Emperor of Japan

by Donald Keene

  Even if it had foreseen how Japanese rule would affect its people, at this stage the Korean government was incapable of resisting. The emphasis in the treaty of annexation on the good treatment that would be accorded to the king and the nobility probably reflected the belief of the Japanese that as long as the upper classes were satisfied, it did not much matter if there was discontent among the ignorant masses.

  The Korean emperor, soon to be only a king, could not be a rallying point for Korean independence, as he made clear in a rescript issued on August 29 in which he spoke of his futile efforts to reform the government ordinances. Furthermore, he was handicapped by a long-standing debility, originating twelve years earlier when he drank poisoned coffee. His exhaustion had reached its limits, and there was no hope that he would recover his strength. Day and night he had attempted to think of some solution to the problems facing the country, but in the end he had found nothing, and it seemed best to turn over the responsibility to someone else. He had decided to surrender Korea’s sovereign power to His Majesty, the emperor of Great Japan, the neighboring country, a man he had long trusted, believing that he would ensure peace in East Asia and preserve the livelihoods of the people of the entire country. He urged the people not to worry about the state of the nation or the times but to go about their work tranquilly, obeying the civilized new regime of the Japanese Empire and enjoying the blessings. He declared that his abdication did not mean that he had forgotten his people; rather, he had acted entirely out of a deeply felt desire to save them.

  It is unlikely that Emperor Sunjong personally wrote this rescript, but the intensity of the conveyed emotions suggest that whoever wrote it was familiar with the emperor’s deepest feelings, and these may have been his words. Sunjong was frail, prematurely old, and toothless, but he wanted the Korean people to know that he had not given in to the Japanese without first exhausting his limited strength in a vain attempt to find some other solution to the crisis facing the country.29

  On the same day, August 29, a series of imperial ordinances were issued, proclaiming that Han-guk was henceforth to be called Chōsen, that the government general of Chōsen had been established, that an amnesty was to be put into effect in Chōsen, and that there would be an extraordinary imperial bounty in Chōsen. Other ordinances dealt with duties on Korean merchandise imported into Japan, patents, designs, copyrights, and similar commercial matters.30 After long years of laxness under their own rulers, the Koreans were getting an early taste of Japanese efficiency.

  Emperor Meiji expressed his gratitude to Katsura for his skillful handling of the treaty of annexation. On September 1 rites commemorating the annexation of Korea were celebrated with religious observances in the palace, with Iwakura Tomotsuna standing in for the emperor. On the same day the emperor sent Kujō Michizane to the Ise Shrine to report the annexation. On the third he sent Kujō to inform the tomb of Emperor Jimmu and on the fourth, the tomb of Emperor Kōmei.31 Judging from the number of sacred places where the good news was reported, the annexation was judged to be of even greater importance than the victories in the wars with China and Russia.

  On a much humbler level, on August 29, the Yorozu chōhō printed a song including, “Have you seen the likes? Don Saigō is having a drinking party with King Enma.”32 Some thirty years earlier, Saigō had espoused the conquest of Korea, but Korea had now become a Japanese possession without having to fight a war. Saigō was celebrating with Enma, the king of hell.

  The changed relations with Korea did not affect the emperor’s affection for Yi Eun, and from time to time he sent the prince a box of cakes or fruit. Now that the prince no longer had the title of crown prince, it was decided that he would be known as the Ch’angdok young prince.33

  In October, Terauchi sent an official report describing events from the time he took office as resident general up to the annexation of Korea. He had reorganized the administrative organs and simplified procedures. He had drastically reduced expenses with a view to promoting regional administration. As the consequence of these measures, high and low, nobles and plebes in Korea all basked in the blessings of the emperor’s influence and were profoundly moved by the generous treatment and special favors they had received.34

  Terauchi did not mention it in his report, but he had prohibited the use of the Korean nengō; all official documents would henceforth bear a date according to the year of Meiji’s reign. The name of the capital, Hansong, although it had been used for more than 500 years, ever since the Yi family built their capital on the site, was forbidden and replaced by Keijō.35 Even at this early stage of the union, Terauchi seems to have been determined to destroy the Koreans’ national consciousness.

