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Europe and Japan: A Historical Perspective, by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, Annual Meeting of the Canon Foundation in Europe, the Canon Foundation, Windsor, Saturday 11th November 2006 Review by Sean Curtin Sir Hugh Cortazzi delivered this year's speech to the Annual Meeting of the Canon Foundation in Europe at the Canon Foundation in Windsor. The master of ceremonies for the event was Professor Willem van Gulik, Professor of East Asian Art and Archaeology at the University of Leiden. At the gathering certificates were also awarded to research fellows who had completed their periods of research funded by the foundation. The lecture was also attended by the members of the foundation board including its honorary chairman Andreas van Agt, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands. After the talk there was a question and answer session in which Sir Hugh expanded on some of his ideas. A full transcript of the presentation follows. Europe and Japan: A Historical Perspective I thought it might be worth putting together some facts about the development of relations between Japan and Europe and considering whether there was anything much we could learn from past experience of Euro-Japan relations. I first wondered when the Japanese began to have a concept of what was meant by Europe, but I realized that the term Europe other than as a geographical definition of an area is relatively recent even in Europe. I wondered when for their part the Japanese first began to be conscious of Europe as such. According to a major Japanese dictionary the word Europe was first used in katakana in 1592 and 1593. One of these was a version of Aesop's fables no doubt introduced into Japan by the Jesuits. The Japanese scholar Arai Hakuseki in 1709 noted that Europe was vulgarly termed 'Yoroppa'. The first Chinese character of the three used to pronounce the term was a character pronounced O. This led to Europe being term O-shu where 'shu' means territories. But I don't think that this means that there was any real idea in Japan of what was meant by 'Europe' when these terms were first used. Portugal was practically the only European country which had a presence in Japan up to the end of the sixteenth century. The rest of Europe hardly existed for the Japanese in those days. The world maps introduced by the Jesuits while delineating the general shape of Europe did not carry the names of European countries even of France and Austria. The Japanese boys sent by the Jesuit visitor Valignano to Europe in the years 1582-1590 had visited the Pope in Rome and other Italian cities but Italy was not then a country. I thought that Sir George Sansom in his book The Western World and Japan published in 1965, might have some interesting points to make about Japan and Europe, but in his book he does not really distinguish between Europe and the Western World. In fact until the emergence of the United States in the late eighteenth century the Western World was Europe. Sansom, as he explained at the beginning of his first chapter saw 'The modern history of Japan' as 'in essence a record of the clash and fusion of two cultures, the development of an Asiatic civilization under the impact of Western habits of life and thought, the response of a crumbling feudal system based on agriculture to the demands of industrial society.' This was probably a fair judgement of Japanese history up to the middle of the twentieth century, but when we review the post-war history of Japan the record is more complicated. Few signs remain of a 'feudal society based on agriculture.', although the problems arising from a clash of two cultures have not yet been solved even if in some respects at least there has been a fusion of cultures. Sansom noted the ability of the Japanese to absorb and adapt other cultures and their readiness to learn from the first westerners to reach Japan in the sixteenth century when 'Japan was…in the midst of civil war, which was breaking down old institutions'. He reminded his readers that 'The progress of the early Christian missions to Japan is of interest not only in the history of evangelism It is of great value as presenting a clear picture of the meeting of two cultures.' He declared that 'Some of the disagreements between Europeans and the Japanese [could] be ascribed to pure ignorance.' We might say prejudice. Buddhist priests resented the success of the Jesuits in western Japan and no doubt stirred up Japanese leaders against the missionaries, But evangelism was only one element in the early meeting between Japan and Europe. The Portuguese Jesuit missionaries were the first Europeans in Japan but they were soon followed by Portuguese merchants from Macao. Then came Spanish friars and Dutch and British merchants. Trade rather than evangelism soon came to be the dominant issue in relations between Japan and the few European countries with which they came in contact in these early days. As Sansom noted 'The evolution of maritime trade was… governed to an important degree by the political development of Europe, for the Portuguese and Spaniards were by no means alone in feeling a strong urge to expand'. The Europeans in the early history of trade relations with Japan 'showed a firm resolve to sell and the Asiatics a reluctance to buy.' (An interesting comment when we think of trade relations between Japan and Europe in the second half of the twentieth century). The rivalry between the Portuguese merchants at Macao and Nagasaki in the second half of the sixteenth century and between them and the Dutch (and for a few years the English) at Hirado at the beginning of the seventeenth century must have seemed uncivilized to the samurai class in Japan who had been trained to despise trade. Although