by Andrew Marr
The daimyo, whom most Samurai served, were themselves organized into categories, depending on their historic family loyalty, or absence of loyalty, to the Tokugawa clan. A system of one-year-in, one-year-out enforced residence in the capital Edo (today’s Tokyo) made the daimyo families effectively hostages of the shogun and of his government, and they posed little threat. In a country that had spent so much of its history engaged in complex civil and clan warfare, the peace that resulted was a major political achievement.
Tokugawa Japan was no paradise, particularly for the farmers at the bottom of the social pile and the outcast families who (as in India) did the dirtiest jobs. There were periodic famines, peasant revolts, volcanic eruptions and serious crime problems in the cities. But these were centuries without civil war or imported epidemics, during which the population grew faster than in Europe. The production of rice wine, paper luxuries, expensive cloth, lacquered and wooden items, grew, and the roads between the towns, generally larger than those in Europe, were crowded with traders. But this period also brought a complacent, even arrogant, attitude to the outside world. As Western ships began to arrive off the coast again, one Japanese critic complained: ‘Recently, the loathsome Western barbarians, unmindful of their base position as the lower extremities of the world, have been scurrying impudently across the Four Seas, trampling other nations under foot. Now they are audacious enough to challenge our exalted position . . . What manner of insolence is this?’31
The Tokugawa-era Japanese had no real answer to the insistent demands of the Americans for trade. Following Adam Smith and theorists such as David Ricardo, nineteenth-century economics saw trade as a great beneficent power in the world. As noted earlier, countries which were mutually enriching one another were thought less likely to go to war. What this happy liberal belief ignored was that so much of the really profitable trade brought huge riches because it was unequal and – from India to China to Japan – imposed down the muzzles of cannon: ‘Peaceful free trade – or we shoot.’ Once trade was fully opened up, the West found much in Japan that it wanted, from fine lacquered furniture and silks to the vivid prints that so influenced the Impressionist painters. The Japanese would take a radically different route from the Chinese, building a modern industrial economy and army. But the price for Japan was the destruction of its earlier self, and this was a painful and paradoxical process, which a century on would enmesh America in further war.
The paradox had started with those samurai. With some of the leading landowners they began to agitate against the Tokugawa shogun. As he and his advisers reluctantly accepted that they had to sign the unequal trading treaties being demanded by the Westerners, which included such humiliations as foreigners being immune to Japanese laws, there had been a fierce backlash. The Tokugawa bakufu, the military government, was doing its best to reform the old system, but gently. The rebels wanted the foreign devils simply expelled. They appealed to that symbol of ancient Japan, so long out of politics, the emperor at his court in Kyoto. Which way should Japan turn? In a revealing story of this confusing time, one samurai, Sakamoto Ryoma, broke into the home of a bakufu official involved in modernizing the navy, intending to assassinate him. But the official, Katsu Kaishu, asked the samurai to listen to his explanations before he killed him: after an afternoon of discussion about the importance of a strong navy, the would-be assassin was convinced and changed sides.
Yet increasing unrest caused by opening up to the West, revolts, inflation and the desertion of daimyo supporters weakened the Tokugawa regime, creating a crisis into which more rebel samurai flung themselves. A national argument was taking place, about the need to shift from an essentially feudal and traditionalist society to a modern one, in essence not so different from the struggles in Russia and America. Japan would achieve her modernization with far less bloodshed than the United States had – though it would be a less democratic transformation – and far more successfully than Russia. Eventually, after more than two centuries of relative stability, the shogunate collapsed, and in 1867–8 the young emperor Meiji returned as the supreme ruler of Japan. This period is remembered as the ‘Meiji restoration’.
Traditionalists now got a horrible shock, which led directly to the confrontation between Saigo’s samurai and the Japanese army; for the new regime promptly did exactly what the conservative and anti-foreigner samurai had hoped to prevent. It modernized, and very fast. The 280-plus daimyo landholdings were abolished and turned into seventy-two Western-style prefectures, effectively creating a single national territory for the first time. Samurai lost their privileges, from the right to carry swords to their untaxed stipends. Who, in the 1870s, needed poetry-crazed, sword-fighting (and somewhat rusty) warriors? Old rules about dress, haircuts and where people could live were torn up. Japanese town-dwellers started to experiment with Western clothing.
A modern conscript army, based on Western military thinking, was created. Compulsory education was brought in. The capital moved from old Kyoto to Edo. A new land tax swept away complex feudal arrangements, and in 1872 railways arrived. After a rocky start, the Japanese turned to the German experience of state-directed capitalism to create their industries, and to the British to help build a modern navy. By 1889 a new constitution, creating a house of peers and a house of representatives, the latter elected but on a tiny franchise (about 1 per cent of men had enough property to vote), had been unveiled. Japanese citizens were granted civil rights and there was a flowering of popular democratic movements.