  It is likely that some Koreans, particularly those of the upper classes, felt grateful for the greater efficiency of the government and the greater security for themselves under Japanese rule, but the vast majority were acutely unhappy under the rule of strangers, who treated them as inferiors in their own country and who eventually sought to rob them of their language and even their names. Most Japanese were pleased and proud to think that their emperor now ruled over not only the Japanese islands but Taiwan, Sakhalin, and now Korea. In the Far East, the Japanese had done better than the British, who had only Hong Kong and a couple of Chinese ports; the French, who had not gone beyond Indochina; or the Americans, whose rule in the Philippines was plagued by unrest. Few Japanese of the time seemed to be aware that colonialism was a poison that attacked not only the victims of colonialism but also the colonizers.

  Chapter 60

  The year 1911 began quietly. The emperor was now in his sixtieth year, and there were further signs that his health was failing. He was scheduled to go to the Aoyama parade grounds on January 7 for the first military review of the year, but on the recommendation of the chief surgeon, he canceled the review for reasons of health.

  On January 10 he and the empress went to the Phoenix Hall to hear the annual first lectures of the year. As usual, there was one lecture each devoted to Western, Chinese, and Japanese learning.1 On the eighteenth the first poetry gathering took place in the customary manner. The emperor’s poem on the topic “A Cold Moon Shines on the Plum Blossoms” was

  teru tsuki no The light of the moon

  hikari wa imada Shining in the sky is still

  samukeredo Cold, but already,

  haru ni kawaranu No different from in spring,

  ume ga ka zo suru The plum blossoms are fragrant.2

  The poem is graceful, although the fragrance of plum blossoms in the early spring had been noted by earlier poets.

  On the same day that this elegant gathering took place, the supreme court passed death sentences on twenty-four persons who had been found guilty of planning to assassinate the emperor. Two other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. In the afternoon, Prime Minister Katsura Tarō went to the palace with a transcript of the verdict and reported to the emperor on the circumstances of the case. The emperor listened to Katsura with evident distress and directed him to consider an amnesty and a reduction of the sentences.3

  It is almost unbelievable that the emperor should have learned now, for the first time, of the trial of Kōtoku Shūsui and the other defendants, the subject of immense interest throughout the country ever since the trial began on December 10. The only explanation is that people at the court, aware that he did not read the newspapers, had deliberately not informed the emperor.4 If, indeed, he had no knowledge of the planned attempt on his life, the fact that any Japanese would have desired to kill him must have come as a shock. From time to time, Meiji had received word of assassinations of foreign heads of state. Czar Alexander II of Russia, King Umberto I of Italy, and King Carlos I of Portugal had all been killed in recent years.5 President Sadi Carnot of France and Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley had been assassinated. Queen Min of Korea had been killed by Japanese ruffians. In addition, there had been unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Alfonso XIII of Spain and even of
Queen Victoria.6 Closer at hand, a Japanese policeman had attempted to kill Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia at Ōtsu in 1891.

  The emperor regularly sent telegrams of grief when he learned of assassinations and telegrams of joy when he heard that the intended targets of assassination attempts had escaped, but probably it never occurred to him that he himself might one day be a target.

  The plot against his life, characterized as “high treason” (taigyaku), was planned by anarchists whose spiritual mentor was Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911), a journalist and translator.7 Kōtoku grew up in Tosa Nakamura, a small town in Shikoku, where he early demonstrated unusual scholarly ability, A poem in Chinese he wrote when he was seven years old has been preserved.8

  In his autobiographical “Why I Became a Socialist,” Kōtoku suggested various reasons that he was attracted to socialism while still a boy. He recalled one misfortune with resentment: his family had suffered such severe financial reverses during the period after the Restoration that he was unable to continue his studies.9 He did not mention two other misfortunes—the death of his father when Kōtoku was a year old, depriving him of parental protection, and the discrimination he suffered at school because he did not belong to the samurai class.