the Jesuits generally behaved with sensitivity towards the Japanese this could not be said of the merchants whose behaviour was often licentious and violent. In the early years of the seventeenth century it was becoming clear to the Japanese that they could do without the Portuguese trade. They reckoned that they could play the Spaniards who were beginning to infiltrate Spanish friars into Japan against the Portuguese run Jesuit mission. They also hoped to play the Dutch and the English Protestants off against the Iberian Catholics. The former fanned Japanese suspicions that the missionaries were the fore-runners of Iberian colonization and attempts to dominate the Far East. These suspicions were enhanced by the arrogance of Sebastian Vizcaino, who in 1611-13 obtained Japanese permission to survey the east coast of Japan in order that Spanish galleons bound for Mexico from the Philippines might use Japanese ports if they were blown off course. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, was irritated against the Christians by intrigues involving the Christian daimyo of Arima in Kyushu and by warnings that Christian doctrine enjoined the faithful to obey their spiritual leaders rather than their temporal lords. It was the fear that evangelism and trade would be followed by political and military intervention which really disturbed Japanese leaders and led to seclusion policies adopted by the Tokugawa shoguns in the 17th century. Sansom declared: 'The intense distrust which drove the Tokugawa shoguns to close their doors arose from no ordinary conservatism. They were moved by fear, and not of the contamination of national customs …but rather of domestic uprising against themselves.' The first Europeans to visit Japan in the 16th and early seventeenth centuries were generally favourably impressed by what they saw of the people and many of the Jesuit missionaries developed a fair understanding of Japanese civilization. Michael Cooper's book They came to Japan' is a good summary of European reactions. Sansom quotes some as follows: St Francis Xavier (c.1550): 'These people are the delight of my heart.' Father Frois (1560): As gifted a nation as any in Europe.' William Adams (1611) 'The people of this island of Japan are good by nature, courteous above measure, and valiant in war. Their justice is severely executed without any partiality upon transgressors of the law. They are governed in great civility. I mean there is not a land better governed in the world by civil police.' Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco, Spanish Governor of the Philippines, c 1612: 'The streets and open places of Yedo are so very handsome, so clean and well kept that it might be imagined no person walked in them…' (Edo had, it should be noted only become city a few years earlier with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate). But information about Japan did not spread widely in Europe and when the Japanese expelled the missionaries and the Portuguese merchants there was very little information about Japan in Europe. Japan was remote and not a priority for any European country except the Netherlands which had a monopoly of Japan's foreign trade other than that with China. England in the seventeenth century was relatively poor and its economy was still largely based on agriculture and wool. It was also riven by civil war. On the European continent the 17th century was marked by the internecine conflicts of the thirty years war. The history of European relations with Japan in the two hundred years of Sakoku (translated as 'closed country') consists of two main elements. The first element consists of the Dutch outpost on the artificial island of Deshima or Dejima in Nagasaki bay to which the Dutch merchants were transferred and confined by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1635. Most of the Dutch were only interested in trade, but there were a few Dutch members of the 'factory' who developed an interest in Japan such as Francis Caron in the seventeenth century and Isaac Titsingh in the eighteenth century, but the most important observers of Japan in these centuries were three doctors attached to the factory who developed a close interest in the country, its flora and fauna. These were the German Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), who when he arrived in 1690 was described as a 'yama orandajin' (mountain Dutchman), the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1822) and the German Philip Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) who provided through their writings a unique insight into Japan. The second element was the development in Japan of Dutch studies. Japanese interpreters of Dutch, which gradually replaced Portuguese in the 17th century as practically the only foreign language studied in Japan, began to absorb information from their study of Dutch language works. Their interest was initially in military and defence subjects but soon spread to science including anatomy and medicine as well as art techniques such as the use of perspective. Such knowledge was not, however, widely disseminated and even in the nineteenth century Japanese world maps did not reflect western knowledge. Nor did they suggest that the Japanese were able to distinguish correctly between the various countries and languages of Europe. As Donald Keene in his pioneering study The Japanese Discovery of Europe, (1952) points out the interpreters and scholars faced enormous problems. 'They had no dictionaries save for rough-and ready lists of words and phrases, no grammars and no competent teachers…It was not only a matter of learning a language with a totally dissimilar grammatical structure, but also of attempting to pronounce complicated series of consonants and vowels with the simple open Japanese syllables.' Moreover the Japanese way of life was so different from that of the Dutch and as they could not go to the Netherlands they had no way of experiencing how the Dutch lived except by observing them in their Deshima cage. Keene thought that Dutch interpreters did not make the most of their opportunities. 