An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

The most extravagant expectation of the ultra-conservatives was thus frustrated, but the conservative spirit in the nation, which was by no means to be swept away at all found its devotees among the class of the samurai. Though they were the real makers of the Revolution, yet the loss of their privileges and material interests which it entailed, touched them sorely. A very small fraction of them served the new government as officials and soldiers of high and low rank, and could enjoy life much more comfortably than they did in the pre-Meidji days. The greater part of the samurai, however, were obliged to betake themselves to some of the callings which they were accustomed to look down upon with disdain, for if they did not work, the compensation which they received from the government did not suffice to sustain them for long. Some of them preferred to become farmers, and those who persisted in that line generally fared well. Many others turned themselves into merchants, and mostly failed; being accustomed to the simplicities of the life and the code of soldiers, and utterly unversed in the complexities of the code commercial, and the trickeries of the life merchants; and the small capital obtained by selling their compensation-bonds was soon squandered. What wonder if they began to regret and whine for better days of the past? Discontentment became rampant among them; but the inducement to its disruption was provided by the diplomatic tension with Korea.

I have no space here to dwell upon the intricate history of the differences between Korea and our country in the later seventies of the nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the militaristic party in and out of the government favoured the war with Korea, while the opposing party was against it, considering it injurious to sound national progress, especially at a time when it was an immediate necessity for the welfare of the country to devote all its resources to internal reconstruction. The war party with Takamori Saigô at its head seceded from the government. Saigô had been a great figure since the Revolution, as the representative samurai of the Satsuma, and had a great many worshippers, so that even after his retirement his influence over the territory of Satsuma was immense. At last he was forced by his adorers, whose ill-feeling against the government now knew no bounds, to take up arms in order to purge the government, which seemed to them too effeminate and too radical. Not only the warlike and conservative samurai of Satsuma, but all the samurai in the other provinces of Kyushû, who sympathised with them, rose up and joined them. Siege was laid by them to the castle of Kumamoto, the site of régimental barracks.

So far they had been successful, but owing to insufficiency of ammunition and provisions, they could not force their way much farther. Moreover, the Imperial Army recently organised, recruited mostly from the common people by the conscription system, proved very efficient, owing to the use of Snider rifles, although at first the new soldiers had been despised by the insurgents on account of their low origin. The siege of Kumamoto was at last raised; the remnant of the defeated forces of Saigô retired to a valley near the town of Kagoshima; Saigô committed suicide; and the civil war ended in the victory of the government in September 1877, seven months after its outburst.

This civil war is an epoch-making event in the history of the Meidji era, in the sense that it was a death blow to the last and powerful remnant force of feudalism, the influence of the samurai. Though the samurai-soldiers who fought on the side of Saigô were very few in number compared with the host of the samurai within the whole empire, and though not a few samurai-soldiers fought also on the opposite side, still it was clear that the insurgents represented the interests of the samurai as a class better than the governmental army, and the defeat of the former had, on the prestige of the class, an effect quite similar to that which was produced in Europe of the later Middle Ages by the use of firearms and the organisation of the standing army, and significantly reduced the traditional influence of knights on horseback. It is for this reason that the democratisation of the nation markedly set in after the civil war, and with it the territorial particularism, which had been weakened by the Revolution, has been rapidly dying away. Political parties of various shades began to be formed. The works of Montesquieu and Rousseau were translated into Japanese, and widely read with avidity. The cry for a representative government became a national demand. Against the hesitating government riots were raised here and there. To sum up the history of the second decade of the Meidji era, we see that it strikingly resembles French history in the first half of the nineteenth century. The rise of the influence of the new-born bourgeois class in modern Japan may be said to have dated from this epoch. Europeanisation in manners and customs became more and more striking year by year.

What is unique in our modern history is that, parallel with the growth of the democratic tendency in the nation, the imperial prestige effected a remarkable increase. This seemingly contradictory phenomenon may be explained easily by considering how our present notion of fidelity to the Emperor has evolved. The divine authority of the Emperor did not suffer any remarkable change after his personal régime ceased, though his political prestige had been eclipsed by the assumption of power by the Fujiwara nobles. Even after the establishment of the Shogunate, nobody in Japan had ever thought it possible that the Emperor could be placed in rank equal to or under a Shogun or any other sort of dictator, however virtually powerful he might have been. Through all political vicissitudes the Emperor has remained always the noblest personage in Japan, and in this sense he has been the focus toward which the heart of the whole nation turned.

