by Ian Buruma
Perhaps Williams’s view of the Japanese as “partially enlightened” was not so wrong after all. The same applies to all people in the world. The enlightened side has to struggle everywhere, at all times. In Japan, alas, the battle was too often lost.
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The period from 1853 to 1868, from Perry’s arrival to the overthrow of the shogunate, is known in Japanese as bakumatsu, or “end of bakufu.” Bakumatsu shares the giddy, somewhat salacious connotations of “fin de siècle,” but it also has a darker, more violent image, expressed in brilliantly sinister Kabuki plays and, much later, in countless swordfight movies. The end of bakufu was a time of violent intrigues and murderous plots, of rebellions and countercoups, of feudal lords from the southwest maneuvering against the Tokugawa loyalists, ending in civil war. It was a time of popular hysteria and millenarian cults. Mobs gathered in the big cities, including Edo itself, carrying Shinto images, visiting shrines, dancing half-naked in the streets, having sex in public, and raiding wealthy houses, while shouting in a state of quasi-religious ecstasy: “It’s okay, it’s okay, anything we do is okay!” The 1860s, like the 1930s and the early 1970s, produced many young extremists, who saw ultraviolence as the way to national salvation, the result, perhaps, of a society that in more stable times tends to be too tightly controlled.
Commodore Perry’s arrival turned the slogan “Respect the emperor, expel the barbarians” into an anti-bakufu war cry. The increasingly helpless government in Edo was blamed for the foreign intrusions on Japanese soil. People feared change but rebelled against tradition. Revolutionaries were at once iconoclastic and reactionary. Young extremists, often of lower samurai stock, who had lost their moorings in the old society, expressed their xenophobic, emperor-worshiping, nation-saving idealism in a spate of assassinations, which set the pattern for the next century. In 1858, a senior bakufu official signed a treaty giving the United States trading and residency rights. He knew he had no choice. Two years later, he was ambushed outside the shogun’s castle in Edo by a group of samurai from Mito who pulled him from his palanquin and slashed off his head. To make up for this necessary act of insubordination, the assassin later disemboweled himself in the ritual manner of his warrior caste.
Another would-be assassin was a young man from the Tosa region (in the southwestern island of Shikoku) named Sakamoto Ryoma. The hero of many novels, plays, television dramas, and films, he is usually depicted as a Japanese Garibaldi who began as a wild-haired protohippie with a sword. This kind of thing has been more widely admired since World War II than in less liberal periods. But Sakamoto’s political journey from murderous fanaticism to political enlightenment contains all the dark glamour, radical intelligence, and openness to different political possibilities of his age.
Bored with the prospect of a constrained provincial samurai life, Sakamoto dropped out of school, left his family and his lord, and joined a fencing academy. With a head full of Mito School propaganda about national purity and the barbarian peril, Sakamoto then set off to assassinate traitors. He thought he had found the perfect target in Katsu Rintaro, the bakufu‘s naval specialist and a renowned Dutch scholar. Katsu had spent time in Nagasaki with Dutch naval experts and seen American strength with his own eyes as a member of the first Japanese mission to the United States in 1859. He concluded that Japan’s only chance to survive as an independent nation was to open its borders. To a crazed young warrior like Sakamoto, this smacked of cowardice and treachery.
The story goes that Katsu, confronted by his young assassin, kept his cool and said: “Did you come to kill me? If you did, you ought to wait until we’ve had a chance to talk.” What followed was one of those extraordinary volte-faces that sometimes mark the overheated behavior of Japanese heroes. Katsu explained that he was a patriot like Sakamoto, and his only goal was to strengthen Japan. The best way to fight the barbarians, he said, was to learn all their tricks first. Hence his advocacy of openness and initial compromise. According to legend, Sakamoto dropped his sword, fell on his knees, apologized for his “narrow-minded bigotry,” and begged Katsu to take him as his disciple. Perhaps something like that actually occurred.
