TEXT: THE CAMBRIDGE
  HISTORY
  OF JAPAN
  Volume 5
  The Nineteenth Century
  Edited by
  MARIUS B. JANSEN
  CAMBRIDGE
  UNIVERSITY PRESS
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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  © Cambridge University Press 1989
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  and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
  no reproduction of any part may take place without
  the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
  First published 1989
  Reprinted 1993, 1996, 2002, 2004, 2007
  Printed in the United States of America
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  ISBN 978-0-521-22356-0 hardback
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  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  GENERAL EDITORS' PREFACE
  Since the beginning of this century the Cambridge histories have set a
  pattern in the English-reading world for multivolume series contain-
  ing chapters written by specialists under the guidance of volume edi-
  tors. Plans for a Cambridge history of Japan were begun in the 1970s
  and completed in 1978. The task was not to be easy. The details of
  Japanese history are not matters of common knowledge among West-
  ern historians. The cultural mode of Japan differs greatly from that of
  the West, and above all there are the daunting problems of terminol-
  ogy and language. In compensation, however, foreign scholars have
  been assisted by the remarkable achievements of Japanese scholars
  during the last century in recasting their history in modern conceptual
  and methodological terms.
  History has played a major role in Japanese culture and thought,
  and the Japanese record is long and full. Japan's rulers from ancient
  times have found legitimacy in tradition, both mythic and historic,
  and Japan's thinkers have probed for a national morality and system of
  values in their country's past. The importance of history was also
  emphasized in the continental cultural influences that entered Japan
  from early times. Its expression changed as the Japanese consciousness
  turned to concerns over questions of dynastic origin, as it came to
  reflect Buddhist views of time and reality, and as it sought justification
  for rule by the samurai estate. By the eighteenth century the succes-
  sive need to explain the divinity of government, justify the ruler's
  place through his virtue and compassion, and interpret the flux of
  political change had resulted in the fashioning of a highly subjective
  fusion of Shinto, Buddhist, and Confucian norms.
  In the nineteenth century, the Japanese became familiar with West-
  ern forms of historical expression and felt the need to fit their national
  history into patterns of a larger world history. As the modern Japanese
  state took its place among other nations, Japanese history faced the
  task of reconciling a parochial past with a more catholic present. Histo-
  rians familiarized themselves with European accounts of the course of
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  vi 
  GENERAL EDITORS' PREFACE
  civilization and described Japan's nineteenth-century turn from mili-
  tary to civilian bureaucratic rule under monarchical guidance as part
  of a larger, worldwide pattern. Buckle, Guizot, Spencer, and then
  Marx successively provided interpretative schema.
  , The twentieth-century ideology of the imperial nation-state, how-
  ever, operated to inhibit full play of universalism in historical interpre-
  tation. The growth and ideology of the imperial realm required cau-
  tion on the part of historians, particularly with reference to Japanese
  origins.
  Japan's defeat in World War II brought release from these inhibi-
  tions and for a time replaced them with compulsive denunciation of
  the pretensions of the imperial state. Soon the expansion of higher
  education brought changes in the size and variety of the Japanese
  scholarly world. Historical inquiry was now free to range widely. A
  new opening to the West brought lively interest in historical expres-
  sions in the West, and a historical profession that had become cau-
  tiously and expertly positivist began to rethink its material in terms of
  larger patterns.
  At just this juncture the serious study of Japanese history began in
  the West. Before World War II the only distinguished general survey
  of Japanese history in English was G. B: Sansom's Japan: A Short
  Cultural History, first published in 1931 and still in print. English and
  American students of Japan, many trained in wartime language pro-
  grams, were soon able to travel to Japan for study and participation
  with Japanese scholars in cooperative projects. International confer-
  ences and symposia produced volumes of essays that served as bench-
  marks of intellectual focus and technical advance. Within Japan itself
  an outpouring of historical scholarship, popular publishing, and his-
  torical romance heightened the historical consciousness of a nation
  aware of the dramatic changes to which it was witness.
  In 1978, plans were adopted to produce this series on Japanese
  history as a way of taking stock of what has been learned. The present
  generation of Western historians can draw on the solid foundations of
  the modern Japanese historical profession. The decision to limit the
  enterprise to six volumes meant that topics such as the history of art
  and literature, aspects of economics and technology and science, and
  the riches of local history would have to be left out. They too have
  been the beneficiaries of vigorous study and publication in Japan and
  in the Western world.
  Multivolume series have appeared many times in Japanese since the
  beginning of the century, but until the 1960s the number of profession-
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  GENERAL EDITORS PREFACE 
  VU
  ahy trained historians of Japan in the Western world was too small to
  sustain such an enterprise. Although that number has grown, the
  general editors have thought it best to draw on Japanese specialists for
  contributions in areas where they retain a clear authority. In such
  cases the act of translation itself involves a form of editorial coopera-
  tion that requires the skills of a trained historian whose name deserves
  acknowledgment.
  The primary objective of the present series is to put before the
  English-reading audience as complete a record of Japanese history as
  possible. But the Japanese case attracts our attention for other reasons
  as well. To some it has seemed that the more we have come to know
  about Japan, the more we are drawn to the apparent similarities with
  Western history. The long continuous course of Japan's historical
  record has tempted historians to look for resemblances between its
  patterns of political and social organization and those of the West. The
  rapid emergence of Japan's modern nation-state has occupied the atten-
  tion of comparative historians, both Japanese and Western. On the
  other hand, specialists are inclined to point out the dangers of being
  misled by seeming parallels.
  The striking advances in our knowledge of Japan's past will con-
  tinue and accelerate. Western historians of this great and complex
  subject will continue to grapple with it, and they must as Japan's
  world role becomes more prominent. The need for greater and deeper
  understanding of Japan will continue to be evident. Japanese history
  belongs to the world, not only as a right and necessity but also as a
  subject of compelling interest.
  JOHN W. HALL
  MARIUS B. JANSEN
  MADOKA KANAI
  DENIS TWITCHETT
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  CONTENTS
  General editors' preface 
  page v
  Preface to Volume 5 
  xiii
  Map 
  xiv
  Introduction 
  1
  by MARIUS B. JANSEN, Princeton University
  An end, a beginning, and a transition 
  7
  The stages of transition 
  12
  Historians and nineteenth-century Japan 
  34
  1 Japan in the early nineteenth century 
  50
  by MARIUS B. JANSEN
  Shogun and regent
  The Kansei reforms
  Towns, travel, and urban culture
  The countryside: growth, surplus, and the problem
  of control
  The image of the Western world
  Probings toward synthesis
  51
  52
  62
  7i
  87
  i n
  The Tempo crisis 
  116
  by HAROLD BOLITHO, Harvard University
  The Tempo famine 
  117
  Civil disorder 
  120
  The foreign threat 
  124
  Critics and criticism 
  126
  Domain reforms 
  133
  Bakufu reforms 
  139
  Mizuno Tadakuni 
  155
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  X 
  CONTENTS
  The aftermath 
  158
  The implications 
  164
  3 
  Late Tokugawa culture and thought 
  168
  by H. D . HAROOTUNIAN, University of Chicago
  The culture of play 
  168
  The play of culture 
  178
  Good doctrine and governance 
  182
  The restoration of worship and work 
  198
  Religions of relief 
  215
  Defense and wealth 
  231
  Cultural practice and the triumph of political
  centralization 
  252
  4 
  The foreign threat and the opening of the ports 
  259
  by W. G. BEASLEY, University of London
  The challenge to national isolation 
  261
  The commercial treaties of 1857-1858 
  271
  Problems of implementation 
  284
  Settlement 
  297
  Trade relations under the treaty port system 
  304
  5 The Meiji Restoration 
  308
  by M A R I U S B. 
  JANSEN
  Troubles within, disaster from without 
  308
  The Harris treaty and its aftermath 
  314
  The loyalists 
  320
  Court and camp, daimyo style 
  325
  The treaty ports and foreign influence 
  335
  Bakufu rally 
  342
  Regional reform 
  345
  Restoration 
  353
  The Restoration in history and historiography 
  360
  6 
  Opposition movements in early Meiji, 1868-1885 
  367
  by S T E P H E N VLASTOS, University of Iowa
  Early rural protests 
  368
  The Meiji land tax and village protests 
  372
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  CONTENTS 
  XI
  Shizoku revolts 
  382
  The popular rights movement 
  402
  Conclusion 
  426
  Japan's turn to the West 
  432
  by HIRAKAWA SUKEHIRO, University of Tokyo
  Translated by BOB TADASHI WAKABAYASHI
  The medium of books: first awareness of modern
  Western civilization 
  435
  From books to experience: late Tokugawa and early
  Meiji travelers 
  448
  Teachers of "arts and sciences": foreigners in Meiji
  government employ 
  466
  The Japanization of Western thought and
  institutions 
  472
  The spirit of capitalism: first translations from
  Western literature 
  477
  The return to Japan: a consciousness of self in Meiji
  youth 
  487
  Social change 
  499
  by GILBERT ROZMAN, Princeton University
  Assumptions reexamined 
  501
  Social stratification 
  505
  Urban transformation 
  533
  Household decisions 
  548
  Conclusions and comparisons 
  562
  Economic change in the nineteenth century 
  569
  by E. SYDNEY CRAWCOUR, Australian National
  University
  The economy at the beginning of the nineteenth
  century 
  571
  The Tempo reforms 
  587
  The opening of foreign trade 
  600
  The Meiji Restoration: continuity and change 
  605
  Economic development, 1868-1885 
  610
  The transition and its nature 
  614
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  CONTENTS
  10 Meiji political institutions 
  618
  by W. 
  G. 
  BEASLEY
  Initial decisions 
  620
  The abolition of the domains 
  628
  Central and local government 
  641
  The Meiji constitution 
  651
  Political society after 1890 
  665
  11 Meiji conservatism 
  674
  by KENNETH B. PYLE, University of Washington
  The challenge of the Japanese enlightenment 
  676
  Early Meiji conservatives: the moral imperative 
  679
  Conservatives and the problem of foreign relations 
  688
  The emergence of bureaucratic conservatism 
  696
  The conservative approach to industrial society 
  704
  The social program of the conservatives 
  710
  The legacy of Meiji conservatism 
  716
  12 Japan's drive to great-power status 
  721
  by AKIRA IRIYE, University of Chicago
  The foreign policy of a modern state 
  721
  The Meiji polity and society 
  728
  Consolidation of domestic and foreign affairs,
  1868-1880 
  733
  Domestic politics and overseas expansion,
  1880-1895 
  747
  Imperialism and militarism, 1895-1912 
  765
  Works cited 
  783
  Glossary-index 
  813
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  PREFACE TO VOLUME 5
  Japanese is romanized according to the Hepburn system, and Chinese
  names according to the Wade-Giles system. Japanese and Chinese
  personal names follow their native form, with surname preceding
  given name, except in citations of Japanese authors writing in English.