The relation of the Emperor to the people at large, during these periods of eclipse, was indirect. Between them intervened the Shogun and the daimyo as actual immediate rulers, so that fidelity to the Emperor had been spoken of only academically, and their fidelity, in a concrete sense, had been solely centered in their immediate master, who reciprocated it by the protection he extended directly over them. Thus fidelity on the one hand and protection on the other hand had been conditioned by each other, and because the bond was naturally an essential link of the military régime, it was strengthened by its being handed down from generation to generation. In short, the fidelity of the Japanese may be said to be a product of the military régime, and owes its growth to the hereditary relation of vassalage. As all the ideals and virtues cherished among the samurai class used to be considered by plebeians as worthy of imitation, if practicable in their own circles, fidelity was also understood by them in the same sense as among the military circles, that is to say, as a soldierly virtue in a subordinate toward his superior. So it grew to be more disciplinary, self-sacrificing and devotional, than in the times before the military régime. This condition of the national morals had continued to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, with occasional relaxations, of course. But now that the Shogunate and the daimyo were eliminated from the political system, the foci toward which the fidelity of the people had been turned ceased to exist, and the fidelity remained, as it were, to be a cherished virtue of the nation though without a goal. It sought for a new focus, looked up one stage higher than the Shogun, and was glad to make the Emperor the object of its fervent devotion. Soon it developed almost into a passion, because the nation became more and more conscious of the necessity of a well-centred national consolidation, and it could find nowhere else a centre more fit for it than the Emperor. His prestige could increase in this way pari passu with the growth of the democratic spirit in the nation. It is not, therefore, a mere traditional preponderance, but an authority having its foundation in modern civilisation.

It cannot be denied, however, that history clothes our imperial house with special grandeur, which might not be sought in the case of any royal family newly come to power, and if conservatism would have a firm stand in Japan, it must be the conservatism which sprang from this historical relation of the people to the Emperor. This explains the sudden rise of the conservative spirit, which at once changed the aspect of the country at the end of the second decade of the Meidji era. It happened just at the time when the current of Europeanisation was at its height and the realisation of the hope of the progressives, the promulgation of the Constitution and the inauguration of representative government, drew very near.

In February 1889 the Constitution long craved for was at last granted, and by virtue of it the first Imperial Diet was opened the next year. This adoption of the representative system of government by Japan used to be often cited as a rare example of the wonderful progress of a nation not European, and all our subsequent national achievements have been ascribed by foreigners to this radical change of constitution. Every good and every evil, however, which the system is said to possess, has been fully manifested in this country. We have since been continually endeavouring to train and accustom ourselves to the new régime, but our experience in modern party government is still very meagre, and it will take a long time to see all classes of the people appropriately interested in national politics, which is a requisite condition to reaping the benefit of constitutional government to the utmost. At present we have no reason to regret, on the contrary much reason to rejoice at, the introduction of the system.

After the constitution came many organic laws, the civil and penal code, and so forth, in order of proclamation. This completion of the apparatus necessary to the existence of the modern state improved in no small measure the position of our country in the eyes of attentive foreigners. What, however, contributed most of all to the abrogation of the rights of extraterritoriality enjoyed by foreigners on Japanese soil, the object of bitter complaint and pining on the part of patriots, was the victory won by our army in the war against China.

Before the outbreak of the Sinico-Japanese war, China had long been regarded not only by Western nations, but by the Japanese themselves, as far above our country in national strength, not to speak of the superiority of wealth as well as of civilisation in general. Though the victory of the expeditionary troops sent by Hideyoshi over the Chinese reinforcements despatched by the Emperor of the Ming to succour the invaded Koreans was sufficient to wipe off the military humiliation which our army had suffered on the peninsula nine hundred years before, and had much to do in enhancing the national self-confidence against the Chinese, the renewed imitation of her civilisation during the Tokugawa Shogunate turned the scale again in favour of China even to the eyes of the Japanese intelligents, and we had been constantly overawed by the influence of the big continental neighbour. So that the formal annexation of the Loochoo Islands in the first decade of the Meidji era against the opposing Chinese claim was considered to be a great diplomatic victory of the new government. The failure of the French expedition added also to the credit of the unfathomable force of the Celestial Empire. The grand Chinese fleet which visited our ports in the year previous to the war was thought to be more than our match, and made us feel a little disquieted. Contrary to our anticipation, however, battle after battle ended in our victory in the war of 1894-1895, and Korea was freed from Chinese hegemony by the treaty of Shimonoseki.