Ōi, for his part, was not going down without a speech. He persuaded the court to let him speak for three days about his motivations, in the course of which he claimed that he had done it all for the sake of Korean democracy. After all, he said, Koreans, like ordinary Japanese, were presently caught between Western aggression and reactionary elites at home – power in Japan, he believed, simply having been passed in 1868 from one narrowly self-interested group to another. The judges were unmoved and handed Ōi a six-year prison term. He appealed, alleging political persecution – to which they responded by upping his sentence to nine years.
Ōi used his time in prison to develop his political vision, going on after his (very) early release in 1889 to try his hand at both electoral politics and violent unrest. He supplied a bomb, from the Osaka Incident stockpile, to an ultra-nationalist group opposed to what they saw as the appeasement of Western powers by Japan’s Foreign Minister – Ōkuma Shigenobu, who had been tempted back to the government fold. The bomb took Ōkuma’s leg off.
Feted in the press as ‘Japan’s Joan of Arc’, Kageyama spent her jail time leafing through love letters from Ōi, helping other women in her prison learn how to read and write, and beginning to set out her call for women’s rights in Japan. This was something she thought that egotistical male radicals were still rather neglecting, happy as they were to spend money that might have gone to political causes on drinking and prostitutes instead.
Where Kageyama’s original career in school-teaching had fallen prey to the state’s clampdown on political discussion, her fellow teacher Miura Momonosuke was a victim of the serious economic harm being done to the countryside in the interests (as many a rural radical saw it) of propping up an illegitimate urban leadership. He began his plotting and training in Gunma prefecture, in 1884, after losing an appeal to a high-interest loan company for repayments to be postponed. He had links with Ōi Kentarō’s radical wing of Jiyūtō, and also with local gangsters, including Yamada Jōnosuke. Heavily involved in the illegal gambling industry, Yamada, like Miura, was losing out to various government policies of recent years. Its deflationary drive impoverished his gambling customers. A new anti-gambling law saw well over a thousand people punished in Gunma in a single year. And rocky consumer markets damaged Yamada’s silk-farming business.
Working with the mob was useful at a time when the state was beefing up its police force. In April of 1884, Miura helped to hide a gangster in his storehouse, following a fatal sword attack on a policeman conducting surveillance of a gambling den. Later that month the favour was repaid; after police threatened to break up a meeting at which Miura and others were speaking – and at which a revolutionary song about the skies raining blood had just been sung – Yamada rushed in with around one hundred of his men, forcing the police to flee.
It was later at Yamada’s house that the bigger incident was planned out, set for 1 May when the Emperor was due to arrive to open a new stretch of railway. But local police started to become suspicious when an unusually large number of people began to gather near the train station. They called off the opening ceremony as a precaution. Miura’s group moved to Plan B: they gathered together thousands of farmers a couple of weeks later, attacked the boss of a local moneylending company, robbed some wealthy farmers nearby and launched an assault on a police station. When expected reinforcements failed to arrive, large numbers of the attackers, Miura included, ended up getting arrested. While Kageyama taught and wrote behind bars, Miura began a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
Mere months after the ‘Gunma Incident’ reached its climax, it was the turn of the Poor People’s Army in Chichibu, Saitama prefecture, to make its anger felt at what the country and people’s lives were turning into. As in Gunma, the traumatic impact of a collapse in silk prices came together with calls for political rights and responsible government to create a broad base of potential recruits for armed rebellion. Making their way to their village meeting point, 3,000 volunteers were divided into two battalions by their commander – the sometime gangster Tashiro Eisuke – and sent into action. Two local towns were promptly captured, government offices and money-lenders’ homes were attacked (Tashiro himself was reportedly in debt to three separate loan companies, in addition to a mortgage on his land), and supplies were stolen – albeit with receipts issued bearing the stamp ‘Headquarters of the Revolution’. From their new bases, the Poor People’s Army sent out recruiting parties to nearby villages, sometimes claiming to be from Jiyūtō.