  Where alternative readings of personal names exist, they are given in
  both forms in the Glossary-Index, as are technical terms. References
  cited in the footnotes are listed in alphabetical order by author in the
  list of Works Cited at the end of the volume. As to dates, Japanese and
  Western years do not exactly coincide before 1872, when Japan
  adopted the Western calendar. Years prior to that date are normally
  given in the Japanese lunar days and months, together with the West-
  ern year most closely coinciding with the Japanese (e.g., fourth
  month, 1848). Where day and month have been converted to the
  Western date they are given in that form (e.g., April 6,1868).
  We wish to thank the Japan Foundation for grants that covered
  costs of manuscript fees, translation of chapters by Japanese contribu-
  tors, and editorial expenses and meetings. During the years that this
  volume has been in preparation, a number of young scholars have
  been of assistance in the editorial process by helping to put the manu-
  script on the word processor, standardizing usage, and assembling the
  bibliography and the Glossary-Index. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi's edi-
  torial help was particularly important. Luke Roberts and Lee Butler
  assembled the list of Works Cited and David Howell and Thomas
  Schalow compiled the Glossary-Index. To them, to Scott Miller and
  Constantine Vaporis, and especially to the contributors, go my thanks
  for their patience and forbearance.
  MARIUS B. JANSEN
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
  INTRODUCTION
  This volume deals with nineteenth-century Japan. The century is usu-
  ally broken in its third quarter by historians who treat the Meiji Resto-
  ration as a watershed in Japanese history, but we shall treat it as a
  whole. The Restoration surely marked an important divide in Japa-
  nese social history, but it is impossible to analyze its elements without
  a perspective of what preceded and what followed it.
  The nineteenth century saw Japan transformed from a society that
  was divided territorially, politically, socially, and internationally. Ja-
  pan's borders were still unclear, for its sovereignty over Okinawa, the
  Kurils, and Hokkaido was not established. Politically, Japan was still
  structured in the territorial divisions that had been worked out in the
  early seventeenth century. The Tokugawa shogun held dominion over
  lands that produced about one-quarter of the national agricultural
  yield of rice, which was the sole measure of productivity, but although
  he retained about half of that for his own house as tenryo, the rest he
  allocated to his vassals. The balance of the country was divided among
  some 260 feudal lords, who in turn allocated part of their holdings to
  their retainers. The domains were substantially autonomous in inter-
  nal administration; each had its own army, its own administrative
  system, and its own capital city, which had grown, in the larger do-
  mains, around the daimyo's castle. The lords and their domains were
  not taxed by the shogun, who, as primus inter pares, was restricted to
  the revenue of his own holdings.
  The daimyo were, however, expected to perform acts of fealty to
  their overlord, and in the absence of warfare, that service had become
  ritualized in the procedures of alternate attendance whereby they
  spent half their time in residence at the shogunal capital of Edo. In
  that city, large estates, usually three each, were set aside for the lords,
  and these they built up as residences and garrisons for their retainers
  during their duty stay. The lords' families, and their principal retain-
  ers' families, were expected to remain in Edo as hostages during the
  daimyo's sojourn at home. The lords thus contributed to the shogun's
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  2 
  INTRODUCTION
  wealth through their expenditures during their stays in his territory,
  and they were substantially autonomous at home and even enjoyed a
  sort of extraterritoriality during their residence in Edo. But the fact
  that their families remained there meant that after the first generation,
  the ruling elite was born and brought up in Edo, knew its own lands
  only after acceding to rule, and oriented itself more to the luxury and
  ritual of the capital than to the problems and realities of its territories.
  The daimyo, in turn, expected their own retainers to reside in the
  domain castle towns, in most cases permanently. As a result the ruling
  military estate had become a circulating and highly urbanized status
  group. The polity was premised on a disarmed and compliant country-
  side, one that had been restrained by the legislative measures of the
  late sixteenth century when Hideyoshi and his peers separated the
  warriors from the agriculturists, disarmed the countryside, and car-
  ried out cadastral registers to provide a sure base for future consider-
  ation of rural governance and productivity.
  Japan was no less divided socially. The four status groups of samu-
  rai, agriculturalist, artisan, and merchant that had been established in
  the early seventeenth century continued to maintain distinct patterns
  of status, shown in clothing, appearance, manner and behavior, and
  residence despite considerable changes in relative well-being that de-
  veloped during the Tokugawa centuries. The samurai, in particular,
  whose fiefs had for the most part given way to stipends paid from their
  lord's granaries as rationalized administration replaced the extremes of
  early territorial fragmentation, existed on fixed incomes during peri-
  ods of economic growth and changing standards in which their lords'
  needs for additional revenue found those stipends inviting targets of
  retrenchment. Lords and vassals alike were constantly in debt to the
  merchant brokers who changed their rice income into spendable coin-
  age through the mechanisms of the commodity markets that had devel-
  oped. Years of peace had dulled the samurai's martial proclivities, and
  years of service had changed the warriors from an unlettered and
  unruly fighting force to educated bureaucrats who competed eagerly
  for the positions available to them. The samurai had become an under-
  employed and unproductive elite. Despite this and the accelerated
  movement in and out of lower ranks and even sale of status member-
  ship, the perquisites of samurai standing in 1800 remained substan-
  tially what they had been two centuries earlier.
  In 1800 most Japanese were agriculturalists living in the seventy-
  thousand-odd villages that bound isolated hamlets into administrative
  units. The Tokugawa authorities desired a countryside populated by
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  INTRODUCTION 
  3
  hardworking peasants responsive to the directives of their own elite,
  the landowning farmers with membership rights to water and represen-
  tation in village assemblies that ruled on matters of common interest.
  The village was taxed as a unit, and that burden was allocated by the
  same landed families under the leadership of an appointed or elected
  headman. Village families were arranged in groups of five for purposes
  of surveillance and mutual responsibility. Heavily burdened by a tax
  that initially averaged 50 percent of its product, the village was still
  fairly autonomous, thanks to the absence of the samurai administra-
  tors who lived in the castle towns and dealt only with the village head.
  Reclamation of new fields, agricultural improvement, and under-
  reporting combined to make the countryside more prosperous and less
  responsive to the expectations of those who taxed it. By 1800 the
  presumed uniformity of status for peasants had given way to a far
  more varied scene in which managerial farmers were profiting from
  commercial agriculture that grew in areas able to ship to the great
  metropolitan centers of Osaka and Edo. The spread of literacy among
  the village leaders made for a lively trade in and distribution of agricul-
  tural texts as well as other products of urban printing establishments
  throughout the countryside. More and more a single culture was in-
  forming all status groups throughout Japan, even though the status
  divisions of the past continued to divide the population. Economic
  change had created change in social realities, but not yet in formal
  social relations.
  In the early nineteenth century, Japan's isolation from the outside
  world also continued the patterns that had been instituted in the 1630s.
  State-to-state relations existed only with Korea, which sent twelve em-
  bassies to Japan in Tokugawa times, and yet even those relations were
  attenuated and camouflaged by being implemented through the daimyo
  of Tsushima, who maintained a trading station at Pusan under circum-
  stances of inequality and some indignity. At Nagasaki a trading station
  maintained by the Dutch East India Company until its abolition in 1799
  was continued by the Java colonial administration, which sent ships
  from Batavia and agents who lived under strict surveillance on the man-
  made islet of Deshima. A Chinese station was also maintained at
  Nagasaki for private traders who brought goods for sale to authorized
  guild representatives. The southern domain of Satsuma also had access
  to Chinese goods through its control of the Okinawan kingdom. Yet
  over the years the exhaustion of Japan's silver and copper mines com-
  bined with the development of Japanese handicrafts, which substituted
  for the Chinese silk and embroidered textiles that had been the heart of
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  4 
  INTRODUCTION
  the trade, to reduce the number of Chinese and of Dutch vessels to a
  trickle; the trade had become more ritual than real.
  At the end of the nineteenth century, where this volume ends,
  Japan was a highly centralized state whose government had little toler-
  ance for local variety and divergence. A powerful Home Ministry
  appointed governors and mayors. A national police system had re-
  placed the myriad forms of local control with a network of police
  stations and boxes that were the marvel of Japan's neighbors. The
  Education Ministry prescribed texts for a school system whose unifor-
  mity was such that pupils all over the country could be expected to be
  going over the same lessons out of the same textbooks at the same
  time. Precise distinctions of class and status had given way to a ho-
  mogenized nation of commoners. The substatus groups of feudal
  times had been assimilated by law but continued to suffer from dis-
  crimination; the highest of the old elite had been declared a new
  aristocracy so as to provide a conservative counterweight to possible
  radicalism in the newly established Imperial Diet. The nation was
  being schooled in gratitude and veneration for a uniformed sovereign
  whose picture was beginning to appear on the walls of even the hum-
  blest homes.
  On every hand the variety of local precedent and personal govern-
  ment had given way to firmly established codes of law for commercial,
  civil, and criminal procedures. Feudal variety in landholding obliga-
  tions had given way to individual ownership with firm legal rights and
  equally firm tax obligations. The samurai class had been disestab-
  lished and pensioned off, its military functions assumed by a con-
  scripted army of commoners and its administrative role transferred to
  a meritocracy trained in the imperial university. The imperial court,
  which had survived the Tokugawa years on the fringe of public notice
  with attenuated ceremonies and posts, had been "restored" to rule.
  Press, school, armed services, and police competed in affirmations of
  loyalty and fealty to the sovereign. The last Tokugawa shogun had so
  far outlived his displacement and disgrace that his house ranked with
  the few in the new aristocracy that were qualified to provide imperial
  consorts, and his successor presided over the deliberations of the
  House of Peers. Japan was no longer feudal, decentralized, and status
  bound, but unified, homogenized, and capitalist. A century that en-
  compassed such changes needs to be treated as a whole for historical
  analysis.
