Emperor of Japan

by Donald Keene

  36. Guranto shōgun, p. 26.

  37. Ibid., p. 17.

  38. Asukai Masamichi, Meiji taitei, p. 183.

  39. Asukai wrote that because Grant’s advocacy of gradualism came from a leader of an advanced country, it probably greatly strengthened the hand of the emperor, who had already demonstrated his preference for a gradual approach to the creation of a parliament (Meiji taitei, p. 183). At this time, by contrast, Ōkuma Shigenobu favored setting a timetable for calling a parliament within two years.

  40. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 729–32. Grant urged the Japanese to withdraw the harsh words they had used about the Chinese, and the Chinese, to withdraw the equally harsh language they had used about the Japanese. A useful summary in English of the negotiations between Japan and China is in George H. Kerr, Okinawa, pp. 389–92.

  41. Kerr, Okinawa, p. 389.

  42. Shimbun shūsei Meiji hennen shi, 4, p. 75.

  43. For a full account of the festivities, see Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 735–40.

  44. Young, Around the World, 2, p. 573.

  45. The curtain was crimson with the word shōhei, or “peace,” embroidered in white. To one side were the words “Guranto yori” (from Grant) woven in gold thread.

  46. For an account of the play, see Engeki hyakka daijiten, 2, p. 477. Although the cast included the greatest stars of kabuki—the ninth Ichikawa Danjūrō, the first Ichikawa Sadanji, the third Nakamura Nakazō, etc.—it was not a success.

  47. McFeely, Grant, p. 468.

  48. Yanagizawa Hideki, Hōshō Kurō den, p. 34.

  49. Meiji tennō ki, 4, p. 741. A similar, but not identical, speech is in Shimbun shūsei Meiji hennen shi, 4, p. 97. I have quoted elements of both.

  50. Young, Around the World, 2, p. 602.

  Chapter 32

  1. Harunomiya was a name denoting the crown prince, but the infant had not yet been so designated.

  2. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 755–56. Probably Naruko was still suffering from the hysterics she had at the time of the birth.

  3. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 821, 827. These works of art reached Japan in June. The government was of the opinion that they should be accepted by the Imperial Household Ministry, but it was not until December that these works were acknowledged. Ugolini was sent money and various expensive gifts. His portrait of the emperor is included in Meiji tennō no Go-Shōzō.

  4. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 746, 820. Meiji soon afterward sent a telegram to Alfonso XII congratulating him on his narrow escape from an assassin (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 2).

  5. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 773–74.

  6. Ibid., 4, pp. 777–78.

  7. Ibid., 4, p. 245. The jiho, a name proposed by Itō Hirobumi, was an office within the Imperial Household Ministry whose members were to serve and advise the emperor, compensating for possible deficiencies in the administration.

  8. Asukai Masamichi, Meiji taitei, pp. 175–76.

  9. This and the previous poem are quoted from Watanabe Ikujirō, Meiji tennō, 1, p. 159. Watanabe did not indicate that the former dated from 1907 and the latter from 1909 (Shinshū Meiji tennō gyoshū, pp. 911, 1023). Watanabe seems to have believed that both these two poems, written from quite different points of view, were characteristic of Emperor Meiji.

  10. Kishida Ginkō, “Tōhoku go-junkō ki,” p. 396.

  11. Asukai, Meiji taitei, p. 173.

  12. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 364–65.

  13. Watanabe Ikujirō, Meiji tennō, 1, p. 220.

  14. For a brief account of the directive (as issued by the Ministry of Education on September 5, 1871), see Kokuritsu kyōiku kenkyūjo, ed., Nihon kindai kyōiku hyakunen shi, pp. 477–89. The plan called for 8 university districts, further subdivided into 32 middle-school districts, with each middle-school district divided into 210 elementary-school districts. This would be a total of 53,760 elementary schools, or 1 school for each 600 pupils. The organization of the school system was an indication of French influence, and several of the men responsible had written or translated studies of French education (Katsube Mitake and Shibukawa Hisako, Dōtoku kyōiku no rekishi, p. 11). The curriculum actually followed in the schools tended to be modeled on American examples, under the influence of Guido Verbeck and other Americans. But France was the only major country with instruction morale et religieuse as an integral part of the curriculum, and this appealed to the Japanese (Katsube and Shibukawa, Dōtoku, p. 211).