'Their attitude was one of extreme inquisitiveness mixed with a fondness for the exotic'. This was reflected in the way the biannual embassies (bearing presents or 'tribute') made by the Dutch from Nagasaki to Edo were treated. They were expected to perform like monkeys in a zoo for the amusement of the shogun and his vassals. Dutch learning or Rangaku has rightly attracted much research both in Japan and in the West. In the circumstances and under the restrictions imposed on them by the Japanese authorities it is in fact remarkable how much the scholars learnt. A number of desultory attempts were made in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to persuade the Japanese authorities to open Japan to intercourse with Europe, but they were easily rebuffed. Japan was, however, too important to be ignored by western explorers and cartographers. Two names stand out among those from western Europe namely those of the British naval captain William Broughton who in 1797 surveyed the south coast of Kyushu and the coast of Honshu from the Kii peninsula as far as the Tsugaru straits and the French navigator La Perouse who explored the Japanese coast around the Noto peninsula on the Japan Sea, the west coast of Sakhalin and the Southern Kuriles. French geographical interest in Japan began in the seventeenth century. An interesting if inaccurate map of Japan was published in Paris in 1679 by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier who included some amusing comments. For instance he noted of Ocasaqui (Okasaki) 'c'est où sont les plus belles femmes du pays.' More important was the development of Russian interest in Japan as Russia expanded into the Far East. Alexander Lensen's scholarly work on Russia's expansion towards Japan has been followed up by Professor William McOmie who has done a detailed study of Russian materials not hitherto generally available to western scholars. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Japanese knowledge of Europe was even more limited than European knowledge of Japan although the bakufu demanded that the Dutch provide them with annual reports on developments in the world outside Japan and particular in Europe. These were called fusetsugaki. These were quite detailed and informative. Donald Keene in his recent biography of the painter and intellectual Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841) (Frog in the Well )records that in his Shinkiron ('Exercising Restraint over Auguries') Kazan devoted a fairly long section, based on the fusetsugaki to Poland, a country of minor interest to Japan in those days. The bakufu authorities in Edo and the leaders of the domains were alerted by the Dutch to European incursions into China and by Russian explorers to Russian expansion to the north of Japan. They were also made aware of the American whalers in the North Pacific by shipwrecked sailors. The American and British ships which tried to prise open the door were rebuffed until the arrival of the American, British and Russian expeditions in 1852-1854. As Professor McOmie in his recent study on The Opening of Japan has pointed out the assertion that Perry opened Japan is a gross exaggeration if not a myth even if he played an important part in the process. The Russians under Admiral Putiatin were a significant element in the process of opening the country. The Dutch and the British also contributed. The Europeans (westerners) were hampered by their inadequate knowledge of Japanese customs and how the country was governed. The relationship between the Shogun in Edo (later Tokyo) and the Mikado in Miyako (Kyoto) was not understood. In the first few years up to about 1862 all communications between foreign missions and the Japanese authorities had to be via Dutch interpreters. This meant that English had to be translated into Dutch and then into Japanese and vice-versa, The Japanese language at that time had no equivalent words for many political and economic terms in English. It is not surprising that there were many misunderstandings. The foreigners found the bakufu negotiators devious and untrustworthy while the Japanese thought the foreigners arrogant and rude. Only when Japanese began to be trained in English and foreign diplomats such as Ernest Satow in the British Legation mastered Japanese could progress be made in clearing up the misunderstandings. The Japanese deeply resented the unequal treaties and the system of extraterritoriality which the treaties imposed in the treaty ports. Japanese resentment was understandable, but in the absence of modern civil and criminal codes temporary extraterritoriality was needed if trade between Japan and the West was to develop. While the Americans had taken the lead in concluding the commercial treaties of 1858 and Americans continued to play an important role in modernization of Japan the lead was increasingly taken by the British and in particular by their abrasive and domineering Minister to Japan Sir Harry Parkes. One reason for the comparative decline in American interest in Japan was the American civil war. Another was American concentration on opening up the western part of North America. Half of the foreign experts appointed by the Meiji Government to help to modernise the country were British. The first railways in Japan were not only built but also run by the British. A British engineer established the first Japanese lighthouses and the engineering college established in Tokyo as the forerunner of Tokyo University had a British principal