The ‘Boshin War’ dragged on into 1869, with anti-Tokugawa troops multiplying as a mix of samurai and commoner conscripts joined up from across Japan’s domains. Tokugawa forces found themselves pushed ever northwards, right up to the island of Ezo (soon to be known as Hokkaidō) where they established a short-lived, quasi-independent state, complete with elections to its leadership. They finally surrendered to ‘imperial forces’ – as the rebel samurai now styled themselves – in the summer of 1869.
Back down south, a fresh epoch had begun the year before. In the past, the era name in Japan, decided by imperial court officials, had often changed several times across the reign of a single emperor. Now, the era would only change with the succession of a new emperor, who would posthumously bear its name. This new era and this new Emperor were to be known as ‘Meiji’: ‘enlightened rule’.
The young man on whom all this was being staked found himself evicted from the refined comfort of Kyoto towards the end of 1868 – ‘Meiji 1’ of the new age – and paraded all the way to Edo, where he was installed in the imposing castle that had once belonged to the Tokugawa family. That great city, peacefully surrendered except for outbreaks of sporadic resistance and opportunistic criminality, acquired a new name: ‘Tokyo’, or Eastern Capital. Here, the Emperor was to be fashioned into an effective figurehead – the centrepiece of an as-yet embryonic national narrative.
The new regime’s Charter Oath, issued in 1868, struck an artfully general and conciliatory tone:
Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion.
All classes, high and low, shall be united in vigorously carrying out the administration of affairs of state.
The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, shall all be allowed to pursue their own calling so that there may be no discontent.
Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature.
Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.
Alongside high-sounding ideals ran necessarily grubbier, more urgent priorities. A guiding principle was established: fukoku kyōhei, ‘enrich the state, strengthen the military’. Japan had to avoid being next after once-mighty China on Western colonialism’s ‘To Do’ list, and must secure revision of the humiliating international trading agreements now widely disparaged as ‘unequal treaties’. The new Japanese state and its story were to be forged in an atmosphere if not of outright panic then of acute anxiety, mixed with powerful and urgent determination.
Every resource, including every human resource, was devoted to the self-strengthening task. An effective military needed reasonably up-to-date hardware, which in turn meant the finance, raw materials, technology, infrastructure and expertise necessary for building up industrial capacity. Japanese students and scholars, businessmen and diplomats toured the world in search of all of this, in the years after 1868, while at home a small clique of rebels-turned-statesmen oversaw an unprecedented concentration of national power: Ōkubo Toshimichi, Mori Arinori and Saigō Takamori from Satsuma domain; Kido Takayoshi, Yamagata Aritomo and Itō Hirobumi from Chōshū; Itagaki Taisuke from Tosa; and Ōkuma Shigenobu from Hizen. Together these men and their allies revived a centuries-old executive body known as the Dajōkan, or Council of State. They exchanged Japan’s hundreds of old domains, run by great regional families, for just fifty ‘prefectures’ controlled ultimately from the new capital – in whose Kasumigaseki district they established European-style ministries (including Public Works, Industry and Education), developing national policies and issuing national directives.
Transformation proceeded apace across the 1870s. A new banking system began dealing in the yen as the national currency, replacing the old Tokugawa koban. A combination of government and private capital helped to establish high-tech mining and the industries of the future, including cotton-spinning and silk-reeling. Telegraph and postal services were set up, and via a Fundamental Code of Education (1872) a national schooling system was established. Pupils, a few clad in the shiny-buttoned military-style uniforms favoured by their Prussian counterparts, learned modern values first from American textbooks and then via role models from Japanese history and legend – from good-hearted soy-sauce vendors up to the great Tokugawa Ieyasu himself (his descendants might have let the country down, but he himself was revered as a great nation-builder). For those occasions where education botched the job, a Tokyo police force based on a French model stood ready to keep His Majesty’s subjects in line.
