Mark Koyama: prediction

Transcript context

…Why did China and Japan react so differently to the arrival of the West? That’s a great question. I think that there are many factors. I’ll describe the one I felt certain of in some of my research with, again, Tuan-Hwee Sng and Chiaki Moriguchi. I think there are several interesting features. We’re going to focus on the science. The science is very different. China is just vast, so even if the most developed parts of China, like the Yangtze area, are urbanized and commercialized — and they’re probably doing quite well until at least 1750 — you have these peripheral regions which are facing very different climatic and economic conditions. Both China and Japan are basically insulated from Western threats until the mid-19th century. Then they faced them very . . . It’s very stark. It’s very quick. You have the ability of Americans and British to sail steamships into the harbor of Yokohama. Japan is very small, and all of Japan is vulnerable, so this is a geopolitical crisis of the highest order for Japan. China, initially — they don’t necessarily care about the British. They didn’t take them very seriously. It’s huge. And once they do take them seriously, they have to face threats from both Russia . . . Russians are really pressing in on the Chinese in the 1850s. And they’ve got these coastal threats from the British. It’s very difficult for this traditional Chinese state, which has emerged and developed to protect and dominate the steppe. There’s no navy, for example. It’s extremely difficult for that state to adapt to face the threat from Britain and France. Agility is kind of a term — we sometimes think about it with respect to states as well as individuals, that premodern states are not agile. They can’t redeploy resources, reprioritize. So the Chinese state really struggles to do this. Japan also struggles. Japan undergoes political crisis for 15 years, from Perry’s arrival in 1853 — I believe that’s when the black ships first arrived — to 1868, which is the Meiji Restoration. It’s 15 years of total chaos. Individual Japanese daimyo and statelets are basically going to war with Westerners. English ambassadors are being killed. But once they overthrow the shogunate and restore the emperor, they’re able — partly I think because it’s a cohesive territory — to develop this modern state which can respond to the West. That said, I don’t think we have a total explanation for it. It’s still a bit of a mystery they were as successful as they were. We are squared of my explanation about the size, and their political histories is quite small. I think a large part of it is very difficult to explain. And one either has to make recourse to luck, to some amazing abilities of specific statesmen, or to cultural factors, which are quite difficult there. But Cortés was also luck, with the Aztecs.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.