This added up to the most dramatic, fastest (non-revolutionary) reform programme in modern history. It was almost a revolution – but not quite, because it was driven by samurai and landowners, albeit mostly middle-ranking ones, and occurred under the authority of an ancient imperial system. It made Czar Alexander II look lazy. Yet it produced turbulence and reactions almost as extreme as many another revolution. There were revolts by peasants and samurai who could not accept the loss of their old powers – and who were still supported by many conservative-minded Japanese in the cities and villages. Saigo Takamori was only the boldest of the rebels, and he, like so many other samurai, had started on the side of the Meiji restoration. He broke with the new regime only in 1873, when it failed to take his advice to invade Korea – a plan he hoped would restore the glamour and authority of the warrior class.
Saigo had been born in the domain of Satsuma, or Kagoshima, on the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese islands. It was famous not only for its small oranges but for being backward, traditionalist and having an unusually high number of samurai – about a quarter of the male population.32 It was also famously independent-minded, and headed by an ancient daimyo family who represented themselves as the independent kingdom of Satsuma at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition. Saigo’s family were poor samurai, but he was bright and scholarly and worked his way up from clerking jobs to a role at the centre of Japanese political life in Edo. His political career had its ups and downs, including two banishments, but by the mid-1860s he was representing the interests of Satsuma at the imperial court in Kyoto. There he emerged as an opponent of the Tokugawa regime but, though conservative in much of his thinking, he became a political reformer.
After the Meiji restoration he even emerged as a hardliner, enthusiastic about the creation of the modern conscript army that would later finish him off, keen on destroying the old samurai stipend system, and ruthless in destroying the power of the old regime and its supporters. He was about the least likely rebel against the Meiji emperor, whom he revered, that it is possible to imagine. Indeed, Saigo’s own Satsuma lord, Shimazu Hisamitsu, thought he was a destructive reformer bent on turning proud old Japan into a colony of the barbarian nations. The Korean crisis provoked his resignation from the government, but Saigo’s internal conflict as between the old samurai culture he had been brought up in and the demands of modernization may have made his life feel intolerable.
As soon as he left the government and returned to Satsuma,
he began an almost Tolstoyan life of hunting, farming and setting up chidren’s schools to teach Confucian values. He did not write novels, but he did write poems:
I moor my skiff in the creek of flowering reeds
With a fishing-pole in hand, I sit on a stepping-stone
Does anyone know of this high-minded man’s other world?33
Saigo was also, by now, an iconic national figure in Japan whose every move was watched.
Precisely what turned him from visionary in voluntary exile, warning of decadence in government, into the leader of a full-scale military rebellion is hard to pin down. But the revolt was provoked by the Tokyo administration, who sent spies – and possibly assassins – after Saigo, and tried to seize arms stored in Satsuma. It began as an uprising of private military school students in Kagoshima. Saigo put himself at their head and announced that he was setting off for the capital with this local army, to challenge the government. Beginning with more than twelve thousand men, armed with rifles, carbines, howitzers and mortars as well as their swords, they collected supporters as they marched north through the snow. But they then halted for an unsuccessful fifty-four-day siege of the huge seventeenth-century Kumamoto Castle, which allowed the opposition to land a much larger and far better-equipped army of sixty thousand loyal samurai and conscript soldiers. In ferocious battles, the rebels were forced back through a long retreat, fighting and losing men all the way, until their final downhill charge and Saigo’s death.34
So this is not quite the simple story of traditionalist samurai fighting hopelessly against a modernizing government that it first seems. Had it been, Saigo Takamori would not be the tragic hero he remains for many Japanese. His tale is more interesting, and sadder, than that. He was a modernizer, too, for much of his life (and fought more often in a French-influenced modern uniform than in samurai clothes). He was torn between his country’s past and its future, and it was only when he found himself with his back to the wall that he chose to fight for its past. Even then he had no coherent project beyond the very vague notion of wanting a more ‘virtuous’ government. The ambiguous nature of his revolt is shown by his declaration in the course of it that he was not fighting to win, but for ‘the chance to die for principle’ – in other words, to turn himself into a symbol. That he certainly did.
Japan’s success as a modernizing power would soon astonish the world when she defeated the Imperial Russian Navy at the battle of Tsushima in 1905. But though clad in modern steel and European uniforms, in its heart twentieth-century Japan retained many of the medieval instincts of the samurai class, with its emphasis on death, honour and family lineage and its contempt for outsiders – at least until the disastrous 1940s. Saigo represented both Japans, which was one too many for a single life.
The Mystery of Imperialism
That the age of modern imperialism should start in Europe is no surprise. Europeans had been in deadly competition with one another for centuries. Their domestic sea, the Mediterranean, had fostered seamanship, piracy and trading rivalries, so that as soon as their craft were able, they were bound to go further afield, round Africa and across the Atlantic. When they first took, or bought, a piece of land, then built a fort and stayed, it was generally to protect their new trade against other European enemies: the Portuguese fortified against the Dutch, the Dutch built forts to keep out the British; the British and French built settlements against each another. Though the obvious and primary story of empire is that of Europe’s colonizing nations imposing themselves on less powerful non-European peoples, it began because of internal European competition.
