Emperor of Japan

by Donald Keene

  The announcement of the forthcoming journey, made on March 30, set the date for his departure on June 16. In May the people of the Shimo-ina district of Nagano sent a petition to the emperor imploring him to travel through their backward part of the country rather than through Kiso, which already had a fine road and might soon expect the railway. Such a visit would serve to stimulate the production of silk, the local industry, and would give women and children, who could not hope to visit the capital even once in their lifetimes, an unforgettable experience.8 Although the emperor did not accept the petition, it suggests the people’s eagerness for the emperor to visit their region.

  In preparation for the emperor’s travels, the roads were improved. For example, the road beyond Sasago, formerly a perilous trail into the mountains, had been widened and railings erected at places where there was a sharp drop below.9 The cost of mending the roads over which the procession would pass soon became the subject of conflicting statements by the newspapers and the authorities. According to one newspaper, each household in the district was required to pay part of the cost of improving the road and of providing flags, roadside lighting, and the like. It was reported that many people, though delighted at the prospect of worshiping the emperor as he passed, had complained that even if they sold all their possessions, they would not be able to raise the 3 yen, 53 sen, 3 rin that was their share of the expenses.10 The headman of the town of Kita Fukashi, however, denied that vast sums of money were being spent in preparation for the emperor’s visit. He insisted that no levy had been imposed on the population, that the expenses would be paid by public-spirited persons.11

  Perhaps the most striking editorial on the emperor’s proposed journey appeared in the Tōkyō Yokohama mainichi shimbun on April 4. The writer drew a distinction between necessary and unnecessary travels by the emperor. At the beginning of his reign when people in such places as the northeast or in Kyūshū were unaware there was an emperor who ranked even higher than their feudal lords, it was necessary for him to journey to these places to make people aware of his existence. However, the editorial continued,

  the people of the entire country now know there is an emperor, and they realize there is no one else to whom they should offer their respect and awe. It is a time when he can remain in his palace and govern calmly and without strain. Why, when the country is so well governed, should he be obliged to travel about in his palanquin, braving the burning heat? … In such a time as this, the thirteenth year of Meiji, one can say that an imperial progress is unnecessary.12

  This view seems to have found receptive ears among the emperor’s advisers, and he made only two more progresses during the remainder of his reign.13

  The same editorial writer also refuted the argument that the emperor’s travels were necessary because they enabled him to learn about conditions in the country. He declared that one could learn quite enough about conditions by reading the newspapers. Other people had suggested that it was important for the emperor to see with his own eyes the conditions of misery under which some of his subjects lived, but because the route taken by the emperor’s palanquin never passed through such places, he saw only the most prosperous areas. It was insulting to the emperor to say that travel to remote parts of the country was his only way of discovering the hardships suffered by his people.

  Another editorial (in the Chōya shimbun) was addressed to people who lived along the route that the emperor would travel, urging them to take advantage of this rare opportunity to let him know how they really lived. It was to obtain such information, the editorial said, that the emperor traveled to distant parts of the country. Of course, people would be delighted to have the opportunity of seeing the splendor of the imperial palanquin, but they should not, in their joy over welcoming the emperor, attempt to conceal the true state of conditions. Not only would this defeat the purpose of the progress, but their servility would be an affront to the imperial virtue.14

  It is hard to imagine what the common people specifically could have done to enlighten the emperor as his palanquin went by. But it seems also to be true that Potemkin villages were not erected in order to beguile the emperor into supposing that his subjects were all gratefully enjoying the blessings of his reign.

  Finally, an editorial in English, published in the Japan Weekly Mail, stated the purpose of the emperor’s journeys in these terms:

  At the termination of the present tour, His Majesty will have seen more of the country than the great majority of his subjects. Schools, industrial establishments, objects of antiquarian or historical interest, will all receive attentive examination. The object of such progresses as this is not mere pleasure-seeking. Indeed, in many cases, a journey into the interior, even with all the luxuries of Majesty, must be quite the reverse of a pleasure. It is doubtless the desire of His Majesty and of his ministers that he should be acquainted, by personal observation, with the condition of the country over which he rules, and thereby fit himself more and more for the duties of the august station which he occupies.15

  This is probably what the emperor himself and the members of the government believed at the time, although recent scholars have interpreted the progresses in terms of their effectiveness in building an imposing image of the emperor and causing the populace to think of him not simply as a benevolent ruler who wished to know the conditions under which his subjects lived but as an overseer whose unwavering gaze was fastened on their lives.16

  The emperor set out as planned on June 16, 1880. He was accompanied by a retinue of 360 people, including Prince Sadanaru, the prime minister Sanjō Sanetomi, a councillor, a minister, high-ranking military officers, the minister of the imperial household, chamberlains, a court physician, mounted officers and men, foot soldiers, grooms, and so on. This was a large retinue by our standards, and it was augmented by local security agents wherever he went, but it was by no means large by Japanese standards of that time. Even on quite ordinary occasions, the emperor was accompanied by a large number of attendants,17 and it is unlikely that people who saw the progress pass were stunned by its numbers or magnificence.

