Persona
Page 4
What prompted Azusa to look closely into his paternal genealogy was the thought that his father might—just might—have a samurai ancestor. He probably was certain that was not the case; after all, he was the one who had cut off any links to his father’s relatives in Shikata. But he urged Ono to track down the death register as far back as he could because during the Edo Period, samurai were obliged to become farmers often enough for a variety of reasons. He also knew that Uchida Ryōhei, a prominent figure in Japan’s rightwing patriotic movement, was related to another nationalist leader, Hiraoka Kōtarō, and that Hiraoka came from a notable samurai family in Fukuoka, Kyūshū. That was why, when done with his investigation in Shikata and headed back to Tokyo, Ono asked the resident monk of the Shinpuku Temple to find out if the Hiraoka in Shikata was connected in any way to the Hiraoka clan in Fukuoka. The monk’s letter that followed in due course confirmed what Azusa had expected: There appeared to be no such linkage.19
Azusa’s motive in a genealogical search aside, what Ono found clearly showed how a peasant family dealt with changing circumstances from one generation to another. “Hiraoka Takichi”—Azusa’s grandfather—“was a prosperous landowner-cum-farmer,” Ono reported. “He was also a rural intellectual with a poetic bent who always carried with him a case of writing implements and verse sheets. (That was symbolic of the master class in those days.) He sent two of his sons, Manjirō and Sadatarō, to the private school that Hashimoto Kansetsu’s father-in-law ran in Akashi for them to learn Chinese classics and calligraphy; he then sent them off to the Eastern Capital [Tokyo] to study.” “Takichi’s wife, Tsuru,” Ono did not forget to mention, “was known in the area as an exceptionally wise spouse.”
It was Takichi’s father, Tazaemon, who provided impetus for the Hiraoka family to improve upon a regular peasant’s life. After the banishment he moved to a neighboring village, cultivated new lands, grew indigo plants, made charcoal, and raised fish. Takichi expanded on his father’s approach with the help of his “exceptionally wise spouse” and eventually acquired land ten times the size of what an ordinary peasant owned in those days. He was born in 1833 and was thirty-five when the Tokugawa rule ended and a new regime came into being, in 1868. It was a time of wrenching change. Takichi had talent and an ability to cope with it, though local stories say that he expanded his holdings mainly through money-lending that was at times unsavory.
Takichi and Tsuru had three sons and a daughter. They were doing well enough by the local standards but weren’t rich enough to support their first and second sons, Manjirō and Sadatarō, in Tokyo. But Takichi had created a network of intellectuals to work with before the 250-year Tokugawa rule ended. As the general view of the Tokugawa regime has it, it was a feudalistic period of rigid class immobilization. The truth was different. It tolerated a fair degree of interclass fluidity, especially as it became destabilized and faced collapse. In 1872, the new government abolished the existing four classes—which in social order were samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants—and reclassified them into three—nobility (kazoku), gentry (shizoku), and commoners (heimin). This new class system was more lax, the notion that was promoted being ikkun banmin, “All men are equal under one monarch.”
One thing that did not change for quite some time was a loose system of mutual help that members of each locality maintained when they went to live in a large city like Tokyo. The Tokugawa government was noted for the sankin kōtai arrangement that required each daimyo to spend every other year in Edo. This in effect created for each fief a liaison office in the largest city of Japan. Shikata was closest to the Himeji fiefdom, so it was to a former samurai of Himeji that Manjirō and Sadatarō turned when they went to Tokyo. He was Furuichi Kimitake, whom Takichi knew. Furuichi enrolled in Kaisei School,20 the forerunner of the Imperial University of Tokyo, in 1870, when he was fifteen. In 1875 he went to France to study, with the financial support of Himeji. After returning to Japan, he joined the Civil Engineering Bureau of the Home Ministry and eventually rose to the rank of director-general. After leaving the ministry, he became a professor emeritus at the Imperial University of Tokyo. For some years after arriving in Tokyo, Manjirō and Sadatarō stayed with him as shosei, “live-in students.”
