Emperor of Japan

by Donald Keene

  Chamberlain Hinonishi Sukehiro recalled that the emperor seldom revealed his emotions by his expression: “I served him a long time, but I never saw him either extremely happy or extremely sad.” Hinonishi was unable for two or three days to summon up the courage to break the news to the emperor that Itō Hirobumi had been assassinated, but all the emperor said when informed that his most trusted minister had been killed was un. At a session of the constitutional convention, when the emperor learned of the death of Prince Akihito, he said muu muu and nodded. The meeting went on.3

  In the early years of his reign, he did not complain about the grueling progresses to different parts of the country, even though the accommodations at his destinations were likely to be primitive. In keeping with his personal code of behavior, he endured the torture of riding all day in a sweltering hot palanquin, sitting erect for long hours. He could not enjoy even the relief of being alone even after he arrived. As soon as he reached a destination, he would be surrounded by local officials, probably verbose in expressing their joy over his visit, and he had to listen to them all attentively, as if grateful for their words, never revealing boredom. He was obliged by his sense of duty also to examine carefully local products and relics, even when he was exhausted.

  What did he think about while being tossed for hours in a palanquin? Much of the time, especially when the going was most arduous, he may have reminded himself, “This is my land.” He never forgot that he was the descendant of a long line of emperors who had ruled over the country through which he was passing, and he was obligated to see every part, following the ancient practice of kunimi. He never relaxed in his resolve to follow precedents established by his ancestors, and he was determined to do nothing that might disgrace himself in their eyes.

  In the same way, the emperor also recognized the people he encountered on his travels as his people. He probably never saw farmers or fishermen at work until his first journey to Edo, but he knew when he saw them that they were his people. He did not think of them, in the manner of a Heian-period aristocrat, as menials who were scarcely human. He never disdained to share with the common people their pleasures at the circus, the horse races, or displays of fireworks, and sometimes, on his travels, he shared their simple food.

  Although the emperor felt a special closeness to Iwakura Tomomi, a nobleman who for many years had been his mentor and whom he associated with the world of his childhood at the Gosho, the men closest to him in later life, like Itō Hirobumi, were of humble stock, and he did not look down on them because of their birth. As the case of Itō proves, talented men could rise within the ranks of the new aristocracy, regardless of their forbears.

  In his dealings with foreigners, Meiji was invariably courteous and even cordial, ready to smile and shake hands with anyone who was presented to him. His meeting with former President Grant was especially memorable; probably no advice that he received is his lifetime created a deeper impression than Grant’s. He was friendly toward the king of Hawaii, although he expressed doubts concerning the feasibility of the king’s plan for a league of Asian nations to be headed by himself. His solicitude for Crown Prince Nicolas after he had been wounded at Ōtsu was dictated not merely by fear of a Russian attack but by compassion for a prince who had been attacked while in a distant country. Each member of foreign royalty who was presented to the emperor was persuaded by his gracious reception that never before had the emperor shown such friendship to a visitor.

  Meiji’s meetings with foreigners were not confined to heads of state. Hardly a day passed without his receiving some foreign technician or teacher about to return to his country. Innumerable foreign dignitaries—chiefly military men and politicians but also such figures as the general of the Salvation Army—called on him to convey their compliments during their sojourns in Japan, and the emperor met most of them. Many foreigners received high-ranking decorations from the court; few countries have ever been so generous with their decorations as Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji.

  It is difficult to say how the emperor responded to the changes in Japan during his reign. Although like many who followed Confucian doctrines, he generally looked to the past for guidance, he seemed increasingly unwilling to perform such traditional duties of the emperor as the worship of the four directions at the New Year. He undoubtedly believed in Shintō, but he seldom visited shrines. When he returned to Kyōto, he worshiped at the tomb of his father, rather than at a shrine; his religion was less Shintō than ancestor worship.4 It did not bother him that many of his ancestors had been devout Buddhists, even though he himself was indifferent or even hostile to Buddhism.

