by Ian Buruma
Could it have been otherwise? Did the Japanese have to pick a quasi-Teutonic, pseudoancient Japanese authoritarian system? Was there even a chance of establishing a more democratic system? A chance, yes. But given the men who forced the Tokugawa bakufu out of power, it was never likely.
The heroes of the Meiji Restoration, notably Ito Hirobumi, Saigo Takamori, Yamagata Aritomo, Okubo Toshimichi, and Kido Takayoshi, all from Choshu or Satsuma, were steeped in the samurai ethos of loyalty, obedience, and military discipline. Saigo Takamori, one of the most romantic figures of the restoration, a large fighting man celebrated for the impressive size of his testicles, wanted to establish a warrior state in Satsuma. He became a hero to disaffected samurai, who felt left behind by modern reforms, most significantly the abolition of the samurai’s status as a hereditary caste, and in 1877 he led a bloody rebellion against the central government. The ostensible cause of the Satsuma rebellion was Japanese policy toward Korea, which Saigo deemed too soft. But the real point was that even reforms that were still far from democratic went too far for many thousands of men, who were used to more feudal ways. It is a clear sign of the traditional Japanese fondness for reactionary rebels that Saigo, whose sincerity was never in doubt, is still seen as a greater hero than some of his more liberal-minded colleagues.
What is surprising about early Meiji history is not that Satsuma and Choshu autocrats found popular sovereignty uncongenial, but that so many Japanese took the opposite view. The Charter Oath, issued by the emperor in 1868, promised that “deliberative councils” would be established and “all matters decided by public discussions.” Prominent figures from the old Tosa domain, following the lead of Sakamoto Ryoma and spurred on by such inspirational literature as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, formed societies to promote representative politics. Since these Tosa men were excluded from the central government dominated by leaders from Satsuma and Choshu, it was in their interest to do so. They wanted to represent themselves.
In some ways, early Meiji Japan was like China in the 1980s and 1990s: Economic reforms were not matched by political ones. More than that, Ito Hirobumi, among others, was convinced that too many political reforms would derail the progressive economic policies. Japan in the 1870s had the beginnings of a modern market economy. Caste differences were legally abolished; farmers could own their own land; people were free to buy property; and some monopolies were abolished in favor of free enterprise. But free enterprise was never free from state interference. As the Meiji slogan said, the point was to build up not just a rich country, but a powerful one, which meant government support for strategic industries needed by a strong army. Already in the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japanese, helped by European experts, had started to build steamships and cannon. The first iron foundry was constructed in 1857. But it was in the 1880s, when the cash-strapped government sold off textile factories, railroads, cement plants, and other industries to private entrepreneurs, that Japan had its first real industrial boom. This means that Japan’s industrial revolution came later than Britain’s, but only a few years after that of Germany. Since only a few were brave enough in the beginning to risk taking on modern enterprises, much of Japan’s industrial wealth was concentrated in a few companies that soon grew into the huge industrial combines known as zaibatsu. Mitsui, for example, grew from an Edo textile store to a massive concern of banks, trading companies, collieries, chemical plants, and much else besides. Another famous combine, Mitsubishi, began as a small shipping firm and by the 1930s was one of the biggest concerns in the world. Their growth followed a now familiar pattern in Japan. Instead of encouraging competition among big businesses in an unfettered marketplace, an intricate network of bureaucrats, politicians, and business leaders promoted industrial growth through strategic policies, government subsidies, and mutually beneficial backroom deals. Meiji Japan had its share of Horatio Algers. The alienation from their village roots of country boys who made it in the big city was a favorite theme of Meiji novelists. But, unlike in America, individual fortunes were subordinate to the demands of the state. As in Bismarck’s Germany, the economy was as much part of the nationalist endeavor in Japan as the politics.
Economically, then, Meiji Japan was becoming a modern nation. But government was still the preserve of a few ex-samurai from the southwest. They—Okubo, Yamagata, Ito, and the others—became known as the oligarchs. These were able, energetic, and in some cases brilliant men, but their jealous guardianship of power made sure that democracy was hampered at birth.
