Elsewhere, more radical modernizing suggestions were being made: English as the national language, Christianity for the national religion, even organized intermarriage with foreigners – the most direct way, it was speculated, of injecting into the Japanese bloodstream whatever it was about Westerners that had first powered them to Japan’s shores in their spectacular, terrifying steamships.
These were extreme ideas, never likely to materialize. But some still found the general trend worrisome. Modernity seemed to have a way of rendering hollow, quaint or picturesque so much that they valued about their country’s long past: the powerful, paradigmatic stories told in kabuki plays and poetry, in history and fiction, in music and fashion, and in the art and architectural styles that still made up most of the landscape. Were these things now just to be fodder for the international exhibitions – beginning with Vienna in 1873 – at which ‘Japan’ was enthusiastically marketed by government and entrepreneurs alike? Was the Japanese past just a source of objets d’art with which Doodle San could fill his home?
If not, then where was the grand narrative about Japan that could truly interweave the best of the modern West with the country’s aesthetic and moral inheritance? For people of the psychoanalyst Kosawa Heisaku’s father’s generation, hard at work in these closing years of the 1800s, wakon-yōsai – ‘Japanese spirit, Western techniques’ – was turning out in practice to be a kind of bifurcation in their own beings. An urban middle-class man might wear a suit to work and then a kimono at home, where in a ‘Western room’ – positioned to the fore while a ‘Japanese room’ lurked deeper within – he could read in his newspaper an anxiety-producing running commentary on how his country was doing compared with the British or the Germans. How were split, anxious personalities like these to be restored and modernity domesticated?
Real moral and cultural commitment was called for here, not just the blend of shallow pragmatism and embarrassing dilettantism that critics associated with Japan’s leaders, cut off from the people as they were by lengthy travels abroad and the alien sensibilities acquired in the process. For women and men who worried about these sorts of things, the problem by the mid-1880s was not their prime minister’s rather craven interest in wearing the mask of a Venetian nobleman. It was that the man behind the mask, too, appeared to be an imposter.
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This evening so cold and chill
That the mallards’ wings are white with frost
As they skim the reedy shore,
How I think of Yamato!
These lines, attributed to a member of Japan’s imperial family in 706, were included in the country’s first known anthology of poetry: Man’yōshū, or The Ten Thousand Leaves. Compiled in the mid-700s, it featured more than 4,000 poems spanning courtly culture and the coarser existences of the lesser born – albeit with many of the book’s ‘peasants’ and ‘soldiers’ being courtiers imaginatively garbed in the lives of others. Nature, and especially the changes wrought by the seasons, appeared everywhere as backdrop and as metaphor for fleeting moments of grace: playfulness and delight, the poignancy of loss and grief, tiny captured glimpses of great cycles of vitality bursting forth, then withering away. Life was apprehended as brief, seasonal and sorrowful.
A language that ‘rhymes too readily’, and with which care must therefore be taken to avoid vulgar versifying, had been brought together here with a broader aesthetic based on the evocative power – to the intellectually and emotionally initiated – of the minimal and the allusive. The result was a poetic tradition dominated by the thirty-one syllable tanka (‘short poem’) version of waka (‘Japanese poem’), usually created using the pattern: 5-7-5-7-7. The original Japanese version of the poem above ran:
Ashi e yuku
Kamo no hagahi ni
Shimo furite
Samuki yūhe ha
Yamato shi omohoyu
Argument raged across the Meiji era as to whether there was any role for literature like this in the new, modernizing nation. In the year of Itō’s masquerade ball, a thesis on ‘Reform of National Literature and Waka’ counselled that the content of Japanese poetry must at the very least be made manlier – ‘conducive to a spirit of bravery’. Other critics suggested doing away with traditional forms entirely.