  As a boy, Kōtoku felt restive in the closed world of Tosa Nakamura. Recognizing his unusual ability, his family made sacrifices in order that he might attend a school in Kōchi, but he hated the regimen and felt like a “prisoner.”10 His restlessness (and the poor food) is said to have induced pleurisy, the first of many illnesses that dogged him. When he recovered, he returned to middle school, but his long absence had a deleterious effect on his studies, and he decided to quit school and go to Tōkyō. He raised money for the journey by selling his books. He had just turned sixteen when he arrived in Tōkyō in September 1887.

  Kōtoku found work as a houseboy, attending an English-language school in his free time. Three months later, he, along with others members of the Tosa Freedom Party, an association of Kōchi men with advanced political views, was ordered by a public security ordinance to leave Tōkyō. Their principal crime was having protested against the weakness of the government’s handling of treaty revision. This “crime,” shared by persons of many varieties of political belief, probably would have escaped punishment had it not occurred just as the draft of the new constitution was being completed. The government (especially Itō Hirobumi) feared that such protests might threaten the successful completion of the constitution and therefore issued the decree in the name of preserving public order. Kōtoku was one of 570 men ordered to stay away from Tōkyō for a period of three years.11

  Kōtoku walked all the way back to Tosa Nakamura, and his suffering on the road from cold and hunger created in him a hatred of Itō that he never lost. No sooner did he get back home than he was subjected to complaints that he was not doing anything to relieve the family’s financial problems. Once again he decided to run away, this time to China, but his money took him only as far as Ōsaka. This city turned out to be of critical importance to Kōtoku, as it was in Ōsaka that he met Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901), a materialist philosopher and popular-rights advocate who, by his own testimony, was his only teacher. Kōtoku, now in his eighteenth year, served for two and a half years as Nakae’s houseboy and disciple.

  Nakae (who was also from Kōchi Prefecture) was living in Ōsaka because he, too, had been ordered to leave Tōkyō. Ōsaka was an exciting place: most of the liberal or radical thinkers who had been expelled from Tōkyō had settled there, giving rise to discussions, meetings, and publications devoted to political issues.

  Kōtoku began at this time to keep a diary of his impressions. On February 11, 1889, the day the constitution was proclaimed, Mori Arinori, the minister of education, was stabbed and killed by a young man named Nishino Buntarō. Kōtoku wrote nothing in his diary about the constitution, but he composed a funeral oration in classical Chinese expressing sympathy and admiration for Nishino, identifying himself with an assassin who had chosen the dangerous course of implementing his convictions with direct action.12 Kōtoku’s admiration hinted at his future politics, although at the time he was not even a socialist, much less an anarchist.

  Although the constitution was joyfully welcomed by most Japanese, Kōtoku’s silence probably reflected the influence of Nakae, who questioned the value of this “gift” from the emperor and mocked the foolishness of Japanese who acclaimed the word “constitution” without any conception of its probable effects.13

  To earn a living, Kōtoku for a time wrote plays for a popular actor, including one on the assassination of Mori Arinori, contrasting the arrogance of the cabinet minister with the powerlessness of ordinary Japanese. Kōtoku also began to write articles for political magazines. Once the celebrations of the proclamation of the constitution had passed without incident, the ban on radicals in Tōkyō was lifted, and the center of political activity reverted to the capital. Nakae moved back, taking Kōtoku with him.

  In 1890, when he was nineteen, Kōtoku failed a physical fitness test for army service, the one fortunate result of his lingering illness. He studied at a government English-language school, graduating in 1893. In the meanwhile, he had become addicted to the pleasures of the Yoshiwara district. Nakae predicted that Kōtoku would become a writer rather than a political figure, but Kōtoku insisted that he intended to become a cabinet minister.14

  In September 1893 Kōtoku took a job with the Jiyū shimbun, a newspaper that had stood for liberalism in the traditions of Itagaki Taisuke but had been bought and turned into a government organ. Kōtoku’s work was mainly translating articles that had appeared in English-language publications. Although he had learned at the language school to read Macauley, Dickens, and Carlyle, translating political dispatches was quite a different matter. In later years, he vividly recalled how hard this work had been.