A limited railway entered operation, its brick and glass station buildings serving as models of modern architecture. Tax payable in rice, based on harvest size and local agreement, was replaced by a centrally assessed land tax, payable in cash. Conscription was introduced, to an army based on the French, and then later on the evidently superior Prussian, model – the Japanese kept a sharp eye on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 as they now did on most goings-on in Europe and beyond. Japan’s navy, comprising mostly volunteers, was based on Britain’s Royal Navy.
The scale of this task was enormous, involving a rapidly rising population destined to reach 42 million by the turn of twentieth century – larger than that of the United Kingdom or France. But one of the advantages of being a relative latecomer to modernity – which was how Japan’s first leaders regarded their situation – was that you could learn not just from its hits but from its evident misses too: avoiding London’s slums and the coal smog draped over Liverpool, all but blocking out the daylight (one Japanese official wrote of the ‘sad and pitiful’ history of British industrialization), and avoiding the excessive ceding of political power to the general public that marred the English and French systems.
Everything could be assessed in advance and then adapted to suit the new nation’s needs and evolving self-image. The postal system was based on Britain’s General Post Office (GPO). But where the GPO employed women – as sub-postmistresses, postwomen and clerical workers – it was decided that a Japanese system could only be staffed by men. And with Tokyo’s transport still underdeveloped, and its population swelling with rural migrants not entirely to be trusted, to the original Parisian model was added a dense network of kōban: police boxes housing one or two officers, so that city-dwellers could more easily get hold of a police officer – or vice versa.
But while there was general consensus amongst Japan’s leaders on the practical measures required to strengthen the country, and on the basic need for unity of national purpose, precisely what that purpose ought to be beyond security and revising the treaties was less easily agreed. Argument, trial and error, and changes of direction were to be significant features of the years ahead, both at the apex of politics and out across the country. Sometimes, what seemed modern ended up governing decision-making in building the country’s capacities. For a hugely expensive new silk-reeling plant in 1872, pure economics dictated the use of wood for fuel and a simple design that could be easily repaired. This way, Japan could get a major export industry moving relatively quickly. But wood was redolent of the past. It was primitive. Coal was the fuel used in the modern West (though Tokugawa Japan, too, had been known for its production; President Fillmore had noted as much in his letter to the Emperor). So it had to be coal for the new plant – and French coal at that. And it had to be a complex modern design, which it turned out few in Japan could operate and even fewer could put right when it went wrong.
Elsewhere, modernization could be a matter of pure caprice. Early Meiji Japanese might have learned much more than they did from the Italians or the Americans. But at the crucial moment both countries were riven by war, leaving Britain, France and Prussia better placed to provide models and expertise. One of Japan’s first and most influential teachers of medicine at the new Tokyo University, Erwin von Bälz, was recruited on the basis of a chance meeting with a Japanese patient in Leipzig. And though large numbers of Japanese went abroad to
learn from the world’s best, many of those trips were planned on the basis of limited knowledge about what ‘best’ was, and where it could be found. Time away was often limited to mere months, so that the connections made, and the imprimatur gained of some famous European scholar, were sometimes of greater significance than anything that was actually learned.
Japan’s determining of its own borders, too, was an uncertain, exploratory affair. On the basis that a great power must be a colonizing, civilizing one – the logic of the day – territories towards the north and south of the archipelago became subject to colonial experiments, alternating between attempts at assimilating their inhabitants as true ‘Japanese’ (still a developing concept) and keeping them at arm’s length. The net result was that northern Ainu and the people of the southern Ryūkyū Kingdom found their homelands absorbed into Japan, as Hokkaidō and Okinawa prefectures respectively, while they themselves remained peripheral peoples, in unflattering contrast to whose histories and habits ‘mainland’ Japanese defined and celebrated their own.
These territorial moves were also part of a search for natural resources and fresh markets to help the new economy grow, and for the kind of rightful sphere of security and influence that few Western powers could deny Japan without risk of glaring hypocrisy. The Korean peninsula in particular was regarded as too close for comfort to south-western Japan: it was, as Yamagata Aritomo put it, ‘a dagger pointed at Japan’s heart’. And yet once Japanese influence began to extend into mainland Asia, there arose a question of enormous difficulty and significance: where should that influence end?
