Samurai
Page 4
As it happened, Saigo’s ambitions to become a master swordsman came to nothing, rather suddenly, at the age of twelve.3 One day, on his way to school, his path crossed that of a boy from another goju. Saigo was already noted for his size, which made him the target of a challenge. The two got into a fight, which ended with Saigo knocking his opponent into the ditch. That afternoon, on Saigo’s return, the boy was waiting with friends, and carrying his sword. It was sheathed, of course, and the boy’s intention was to deliver a revenge beating with it, not to kill. The blow, made in the Jigen-ryu style, double handed, from above the head, struck Saigo hard on the lower part of his right arm. The sheath broke, and the blade made a nasty wound, cutting him right to the bone. At home, being patched up by his mother, Saigo burst into tears, and felt humiliated by his own weakness. Men should be strong and not cry! But the incident had its benefits. Short term, it gave him great “street cred,” with other kids being told by their parents: “Be a man, like Saigo!” Longer term, the wound, which never healed properly and left him with a scarred arm for the rest of his life, turned him from sport to scholarship, especially when he moved on from the goju to the upper school, the domain’s academy, where he mixed with several hundred of Kyushu’s brightest and best.
Here the early work in Chinese classics paid off. For those who got this far, the curriculum was inspiring as well as conservative. Many scholars were unhappy with Zhu Xi as the sole arbiter of Confucianism. They had turned to an early sixteenth-century philosopher named Wang Yangming, founder of a school of Neo-Confucianism, who taught that people did not have to learn good from evil because that knowledge was innate. In Wang’s words, “The light of wisdom is in every man’s possession.” Intuition was fundamental, learning less important than individual enlightenment. Wang had quite a following in Japan, known as the Oyomei school, this being the way his name is transliterated into Japanese. His metaphysics was extremely obscure and theoretical, but it had practical consequences, because Wang asserted that enlightenment acquired meaning only through action. The emphasis on the individual (rather than the teacher) and on action had revolutionary implications, inspiring several outbreaks of violence that worried the authorities, who tried to ban Oyomei teaching without much success.
Saigo was no revolutionary, and would later seek to combine the philosophies of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming by turning every act into an expression of virtue. This, he came to believe, was the way to become a sage and be at peace with death. You simply knew what was right if you were true to yourself and could dispense with selfishness.
The child was the father of the man: from Saigo’s education sprang the convictions that underpinned three crucial aspects of his character—his passionate sincerity, his determination to follow his conscience and his utter disregard for his own survival. As he wrote in a late poem:
Those things that common men all shun
Are not feared by the hero, but held most precious.
When confronted with difficulties, never escape them;
When faced with worldly gain, never pursue it.
Bright kids came through the upper school strengthened by having mastered a hugely complex discipline. Saigo and his fellow students would have agreed with Kaibara: “There is no pleasure in the world to compare with reading. One has a sense of personal colloquy with the Sages.” For those who emerged successfully from their years of education, the samurai agenda conferred huge benefits. There was no religious baggage, because the education was secular, with no priests in control; it gave scholars an optimistic sense that the world was an organized place, ruled by accessible laws; and it injected an awareness of a culture outside Japan. Above all, like many an old-fashioned British private-school education, it gave those who could absorb it a strong sense of identity.
All in all, goju education and the domain schools produced some remarkable leaders. One was a friend of Saigo’s from childhood, Okubo Toshimichi, one of the principal architects of modern Japan, who would remain close to Saigo as both friend and adversary. We will hear much of him later. A statue of him, clad in the frock coat of a Victorian gentleman flapping in the wind, stands near Saigo’s birthplace, and a plaque copies the sentiments on Saigo’s own: this man is a model for the young today. He and Saigo used to go to meditate with a monk named Musan, head of the Shimazu family temple. Their meeting place is now a tourist site (of course), marked by the Meditation Stone on which they sat, a reminder that Saigo, even as a student, sought to balance his fiery temperament with Zen. Not that it seemed to make much difference.