Sakamoto served Katsu for several years and went on to play a diplomatic role in forging links between Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosa, the main southwestern fiefdoms in opposition to the bakufu. Satsuma was in the south of Kyushu, and Choshu was at the western tip of Honshu. Being on the losing side in the civil wars around the turn of the seventeenth century, the lords of these domains had never been in the inner circles of Tokugawa power. The leaders of Satsuma and Choshu were ready to go to war with the Edo government, but Sakamoto advocated a more peaceful solution and urged his allies to persuade the shogun to resign as the ruler. Sakamoto proposed that Japan should be governed by a council of feudal lords, in which the Tokugawa shogun could still play a role, but not as the supreme leader. In 1867, the last shogun agreed to this proposition. But the warriors of Satsuma and Choshu were impatient. Nothing less than the fall of the Tokugawa house would satisfy them.
Sakamoto’s new base of operations was Nagasaki, where he studied Western political systems. He was particularly interested in European constitutions. Though poorly educated, Sakamoto must have had a brilliant mind, for in 1867 he came up with a highly sophisticated blueprint for the post-bakufu state. Political power should be returned to the imperial court. But all government measures would be decided “on the basis of general opinion” in two legislative bodies, an upper and lower house. A constitution would be drawn up, and high office would be reserved for “men of ability” and no longer based on caste or rank. (One should remember that even lowly samurai like Sakamoto were required to grovel to their superiors, in their own as well as other fiefs.) Later, in another document, Sakamoto elaborated how such worthies would be chosen through election committees. Foreign affairs “should be carried on according to appropriate regulations worked out on the basis of general opinion.”
Given Sakamoto’s own background and the fact that politics of this kind had never existed in Japan before, this was a remarkable document. Much of its language was adopted a year later in the Charter Oath of the Meiji Restoration, which brought bakufu rule to an end. Meiji, literally “Enlightened Rule,” was the name of the new imperial reign. It would soon become synonymous with an astonishing race for modernity, watched with awe by Asians who were still living under Western colonial rule.
An inspiring story, then, of a society transformed by progressive ideas from feudalism and military autocracy to liberty and enlightenment. Alas, it was not quite so simple. The seeds of political liberalism had been sown, to be sure, but their growth was hampered from the beginning by other measures, moving Japan in the opposite direction. Once the emperor and his courtiers were harnessed directly to a political cause, as they were by the anti-bakufu rebels, mostly from Satsuma and Choshu, a particularly modern kind of authoritarianism emerged.
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For many centuries, the emperors in Kyoto had played a symbolic role as guardians of Japanese culture and ethics. Their political blessing was taken for granted by the shoguns, who rarely even bothered to visit them, let alone consult them on matters of state. This changed drastically in the late 1850s, when Emperor Komei was urged by anti-bakufu hard-liners to oppose a treaty with the United States. This was not the kind of thing emperors were supposed to express opinions about. Even if the anti-bakufu rebels did not actually wish to see the emperor take direct political power, they had begun to politicize the imperial institution.
The consequences of this ultimately disastrous course could already be seen in early drafts of the new constitution, drawn up by Sakamoto Ryoma, among others. After a meeting between Satsuma and Tosa representatives in Kyoto in 1867, a document was drafted with the following sentence: “There cannot be two rulers in a land, or two heads in a house, and it is most reasonable to return administration and justice to one ruler.” The wording is still sufficiently vague to leave some room for secular government. Th
e emperor could still be a ruler in name, while a civilian government actually governed. But it began to look as though the Shinto revivalist motto saisei ichi, the unity of government and religious rites, would be turned into a political reality.
The end of bakufu government did not come as peacefully as Sakamoto had envisaged. Civil war raged in 1868–1869 between bakufu loyalists and imperial armies. The former came from the northeastern domains and the latter from the southwest. The fighting was brutal, and civilians unlucky enough to be caught in between were treated with typical samurai contempt. The bakufu’s last stand was in Aizu, a castle town to the northeast of Mito. For more than two weeks, the lord of Aizu stood his ground against thirty thousand imperial troops, who blasted his castle with the latest Western guns. The town was burned to the ground. Dozens of loyalist young samurai slit their stomachs in despair. The castle fell. The Aizu lord lost three thousand men. And the rest of his twenty thousand–odd men were chased into the barren north, where many died of starvation.