  By the end of the nineteenth century Japan's relations with the
  outside world had changed no less profoundly. The tenuous relations
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  INTRODUCTION 
  5
  with outside powers and the shadowy outlines of Japanese sovereignty
  were replaced by firmly differentiated ties and boundaries. To the
  south, the Ryukyu chain had been incorporated as a prefecture. To
  the north, an exchange of disputed territories with Russia had resulted
  in full Japanese sovereignty over the Kurils. More important, the
  island of Hokkaido had been fully occupied and its development be-
  gun. Relations with China were formalized, and in 1894-5 Japan
  bested its larger neighbor in a contest centered on the future control of
  Korea. The treaties that had been worked out with the Western pow-
  ers in the 1860s, with their humiliating provisions for limitations on
  tariff autonomy, extraterritoriality, and most-favored-nation clause,
  were revised in 1894 after a quarter-century of effort. Japan's electrify-
  ing victory over China brought with it possession of Taiwan and full
  membership in the imperialist club, with opportunities for further
  exploitation of China and further competition with Russia for Korea
  and Manchuria.
  Thus the Japan of 1900 was no longer the Japan of 1800. The
  secluded island nation of the past had become an active and aggressive
  participant in world politics, proud of its achievement and insistent
  upon its place, ready to enter the European alliance system, and eager
  for a foothold on the Asian continent.
  Yet it would be foolish to claim particular significance for the cen-
  tury mark and to claim too much for the years at the century's begin-
  ning and close. In some ways, better arguments are at hand for a
  periodization beginning in 1790 and ending in 1890: 1790 brought the
  Kansei reforms directed by the bakufu official Matsudaira Sadanobu.
  Those reforms stand as the last major effort to shore up the Tokugawa
  order after the relaxation of its policies under the administration of
  Tanuma Okitsugu. As had been the case under Sadanobu's ancestor,
  Yoshimune, who led the Kyoho reforms in the 1720s, a determined
  effort was made to return to the martial simplicity of earlier times. In
  fact, however, the measures that Sadanobu introduced served to illus-
  trate how far commercialization had proceeded since the first quarter
  of the century. Bakufu steps were designed to bolster the economy of
  the Kan to plain and liberate it from the dominance of Osaka merchant
  capital. Edicts were issued to provide for the urban poor and needy
  debtors, and stringent measures were introduced to control economic
  activity in the great eastern metropolis of Edo. More striking still was
  the attention paid to warrior education and training to prepare govern-
  ment officials for the new complexity of bureaucratic life. Ideological
  orthodoxy in Confucian teachings was decreed for the bakufu acad-
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  6 
  INTRODUCTION
  emy, a step that was quickly followed by the administrators of domain
  schools. Sadanobu also showed an awareness of the rising importance
  of Western studies and began the steps toward official patronage that
  led to the creation of a center of Western studies soon after the coming
  of Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1850s. In the aftermath of
  Sadanobu's measures, the bakufu insisted for the first time that its
  forthright refusal to deal with foreign countries was the legacy of the
  original Tokugawa founders. A new rigidity in such matters, empha-
  sized by the punishment meted out to scholars of Western learning
  who presumed to publish their views on the possible dangers that
  Japan faced, and the insistent and archaic moral absolutism of govern-
  ment pronouncements all combined to make the Kansei reforms of
  1790 the true beginning of the nineteenth century in Japan. The same
  was true in international affairs: Japanese responses to Russian prob-
  ings in the north signaled a new awareness of the need to prepare for a
  possible military confrontation.
  By 1890, a century later, the Meiji institutional structure had been
  completed by the implementation of the Meiji constitution and the
  formulation of the Imperial Rescript on Education. Once again the
  government defined what was expected and moral while insisting that
  what it was doing was fully in touch with Japanese tradition. Civic
  morality was a public duty and not a private matter. The Imperial
  Oath made in the palace upon the promulgation of the constitution
  explained that document as "merely a reiteration in Our own day of
  the grand precepts of government that have been handed down by the
  Imperial Founder of Our House and by Our other Imperial Ancestors
  to their descendants." In much the same way, Matsudaira Sadanobu
  had argued that his measures conformed with the will of the founder
  of the bakufu (shogunate).
  Between these confident assertions of orthodoxy and continuity lay
  an interval of openness and questioning. For this, too, it had been
  possible to find justification in Japan's past. The "turn to the West,"
  as Professor Hirakawa terms the Charter Oath's promise of 1868 to
  seek "wisdom throughout the world," could cite as precedent the turn
  to the Chinese continent for political and cultural institutions a millen-
  nium before. The willingness of the bakufu minister Abe Masahiro to
  seek daimyo counsel when confronted by Commodore Perry's de-
  mands for treaty relations in 1853 reflected consensual patterns of
  decision making, a tradition that was echoed in the same Charter
  Oath's affirmation that deliberative councils would be "broadly con-
  vened." That promise led to two decades of intense discussion about
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  AN END, A BEGINNING, AND A TRANSITION 
  7
  the way "people's rights" (minken) might best be institutionalized. By
  the century's end, however, Japan's leadership was largely satisfied
  that proper "wisdom" and institutions had been found and had de-
  cided that councils should be used to assist, and not to lead, imperial
  rule.
  Of course, 1890 did not bring an end to change, for implementation
  of the new institutions required continuous adaptation and experimen-
  tation. During the decade of 1890 to 1900 the leaders of the "People's
  Rights" movement were co-opted, step by step, into the governing
  system and gradually incorporated into the cabinet structure. At the
  century's end, ltd Hirobumi, the principal architect of the new institu-
  tions, found it desirable to form his own political party, in order, as he
  put it, to free himself from mercenaries by mobilizing his own army.
  The consolidation of parliamentary government made it possible to
  concentrate on international equality and to develop new and larger
  goals abroad. In 1894 the revision of the unequal treaties after a quarter-
  century of effort brought diplomatic equality and dignity and provided
  the prospect of tariff autonomy for 1911. Japan's success in the Sino-
  Japanese War of 1894-5 brought a seat at the imperialist banquet table
  in China, and the acquisition of Taiwan and the indemnity that accom-
  panied it made for rapid strides in heavy industry with the establish-
  ment of the iron-steel complex of Yawata. Further steps pointed to-
  ward the domination of Korea. That final decade of the century and the
  first decade of the twentieth century loom large in Professor Iriye's
  discussion of Japan's rise to great-power status with which this volume
  ends. The same years signaled the beginning of large-scale industrial
  developments and social discontents, described in Volume 6, problems
  that preoccupied bureaucratic leaders in the twentieth century. A lower-
  ing of the tax qualification for electoral franchise in 1900 represented a
  first effort to co-opt and guide the bourgeoisie and the labor movement,
  and brought Japan into the twentieth century.
  AN END, A BEGINNING, AND A TRANSITION
  A beginning is also an ending. The changes in early modern Europe that
  Jakob Burckhardt interpreted as heralding the Renaissance had more
  meaning for Johan Huizinga as the waning of the Middle Ages, and in
  the same way the closing decades of Tokugawa rule can as well be seen
  as a waning of military governance, or bakumatsu, as they can as a
  prelude to the modern state. The Tokugawa system was clearly spiral-
  ing downward. Matsudaira Sadanobu's efforts to shore up the polity in
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  8 
  INTRODUCTION
  the Kansei reforms enjoyed some success, particularly where education
  and the economy and administration of the Kanto were concerned, but
  the same cannot be said for the reform attempt under Mizuno Tada-
  kuni, the subject of Professor Bolitho's discussion of the Tempo (1830-
  1844) period in Chapter 2. Mizuno's attempt to rationalize and concen-
  trate landholdings around the major metropolitan centers succeeded
  only in alienating lords whose fiefs would be affected and brought him
  quick dismissal from office. His efforts to attack urban poverty by
  ordering recent migrants to return to their villages, and his legislation
  against displays of luxury brought such unpopularity that Edo towns-
  men stoned his residence in a show of contempt. Ideology-motivated
  revivalism, in the 1837 revolt of Oshio Heihachiro, succeeded only in
  burning a large part of Osaka and increasing the distress that Oshio was
  trying to alleviate.
  The late Tempo years were in fact notable for evidence of waning
  effectiveness on the part of Japan's rulers. Famine stalked the land.
  Bureaucratic jealousy combined with ideological rigidity to bring
  about a purge of scholars concerned with Western studies. In 1844, a
  year after Tempo came to an end, the Dutch king wrote to warn the
  shogun of the West's growing power and Japan's inability to withstand
  the new currents. The bakufu explained its inability to respond by the
  fact that there were no precedents for such communications. On the
  contrary: Policies adopted in 1825 had specified that foreign ships be
  turned back without hesitation, no matter what their purpose. These,
  and other rigidities described in Professor Beasley's discussion of the
  coming of the West in Chapter 4, suggest that the Tokugawa system
  was indeed coming to the end of its resources and unlikely to respond
  with imagination or effectiveness to future challenges.
  A reflective article by Hayashiya Tatsusaburo draws some interest-
  ing comparisons between the Tokugawa bakumatsu and those of the
  earlier Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates. Both of the earlier ba-
  kufu, Hayashiya points out, lost control over their vassals after they
  were unable to deliver rewards and impose sanctions. Both declines
  were accompanied by succession disputes, and both took place in the
  presence of growing entanglement in foreign trade. In each case a
  growing impatience with the invocation of stern standards ascribed to
  the founders' wisdom indicated changing social values and a preoccu-
  pation with new, untraditional, and antiestablishment sentiments.1
  1 Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., "Bakumatsuki no bunka shihyo," in Bakumatsu bunka no kenkyu
  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978), pp 3-39. See also Professor Harootunian's reference in Chap-
  ter 3.
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  AN END, A BEGINNING, AND A TRANSITION 
  9
  In the Kamakura case the intensity of the effort to ward off the
  Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 was followed by a long period of
  mobilization in the expectation of a possible third invasion, without
  any increase of territory with which to reward bakufu vassals. Before
  that, the increase of trade with Sung China had accompanied a com-
  mercialization that made difficult for the bakufu the interruption of
  the China trade after the Mongol conquest of the mainland. The Hojo
  regency in Kamakura found itself isolated. Rising discontent was ac-
  companied by changing social values within the elite, a trend symbol-
  ized by the vogue for a new ostentation and unstructured unconven-
  tionality. Basara, the contemporary term coined for this aberration,
  was warned against in the Joei formulary with which the bakufu tried
  to restrain its vassals, but in vain.
