Emperor of Japan Read online

  Emperor of Japan

  Emperor of Japan

  MEIJI AND HIS WORLD, 1852 – 1912

  Donald Keene

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation

  for assistance given by the Japan Foundation

  toward the cost of publishing this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2002 Donald Keene

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-51811-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

  Keene, Donald.

  Emperor of Japan : Meiji and His world, 1852–1912 / Donald Keene.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-231-12340-X (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Meiji, Emperor of Japan 1852–1912. 2. Japan—History—Meiji period,

  1868–1912. 3. Emperors—Japan—Biography. I. Title.

  DS882.7.K44 2002

  952.03′1′092—dc21 2001028826

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  To the Memory of Nagai Michio (1923–2000)

  Friend and Teacher

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Emperor of Japan

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  At the northern end of the Gosho, the grounds surrounding the old imperial palace in Kyōto, just inside the wall marking the perimeter, there stands a small house. In the early years of the Meiji era, when American missionaries were first allowed to reside in the old capital, they used the house for a time to store their furniture and other belongings while they searched for a domicile. Today it attracts little attention, even though it is one of the few houses belonging to the nobility to have survived not only the conflagration that swept through the Gosho in the middle of the nineteenth century but also the dilapidation and destruction following the move of the capital to Tōkyō in 1868.

  Outside the fence that protects the house and garden from intruders is a small wooden marker inscribed Sachi no i, the Well of Good Fortune, and inside, barely visible over the top of the fence, is a more considerable stone monument. These two reminders of the past are all that alert the visitor to the fact that the building possesses greater significance than as an example—a very unimpressive example—of nineteenth-century traditional Japanese architecture. In fact, Emperor Meiji1 was born in this house in 1852, and (according to unreliable tradition) he was first washed in water from the Well of Good Fortune.2

  Meiji was born in this inconspicuous building rather than in the imperial palace itself because his mother, Nakayama Yoshiko, had been obliged by custom to leave her quarters in the palace when it became evident that she would soon give birth. It was traditionally believed that a birth polluted the building where it occurred, and for this reason children of the emperor were normally born near their mother’s house, often in a separate building that was likely to be destroyed when no longer needed. Ironically, this little house has lasted longer than the elaborate residences of the nobility that once surrounded it, vying proud roof against roof.

  In preparation for the imperial birth, Yoshiko’s father, the acting major counselor Nakayama Tadayasu, had erected this “parturition hut” next to his own, more substantial dwelling. He at first attempted to persuade his neighbors to let him use land they were not actually occupying, but even though the child who was to be born might well become the emperor, he was refused by all and, in the end, had to build on his already crowded property. Like many other nobles at the time, Tadayasu was too poor to pay the costs of even so modest a structure—two small rooms with a bath and toilet attached—and had to borrow most of the money needed for the construction.3

  Although the house is itself unimpressive, it is strange all the same that the birthplace of a deified emperor, whose shrine in Tōkyō, the Meiji jingū, attracts millions each New Year and many thousands of worshipers even on quite ordinary days, should be the object of so little interest and treated so casually. Only recently has the little house, badly neglected over the years, been given new tiles for its roof. This unmitigatedly utilitarian dwelling, with bare boards on the floor and not a trace of ornamentation anywhere, hardly suggests that this is where a prince was born who became Japan’s most celebrated emperor.

  The indifference displayed toward Meiji’s birthplace characterizes also, in a curious way, general knowledge of the man: even Japanese who believe that Meiji was the greatest Japanese ruler of all time may have trouble recalling a single accomplishment that might account for so glorious a reputation. Meiji is associated, of course, with the “Meiji Restoration” of 1868, the beginning of Japan’s modern history, but he was only fifteen when it occurred and, at that age, was obviously incapable of making a significant contribution to the Restoration or to the momentous changes that immediately ensued. His name is associated also with victories in wars with China and Russia and with the securing of an alliance with England, although his role in these events was surely that of a benign presence, not that of a formulator of policy or military strategy. Yet it is also true that throughout his reign and even much later, he inspired men to perform extraordinary deeds of valor. There was no question in the minds of the men who effected the changes of the new regime that he was the guiding spirit.

  The general lack of knowledge of the man is not the result of any large-scale suppression of evidence. There is ample documentation for almost every occurrence of Meiji’s life from his birth to his death. The official chronicle, Meiji tennō ki (Record of the Emperor Meiji), lists, on a virtually day-to-day basis, not only events in which he directly participated but relevant occurrences in the world around him. Many books and articles recalling Meiji’s daily life and personality were published after his death by people who knew him, but these books somehow fail to leave much impression. As the first emperor ever to meet a European, he figures also in the journals of foreign dignitaries who visited Japan. Their accounts, less inhibited than those by the comparatively few Japanese who were admitted to his presence, are of particular interest for their candid descriptions of his appearance from the time he first appeared before the public; but even they tell us little about the man.