But as with the Satsuma, Osaka and Gunma incidents, so too with Chichibu: a new state that had yet to achieve clarity in its political arrangements proved nevertheless to have its internal security well in hand. Police and military police units rushed to the scene, and aside from a skirmish or two lost because some of them had brought along the wrong bullets for their guns, they were quickly successful in putting down the rag-tag rebellion. It was all over within days: more than thirty people dead, 200 arrested, and another 200 fleeing the scene. Tashiro was captured and carried away in a bamboo cage, becoming one of seven to receive a death sentence.
Freedom and Popular Rights activist Kageyama Hideko (1865–1927) Dajōkan councillor turned party organizer Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919) *
The conservative Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun dismissed the people of the Chichibu rebellion as ‘villainous gamblers and radical wanderers’. Another paper homed in on the destruction of moneylenders’ records, suggesting that the whole thing was about personal self-interest and nothing more. Such interpretations mattered: the newspapers were becoming immensely influential in shaping the ways in which an ever-larger constituency of urban readers thought about far-off events in rural, regional Japan. Today’s unacceptable outliers in Japan’s constantly evolving modern story were the gamblers and the debtors leading good people astray. Tomorrow’s would be over-educated women, traitorous socialists, uppity industrial workers and venal politicians and businessmen.
Meanwhile, the sense of dislocation between rural and urban worlds that was betrayed in some of the press reaction to the incidents of 1884 and 1885 was set to intensify into the twentieth century. Urbanites would discover too late the implications of failing to keep happy those parts of the country that supplied the lion’s share of their food and of recruits to the army.
For now, what most exercised the minds of city-dwellers were questions of high politics, culture and how to deal with the outside world. With radical movements largely quashed by the mid-1880s, what should responsible politics look like? Why were the unequal treaties still in place – had the country’s leaders spent so much time trying to live like foreigners that they had forgotten how to be firm with them? Might Japan even be losing its cultural memory, and with it any clear sense of what the future ought to look like?
3
The Dancing Cabinet
The navy band struck up, and the guests paraded in. Ball gowns and gentlemen’s frock coats from all points on Europe’s fashion compass hung off wearers poised to put long hours of dance tuition to the test. German beer and American cocktails were on hand to steady nerves, while in the kitchen a French chef was preparing a banquet of his native cuisine, selections to be made by aspiring gourmands from a menu printed entirely in French. The taste and warm haze of imported English cigarettes would round off the whole experience nicely.
In other rooms nearby, billiards and cards could be played. There was even a corridor designed especially for promenading up and down. But this upper floor ballroom was the centrepiece, filling rapidly with Tokyo’s international great and good, gas lights picking out their faces as they danced the night away at the annual imperial birthday ball. The Rokumeikan, as it was called, had been completed in 1883, at ruinous – even insulting – expense, given Japan’s straitened economic circumstances in the mid-1880s. It was intended as a place where the country’s elites might socialize on equal terms with influential foreigners; the name meant ‘Deer Cry Hall’, and was inspired by a Chines
e poem lauding the spending of precious time with strangers.
Advocates for the building lauded a grand, appropriately global design: a large stuccoed mansion dominated by verandas and colonnades, the brainchild of a British architect, Josiah Conder. Detractors spied only a mess of incompatible features from around the world, thrown together and plonked down amongst Japanese pines, ponds and old stone lanterns. Here was a monument to the most curiously self-defeating of national policies; a metaphor in mortar for just how lost, how estranged from its history and culture Japan had become in a few short years.
The Rokumeikan – ‘Deer Cry Hall’ Similar social gatherings were increasingly being held in private homes too. Most notorious was a masquerade ball – reputedly Japan’s first – thrown in 1887 at the residence of one of the era’s most influential governing elites: Itō Hirobumi. Fairy queens and pirates hobnobbed with goblins, beetles and butterflies, as the man himself appeared as a Venetian nobleman and his daughter as an Italian peasant girl. Precisely what went on below the chandeliers that particular night remains a mystery. But etiquette seemed to go missing along the way, and Itō was later rumoured to have tried to seduce a young married woman.