  In late Muromachi times the Ashikaga bakufu was even more obvi-
  ously involved with continental trade, commercialization, and, at the
  last, arms brought by Westerners. Yoshimitsu's acceptance of a title as
  vassal of the Ming emperor, and his successors' efforts to attract larger
  supplies of Ming coinage, set the stage for disorderly competition by
  his vassals for those goods in the operation of the "tally trade" with the
  continent. At its last the Muromachi bakufu was further buffeted by
  the trade and technology that arrived on Western ships. This time the
  term for the irregular and unconventional that symbolized the cultural
  shift was kabuki, a term redolent of emotion and hedonism that be-
  came enshrined in the stage genre of the age that followed. The
  Ashikaga inability to control their vassals, and the accompanying popu-
  lar disorders of those bakumatsu times, led directly into the violence of
  the sixteenth century.
  The Tokugawa parallels to these phenomena are evident. Commer-
  cialization and social change had grown throughout the Tokugawa
  period, not, to be sure, as a result of increasing contract with the
  continent, but through internal economic growth and change. But the
  opening of the ports for the West in 1859 brought a flood of foreign
  goods and coinage as well as a large new market for Japanese tea and
  silk. Discrepancies in the relative values of gold to silver between
  Japan and the outside world resulted in a currency flow that quickly
  drained Japan of precious metal. The trade produced a wild inflation
  that sent prices skyrocketing out of the reach of samurai on fixed
  incomes and denied domestic craftsmen access to materials essential to
  them. Bakufu efforts to monopolize the profits from the trade drew
  sharp opposition from powerful vassals who were able to draw on
  foreign protests and speeded the erosion of confidence and control.
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  10 
  INTRODUCTION
  The Edo bakufu was even more sensitive to the alarm created by the
  Western victories in China. Instability on the continent brought a
  quick response from an elite fully informed about those matters. To
  some it seemed that Japan's security had in fact depended on a stable
  China. Transfer of the treaty port system to Japan, with foreign mis-
  sions and foreign troops on Japanese soil, became a standing reproach
  to the pretensions of the "barbarian-subduing generalissimo."
  This in turn was accompanied by a fascination with the new and
  with what had been irregular and unconventional. In late Tokugawa
  times, violations of the accepted code became expected of activists,
  who proliferated in the new political atmosphere. The growing im-
  portance of an underworld of gamblers and adventurers provided a
  context in which the politically motivated could operate. Theater
  and literature were fascinated by evil and the grotesque. All this
  served to help and hide "grass-roots" {somo) idealists who fled their
  normal obligations to family, group, and lord to taste the heady
  wine of political involvement. Glorification of the "chivalrous adven-
  turer" (kyokaku) represented praise for what had been illegal and
  deplorable in more structured times, and the tradition survived to
  be claimed by China adventurers and right-wing extremists later in
  the Meiji period.
  Yet surely the power and self-confidence of the modern West made
  the Tokugawa bakumatsu more extreme than earlier periods. Think-
  ers moved beyond the bakufu to consider new forms of political
  organization. As early as the 1860s, loyalist activists like Kusaka
  Genzui of Choshu and Takechi Zuizan of Tosa were proposing court-
  centered polities with institutions drawn from the classical past of
  Nara-Heian times. The activists who beheaded the statues of Ashi-
  kaga shoguns in Kyoto were the predecessors of others who would
  rewrite all of earlier Japanese history to decry the substitution of
  military for imperial rule.
  In a larger sense however, the nineteenth century is more custom-
  arily treated as a beginning, and the Restoration years are best de-
  scribed as a transition between late-feudal and modern Japan. The
  transition from warrior to civil rule, albeit one directed by former
  members of the warrior estate, is particularly noteworthy and calls to
  mind Hayashiya's comparison with the transition from civil to warrior
  rule centuries earlier. It is equally possible to compare the process
  with the transition from the Yamato state to the ritsuryo order modeled
  on that of China a full millennium earlier. A third transition to which
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  AN END, A BEGINNING, AND A TRANSITION 
  II
  attention might be called is the Tokugawa stabilization of the status
  structure and vassal system in the early seventeenth century.2
  Each of these transitions was preceded by a lengthy period of prepa-
  ration. The formal assumption of rule by the military houses came in
  the twelfth century, but the remarkably pacific order of the Heian
  days had undergone steady change as Japan's aristocratic leaders
  turned to military specialists for support and protection. Military rule
  knew three shogunates and three bakumatsu declines before being
  exchanged once more for civil and bureaucratic institutions. They too,
  however, had been anticipated by the bureaucraticization of the samu-
  rai in the Tokugawa years of peace; the educational consequences of
  measures taken after the Kansei reform were an important step toward
  the maturation of that system. The desperate efforts of the Tempo
  reforms to restore solvency found the bakufu and important domains
  taking stronger steps to direct economic growth and develop mercantil-
  ist policies of regional autarchy, on the one hand, while also promoting
  exports to other domains. These steps brought to the fore a new type
  of samurai bureaucrat, and the experience and expectations they pro-
  vided has led some historians to see in the Tempo reforms a starting
  point for the modern bureaucratic state.
  Each major transition, that from civil to warrior and from warrior to
  civil rule, was also accompanied by archaicization and revivalist rheto-
  ric and action as new governments tried to establish their legitimacy.
  Hayashiya points to the early Kamakura restorationist emphases in the
  projects to refurbish the great Nara temples. The self-professed return
  to antiquity of the nineteenth century produced more recent and strik-
  ing examples: the building of the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, the institu-
  tion of the Meiji Shrine in central Tokyo - complete with a forest of
  trees from all parts of the country - and the exhuming of ancient
  cultural forms at the court. This had been anticipated in late Toku-
  gawa times by the bakufu's increasing demonstrations of respect for
  the ancient court and its restoration of the great "imperial" tumuli of
  the Yamato state, but in Meiji cultural policy these efforts were far
  outdone. The reign title Meiji was selected from the Book of Changes,
  and the characters used to designate ishin, or "restoration," changed
  from a straightforward "renewal" to the now-standard ishin, were
  taken from the Book of Songs' reference to the renewal of the mandate
  of the Chou. First used in the conscription rescript, this orthography
  2 See, on these comparisons, Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition:
  From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. I3ff.
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  12 
  INTRODUCTION
  brought with it the implication that an imperial order had brought
  light into darkness. Other Meiji revivalist attempts in culture and
  religion are too numerous to require mention; the attack on feudal
  culture and with it Buddhism was in fact so fierce as to bring from
  one student the description of that campaign as a "Great Cultural
  Revolution."*
  THE STAGES OF TRANSITION
  The century proper opened with the Bunka (1804-18) and Bunsei
  (1818-30) eras. They seem, in retrospect, relatively untroubled de-
  cades with good weather and harvests, political stability in the after-
  math of the vigorous reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu; there was a lag
  in the frequency of the peasant demonstrations and rebellions that had
  peaked during the 1780s. There were, however, portents of trouble
  from without, for the Russian envoy Rezanov came to Nagasaki in
  expectation of a permit to trade there in 1804, and the rebuff he received
  was followed by raids on northern coasts by his young lieutenants. At
  Nagasaki the isolation of the Dutch trading station during the Napole-
  onic era led the Dutch to hire American ships to supply their needs, and
  that in turn led to bakufu inquiries that brought word of far-ranging
  changes in the European state system. A few years later an English ship,
  the Phaeton, boldly entered Nagasaki harbor and seized supplies that
  the startled Japanese authorities had tried to withhold. In 1824 a party
  of English sailors came ashore in Mito and alternately puzzled and
  alarmed the local negotiators sent out to deal with them, who thought
  they were probably Russian. The bakufu responded with measures to
  increase the study of European languages and to strengthen Hokkaido.
  In 1826 Fujita Toko saw five Dutchmen in Edo, where they had come
  for the quadrennial visit to the shogun's court. Alarmed because they
  seemed dressed like the Russians in the Rezanov party two decades
  earlier, he concluded that Russia must have conquered Holland and
  that Japan was being surrounded, north and south, by the same malevo-
  lent foreign power. His associate Aizawa Yasushi (Seishisai), involved
  in the Mito interrogation of the English sailors, began to put together
  the threads of ethnic, religious, and nationalist thought that became the
  influential New Theses of 1825. The Mito daimyo, Tokugawa Nariaki,
  3 Alan Grappard, "Japan's Neglected Cultural Revolution: The Separation of Shinto and Bud-
  dhist Deities in Meiji (Shinbutsu bumi) and a Case Study: Tonomine," History of Religions 23
  (1984): 240-65.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  13
  was stirred by these warnings. Within a decade he requested the
  bakufu to allow him to take over Ezo (Hokkaido), and after that
  request was denied, he became and remained the most troublesome
  advocate of rigorous exclusion among the feudal lords until his death
  in i860.
  The 1820s were a period of growing interest in Western learning.
  The German doctor Philip Franz von Siebold was attached to the
  Nagasaki Dutch station from 1823 to 1828. His stay marked both the
  height of interest in things Western, as a variety of able young scholars
  attended the academy he was permitted to set up in Nagasaki, and the
  beginning of officials' fears that such studies could lead to subversion
  and ideological contamination; his departure was marred by the discov-
  ery of a map he had received from a friend in the Bureau of Astron-
  omy. That friend, Takahashi Kageyasu, whose life was forfeit to this
  incident, was, however, himself the author of the rigorous "don't
  think twice" order of 1825 that called for the immediate expulsion of
  foreigners incautious enough to try to enter Japan.
  Although there was evidence of future problems in international
  affairs during this era, however, the growth of public and private
  interest in things foreign testified to the relative liberality and confi-
  dence of the times. Urban culture was never more prosperous, the
  reading public never larger, and publishers never more numerous than
  during these decades. It might well be characterized as an "era of good
  feelings" in comparison with the political intensity that lay ahead.
  Behind the outward show of prosperity and confidence there were
  also portents of the economic crises ahead. After a prolonged period of
  price stability, a creeping inflation began to be apparent around 1820,
  one that continued for more than half a century. Its causes were many.