The emperor was moved to Edo, now renamed Tokyo, and for the first time in almost a thousand years, the emperor and the government shared the same capital. A shrine, named Yasukuni, was built in the center of Tokyo to commemorate the men who had died for the imperial cause. Their enshrined souls, like those of millions who died in a succession of later wars, were worshiped there, unlike the poor souls of men who had remained loyal to the bakufu, for whom there was no sacred site. Yasukuni shrine still manages to stir up deep antipathy, not only among Japan’s former enemies in Asia, but among Christians and liberals in Japan itself.
Sakamoto, sad to say, did not live to see the final demise of Tokugawa rule and the Meiji Restoration he had done so much to prepare. In the last years of the bakufu, Kyoto had become a wild place filled with plotters, assassins, and roaming swordsmen, all looking for trouble. In the winter of 1867, Sakamoto was hiding out in the house of a friendly soy sauce merchant. He knew that bakufu gangs were out to get him but thought he was safe enough to send his bodyguards out for some food. A stranger knocked on the merchant’s door and said he was looking for Sakamoto Ryoma. Sakamoto’s servant turned to inform his master upstairs. But before he could do so, the visitor rushed in with two other swordsmen, and slashed Sakamoto’s head, body, and limbs. The assassins were members of the Shinsengumi, the armed militia formed to kill all enemies of the shogun. After they had gone, the man who wrote the first draft of the Japanese constitution lay dead in a pool of blood.
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CIVILIZATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT
February 11, 1889, the anniversary of the date on which Japan’s mythical first emperor is alleged to have founded the imperial line, was the chosen date for Japan to take its rightful place among the world’s great nations. New, resolutely postfeudal Japan was to have its first constitution as a badge of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” or Bunmei Kaika, that great slogan of the Meiji era. There was another slogan, too, which came into fashion a bit later: Fukoku Kyohei, meaning “Rich Country, Strong Army.” But this is getting ahead of the story. The constitution would be handed down by the emperor to his subjects, as though it were a gift from the gods. The ceremonies surrounding this illustrious event were splendid and typical of Meiji Japan’s peculiar cultural schizophrenia.
In the early morning, the Meiji emperor, known outside Japan as Emperor Mutsuhito, dressed up in ancient court dress and withdrew into the inner sanctum of the Shinto shrine at his Tokyo palace to inform his imperial ancestors of the new constitution. He explained that this document was in line with the “advance of civilization,” then hastened to reassure his divine forebears that it would naturally preserve the imperial sovereignty they had bequeathed to him. More than preserve: The point of the Meiji Restoration—or of Meiji Restoration propaganda—was that it “restored” the ancient form of Japanese imperial rule.
The Meiji emperor’s subjects were still ignorant of the contents of the constitution their emperor had so graciously bestowed. They would have remained in the dark even if they had attended the next ceremony, conducted later in the day, in the European style devised by the emperor’s German adviser on enlightened court etiquette. The emperor’s Western-style throne room, as shown in a contemporary woodblock print, is a Victorian mishmash of lush European and Japanese motifs, with a preponderance of gold tassels, red plush, and ornate gilt candelabras. The emperor, who had changed into the uniform of a European field marshal, sits on a gilded Prussian armchair, with the imperial crest behind him and a red carpet stretching beneath him. The empress, whose presence on such a public occasion was another sign of Japan’s new enlightened and civilized style, sits at his feet, wearing a rather unbecoming pink evening gown. The emperor’s ministers and other bearded and bewhiskered dignitaries, in frock coats and military uniforms, stand unnaturally tall and are blessed by the print artist with slightly longer legs than reality might have warranted. On one side of the emperor is the diplomatic corps, looking on with obvious approval, like parents at a school play. In attendance, too, is Ito Hirobumi, president of the Privy Council and the main author of the constitution. Ito was an admirer of Bismarck and affected some of the Iron Chancellor’s mannerisms, including the way he held his cigar. (Yoshida Shigeru, the post–World War II prime minister, would one day pay the same compliment to Winston Churchill.)