and a number of senior British teachers on its staff. But the Meiji government were determined not to be solely dependent on British experts and deliberately set out to recruit from other European countries and from the USA. In the immediate period after the first treaties of 1854/5 between Japan, the USA, Russia, Britain and the Netherlands the only other European country with a significant role was France. Although Japan did not seem to rank very high on the list of priorities of the government of the Emperor Napoleon III the French government then as later were much concerned to uphold French prestige and France was one of the first European countries after the British and the Russians to conclude a Treaty of Commerce with Japan in 1858. The final years of the Tokugawa shogunate were marked not only by the insecurity in the settlements which led to a number of assassinations particularly of British and French citizens and by attacks on European and American ships in the straits of Shimonoseki, but also by intense personal rivalry between the British and French ministers in Japan. The Japanese authorities not unnaturally tried to play the French off against the British. In 1864 prior to the joint efforts to reopen the Straits of Shimonoseki they tried to arrange a separate settlement with France much to the anger of the British but the Japanese concessions which this involved were repudiated by the bakufu. Léon Roches, the French Minister, attempted to develop a special relationship with the bakufu and a French military mission was sent to Japan. The French also did their best to alleviate continuing Japanese persecution of Japanese Christians. The second British Minister to Japan Sir Harry Parkes who had succeeded Sir Rutherford Alcock adopted an overtly neutral position in the civil war which led to the overthrow of the bakufu in 1868 but his staff at least showed a partiality towards the anti-bakufu clans led by Satsuma and eventually Choshu. The French support for the losing side reduced their influence initially with the Meiji government. French power also suffered as a result of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, but while the French presence in the Treaty ports was considerably less than the British, French interest in Japan was maintained. Interest in Japanese art was particularly strong in France and Paris became a Mecca for Japanese artists. Cultural relations between France and Japan have always been strong. German relations with Japan date from September 1860 when a Prussian flagship arrived in the bay of Edo and a Prussian treaty was concluded with Japan on 24 January 1861 with help from Henry Heusken, the Dutch interpreter to the American Consul and Minister Townsend Harris. (Heusken was assassinated shortly before the treaty was signed). The Prussian and later German Minister, Max von Brandt, stayed from 1862-1875 and established the German presence in Japan which was enhanced under his successor Karl von Eisendecker (1875-1882) and the visit to Japan of the young Prince Henry of Prussia aged 17 in 1879. In this period while the British developed their relations with the emerging Japanese navy the Japanese army increasingly looked to Prussia. German influence was also strong in Japanese medicine partly because of the development of medical studies in Germany but also because the medical texts which the Japanese had studied under the Rangaku were based on German originals. I cannot do more here than refer briefly to the development of relations between Japan and other European countries. Early Japanese diplomatic missions to Europe especially the Iwakura Mission in 1871/2 members of which travelled widely in Europe were quickly made aware of other European powers and their relative strengths. While as I have said British experts filled about half the posts opened to foreigners by the Meiji government which sought the speedy modernisation of the country experts were recruited from other European countries. Twenty-two Danes were for instance employed as o-yatoi gaikokujin between 1868 and 1889. The first Dane to visit Japan seems to have been a gunner on a Dutch ship in 1646 while a Norwegian is reported to have served as a military technician to the Shogun in 1639. When the head of the Dutch 'factory' at Deshima, Johannes Erdewin Niemann visited Edo in 1838 as leader of the Dutch biannual mission he was asked about the relative military power of various countries of Europe and whether Denmark had joined the German confederation. The first treaty between Japan and Denmark was concluded on 12 January 1867 following an approach via Sir Harry Parkes. This was based on similar treaties with Switzerland, Belgium and Italy. Belgium was fortunate in being represented in Japan in the late nineteenth century by an able and widely respected diplomat Baron d'Anethan. His despatches have been a valuable source for historians while the memoirs of his English wife have provided interesting sidelights on diplomatic life in Tokyo during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A word must be said too about Italian influences on Japan. Antonio Fontanesi (1818-82) and Giovanni Vincenzo Capelletti were invited to Japan to teach painting at the newly established college of art. Vincenzo Ragusa was also invited to teach sculpture. The Italian painter Edoardo Chiossone (1832-1898), who settled in Japan, designed Japan's first paper money and engraved portraits of members of the imperial family including the Emperors Meiji and Taisho, The main foreign policy objective of the Japanese government between 1868 and 1894 was to achieve revision of the 'unequal treaties' stemming from those concluded in 1858. Understandably the Japanese tried hard to play off the Americans against the Europeans and particularly against the