  Most conspicuous was the growth of bakufu expenditures during the
  long and luxurious shogunate of Tokugawa Ienari (shogun from 1787
  to 1837 but unchallenged until his death in 1841). This was a factor in
  a twenty-year program of currency deflation that began in 1818, a
  procedure in which the precious metal content of some specie was
  reduced by as much as 50 percent. Prices lagged somewhat behind
  these moves, but they were clearly moving up by the time the bad
  harvests of the 1830s sent them skyrocketing. Another factor in this
  rise was the growth of population that accompanied economic growth
  in the less developed parts of Japan. Population and economic growth,
  which had seemed stationary in the wake of the disastrous decades at
  the close of the eighteenth century, began an upward turn that contin-
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  14 
  INTRODUCTION
  ued throughout the rest of the decade, with the exception of the
  disaster years of Tempo.1*
  The chief element in - or result of - this, however, was the inexora-
  ble growth of commercialization in central and northern Japan. In the
  Kanto region the centrality of Edo in economic life resulted in commer-
  cial farming, increased access to commercially produced goods, grow-
  ing variety in consumption, and higher labor costs. The village was
  beginning to lose its long-maintained self-sufficiency. Its inhabitants
  were able to respond to this according to their endowments and abil-
  ity; commercialization was less an option than a fact, and even though
  some profited from trends, others suffered from them. Vagrancy,
  flight, migration, and abandoned fields gave evidence of a social and
  economic differentation that was brought home by intravillage dis-
  putes and violence. In its "Bunsei" reforms of 1827, the bakufu tried
  to respond to this by instituting a new design of control by setting up a
  new inspectorate for the Kanto (Edo) plain that was designed to ratio-
  nalize administration by grouping villages into economic and geo-
  graphic units without reference to their nominal feudal overlords.
  Village officials were required to report on peasant side employments,
  and efforts were made to reduce the less necessary and less desirable
  aspects of commercialization such as pawn shops, drinking establish-
  ments, gambling, and related "lawless" and "luxurious" life-styles.
  More troubled waters lay ahead.
  Chronology, Bunka-Bunsei eras
  1804 Rezanov appears at Nagasaki and is denied permit to trade.
  1805 
  Bakufu warns lords to be vigilant about Russian ships.
  1806 Bakufu takes western Hokkaido as bakufu territory.
  Russian ships attack points in north.
  1808 
  Bakufu orders six men to study French at Nagasaki, six to study English, and all inter-
  preters to study Russian.
  1811 Translation office is established in Astronomy Bureau.
  1813 The ten major guilds are issued 1,195 permits, in sixty-five groups.
  1815 
  Doeff ("Halma") Dictionary is completed; many other works in Dutch studies are pub-
  lished.
  1822 Cholera breaks out at Nagasaki and spreads to central Japan.
  1824 English whaling ship lands in Mito.
  1825 
  Bakufu orders foreign ships to be driven off (mnen tiaku decree).
  1828 On his departure, Siebold is discovered to have map and is expelled in 1829.
  Source: Selected from Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Kasei bunka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1976).
  4 Discussions of those trends are conveniently summarized by Nishikawa Shunsaku, Nihon
  keizai no seichoshi (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha, 1985), pp. 3off.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  15
  The crisis years: Tempo (1830-1844), Koka (1844-1848), and
  Kaei (1848-1854)
  The next two decades saw these problems intensify. The agricultural
  disasters and the famine that followed, which are described by Profes-
  sor Bolitho, were formative in the life experience of the leaders of mid-
  century Japan. Many individual domains were able to inaugurate re-
  forms in the first years of the 1830s, but the bakufu itself was so
  immobilized by the prolonged influence of the former shogun Ienari
  that its own program could begin only at his death in 1841. Tokugawa
  Nariaki of Mito, who petitioned the bakufu for the resources and
  responsibility of Ezo in 1834 and continued to request this throughout
  most of the decade, surely realized that his attendants arranged his
  processions through his domain with the greatest care to avoid having
  him see the bodies of famine victims along the roads. In the instruc-
  tions he left for his successor he grouped the evils of his time as
  "barbarians, thieves, and famine." Neither the reforms he called for in
  Mito nor the advice he proffered the bakufu was successful. Nariaki
  himself was first told to stay in Mito for more than five years and then
  was recalled to domiciliary confinement in Edo.
  Some other domains, particularly several in the southwest, were
  more successful with the economic reforms they instituted during the
  Tempo years. The famine was most severe in central and northern
  Japan; even there, however, after a temporary decline in population,
  growth and commercialization resumed. What was particularly impor-
  tant about the "Tempo reform" period, in the eyes of economic histori-
  ans, was the way that it impelled daimyo governments to take on a
  planning function. Domain monopolies were set up to centralize and
  exploit the growing commercialization of the economy; in turn they
  speeded the process. This was usually to the disadvantage of local
  producers, who correctly saw the moves as a device whereby the do-
  main governments tried to be the chief gainers of such enterprises.
  Not surprisingly, the "reforms" were frequently accompanied by pro-
  tests from those whose livelihoods were being reformed; protests and
  petitions marked the process. The protests tended to be more success-
  ful in the central area essential to bakufu finance than they were in the
  more remote and more highly militarized domains of the "outside"
  lords. Those domains tried to profit from, monopolize, and simulta-
  neously repress the commercialization of their economies. They could
  profit from the nationwide inflation: Satsuma, which set out to reduce
  domain indebtedness and market its products through domain-estab-
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  l6 
  INTRODUCTION
  lished agencies, was helped by the inflation. The bakufu, with reforms
  that came later and that had to be carried out in areas that were far
  more heavily commercialized and less responsive to official control,
  was more hobbled by resistance and protest. The unhappy tenure of
  its counselor Mizuno Tadakuni, who found himself resisted by Toku-
  gawa vassals and his residence stoned by Edo townsmen after his
  dismissal, can stand as a symbol of the larger forces at work.
  The most striking evidence of bakufu difficulty came in the 1837
  revolt of the Osaka samurai official Oshio Heihachiro. Located as it
  was in the great commercial city of central Japan, the incident had
  reverberations throughout the entire country. Because the participants
  were for the most part products of Oshio's own school and following,
  it illustrated some of the possibilities that might be expected from
  politically motivated teachers and academies and stood as a portent of
  additional insurrections to come in future decades.5
  Chronology, Tempo-Kaei
  1830 
  Kumamoto forbids import and use of products of other domains.
  Satsuma institutes priority program for sugar.
  1831 Tokuyama domain forbids sale of domestically made paper.
  1832 Tokugawa Nariaki urges bakufu to build cannon.
  Mito establishes bureau to sell domestic goods in Edo.
  1837 Oshio Heihachiro stages revolt in Osaka.
  Morrison enters Uraga bay and is shelled.
  1839 Watanabe Kazan held in "Bansha no goku" (d. 1841, suicide).
  1840 Bakufu orders Dutch to provide full account of Opium War.
  Bakufu decrees that astronomy office alone may translate Dutch works on medicine,
  astronomy, and science.
  1841 Bakufu Tempo reforms call for revival of Kyoho, Kansei spirit.
  1842 Bakufu forbids domain monopolies.
  1843 Bakufu rescinds order rationalizing domains; Mizuno Tadakuni is dismissed.
  Sugita Seikei is ordered to translate Dutch constitution.
  1846 Bakufu informs court of foreign ships and is told to be vigilant.
  1850 Court orders services at seven shrines and temples to guard against foreign ships.
  Penalty for unauthorized publication about Opium War.
  Source: Selected from Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Kasei bunka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1976), and Bakumatsu bunka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978).
  The foreign crisis (1854-1860)
  The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 is discussed by
  William Beasley in Chapter 4. The sense of crisis that came to charac-
  5 Okubo Akihiro, "Bakumatsu ni okeru seijiteki hanran to shijuku," in Kano Masanao and
  Takagi Shunsuke, eds., I shin henkaku ni okeru zaisonteki shochdryu (Tokyo: San'ichi shobo,
  1972). PP- "0-33-
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  17
  terize the Ansei (1854-60) era was intense but not entirely new. The
  Morrison event of 1837, in which an American ship trying to establish
  contact by returning Japanese castaways had been driven away by
  coastal batteries, produced expressions of alarm from scholars of West-
  ern learning as well as official directives for position papers on Japan's
  impending problems. Some of those involved in the preparation of
  these became targets for charges of subversion: The trial and convic-
  tion of Watanabe Kazan in 1839 was followed by his suicide two years
  later. In 1844 the Dutch king unsuccessfully attempted to advise the
  shogun on the impossibility of maintaining policies of seclusion and
  expulsion, and two years later Commodore James Biddle came to
  Japan in a futile effort to establish formal United States-Japan rela-
  tions. In addition to these direct approaches to Japan, word of China's
  defeat in the Opium War spread rapidly among educated Japanese.
  Interrogation of the Dutch at Nagasaki confirmed the superiority of
  Western military technology, and Japanese editions of Wei Yuan's
  Hai-kuo fu-chih served as a preface to the near-hysterical denuncia-
  tions of the West from the brush of Shionoya Toin, a Confucian
  scholar who edited the Japanese editions of Wei Yuan.6
  Perry's report to his president predicted a promising future for a
  Japan he described as "the youngest sister in the circle of commercial
  nations." If only, he wrote, the powers would "kindly take her by
  the hand, and aid the tottering steps, until she has reached a vigor
  that will enable her to walk firmly in her own strength," commercial
  and diplomatic relations would soon be firm. Unfortunately Town-
  send Harris, who followed in 1856, found that hand more often
  clenched than open, and the commercial treaty he negotiated in 1858
  stirred such intense opposition that its enactment shook the very
  foundations of Tokugawa rule. Much scholarship relating foreign
  affairs to internal politics has centered on the events in Kyoto that
  led to court opposition to the Harris treaty - discussed in the Beasley
  and Jansen chapters that follow - and relates the bakufu decline to
  the inability of the "barbarian-subduing generalissimo" to control the
  intrusive West.
  Discussions by Bito Masahide have provided an additional con-
  text for facts that have become familiar. The bakufu leader Abe
  Masahiro circulated Perry's letter among the daimyo and at court in
  an effort to build consensus for a decision he knew to be inevitable.
  6 Marius B. Jansen, Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
  ton University Press, 1965), p. 57; and Oba Osamu, "Ahen senso to Kaikoku zushi," in Edo
  jidai no Ni-Chu hiwa (Tokyo: Toho shoten, 1980), pp. 242ft.
