Japan

by Walter G. Dickson

All national institutions having, or pretending to have, order, will probably have to undergo this trial; and when it comes the whole remains of the feudal system will be tested: monarchies, the peerage, tenures of land, orders in the Church, and, above all, the question of primogeniture, cannot fail to be put on trial. The different sections in the religious and political world seem gradually separating themselves into two large parties, the one standing for the vox Dei, the other holding the vox populi to be the vox Dei—the one believing that power comes from above, the other that power comes from below.

The leaven is working in the minds of men, whether they will it or not; and no nation will feel the effects of this fermentation more than Japan. Above all nations, she to this hour retains her feudal system intact. She must learn, as others have in past times and may have to learn again, at the expense of revolution and blood. The people are already being stirred, and dare to question. The nobles are beginning to quake, they know not why, in the face of changes which are being forced upon them. The very throne of the emperor is being searched and shaken.

In order to understand where the weakness of a building lies, or how it is likely to fall down, it is first necessary to know how it is constructed; and in order to comprehend the changes which events may bring about in Japan, some idea must be formed of the government of the country. Without some knowledge of the framework of the constitution, it is difficult to understand the relative position of men, or to appreciate the operation of external agents upon the system of the empire, whether that operation work by a slow process of leavening from within, or by a violent concussion from without.

The aim of the author in the following pages has been to give some idea of the framework of the constitution of Japan. Having resided for some little time in the country, he was enabled to get what seemed to him a clearer glimpse of the working of the different parts of the machinery of State than was to be gained from any of the able works published on the subject. The time at his command was too short, and his knowledge of the language too limited, to enable him to do more than prepare a sketch which may serve a temporary purpose, before works of greater research and fuller information are produced.

The position of the Emperor (Spiritual Emperor, as he is sometimes erroneously called), as the first in the empire, must be recognized; the office held by the Temporal Emperor, the Shiogoon (or Tycoon, as he has been named), must be correctly and distinctly understood before the nature of the rule in the empire can be comprehended. It is further essential that the student should be acquainted with the rank and position of the nobility or nobilities of the empire (for of these there are two classes)—that of Miako at the court of the Emperor, the Koongays; and that of Yedo at the court of the Shiogoon, the Daimio, and beneath them the Hattamoto. Without some knowledge of these the reader is lost in a maze of unmeaning names and titles; but with a slight acquaintance with the rank, offices, and names of these nobles, he is able not only to follow the thread of history, but to understand the intricacies of current events.

A description of a picture by a native artist, seen by the author of this volume, may give some idea of the relation in which these dignitaries stand the one to the other. The upper half of the picture represents the Shiogoon or Tycoon at the palace in the capital, Miako, making his obeisance and performing homage before his liege lord the Emperor, seated in the great hall, Shi shin den, of the palace. The upper part of the Emperor’s person is concealed behind a screen of thin slips of bamboo hanging from the roof. The throne is three mats, or thin mattresses, placed one above the other upon the floor. There is no chair or support to the back. On each side of the Emperor sit on their knees on the floor the high officers of his court. Before him is seen the late Shiogoon, kneeling and prostrating himself, with his head to the floor. Behind the Shiogoon are his high officers Stotsbashi and the great Daimio Owarri, both in a similar position of prostration; while beneath, in the open court, are military officials of the Imperial Court standing or kneeling. This picture represents accurately a fact, and what appears to be a correct illustration of the ideas of the people of Japan with regard to the relative status of the Emperor and the Shiogoon.

It may almost be a matter of wonder that so little was known of Japan until the advent of the Portuguese. Men were in old times adventurous travelers, and yet, except what is contained in the pages of Marco Polo, written in the thirteenth century, nothing more was known of the existence of the country. The Buddhism of India had permeated China, Corea, and Japan, but it brought nothing back. Mohammedanism, at an early stage, reached China, and gained many converts, and the Arabs carried on an extensive trade with China and the Eastern Isles; but neither by their writings nor by the early native accounts do they seem to have reached the shores of Japan, or, at least, ever to have returned from them. This may perhaps be attributed to the wars of the Crusades, which appear to have lighted up such a fierce feeling between the Christian and the Moslem as to have proved a barrier to the inquisitiveness of the former in his investigations regarding the East. When the Portuguese, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had pushed their discoveries and trade as far as Malacca, and thence to China, it was to be expected that such adventurous seamen as they then were would, before long, solve the question of a people living under the rising sun. It is fortunate that, among the lawless buccaneers and pirates, as they evidently were, on those seas during this time, one man, Mendez Pinto, should have been found with the zeal to write some account of the doings on the Sea of China, and to lift the veil which, until he wrote, hung over the events which he records. That the latter part of his narrative, relating principally to China, should have been called mendacious, is not to be wondered at. But all that he relates with reference to Japan is not only corroborated by a closer acquaintance with the country and people, but also by the native historians in their accounts of the arrival of foreigners in the country, as well as by the letters of the Jesuits who visited Japan very shortly after it was first discovered by the Portuguese traders.