  In addition to the host of facts in the twelve closely printed, stout volumes of the official record, there are innumerable legends and anecdotes about Meiji, notably the gossip concerning such subjects as his amours and the amount of liquor he consumed. There are even people who proudly claim to be illegitimate descendants, usually with only the flimsiest of evidence. Indeed, so much material is available that it might seem that the only requirement for a scholar who intended to write a well-rounded biography was patience; but Meiji’s biographers have rarely succeeded in the most essential task, creating a believable portrait of the man whose reign of forty-five years was characterized by the greatest changes in Japanese history.

  It may be that the biographers, whether or not they are willing to admit it even to themselves, have reached the frustrating conclusion that the personality of Emperor Meiji had no greater depth or complexity than the pieces of paper printed with his portrait, the conventionalized image of a monarch before which his subjects bowed in reverence without ever wondering what might lie beneath the surface. In order to illustrate their contention that Meiji had a “human” side, biographers often relate anecdotes suggesting that underneath his impassivity he felt great affection for his consort or that he thought constantly of his peop
le or that he possessed a wonderful sense of humor; but such anecdotes are seldom memorable or even believable. Debunking critics of more recent times tend to portray Meiji either as a cipher who was incapable of performing the acts attributed to him or, conversely, as a ruthless tyrant whose actions betrayed his indifference to the welfare of his subjects. They are probably equally mistaken, and their efforts only deepen the mystery of Meiji’s abiding fame and the immense number of his worshipers.

  Unlike Queen Victoria, his near contemporary, Meiji kept no diary and wrote virtually no letters. Meiji’s father, Emperor Kōmei, left many letters, most of them filled with the passionate anger that developments in the world had aroused in him; but the rare surviving letters of Meiji are without interest. Apart from his signatures on state documents, hardly anything in his handwriting survives.4 There are very few photographs, perhaps no more than three or four altogether, although many less exalted Japanese of his day were frequently photographed. The portrait paintings made both while he was alive and after his death, whether showing him inspecting a silver mine or presiding over a conference on drafting a constitution, were effigies not meant to be literally accurate, the work of artists who had probably never had so much as a glimpse of Meiji’s face.5

  One way of knowing Meiji, apart from the official records and the unofficial, sometimes untrustworthy, reminiscences of his chamberlains, is by reading the poetry he composed. It is estimated that in his lifetime Meiji wrote more than 100,000 poems. Despite the conventional language and imagery that marks them all, they contain bits of autobiographical interest and suggest his feelings on various occasions; but the documents for which he is best known—the rescripts on the army and on education—were composed by other men, and it is difficult to find in their wording anything of Meiji’s personal beliefs.

  The testimonies written after his death by people of the court who knew him are unsatisfying and sometimes mutually contradictory. One man recalls that Meiji was an unusually healthy and active boy, somewhat of a bully perhaps, a champion sumo wrestler in his youth. Another man, who knew him equally well, contends that as a child Meiji was delicate and prone to illness, testimony that makes one question accounts of his prowess at sumo. The story that Meiji fainted the first time he heard gunfire has been repeated by many biographers but denied by others. When faced with such contradictions, a modern reader tends to suspect the worst—that although Meiji as a boy was in fact sickly and timid, his biographers invented anecdotes that made him appear to have been a sturdy little son of Yamato. But can the man who many years earlier served as Meiji’s playmate have been lying when he recalled how regularly Meiji used to thrash him?6

  These contradictions are not confined to his boyhood: his intelligence, judiciousness, concern for his people, and other qualities befitting a sovereign have been questioned by recent scholars. To cite a minor example of such contradictions: Is it true that (as one chamberlain stated in his memoirs) Meiji not only received a dozen or more Japanese and foreign newspapers every day but examined them assiduously?7 Or is it true (as another chamberlain claimed) that during the early part of his reign, Meiji read the headlines but later on did not even glance at a newspaper?8 There also are contradictions in his reported daily behavior that make it extremely difficult to decide what he was really like. If, as often mentioned, he was simple in his tastes and so reluctant to spend money on himself that his uniform was patched,9 how does this square with his reported penchant for diamonds and French perfume?10

  It is difficult to feel that one knows Meiji even after plowing through the twelve volumes that record every day of his life. We know precisely when he set foot outside the Gosho for the first time, but what we really want to know is not the hour but the impression produced on him when he emerged from the walled enclosure that had been his entire world and (like Shakyamuni Buddha before him) saw, for the first time, poverty, illness, and death.

  Those who knew him personally praised his fortitude, his evenhandedness, and other admirable qualities. Even if we accept their praise as literal truth, we would like to know how it happened that a prince, raised mainly by ignorant women and devoted to the traditional, elegant pastimes of the nobility rather than to the use of weapons, a descendant of many generations of monarchs who had never participated in warfare, is remembered above all as a soldier, a man rarely seen out of uniform?