Satsuma, in Japan’s top four provinces in terms of population, size and rice harvest, always felt itself to be special. Cut off from the north by mountains, by Saigo’s day it had been self-assertively independent under the Shimazu family for seven hundred years, which made them Japan’s oldest ruling house. In the years leading up to 1600 they had opposed the Tokugawa shogun and lost, but were still formidable enough to retain their independence locally in exchange for acknowledging the shogun’s supremacy nationally.
Another aspect of Satsuma’s uniqueness was Kagoshima’s rather unimpressive seventeenth-century castle. At first glance its masonry walls and simple structure—with none of the complex redoubts and high towers of typical domain castles—suggest that the Shimazu were so secure they had no need of defenses. In fact, Tsurumaru, the province’s political and administrative heart, relied for protection on a halo of smaller castles that were technically illegal—not that the shogun was going to make an issue of it. “The people are the stronghold,” claimed the Shimazus. The town had other unique features. Of its seventy thousand residents, some fifty thousand were samurai and their families, a much higher proportion than elsewhere, the rich ones resplendent in their stone-walled compounds lining the main avenue in front of the castle, the poorer ones huddling in thatched houses like Saigo’s toward the sea. Satsuma’s people were proud, a little overburdened by their samurai and a mite arrogant.
In addition, the province had a sense that, because it looked south, it was Japan’s gateway to the outside world, and vice versa. In the 1540s the musket-carrying Portuguese made their approach northward from Okinawa, hopping along the Ryukyu Islands as if they were stepping-stones across a river. Along the way, some of them seized a Chinese ship, which was then wrecked in a storm on the coast of Satsuma. Locals rescued them, and as a thank-you the adventurers gave them some muskets. That was the first Japanese had seen of Europeans and their weapons.
Six years later, the first European missionary, St. Francis Xavier, from Spain’s Basque country, landed on Satsuma’s coast, guided by a local man who had become his disciple in Malaya. So he first preached in Kagoshima, with considerable success. Later the ground on which he cast his seed turned stonier. The shogun did not like the idea of what might follow a mass conversion to Christianity. Oppression followed—twenty-six Franciscans crucified in Nagasaki, among other atrocities. Kagoshima’s Christian church, rebuilt after being bombed in the Second World War, has a scanty following nowadays—a forlorn reminder of Francis’s disappointed hopes. He is honored in Kagoshima not as a missionary, but as a foreigner who followed the islands northward in the footsteps of the Portuguese traders.
The Chinese were there as well. They considered the Ryukyu Islands their own, without ever forcing the point. Even after Satsuma took them over in 1609, the Chinese went on believing them to be Chinese, mainly because the local king in Okinawa ordered all Japanese into hiding whenever an official arrived from China, while at the same time sending numerous embassies to Kagoshima. Depending on your point of view, the Ryukyu Islands were vassals of the shogun, Chinese vassals, an independent kingdom or vassals of Satsuma, which was itself independent when it felt like it. No shogun could expect to be taken seriously 1,700 kilometers from his home in Kamakura, in the face of such long-established eminence and free-spirited self-importance.
There are still hints of Shimazu power and prestige in Kagoshima today. The thirty-second lord—by tra
dition, they always number their generations—is president of the family corporation, which focuses on tourism. Among other things, it manages what used to be its own palatial villa and estate, Sengan’en, with a garden as exquisite today as it was when first laid out by the nineteenth lord, Mitsuhisa, in 1658. To the north is a steep mountain covered with five-needle pines (for this is the northern limit of these tropical trees), with a grove of bamboo introduced from China in the mid-eighteenth century, and an eleven-meter rock face displaying three enormous kanji signs one above the other—Sen Jin Gan (“1,000-fathom crag”). A stream wanders in gentle bends through a grassy glade. Here, at summer garden parties in the eighteenth century, gentlemen composed lines of verse, which they floated downstream to be completed by other aspiring poets, their refined literary skills being rewarded with sake offered by kimono-clad women of porcelain delicacy (actually, this part of the garden was later covered by a landslide, but it has now been remade, and locals reenact these garden parties every year). To the south the garden was, and is still, bordered by a hedge trimmed into wavelike shapes, images of the waves of Kinko Bay beyond, all set against a backdrop formed by the decapitated and gently smoking cone of Sakurajima. A restored summerhouse, open on all sides to cooling breezes, recalls the original, a gift from the Ryukyu islanders as a place to receive their embassies. On the lower slopes of the mountain there is a reminder of the Shimazus’ attempted conquest of Korea in the 1690s—a shrine to seven cats that the daimyo brought back with him and turned into cat deities; now you can buy a ready-made prayer to bring your own cat good luck and a long life.