  Well-meaning missionaries sometimes presented the emperor with copies of the Bible, but nothing suggests that he ever read them. Even if he had diligently perused the Japanese translation, it is unlikely that the Bible would have shaken his conviction that he was descended from the gods, the scion of an unbroken line of emperors. Christianity was too alien for him to consider its teachings, but many young intellectuals of his time became converts.

  Even though he was not interested in Christianity, Emperor Meiji seems to have felt no antagonism toward the European things that flooded into Japan during his reign. In his daily life, he usually wore a military uniform or a frock coat and was rarely seen in public wearing Japanese clothes. He did not object, for that matter, to the empress’s preference for wearing European clothes. He seems to have enjoyed Japanese food best, but at formal dinners Western food was always served, and he ate it without complaint and even with relish. During the day, he sat on a chair in front of a desk in his study, and all the public rooms of his palace were in Western style. He disliked electric lights not because they were foreign but because he feared that faulty wiring might cause a conflagration.

  After a fire destroyed his old palace, he put off as long as possible the construction of a new one, reluctant to allow money to be spent for this purpose. He eventually realized that in order to impress foreign visitors, the prestige of the country demanded that he have a palace of some magnificence; but those parts of the palace to which visitors were not admitted were shabbily maintained. He always seemed reluctant to spend money on himself, as the tales of his patched uniform attest.

  Meiji’s pleasures included listening to the phonograph and singing along with it, especially martial tunes.5 Late in life, a new pleasure came his way, the films. His enjoyment of nonnative diversions did not imply any rejection of traditional Japanese arts but merely demonstrated his acceptance of the latest inventions. But the sports he played—kemari and archery—were traditional, and he often expressed a preference for Japanese works of art.

  The emperor had his foibles. Erwin Baelz recalled that

  he could not endure that the empress’ throne should be as lofty as his. He wanted a higher one, but Inouye protested. When Inouye, paying a casual visit to the palace, found that a thick silken mat had been smuggled beneath the emperor’s throne, he dragged it out and flung it into the corner of the room, which naturally led to a great “row.”6

  He seems also to have had a streak of sadism, as when he deliberately dropped asparagus on the dusty dining-room floor, to be retrieved and eaten by a chamberlain. Perhaps this kind of sadism was inevitable in someone who (in theory at least) had absolute power; he may have wanted to see to what extremes of obedience he could obtain from a comically devoted retainer.

  The emperor’s sadism (if that is the proper word) was closely related to his sense of humor. Everyone who knew and wrote about him mentioned the humor of this imposing, even awesome man. His humor, if the examples given are typical, was of masculine heartiness rather than witty. Chamberlain Hinonishi recorded this anecdote:

  One day when I appeared in his presence, I found him laughing. He said something interesting had occurred the previous night. When I asked what it was, he said, “Last night Yamaguchi and Ayanokōji were sleeping in the next room. Yamaguchi was snoring loudly and Ayanokōji was grinding his teeth. Between them they mad
e a most unusual concert.” Yamaguchi, who was standing nearby, said, “No, I believe that Your Majesty snored even louder.” At this His Majesty laughed a great deal.7

  The emperor was also reputed to have an extraordinary memory, but the examples given of his powers of memory are by no means dazzling. Chamberlain Hinonishi wrote,

  Everyone agrees that Emperor Meiji had an extraordinary memory, but I can’t remember any specific examples. However, when I accompanied him to Kyōto, he told me in detail how a certain room was used in the past. Or he recalled that when he was still a small boy, there was a ditch that ran along the wall of the crown prince’s pavilion, and he often used to catch medaka [killifish] there.8

  The emperor’s intellectual interests were limited. Hinonishi wrote,

  I almost never saw him read anything. Apart from when he was listening to lectures at the beginning of the year, I never saw him look at a book. Probably when he was still at the Akasaka Temporary Palace, he had more leisure and read books, but this must have ended when the pressure of state business became more intense and there were many other things to occupy him. In all the time that I served him, I never saw any indication that he had been reading.9

  Even if Meiji did not read books or newspapers, he managed to acquire considerable information about the world from the officials he daily consulted. No doubt he was briefed before he met foreign visitors about conditions in their countries, and his knowledge impressed them. The lectures he heard early each year may have stimulated his interest in history or philosophy, but he was never inspired to make a deeper study of the subjects described. He seems not to have read contemporary works of literature or contemporary tanka poetry, let alone scholarly monographs.