  When writing about Meiji, it is often difficult to keep one’s attention focused on the man himself because he was surrounded by officers of extraordinary ability and vividly contrasting personalities. Historians tend to discuss Meiji’s reign in terms of these men, leaving only a ceremonial role for the emperor in whose name their glorious achievements were performed. Yet surely it would be unfair to attribute Meiji’s extraordinary reputation solely to his having been, quite by chance, the emperor at a time of cataclysmic changes. In a more negative view, his youth and inexperience unquestionably helped the architects of the Restoration; one can easily imagine how their work would have been impeded at every stage if Meiji’s father, Emperor Kōmei (whose hatred of foreigners was implacable), had not providentially died at the early age of thirty-six. But Meiji was also capable of making important decisions even while he was young; for example, his intervention prevented the invasion of Korea advocated by Saigō Takamori and a majority of the other ministers. On many later occasions, Meiji’s actions—notably his repeated tours of the country—helped create in his subjects an awareness of Japan as a unified, modern country. To label Meiji a mere cipher is as inappropriate as to dismiss Queen Victoria in the same terms.11

  Meiji’s first name, Sachinomiya, or Prince Sachi, was given to him by his father a week after the infant’s birth. He was later known as Mutsuhito, the name that appears on documents he signed throughout his reign. Meiji, the name by which he is now normally known, was his posthumous designation; it was also the nengō, or reign-name, used in Japan instead of Western chronology. Until the adoption of “Meiji” as the name for Mutsuhito’s entire reign, the nengō was traditionally changed several times during the reign of a single emperor—at two fixed points in the cycle of sixty years, or when a series of natural disasters were attributed to an inauspicious nengō or when some prodigy of nature required recognition in the calendar. The name Meiji, meaning “enlightened rule,” was the nengō used for his reign from his first full year as a sovereign, 1868, until his death in 1912. It is now used also to characterize the whole of Japanese culture during a period of rapid and sometimes violent change.

  I shall attempt in these pages to find Emperor Meiji, a man who was born in a country that for centuries had refused almost all contact with the West but who in his lifetime saw Japan transformed into not only a world power but also a member of the community of nations.

  Chapter 1

  There are two portraits of Emperor Kōmei (1831–1867). The first, often reproduced, shows him sitting on a raised tatami (the gyokuza, or jeweled seat), dressed in court costume and wearing the distinctive headgear of an emperor, a hat with a tall, projecting plume-like band. His oval face, turned somewhat to the right, is composed and utterly without expression, in the typical manner of formal court portraits. Nothing (except perhaps the angle of the plume) indicates that this portrait was painted in the nineteenth, rather than, say, the thirteenth century, and no attempt was made to suggest in the depiction of Kōmei’s features his long suffering during an unusually turbulent reign. Judging by this portrait, Kōmei differed little from his ancestors, the emperors of the previous 200 years, most of them figureheads who contributed little to the nation. During their lifetimes, their existence was unknown to most Japanese; today even their names have been forgotten. Kōmei, however, despite the blandness of his features in this portrait, is distinctly remembered.1

  The second portrait creates quite a different impression. The face reveals a strong personality of which wrath seems to be the principal component. Kōmei was indeed angry throughout much of his life. His surviving letters and other
documents make it plain that almost every development during his reign infuriated him, and his response to each was not merely anger but frustration over his inability to prevent the impending changes in the government and society.

  Kōmei was born on July 23, 1831. His father was Emperor Ninkō, the 120th emperor according to the official chronology. His mother was not the emperor’s consort but a gon no tenji, or lady of the bedchamber, the daughter of the nobleman Ōgimachi Sanemitsu. Officially, however, Kōmei was considered to be the empress’s own child. As the fourth son of Ninkō, he normally would not have succeeded to the throne, but all his elder brothers had died by the time he was born. The mortality rate among children of the imperial family at this time and even much later was astonishingly high. Of Ninkō’s fifteen children, only three lived past their third year; of Kōmei’s six children, only one (Meiji) survived him; and of Meiji’s fifteen children, only five lived to be adults.2 It is not clear why the mortality rate should have been so much higher at the imperial court than among contemporary Japanese peasant families;3 but it has been ascribed to various causes, such as excessively early marriage (the heir to the throne normally married by his sixteenth year), the backward state of medicine as practiced by the court physicians, and the unhealthy, gloomy atmosphere prevailing in the palace. Perhaps also—though this is rarely suggested—the extremely limited choice of women of the nobility as mothers of imperial children tended to promote inbreeding.

  Especially after the beginning of the eighteenth century, emperors did not live long, although there were a few exceptions. Sakuramachi died at thirty; his successor, Momozono, at twenty-one; Go-Momozono, at twenty-one; Ninkō (Kōmei’s father), at forty-six; and Kōmei himself, at thirty-six. Accession to the throne was accordingly early: Kōmei’s grandfather, Emperor Kōkaku, ascended the throne at nine; his son, Ninkō, at seventeen; Kōmei, at fifteen; and his son, Meiji, also at fifteen. Under other circumstances, the accession of an inexperienced boy emperor might have created severe problems in the country’s administration, but in fact it hardly mattered to the Japanese state whether the emperor was a venerable exemplar of monarchical wisdom or a mere child; he took no part in the government, and his only public activities were the performance of prescribed rituals and ceremonies.4 The shogun did not have to ask the emperor’s advice when planning a course of action, and once he had made a decision, he did not seek the emperor’s consent. This situation would change with Kōmei.