British. They also tried their best to divide the Europeans. These efforts might have been successful but for the most favoured nations (MFN) clauses in the treaties. In the end revision was achieved by agreement with the British in 1894 and the entry into force of new treaties in 1899 abolishing extraterritoriality. The Japanese government at the end of the nineteenth century inevitably concentrated on their relations with the major European powers with interests in the Far East. These were Britain, Russia, Germany and France. The Dutch could not be forgotten not least because of the Dutch East Indies and Japan's historical connections. The Portuguese still had a presence in Macao but were hardly significant for Japan. The Spanish presence in the Far East was much reduced by the cession of the Philippines to the USA in 1898. The Japanese were determined to show that they were a power to be reckoned with and they wanted some of the spoils which the other powers were they thought winning in China. The Sino-Japanese war of 1894/5 demonstrated that Japan had arrived, but it did not convince the Russians, Germans and French and as a result of the so-called triple intervention the Japanese were forced to return the Liaotung peninsula to China. The British wisely kept out of this. The Japanese deeply resented the intervention. The Japanese wanted to expand in Korea and in North China. This inevitably involved confrontation with Russia. First they had to ensure that the French and the Germans did not support Russia in any conflict. This was the main Japanese objective in concluding the first Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. In the Russo-Japanese war of 1904/5 the British were almost involved in war with Russia when in an incident in fog in the North Sea when Russian ships fired on British trawlers, one of which was sunk and some members of the crew killed. The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 marked the high point in Japanese prestige and popularity in Britain and probably in the rest of Europe outside Russia. Japanese prowess on land and sea was much admired. In the era of the globetrotters Japan was a popular destination. Japan was famed for its cherry blossoms, geisha and Mt Fuji and was given a romantic image which had little to do with realities in Japan. But Europeans were now beginning to make serious studies of Japan, its history and culture. Most of these studies have now been overtaken by the work of specialist Japananologists but we should still recall the work of Satow, Aston and Basil Hall Chamberlain from Britain, Karl Florenz, Netto and Wagener in Germany and men like Bonneau in France. Unfortunately the work of this pioneering generation of foreign scholars was inadequately followed up and when the Second World War came European countries found themselves short of experts in Japanese language and culture. The British Japan consular service was almost unique in ensuring that the British outposts in Japan were manned by officers who spoke Japanese. As far as I am aware only the Dutch attempted to emulate the British in this respect. This is not the place for a discussion of the way in which relations developed between the European powers and Japan after the Russo-Japanese war. The most significant feature was that of the increasing suspicions of Japanese intentions in China and East Asia. Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 the Japanese saw their opportunity and soon managed to seize German concessions and territories in the Far East. They also saw the chance to expand in China and made their infamous Twenty-one demands on China in January 1915. The Japanese navy did help the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean although they refused to participate in the fighting on land. The collapse of Russia in 1917/18 opened the way for Japanese intervention in Siberia, but this yielded Japan no long term gains. For the Japanese the Treaty of Versailles was a disappointment. They had to accept League of Nations mandate for their continued control over German possessions in the Pacific and failed to get the League Charter to ban racial discrimination as a result of opposition from the USA, Britain and America. This failure fed Japanese resentment of the West in general and America and Britain in particular. The failure to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921 was basically due to British fear that American-Japanese hostility of which there were growing signs could embroil Britain in conflict with the USA. The Four-Power pact of December 1921 brought in France but solved nothing. Japanese aspirations in Manchuria and the growing power of the military in Japan led up to the Manchurian incident and the Japanese decision to withdraw from the League. Japanese 'fascism' was different from the Italian variety and from Nazism in Germany, but Japan was gradually drawn into alliance with Germany and Italy and on 27 September 1940 a tripartite pact was signed. The Second World War in which Britain, France and the Netherlands were forced out of their possessions in South East Asia by the Japanese was a traumatic blow for them. Resentment against Japan especially in Britain and Holland was greatly exacerbated by the ill-treatment of British and Dutch prisoners of war and the brutal methods of the Japanese occupation forces. These factors made post-war reconciliation with Japan much more difficult. The European part in the defeat of Japan was limited. British forces having defeated the Japanese in Burma were about to land in Malaya when the Japanese surrendered. The British had to re-establish their rule in Singapore and Malaya and disarm the Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies and in Indo-China. The Dutch and the French returned but there was no going