Manjirō, born in 1860, graduated from Senshū School, the predecessor of today’s Senshū University, which Megata Tanetarō founded with his friends, in 1880, as the first private institution to teach economics and law. He became a lawyer, a new profession. Sadatarō, born in 1863, financially depended on his brother while attending Tokyo Senmon School, the predecessor of today’s Waseda University, which Ōkuma Shigenobu founded, in 1882, to teach government and law. Both Megata and Ōkuma were illustrious representatives of the Meiji Era (1868–1912): Megata became, among other things, ambassador to the League of Nations, and Ōkuma became prime minister twice. But in the case of Senmon School, it was Ōkuma’s right-hand man, Ono Azusa, who actually managed the school and helped Sadatarō both materially and spiritually. That was why Sadatarō named his son Azusa and, later, when asked to serve as godfather for his first grandson, named the boy Kimitake, the name of his first sponsor in Tokyo.
Sadatarō graduated from the Imperial University in 1892 when he was twenty-nine. Manjirō had urged him to attend it after he finished Tokyo Senmon School. Having chosen to be a lawyer, Manjirō had become keenly aware that one had to be part of the power center, the government bureaucracy, to play any significant role in the new age the Meiji Restoration had ushered in and the best way to accomplish that was to graduate from the Imperial University and work for the Home Ministry, the most powerful bureaucracy with the authority to appoint prefectural governors from among its own ranks.
Sadatarō followed Manjirō’s advice, although graduating from the private Tokyo Senmon School and then going to the national Imperial University in effect meant having a college education twice. He did not do so solely for the personal gain he could expect by becoming a bureaucrat, however. Many who opted for public service during that period carried a sense of mission. “The university student’s greatest ambition was to become a civil servant, one of the bureaucracy, which has raised Japan to its present place,” an American observer more than half a century later put it, describing the youthful days of Vice Adm. Shimizu Fumio, who designed the eighteen-inch gun barrels aboard the battleship Yamato. “His motive was not the security that drove so many European students later to prize the life of the petit functionnaire. It was an active desire to participate in the growing family life of the country.”21
The Meiji government had started out without even an adequate legal system—not one based on Western principles at any rate. One way of remedying this situation was to send bright young men abroad to study in advanced countries and transplant to Japan whatever they learned about American and European law. Another was to invite foreign scholars and experts to Japan so the Japanese might learn from them to work out legal codes appropriate for local Japanese conditions. The Imperial University was established primarily for that purpose and had a number of oyatoi gaikokujin, “foreigners in government employ.”
Japan at the time needed a great many bright minds, and fast. There was not much time for class considerations. Every capable person had to be put to use at once. And Sadatarō was a bright man. Four months before he graduated from the Faculty of Law (English Law), of the Imperial University, in July 1892, he had published, with his classmate Fukuhara Ryōjirō, International Private Law (Kokusai shihō). The five-hundred-page book came with an English preface by Alexander Tison, a Harvard graduate and a “foreigner in government employ.” Tison commended the book by noting that there had been no book in Japanese on international private law and that the two authors tried to remedy this.
The book’s timing was right. One of Meiji Japan’s pressing concerns was the elimination of unequal treaties foisted on it by Western powers. The two essential features of unequal treaties were extraterritoriality and the loss of tariff autonomy. The Western powers�
� one excuse for extraterritoriality, if they ever needed one, was lack of internationally applicable laws, including private law. In 1889 Japan had promulgated its first modern Constitution, the basic framework for launching Japan as a nation of laws. But the country still did not have an array of legal codes to deal with international issues, nor did it have authorities on international law. As it happened, the proposed revisions of unequal treaties that Foreign Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu prepared in the same year had provisions that would allow foreigners to live, travel, run a business, and own land in any part of Japan to make up for the elimination of extraterritoriality. However, the rules and regulations needed to implement these provisions were weak or nonexistent.