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  l8 
  INTRODUCTION
  By this act he helped activate a politics that had long seemed dor-
  mant, and succeeding years saw the ripples of participation move
  outward from the heads of the military families to their retainers and
  among sectors of the commoners as well. As Bito pointed out, this
  sequence too was foreshadowed in the 1840s, when the same Abe
  Masahiro was serving a term as bakufu roju. Abe had discussed the
  bakufu response to the Dutch king's letter of 1844 with daimyo
  Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito, who criticized its wording and urged that
  future matters be brought before the leading daimyo, tozama as well
  as gosanke and fudai, in a survey of "public opinion" (shuhyo). This,
  Nariaki urged, would "be to the benefit of Japan and will help
  ensure that no disgrace befalls the nation." So too with political
  participation by the imperial court. In 1846 the court had directed
  the bakufu to strengthen the coastal defenses, and so it was natural
  for Abe to include Kyoto in his distribution of the United States's
  request for treaty relations.
  These same steps proved disastrous a few years later when Hotta
  Masayoshi tried to repeat them in presenting the Harris Commercial
  Treaty of 1858. By now the disagreement was clear, for Harris's
  provision for genuine trade went well beyond Perry's original de-
  mands. Worse, the awareness of weakness at the very center of the
  bakufu led some of the great lords to try to influence the Tokugawa
  succession by tying approval of the treaty to the selection of Hitotsu-
  bashi Keiki, Nariaki's son, as the shogunal successor. A strong back-
  lash of authoritarianism within the bakufu came with the leadership
  of Ii Naosuke, who resorted to force in the "Ansei purge" of 1858—
  60. Ii's assassination in the spring of i860 brought on a decade of
  increasing violence that ended with the (Boshin) civil war of 1868-9.
  The opening of Japan thus reactivated politics at all levels of Japa-
  nese society.
  In Bito's treatment, the moves taken by Abe Masahiro helped estab-
  lish a polarity between referral to broader opinion {koron) and the
  authoritarian centralism pursued by Ii Naosuke. The bakufu, despite
  its experimentation with wider referral and its professions of respect
  for the court, found itself condemned by partisans who now linked
  those themes and attached to them the issue of expulsion of unwel-
  come foreigners. The higher morality of koron, buffeted by the politi-
  cal disputes of the 1860s, reemerged with the promise of the infant
  Meiji government (in the Charter Oath of 1868), which in turn became
  the demand of the "People's Rights" movement of the Meiji period.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  19
  These were themes whose changing interpretation helped unify and
  illuminate the transition decades of the nineteenth century.">
  The assassins' bill of complaint against Ii Naosuke in i860 illustrated
  the way in which a cluster of complaints had formed. They charged that
  Ii had wielded his power willfully and in disregard of "public opinion
  and morality" (koron seigi). He had abandoned standards of religion as
  well as those of public policy; it was contrary to the national interest to
  conclude treaties with the foreigners and to give up the established
  practice of requiring foreigners to trample on pictures of Christ; in
  short, "too much compromise has been made at the sacrifice of national
  honor." Political decisions judged in terms of moral absolutes would
  have little room for discussion or for compromise.
  The Tokugawa fall
  The Meiji Restoration of 1868, discussed in Chapter 5, was the result of
  the turbulent politics of the 1860s. Ii Naosuke's Ansei purge had turned
  doubts into conviction for many, and his successors' uncertain course
  produced a zigzag trail that left even Tokugawa vassals uncertain as to
  what their course should be. Efforts to work out new relationships with
  a more important imperial court involved all parties. For most of the
  decade the bakufu was able to maintain close relations with Kyoto, but
  professions of loyalty were no substitute for the active support of the
  most able courtiers around the sovereign. The bakufu began with the
  selection of an imperial princess as consort for the young Tokugawa
  Iemochi (shogun from 1858 to 1866). The domain of Choshu followed
  with a scheme for court participation in politics, one that was quickly
  strengthened by proposals put forward by Satsuma and Tosa. Political
  reorganization in the Bunkyu (1861-64) era brought members of Toku-
  gawa collateral houses into new positions and tried to enlist the coopera-
  tion of highly placed lords from outside domains. These steps suc-
  ceeded in weakening the control of Edo-centered traditionalists, but
  without securing the support of the domains they were designed to co-
  opt. Requirements of alternate attendance were relaxed, never to be
  7 Bito Masahide, "Bushi and the Meiji Restoration," ActaAsiatica 49 (Tokyo: Toho gakkai, 1985),
  pp. 78-99; and in expanded form, Bito Masahide, "Meiji ishin to bushi: 'koron' no rinen ni yoru
  ishinzo saikosei no kokoromi," Shiso 735 (September 1985). Harold Bolitho, however, stands
  this appraisal of Abe on its head to argue that Abe misjudged the situation to pursue an essen-
  tially debilitating course of consultations and that Ii Naosuke and his purge, and the concept of
  authoritarian government behind it, represented the wave of the future. See Harold Bolitho,
  "Abe Masahiro and the New Japan," in Jeffrey P. Mass and William B. Hauser, eds., The
  Bakufu in JapaneseHistory(Stan{ord, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985).
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  20 
  INTRODUCTION
  restored, and politics centered on the Kyoto court began to make the
  ancient imperial capital a national center at the expense of Edo, where
  the bakufu began to resemble a more regional, though still immensely
  important, power.
  The opening of the ports in 1859 brought additional problems into
  play. Foreign relations provided opportunities for self-strengthening
  and rearmament for the bakufu, but the same contacts soon made it
  possible for vassal dissidents to import modern weaponry. The do-
  main monopolies that had been set up in the Tempo years brought
  resistance to Tokugawa efforts to control and monopolize foreign
  trade, and domains began to treat directly with outside suppliers and
  customers through the treaty ports. They also began to trade with one
  another in defiance of bans on lateral contact; Choshu with Fukui,
  Kokura, and Goto (1862) and Tsushima (1864), and Satsuma with
  Okayama, Hiroshima, Wakayama, Toba, and Tosa. Additional lateral
  arrangements developed in the years that followed.8 More serious for
  the bakufu was a rampaging inflation that broke out in metropolitan
  areas. Divergence in gold-silver ratios between Japan and the China
  coast brought a run on Japanese precious metals. The sudden growth
  in outside markets for Japanese goods, particularly raw silk and tea,
  raised prices and brought hardships to domestic processors and samu-
  rai on fixed incomes. Some of the larger domains began experimenting
  with modern technology and production in armaments, shipbuilding,
  and textiles.
  The political process was continually exacerbated by the foreign
  presence and pressure. Outraged samurai generated antiforeign inci-
  dents for which the bakufu had to make amends at cost to its prestige
  and treasury. The foreign response to these incidents chastened anti-
  foreign radicals in Choshu and Satsuma, but without producing unity
  in either domain. In Satsuma, bureaucratic regulars defeated ambi-
  tious radicals, and in Choshu, by a much more complex process, those
  radicals gained leadership of domain policy. The bakufu first suc-
  ceeded and then failed to mobilize opinion against Choshu radicals:
  When its effort to punish Choshu a second time failed badly in 1866,
  the end was in sight.
  Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki), son of Nariaki and the successor pro-
  posed and rejected in 1858, became the fifteenth and last Tokugawa
  shogun upon the death of Iemochi in 1866. He was never once free to
  leave Kyoto to return to Edo and his real power base, and he was never
  8 Nishikawa, Nikon keizai no seichoshi, p. 137.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  21
  fully in tune with the fudai at that center. His conviction of foreign
  danger and the attraction of an apparent opportunity to emerge as first
  in a new alignment of equals led him to agree to a proposal put forward
  by Tosa in 1867 that he resign his powers. Outmaneuvered by the
  Satsuma leaders and their allies at court who secured an imperial de-
  mand that he surrender his lands as well as his offices, the shogun then
  tried to march on Kyoto from Osaka. This ended in disaster, a retreat to
  Edo, and there surrender to a newly constituted "imperial army" led by
  Saigo Takamori of Satsuma. The new government's forces moved on to
  the north, fighting where necessary in a war that came to a close in the
  late spring of 1869.
  These tumultuous political events produced the leaders of the mod-
  ern state and the heroes of modern Japanese nationalism, but they
  have overshadowed equally interesting and important developments
  that were taking place. Abundant signs of popular disaffection were
  shown in a new rebellious mood that often took on millenarian over-
  tones. Crop failures in the latter 1860s produced hardship conditions
  that complicated the tasks of government everywhere in Japan. The
  disruption of life caused by the military mobilization and campaigns
  brought resentment and opposition from commoners who were tired
  of providing ever-greater amounts of service labor and produce. The
  long stay of the bakufu forces in the Osaka area while preparations
  were under way for the second expedition against Choshu produced
  resistance shown by desperate burnings and riots. The new "imperial"
  armies were able to utilize this discontent and disillusion by offers of
  tax reduction and benevolence in the virtuous era that they announced
  was at hand.
  Bakufu attempts to acquaint the strategic elite with the requirements
  of the times also produced a much-improved communication system.
  The previously sheltered reports from Dutch and Chinese merchants
  now gave way to officially sponsored news of foreign events in early
  newspapers. One unexpected product of this was a consensus, common
  to late-Tokugawa political pronouncements, that because no other coun-
  try had the divided administration that characterized Japan, political
  reconsolidation was needed to produce a single and effective national
  decision center. There was substantial agreement between the bakufu
  and its opponents as to what was needed in terms of political change,
  and disagreements over who should lead were resolved by eliminating
  the Tokugawa bakufu.
  Although a number of merchant sympathizers helped support and,
  when necessary, hide the Restoration activists and although local not-
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  22 
  INTRODUCTION
  ables in many areas contributed sons to the Restoration fighting, for
  the most part ordinary Japanese played little or no part in the events
  that have been described. This is not to say that they were ignorant of
  or out of sympathy with what took place, but they were unarmed and
  not involved. English who participated in the shelling of Shimonoseki
  in 1864 remarked on the objectivity of the commoners, who watched
  from a safe distance and helped landing parties load or destroy the
  Choshu batteries after the danger was past. When "imperial" forces
  reduced the Aizu castle town of Wakamatsu in 1868, commoners came
  forward with summer fruits to sell during lulls in the fighting. As the
  Restoration forces approached Edo, foreigners wrote of the unearthly
  calm and quiet that came over that normally bustling city, maintained
  in perfect order despite the sudden absence of its usual police forces.
  Nor did this change quickly. After the ill-fated Hagi rebellion of the
  Choshu leader Maebara Issei in 1876, Kido Takayoshi noted in his
  diary that the townsmen were so angered by the destruction that "in
  the event Maebara is treated leniently, the people in Hagi castletown
  are saying that they want to behead him themselves" and that "they
  will not sell the shizoku a sheet of paper or a single towel unless they
  are paid in cash."' The enthusiastic ebullience of a millenarian frenzy
  in 1867 served the Restoration activists' purposes in the complications
  it made for public order, but at no time did commoners contribute to
  the process by politically motivated disorder. They left for others a
  struggle that did not seem to concern them directly.