  The first stop was at Hachiōji, where the emperor examined such local products as silk thread and material. He was offered fireflies from a nearby river that were forwarded to the empress dowager and the empress. The latter responded with a poem that suggested both her loneliness and the comfort the gift had brought.

  The journey was far easier than the progress of 1878 to Niigata and the Hokuriku Provinces, but it was hardly a royal progress in European style. On June 18, for example, the emperor rose at four in the morning and was carried off in the rain over twisted mountain paths. He traveled all that day, sometimes in a sedan chair, sometimes in a horse-pulled carriage, reaching his destination at Sasago after five that afternoon. His quarters that night were no better than a ramshackle hut, for the village offered no more suitable accommodations.18

  One new note was struck on this journey: whenever the emperor passed through beautiful scenery, he asked a photographer to take pictures. Later on, the emperor told the photographer not to wait for his command but to take pictures wherever the scenery was particularly beautiful. This was one way the emperor would have of recalling the sights he had passed.

  The summer heat made the journey anything but a pleasure excursion. The emperor, as usual, inspected schools, factories, and (in Yamanashi Prefecture) a wine distillery. In Kōfu he visited a hospital founded in 1872 where he saw an exhibition of the more than twenty varieties of insects vomited by a girl suffering from some strange disease. He also examined the mummy of the priest Myōshin, who had died about fifty years earlier.19

  In Kuwana the progress was greeted by particularly enthusiastic crowds, even though Kuwana had been one of the domains that held out longest against the imperial forces in the struggle between court and shogunate fourteen years earlier. The emperor observed a chemistry experiment conducted by two prize pupils at the teachers’ training school in Tsu and later listened at the middle
school to five pupils deliver lectures on the history of the world.

  On July 8, although the weather was extremely hot, the emperor put on his dress uniform and, carrying the sword and jewel, went to worship at the Inner and Outer Shrines in Ise. The emperor, going first to the Outer Shrine, washed his hands, and then passed through the tamagaki (shrine fence) to the hamayuka, a platform erected at the foot of the stairs of the sanctuary. He removed his hat and, in an attitude of deepest reverence, bowed in worship. Later he went to the Inner Shrine where an identical ceremony took place. The order of his visits to the two shrines was apparently based on the belief that Toyouke no ōkami, the goddess of agriculture, was fundamental to all existence. But experts in Shintō lore, learning of the proposed order of worship, insisted that he go first to the shrine of Amaterasu-ōmikami, the foundress of the imperial line. Their protest was rejected, and the emperor followed the precedent established in 1869 when, on his first visit to Ise, he worshiped first at the Outer Shrine.20

  The weather was so hot when the progress reached Kameyama that the emperor rose at 3 A.M. to profit by the relative cool of early morning. He left his quarters at 5:30 A.M. to observe military maneuvers near Yokkaichi. The next day he rose at 2:30 A.M. and went on horseback to observe maneuvers between Kameyama and Seki. It has been justly said that Meiji liked nothing better than observing maneuvers.

  The last stage of the journey, from Ōtsu to Kyōto, was by train. This was made possible by the new railway tunnel through the mountains east of Kyōto, the first such tunnel in Japan. No doubt the emperor was glad to be back in Kyōto, but disappointingly little is recorded concerning his activities. On July 15, the day after his arrival, he granted an audience to various high-ranking dignitaries, including Buddhist priests. He contributed 100 yen to the rebuilding of the Bukkō-ji, a temple burned during the fighting in 1864. On the sixteenth he visited the Sennyū-ji, the site of his father’s tomb. On his way back, he stopped at the Myōhō-in and inspected its treasures. The attention the emperor gave to Buddhist temples was not surprising in Kyōto, a city full of temples; but it contrasted with the anti-Buddhist measures of the early years of his reign and indicated that the persecution had ended.

  The moment that may have most affected the emperor during his stay in Kyōto was when, on the way to visit his aunt, Princess Sumiko, he stopped to look at the Sachi no i, the well dug in Nakayama Tadayasu’s garden during the drought of 1853. Emperor Kōmei, pleased by the abundance of good water, had given the well the name Sachi, Meiji’s childhood name.21

  When the emperor arrived at the princess’s residence, he gave her two cloisonné boxes, one containing confetti from Yamada in Ise, and the other rock candy from Ōsaka. The unpretentious nature of these gifts is endearing. The princess had arranged a program of five nō and four kyōgen to divert the emperor. The performance was attended also by members of the nobility still living in the old capital, a momentary revival of their former glory.

  The rest of the emperor’s journey passed without incident. From Kyōto he proceeded to Kōbe, from where he sailed to Yokohama, reaching Tōkyō on July 23. After a few weeks of recuperating from his journey, on August 16 he summoned the ministers and councillors to discuss the advisability of collecting peasants’ land rents in rice rather than in cash. The various ministries had failed to reduce expenses, despite the government’s injunctions, and the leaders were obliged to search for another way to redress the financial crisis. They concluded that the crisis had resulted from collecting rent on farm land in cash, and their solution was to revert to the old custom of collecting rent from the peasants in rice. The chief proponent of this policy was Councillor Ōki Takatō (1832–1899).