The oligarchy, however, did not go unchallenged. One of the first men who wished to translate economic into political liberties was a Tosa intellectual named Itagaki Daisuke. Like Okuma, the relatively liberal Meiji leader, he was the target of a failed assassination. As he crumpled to the ground at a public meeting in 1882 after being struck down by a fanatical police officer, he is said to have shouted the famous line “Even if Itagaki perishes, liberty will never die!” In fact, Itagaki survived in rather better shape than the liberties he promoted.
Itagaki and other leaders of the so-called People’s Rights Movement argued that sovereignty should not be based on divine right—a direct attack on imperial rule. The idea of natural law was often invoked. Rousseau was much read by these early advocates of people’s rights, along with Mill, Spencer, Bentham, and Tocqueville. The society of like-minded activists turned into a political party, the Jiyuto, or Freedom Party. Okuma and his fellow Anglophiles set up a rival party called the Kaishinto, the Constitutional Progressive Party. But their interest in European theory notwithstanding, Itagaki and his fellow activists were still samurai at heart, who never thought that the common people should participate directly in politics. There were always enough Westerners at hand to firm up such views. Ulysses S. Grant, on a much heralded visit to Tokyo, advised the Japanese government that the Japanese people could not handle too much freedom. And one of the heroes of people’s rights activists, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, the man who in earlier years advocated the right to rebel against oppressive government, was of the opinion that only absolute imperial rule suited the Japanese.
In fact, however, many people did try to participate in politics. The enthusiasm with which politics was discussed in villages and towns by people of all classes is particularly interesting, given the common belief, held in Japan as well as abroad, that the “conformist,” “consensus-minded,” “obedient” Japanese don’t take to politics. Not only did rural people form their own political parties, but Meiji Japan was marked by a huge number of rebellions, directed less at the central government than against local bosses and landlords. The problem was arbitrary rule. You didn’t need to have read John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith to resent it. In at least one instance, farmers were up against the imperial institution itself. Although the right to private property was one of the key tenets of the Meiji reforms, the government had decided to confiscate land from farmers in Nagano prefecture for conversion to imperial forestland. The farmers resisted for twenty-five years, arguing their case on legal grounds. In 1905, they were paid some money in compensation. They were lucky not to be locked up for sedition.
One of the most famous uprisings took place in the mountains around Chichibu, northeast of Tokyo, in 1884. Like most rebellions, it was rooted in the farmers’ crippling debts—brought on, at least partly, by misguided government policies. Represented by amateur lawyers, some Freedom Party figures, angry schoolteachers, and the odd rabble-rousing rogue, they formed the Poor People’s Party. When petitions to the authorities, village meetings, and negotiations with creditors met time and again with violent police repression, the farmers decided they wouldn’t take it anymore. Armed with swords, hunting rifles, and bamboo spears, the farmers battled with government troops for ten days. They lost, of course. Three hundred were jailed, seven executed.
Horrified by these rebellions, the leaders of the two “liberal” parties quickly dissociated themselves from what they regarded as unruly mobs. This was a
characteristic but futile move. Weakened and demoralized by constant government harassment, the parties themselves were dissolved in 1884, only to revive later in a rather emasculated form as promoters of corporate interests: the Freedom Party for the Mitsui combine, the Constitutional Progressive Party for Mitsubishi.
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“Civilization and Enlightenment” always was more a cultural than a political slogan, a matter of style and appearances. But appearances count for a lot in Japan. There was a satirical Meiji saying that went: “Knock a head without a top-knot, and you hear the sound of Bunmei Kaika.” As if wearing one’s hair in the European style were a sign of superior breeding. Some Meiji leaders seriously believed that a display of European manners would persuade Western powers to give up the unequal treaties.
There was something priggish, as well as noble and absurd, about Meiji enlightenment. Even as some ancient and quasi-ancient customs were invented or revived to dress up modernization in nativist garb, there was a conscious effort to reject or clean up the recent past, especially if it might seem frivolous or plebeian in Western eyes. The Kabuki theater, for example, once a lively feature of the raffish pleasure quarters, was made respectable and turned into an increasingly stagnant classical tradition. The great Kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjuro IX opened a new theater in Tokyo in 1872, dressed not, as he would have before, in a dashing kimono, but in white tie and tails. “The theater of recent years,” he said in his speech, “has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean.… I am deeply grieved by this fact, and in consultation with my colleagues I have resolved to clean away the decay.”
