by Donald Keene
Nagai believed that this unhappy situation had arisen because of the policy of sakoku (closure of the country) adopted by the shogunate after the Shimabara rebellion. Earlier in Japanese history, not only foreigners had visited Japan freely but facilities had even been erected to accommodate them. Indeed, isolation from other countries was by no means true to ancient Japanese traditions. Had not the goddess of the Ise Shrine promised that imperial influence would extend everywhere the sun shone? The empress Jingū’s conquest of the Three Han Kingdoms of Korea was in accord with the intentions of her divine ancestor, and if she had known about countries farther away than the Three Han Kingdoms, she probably would have continued her conquests. But now the government, far from extending Japanese territory abroad, passively allows barbarians to enter the country. Even supposing that sakoku were desirable, it could be successfully maintained only if the country possessed striking power; isolation that depended entirely on Japan’s island situation was bound to fail. At present the most urgent need is the power both to defend and to attack.
Nagai begged the emperor to change his views on sakoku and, returning to the policy of his ancestors, extend imperial authority abroad. He should establish a policy of insisting that all five continents offer tribute to the imperial land, in this way transforming a national calamity into a national blessing. There would be peace within the country, thanks to the union of the court and the military, and once Japan possessed an abundance of warships, imperial rule could be imposed throughout the world.8
Mōri Takachika (through his emissary Nagai Uta) was attempting to persuade Emperor Kōmeiō to abandon his support for sakoku, not by preaching the brotherhood of man, but by reminding him of the Sun Goddess’s promise of Japanese domination of the world once the court and the military had united. Several steps remained to be explained between the present, when the debilitated Japanese military are no match for the foreigners, and the future, when countries all over the world will pay tribute to Japan; but it was hoped that profits from trade with foreigners would enable the Japanese to strengthen their armaments.
As Takachika had expected, Ōgimachisanjō passed on the contents of Nagai’s memorial to the emperor who was pleased to receive it. Kōmei did not approve of dismantling sakoku, but he favored strengthening Japanese military capacity, and he never wavered in his support of kōbu gattai. He commanded Takachika to use his influence to promote understanding between the Court Council and the shogunate and bestowed on him this poem:
kuni no kaze Even if stormy winds
fukiokoshite mo Should rage through the country,
amatsuhi wo I shall wait for them
moto no hikari ni To return the sun in heaven
kaesu wo zo matsu To its pristine radiance.
As the result of Nagai’s exertions, the shogunate ultimately agreed to ask Takachika to serve as its intermediary in negotiations aimed at achieving kōbu gattai. Unfortunately for Nagai, however, the wording of the document he submitted to Ōgimachisanjō was deemed to include disrespectful language, leading to a controversy that ended with Nagai’s dismissal.9
During most of that year, 1861, the main matter occupying the court’s attention was Kazunomiya’s journey to Edo as the bride of the shogun. The date of her departure, the end of October 1861, was initially set in 1860. The shogunate hastily repaired the roads along which she would travel; but the emperor sought a delay on the grounds that the princess should be in the capital in the spring of the following year for the services on the seventeenth anniversary of the death of her father, Emperor Ninkō. This request was submitted to the shoshidai, Sakai Tadaaki, but he was opposed, citing the preparations that had already been completed. Nonetheless, the shogunate yielded to the extent of allowing Kazunomiya to leave as late as the middle of the November.