  Proponents argued that the sudden general rise in prices could be attributed to the sharply higher price of rice, which had affected all other commodity prices. If the government received payments in rice, it would be able to control the price, for when the price was high, it would sell the rice it had stored, and when it was low, it would buy rice, thereby maintaining the price at an acceptable level. They noted without pleasure that the high prices paid for rice had brought such prosperity to the villages that farmers had begun to indulge in luxuries. Farmers were now buying costly imports, which hurt Japanese industry.

  Kuroda Kiyotaka, one of the strongest proponents of a change in method of payment, pointed out that in the past, farmers were content with coarse grains, but now they ate rice as their staple food. The financial crisis had arisen because the sale of rice was left entirely to the farmers. Accordingly, they should be required to pay at least part of their rent in rice, which the government could use to keep the price stable.

  The councillors were divided on the issue. On August 16 the prime minister and the minister of the left visited the palace to explain the proposal. They said that a decision by the emperor himself was the only way of breaking the impasse and suggested that representatives of both factions discuss the issue in his presence.22

  On August 31 Iwakura proposed an eleven-point program for rescuing Japan from its financial crisis. The first point, which he considered to be the most important, provided that one-quarter of the rents be paid in rice. He deplored the tendency of even the humblest farmers, the beneficiaries of higher prices for rice, to shun other grains and eat rice themselves. This meant that there was not enough rice for the samurai, merchants, or artisans, necessitating its import. The farmers’ newly acquired taste for luxury items had caused an increase in the demand for cotton cloth, sugar, coal, cooking oil, and the like. The farmers had also become lazy, a sign portending a decline in agriculture. They should return to their old ways and eat coarse grains, and when that happened, Japan, instead of importing rice, would become an exporter.23

  The callousness of Iwakura and his supporters was not only surprising but shocking in their implicit rejection of the Confucian adage (to which all paid lip service) that agriculture is the foundation of a nation. Even if they now ate rice, the farmers were surely less extravagant than the Tōkyō officials,24 but the latter deplored any improvement in the standard of living of the poorest class of society. The advice offered to the supposedly indolent farmers paraphrased Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat sorghum!”

  Not all officials were won over by this promise of an easy solution to the financial crisis. Sasaki Takayuki, urging the importance of strict economy for all classes of society, blamed the upper classes for the taste for luxury now exhibited by the peasants: “They hear about the extravagant and frivolous ways of upper-class society, and they mistakenly suppose that this is what is meant by culture and freedom; in that way the whole country has come to imitate them [the upper classes].”25

  Meiji’s eventual decision to reject the councillors’ recommendation that rents be collected in rice from the farmers was probably influenced by Sasaki and Motoda, both Confucianists.26 He also benefited from the advice of Itō Hirobumi, with whom he discussed the matter of rice payments on September 15.27 Itō seems to have realized that his only chance to overcome Iwakura’s advocacy of the rice tax was by enlisting the emperor’s support.

  On September 18 the emperor summoned the ministers and gave them a rescript in which, though expressing appreciation for their efforts to resolve the financial crisis, he declared unambiguously his opposition to what he termed an “extremely alarming” plan. The only solution to the crisis was, as he had said many times, to practice strict economy, and he enjoined the councillors to consider ways of implementing his wishes.

  Before issuing the rescript, the emperor had privately revealed to Sasaki and Motoda his opposition to the plan. He was sure that imposing a rice tax would cause extreme resentment by the farmers and that no region of the country would be immune to their rebellions. He noted in particular that it had been publicly announced in May 1880 that rents (in money) had been fixed until 1885. If they abrogated this declaration and returned to the old system of payment in rice, the public would lose confidence. This indeed was the chief reason not to r
evert to payments in rice.28

  The third problem that faced Meiji at this time concerned the creation of a parliament and a constitution. In the first of the five oaths he swore at the beginning of his reign, he had promised that a legislative body would be created in which measures would be decided after open discussion. Regardless of the context in which the oaths were proclaimed in 1868, by this time they had acquired the character of an imperial promise that a parliament would be created and would operate within the framework of a constitution.

  This was not the first time that the government had considered writing a constitution. As far back as May 1872 a member of the Sa’in, Miyajima Seiichirō (1838–1911), had urged that a constitution be drawn up defining the powers of the ruler. He believed this was necessary because, having learned of the polity of other countries, “ignorant people” were insisting on their rights in the name of individual freedom; some were even calling for a republic. Under present conditions, it was difficult to know how to deal with such people, but once the powers of the ruler were clearly defined by a constitution, anyone trespassing on them could be punished by law. Miyajima insisted that he did not favor a constitution that prescribed one-man government by the ruler; this would be oppressive to the people and would hamper modernization. The ideal solution would be joint rule by the sovereign and the people, but the level of education was still so low it was unlikely the people possessed the necessary intelligence to elect suitable representatives. So, Miyajima concluded, the sovereign should personally draw up a constitution but take into account the principle of joint rule. This proposal was forwarded to the Sei’in,29 and preparations began for writing a constitution.