Portrait of Commodore Perry, from the Black Ship Scroll Foreign Ship: one of the American ‘Black Ships’ *
Riding on the Nagasaki road the other day, I met with another striking illustration of the entire absence of modesty which astonishes Europeans on their first visit to Japan. A little urchin, seated at the door of a neat and substantial dwelling-house, gave the alarm of the approach of a Tojin [foreigner], and as I passed I had the pleasure of seeing the whole family rush out into the street to gaze at me.
I retained my presence of mind sufficiently to notice that this family group represented three generations. There were two very old women, one unmistakable old man; then paterfamilias with his wife; lastly some half dozen boys and girls, from about eighteen to six years of age. They were all stark naked, and to all appearance perfectly unconscious of the fact, as they stared at me in open-eyed wonder. After having passed some little distance I looked back; they were still at their doors quietly chatting, and, I suppose, criticizing my appearance. I wondered whether they would dress for dinner.
Historian and traveller Edward Barrington de Fonblanque,
visiting Japan in the 1860s
A powerful sense pervaded Japan, from the late 1860s onwards, that the eyes of the world were upon it. A range of newly established journals and newspapers featured much discussion of how other countries were doing things – from planning parties to planning cities, from raising children to selling insurance. Details might differ, yet there were certain standards, it was thought, to which any civilized country must adhere.
So the tut-tutting of visitors like Edward Barrington de Fonblanque mattered. There were anxious calls for curbs on bathing naked in public or urinating in the street. More profoundly the search for a new national purpose, in which people far beyond the political elite soon began to engage, was subject to two potentially conflicting pressures: the need to rediscover something lost or forgotten – 1868 was, after all, billed as a ‘restoration’ of imperial rule rather than a revolution – and a desire for foreign approval. Some of the earliest and lasting impressions of Japan amongst Westerners were products of these pressures. Samurai culture was proudly advertised as a Japanese equivalent of Europe’s chivalric tradition, in Nitobe Inazō’s bestselling Bushidō: The Soul of Japan (1900) – published in English, for foreign consumption. Zen Buddhism was repackaged, around the same time, to suggest the power of intuitive Japanese spirituality while accommodating Western yearnings for experiential over dogmatic religion.
There was an attempt, early on, to guide Japan’s modernization according to a basic principle of wakon-yōsai: ‘Japanese spirit, Western techniques’. But spirits and techniques, it was soon discovered, are not so easily distinguished or disentangled. Spirit shapes technique: social and political institutions are derived, somewhere along the line, from assumptions about what human beings most fundamentally are, and what is natural and good for them both as individuals and in communities. Great feats of science and engineering also have their intimate, human underpinnings and inspirations. Techniques, in turn, shape spirits. Education systems, jobs markets, media, medicine, governmental arrangements – all these things create certain types of people over time.
Highbrow publications and societies dedicated to tackling such challenges began to proliferate, run and populated by scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen and members of the emerging civil service. The Meirokusha, ‘Meiji 6 Society’ – established in the sixth year of the new era – counted amongst its members some of the most influential commentators of the day. Fukuzawa Yukichi excoriated the conservative Confucian scholars of the recent past as ‘rice-consuming dictionaries’, while recalling through tears of gratitude the heroic painstaking of inquisitive rangaku pioneers like Sugita Genpaku. He urged upon Japan modes of learning that were practical and pragmatic, helping to build a modern nation from the roots upwards rather than simply importing modernity in some ‘finished’ foreign form. Other prominent Meirokusha members included the great statesman Mori Arinori, founder of Japan’s modern education system and ambassador to the United States and then China, and the philosopher Nishi Amane, who took on the mammoth task of importing and categorizing modern Western philosophical knowledge for a Japanese readership.
