Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

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What? This is totally ahistorical. The Meiji era (the beginnings of what we might call a modern Japanese state) didn't start until 1868. Before that, Japan was feudal with wars happening all the time. Quoting from Wikipedia about the infamously-chaotic Sengoku period in the 1400s [1], which was just one of many turbulent times prior to the Meiji period:

> The period saw a breakdown in the traditional master-servant relationship between a lord and his vassals, with many instances of vassals rebelling against their lords, internal dynastic conflict over lordships within noble families (in which vassals would take sides), and the installation of figurehead lords by cadet branches of noble families.[3] The period was also marked by the loosening of samurai culture, with people born into other social strata sometimes making a name for themselves as warriors and thus becoming samurai.

> [W]eariness of war, socioeconomic unrest and poor treatment by aristocrats provoked the wrath of the peasant class. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants and even villages would organize uprisings (known as "ikki") against the ruling class. An extraordinary example is the Kaga Rebellion, in which the local ikki had staged a large-scale revolt with the support of the True Pure Land sect (thereby establishing the term ikkō ikki) and assumed control of the entire province of Kaga.

Whatever post-Heian, pre-Meiji Japan was, it was not an orderly, harmonious society.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period

Rayiner is using the word “state” in a subtly different manner than you are. You’re talking about concrete polities, but he’s talking about the state apparatus which generally survives between republics, dynasties, and even empires. It’s the bureaucracy (in a broad sense) used by the feudal lords to collect taxes, raise retinues, etc. that was transformed into the modern state. Tax collectors that are familiar with how much everyone owns in an area, agronomists who are familiar with farming and irrigation techniques suited for the area, judges or local chiefs that have the trust and authority to settle disputes, recordkeepers and their records, that kind of thing. After a revolution or conquest, any of these people that survive are usually recruited to help run the new state, just under new instructions from up top.

On the contrary, there ended up being not much continuity between pre-Meiji Japan and Meiji Japan--the daimyo's domains were replaced with prefectures and the daimyo themselves were largely forcibly retired. This was intentional on the part of the Meiji oligarchy, in order to prevent the daimyo from retaining enough power to be able to rebel [1]. The Meiji Restoration was an enormous change in Japan's government, really from top to bottom.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system

The abolition of the han system is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The majority of daimyos first became government employees, eventually becoming the governors of the prefectures, responsible for their administration with funding from the central state. The Meiji government even paid stipends so that the daimyos could pay their former samurais to disarm. The subsequent reforms (which took years) did transform the state away from the hereditary system but there was a continuity in the administrative apparatus. Likewise when the US occupied Japan after WWII it kept much of that apparatus and slowly reformed it further.

Contrast that with Haiti where the vast majority of Haitians weren’t allowed to hold administrative positions in the colonial government so when the remnants of the French bureaucrats fled after the 1804 massacre, Haiti was left with very few people who knew how to run any part of the government. They were left with post offices but without anyone with the experience to actually run a postal system. No officers capable of training and disciplining a police force or military. And so on. They had to build up their bureaucracy entirely from scratch which is an incredibly hard thing to do and usually turns into situations like in Haiti, as opposed to outcomes like Japan where the state isn’t violently wiped clean. It’s hard to overstate how big a roll that continuity plays when a new polity forms in its success or failure.

I didn’t say it was an orderly, harmonious society. I said it had a highly functional centralized state. Which it did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period.

Feudalism is the literal opposite of a highly functional centralized state! And you said 1,000 years, which extends well before the Edo period, even if you consider the Edo period a centralized state (which I would not--the establishment of a centralized state is what characterized the Meiji Restoration).

I think that Edo was centralized to a similar degree as medieval England - not that it necessarily had a central bureaucracy that we'd associate with a modern state (although I believe in actuality that the samurai-staffed bureaucracy in Edo was on a similar level to contemporary states in Europe, if not as sophisticated as China), but that it was never under any serious doubt that one government had legitimacy to rule over the entire country. There were no daimyo, as far as I know, that ruled territories that the Edo government struggled to control, after the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. By contrast, France had powerful independent duchies until at least the 1500s.

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