The book Sadatarō and his friend wrote explained a range of civil law issues that would arise when foreigners were allowed to live in Japan, such as citizenship, marriage, ownership, inheritance, and lawsuits. It appeared two years before Japan and Britain initialed the Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty of 1894—the first important step to eliminate extraterritoriality and gain tariff autonomy. Thus Sadatarō, along with Fukuhara, had become the authority in the field just in time.
As planned, Sadatarō entered the Home Ministry upon graduation. Toward the end of the following year he, who was thirty, married Nagai Natsuko, who was seventeen. His local postings began in October 1894, as counselor to Tokushima Prefecture, then as chief of police of Tochigi Prefecture, in 1896. The following year he returned to Tokyo to serve as secretary to the House of Representatives, then as councilor to the Ministry of Home Affairs as well. During the two years before his next local posting—this time as director of home affairs of Hiroshima—he wrote and published two books: one on international public law (1898) and one on statute of limitation law (1899). Following Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, in 1895, negotiations for treaty revisions were quickening their pace. Sadatarō’s reputation as a legal expert continued to grow.
His government postings went on smoothly, along with his substantial accomplishments. As governor of Fukushima, from 1906 to 1908, for example, he built nursery schools, kindergartens, agricultural schools, and women’s schools in his prefecture. He pushed for public works, building parks, railroads, and dams. And in every local post, he was treated as a dignitary, as he indeed was; every man of any local importance wished to gain and maintain influence with officials of the central government, and Sadatarō was a very important person. Expensive gifts flowed, and ladies from the pleasure quarters were made readily available as was done to any man of importance from Tokyo.
In 1908 Sadatarō became administrator of Karafuto. While in that post he paid a triumphant visit to his hometown—a “homecoming in brocade,” as the saying goes. Hōden Station had not been built yet, so the long line of jinrikisha rolled out of Kako River Station, with people lining the streets, reminding some of the pomp and glory of a great daimyo procession of days not long past. But, as with a daimyo procession, Sadatarō’s authoritarian behavior on that occasion, such as taking land from some people to make a road for his jinrikisha, also bred some resentment among the residents.22
A history of notable figures of Hyōgo Prefecture, published in 1911, has this to say about Sadatarō: “Early on he went to Tokyo to study and graduated from the College of Law, of the Imperial University, in the twenty-fifth year of Meiji [1892]. He did so well as a student that some strongly urged him to stay on and become an academic scholar. But he had a hegemonic temperament and could not imagine himself confined in a small corner of academia and spending his whole life as a walking dictionary. As a result, he entered the Home Ministry.”
The editor of this history visited Sadatarō while he was in Tokyo with the Diet in session and found the man to be “someone rare in Banshū”: “warmhearted by nature, easygoing, while at the same time refreshing,” “talking to the visitor as if he were someone longacquainted,” and yet “stern in temperament.”23
All that while Natsuko stayed in Tokyo. She would not get used to “rural life,” she proclaimed. Kabuki and jōruri (puppet theater) were indispensable pleasures of life for her, and they weren’t common outside Tokyo. She took it for granted that she could stay in Tokyo while her husband was posted in some other city. As long as his fat salaries and expensive gifts came her way, without interruption, his absence did not matter. As his rank and pay rose, the number of domestics in her household increased.
But in June 1914 the elite bureaucrat Sadatarō’s career came to an abrupt end. He was trapped in the difficulties of managing a newly acquired territory and in the shifting fortunes of the two major political parties of the day.
The Scandal
In 1908, when Sadatarō became its administrator, Karafuto was brandnew to governance. The southern half of Sakhalin had become Japanese territory only a few years earlier, with the Portsmouth Treaty engineered by President Theodore Roosevelt following the Russo-Japanese War, from 1904 to 1905, and it was called Karafuto, Japan’s name for the entire salmon-shaped island. One result was that Sadatarō had to write a number of laws for Karafuto himself: criminal law, criminal enforcement law, prison law, tariff law, tariff-rate law, tobacco monopoly law, revenue-stamp crime punishment law, and so forth.