This explains the speed, rapacity and aggression of the continent’s imperial expansion. Local enmities and rivalries, simmering for centuries, were exploding afresh in new lands. In thinking of empire we must remember mutual Dutch and Spanish loathing, born of Habsburg Spain’s brutal attempt to hold on to and suppress the young Protestant republic; the very longstanding Spanish–Portuguese rivalry; the mutual contempt of English and Dutch sailors, nurtured in sea battles up and down the Channel and the Thames. Often, these were religious feuds as well as national ones. We have to recall how envious the British court had been of the dominance of Catholic Bourbon France; and how furious French merchants, Jesuit missionaries and aristocrats were when the British seemed to be stealing a march on them in the forests of America. Had the boot been on the other foot, it would have been as if Africans had not only colonized Europe, but had been playing out an ancient and bitter competition among themselves at the same time – Kongo against Mali, Zimbabwean against Bantu, as they hacked and surged their way through the valleys of the Thames, the Rhine and the Rhône.
Had this been all, it would have been a simple, if unpleasant, tale. We would have been able to define Europe’s age of empire as the predictable result of one part of the world developing better technologies and organization than most of the rest of it, and then for a short period taking what they could. There is nothing specifically European about this – no original sin. Muslim Arabs, Mongol herders, Chinese border-people and Maori seafarers all behaved just as murderously when they had the chance. Whenever you get all-male warrior bands unleashed on normal settled family-based people, there is a high risk that they will behave abominably. Untethered from the bonds of mutual need, nurtured empathy and the possibility of shame inside their own society, they are likely to kill randomly and even rape and torture. Whether the men concerned are British, American, Spanish, German – or Hindu, Aztec or Zulu – makes little difference.
Yet European imperialism did not simply let loose bands of greedy, lonely men, itchy with national rivalries, on other parts of the world. It also thrust upon them European national and religious cultures, which were well developed and had a strong sense of their own special history and cultural value. So the story of the British in America could not be just the story of military conquest, traders and trappers, but also had to be about law, Christian dissenters, moral arguments and political rebellion. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico and Peru, they brought microbes and mayhem, but they also brought monasteries and the mass. Nineteenth-century French colonies struggled to reconcile republican citizenship with ownership of the new lands and people. The Dutch settlement in South Africa (not strictly an imperial moment) was a republican-Christian exodus from the homeland, deeply rooted in a Calvinist sense of mission, the Dutch as a people chosen during the Reformation in Europe. German imperialism in Africa was an extension of that court’s belief in Germany’s destiny as the new European superpower, more disciplined and less raggedly democratic than its decadent liberal rivals.
All this came with a huge dollop of humbug and self-seeking propaganda. It had to. How could Catholic Portuguese explain themselves in Brazil or the Congo, without insisting they were bringing eternal Christian light to the darkness – as well as slave-trading? When the British in India blew mutineers from the barrels of cannon, or gunned down protest movements, they had to tell themselves they were bringing the rule of law, education and proper administration which would, in the long run, benefit their Muslim and Hindu subjects. When the ‘scramble for Africa’ began, French, Belgian and British newspapers inveighed against the evil of the Arab slave-traders: for it was to free the African that their soldiers were shackling their tribal lands.
Yet European societies had become more open and more self-critical at just the same time as they were acquiring empires. They had advanced beyond the point where they could live on a diet of humbug without feeling ill. The missionaries included many men who enjoyed lording it in steaming backwaters, ordering servants around and taking their sexual pleasure from the conquered, thousands of miles from their families and fellow citizens. But they also included genuine Christians aghast at the moral consequences of imperialism – men like Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican friar who campaigned against the worst excesses of ‘New Spain’ and insisted on the full humanity of the native people; or, in Africa, Scotland’s David Livingstone.
At
home, almost from the beginning, European societies were divided on the subject of imperialism. The nonconformist, Baptist and free-trade strain in British political life fought vigorously against the slavers and other empire enthusiasts. A large, vocal group of pro-Americans existed in London well before the Boston Tea Party. In France, there was a long tradition of writing that mocked European pretensions of being more advanced than the people they were enslaving and conquering. The victory of the anti-slave-trade lobby in early-nineteenth-century Britain was a battle won, not the end of a war, but it was nonetheless hugely significant.
Every European society that acquired an empire was affected, often for the worse. We have seen the effect of American gold and silver on Spain. Though Portuguese wealth was based for centuries on its African and Brazilian conquests, by the mid-twentieth century the country had become a backwater, snoring under dictatorship. Britain became socially and politically divided between the free-traders and liberal nonconformists on the one hand, and on the other the empire-lovers clustered around the court, the military and London. Had the imperialists lost much earlier, then perhaps Britain today would not be a post-manufacturing, post-industrial nation overdependent on the financial services that are the last vestige of imperial stretch. She would certainly have experienced far less mass immigration and would have a shorter record of involvement in overseas wars.
So it is important to remember that imperialism was never simply about one country invading or occupying others. It was two-way. It always involved internal choices and the victory of one lobby or economic interest over others. Outside the Dutch Republic, where capital was raised from the growing middle class, this generally meant the victory of the court, and the military associated with the court.