Subsequently to the period at which Mendez Pinto wrote, the history of foreign relations with the country is kept up by the letters of priests and Jesuits who occupied Japan as a field for the spread of Christianity. In the “Histoire de l’Église du Japon” there is an excellent summary of occurrences connected with the Church, its missions, its successes, its difficulties, its martyrs, and its enemies, together with a glance at events in Japan during the most eventful crisis in the history of the country. After the expulsion of the Jesuits and Roman Catholic doctrines from the empire, there are accounts from time to time published by the officers connected with the establishment kept up by Holland at Nagasaki. Caron, Fischer, Meylan—but, above all, Kæmpfer and Thunberg, and Titsingh and Klaproth—and, in our own times, Siebold—have done much to elucidate the manners and customs and natural history of Japan.

Kæmpfer has given a most interesting and instructive account of what he saw in the country during a long residence, and upon more than one progress to the courts at Miako and Yedo. His delineation of the manners and customs of the people of Japan will remain as a memorial of a state of things seen under circumstances not likely to occur again. But the work was published by another after the death of the author, and, in consequence of this, many of the names of men, places and things are nearly unintelligible. Kæmpfer’s work is well known to the Japanese, having been translated or repeatedly copied in manuscript, and is known as “Su koku rong.” It is an interdicted book, and only recently a man was punished upon being detected in the act of copying the translation. The translation by Klaproth of the “Annales des Empereurs de Japon” is a most valuable work, and contains a wonderful amount of information, being, as it were, the complement of Kæmpfer’s work, drawn entirely from books and not from personal observation.

The natives of Japan appear to have an intense love and reverence for their own country, and every individual in the empire seems to have a deep and thorough appreciation of the natural beauties and delights of the country. To this the genial climate, the rich soil, and the variety of the surface contribute. The islands lie at such a latitude as to make the air in summer warm without being hot, and in winter cold without being raw. The soil, as in all recent lava soils, is of a rich black mould, raising the finest crops of millet, wheat and sugar-cane, and when supplied in unstinted profusion rearing splendid timber, or capable, when nearly entirely withdrawn, of keeping life and vigor and seeding power in a pine tree of two inches in height. The trees have a tendency to break out into excrescences from plethora. The variety of surface arises from the great height to which the mountains rise in an island which at no part presents so great a breadth as England, and yet slopes gradually from the mountain tops to the sea. Some of these ridges appear to rise to the height of Mont Blanc, one of them, Fusiyama, being upward of thirteen thousand feet in height, and it would appear that other ranges are higher. The great beauty of Fusi (pah rh, not two) consists in its rising singly out of a low country with a beautifully curved sweep to a conical apex; and the atmospheric effects changing from hour to hour, as it is seen from thirteen provinces, give such a variety to this single object that it is rightly called by a name to express the feeling that there are not two such in the world. The variations of atmospheric density make it look at one time much higher than at another. It may be seen with its head clear in the blue sky rising out of a thick base of clouds—or the clouds rise and roll in masses about the middle, leaving the gentle curve to be filled up by the mind’s eye from the base to the apex. Again, the whole contour, in a sort of proud, queenly sweep, stands out against a cloudless ether, or with a little vapor drifting to leeward of the summit giving the appearance of a crater—or, after a cool night in September, the eye is arrested by the appearance of the bursting downward of a flattened shell, the pure white snow filling the valleys from the top, the haze of the morning half concealing the hill beneath. Every hour brings a change upon a landscape which consists of a single object which the lover of nature can never weary of admiring, in a climate where seventy miles of atmosphere does not obscure the larger features on the face of the mountain even to the naked eye. How often would such an object be visible in the climate of England?