By the late 1700s, lower-ranking samurai especially found that these virtues were not getting them very far. Stipends were worth less and less all the time: they were not reassessed to keep up with inflation, and needy daimyō would sometimes ‘borrow’ a portion before paying them out. Meanwhile, all around them in cities like Edo and Osaka the vulgar merchant class seemed to be hoarding most of the wealth and to be having most of the fun. Some samurai turned to drink – stories abounded of men being confined by embarrassed families to wooden cages – while others pawned their armour or, through gritted teeth, conceded to merchants their daughters’ hands in marriage.
The restoration of 1868 had failed to improve matters, despite its leaders being samurai themselves. Disaffected samurai of the old Satsuma domain acquired a valuable figurehead in 1873 when Saigō Takamori turned his back on the Council of State in Tokyo – disgusted at the collapse of the clique’s plan to provoke war with Korea – and returned home to the soothing hot springs of what was now Kagoshima prefecture. Branches of a ‘private academy’ began to spring up in the region, to whose young students Saigō was a hero. He worked with them, hoping to pass on something of the old samurai values before the last generation of natural-born samurai died out.
To Saigō’s former friends in the capital, these schools looked very much like military training camps. Alongside instruction in Chinese, French and English, ‘schooling’ was being offered in the use of weapons and artillery. Spies from Japan’s new police force were duly sent to investigate, towards the end of 1876. Some of these agents were caught and questioned, and a rumour began to circulate that at least one of them had confessed a government plot to assassinate Saigō. Coming around the same time as the arrival in Kagoshima of a ship sent by the government to remove munitions stored in the town, it was enough to convince Saigō’s supporters that if action were to be taken against Tokyo, it was now or never.
Saigō himself did not declare an uprising. He agreed to go to Tokyo to ‘remonstrate’ and ‘question’, setting out early in 1877 with around 12,000 of his student soldiers. The number rose to as many as 42,000 as others joined his cause. Fearing what might come next – especially after an attack by Saigō’s men on government troops at Kumamoto Castle – Tokyo sent tens of thousands of troops from its new army of conscripted commoners to stop him.
Violent clashes erupted, continuing on for months as 6,000 government soldiers were killed and three times that number from amongst the rebels ended up dead or wounded. Eventually, Japan’s new regime prevailed. It was able to supply its men with modern weapons and to produce half a million rounds of small-arms ammunition every day (albeit at ruinous expense), while the rebels had to make do with what they had. The American captain of a Mitsubishi Steamship Company vessel, used by the government to transport troops and supplies, later recalled seeing caches of confiscated rebel arms: old-fashioned match-lock rifles, together with piles, ten feet high, of worn-out swords.
The ‘Satsuma Rebellion’, as it became known, reached its denouement when a wounded Saigō retreated to a cave to perform ritual suicide. It was the last and greatest of a series of uprisings in the 1870s by former samurai who had hoped that 1868 would be a means of refashioning their world rather than overturning it – and who believed that for all its rapid achievements the new order was not yet set in stone.
Surrender of the Rebels (Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, c.1880) They were wrong, at least as far as their own class was concerned. The payment of samurai stipends had made up almost a third of government spending early on; at first they had been reduced and then, in 1876, converted into government bonds – often for small sums that were easily frittered away. Samurai were encouraged to become business entrepreneurs, but while some succeeded, many failed. In the newspapers, where old-school samurai were not much loved to begin with – their arrogance, sophistry and empty bravado regarded as part of the toxic Tokugawa brew that Japan had at last left behind – much fun was had over shambolic bushi shōhō: ‘warrior business-management’.
And yet Saigō was regarded in some quarters as a hero after his death, eventually receiving a posthumous imperial pardon. Before the century was out, a statue of Saigō stood proudly in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. The samurai class might be dead and gone, but the samurai ideal – for better and frequently for worse – had a long future ahead of it in modern Japan.
