I've been spending a lot of time these days studying China, Japan and
Korea in the 1800s, and the lack of obvious conflict in Japan between
1600 and 1868 continues to be puzzling. So I'm wondering if there's
some paradigm unique to Japan that has to be understood.
There's a current debate going on today in Japan about a proposed law
to bring in a few thousand low-skilled foreign workers to do farming,
nursing care and construction jobs that Japanese workers don't want to
do. This is an important problem in Japan because the aging
population does not have enough younger workers.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan ... gn-workers
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/asia/jap ... index.html
This is being hotly debated in Japan, and one of the main reasons that
some people give for opposing it is that Japan has always been an
island shut off from the rest of the world, with its unique shared
customs and shared culture, and newcomers would not fit into that.
So let's assume that Japan had crisis wars in the 1600-1868 period
like every other country. How would those wars be different from
crisis wars in other countries?
Xenophobia and nationalism are often defined in terms of things like
race, skin color, appearance, language and religion, things that are
set at birth and cannot be easily changed. But these things are all
the same for Japanese. The only thing that separates Japanese would
be political beliefs, things that can be easily fudged or even
changed.
So that would eliminate things like genocide and ethnic cleansing as
motivations for crisis wars. What's left? Clashes over resources --
land, water, and so forth. And wars over those kinds of resources,
when genocide and ethnic cleansing are not involved, would not be
recognized by historians in the same way that other crisis wars are
recognized, and so reading histories of the Japan 1600-1868, it would
be impossible to identify crisis wars in the same way. In fact, how
would historians characterize such a war, if they couldn't say
something like "the French versus the Germans" or "the Protestants
versus the Catholics"? They'd have to use some other euphemisms.
In summary: There were crisis wars in Japan in 1600-1868, but we have
to look for them in different ways