by Ian Buruma
General Nogi Maresuke, despite the old-fashioned style of his death, was as typical of his age as Fukuzawa, Ito, Yamagata, or Natsume Soseki. Like Soseki’s Master, he harbored feelings of guilt. Commanding government troops in the war against Saigo Takamori’s samurai in the Satsuma rebellion of 1877, Nogi lost his regimental flag and thought of committing suicide then to atone for this disgrace. But he lived on to fight in the Sino-Japanese War and, of course, as a legendary general in the war against the Russians. He lost both his sons in the latter conflict. Grief did not deflect him from his purpose. After the death of his second son, he said he would consider it an honor to die for the emperor.
And in a manner of speaking he did, out of patriotism, but also, possibly, out of guilt for losing his sons. On the day of his emperor’s funeral, Nogi wrote a short poem about Mount Fuji and his wish for Japan to be united in memory of the heroes who died for the emperor. His wife changed into a black kimono, and Nogi stripped to his white undergarments. After bowing to portraits of the late emperor and of their two sons, General Nogi let his wife die first by plunging a dagger into her neck, then died the samurai’s death by cutting his stomach with a short sword. It was, as I said, a quaint way to go even then. But General Nogi and his wife, as models of ideal behavior, set the tone for future years, at least as much as Fukuzawa and his more liberal ways, and possibly more. Few could ever wish to live up to their example, but enough would try, with often grotesque and ultimately catastrophic results.
Every ten-thousand-yen bill has a portrait of Fukuzawa, and Natsume Soseki is on the one-thousand-yen notes. General Nogi might have been horrified had he been remembered in such a pecuniary way. But he has not been forgotten, even now. His house in Tokyo can still be seen, next to a shrine dedicated to the general’s soul. Twice a year, on the eve and anniversary of his death, the public is invited to walk around the house on an elevated path, and if you look carefully through one of the windows, you can just make out the bloodstained undershirt of the man people called the Last Samurai.
3
ERO GURO NANSENSU
The year 1920 was, for many Japanese, the best of times. World War I, fought by others on the far side of the world, had come as a stroke of luck. While European powers wasted their resources and millions of young men on war, the Japanese built ships, exported textiles, made industrial machines and railway rolling stock, and supplied the Europeans with munitions. By the end of the war, the Japanese economy was booming, with large combines such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo at the top and countless small workshops at the bottom of the industrial pile. As an added bonus, Japan was able to secure some spoils for itself. Having joined the Allies, Japan expanded its empire by grabbing German possessions in China and the South Pacific.
The oppressive air that had hung over the last Meiji years had lifted. The Taisho emperor, Yoshihito, a feeble-witted man, inspired none of the awe enjoyed by his father, even as a symbolic figure. Once, when the poor man was asked to grace the Diet with his presence, he allegedly rolled up a document and used it as a telescope. He was rarely seen in public again. (His son, Hirohito, had to step in as regent in 1922.) The old Meiji patriarchs had died or were too old to assert their authority. And for the first time, the prime minister of Japan was not an old bureaucrat but a party politician.
There was some trouble in the Japanese empire, to be sure. In March 1919, Koreans rebelled against their forced assimilation as second-class Japanese subjects. A Japanese protectorate since the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Korea had been annexed by Japan in 1910. Some members of the Korean elite welcomed this and collaborated with the Japanese, but most Koreans, especially university students, hated being bossed around by officials from a nation whose culture they considered less civilized than their own. Thousands gathered in Pagoda Park in the center of Seoul and declared independence. Up to half a million Koreans from all walks of life came out in support. The Japanese gendarmerie, armed with sabers and rifles, charged. The rebellion was crushed, but the massacre of at least seven thousand protesters, many of them students, was so shocking that even the Japanese government acknowledged that something had gone badly wrong.