Even after this arrangement had been reached, a fresh obstacle to the marriage arose. Since the middle of 1860, the shogunate had been privately conducting negotiations with Prussia, Belgium, and Switzerland for opening diplomatic relations, and at the end of the year a treaty with Prussia was signed.10 When Kōmei received word that the shogunate was concluding three new treaties with foreign countries, he was, predictably, enraged, and he declared that the engagement of Kazunomiya and the shogun should be broken. He said that it was precisely because he had trusted the shogunate’s promise to abrogate the treaties that he had consented to the marriage. The chancellor and other court officials, panic stricken at the thought of the effect that Kōmei’s decision might have on relations between the court and the shogunate, attempted to mollify him, and in the end succeeded in getting him to agree to postponing for a few years (rather than terminating) the marriage plans. When Kazunomiya was asked her opinion, she answered with startling frankness that she had never wished for the marriage and that she hoped that she would not have to go to Edo until every last foreigner had been expelled and the East was peaceful; if this failed to happen, she hoped that the wedding would be called off.11
The marriage was preserved by an adroit maneuver by Sakai Tadaaki, who objected to transmitting to the shogunate the angry reactions of the court. He insisted that the information he had given concerning the new treaties had been privately transmitted to the chancellor and that it would be a violation of confidence if a formal protest were lodged with the shogunate. Kōmei was eventually persuaded to leave everything to the chancellor. On New Year’s Day of 1861, the shogunate sent the court a message explaining in detail the circumstances of the three new treaties and promising once again to expel the foreigners in seven to ten years.
Several other crises threatened to destroy the marriage plans, but in September 1861 Emperor Kōmei, his anger abated, agreed that Kazunomiya should leave for Edo in November. Princess Chikako, as Kazunomiya was now officially known,12 left Kyōto reluctantly.13 She visited the Shugaku-in, which had been refurbished for her grandfather, Emperor Kōkaku, and on the return journey worshiped at the Kamo and Kitano Shrines. She attended a performance of nō in the palace. When she went to pray at the Gion Shrine for a safe journey, the emperor and the prince watched as her procession left the palace gate. On November 17 she visited the palace to bid farewell to the emperor, empress, and prince and received presents from them. Before her departure, the emperor wrote the princess a letter asking that when she was married, she would use her influence over her husband to effect the expulsion of the barbarians. Finally, the day she dreaded, the day of her departure, arrived. On November 22 her palanquin left the Katsura Palace, accompanied by court officials. A year later, when patriots decided that the princess’s departure for Edo had been an unspeakable affront to imperial dignity, the two nobles who accompanied her all the way to Edo (Chigusa Aribumi and Iwakura Tomomi) were punished for their role in the affair.14
The marriage procession was on a grand scale—as many as 10,000 armed men,15 horses, and an enormous amount of food, gifts, and baggage, including a dismantled Kyōto-style house that was to be erected in Edo, in keeping with the second of Kazunomiya’s five conditions for agreeing to the marriage. The princess traveled in the utmost luxury, with frequent stops along the way at places of touristic interest, not reaching Edo until December 16, though two weeks was usually ample time for the journey. The huge number of people in her entourage was deemed essential to guarantee her absolute safety. (There had been rumors that the princess might be abducted along the way.) Males over fifteen were forbidden to cross the path of the procession, and in the cities men were ordered to remain in back rooms, leaving the women to bow from their doors. The route taken was devious, in part to avoid places with inauspicious names; for example, in order not to cross Satta Pass, whose name suggests satta, or “divorced,” the procession left the Tōkaidō, the normal route to Edo, and took a long detour through the mountains along another highway. Unfortunately, there was no way of avoiding the enkiri enoki, whose name meant “broken vows nettle-tree,” highly inauspicious before a marriage, but every last leaf on the tree was concealed with straw mat
ting so as to protect the princess from any harmful effects from its name.16
The marriage between the princess and the youthful shogun did not take place until March 11, 1862, but even before then, opponents of the marriage had resorted to violence. On February 14, 1862, the senior councillor Andō Nobumasa (1819–1871), a leading proponent of both kōbu gattai and the marriage, was set upon by six rōnin from Mito while on his way to the shogun’s castle. One man fired a shot into Andō’s palanquin, wounding him. The other five men attacked with drawn swords, but Andō was protected by some fifty retainers (the assassination of Ii Naosuke having alerted shogunate officials to the danger of traveling without sufficient escort), who quickly disposed of the would-be assassins.