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Saigō Takamori (1828–77) Rumours About ‘Saigō Star’: when Mars reached its closest approach to earth in 1877, seeming to emit powerful light, there were rumours that the great Saigō Takamori was inside, alive and well The early years after 1868 were also marked by hundreds of disturbances by farmers concerned about the impact – especially during times of crop failure – of the country’s rigid new tax arrangements. In Okayama, people campaigned to have their old feudal lord reinstated, along with the lower taxes he used to request. For similar reasons, villagers in Hiroshima tried to prevent their daimyō and his entourage from leaving when the domains were abolished.
Communication between the country’s leadership in Tokyo and the majority of Japanese who lived and worked in the countryside was as yet far from perfect, compounded by a dismissive attitude towards rural people held by educated urbanites like Fukuzawa Yukichi – who declared them so woefully ignorant that they practically ‘invited oppression’. Various attempts were made by the Meiji leaders to improve that situation, and to persuade people of their vision for Japan. But there was a risk their actions could backfire – alienating the countryside even further, and even radicalizing it.
An early initiative was the ‘Great Promulgation Campaign’, launched in 1870. Buddhist and Shinto priests were sent out across the land as peripatetic political agents, spreading Three Great Teachings: respect for the gods and love of country; principles of Heaven and the Way of Man; and reverence and obedience to the Emperor and court. By 1876, a total of more than 10,000 ‘evangelists’ had been signed up to share a message that in practice boiled down to three more prosaic points: pay your taxes, send your children to school and comply with military conscription. At the same time, Japan’s numerous Shinto shrines were united in a single national framework, ranked in order of importance with the Ise Grand Shrine at the top – with whose rites everyone else had to harmonize theirs. This was also to be a means of reaching the population with whatever religious or political messages their new rulers sought to send.
Unfortunately, the Great Promulgation Campaign was not universally well received. People complained that the sermons were dull and the teachers were dullards, constantly arguing with one another – Shinto and Buddhist speakers were often tempted to slip sectarian asides into supposedly ‘national’ teachings. One group of samurai became so enraged that they travelled to the Great Teaching Institute and tried to burn it down.
Another option for Japan’s governing elite, as with their counterparts in the West, was fostering a loyalist newspaper industry. Most of the influential early Meiji papers were linked to members of the ruling clique. The conservative Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun had permission to report imperial court news, and functioned for a while almost as an official mouthpiece for the Chōshū faction within the leadership. Increasingly, however, large national newspapers served not just to encourage a sense of national cohesion but to lay bare a lack of elite consensus about what shape Japan’s future should take.
Education and conscription, the two final major means by which rural Japan came into contact with the new state, were similarly double-edged. By the mid-1870s the country was home to around 20,000 primary schools, most of them using Buddhist temples and private homes for their premises. But many people simply didn’t see the benefit: forking out extra taxes and losing the labour of their children for extended periods seemed a poor deal without clear evidence of improved job prospects. Moreover, in the early years before curricula and teacher training could be ironed out, it was possible for people like the future explosives courier Kageyama to become teachers, and to blur the line
between education and politics.
The demand that every man give three years of service to the regular army, followed by four to the reserves, was similarly unpopular – made more so by a rather unnecessary digression on foreign culture contained within the text of the Conscription Edict of 1873: ‘Western people call this a “blood tax” … This is because one protects one’s country verily with one’s blood.’ It said much about how fed up many in rural Japan were with the new regime’s rapidly multiplying demands upon their time and wealth, and the degree to which they suspected its motives, that a rumour swiftly gained traction in some parts of the country that the government now wanted literally to syphon off blood out of the veins of conscripts so that it could be sold abroad, possibly as wine. Some even claimed to have spotted men in white coats roaming the countryside carrying large glass receptacles. The choice of targets in the violent protests that ensued – involving many tens of thousands of people – made clear people’s wider grievances: moneylenders, wealthy farmers, merchants, schools, machinery at state-run mines and local government offices.
