It is a mistake to suppose that because foreign influences enter so largely into the educational course Japan must necessarily end by becoming Europeanized. The foundation of her culture is too deeply laid for that. So long as elementary education remains, as it is now, practically untouched by Western influences, no great change of the kind in question is likely to happen. All that educational reform, as illustrated in the present system, implies is the making of education one of the chief concerns of the State and the diffusion of Western knowledge. The first has affected the whole nation; the latter chiefly the upper classes.
CHAPTER XXXI
The Makers of Modern Japan—How Japan is Governed.
In preceding pages some account has been given of the steps by which a Far Eastern nation has risen to its present position of a Great Power. The period occupied by this transformation is less than half a century. For during the first two decades that followed the reopening of Japan to foreign intercourse reactionary influences supported by anti-foreign feeling were, as we have seen, in the ascendant; and it was not till after the Restoration that the work of remoulding all branches of administration commenced. While giving full credit to the Japanese people for the possession of the qualities that made this great change possible, the genius of the statesmen by whom they were guided should not be overlooked.
Although the new direction given to national policy, the consummation of which is seen to-day, did not take place until after the Restoration, the services rendered by some of the statesmen whose names are associated with it date from before that time. The Restoration was not the work of a day, the effect of a sudden impulse. Weak as the Shōgun’s Government was, it was too firmly rooted by the mere length of its duration, by the weight of time and usage, to be easily overthrown. Before this could be done something in the nature of a united movement, a combination of forces, was essential. And in the feudal conditions then prevailing it was just this point which presented the greatest difficulty. The military strength, as after events showed, was there, but clan jealousies stood in the way of united effort. The first attempt at rebellion made by the Chōshiū clan failed, it will be remembered, for this reason, the Satsuma clan siding with the Yedo Government. Only when these two clans were persuaded to work together, and were joined by two others, as well as by disaffected members of the military class who flocked to the Imperialist standard from all parts of the country, did it become possible to organize insurrection on a scale that endangered the continuance of Tokugawa rule. It was in the formation of this alliance that the men who subsequently filled the chief offices under the new Government first came into prominence. They form, as it were, a group by themselves as the pioneers of the Imperialist movement. It was another and later set of men who took up the work thus begun, and accomplished the task of modernizing Japan.
What Japanese writers tell us of the relations subsisting between the Court at Kiōto and the Yedo administration brings out very clearly the fact that the Kugé or Court nobles, who had in former days governed the country, never ceased to regard the Shōguns as usurpers, the Capital serving as the focus of constant intrigues directed against the Government of the day. It was only natural, therefore, that the Imperialist movement should find strong support at Kiōto, and that the men who undertook the delicate and dangerous project of uniting the southern clans in organized resistance to the Shōgunate should be in a position to vouch for the secret approval of the Throne, whose formal sanction recorded in State edicts remained to the last days of Tokugawa rule one of the few shreds of prestige still left to the Sovereign. Though the Kugé, as a body, having long been excluded from active participation in public affairs, were at the time in question little better than nonentities, in view of the fact that the movement in contemplation had for its avowed object the restoration of direct Imperial rule, it seems to have been regarded as essential to establish a close connection with the Court. This explains the inclusion of two Court nobles, Sanjō and Iwakura, each of whom afterwards received the title of Prince. The former, it is said, owed his selection mainly to the accident of birth. As representative of one of the oldest Kugé families, his name alone gave weight to the Imperialist cause. Of him we hear little subsequently, as the political situation developed, apart from his filling the post of Prime Minister. Iwakura stood on a different footing. His commanding abilities and natural talent for affairs made his services indispensable, and for several years he was a dominant figure in the Ministry. Two of the most notable clansmen who were associated with Iwakura in this early period were Ōkubo (father of the present Marquis), a native of Satsuma, whose death by the hands of assassins in 1878 has already been mentioned, and Kido (father of the present Marquis), a native of Chōshiū, who died of illness not long after the new Government had been established. Both combined great capacity with very liberal views, the adoption of Western ideas in the reconstruction of the administrative system being largely due to their initiative. Of the elder Saigō, at first the most influential member of this group, the reader has already heard in connection with the Satsuma rebellion. All three, it will be seen, belonged either to the Satsuma or to the Chōshiū clan. The Ministerial dissensions which caused the withdrawal from the Government of leading men of the two other clans which had taken part in the Restoration led, as has already been explained, to the disappearance from the scene of the Tosa and Hizen clans at an early stage of the new régime, and to the direction of affairs being assumed and continued till to-day by Satsuma and Chōshiū statesmen. The list, however, of those who came into notice during this critical period would be incomplete without the addition of the names of Itagaki and Gotō of Tosa, and Soyéshima and Ōki of Hizen.
