SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The opening of Japan to foreign residence brought not only the same system of treaty ports and foreign settlements as had developed in China to solve the problem of the meeting of two very different cultures, but also led to the same people who had known the system in China operating it or living under it in Japan. The events of l859-l869 gave foreigners fixed ideas about the Japanese which subsequent changes could do little to alter. The foreign settlers quickly abandoned any ideas they may have had about making close contact with the Japanese. They preferred to recreate as near as possible the life they had lived in Europe or America, The main prop of this was extraterritoriality, which shielded them from Japanese laws. It was not a very efficient system and increasingly it worked against foreigners' own interests. Yet they demanded its continued existence, although the Japanese had made it clear by 1880 that they wished to see a complete end to it, and by 1886 the foreign powers were ready to agree to this. Extraterritoriality bedevilled foreign attempts to run their own municipal affairs, and except at Kobe, all such attempts proved failures. It also led to a loss of interest in the expansion of trade, for the Japanese made it clear that the price for this was the end of extraterritoriality. The foreign-language press was, apart from trade, the one major foreign contributor to Japan's modernisation, but it provided a poor service to foreign settlers. It was far too dependent on its subscribers ever to be really independent. The treaty ports themselves came to an end in 1899, but the foreign settlement ethos lingered on until the 1923 earthquake and the second world war finally killed it.