When trouble like this broke out, rural leaders tried to remonstrate with the authorities, as they had in the Tokugawa past. The rural poor shouldn’t be asked to fund so many new and dubious government initiatives all at once. Tax payments ought to reflect the productivity of the land. Moneylenders charging exorbitant rates during hard times should be brought to justice. And yet the rules appeared to have changed. A certain amount of negotiation was still possible, particularly where influential landowners were doing the asking. But isolated rural demonstrations that would once have caused embarrassment and a rethink were now sometimes simply fired upon, charged into and pushed back. Administrators, police forces and the new conscript army were often not local people anymore, with the knowledge or power or desire to put things right. They were agents of a distant central authority, with a job to do.
Ultimately, the only means of addressing grievances now was to find ways of influencing that central authority directly – not least via representative government of some kind. It was a conclusion that people across Japan were reaching during the 1870s and into the early 1880s.
In 1879, a man by the name of Chiba Takusaburō found work as a primary school teacher in a mountain town called Itsukaichi, not far from Tokyo. A decade earlier, he had served in the Tokugawa warrior ranks as they retreated northwards. Later he became a drifter, studying medicine and the tenets of the Pure Land Buddhist sect, joining the Russian Orthodox Church (at that time making minor inroads into northern Japan) and later assisting a Catholic missionary. In Itsukaichi, he made a brand-new discovery. A group of farmers drawn from five local villages were engaging in the most unusual of late-night fireside conversations: they were planning a draft constitution for Japan.
Chiba’s record of those discussions was unearthed many decades later, along with a worm-eaten treasure trove of books on British, French and German constitutional law – with Chiba’s comments scrawled in red in the margins. Incredibly, the Itsukaichi Constitution was far from the only document of its kind: evidence of more than thirty such constitutions was later found, all around Japan. A movement for ‘Freedom and People’s Rights’ (jiyū minken) was underway with small political societies like Chiba’s springing up everywhere. Drawing on people’s experiences of life before and since 1868, their aspirations for the future, longstanding beliefs in a just reciprocity between ruler and ruled, and incoming Western models and concepts, many of these societies were championing a form of constitutional monarchy in which people’s rights would be carefully elaborated and protected.
It all helped to pile pressure on Japan’s leaders, already reeling from samurai rebellions and splits amongst themselves. Itagaki Taisuke had left the Council of State along with Saigō in 1873 – over policy towards Korea, and also because of resentment about the dominance of national politics by Satsuma and Chōshū men. Itagaki petitioned the Emperor in 1874 to establish a representative assembly. And while this request came to nothing in the short term, Itagaki emerged as a leader in the Freedom and People’s Rights movement. By 1881 the government found itself forced to act on a long-held plan to risk some degree of representative democracy in Japan. An imperial rescript was issued, promising a constitution by 1890. A few days earlier, Itagaki had formed Jiyūtō, the ‘Freedom Party’. This was followed the next year by Rikken Kaishintō, Constitutional Progressive Party, also led by a former clique member who had fallen out with his colleagues – Ōkuma Shigenobu.
Itagaki, Ōkuma and their allies rooted their politics in translations of Western political treatises. Itagaki’s group preferred French revolutionary ideas while Ōkuma’s group built on English constitutional thought. Like Chiba and his friends, these elite-led parties worked on the fundamentals of a constitution for Japan, while trying to familiarize the public with concepts that were new and foreign. ‘Free-ness’ – was that moral or metaphysical? Was it about movement in some ethereal sense? ‘Rights’ – to do what, why and in defiance of whom?