The territory was poor, with a resident population of a mere twenty thousand—thirty thousand with migrant workers added—practically all of them subsistence fishermen, and these fishermen were in dire conflict with capital-backed fishing companies that focused on salmon, herring, and trout. Sadatarō’s well-meaning attempt to help the poor fishermen backfired. Almost all the mining and other development ventures he pushed for increasing revenues failed. Desperate, he devised discounts for the volume sales of postal and revenue stamps, and that led to a political problem.24
The political problem may well have been touched off by the slander of his classmate at the Imperial University, Nakagawa Kojūrō. As another classmate, the novelist Natsume Sōseki, suggested, in 1912, when he was asked for a preface to his former student Takahara Misao’s account of trekking through Karafuto, Kyokuhoku Nippon (Northernmost Japan), Nakagawa was an ambitious, overtly confident man.
“I wasn’t that close to Mr. Hiraoka but had a particularly close relationship with Mr. Nakagawa,” Sōseki recalled. Takahara had written how Administrator Hiraoka explained his plans for Karafuto to him, while First Director Nakagawa looked after his needs. “As I remember it, it was when we graduated from the school and several of us acquaintances got together for some reason. It was the same Mr. Nakagawa that looked around those seated and wondered aloud, Who among us will be the first to ride in a horse carriage? Before anyone responded, it was the same Mr. Nakagawa who said, Well, I think I’ll be the one.” Riding in a horse carriage meant attaining a high social stratum. “I of course do not know, because I haven’t checked into the matter, whether any of the several graduates who were there then is riding in a horse carriage now, but at least Mr. Nakagawa must be riding a sled as he crisscrosses Karafuto.”25
Nakagawa was an able man. He accomplished a great deal, not just in government but in business as well, and promoted worthy causes such as women’s education and the expansion of higher education as a whole. Yet because of political alignments, Sadatarō went ahead of Nakagawa in bureaucratic advancement. When he became Administrator of Karafuto, Nakagawa followed him as his deputy, and that bred resentment, which, in turn, led to the revelation of Sadatarō’s scheme to increase revenues to the Karafuto Agency. After his forced resignation, Sadatarō was found to have created a deficit of one hundred thousand yen, today’s equivalent of one billion yen. National newspapers treated the discovery as a big scandal, although Karafuto’s local daily strongly defended Sadatarō, pointing out the difficulties of colonial finances.26
After nearly two years of investigation, Sadatarō was acquitted, with both the prosecutor and the preliminary judge recognizing “the embezzlement” for what it was: a casualty of a political conflict at the central government. Sadatarō’s lawyer Hanai Takuzō’s
fabled eloquence and able defense, pointing to “partisan slander,” helped. Also, by the time the investigation was underway, Sadatarō had paid for the “deficit” with his own money, by borrowing large sums.
In the year Sadatarō was thrust into the scandal, his brother Manjirō won considerable fame choosing to defend those accused in the Siemens Scandal, the German concern’s bribery of high Japanese government officials.27 He had become a member of the House of Representatives, in 1898, and later headed the Tokyo Bar Association, but he had no financial wherewithal to help Sadatarō.
Having sent his first two sons off to Tokyo, Takichi had one son left to inherit his estate, Hisatarō, who indeed took over. Hisatarō had two sons, Yoshio and Yoshikazu. Yoshio started a brewery near the new road. Though his sister, Mume, was married to a thriving brewer not far away, Tanaka Toyozō, Yoshio himself apparently had no business sense. He kept piling up debts, until he went bankrupt. He lost all his father’s land that he had used as collateral. Not long afterward he left his hometown and disappeared.
Yoshikazu was said to be an eccentric. Sometimes he was seen walking up and down the main street, stripped naked except for his loincloth. He was married, but he spent more time in his storehouse than in the main house, sometimes cooping himself up there all day. If neighborhood children came by and looked in, he would show them the pictures he’d painted—of men and women copulating—with no indication of an awareness that he was showing something lewd to children. They were as colorful as ukiyo-e prints. No one bought his erotic paintings. Nor, apparently, did he have any intention of selling them. He painted them for his own pleasure.