  As Kōtoku gradually became more adept at reading political works in English, he fell under influence of the writers. He mentioned in a personal memoir having read early in his career the works of Albert Schäffle and Henry George, but he was still far from being a convinced socialist. Kōtoku first attracted attention with an article he wrote in 1897 on the funeral of the empress dowager. Its reverent loyalty to the throne made the editor suppose that Kōtoku was a model young Japanese, and he was promoted to writing editorials.15

  Kōtoku first came in contact with socialist organizations in the following year. He joined a study group that met monthly to hear and discuss lectures on issues related to socialism. Kōtoku was at first an inconspicuous member of the group, probably because his knowledge of socialism was limited, but on June 25, 1899, he delivered a lecture entitled “Present-Day Political Society and Socialism” that brought attention, particularly because he dealt with socialism in Japan, unlike the other lecturers, who delivered papers on foreign socialists like Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, Karl Marx, and Henry George.16

  In 1898 Kōtoku moved (as an editorial writer) to the Yorozu chōhō, the most progressive of the major Tōkyō newspapers, and wrote editorials for five years. His first (published in February 1898) bore the provocative title “Grief over Empire Day.” It opens:

  It was just ten years ago today that our people, excited by the mere report of the proclamation of a constitution, had instant visions of an age of gold and danced for joy, all but crazed with happiness. Quite a few months and years have passed since then, but the absolutist, oppressive administration has not changed. The constitution has frequently been dishonored by the Satsuma clique, and the legislature has been trampled on by the Chōshū clique. The political parties are anesthetized, and society advances day by day in the direction of corruption and degeneration.17

  Kōtoku’s criticism of the government, particularly its monopoly by the Satsuma–Chōshū cliques, was severe, but he had not abandoned hope for the political parties. In November he wrote an editorial welcoming the new Yamagata cabinet, not because he admired its policies, but because the failure of the Ōkuma–I
tagaki cabinet had demonstrated that the existing political parties were not worthy of the name. He felt it was preferable to have as the prime minister someone who did not even pretend to lead a party. Kōtoku continued to call for such reforms as an equalization of income between rich and poor, the spread of education, fair elections, an end to the aristocracy, the establishment of an inheritance tax, the establishment of laws to relieve poverty and to supervise the workplace, and the nationalization of monopolies and land.18 He still seemed to hope that the existing political system could be reformed and made beneficial to the mass of the Japanese people.

  Kōtoku considered going into politics and seeking office. He joined a movement that advocated the creation of a system that would enable anyone who so desired to run for election. His goal at this time was a democracy based on the constitution, but as a result of his participation in the study group, his writings began to treat socialism more overtly. In an editorial written in September 1899, he recognized that the Japanese were not yet ready for socialism but urged readers before rejecting or persecuting socialism to study it seriously.

  The central figure of the study group was Katayama Sen (1859–1933), a major figure in the history of Japanese socialism. Katayama had received a good education but had become dissatisfied with its traditional content. He declared that the study of Chinese texts was stupid, and that writing Chinese poetry and prose was of no use in earning a living.19 In 1884, at the age of twenty-five he went to America and remained there for eleven years, earning a living as best he could while studying at various institutions.20 In 1886, while in California, he “discovered God” and became a member of the First Congregational Church of Alameda. Although in later years he sometimes mocked his conversion in terms of having prayed to Jesus, the god who dwelled in America, only because the Japanese gods were so far away, his Christian faith was of prime importance in his development. Katayama left the United States with a master of arts and a bachelor of divinity. But even more valuable than these degrees were his contacts with the social thought of advanced Protestant leaders, confirming his concern for workers and other exploited members of society.21 Katayama wrote that socialism was the “new gospel” that would save twentieth-century society.