The effort to make meanings clear here was fraught with risk – of confusion, misunderstanding, raising false hopes, or upsetting important allies. The selection of a word that would correspond to the French word liberté involved the careful weighing of at least four options. Jishu suggested self-mastery; fuki, unfetteredness; while jiyū and jizai implied following one’s intentions without restriction. The last two were close to what was needed, but carried unfortunate connotations of having one’s way at the expense of others. That left Fukuzawa Yukichi and other advocates of jiyū with a struggle on their hands to make it respectable while preventing it from dissolving into the ‘freedom’ of anarchy or barbarism. Long after jiyū won out – and was used in Itagaki’s party’s name – advocates of ‘freedom’ remained vulnerable to charges of living self-seeking lives that ignored the needs of others and the state. It was to become a favourite means of opposing new ideas down the decades in Japan, as elsewhere in the world: the conflation of political dissent with anti-social behaviour.
The emergence of these new political parties and the enthusiasms of their activists was looked upon with concern amongst leaders in Tokyo, amidst a snowballing economic crisis. In 1881 the pressure of paying old domain debts and samurai stipends, of putting in place the rudiments of a modern state despite terrible trade terms imposed by the unequal treaties, and finally the costly defeat of Saigō Takamori’s Satsuma Rebellion had brought the government to the brink of bankruptcy. Foreign loans – save one, for a railway line – were not an option: Japan’s leaders needed only to glance out into the world, most notably to Egypt, to find cautionary tales of countries whose relationship with European powers began with inward investment and ended in colonization. Instead, an urgent deflationary drive was launched.
By drastically reducing the amount of money in circulation, and raising taxes, the country’s finances and the immediate future of Japanese industry was eventually secured. But as rice and silk prices crashed, much of rural Japan fell into deep debt. People found themselves forced to take out new, high-interest loans to repay the ones they had taken out in good times, in order to invest in modern equipment. Anger escalated, and Japan’s leaders had to learn swiftly how to balance use of the carrot with the stick. Itagaki was a talented speaker, but he was also a man with a weakness for being blown off-course by well-timed bribes: once with a welcome back into government, before Jiyūtō was established; and then again at the height of the party’s national impact in 1882, with an all expenses paid fact-finding trip to Europe – though it is not clear that he was aware of the government’s role in funding his journey. Other rights activists encountered a police force that was increasingly well-informed and well-resourced. Many a political or ‘lecture’ meeting was broken up, often violently. Some groups took to having their meetings on barges in the middle of rivers and lakes, to guarantee undisturbed deliberations.
It was amidst these heightened tensions, particularly in the countryside
, that the Okayama schoolteacher Kageyama Hideko moved to Tokyo and became involved with plotters raising funds for the Korean Revolutionary Movement. Her dedication to the cause impressed the radical Freedom and Popular Rights leader and Jiyūtō member Ōi Kentarō, who had initially had his doubts about letting a young woman in on his scheme. Kageyama was asked to help carry the explosives for the group, from Osaka to Nagasaki in late 1885. From there, they would make the crossing to Korea and join activists who were hoping to install a new, reformist government.
But word spread about the Korea plot, and Ōi, Kageyama and the others were rounded up at an inn in Nagasaki while waiting for their ship. When the police turned up, Kageyama tried to feign ignorance of the plot, but an incriminating letter of hers was discovered in her bedding. Still, under interrogation she insisted that she was just in Nagasaki to ‘see the sights’ – only then to be goaded by the police: surely someone like her, who claimed to be a woman of principle, ought to give an honest account of her actions? Kageyama conceded the point and spilled the beans.
All in all, 200 people were arrested in 1885 in what became known as the ‘Osaka Incident’, named after the city where the plans had first been hatched. Put on trial for crimes against the state, possession of weapons and inciting riots, Kageyama received a prison sentence, becoming the first woman in modern Japan to be imprisoned for international political activism. She later recalled in her writings the journey to the prison on the Ise Peninsula: the pleasure of the beautiful, inspiring scenery somewhat dampened by ‘my persimmon-coloured, tight-sleeved [prison] garb and … a rope around my waist’.
Japan Story Page 5