back to the old colonial rule. The post war problems of South East Asia inevitably became intricately connected with the relations of the British and the Dutch and to some extent the French with Japan. The British Commonwealth (Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India up to partition) had a limited role in the occupation of Japan, but the control rested with SCAP (General MacArthur) and the Americans. After 1947 the British presence was small and British influence on occupation policies was marginal. The British role in the negotiations which led up to the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan should not be exaggerated, but the Americans did not want the Treaty to be seen as an American Diktat. The Treaty was more generous than some in Britain would have wanted but with the exception of the limited provision in Article XVI for compensation for former prisoners of war it left no permanent scars. It was signed and ratified by Britain and the European states which had been allies in the war against Japan. Current EU member states which signed the treaty were France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece. Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, together with the Soviet Union, rejected the treaty. In the first few years after the coming into force of the Peace Treaty Japan was of marginal interest to most European states. The first event to attract European attention towards Japan was the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. The Europeans were impressed not only by Japanese organization but also by modern Japanese architecture and the engineering achievements shown by the Shinkansen ('bullet train') and the new roads being built in Tokyo and elsewhere. Japan began to be seen as a potential market and Europeans were impressed by Japanese economic growth. These impressions were reinforced by Expo 70 in Osaka where a number of European powers participated through individual country pavilions. But trade was a major problem. European industry in many sectors was sclerotic. It had failed to modernize quickly enough and adapt to change in the post-war world. European governments responded to pressures from industries in difficulties by adopting protectionist policies. In 1955 Japan was accepted as a member of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) but Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands invoked Article 36 allowing them to continue discrimination against Japanese imports. In theory Japan achieved MFN treatment when new Treaties of Commerce and Navigation were signed with Japan (the UK-Japan Treaty was signed in 1962) but these included a safeguard protocol allowing discrimination against imports from Japan in exceptional circumstances. Despite pressures from industry Britain fearing Japanese retaliation never invoked this protocol, but France did so and applied various measures designed to slow imports from Japan including insisting that VCRs from Japan should go through the customs post at Poitiers. Trade friction was exacerbated by the huge increase in Japanese exports to Europe (a tenfold increase in the 1970s compared with a fivefold increase in European exports to Japan). Europeans began to speak of concentrated and torrential Japanese exports (shuchu go-u-teki yushutsu) which it was feared threatened European economies. This came to a climax in 1976 as unemployment in Europe mounted and the trade deficit reached a new record. The problems in the 1960s had been primarily over textiles. In the 1970s the main problem was over motor cars. The French and the Italians were even more protectionist than the British. Japanese industry fearing that the Japanese economy would suffer as a result of European protectionism adopted 'voluntary restraint' arrangements which had been used to mollify the United States to restrain the growth of Japanese exports to Europe. They were also induced by investment incentives and other measures to invest in production facilities in Europe. Britain led the way but other European countries including France soon followed suit. Attempts had been made to coordinate the trade policies of members of the EEC through the 113 committee in Brussels with limited success. In 1979 a European Commission report drafted by the late Sir Roy Denman referred to the Japanese as 'workaholics living in rabbit hutches'. Eventually it was recognized not only in Brussels but in the capital of EEC member states that a common EEC trade policy towards Japan should be adopted. This led in due course to more sensible, pragmatic and liberal trade policies towards Japan although it was almost the end of the last century that trade in motor cars was finally liberalized. In the 1970s and 1980s European governments began to recognize that Japan was an increasingly important political power and that a political dialogue with Japan should be developed. This led in 1991 to the Japan-EEC joint declaration of political friendship. A framework for formal consultations was developed providing for regular ministerial discussions and through annual meetings between the President of the European Council, the President of the Commission and the Japanese Prime Minister. It was hoped that these would balance the US-Japan dialogue. In practice this has not happened not least because of European disarray. The Japanese government have attached more importance to the bilateral dialogues with the British Prime Minister, the French President and the German Chancellor. Like Dr Kissinger the Japanese did not know to whom they should speak when trying to discover a European view. This was of course hardly surprising when there often was no unified European view. One Japanese commentator (Mr Nishikawa Megumi of the Mainichi Shimbun) recently (Gaiko Forum Summer 2006) asserted