  The emperor’s formal studies, mainly in the Confucian tradition as interpreted by Motoda Nagazane, lasted until he was in his thirties and undoubtedly contributed to his abiding sense of duty. On rare occasions he refused to do what was expected of him, as when he obstinately insisted on not attending the banquet ending the maneuvers in Kumamoto. He seems to have disliked particularly the feeling that his ministers (or others) were forcing him to accommodate himself to their plans. This was revealed most clearly when he refused to take advantage of being in Nara to worship at the tomb of Emperor Jimmu. It was not that he was averse to worshiping at the tomb but that he did not like other people to decide what he should do. Generally, however, he yielded in the end to persuasion, and when he did not, he apologized afterward. There were periods in his reign when he seemed loath to perform even his ordinary daily business as the ruler, perhaps out of boredom with paperwork or with his advisers. On the whole, however, he was highly responsible and seldom went against the advice of his ministers.

  Meiji’s reliance on his ministers makes it difficult to be sure whether decisions made in his name were in fact his or actually made by his ministers. At the very least the wording of his rescripts was surely the work of men better trained than he in classical Chinese; but we have no way of knowing the degree to which his personal opinions were reflected in his rescripts. Probably it is safe to say that nothing in the rescripts was contrary to his wishes.

  One theme recurs in his rescripts so often that it is tempting to view it as an expression of the emperor’s deepest conviction—his repeated hopes for peace. This may seem no more than a convention, or even the excuse for crushing enemies as “obstacles to peace,” but the emperor’s behavior during the wars of his reign suggests that despite his fondness for uniforms and for observing maneuvers of his army, he genuinely disliked war.

  During the Satsuma Rebellion, he was so given to apathy that he refused to perform his duties as head of the state or even to pursue his studies. He opposed the declaration of war on China in 1894. When informed of the victory at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War, his first reaction was not a cry of elation but the command that the enemy general be given proper treatment. The emperor’s insistence on his desire for peace impressed even An Chung-gun, the man who assassinated Itō Hirobumi, the emperor’s most trusted adviser.

  Perhaps the emperor’s greatest achievement was reigning so long. In this respect he resembled his near contemporary Queen Victoria, who for years was attacked by the press for indulging in her griefs to the neglect of her duties; but in the end, thanks to the length of her reign, she acquired the reputation of a great monarch.10 If Meiji, like his father, had died at the age of thirty-six, he would hardly be remembered today except as a young man who happened to be on the throne at a time of great changes in Japan. But the length of his reign, and the impression he increasingly created of unwavering steadfastness, gave him an awesome, almost sacred authority. Immediately after his death, a special issue of the magazine Taiyō was published with the title Meiji seitenshi (Meiji, the Holy Emperor). The day after his death, an article on the front page of the Ōsaka mainichi shimbun referred to the late emperor as taitei (the Great), in the manner of Peter the Great, and this term was frequently used of him until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Asukai Masamichi explained why he used it as the title of his Meiji taitei: “It was because in modern history—no, in the whole of Japanese history—there was no other ‘great emperor’ except this one. Emperor Meiji definitely left behind the footprints of a great monarch.”11

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. I shall refer to him as Meiji, even though this was a posthumous designation. During his lifetime he was referred to by Japanese simply as tennō, or emperor; his personal name, Mutsuhito, was used mainly when communicating with foreigners or signing rescripts.

