere to be seen.

1 De-min Tao, “Negotiating Language in the Opening of Japan: Luo Sen’s Journal of Perry’s 1854 Expedition,” Japan Review, 17, 2005, pp. 93–94. 2 Ibid., p. 95. 3 Tanaka Seiichi, Ichii taisui – Chūgoku ryōri denraishi, p. 187. See also Joshua Fogel, “A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations: The Senzaimaru Voyage to Shanghai of 1862,” Late Imperial China, Volume 29, Number 1 Supplement, June 2008, pp. 104–124.