that Japan was similar to Europe in that since the war both had come to understand the need for restraint on the exercise of national sovereignty and were actively dedicated to achieving an international order based on multilateralism in contrast to the USA, Russia, China, India and Brazil which continue to accord priority to national sovereignty. He noted that at the UN Security Council Japan had voted with Europe many more times than it has with the United States. He noted that European concerns about Asian security had lessened since the end of the cold war, although East Asia still lives with residual effects of the cold war. However at the fourteenth Japan-EU summit in May 2005 there had been agreement to 'initiate strategic dialogues on East Asia's security environment, especially on issues pertaining to China. Nishikawa also drew attention to the way in which European homogeneity had been weakened by the expansion of the EU in 2004 by the accession of 10 new states in central and Eastern Europe. Dr Tsuruoka Michito in the same issue of Gaiko Forum took up the theme of trilateralism - US, Europe and Japan, where the weakest link has been that between Europe and Japan. He too noted the ending of the Cold War had led to a weakening in solidarity between Japan and\ Europe. He pointed out that with the exception of disagreement between Japan and Europe over the proposed lifting of the EU arms embargo against China there had been very little in the EU-Japan political dialogue which 'for Japanese foreign policy could be considered high-priority issues in the political arena.' Chris Patten, the former EU Commission for External Relations said that 'the problem of [EU-Japan relations] is that there is no problem.' We should not belittle the importance of economic and political relations, but understanding is as much dependent on the cultural dimension. This has grown hugely in the last half century. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s the number of Europeans resident in Tokyo who could communicate effectively in the Japanese language was very limited there has been a huge increase not only in European businessmen (thanks in part to a scheme adopted by the European Commission covering the training of European businessmen in Japanese) who speak reasonable Japanese but also of European students and scholars of Japanese. At the same time Japanese proficiency in foreign languages especially English has also grown significantly. British higher education institutions providing facilities for the study of Japanese language and culture have faced funding difficulties and are not as well supported as they should be, but the British Association of Japanese Studies (BASJ) is active and its journal demonstrates that there are a number of outstanding scholars in Japanese studies in Britain. I am not in a position to comment on the particular problems of Japanese studies in European universities but I am conscious of the work done by the European Association of Japanese Studies and I have been impressed by scholars of Japanese whom I have met from a number of European universities including universities in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France. Japanese art is well represented in museums in Europe especially in Britain, France, Germany and Holland, but there are, I know, important collections of Japanese art in places such as far apart as Lisbon, Krakow and Stockholm. The Japan-EU Year of People-to People Exchanges held in 2005 boasted that it had featured over 1,000 programmes carried out on both sides. While a good deal has been done in recent years to promote Japan's cultural image in Europe through special exhibitions and promotions the results have been patchy. Many of the myths about Japan have been dissipated but the image of Japan in Europe is a mixed one and for many Japan remains both remote and 'inscrutable'. One problem is that the Japan Foundation, Japan's cultural organization with responsibility for promoting Japan's cultural image abroad has very limited funds as compared for instance to the budgets of French, German and British cultural organizations. The Japan Foundation has cultural centres in Paris, Rome and Cologne, but only an office in Britain. It is not easy to draw sensible conclusion from this canter through five centuries of the history of relations between Europe and Japan except such obvious ones as: 1. For the Japanese Europe remains largely a collection of different states with different language and cultures. Europe will only count as such with the Japanese when it presents a united front and there is a unified European view. As the EU has grown from 15 to 25 member states and is set to expand further, if more slowly, it seems likely to become more difficult to reach common European positions. This is liable to weaken the Europe-Japan link. There is a real danger that European eyes will become too focussed on China and that this will lessen the importance attached to Japan. WE should do all we can to ensure that the continued importance and strength of Japan is recognized in both the political and strategic contexts. 2. Economic relations, trade and investment are likely to remain matters of prime concern in Europe's relations with Japan. The European Commission needs to ensure that the policies of EU member states do not get out of line, but the EU also needs to ensure that these are not based on the lowest common denominator. Japanese competition and Japanese investment are beneficial to the EU. 3. EU relations with Japan need to be backed by a greater cultural understanding. Japanese studies need to be further developed in European countries. The Japanese should be encouraged to put more effort into cultural promotion in Europe.

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