  Selected chronology of foreign relations, 1860s
  1858 
  Ii Naosuke forces approval of American treaty, Ansei purge.
  1859 Dutch terminate Deshima station at Nagasaki and establish consulate at Edo.
  Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakodate are opened as treaty ports.
  Bakufu permits import of military materials.
  1860 Mission is sent to Washington to ratify commercial treaty.
  Ii Naosuke is assassinated.
  1861 
  Russians occupy Tsushima.
  Choshu proposes first of kobu-gattai plans.
  Officially sponsored Batavia News begins publication.
  1862 Institute of Barbarian Books is renamed Institute of Western Books.
  Bunkyu reforms are announced.
  Richardson (Namamugi) incident takes place.
  Sankin kotai regulations are eased; hostages are released.
  Bakufu sends fifteen students to Europe.
  1863 Choshu shells foreign ships in Shimonoseki Straits.
  Choshu forces are driven from Kyoto.
  Institute for Western Books is renamed the Development Office.
  9 Sidney D. Brown and Akiko Hirota, trans., The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, vol. 3: 1874-1877
  (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1986), pp. 395,402.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  23
  English shell Kagoshima.
  Group of outside domain lords is named court counselors.
  1864 Choshu units try to seize palace in Kyoto and are driven off.
  Bakufu orders thirty-five domains to contribute to campaign against Choshu.
  English, French, American, and Dutch ships shell Choshu batteries at Shimonoseki.
  1865 Satsuma sends fifteen students to England.
  Bakufu orders second Choshu expedition.
  1866 Satsuma-Choshu alliance is formed.
  Second Choshu expedition begins.
  Shogun and Emperor Kdmei die.
  1867 Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki) resigns office.
  Political centralization
  The great task of the 1870s was to end the political and social separatism
  so that Japan could become an effective political unit. For several years,
  "Restoration" left the domains intact. The regime, dominated by
  Satsuma and Choshu, soon co-opted Tosa and Saga as allies and masked
  its efforts as the will of the boy emperor Mutsuhito with proclamations
  of a new era of "enlightened rule" (Meiji). Yet it was effectively re-
  stricted to that part of the Tokugawa domain that it kept. The only
  certainty was that the Tokugawa bakufu had been eliminated.
  Many feared the development of a new hegemon in accordance with
  the patterns of previous bakumatsu periods, and chaos in a struggle
  between Satsuma and Choshu for such hegemony seemed equally pos-
  sible. Tosa leaders organized other Shikoku domains in a regional
  alliance, with contingency plans to snatch and "protect" the boy em-
  peror in the event of such violence. In the north a league of domains
  that had slowed the "imperial" advance in the closing months of the
  civil war had been animated more by suspicion of the southern fiefs
  than by loyalty to the Tokugawa cause, for they professed themselves
  no less "loyal" than their opponents. Indeed, even within the Toku-
  gawa camp, there had been no dispute about imperial sovereignty, for
  the last shogun assured foreign representatives even after the outbreak
  of violence that no one disputed the imperial preeminence.
  The problems that existed were thus inherent in the existence of a
  "government" dependent for its force and much of its resources on
  two domains of the southwest while aspiring to national hegemony.
  Worse, the leaders of those two domains had until recently distrusted
  each other as thoroughly as they had disliked the Tokugawa bakufu.
  Those who worked at the political center in Kyoto and Tokyo, as Edo
  was renamed in 1868, were quickly criticized by their peers at home as
  deficient in loyalty to their domain lords in the expectation of national
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  24 
  INTRODUCTION
  prominence for themselves. Several factors helped offset this. In both
  Satsuma and Choshu, effective leadership lay with samurai counselors
  who had the prestige of successful leadership in the maneuvering of
  the 1860s. Perhaps more important still, they had control of the do-
  main's armed forces and thus of samurai loyalties that came with
  military command. Nevertheless it was a situation that could not be
  long continued, and quick action was necessary.
  The political experimentation of the early months, described in
  William Beasley's discussion of political institutions, saw the leaders
  maneuver behind a pattern of apparently "open" institutions, in which
  they held second-rank status themselves in deference to the court
  aristocrats and feudal lords who were in the top positions. Early pro-
  nouncements, like the emperor's "Charter Oath" of April 6, 1868,
  promised all that decisions would be reached on the basis of "general
  opinion," that "councils" would be established to work that out, and
  that "all classes" would enjoy equal opportunities to work out their
  reasonable desires. Then, as the warfare drew to a close, institutions
  were reshuffled to reduce the incubus of the old elite, and responsibil-
  ity was narrowed to reflect the role of the Satsuma-Choshu middle
  samurai more accurately. It was a fascinating moment of changing
  status. Just as the imperial court provided the focus for changing
  loyalties from bakufu and domain to nation, imperial office and court
  attire provided the blind for a shift from hierarchic samurai loyalties to
  a new and more nearly egalitarian (in samurai terms) world of imperial
  service. It was not immediately successful. When the lord of Tosa
  slighted a retainer who presumed to stand his ground, he drew a retort
  that, samurai though he had been, he was now an imperial official. As
  late as 1876, on the other hand, Kido Takyoshi expressed his anger
  that the lord of Satsuma denied equality to an imperial messenger;
  "the General was treated exactly as if he were still a retainer, and could
  not sit on the same level with [Lord] Shimazu, [who] waited for him in
  a haughty manner."10
  There were two principal steps in the process of political unifica-
  tion. In 1869 the samurai leaders of Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa per-
  suaded their lords to petition the imperial court to accept the return of
  their registers. "The abode wherein we the undersigned dwell is the
  Sovereign's land," their petition read, "the people over whom we rule
  10 See Albert M. Craig, "The Central Government," and Michio Umegaki, "From Domain to
  Prefecture," in Jansen and Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition, pp. 36-67 and 91-110; and
  Kido, Diary, p. 480.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  2$
  are his people. Why should we privately own them?" They went on to
  ask that
  an Imperial command be issued that the domains of all the hart be reorga-
  nized; and also that all the regulations, from the ordering of laws, institu-
  tions, and military affairs, even until the fashioning of uniforms and instru-
  ments, issue from the Imperial Government, and the conduct of all the affairs
  of the realm, whether great or small be placed under unified control.
  Significantly, it was only then that Japan would "stand beside the
  foreign Powers." The court hesitated some months before accepting
  this petition. During that period, other domains, anxious not to seem
  less loyal than the Restoration leaders, came flooding in with compara-
  ble petitions, and so when the acceptance was made public, it was no
  longer a chiefly Satsuma-Choshu idea.
  With authority came responsibility, and the court responded by
  appointing the former lords as governors of their domains. Uniform
  procedures were prescribed for all domains, and one of these stipu-
  lated that the lords reserve one-tenth of their revenue for their own
  needs. Thus an embryo distinction between public and private was
  worked into the system. Next came the regularization and simplifica-
  tion of samurai ranks from the complexity they had known. Lords and
  court nobles were to be distinguished as kazoku, samurai as shizoku,
  and the lower ranks as sotsu. The national government was now in
  theory responsible for samurai stipends, and it soon found that burden
  impossible to combine with effective administration. Meanwhile, a
  number of domains petitioned to be absorbed into the imperial land.
  These requests were held at arm's length for a time, but they indicated
  that many were aware of the necessity for a rationalization of adminis-
  trative units.
  There were good reasons for the Satsuma and Choshu leaders to
  plan more effective centralization. Suspicion of their desires would
  continue so long as their domains existed. Military costs would be
  heavy for them as long as they alone had effective armies. Therefore it
  was not long before Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa pooled their troops to
  establish a ten-thousand-man "imperial guard" and, with that as a
  prelude, worked out the ordinance that abolished the domains and
  established seventy-five (later reduced to forty-seven) units for admin-
  istration. The lords-become-governors were recalled to Tokyo "for
  consultation," and the central government appointed real governors to
  administer the newly designated prefectures. This took place in 1871.
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  26 
  INTRODUCTION
  The government had now taken full responsibility upon itself, and
  it would require drastic new measures to make a success of the new
  system. Plans were immediately begun for a single and rational system
  of landholding and taxation, for a conscription system to replace the
  samurai as a national army, and for a school system to replace with a
  single educational grid over the land the mix of status-group schools
  that had proliferated in the last half-century of Tokugawa rule.
  These measures were announced in the waning months of 1872 and
  1873. Before that, however, forty-eight of the new government's lead-
  ers sailed from Yokohama, in implementation of another of the Char-
  ter Oath's promises, to "seek wisdom throughout the world in order to
  strengthen the foundations of imperial rule." An eighteen-month tour
  followed that was of tremendous importance for the future policies of
  selective modernization. The United States brought home the impor-
  tance of public schooling; "I have resolved," Kido wrote from Amer-
  ica, "to devote myself entirely to military and educational matters."
  And again, "We clearly must have schools if we are to encourage our
  country's development as a civilized country, improve ordinary peo-
  ple's knowledge, establish the power of the state, and maintain our
  independence and sovereignty." "Our people," he went on, "are no
  different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter
  of education or lack of education."" His Satsuma counterpart, Okubo
  Toshimichi, wrote equally enthusiastically about the industrial devel-
  opments he witnessed in Great Britain, and the embassy scribe, Kume
  Kunitake, concluded that Japan was only thirty or forty years behind
  the "advanced" West, which had known neither railroads nor modern
  weapons at the turn of the century.
  The Iwakura mission thus persuaded its members of the need to
  adopt Western institutions as appropriate to their needs, to educate
  and elevate their people into military, industrial, and political partici-
  pation, and to maintain those priorities upon their return. Kido
  Takayoshi, for example, was inclined to favor continental military
  moves before his departure but returned firmly convinced that it was
  much too early to do so. Before seeing the rest of the world, others
  were inclined to doubt the morality or wisdom of a decline in samurai
  support but returned convinced of the need to devise a system to
  convert that unproductive class into one that could contribute to na-
  tional wealth and strength. When the ambassadors returned home to
  11 Quoted in Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, translation edited by Marius B.
  Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 54-5.
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  27
  find that their colleagues were far advanced with plans for a show of
  strength with Korea, which had rejected overtures for modern interna-
  tional relations, they canceled those plans. Okubo soon concocted
  substitute plans for a more modestly sized force against Taiwan, but
  by then Kido, earlier belligerent with regard to Korea, objected
  strongly, though unsuccessfully, to that as well.