Itō’s hope, together with his childhood friend and fellow Chōshū rebel Inoue Kaoru, who commissioned the Rokumeikan, had been to use grand social occasions to show the world just how far Japan had come. They might also show, by example, Japan’s middling and lower orders something of how to interact properly with foreigners – as opposed to shooting or stabbing them, as had briefly been tried in the febrile 1850s and 1860s.
But by the late 1880s the Rokumeikan became synonymous instead, amongst Japanese journalists and commentators, with the ridiculous and harmful presumptions of a small, deluded clique. The Council of State having been exchanged in 1885 for a cabinet system of government – Inoue as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Itō as Japan’s first Prime Minister – some talented satirist spotted the chance to coin a phrase: ‘the dancing cabinet’. It stuck.
Partly this was a problem of perceived indecency. Japanese journalists were as adept as their international counterparts at professing moral anxiety as a pretext for basking in the salacious:
A beautiful woman leans her head against a man’s shoulder and turns her fair face toward the man’s ears. Her bare arm circles the man’s neck, and her undulant bosom touches the man’s chest, rising and falling with her breathing. Her legs intertwine with the man’s like vines on a pine tree. The man’s strong right arm firmly encircles the small of the woman’s back; with each move he presses her ever more tightly to his body. The light … in the beautiful woman’s eyes is steadily directed at the man, but she is too dazzled to see anything. The music stirs her, but she does not hear the sounds. She hears instead the echoes of a distant waterfall and moves as in a dream, her body clinging to the man’s. When a woman reaches such a state, where is the innate modesty of the virtuous maiden?
But the indecencies that really concerned critics were cultural as much as social or sexual. These soirées were beginning to epitomize what a retrospective piece forty years later in the Japan Times would call the era’s ‘mad rush to adopt Western customs and habits’. Itō’s masquerade ball in particular had ‘astonished the public’: ‘those who saw [a] dignified Premier and other officials appearing in strange costumes thought it an insane and foolish event.’
Western visitors to Japan, too, discovered much that was ripe for satire. The French cartoonist Georges Ferdinand Bigot, who lived in the country for nearly twenty years, lampooned local ladies learning ballroom dance, and the narcissism of elite culture more broadly. In one of his sketches, two people dressed in European costume admire themselves in a mirror – two monkeys stare back. A second Frenchman, Pierre Loti, thought the Rokumeikan’s Japanese patrons were involved in a ‘contemptible imitation’ of European culture, rather sniffily likening the building itself to a casino that one might find in a French spa town.
Monday at the Rokumeikan (Georges Ferdinand Bigot, 1887) Imitation (Georges Ferdinand Bigot, 1877) Western satirizing of this early cultural love-in between Japan and the West cut both ways, of course, with much of it taking the form of long-term ex-pats scorning the vulgarity of their own countrymen blundering through ‘the East’ for the first time. A favourite target was the wealthy tourist, possessed of more money than taste, fawning over fakes and expecting everything to be for sale. Japan resident Osman Edwards offered up a little ditty on the subject, to fit the tune of Yankee Doodle:
Doodle San will leave Japan
With several tons of cargo;
Folks will stare when all his ware
Is poured into Chicago.
There’s silk, cut velvet, old brocade
And everything that’s jōtō [high class],
And ancient bronzes newly made
By dealers in Kyoto.
For the Japanese, there was a deadly serious political context to their concerns about what Itō and his colleagues got up to of an evening. These self-appointed leaders of the new Japan were failing, still, to have the widely despised unequal treaties of a generation before revised. Just how much this mattered, and just what foreigners seemed really to think of Japan, became apparent in late 1886 when a cargo ship called the Normanton, travelling from Yokohama to Kobe, was wrecked and sank. Somehow its British and German crew found safety aboard the lifeboats, while twelve Indian and Chinese crewmen and twenty-five Japanese passengers were left behind in the water. All twenty-five of the Japanese died.