  15. Asukai, Meiji taitei, p. 176.

  16. Katsube and Shibukawa, Dōtoku, p. 13. The term shūshin was defined as gyōgi no satoshi (instruction in deportment). Shūshin remained a part of the curriculum until the end of 1945.

  17. Meiji tennō ki, 4, p. 758.

  18. Ibid., 4, pp. 758–59.

  19. Ibid., 4, p. 759.

  20. Ibid., 4, pp. 760–63. A translation of Itō’s memorial to the throne is in Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan, pp. 230–33.

  21. Asukai, Meiji taitei, p. 178.

  22. Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 760–64.

  23. Kōno’s explanation of why it was necessary to change the educational system, presented to the emperor on December 9, is in Meiji tennō ki, 5, pp. 248–50. He denied that there had been excessive “meddling” by government officials in running the schools. See also Kokuritsu kyōiku kenkyūjo, ed., Nihon kindai kyōiku hyakyunen shi, p. 930.

  24. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 250.

  25. Asukai, Meiji taitei, p. 178.

  Chapter 33

  1. On February 17 Meiji sent a telegram of congratulations to Czar Alexander II on his having escaped a bomb that destroyed part of his palace (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 21).

  2. Sakamoto Kazuto, Itō Hirobumi to Meiji kokka keisei, p. 24. The emperor had previously (from April 4, 1879) attended cabinet meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, but after the change made on March 17, 1880, in the regulations governing cabinet meetings, the emperor attended all meetings except those held on Sundays or holidays. For the regulations, see Meiji tennō ki 5, pp. 35–36. Note that the word naikaku (cabinet) did not have the modern meaning of “cabinet”; rather, it was the body of sangi (councillors), who were officially (hohitsu) “advisers” to the daijin (ministers) (Sakamoto, Itō, p. 20).

  3. Sakamoto discusses Itō’s reasons for desiring the emperor’s participation in cabinet meetings (Itō, pp. 12, 15, 19). It was essentially as a symbolic leader whose presence lent authority rather than as a sponsor of new ideas or as the spokesman of the conservative views typical of the jiho.

  4. This presupposed exchanging paper for specie at a rate of 1 yen 15 sen for 1 yen in specie (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 71).

  5. Sakamoto, Itō, p. 29.

  6. Meiji tennō ki, 5, pp. 74–75.

  7. He actually visited other prefectures in the course of the journey (including Kanagawa, Nagano, and Shiga), but the journey was officially to these three prefectures.

  8. Tōyama Shigeki, Tennō to kazoku, p. 81.

  9. An account of the journey by a reporter named Noda Chiaki was published in the Chōya shimbun. Excerpts are in Tōyama, Tennō, pp. 82–86. The first excerpt is the account of an old man who attempted to present a petition directly to the emperor but was prevented by the police. They contended that the man was deranged and drove him away, but the subject of the petition was probably quite rational, the convening of a parliament. The second excerpt concludes with a brief account of action taken by the police against a reporter for the Iroha shimbun who had mentioned in an article that a policeman had discovered a noble in the emperor’s escort sleeping with a geisha he brought with him from Tokyo. The police, warning the reporter that printing groundless rumors could cause immeasurable harm, required him in the future to submit articles in advance to a police officer, a beginning of censorship of the press.

  10. Ōsaka shimpō, May 29, 1880, in Tōyama, Tennō, p. 94.

  11. Tōyama, Tennō, pp. 94–95. The article by Takizawa Shigeru, describing the Niigata segment of the junkō, confirms that the expenses were met b
y local rich people (“Hokuriku junkō to minshū tōchi,” p. 36). Because they were enjoined not to be extravagant in their reception of the emperor, many falsified their expense reports. In the most extreme case, real expenses of 45,000 yen were reported as a mere 90.30 yen.

  12. Tōyama, Tennō, p. 88.

  13. Historians speak of the Six Great Imperial Tours (roku daijunkō). Not all travels by the emperor were known as daijunkō. Of his three later lengthy journeys, the one in 1881 (to northern Honshū and Hokkaidō) and the one in 1885 (to Yamaguchi, Itsukushima, Hiroshima, and Okayama) are counted among the daijunkō, but the emperor’s voyage in 1890 to Kure, Etajima, and Sasebo is not so termed, perhaps because it was made by sea rather than land.

  Meiji also made numerous day excursions to the race track in Yokohama, to maneuvers in Chiba, and to the launching of ships at Yokosuka, and so on, and he spent much of 1894 and 1895 in Hiroshima during the Sino-Japanese War. These travels were of course quite dissimilar in character to the junkō.