The Chinese May 4th Movement in that same year, protesting the Japanese takeover of the German concessions in China, was as hostile to Japan as it was toward the abject Chinese government. And there had been trouble at home as well. Inflation and a short slump after the war caused poverty in the countryside and high unemployment. In August 1918, rioters all over Japan burned down police stations, shops, rich people’s houses, and, oddly, a few expensive brothels in Tokyo, in protest against the high price of rice. Still, it was a hopeful sign that Japanese felt free to openly criticize their government. The early 1920s was above all a time of movements: for universal suffrage, for the liberation of discriminated outcasts, and for women’s rights. On the whole, then, it was a good time to be young.
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The Ginza in Tokyo, that Europeanized center of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” had changed a great deal since the dark days of late Meiji. Longhaired young men in roido (from Harold Lloyd) glasses, bell-bottom trousers, colored shirts, and floppy ties would stroll down the willow-lined avenue with young women in bobbed hairdos. The more earnest ones, who gathered in “milk bars” to discuss German philosophy or Russian novels, were known as Marx boys and Marx girls. A few years later, the fashionable young would be renamed mobos (modern boys) and their flapper girlfriends mogas (modern girls). Aside from the milk bars, the Ginza abounded in German-style beer halls and Parisian-style cafés, with waitresses who were free with their favors—for a modest fee. Many patrons of these establishments, with such names as Tiger Café and Lion Beer Hall, were journalists, who, like the café waitresses, were a feature of this bright new age of mass media and entertainment. Up the street, near Hibiya Park, where the riots of 1905 took place, Frank Lloyd Wright was building the Imperial Hotel, where people would take their tea and eat ultrafashionable “Chaplin caramels.”
A tram ride to the east of the Ginza took one to Asakusa, the center of popular entertainment. This is where the latest Hollywood movies were shown in art deco cinemas and lines of half-naked chorus girls kicked up their legs at the “opera.” In 1920, one might have seen The Lasciviousness of the Viper, directed by “Thomas” Kurihara, who had learned his craft in Hollywood. So had another director of silent movies, “Frank” Tokunaga, who insisted on speaking English to his Japanese crews, putting his studio to the unnecessary expense of having to provide an interpreter. There were posters everywhere advertising swordfight movies about Sakamoto Ryoma and other Edo swashbucklers. There were cabaret shows, comic storytellers, Western, Chinese, and Japanese restaurants. And there was some real opera, too. An Italian from Britain had introduced Tokyoites to the delights of Verdi.
Taisho Tokyo was marked by a skittish, sometimes nihilistic hedonism that brings Weimar Berlin to mind. It produced a culture that would later be summed up as ero for erotic, guro for grotesque, and nansensu, which speaks for itself. In some instances, the similarities with Berlin were more than coincidental. Painters and cartoonists did pictures à la George Grosz. Directors of the New Theater put on plays by Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and studied Max Reinhardt and Stanislavsky. Dada, expressionism, cubism, constructivism, new sobriety: All had had their day in Japan—more than a day, in fact, since trends tend to stick around a lot longer there than in their countries of origin. Novelists looked to Europe, too. Tanizaki Junichiro adopted the style of fin-de-siècle French decadents. One of the best movies of the period, Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Page of Madness, owed much to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He made this film only a few years after appearing himself in another, far more conventional picture, playing a woman in a kimono and a pair of sturdy rain boots to cope with the open-air location—theatrical realism was late in coming, even in the movies. Taisho was a time of radical politics, but also of artistic experimentation and introspection. Individualism was carried to the point of self-obsession
. Literary diaries recording every nuance of the author’s moods, known as “I-novels,” were highly popular. Far removed from the earnest idealism of Meiji, artists were keen to explore the limits of romantic love and dark eroticism.
Students at elite institutions were just as eager for new ideas. They cultivated a Sakamoto Ryoma–like slovenliness in their dress, used words like “lumpen proletariat” and “bourgeois liberalism” a great deal, and took a passionate interest in DeKanSho, short for Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Intellectual young women from wealthy families insisted on learning more than household skills, and in 1918 the first women’s university was established in Tokyo. Even soldiers were brushed by the fresh winds of early Taisho. The army minister, Tanaka Giichi, worried that his troops had “become bold and rebellious in their attitudes,” and one commander complained that “due to the rise in general knowledge and social education,” his men could no longer be counted on to follow orders blindly.