For Japan’s culture, China was the epitome, the fount, the origin. So what happened to China in 1840–2—the disaster known as the First Opium War—was almost as much of a shock to Japan as to China. It proved exactly what so many in Japan feared: that foreigners, particularly Europeans, were the bringers of catastrophe, and that Japan had better be ready to repel them.
Europeans—French, Portuguese, Dutch and British—and Americans had been trading with China for three hundred years, through small coastal bases where they made little impact on the mainland and were a welcome addition to the imperial coffers. For the British, trade had grown throughout the eighteenth century, all of it in the hands of the East India Company, which ruled India and many places farther east until the mid-nineteenth century. Britain imported tea in astonishing quantities: over four thousand tons a year in 1800, a figure that would quadruple during the next century. Though privately owned, the East India Company was the right hand of government, and the tax on tea—contributing 10 percent of the government’s revenue—was crucial to the British economy. And those were just the official sums. Private adventurers were in on the business as well, buying in China, importing into the Netherlands and smuggling into Britain. To buy the tea, traders used silver, which drained company coffers. They had nothing else that the Chinese wanted—until 1773, when the East India Company took control of poppy growing in Bengal, and found itself with a monopoly on the opium trade.
Demand for opium grew, and so did attempts by China to suppress the destructive habit. The trade went offshore—basing itself in Singapore, acquired by the British in 1819—and underground. By 1836 commerce in opium was “the world’s most valuable single commodity trade in the 19th century.”4 In the main port of entry, Guangzhou, traders paid the East India Company protection money, which the company used to buy tea. No one needed to pay in silver anymore, and European governments breathed sighs of relief. But in China, a shortage of silver caused an economic meltdown. The Chinese government debated how best to control the destructive trade.
In these increasingly chaotic circumstances, the British government moved to impose its own control, sending a commissioner, Lord Napier, to talk to China’s top mandarins. They refused to have anything to do with him; he refused to leave, sent for backup in the form of troops from India and retreated to the Portuguese enclave of Macao, where he died of dysentery. London cried for redress; Beijing cheered and became more determined than ever to stem the flow of opium.
A top official and scholar, Lin Zexu, came to Guangzhou as commissioner, rounded up dealers and demanded the surrender of all the available opium. The new British superintendent, Captain Charles Elliot, backed down, and handed over twenty thousand chests of opium, some one thousand tons, which were destroyed in lime pits. Lin then wrote to Queen Victoria, lecturing her on the evils of opium. Though she was surely ignorant of the fact, she should know that “a poisonous article is manufactured by certain devilish people subject to your rule . . . Our Heavenly Court’s resounding might could at any moment control [the opium traders’] fate, but in its compassion and generosity it gives due warning before it strikes . . . I now give my assurance that we mean to cut off this harmful drug forever.” This was tough talk, in Chinese of course, its effect exacerbated by the British inability to understand the language, the tone or the context.
Lin demanded an agreement by the British never again to carry opium. The British refused, and the dispute escalated. Lin pressed the Portuguese to expel the British from Macao, which they did. Elliot led the now rootless British across the Pearl River to a lump of rock named Hong Kong, where they set up a new base. Provisions were ordered, troops requested. In early 1840 a large force left India, approached the river leading to Beijing and delivered a letter from the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, demanding redress for injuries and insults. Lin having been fired in disgrace for allowing events to lead to such a showdown, his successor negotiated a treaty that was at once repudiated by both governments—by China because of its severity, by Britain because of its leniency.
