IN order to understand as clearly as possible the progress made by New Japan during the past fifty years, it will be profitable to institute some comparisons between conditions then and now. As a matter of fact the greater part of this wonderful advancement was achieved during the last third of the nineteenth century; but it suits our purpose better to compare 1801 and 1901, the first years of the two centuries. Thus can we appreciate fully with how much difference in conditions and prospects Japan has entered upon the twentieth century than she entered upon the nineteenth century.
By the Japanese calendar, the year 1801 was the first of the Kyōwa Era, a short and uneventful period; but the year 1901 was the thirty-fourth of the Meiji Era, or Period of Enlightened Rule,—a most appropriate name for the first era of the New Empire.
The Emperor in 1801 had been known before his ascension of the throne as Prince Kanin Kanehito (from whom the present Prince Kanin has descended); but he is now known by his posthumous title of Kōkaku. He is said to have been “a sovereign of great sagacity”; but he was, as we know, only a nominal ruler, like the fainéant kings of France, while the actual authority was held, and the real power was exercised, by a Mayor of the Palace, a Shōgun of the Tokugawa family. The Emperor was “powerless and lived in splendid poverty.”
The Imperial Court was organized in Kyōto “with all pomp and circumstance; it had its Ministers, Vice-Ministers, and subordinate officials; it had its five principal, as well as more than a hundred ordinary, Court nobles; but the sovereign’s actual power did not extend beyond the direction of matters relating to rank and etiquette, the classification of shrine-keepers, priests and priestesses, and professionals of various kinds,—in a word, actual functions of no material importance whatever.” In an absolute empire Kōkaku was Emperor in name and fame only.
“He was practically confined in sacred seclusion; his person must neither touch the earth nor be polluted by contact with common mortals. The most scrupulous care was exercised about his dress, food, even the very dishes themselves; he was, to the common people, a real invisible deity. It is reported that the Emperors of the olden days must sit motionless upon the throne for a certain number of hours each day, in order that the empire might have peace. Their persons were sacred, so that nobody was permitted to lay hands thereon; therefore their hair and nails might have grown to an unseemly length, had they not been clandestinely trimmed during sleeping hours. The dishes from which they had partaken of food were forthwith dashed in pieces, in order that nobody else might ever use them. And the very rice that they ate was picked over kernel by kernel, in order that no broken or imperfect grain might find lodgment in the Imperial stomach.” It is also said that no one was allowed to speak the name of the Emperor or to write in full the characters of his name; in the latter case, for clearness, at least one stroke must be omitted from each character.
But the late Emperor, whose name was Mutsuhito, was an entirely different personage. He did not live in seclusion, but frequently showed himself in public to his subjects, who could look upon his face without fear of being smitten with death. He was, none the less, revered and loved by all the people, and was the real ruler of the land. He had, however, voluntarily surrendered to the people some of his prerogatives, so that the Japanese to-day enjoy constitutional government, parliamentary and representative institutions, and local self-government. And in 1901 the Empire, instead of being divided up, as in 1801, into about 300 feudal fiefs, in each of which a Daimyō was more or less a law unto himself, is divided into about 50 Prefectures, Imperial Cities and Territories, in each of which the people have more or less a voice in the administration.
The Empress Dowager, too, although brought up and educated in the old-fashioned way, had yet adopted modern ideas with great ease. She did not have shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth, like her predecessor of 1801. She often appears in public, and continues a generous patron of female education, the Red Cross Society, and artistic and philanthropic enterprises.
The Shōgun of 1801 was Iyenari, who exercised that authority for about half a century. He lived in glory and splendor in Yedo (now Tōkyō) with his vassals around him. Theoretically he was only Generalissimo under the Emperor, and, as a matter of policy, kept up the practice of occasional visits to Kyōto, where he humbled himself before his nominal superior; but, as the highest administrative officer, he was ruler in act and fact. Very appropriately has he been called “the Emperor’s vassal jailer.” During his Shōgunate “the military class remained perfectly tranquil, and the feudal system attained its highest stage of efficiency.”
In 1901 there was no Shōgun; the last of the Tokugawa dynasty abdicated in 1867, and has spent most of his life since then in retirement in Mito and Shizuoka. He is now living quietly in Tōkyō, without much regard, apparently, to the new-fangled ways of these times, except that he is reported to ride a bicycle!
In 1801 Japan was still a sealed country, but not hermetically, because there was one chink at Nagasaki, where occasional intercourse was allowed with the Chinese and the Dutch. Not only were foreigners forbidden to enter, but natives were also forbidden to leave, this “holy land.” Already, however, efforts were being made spasmodically to break down the policy of seclusion, with its two phases of exclusion and inclusion.