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So what went wrong? Why had this freewheeling Japanese Weimar spirit been brought down—though not out—by about 1932? For an answer, we would have to look at the power of the imperial court and the military establishment, but also at the nature of political rebellion in Japan. The problem was visible already in 1905, when riots broke out against the Portsmouth Treaty, which concluded the Russo-Japanese War. On first sight, the protest was pure jingoism. The newspapers were particularly violent in their opposition to a treaty that, in editorial opinions, was too soft on the Russians. But the crowds that gathered in Hibiya Park on September 5, after having stormed the police barriers and the few policemen who got in their way, were even fiercer. “The war must go on!” they yelled as brass bands played military marches. People sang the national anthem, cheered for the emperor and his army, and marched to the imperial palace, where they clashed with the police.
The riots in Tokyo went on for several days. There were up to a thousand casualties. Thirteen Christian churches were wrecked and looted, one of them in Asakusa, where the priest had been unwise enough to preach that Russia had got favorable terms because it was a Christian country. Government buildings and police boxes lay in ruins. For some time, the capital looked out of control. Yet there was more to this than chauvinism. For the leaders of the riots were not all right-wing zealots, but included veterans of the People’s Rights Movement and advocates of universal suffrage. One of them had sent a telegram to the army in Manchuria, urging it to crush the enemy, and petitioned the Privy Council to tear up the treaty.
The Japanese rioters, in fact, behaved very much like their Chinese counterparts in 1919, who protested against their government for letting Japan take over the German concessions. When governments rule without popular representation or even consent, one form of rebellion is to be more nationalistic than the rulers. If the rulers are traitors to the nation, they should be overthrown. It is a pattern that has occurred over and over again in east Asia, and it is not very conducive to liberal democracy. It also shows that demands for political rights at home can exist quite happily with imperialist demands abroad. But this is a game that both sides can play; the authorities can turn nationalist sentiments against the liberals, too, and frequently did.
Still, in the early Taisho period it looked as if parliamentary democracy might yet have a chance. The rice riots of 1918 laid the groundwork for the first government formed by a member of the lower house, an elected party politician named Hara Kei. The riots were about more than rice, of course, just as the protests against the Portsmouth Treaty went beyond demands for further Russian concessions. They were an opportunity for all those who felt left behind by the new industrial age to vent their frustration: construction workers, rickshaw drivers, farmers, and small shopkeepers, as well as members of the burakumin, or outcast communities, who had been emancipated legally in 1900 but still faced discrimination. By blaming the outcasts for the violence, the authorities tried to manipulate popular prejudices. It didn’t work. Instead, the discredited prime minister, General Terauchi, had to resign.
Hara Kei was a skillful politician who had to find a way of juggling the interests of his own party, the Seiyukai, and those of the institutions that held the real power in Japanese politics: the House of Peers, stacked with retired military men, old courtiers, and conservative bureaucrats; the emperor’s advisory body, otherwise known as the Privy Council, which decided the most important matters of state; and the army and navy ministers, who had to be serving military officers. While the oligarchs were still active, they managed these various groups as if they were the board members of a very grand gentlemen’s club. The authority of men such as Yamagata Aritomo and Ito Hirobumi was enough to make it work. Frictions were smoothed, faces saved, feathers unruffled, protégés pushed, and interests reconciled through discreet meetings and gentlemen’s agreements. And all this behind the veil of the imperial will. After the oligarchs left the scene, however, through death or old age, Japanese politics became a constant battle between institutions, without anyone to preside. The imperial will, especially under the Taisho emperor but also under his son, Hirohito, really was no more than a screen around a snakepit.