Inoue Kaoru ordered an urgent investigation, only to find himself hampered by the extraterritoriality rules that remained part of the unequal treaties. A British investigation exonerated the captain, John William Drake, of any wrongdoing. Only after Inoue was reduced to bringing charges in the British Court for Japan was a three-month prison sentence for Drake finally won. Compensation claims by families continued to be rejected. An outraged Japanese press covered the whole affair in heavy detail, with one writer at the Tokyo Nichi Nichi accusing Drake of treating his Japanese passengers ‘like luggage’.
It would take Japan’s vanquishing of its erstwhile cultural mentor China in a short war in 1894–5, to help finally achieve treaty revision on acceptable terms. Just as Commodore Matthew C. Perry had thought the Japanese susceptible only to great demonstrations of power, the same appeared to be true in reverse: where carefully costumed civility attracted ridicule from Western counterparts, a naked display of military power succeeded.
Where Japan’s elite had the Rokumeikan as an aspirational point of contact with foreign culture, its middle and lower classes had the streets of the treaty ports and the new capital. These continued to fill with immigrants from across Japan, getting around on horse-drawn buses or iron-wheeled rickshaws (the word itself comes from the Japanese jinrikisha: ‘person-powered vehicle’).
Following a fire in 1872, the Ginza district of Tokyo was rebuilt as a model neighbourhood of brick and gas lighting, down which self-consciously ‘modern’ men and women could be seen strolling in curious combinations of clothing. It was a gift to writers of ‘cheap, amusing literature’ (gesaku) like Kanagaki Robun: kimono worn over trousers, gingham umbrellas come rain or shine, shabby second-hand Western suits for the financially constrained early-adopter, and the occasional ostentatious gesture to consult the time on a watch that might be embarrassingly cheap or solid gold.
Alongside Sunday rest and Christmas, a major contribution to these new rhythms and sights of urban Japanese street life were its fads – or as Basil Hall Chamberlain, a British professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, referred to them: ‘fashionable crazes’.
1873 was the rabbit year. There had been none of these little rodents in Japan. Hence, when imported as curiosities, they fetched incredible prices, as much as $1,000 being sometimes paid for a single specimen. Speculations in $400 and $500 rabbits were of daily occurrence … 1874–5 were the cock-fighting years … Waltzing and gigantic funerals marked 1886–7. The fol
lowing year took quite a new departure, setting mesmerism, table-turning and planchette in fashion; and 1888 lifted wrestling from a vulgar pastime to a fashionable craze, in which the then prime minister … led the way. 1889 saw a general revival of all native Japanese amusements, Japanese costume, anti-foreign agitation, etc. This was the great year of reaction. 1893, the whole nation went mad over Colonel Fukushima’s successful ride across Siberia. 1896, stamp-collecting. 1898–1900, garden-parties …
There were vogues for squeaky brogues – special inserts made of ‘singing leather’ could be purchased. And the eating of meat went from being something done for medicinal reasons only to an experiment by curious urbanites to see whether it really was one of the ingredients of Western success. Beef had been eaten by injured soldiers of the Boshin War, to aid their recovery, and was soon permanently on the menu in army and navy barracks. From there, it made it onto civilian menus, a transition slowed slightly in Tokyo because supply was somewhat at the mercy of the fabled bushi shōhō (warrior business-management). The people involved treated their clients so arrogantly, were so shameless in trying to rig prices, and were sufficiently relaxed about quality control that their enterprise was quickly wound up by red-faced officials. Nevertheless, Western patrons of high-class restaurants were soon enjoying a warm feeling of cultural superiority as they watched their Japanese friends chase a piece of meat patiently around the plate with inexpertly wielded knives and forks. Rougher outlets offered chopsticks to their patrons: these were the cramped, steamy spaces – known as ‘stew restaurants’ – where experiments were made in marinading beef in familiar flavours like miso and soy sauce. All this quickly caught on: by 1877, Tokyoites in search of beef had nearly 600 establishments from which to choose.
Japan Story Page 6