In all of this, talk of a ‘Japanese spirit’ was more a rallying cry than a solid and agreed-upon point of reference. It offered a useful rhetorical gloss, a sense of unity and naturalness, to a process of going global that in fact combined short-term pragmatism, elite self-interest, experimentation and compromise, and ad hoc decision-making in the hasty fabrication of a new order. It provided, too, a means of bringing together two emerging images of modern Japan which it was by no means certain were actually compatible: Asia’s modernizing vanguard, and a place whose history, culture, sensibilities and blood-line made it quite unlike any other. No wonder that a celebrated chronicler of the new nation’s birth pangs, the novelist Natsume Sōseki, found the concept distinctly slippery:
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) Admiral Tōgō [a Meiji-era naval hero] possesses the Japanese spirit, and the local fishmonger has it as well. Swindlers and murderers also have the Japanese spirit. Since it is a spirit it is always blurry and fuzzy; there is no one in Japan who hasn’t had it on the tip of his tongue, but there’s no one who has actually seen it.
As with ‘Japanese spirit’, so with Japan’s story at this point. To their cheerleaders, of whom there were many across the globe, the Meiji leaders were pulling off the world’s most painstaking and thoughtful national overhaul. To their various emerging critics at home, from the mid-1870s into the early 1880s, the country either lacked a clear sense of itself or was rapidly acquiring an unwelcome one: an Asian facsimile of Western life, which farmers and factory girls sweated to fund; a place where new political freedoms were once seemingly promised and then withheld; a nation led and populated by imposters.
2
Blood Tax
Woe betide any new government that can’t keep its schoolteachers onside. In 1884, a young teacher in the south-western city of Okayama saw her small school for women, which she helped run from home with her mother, closed down by the local authorities when some of the staff and students dared to attend a political meeting one summer evening. A year later the same teacher, Kageyama Hideko, was plotting to smuggle explosives into Korea, hoping to launch a violent coup there that would eventually bring democrac
y to Japan.
Kageyama was not the only one embarking on a radical trajectory in 1884. Hundreds of miles to the east in Gunma prefecture, north of Tokyo, a second schoolteacher, Miura Momonosuke, was helping to recruit hundreds of farmers, gangsters, hunters and sumo wrestlers for military training in the mountains. The plan was to make the most of an upcoming imperial visit to attack local government troops and take prisoner several of the Emperor’s high-ranking officials. Meanwhile, in Saitama prefecture, just next door to Gunma, as many as 3,000 schoolteachers, artisans, tradesmen and farmers gathered one day at a village shrine, wearing makeshift uniforms – white headbands, short coats and tight trousers – and carrying an assortment of weapons including rifles, swords and bamboo spears. They listened to men, rumoured to be gangsters, address them as the ‘Poor People’s Army’ …
For all that Tokyo’s new governing elite sought to restructure Japan’s affairs according to their own designs throughout the 1870s, a great many others around the country were determined to have their say in what the ultimate meaning and implications of the 1868 restoration ought to be. Teachers, farmers and other commoners were set to press their cases across the turbulent mid-1880s. But first, Japan’s leaders were forced to contend with some seriously disgruntled samurai.
The rigid Tokugawa class system had positioned samurai one rung above the country’s farmers, below whom came artisans and then merchants, with society’s outcasts at the very bottom: hinin or ‘non-people’ (vagrants, some types of singers and dancers, executioners), alongside whole communities of eta (‘full of filth’), their leather-working profession regarded as unclean because of its close connection with dead flesh. A highly diverse class of people, in terms of wealth and standing, the samurai spent the largely peaceful Tokugawa years trying to get used to a shift from warrior work to office work, as administrative servants to their lords. Long and short swords had still been thrust proudly into waistbands each morning, but the likelihood of their being used diminished by the day. Bushidō, the legendary ‘way of the warrior’, was an outcome not of medieval warfare but in fact of this early modern peace. It emerged from the 1600s onwards, bound up more with ideals of service, frugality, honour and pursuit of the arts than with violent conflict.
Japan Story Page 4