The most conspicuous of the statesmen who have been mentioned as composing the second and later set—a description not quite accurate, since the careers of some overlapped those of their predecessors—are Princes Yamagata, Itō, Ōyama and Katsura, and Marquises Inouyé, Matsugata, Ōkuma and Saionji. Their names have long been familiar to the public abroad, for all at one time or another have been recognized as entitled to the popular appellation of Genrō, or Elders, a term never applied to the earlier statesmen. To the part played by each in the rise of Japan attention has already been drawn in the course of this narrative. With the exception of the two last-named, all of these so-called Genrō were Satsuma or Chōshiū clansmen.
In an undertaking so vast as the recasting of a nation’s institutions on lines quite new, and in their nature so opposed to traditional usages, many minds of necessity co-operated. The selection for the present purpose only of the few whose names will always be household words in Japan implies no lack of recognition of what was done by many others, less conspicuous in their time, who rendered signal service to the country. In estimating the difficulties encountered by the statesmen who undertook the task of introducing Western reforms, and successfully maintained and carried through the Liberal policy adopted after the Restoration, regard should be paid to the dangerous conditions amidst which much of this work was done. The opposition they met with came, as we have seen, from two quarters—reactionaries, who for a time were very hostile to foreigners, and those who were more advanced in their views than Ministers themselves. The old ideas associated with vendettas, which, so long as feudalism lasted, could be prosecuted under official sanction, had produced an atmosphere of insecurity to life that survived well into the Meiji era. The frequency of political assassinations, and the precautions taken even in recent times to protect members of the Government from attack, show how real were the risks to which prominent statesmen were exposed.
The influence in public affairs of the Genrō, and of the earlier leaders of the Restoration movement who never received that appellation, has never been questioned. The columns of the Japanese Press have constantly borne witness to the position they have held in public estimation. They seem to have assumed from the first the functions formerly exercised by the Council of State in Tokugawa times, with this difference, that, as a body, no official recognition was ever accorded to them. The Japanese family system gave opportunities to the Genrō of strengthening their position by the tie of adoption as well as by that of marriage; and in availing themselves of these they followed the example of the feudal nobility and courtiers of earlier days. Several were thus connected with each other by one, or both, of these ties, the support thus obtained being independent of that which came from their purely political followers. When in the course of administrative reconstruction the Ministry was reorganized on European models, the exact position they occupied was not inaccurately represented in popular parlance by the expression Kuromaku-daijin, which, freely rendered, means “unseen Ministers of State.” The anomalous and singular situation thus created will be understood when it is explained that the Ministry of the day might, according to circumstances, be composed entirely of Genrō, though latterly this became unusual, or might include several Genrō, or even none. In the last-mentioned case the Ministry without Genrō had very little to do with decisions on important questions. Of recent years the number of surviving Genrō has gradually decreased. Other causes, too, than that of death—namely, increasing age, the lesser prestige of later statesmen and the constitutional changes which resulted in the creation of two consultative bodies, the Privy Council and Court Councillors—have tended to diminish the influence of the Genrō who still remain. The institution of these two consultative bodies has had an important bearing on the direction of affairs. The idea prevailing at one time in political circles that the ranks of the Genrō would be reinforced from time to time, as occasion served, by the introduction of younger and rising statesmen, as actually took place in one or two instances, does not appear to have met with general approval. The present tendency seems rather to lie in the direction of enlarging the circle of influential statesmen so as to include those members of the Privy Council and House of Peers as well as Court Councillors, whose age (to which much respect is still paid), experience, and clan connections mark them out for selection. This tendency, if continued, will have the effect of perpetuating a state of things under which the Cabinet will, as hitherto, be kept in a position of subordination to higher though veiled authority; for the Constitution works without excessive friction, and neither the Lower House nor the political parties it represents have much real power.
There are in the modern development of Japan a few salient points which invite attention. The opening episode itself is one of these. Beyond the fact that the Government which was overthrown had outlasted its time, the Restoration bears no close resemblance to other revolutions. The impulse that produced it did not come from the body of the people. It was in no sense a popular uprising—due to class grievances, and aimed against oppression which had become unbearable. The discontent that existed was of a kind that is found everywhere when the machinery of administration shows signs of breaking down. Nor was it altogether a movement from above of the nature of those which elsewhere have put an end to feudalism by a concentration of authority in the hands of a monarch. In its inception it was simply a movement directed against the Shōgun’s Government by a section of the military class belonging to the Southern (or, as the Japanese would say, Western) clans. The cry of “Honour the Sovereign” derived much of its efficacy from the appeal to drive out foreigners which accompanied it. The abolition of feudalism was mainly an afterthought.
Other outstanding features, taken in the order of events, are the Satsuma rebellion (in which the progressive element in the clan supported the Government); the establishment of parliamentary government; treaty revision, in which Great Britain took the lead; the war with China and that with Russia; the annexation of Korea; and, more recently, the Great War.