Makers of Japan

by J. Morris

Yoshida conducted the village school for two years and a half, from July 1856 to December 1858, but in the latter month he was arrested, and thrown into gaol for having, it was alleged, incited his pupils to plot against the Tokugawa dynasty, and planned the assassination, his enemies asserted, of the Minister Manabe Norikatsu, a member of the Government. It is certain, whatever degree of guilt may have attached to him in other respects, that he consistently challenged the wisdom of the Tokugawa’s foreign policy, and advocated most zealously the abolition of that form of administration, becoming in consequence the object of a most determined persecution by the Yedo Government.

After an incarceration lasting five months in his native province he was transferred to the Temmacho Prison in Yedo, and its doors closed over him in July 1859. On the 27th of October following he was decapitated in obedience to the orders of the Bakufu, and thus at the early age of twenty-nine ended the career of one of Japan’s most earnest patriots. While his aim was the retention of Japan for the Japanese, and his determined antagonism to the Shogunate arose from its willingness to enter into treaties for the opening of the Empire to foreign trade, the object sought by his followers was the destruction of the Tokugawa dynasty itself, and their opposition to foreign intercourse proceeded not from antipathy to the Occidentals so much as from a paramount desire to put an end to the dual form of administration. The cry of “Expulsion of the Alien” was raised by Yoshida’s disciples in the expectation that acts inimical to the strangers would embroil the Bakufu with those Western Powers, the subjects of which were by degrees attaining a foothold in the country, and that government by the Shogunate would then become an impossibility.

VI
MARQUIS ITO

A Statesman of transcendent ability, the Marquis Ito Hirobumi of necessity has his detractors. By the vast majority of the nation, however, his political views are deemed wholly acceptable, and in regard to the value of his services to his country there are not in Japan two opinions. He was born in September 1841, at Kumagé, in the province of Cho-shiu, otherwise Nagato, in south-west Japan. By birth a samurai, he spent his boyhood in studies suitable to his station in life, and became proficient in the military exercises which were prescribed for the retainers of the feudal barons, but from the time of Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853 his aspirations became directed into a new channel, and his reading especially took a turn in the direction of the adaptation of foreign methods to the needs of Japan. In this he was associated with many of his fellow-clansmen whose names have become in later years household words in the country of their birth, and are almost equally well known to the people of other lands. Yamagata, Kido, Takasugi, Yamao, Inouye Kaoru, with many others who have since risen to fame, were fellow-students of the political and military systems of the Occidental nations, striving desperately to acquire information that should guide them in their project of raising their country to the level of the leading powers of the world.

MARQUIS ITO

The little knot of reformers was headed by Takasugi, a man of samurai rank who was considerably the senior of his colleagues in age, and one of the earliest acts of the party, on ascertaining the attitude of the lord of the province towards the Bakufu, was to put itself in a posture of something like rebellion against his authority. The reformers sought to organise a substantial resistance in Cho-shiu to the policy of the Shogun, who had, it was urged, betrayed the best interests of his country by entering into treaties with foreigners. Ostensibly, if not actually, the leaders of this anti-Bakufu league were hostile to innovations from the Occident, but they were willing to avail themselves of Western arts and sciences to the end that their own position might be strengthened to oppose the Shogun’s administration, and accordingly we find the new military system gaining ground notwithstanding the avowed antagonism of the reformers to the invasion of their country by the originators of that system.

At Hagi, a town beautifully situated on the west coast of Nagato, and the castle town of the lord of that province, the reformers gradually matured their plans and drilled a small army of their fellow-samurai in the martial exercises of the West as set forth in books of which they had become possessed at Nagasaki and elsewhere, mainly in the Dutch tongue. It is recorded of Ito Shunsuke that he earnestly strove to make himself acquainted with Occidental progress, and became by degrees a competent English scholar, thus equipping himself for the course of Western travel which he was able to undertake in the year 1863, when he left his country for the first time on the long voyage to Europe in a sailing vessel belonging to Jardine Matheson & Company of Shanghai, for whom Glover & Company, British merchants of Nagasaki,—a port which had been opened to foreign trade four years previously,—were agents.

Ito Shunsuke, as he was then named, was one of many young men of Samurai rank who, with the view of acquiring information which they felt might the better enable them to do good service to their country, were willing to undergo all kinds of privations and run all risks in order that they might add to their store of knowledge. Glover & Company, as agents for the owners, Jardine Matheson & Company, facilitated the escape of the young men, who were concealed in a garden at Yokohama, their queues having previously been cut off and their hair trimmed in foreign fashion, until the sailing ship was prepared to weigh anchor, when they were stealthily put on board by their English friends. It is due to the Marquis Ito to say that he has never failed to acknowledge in most graceful terms his indebtedness at the outset of his career to the aid he thus received from those who were not of his own land.