And yet the long-standing association in Japan of poetry with the life of the imperial court was thought too precious to lose. A preference emerged for reworking rather than rejecting. The old Imperial Poetry Bureau was re-established in 1869 and a New Year’s poetry competition inaugurated, to which, after 1874, commoners were permitted to contribute. Beginning in the early 1880s, the winning poems were printed in the daily newspapers, those from imperial and commoner pens appearing side by side. Over the course of his lifetime, the Emperor Meiji himself – no doubt with the assistance of the Imperial Poetry Bureau – was said to have composed more than 90,000 verses. Haiku poets, meanwhile, were recruited by the government to help them communicate the new national morality – Emperor, taxes, conscription – to the masses. Matsuo Bashō, the great Tokugawa-era master of the haiku form, was quite literally deified – worshipped as the god Hana-no-moto Daimyōjin.
Part of the impetus for the preservation of poetry as a living form could be traced back to late Tokugawa kokugaku (‘national learning’) scholars like Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). He claimed to find in ancient and classical Japanese poetry and prose an unrestrained response to the beauty of life, which stood in stark contrast to ponderous Chinese poetry – drily rationalistic and excessively concerned with rigid standards of behaviour. Various versions of this ‘Japanese’ aesthetic were developed before and well after Motoori’s time, but in general they tended to be defined and energized by three sets of tensions, each giving the other two much of their force.
The first was between emotion and its refined restraint, present in waka poetry and informing, too, the design of masks used by principal dancers in the ‘Nō’ style of theatre. The second was between complexity on the one hand and an understated rustic simplicity, bordering on loneliness (wabi) on the other – it was part of the potter or shrine-builder’s highly developed skill to allow their finished product to radiate a sense of the raw, imperfect clay or wood from which it was fashioned. Under the influence of Zen, a version of the tea ceremony was developed from the late 1400s called wabicha – tea based on wabi – in which elegant Chinese kettles and vessels were exchanged for ceramics from regions of Japan like Bizen, known for their natural and imperfect, ‘withered’ (sabi) appearance. The final tension was between the enjoyment of life and an awareness that everything in nature is constantly passing away. This awareness, often referred to as mono no aware, was less an unfortunate, melancholy disposition than a prized human capacity to be moved by the world.
To have a modern Emperor who could appreciate and express all this in poetry of his own was all the more important because of the associations suggested by thinkers like Motoori between Japanese aesthetics and emotions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the country’s ancient and mythical history and its imperial bloodline. Back in the early 700s, not long before the Man’yōshū anthology was compiled, two chronicles had appeared: the Kojiki (‘Records of Ancient Matters’) and the Nihon shoki (‘The Chronicles of Japan’). The oldest extant writings in Japanese, they were produced at a time when a kingdom was coming together – the ‘Yamato’ period – that did not yet encompass the whole of modern-day Japan, but to whose emperors Meiji could nevertheless trace his family line all the way back.
The Nihon shoki offered a creation story that gave Japan pride of place. It told of a country created as a ‘drifting land’ by the brother and sister kami (gods) Izanagi and Izanami. Izanagi thrust his spear into the ocean; when he withdrew it, drops of brine from its tip formed into small islands. Among the kami later to emerge from Izanagi’s body were Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, and her brother Susanoo, the Wind God. Appointed to rule over the high plains of heaven, Amaterasu sent her grandson, Ninigi, to pacify and
rule this drifting land, giving him three treasures: a bronze mirror, a sword and a curved jewel. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu became the land’s first Emperor in 660 BCE, from which point the Nihon shoki traced an imperial line for more than a thousand years right up to the early 700s, mythology shading into history along the way.
These powerful, ancient convictions about Japan’s special place in the world were given new life by kokugaku thinkers like Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), who suggested that via the performance of certain rituals the emperor in every age was able to connect his people to the gods and to awaken in them the spirit that Motoori liked to call yamato-gokoro – ‘Yamato-heart’.
Of the various ways in which such ideas filtered through to the modern era, one was expressed in the 1880s by Kuga Katsunan, the influential editor of the newspaper Nihon. He insisted that Japan had its own distinctive forms of behaviour and politics, formed naturally and organically across many centuries, the value and truth of which was deducible not through scientific reason (whose modern reification was itself a matter of culture rather than nature or necessity) but via appeal to the emotions.