  14. Tōyama, Tennō, p. 90.

  15. Ibid., p. 101.

  16. See especially T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: “Through these pageants and various written and nonwritten representations of them the people could begin to imagine that the emperor was at the apex of a panoptic regime and that he was the Overseer who disciplined the realm and the people within his gaze” (pp. 55–56). For a somewhat different interpretation of the facts, see Takizawa Shigeru, “Hokuriku junkō to minshū tōchi,” pp. 24–25.

  17. For example, on April 11, 1881, when the emperor went to the horse races at the Fukiage Garden, he was accompanied by more than 160 persons (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 328).

  18. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 87.

  19. Ibid., 5, p. 93.

  20. Ibid., 5, p. 128. See also Meiji tennō ki, 2, pp. 76–77.

  21. Meiji tennō ki 5, p. 144. Meiji was known as Sachinomiya until he received the name Mutsuhito.

  22. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 164.

  23. Ibid., 5, pp. 171–73.

  24. Perhaps the worst example of extravagance was the Naval Ministry, which eagerly bought whatever new weapons were invented in Europe and America, sometimes getting quite different items from what they thought they had ordered (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 182).

  25. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 179.

  26. Watanabe Akio detected an “extremely dense coloring” of the views of Motoda and Sasaki in Meiji’s pronouncements on the need for economy (“Tennōsei kokka keisei tojō ni okeru ‘tennō shinsei’ no shisō to undō,” p. 2). This was also true of his other proclamations at this time.

  27. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 176. See also Sakamoto, Itō, p. 37.

  28. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 181.

  29. The highest political organ of the state, established in 1871 and abolished in 1877. It consisted of the dajō daijin, the sadaijin, the udaijin, and the sangi.

  30. Meiji tennō ki, 3, p. 696. Meiji’s command to Prince Taruhito, directing him to frame a constitution, was issued on September 7, 1876 (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 245).

  31. Guranto shōgun to no go-taiwa hikki, p. 17. See also Meiji tennō ki, 4, p. 722.

  32. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 168.

  33. Ibid., 5, p. 234. See also Sakamoto, Itō, p. 43.

  34. He advocated borrowing the content from England, the United States, and France but borrowing the form from Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 246).

  35. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 49.

  36. Kasahara Hidehiko, Tennō shinsei, p. 174.

  Chapter 34

  1. Sasaki Takayuki, Hogo Hiroi, 10, pp. 1–2.

  2. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 254.

  3. On January 7, when it was customary for him to hear his first lectures of the year, the emperor went to Yokohama to inspect the Italian warship aboard which the duke of Genoa was about to leave Japan (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 257).

  4. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 259. This was even fewer than the twenty-three delivered in 1880, itself an extremely low figure. Soejima lectured on the Confucian classic the Doctrine of the Mean. Nishimura may have lectured on moral philosophy, a subject that preoccupied him at the time. Motoda attended all lectures, even when he did not speak.

  5. Meiji tennō ki, 5, pp. 265–66. See also Sasaki, Hogo Hiroi, 10, pp. 66–68. Sasaki’s own account gives many more details of the conversation.

  6. Mori Senzō, Meiji jimbutsu yawa, pp. 19–20. See also Meiji tennō ki, 5, pp. 281–82.

  7. The music of the anthem had been borrowed from a foreign woman who had served as a missionary in Hawaii by American Consul General Robert Walker Irwin (a descendant of Benjamin Franklin), who had in turn passed it on to the Japanese military band (Aramata Hiroshi, Karakaua-ō no Nippon gyōten ryokōki, p. 70).

  8. William N. Armstrong, Around the World with a King, p. 37.

  9. Ibid., p. 39.

  10. Ibid., pp. 47–48.

  11. Ibid., p. 50.

  12. The exchange of rings was probably intended to signify the emperor would not break his unwritten promise. Apparently, Meiji did not give Kalakaua his ring.

  13. This account of the secret meeting between Meiji and King Kalakaua is taken from Meiji tennō ki, 5, pp. 294–98. It is not found in Armstrong’s Around the World with a King, evidence that Kalakaua did not reveal to members of his suite what he had proposed. Armstrong expressed annoyance with the king for his mysterious departure from their quarters: “It was a neglect of his own suite which was entirely contrary to etiquette. Its secrecy puzzled us, as he usually placed the fullest confidence in us” (p. 62). Meiji tennō ki gives no fewer than thirteen sources for its account, but the letters of Inoue Kaoru and the report of Nagasaki Seigo (the interpreter) probably provided the bulk of the information about the secret meeting.