While the stench of late Edo brothel districts was removed from the Kabuki, Western theater was introduced to civilize the urban elite. One of the pioneers in this genre was an ex-policeman and radical activist named Kawakami Otojiro. In 1901, he went on an extended tour of Europe and the United States with his wife, Sadako, a former geisha alleged to have been Ito Hirobumi’s mistress. They presented to fascinated Europeans a rather phony version of Kabuki, and to fascinated audiences in Japan an equally phony version of Western theater. On one memorable occasion, Kawakami, playing Hamlet in Tokyo, entered the stage on a bicycle. To the audience, for whom Hamlet was as exotic, and modern, as the bicycle, this did not seem incongruous at all.
Another Meiji peculiarity was the fashion for eating large quantities of meat, which was a radical break with Buddhist taboos. But then Buddhism went through hard times. In the first years after the restoration, Shinto fanatics went about smashing Buddhist temples in an effort to purge Japan of its Chinese cultural traditions. The fashion for meat began when Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of the greatest Meiji intellectuals, suggested that eating meat would improve Japanese physiques. Soon meat eating was promoted as a way to achieve enlightenment.
Writing almost a century later, the novelist Mishima Yukio could still work himself into a rage about the superficial primness of the Meiji years. Prohibitions on public nudity, mixed bathing, and other embarrassing signs of “the coarse and the mean” stemmed less from native prudery than from fear of foreign disapproval. Mishima likened Meiji Japan to “an anxious housewife preparing to receive guests, hiding away in closets common articles of daily use and laying aside comfortable everyday clothes, hoping to impress the guests with the immaculate, idealized life of her household, without so much as a speck of dust in view.”
This is a slight exaggeration. Most Japanese did not act like stage Europeans, and even members of the upper classes did so only in public. But when they did, they did it with gusto. The high tide of ostentatious Europeanized posturing, the icing on the cake of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” as it were, was the great ball at the Deer Cry Pavilion, or Rokumeikan, hosted by the foreign minister, Inoue Kaoru, in honor of the emperor’s birthday in 1885. Pierre Loti, the French author of Madame Chrysanthemum, was there. His observations were supercilious and probably quite accurate. The exterior of the pavilion, designed by a British architect in a mixture of high Victorian, French Empire, and Italian Renaissance styles, was likened by Loti to a provincial French spa. He thought the Japanese gentlemen, dressed up in suits of tails, looked like performing monkeys, and the ladies, lining the walls like tapestries in their hoops and flounces and satin trains, were, well, “remarkable.” Doing their best to strike the proper European attitudes, gentlemen puffed Havana cigars and played whist, while others picked at the truffles and pâté and ice-cream sorbets laid out on the buffet tables. A French orchestra struck up operetta tunes, while a German band played polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes. Loti: “They danced quite properly, my Japanese in Parisian gowns. But one senses that it is something drilled into them that they perform like automatons, without any personal initiative. If by chance they lose the beat, they have to be stopped and started all over again.”
It is easy to laugh at all this with Pierre Loti. But the intention behind the entertainment was serious. Inoue Kaoru was foreign minister in his friend Ito Hirobumi’s cabinet. They hoped that rapid Westernization would make foreign powers treat Japan as an equal and thus agree to relinquish their privileges under the unequal treaties. The best way to acquire modern—that is, Western—forms was to be exposed as much as possible to the real thing; hence the creation of the Deer Cry Pavilion. It was to be the place where East and West could mingle at the highest level, over whist and the mazurka. To critics of this kind of thing, Ito’s government became known as “the dancing cabinet.”
When it became clear that Western diplomats and writers were quite willing to dance, but not to revise the treaties as a result of Inoue’s hospitality, the foreign minister’s star began to fade. His policy was discredited, and in 1889 the Deer Cry Pavilion was sold to a private club. A backlash against all the Westernizing had already begun by then. The building, alas, is no more.