Izanagi and Izanami Creating the Islands of Japan (Kobayashi Eitaku, c.1885) These forms, he argued, were politically and psychologically indispensable to the successful building up of Japan as a competitive modern nation. ‘If the culture of one nation’, Kuga wrote, ‘is so influenced by another that it completely loses its own unique character, that country will surely lose its independent footing.’ Here was a warning with powerful resonance in the era of the dancing cabinet: if as Japanese we all end up capering around in foreign finery, aping foreign manners and mannerisms, then the colonization of our country that our leaders claim to fear will have been achieved without a shot being fired.
Kuga also wished to impress upon his readers that there was no such thing as ‘the West’: each Western nation possessed its own particular genius, had mapped its own route to progress and had made its own contributions to world development. Such varied and complementary talents amongst nations was the stuff of real and creative internationalism, he insisted, and Japan ought to play its part rather than being content with mere borrowing or imitation.
Kuga’s ideas were developed by Miyake Setsurei, who claimed in an essay entitled ‘The Japanese: Truth, Goodness and Beauty’ that in working for the good of one’s country one works for the good of mankind. For the Japanese, this meant making use of the unique opportunity of being the first Asian country to approach economic and technological parity with the modern West, by reaching deep into their culture to find ways of being in the world that would balance those offered up and lived out by Westerners. Japan should pursue balance too, he added, by building up its military strength to the point where Asian countries need no longer fear being overrun by European colonialism.
For popular nationalists like Kuga and Miyake, discerning the finer details of all this became an urgent priority in the late 1880s and 1890s. What precisely was the ‘national essence’ (kokusui) running through Japan’s past, aesthetics and emotional life, and what was the proper role of the imperial institution in guaranteeing its preservation?
Japan by the late 1880s thus found itself home to at least three powerful and conflicting sets of ideals. A great many liberals, some of whom were prepared to condone violence in the pursuit of their aims, thought that in questions of politics and rights Japan had much to learn from the likes of America, Britain and France. They believed the country’s leaders had become too comfortable in their power, and risked betraying the great promise of 1868. A newer nationalist line of thought urged a more critical stance towards Western culture, seeking to tease out and promote some kind of national essence as the basis for education, behavioural norms and policy-making. Both approaches were overtly and self-consciously forward-looking, though they differed fundamentally in their conceptions of what ‘progress’ might be and how it would happen.
Finally, there were traditionalist conservatives like Motoda Eifu, who served as personal tutor to the Emperor. Motoda saw much good in Confucian standards and patterns of relationship as the foundation for a successful society in any era. Fearing for his country’s future, he produced an imperial rescript in 1879 warning of ‘foreign civilizations’ whose ‘only values are fact-gathering and technique’. It led them, he said, to lack the attention to sincerity and morality for which Confucius remained the best guide.
Inside many Japanese swirled elements of all three sets of ideals, and the era was famous for political U-turns by great thinkers. Timing, too, was enormously significant in helping to settle matters between competing visions for modern Japan. Traditionalists and the new nationalists found themselves enjoying influence – in the press and at the Emperor’s ear – just as Japan’s political leaders were completing their work on a long-awaited Constitution.
*
The move from a Council of State to a cabinet system of government had been made in 1885 in preparation for the publication and promulgation of a document whose compilation was carried out without public discussion (as, its defenders were keen to point out, the Constitution of the United States had been), but with careful reference to what worked and what did not in Europe. Itō had travelled there in the early 1880s, returning having learned two crucial things: how to hold a cigar like Bismarck, and how to adapt Prussia’s constitutional monarchy to fit Japan’s unique situation – a divine Emperor at the head of a ‘vast village community’, as Itō put it.