  14. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 296. Yamashinanomiya Sadamaro (1865–1921) was the son of Prince Fushiminomiya Akira. His letter to Kalakaua, dated January 14, 1882, in which he explains why he cannot marry Princess Kaiulani, is in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The prince revealed that he had been engaged as a small child and that he was therefore not at liberty to consider marriage to the princess. Although the prince did not say so, there was undoubtedly opposition to a member of the imperial family’s marrying a foreigner. According to Armstrong, “The emperor received his suggestion with excellent humour and politeness, but declared that it required much reflection and would be a startling departure from Japanese traditions” (Around the World, p. 63). (Prince Yoshihisa, who had married a member of the German nobility while residing in Europe, had been forced to divorce her.) Armstrong, who dismissed the planned marriage as something conceived by the king in “the curious recesses of his Polynesian brain,” was sure that “had the scheme been accepted by the emperor, it would have tended to make Hawaii a Japanese colony; a movement distasteful to all of the Great Powers.”

  15. Aramata, Karakaua-ō, pp. 298–300. There were two problems connected with the cable. The first was the lack of Japanese funds for such a project; the second was the prior request by an American, Cyrus Field (who had successfully laid the Atlantic cable linking the United States and Great Britain), which would have to be given preference (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 674).

  16. There was one exception. Inoue Kaoru enthusiastically accepted the king’s request that Japanese be encouraged to emigrate to Hawaii (Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 674; Aramata, Karakaua-ō, p. 151).

  17. On January 24, 1882, Meiji sent Kalakaua a letter in which he expressed his appreciation of Kalakaua’s proposal that he head the league of Asian monarchs, and his wholehearted support of the project; but he reiterated his belief that it would be exceedingly difficult to create a league because of the diversity of the countries involved. He also declined, in deferential language, to head the league. The letter is preserved in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu (Kapiolani-Kalanianaole Collection) (Aramata, Karakaua-ō, pp. 299–300).

  18. Aramata, Karakaua-ō, p. 139; Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 298.

 
19. Hugh Cortazzi, “Royal Visits to Japan in the Meiji Period,” p. 84. The source of this information is The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’ 1879–1882, compiled from the two princes’ journals, letters, and notebooks.

  20. Quoted in Cortazzi, “Royal Visits,” p. 85.

  21. Quoted in ibid., pp. 85, 87.

  22. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 567.

  23. Ibid., 5, p. 417.

  24. He also stayed at the houses of rich men, Buddhist temples, a museum (in Yamagata), county offices, a medical school (in Fukushima), and the like.

  25. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 506. At Yonezawa he heard a middle-school honor student lecture on Nihon gaishi and an elementary-school honor student lecture on Nihon ryakushi (p. 521).

  26. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 535.

  27. Ibid., 5, p. 536.

  28. The founder of the Mitsubishi enterprises; he was said to have been annoyed not to have had the opportunity to purchase government assets that were being sold.

  29. Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 548.

  30. I do not know in what way Kawamura irritated the emperor. Edward James Reed and his son visited Japan in January 1879. He had supervised the building of three Japanese warships in England—the Fusō, the Kongō, and the Hiei. When he visited Japan, he was given an audience by Meiji, who praised Reed’s part in the launching of ships that were to become the backbone of the Japanese navy (Meiji tennō ki, 4, pp. 596–97.

  31. Sasaki Takayuki, Hogo Hiroi, 14, p. 495. The account in Meiji tennō ki, 5, p. 558, is based on Sasaki, but differs in wording and minor details. I have incorporated elements from both versions in my translation.

  Chapter 35

  1. There had been opposition earlier to the idea of a popularly elected assembly. See, for example, Katō Hiroyuki, “An Abridged Translation of Bluntschli’s ‘Allgemeines Staatsrecht’ on the Inappropriateness of Establishing a Popular Assembly,” in William R. Braisted, trans., Meiroku zasshi, pp. 47–49. Katō followed the translation with these remarks: “I beg the readers to believe that this translation is in no sense an effort to deny the validity of public discussion and public opinion. I only desire to explain the error of recklessly trying to expand public discussion without reference to the times and the condition of the people.” See also Gotō Yasushi, Jiyū minken, p. 39.