The rōnin carried with them a manifesto in which they stated why they had been impelled to take this action.17 They accused Andō of having deceived the court: although he had given kōbu gattai as the reason for making the emperor’s sister marry the shogun, in reality it was no more than a scheme for obtaining imperial consent to the treaties with the foreigners. The rōnin had been aroused in particular by a rumor circulating at the time. Hori Toshihiro (1818–1860), a shogunate official who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, was said to have left behind an open letter to Andō accusing him of disloyalty.18 According to the letter, Andō had, at the instigation of Townsend Harris, plotted to depose the emperor. To this end, he had employed two scholars of national learning to produce examples from the distant past of emperors who had been dethroned.19 The assassins, believing the rumors and angered by Andō’s apparent friendliness with foreigners, decided that he had defiled the sacred Way of a true subject. For this reason they had no choice but to impose Heaven’s punishment on him. The term tenchū (divine punishment), though ancient in origin, first came into vogue at this time as a justification for the political murders of the 1860s.
Having narrowly escaped death at the hands of assailants, Andō might have been the object of sympathy, and his position might have become even stronger than before; but in fact, he lost the considerable political power he had enjoyed as the leader of the shogunate faction favoring economic reform and trade with the West, probably because the anti-shogunate forces had moved into the ascendancy.
One other crisis occurred before the marriage could take place. The shogunate had promised Princess Chikako that she would be allowed to return to Kyōto for the services in memory of her father to be held on the seventeenth anniversary of his death, but her departure for Kyōto was repeatedly delayed. The princess finally sent her senior lady-in-waiting in her stead. Kōmei was angered by the shogunate’s failure to keep its promises, but the latter argued that the long journey would fatigue the princess before her wedding.
Chikako was treated with the utmost deference at the wedding. The ceremony went on for about ten hours, sufficient time for the bride to change costume many times. Her feelings on first encountering her husband were not recorded, but the marriage, despite its political background and later problems with her mother-in-law, was as happy as any dynastic marriage could be. The princess’s wedded life lasted for only five and a half years, until Iemochi’s sudden death, but when she herself was on her deathbed, she asked to be buried in the Tokugawa tomb rather than in Kyōto.
The marriage of the emperor’s sister and the shogun achieved the aim of bringing about closer relations between the imperial family and the shogunate, and it ushered in a brief period when the emperor enjoyed greater influence than he had in centuries.20 kōmei unswervingly favored kōbu gattai and opposed those who advocated overthrowing the shogunate, but tension mounted as the shogunate continued to sign treaties of commerce and amity with foreign countries, even though the court desired nothing more than to have every last foreigner expelled from Japan.
Shifts of policy were frequent and abrupt in all the factions, resulting at times in surprising alliances or hostilities. In the past, Satsuma had often behaved like a separate kingdom, almost independent of the shogunate, but at the end of 1861 the youthful daimyo, Shimazu Tadayoshi (1840–1897), sent envoys to the capital, offering to serve as a conduit in transmitting imperial wishes to the shogunate. The envoys offered Kōmei a sword, for which he expressed gratitude in a poem inscribed in his own hand:
yo wo omou There can be no doubt
kokoro no tachi to This sword possesses a heart
shirarekeri That cares for the world;
saya kumori naki Brightly and without a cloud
mononofu no tama Shines the soul of the soldier.21
When Shimazu Tadayoshi and his father received the poem, they were moved to tears.
In June 1862 the Satsuma daimyo and his father sent envoys to the capital informing the former minister of the left Konoe Tadahiro and the acting major counselor Konoe Tadafusa of their support for the emperor and their conviction that change in the shogunate was of urgent importance. They also expressed fears that the emperor was insufficiently protected, and for this reason, they had decided to send troops of their own into the capital. Konoe Tadafusa, alarmed, tried to fend off this unwanted assistance, but the Satsuma leaders would not listen. On June 15 some 1,000 Satsuma soldiers entered the capital. Their leader explained that they wanted to see some high-ranking court officials dismissed and the chancellor Kujō Hisatada replaced by Konoe Tadahiro. They also had demands concerning the reorganization of the shogunate. What they sought was the dismissal of officials who opposed kōbu gattai. They demanded that the shogun swear fealty to the court. Once the imperial dignity was fully ensured by this action, ways should be considered of how it might be extended overseas.22 That night, possibly as a test of the genuineness of Satsuma’s promises of loyalty, the emperor commanded Shimazu Hisamitsu to quiet the turbulent rōnin in the capital.