  2. It is often said that Meiji’s boyhood name, Sachinomiya, was taken from the name of the well, but the well was not drilled until the drought in Kyoto in the eighth month of 1854, when Meiji was about a year old. The name Sachinomiya (or Prince Sachi) was chosen by Emperor Kōmei from among seven names suggested by the imperial councillor (sangi) Gojō Tamesada. Emperor Kōkaku (1771–1840), Meiji’s great-grandfather, had had the same childhood name. The well took its name from the prince, rather than the other way round; Emperor Kōmei himself, pleased with the quality of the well water, named it Sachi no i (Meiji tennō ki, 1, p. 59).

  Although it is commonly believed that Meiji was first bathed with water from the Sachi well (see, for example, Kurihara Kōta, Ningen Meiji tennō, p 1), the official record plainly states that the water used was drawn from the Kamo River north of the Demachi Bridge (Meiji tennō ki, 1, pp. 20, 23).

  3. The building itself cost 100 ryō, and Tadayasu asked for a loan of 200 ryō. The request went through various officials and finally reached the chancellor (kampaku), who refused, stating there was no precedent for lending more than 100 ryō. Tadayasu therefore borrowed the money, promising to pay back the loan in installments over the next fifteen years. Fortunately, Tadayasu’s great-aunt, Nakayama Isako, was serving as senior lady-in-waiting, and he was able to borrow an additional 50 ryō in her name, to be repaid in ten years (Meiji tennō ki, 1, pp. 8–9). Tadayasu no doubt expected that if a child was safely delivered, his daughter would receive presents that would enable him to repay these debts.

  4. His many poems were written on scraps of paper, copied by expert lady calligraphers, and then destroyed.

  5. The Seitoku kinen kaigakan (Memorial Picture Gallery) at the Meiji jingū contains eighty large paintings depicting highlights of Meiji’s life from his birth to his funeral. They were painted between 1926 and 1936 by outstanding artists of the period, but probably none of the artists had actually seen Meiji. The Italian painter Edoardo Chiossone (1832–1898) was one of the few to depict Meiji from life; his drawing, supposed by most people to be a photograph, was worshiped in schools throughout Japan.

  6. Kimura Teinosuke recalls (when he was seven and Meiji was eight), “If ever anything occurred that displeased him in some way, he usually clenched his little fists and struck whoever was to blame. I can’t tell you how many times I was the recipient of blows from his gracious fists. At any rate, because I was a year youn
ger than he, I tended not to show sufficient awe. I was always venturing to do something that went contrary to his wishes, and each time he would deign to drub me” (“Meiji tennō no go-yōji” p. 17).

  7. Bōjō Toshinaga, Kyūchū gojūnen, p. 15.

  8. For an account of why he stopped reading newspapers, see Hinonishi Sukehiro, Meiji tennō no nichijō, p. 53.

  9. Ibid., pp. 44, 175.

  10. See ibid., p. 59, where Hinonishi mentions that sometimes Meiji spent tens of thousands of yen on diamond rings. About the perfume, see p. 146, where it says he used up a bottle of French perfume every two or three days.

  11. Giles St. Aubyn comments, “Almost all nineteenth-century constitutional text books implied that the Queen was a cipher …. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth, and Gladstone must have smiled ruefully at such nonsense” (Queen Victoria, p. 218).

  Chapter 1

  1. The lack of individuality in official portraits of emperors may have been due to their having been painted after the emperor’s death by an artist who might never have seen his subject. We know the circumstances of one portrait: on November 4, 1846, Toyooka Harusuke, who had painted Emperor Kōkaku’s portrait, was commanded to paint a portrait of Emperor Ninkō, eight months after the latter’s death. Toyooka was paid ten pieces of silver and two tan of silk for the portrait (Kōmei tennō ki, 1, pp. 270–71; Fujita Satoshi, Bakumatsu no tennō, p. 141).