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Westernization was not all glitter and political calculation. Some Meiji intellectuals had managed to absorb European ideas in a way that could have turned Japan in a more liberal direction than it actually did. The life of Fukuzawa Yukichi represents much of what was best about Meiji culture, even though he, too, was not entirely free of the priggish tendency. Fukuzawa’s role was, in his own words, to “become the sole functioning agent for the introduction of Western learning.” He founded an academy in Tokyo to this purpose, which later became Keio University. His book introducing customs and mores of the Western world was such a best-seller that other publications in this vein became known as “Fukuzawa books.” And in the true manner of a Confucian sage, he tried to set a moral example in his life as well as his works. Unlike most Confucian scholars, however, he sought to give the example of an individualist, a critical thinker, independent of power. Fukuzawa was one of the first—and still uncommon—examples of an independent Japanese intellectual. His skeptical views, unheard of in the neo-Confucian tradition, were staunchly antiauthoritarian. He knew that assassination was always “an unpleasant possibility” and was lucky to escape from the murderous intentions of his second cousin, an excitable, though no doubt sincere, product of the Mito School.
Born in 1835 as the son of a low-ranking samurai, Fukuzawa was introduced to Western learning through Dutch studies. He was shocked to discover, however, that the foreigners who began to arrive in Japan in the 1860s didn’t understand a word of Dutch. So he learned English as well, joined missions to the United States and Europe, and set out “to open this ‘closed’ country of ours.” He was often disappointed by his fellow countrymen, especially by their habit, as he saw it, of bending with every wind, like “rubber dolls,” always anxious to appease authority. But he never stopped arguing for intellectual freedom. In 1874, together with Mori Arinori and other enlightenment intellectuals, Fukuzawa started a society called Meirokusha, to encourage free and open debate. Their views were published in a journal by the same name. These men were not antigovernment activists. On the contrary, most held positions in the government. But this early experiment in open political discussion
did not last long. An antilibel and press law, promulgated in 1875, was so restrictive of free speech that the members decided to close the magazine. Another law, four years later, making it illegal for public servants, teachers, soldiers, farmers, and students to attend any political meetings, made the Meirokusha impossible, too. And so began the long retreat of Japanese intellectuals from public affairs. Like so many of their counterparts in Germany, the intelligentsia withdrew to tend their academic or aesthetic gardens.
Fukuzawa watched the end of promised freedoms with dismay, but he decided against an open protest. He took “full account of the conditions,” he wrote in his autobiography, but “kept it among my private papers.” When a friend urged him to speak out, Fukuzawa said: “I am now over forty years old, and so are you. Let us remember this and beware of hurting other men.” It was an attitude repeated by future generations of Japanese intellectuals. Something died in the 1870s, and with some notable exceptions, it never fully revived until 1945.
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One of the strangest and most emotional passages in Fukuzawa’s life story is his joy about the 1895 war with China. The Sino-Japanese conflict was over the domination of Korea. The Koreans, though traditionally subservient to the Chinese court, were divided between pro-Chinese and pro-Japanese factions, and the assassination in Shanghai of the leader of the pro-Japanese faction was what triggered the war. It was not just a geopolitical battle, however, but also a test of the two nations’ modernity in military affairs. The one with the most advanced weapons, the most efficient army, and the most up-to-date tactics would win, and that nation, despite being outnumbered in warships and troops, was Japan. Fukuzawa was so happy about Japan’s victory that he “could hardly refrain from rising up in delight.” In fact, this was not all that strange. One aspect of “Civilization and Enlightenment” was a contempt for the backwardness of other Asians. Fukuzawa saw Chinese learning as a kind of cancer in Japanese society. Joining the West, in his view, would have to mean a rejection of Asia. If Japan had been part of the Chinese cultural world before, it should now become part of the enlightened West. Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War showed how far the nation had “progressed.” It was indeed a sign of a higher civilization. The popular woodblock prints of the war invariably show the Japanese soldiers as tall, pale-skinned, heroic figures, while the Chinese enemies are grotesque, cowering Asiatics with pigtails. It is as though the Japanese suddenly belonged to a different race, one akin to Europeans.