Five days later, Hisamitsu moved into action. Before he arrived in Kyōto, the samurai and rōnin who supported sonnō jōi supposed that he would lead them in an attack on the shogunate, but when he made it plain that reform and not destruction of the shogunate was his aim, they were much disappointed. Members of the Hagi and other domains who favored violent action met at the Terada-ya, an inn in Fushimi south of the capital, with malcontent members of the Satsuma domain to plan the assassination of the chancellor and Sakai Tadaaki. The plotters and members of the Satsuma domain who were obedient to Hisamitsu’s orders clashed. The rebels were massacred, and the emperor, greatly pleased, bestowed on Hisamitsu a dagger from the imperial collection, praising him for his victory over lawless men. Shimazu Hisamitsu had won a high reputation at the court.
Mutsuhito figures hardly at all in this part of the chronicle of his life. We know that he saw off Kazunomiya when she left for Edo, and perhaps he was aware (even at the age of ten) of her sadness. In June there was a ceremony, patterned on the one Kōmei had undergone at the same age, to commemorate his beginning the study of the Confucian classics, although in fact he had started three years earlier. An epidemic of measles that summer caused alarm in the palace, and prayers were said to preserve the prince. Another baby sister died, less than a year old. On a more pleasant note that same year, Mutsuhito first tried his hand at painting.
These bits of information are scattered among the prosaic events recorded in the official chronology. It is easy to miss the facts of lasting importance. For example, the section describing events of September 1862 records in detail the religious observances at various shrines, the emperor’s evening spent admiring the moon, and his presentation of gifts to the crown prince. These and similarly unexciting events are followed by the entry for September 14, which opens with a flat statement: three nobles—Iwakura Tomomi, Chigusa Aribumi, and Tominokōji Hironao—accused of having cooperated with the shogunate in sending Kazunomiya to Edo, were confined to their houses, relieved of their posts, and urged to become Buddhist priests.23
Behind this surprising development was the great intensification of pressure from supporters of sonnō jōi as their numbers swelled with malcontents and their actions be
came more reckless. Anyone who opposed them was likely to be threatened if not killed. Just a month earlier, Shimada Sakon, a retainer of Chancellor Kujō Hisatada, was attacked and killed. His head was exposed at Shijō-kawara, and his severed limbs were thrown into the Takase River. This initiated a wave of terror, which the extremists called tenchū, or “divine punishment.” When the shogunate showed itself powerless to suppress the disorder, the terrorists gained the upper hand. They singled out for special attack “four villains and two ladies,”24 members of the court whom they charged with responsibility for Kazunomiya’s marriage to the shogun. They found support among the nobles, and the jōi faction now controlled some of the major domains. Despite his repeated statements of support for the shogunate, Kōmei declared at this critical moment that he had not in any way deviated from his sworn mission of jōi,25 an avowal that probably encouraged the perpetrators of “divine punishment.”
It is hard to imagine what effect these developments may have had on Mutsuhito’s development. Was he still too young to understand what was happening in the world outside the Gosho? Or was he deliberately sheltered from the raging controversy and news of the murders? Or did even this prince, living deep within the Gosho, become aware, when people he had often seen at the court ceased to appear, that major changes had occurred? Did Kōmei explain to his son why he was always so agitated and fatigued? In any case, the harsh realities of the times were gradually intruding into a world that had been guided for centuries by traditional conceptions of order and decorum. Now change would be the rule.