Promulgated in 1889, the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kenpō) was presented as a gift from the Emperor, in whom sovereignty resided on the basis of his divine ancestry – as recorded in Japan’s two ancient chronicles. The ceremonial events of that great day, 11 February, began with a visit by the Emperor to the Place of Awe, the most sacred part of the newly built imperial palace in Tokyo. There he promised Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess and great mother of the imperial line, that he would protect Japan’s ancestral form of government and uphold this new addition to it. He repeated his promise at the Ancestral Spirits Sanctuary before worshipping for a while at the Sanctuary of the Kami. Messengers were then sent out to shrines and places of remembrance across the country, bringing the news to the gods and to deceased leaders of the 1868 restoration of imperial rule.
The Emperor proceeded to exchange his ritual robes for the military uniform of a modern European monarch, and enter the Throne Room, where national and prefectural politicians, peers and select members of the press awaited him. Reading out a short speech, he handed – literally made a gift of – the new Constitution to Japan’s Prime Minister. A specially installed telegraph line informed the Imperial Guard outside of what had just occurred, and a 101-gun salute was fired off – duly answered in kind by battleships moored at Shinagawa and Yokohama, and by the crackle of fireworks and the ringing of temple bells.
Under the terms of the new Constitution, the Emperor was supreme commander of the armed forces, and would make all appointments to the judiciary, to the new Diet’s Upper House (or House of Peers), and to the Cabinet. The Lower House of the Diet, the House of Representatives, was to be elected on the basis of a limited franchise: just 5 per cent of the adult male population, based primarily on age (twenty-five or over) and the amount of tax paid. In 1890, the year of Japan’s first election under the new Constitution, that meant around 450,000 people, or a little over 1 per cent of Japan’s total population. The Lower House was set up so as to have an influential rather than a decisive role in governance, drafting legislation (a function shared with the ministries and with the dependably conservative and loyalist House of Peers) and passing the annual budget.
The real purpose of the Diet, for Meiji leaders like Itō and especially his hardline Chōshū ally Yamagata Aritomo – who regarded party politics as an immoral tussle over power, and ‘public opinion’ as a barely legitimate concept – was in fact two-fold. First, as a safe means of letting the opinionated feel important and effective; and secondly
, as yet another way (alongside schools, conscription, newspapers and imperial rescripts) in which the will of those really in charge might be communicated to the public. That real power lay with the executive: the Cabinet, with its Ministers of State, who remained separate from the Lower House (‘transcendent’ was the preferred term) and independent of any interference by the judiciary. The only true leverage enjoyed by elected politicians under the new Constitution was the ability to refuse to pass the annual budget.
People’s freedoms were, on paper, extensive, spanning movement, property, free speech, religion, assembly and privacy of correspondence. But all were vulnerable to restriction by law or by (very flexible) considerations of the public peace. Similarly, although management of the press via legislation seemed at first to augur a more liberal regulatory regime, the Cabinet could still use imperial directives to intervene with editors and publishers. A Newspaper Law in 1909 added to those powers, enabling the complete banning of a particular edition of a publication (and the seizure of all copies) without resort to the courts. In the early days of the Meiji era, the Council of State had encouraged journalistic discussion of national matters, but had made clear that books and newspapers would be subject to scrutiny and ‘irresponsible criticism’ would not be tolerated. In this new constitutional era, the thinking remained very much the same.
Japan’s first ever nationwide elections, in 1890, were greeted with a 97 per cent turnout amongst eligible voters. The two major parties by 1890 were a reformed Jiyūtō and Kaishintō, channelling anger at government leaders for their failure to revise the unequal treaties and for the high taxes to which they were subjecting the wealthy farmers and merchants who made up the majority both of the voting public and their newly elected representatives. Most of the latter were young – two-thirds were below the age of forty-three – and from this point on Japan began to establish a tradition of returning the same people, and often their sons or other relatives after them, time after time to public office. Other new electoral traditions included government bribery of Diet members (Yamagata enjoyed an imperial palace purse of nearly a million yen to this end in 1892) and the use of the police and hired thugs to try to swing key election outcomes. No party whose members or allies controlled the Home Ministry ever lost a Lower House election.
Japan Story Page 7