One blot on this joyous occasion was the assassination of Mori Arinori, the reforming education minister, who was so convinced of the superiority of Western civilization that he proposed mixed marriages with people of European stock as the best way forward for Japan. Xenophobes had long hated his Westernizing ways. He was murdered on Constitution Day by an ex-samurai from Choshu for not paying sufficient respect to the holiest imperial Shinto shrine at Ise. While Mori would go down in history as a rather earnest pedagogue, his young killer became a popular figure because of the “sincerity” of his patriotic spirit.
So now they had it, a real constitution, after having been promised one in 1868. For a decade, people all over Japan had discussed the nature and possible contents of a constitution. Advocates for civil liberties and natural rights had made proposals and written drafts. Ueki Emori, a former samurai from Tosa, like Sakamoto Ryoma, had composed a song to promote popular sovereignty, containing such stirring lines as these:
Let’s resolve for constitutional laws
And for the early popular election of an assembly.
Onward! Onward! People of our country.
Let’s push for liberty and people’s rights.
What they had got, however, was a vaguely worded document that put sovereignty entirely into imperial hands. Like the uniforms and top hats worn by Japanese worthies, and like some of the modern redbrick buildings erected in the center of Tokyo, the constitution had a respectable Western-style veneer. Based on the Prussian constitution, it was meant to impress the Western world that Japan was now a modern nation-state, which should be free at last of the unequal treaties that still afforded Americans and Europeans special privileges on Japanese soil, such as their own law courts. The old game of catch-up with an outside metropole was being replayed as it had been for centuries, with one difference: Paris, London, Berlin, and Washington had replaced the old capitals of China.
The Meiji constitution did allow for parliamentary, or Diet, elections, the first of which were to take place the following year, but political parties would have no say in the selection of government ministers. Only a small percentage of the population—for the most part wealthy landowners—would have the right to vote. Ito Hirobumi, a relatively free-spirited figure among his peers, agreed entirely with his role model, Otto von Bismarck, that popular sovereignty would be a very dangerous thing. “Because imperial sovereignty is the cornerstone of our constitution,” he said, “our system is not based on the European ideas in force in some European countries of joint rule of the king and the people.”
Ito and his fellow oligarchs, mostly from Satsuma and Choshu, had spent much time after the 1868 restorat
ion shopping around for good political ideas. They went on missions to Europe and the United States. They studied British and American models and made sentimental visits to Holland, as Japan’s “oldest friend.” Although they admired American strength and appreciated the friendliness of their reception in that country, American democracy worried them. It smacked of disorder. So they were relieved to hear from the Japanese resident in Germany that there were other alternatives, more suitable to Japan. Germanophilia was not universal. One famous Meiji leader, Okuma Shigenobu, was an advocate of British constitutional thought. But this avenue was swiftly blocked by his colleagues, and Okuma almost lost his life in an assassination attempt by the same kind of sincere zealot who brought down Mori Arinori.
Japanese democracy, then, as defined in the Meiji constitution, was a sickly child from the beginning. The spirit of the constitution was a mixture of German and traditional Japanese authoritarianism. But the greatest danger, in the long run, lay in its vagueness. For the emperor, though empowered with absolute sovereignty, was not really a royal generalissimo. He was never a dictator in the European sense. The emperor was not supposed to be directly involved in politics; he was expected to stand above worldly affairs, while a bureaucratic elite made political decisions in his name. At the same time, Japan’s armed services owed their loyalty only to the monarch and not to the civilian government. This made for a politics of veils and smoke screens, behind which power could be exercised more or less unchecked, without any individual having to take final responsibility for his actions.