The British task force, which included an iron-clad paddle steamer, went on the offensive. In a few days, British guns sank seventy-one junks and shattered Guangzhou’s waterfront. On land, a minor conflict inspired an upsurge of Chinese irregulars, as angry with their own government as with the foreigners: a sign that China was seething with discontent which would eventually explode in rebellion. More British ships arrived with more troops and more demands. Ships advanced up the Yangzi, bombarding and raiding their way to Shanghai and seizing a vital city on the Grand Canal.
The emperor had no choice but to capitulate. By the Treaty of Nanjing, the British got $21 million in silver as compensation, Hong Kong as a colony and the right to trade in five treaty ports. Opium remained illegal, but the smuggling trade continued. To balance this “unequal treaty” the Chinese government signed many other similar ones, in effect opening China to foreign traders and missionaries. Fourteen years later, a Second Opium War would wring more concessions from a totally discredited Qing government. Foreigners, it seemed, were free to tear at the flesh of a nation and a culture which only a few decades before had seemed utterly impregnable.
When Saigo was sixteen he left school, and for ten years thereafter we hear little of him. He got a job as a low-level clerk, which brought him for the first time into contact with the reality of life in the countryside.
Satsuma had more samurai families—some 40 percent of its 650,000 people—than most other domains, which meant that its peasant farmers had to provide enough rice to feed over 200,000 extra mouths. Its peasants were overtaxed, its samurai underpaid and underfed. At the age of twenty-two, Saigo saw the consequences. Bad weather reduced harvests, but the government allowed no tax relief. The tax director resigned in disgust, a moral stand that seems to have impressed Saigo, who would always be ruled more by morality than practicality. The hardships he saw left him with a lifelong admiration for the frugality and stoicism of rural samurai. He married, in response to family pressure, but soon divorced, apparently without recriminations, and when both his parents died in quick succession in 1852 he was left as head of the family at age twenty-five, looking after his six younger siblings, relying mainly on the pathetic rice stipend inherited from his father. They were as poor as ever, and would apparently remain so. He seemed all set for a life of poverty, hard work and utter insignifica
nce.
But his life was about to be transformed. The man who would work the transformation on both Saigo and Satsuma was Satsuma’s daimyo, Nariakira, who had taken over four years previously in shocking and gruesome circumstances.
Once, everything had seemed set fair for Nariakira. He had been designated heir by his father at the age of three, and gone on to become one of the best and brightest: talented, well-read in both Chinese and Japanese, a brilliant archer, rider and fencer, and all in all a fine product of the shogunal system. Indeed, he owed more to his father’s house in Edo, the shogun’s capital, where daimyos were required to spend much of their time, than the castle in Satsuma. Like many of his peers from other parts of the country, he never saw his own domain when he was growing up, visiting Kagoshima for the first time only in his midtwenties. So it was in Edo that he became one of the minority who were able to indulge a fascination with western culture.
This unusual interest he owed to his great-grandfather, a collector of Dutch instruments both musical and scientific, who introduced him to a German scientist, Philipp von Siebold, a leading member of the Dutch colony clinging to its base on the tiny island of Dejima off Nagasaki. Von Siebold, one of a family of brilliant scientists, was a doctor, which was what won him the favor of the Japanese. But he was much more than that: he was a polymath who trained Japanese researchers and gathered encyclopedic amounts of information about Japan’s flowers, animals, people, language and literature, writing volumes still regarded as prime sources. No wonder he was an inspiration to Nariakira when they met in 1826, the prince being just seventeen at the time. (Von Siebold’s legendary zeal ran away with him shortly afterward when he obtained a Japanese map of the country and was thrown into jail, then out of Japan altogether. He would return twenty years later, to be welcomed by the emperor and become for three years the main contact between Japan and Europeans.)