The Embassy left Yokohama by a Pacific Mail Company’s steamer in December 1871, and it was absent altogether a year and nine months. Everywhere it was well received, but the results were not quite satisfactory, for when it returned the vexed question of extra territoriality was no nearer a settlement in accordance with Japan’s views than when it set out.
On his return Iwakura found a strong party in the Government in favour of inflicting punishment on Korea for wrongs and insults that it was declared the nation had sustained at the hands of the people of the neighbouring peninsula. As Korea was tributary to China, this meant going to war with the Chinese, and Iwakura was profoundly opposed to an adventure of this character in the then state of the Empire’s naval and military forces. A split in the Government followed, and the members of the war party, which included Goto Shojiro, Itagaki Taisuke, Saigo Takamori, Soyeshima, and Yeto Shimpei, all resigned, their places in the administration being taken by Ito Hirobumi, Katsu Awa-no-kami, Okubo, and Terashima.
The ill feeling in the country engendered by this conflict of opinion led to a determined attempt on Prince Iwakura’s life by men belonging to the Tosa clan, who were caught and executed for their abominable crime. The prince was returning from the imperial palace at eight o’clock in the evening of the 15th of January 1874, in a small open carriage, the hood of which, fortunately, as the night was cold, had been drawn up. Nevertheless, though the hood was a partial protection, he received several wounds from the swords and spears with which the intending assassins had armed themselves. The attack took place on the causeway at Ku-ichi-gai, close to the castle moat, and the driver of the carriage and the betto or groom, were likewise both badly wounded. In endeavouring to escape from his assailants the prince fell headlong into the moat, which happily was not deep at that point, and the assassins, as they deemed themselves to be, took to flight, on the guard at the palace gate approaching with a lantern. Their victim had strength left to shout, and was hauled out of the moat, more dead than alive from his injuries and immersion in the ice-cold water on that winter night. He was a long time confined to his bed, but he eventually recovered to be able to resume his part in the official life of the capital.
He died in 1881 deeply mourned by the whole of the Japanese people, who recognised in him perhaps more than in any other statesman of his generation the guide and counsellor of the monarch at critical periods of the nation’s history, and he undoubtedly was honoured by his sovereign with a close personal friendship such as rarely falls to the lot of a subject under any conditions, in Japan or elsewhere.
VIII
PRINCE SANJO SANETOMI
On the 6th of November 1868, when the British Minister, the late Sir Harry Parkes, was reviewing the British garrison at Yokohama, a Japanese equestrian, wearing the native robes of white silk which befitted his rank as a kuge or Court noble,—his horse led by two grooms or “bettos,” and attended by forty soldiers in blue serge uniforms, with black cloth caps,—a man of slight physique, and particularly juvenile in appearance,—sat placidly in his saddle watching with an interested air the movements of the foreign troops as they executed a series of evolutions and marched past the representative of Queen Victoria. The visitor, who had come from Tokio to attend the review, was Prince Sanjo, the first Prime Minister of Japan, and leader of the newly formed Government of the Restored Imperial Rule. A few minutes later Sir Harry, with a well-turned compliment on the skill of Japanese swordsmen, and a graceful acknowledgment of his indebtedness personally to the valour of one of their number, handed to the Japanese statesman the sword sent by the British Queen for presentation to Mr Nakai Kozo, in memory of the day when Nakai and Goto Shojiro, as is elsewhere related at length, saved the life of the British Minister when he was attacked by outlaws in the streets of Kioto in March of the same year. Prince Sanjo passed on the gift to Mr Nakai with his own congratulations to the recipient on the performance of a brilliant feat of arms, and thus closed an incident that served to remind those present of an exceptionally stormy period in the history of the nation, and which happily was then giving place to comparatively settled conditions. Prince Sanjo had come from Kioto to Yedo, thenceforward to be the capital of the Empire under the title of Tokio, in the month of June, in attendance on the Emperor, who then removed to the former headquarters of the Shogunate and gave to the place its new name. Sanjo was at that time Fuku-Sosai, ranking next to the Emperor’s uncle, Prince Arisugawa Taruhito, who occupied in the first administration formed under the Restored Imperial regime the position of Sosai—i.e. Supreme Director of the Government. The decisions of the So-sai were unchallengeable, and it was an office which only a prince of the blood might hold. Sanjo had always, even during the lifetime of the present Emperor’s father, sided with those who recognised the need of reforms, and when, in the autumn of 1868, the Department of the So-sai was abolished and the Dai-jo-kwan, or Supreme Governing Council, was constituted, thus resuscitating an ancient advisory body that had had a prior existence in the eighth century, he succeeded to the post of president, or Dai-Jo-Dai-Jin, thereof, and occupied it from that time forth until the dissolution of the Council on the reconstitution of the Government in the year 1886.
PRINCE SANJO SANETOMI