Hara’s way of expanding the power of parliament, and thus of party politics, was by playing the same game that kept the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in office more or less continuously since the 1950s. Already as home minister in previous governments, he had cultivated local landowners, businessmen, and industrialists by setting up a network of rich pork barrels: railways here, bridges, roads, and new factories there. Sweet deals and kickbacks made it worth the while of bureaucrats to be involved in Hara’s party machine. It worked, up to a point. But when Hara became prime minister, criticisms of official corruption met with harsh crackdowns. Special thought police, established in 1911, went after writers and publishers of “dangerous” books. “Dangerous” was, of course, a flexible concept, but any kind of socialism would normally fall under its rubric.
Hara was by no means a radical. He did little to promote universal male suffrage. The reason he became prime minister in the first place was his careful cultivation of Yamagata while the old oligarch was still powerful. Even so, he was too radical for some. Hara upset senior figures in the navy by agreeing to sign a treaty with the United States, Britain, and France and limiting the buildup of Japan’s battle fleet. So it was no surprise, really, that Hara was assassinated in 1921 by another of those sincere zealots who did so much to wreck the chances of Japanese democracy.
As was true in most Western countries, democracy was still a relative term even among Japanese liberals. One of the great activists for universal male suffrage and constitutional government was Yoshino Sakuzo, a graduate of the Tokyo Imperial University law faculty. This august institution was the academic nursery for the bureaucratic elite. Renamed Tokyo University after the war, it still is. Yoshino could have joined the select and secretive band of men who administered Japan in the emperor’s name. Instead, like Fukuzawa Yukichi a generation before, he chose that most precious, precarious, and indeed dangerous of occupations: to be an independent intellectual. Like many east Asian liberal activists, he was also a Christian convert.
In 1905, a year after his graduation, Yoshino began to publish his critical views of autocratic government and “militaristic imperialism.” Although he did not believe Japan was ready for American-style democracy, he liked to quote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The only way to compete as a serious power, he argued, was to have a constitutional government and what he called “people-centered democracy.” Unlike some Christians, he had been totally in favor of the war against Russia, since Russia, in his view, was a feudal dictatorship and Japan the natural master of Korea and Manchuria. But since people were asked to fight—and thus often to die—for their country, they should surely have a voice in the way they were governed. This formed the basis of what came to be known, to those who looked back fondly, or with loathing, as “Taisho democracy.”
Yoshino was a libera
l-minded reformist, the kind who so often got trampled on in Japanese politics. He was a socialist, but not a revolutionary—a distinction that was often lost on Japanese authorities. One day, he thought, the mystique of the imperial institution would fade, but not yet. One day, the Koreans might have real autonomy, but not absolute independence. One day, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese would come together in opposition to militarism and capitalist exploitation. He wanted to limit the almost unlimited authority of the Privy Council and if possible do away with it altogether. Yoshino was about as democratic as it was possible to be at the time. But he was not a leader of violent demonstrations, which were still the only way for common people to voice their discontent.
Instead, Yoshino wrote for liberal journals, gave lectures, taught at Tokyo Imperial University, studied abroad, worked as a journalist for the Asahi newspaper, and, in the tradition of the early Meiji debating clubs, started the Shinjinkai, an informal society for clever “Marx boys” to discuss social and political affairs. He had spent some time in China as a teacher and wrote positive articles in the Japanese press about the May 4th Movement in 1919. He also visited Korea in 1916, where he saw the brutality of Japanese authorities and the futility of their efforts to turn Koreans into Japanese. The official propaganda about Koreans being of the same race and culture as the Japanese was fatally undermined by official and unofficial discrimination. He told his Japanese readers that to be Korean was to be anti-Japanese, a fact, alas, that still holds true for many Koreans almost a hundred years later. The 1919 rebellion, Yoshino held, was “a stain on the Taisho period.” Such an uprising had to be put down, of course, but he strongly argued for fairer treatment of the Koreans. A staunch imperialist, then, but a humane one. The limitation of Taisho liberalism—as much as its nobility—was reflected in Yoshino’s thinking. If even a liberal such as Yoshino could find no principal objection to Japanese domination of its neighbors, it becomes easier to understand how Japan could later embark on far more perilous military adventures.