  The ambassadors' reversal of their colleagues' decision divided the
  ruling group. Some petitioned for an elective council that would reach
  decisions more democratically, whereas others retired in anger. The
  opposition movements of the decade are taken up by Stephen Vlastos
  in Chapter 6. They can be divided, as he shows, into agricultural,
  samurai, and liberal movements of protest. Farmers were alarmed by
  change, alienated by the tax reassessment that brought them hard and
  fast requirements after a more precedent-based and flexible village
  survey, and frightened by a new kind of state that had access to
  effective police enforcement of its requirements. When the country-
  side was faced with the realities of the new order, the optimistic expec-
  tations of a Utopian future that millenarian rehgious leaders had held
  out faded, though some of those expectations survived into the demo-
  cratic movements of the 1880s. The new regime proved to have ideo-
  logical expectations of its own that conflicted with those of many folk
  cults.12
  Samurai movements posed a sterner test for the new regime. They
  were centered in the same areas whose domains had led in the Restora-
  tion, for the civil war of 1868-9 had extinguished samurai expecta-
  tions in the north. The great Satsuma Rebellion led by the Restoration
  hero Saigo Takamori in 1877 presented the regime with its most diffi-
  cult test and required the expenditure of great financial and military
  resources. With its failure the Restoration decade can be said to have
  come to its end. Thereafter regional and class separatism had no fu-
  ture, for if Satsuma failed, no other domain could succeed. The nature
  of the samurai class helps explain the failure of these insurrections.
  Indignant as they might be over issues of personal disadvantage inher-
  ent in the decision to pension them off, a decision that culminated in
  compulsary commutations of stipends for interest-bearing bonds in
  1876 and the simultaneous prohibition of wearing swords, the warrior
  code of service and contempt for gain ruled out appeals to self-interest.
  Feudal barriers and jealousies also made it impossible to secure effec-
  12 Kano Masanao, "Yonaoshi no shiso to bummei kaika," in Kanao Masanao and Takagi
  Shunsuke, eds., I shin henkaku ni okeru zaisonleki shochoryu (Tokyo: San'ichi shobo, 1972),
  pp. 288-324.
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  28 
  INTRODUCTION
  tive cooperation between different domains, so that the insurrections
  came, and were repressed, piecemeal. The rebellions were proclaimed
  over issues of honor - policy on Korea, use of swords, real or imag-
  ined disrespect for local custom and leaders - and, with the exception
  of the case in Satsuma, involved relatively small numbers of men,
  usually too proud to seek assistance and too parochial to inspire wide
  support.
  Selected chronology for the 1870s
  1868 Edo is renamed Tokyo; era is changed to Meiji, one era per sovereign.
  1869 Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa ask the court to accept the return of their registers.
  Yasukuni Shrine is established as memorial to those killed in Restoration.
  1870 Commoners are permitted to take family names.
  1871 
  Ten-thousand-man unit established from Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa troops.
  Court calls in all daimyo-govemors and announces the abolition of domains.
  Iwakura mission leaves.
  1872 Permanent sale of land is permitted.
  Conscription ordinance and education ordinance are enacted.
  1873 
  Signs forbidding Christianity are taken down.
  Emperor's picture distributed to prefectures to build affection for him.
  Land taxes are revised.
  Itagaki, Soejima, Eto, and Saigo leave government and petition for constitution.
  1875 Japan exchanges with Russia Sakhalin for Kurils.
  1876 Medical system revision finds 14,807 Chinese-style, 5,097 Western-style, and 2,524
  eclectic-style doctors.
  1877 
  Satsuma Rebellion takes place.
  1878 
  Laws for local government are enacted.
  1879 
  Ryukyu kingdom is renamed prefecture.
  Army is revised with general staff, directly reporting to emperor.
  Source: Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Bummei kaika no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1979),
  pp. 3-42.
  The 188os: fashioning political institutions
  The three principal leaders of the Restoration government died within
  a year of one another a decade after the political overturn of 1868:
  Kido Takayoshi from illness, Saigo Takamori by his own hand upon
  the failure of the Satsuma Rebellion, and Okubo Toshimichi by assassi-
  nation in May 1878. The government leaders had used as structure the
  Council of State (Dajokan) of an earlier age, but the decision center
  was with the imperial councilors and not with titular ministers. The
  loss of the early triumvirate and the suppression of localism made it
  necessary to think about more enduring forms that would better serve
  a modern national state.
  The Charter Oath of 1868 had spoken of a "council chamber," and
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  29
  in 1876 the experimental but powerless "senate" (genroin) had, as
  William Beasley's discussion of institutions shows, begun deliberation
  on a more enduring form of state structure. The decision of the samu-
  rai leaders who left the government in 1874 to petition for an elective
  council was soon followed by a surge of activity in support of such
  goals. The government tried to co-opt some of this enthusiasm by
  drawing the Tosa leader, Itagaki Taisuke, back into its ranks in 1875,
  and a council of prefectural governors was set up to provide a forum
  for the discussion of problems, but those meetings proved unproduc-
  tive. Prefectural assemblies did provide elective experience and parlia-
  mentary practice for a constituency chosen on the basis of a tax qualifi-
  cation, but more was needed.
  The samurai leaders of the "People's Rights" movement worked
  with a series of organizations. Initially they were based on the needs of
  their samurai peers, but before long the movement had found echo in
  the interests of a local elite, ranging from village notables to rural
  brewers and informed farmers. National meetings were held in Osaka
  in March and October 1880, and the Liberal Party was formed at the
  second of those meetings to emerge as a national political movement at
  Osaka a year later in 1881. By that time the government was finding
  itself in trouble on several scores. The revelation of plans to sell off
  government assets developed for the colonization of Hokkaido stirred
  widespread discontent. This reached high quarters with petitions and
  resignations from high-ranking members of the armed forces. Non-
  Satsuma-Choshu officials in the central government were discussing
  ways to checkmate their more powerful colleagues, and unease ex-
  tended to court officials with ready access to the young emperor. As
  the fever of discontent mounted, Okuma Shigenobu, the minister of
  finance, submitted directly to the court a proposal for early adoption
  of an English-style constitutional system.
  In the fall of 1881, the Satsuma-Choshu leaders utilized the person
  of the young emperor to co-opt the popular movement and curb its
  leaders. Plans to sell the Hokkaido assets were canceled. Okuma was
  forced out of government to be replaced by Matsukata Masayoshi,
  who headed the Ministry of Finance for the rest of the decade. An
  imperial rescript, perhaps the most important of the era, announced
  that a national assembly would meet in 1890 and commissioned "the
  officials of Our Court" to take charge of all the preparations. With
  regard to the assembly and its constitution, the rescript said, "We
  shall personally make an impartial decision and in due time issue a
  proclamation." The statement ended with warnings of punishment for
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  30 
  INTRODUCTION
  those who, by trying to speed the timetable, might harm "Our great
  and farsighted plans." Soon I to Hirobumi was appointed head of a
  commission that journeyed to Europe to study other state charters.
  The product of its labors, the Meiji constitution of 1889, was cast in
  the mold of Prussian and Austrian institutions. It was to channel
  Japanese political life until the defeat of 1945.
  In the meantime, the People's Rights movement that had begun as
  samurai centered had made deep inroads into Japanese popular con-
  sciousness, particularly in central and northern Japan. Hundreds of
  organizations of local notables met in eager discussion of alternative
  formulations for electoral restraint on arbitrary government. The
  Meiji leaders saw themselves in a race against time to head off what
  they saw as anarchy and what their opponents saw as liberalism. Be-
  tween 1882 and 1884 a number of outbreaks of violence confirmed the
  leaders' fears and dismayed the Liberal Party leaders. They were
  harshly suppressed, and political activity went into decline during the
  final steps of constitutional preparation. When the document was com-
  pleted, the party leaders returned to political activity as candidates for
  elective office. In the twentieth century, party representatives went on
  to hold the highest cabinet posts; fully absorbed into the government
  structure, they vied with their former opponents to praise the enlight-
  ened statecraft of the monarch who had granted the constitution.
  The economic policies of the decade affected the modern Japanese
  state as profoundly as did the political institutions that were worked
  out. The centralization and pacification of the 1870s had been expen-
  sive. Assuming samurai debts, funding samurai pensions and bonds,
  suppressing rebellion, and launching experimental industries and pilot
  plants had forced the government to issue an ever-increasing volume
  of paper money, and the result was a strong inflationary tide. This
  benefited the landowners whose produce grew in value, but it hurt
  agricultural and urban workers, former samurai, and especially the
  government, which soon found itself overextended. Debates within
  the government polarized around two positions. Okuma Shigenobu, a
  Saga councilor who favored a policy of rapid growth, advocated a
  foreign loan to bolster the currency and the continuation of easy
  money. His opponents argued the case for deflationary policies that
  would lower the price level and increase the real value of the land tax.
  After Okuma's ouster from the government in 1881, he entered the
  party movement as a rival of Itagaki Taisuke. In his place as finance
  minister came Matsukata Masayoshi of Satsuma. Matsukata pursued
  orthodox financial policies to provide a basis for future capitalist
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  31
  growth by curbing the money supply and, in so doing, brought on a
  drastic deflation. This contributed to rural hardship and helped bring
  about the participation of villagers in the political party movement. At
  several points it combined with insensitive and arrogant administra-
  tive tactics to produce flash points of violence in the period between
  1882 and 1884. Matsukata's policies also established the infrastructure
  for capitalist development by building the Bank of Japan and other
  financial institutions on a sound basis and prepared the way for Ja-
  pan's adoption of the gold standard in 1898. In the process many of
  the provisional, pilot plants that the government had launched in the
  1870s were sold to private interests to get them off the government
  treasury. The opportunities that this provided for investors in many
  fields helped lead to the phenomenon of large combines which came to
  be known by the derogatory term of zaibatsu. These developments are
  treated at length in E. Sydney Crawcour's discussion of economic
  innovation in Chapter 9.
  The 1880s also saw the development of institutions of local govern-
  ment. These were under the direction of the military leader Yamagata
  Aritomo, who served as home minister. On the local, as on the national,
  level, models were found in Prussian and Austrian examples. Just as the
  drafters of the constitution used the German legal specialist Herman
  Roessler, Yamagata took as his guide Albert Mosse. Together they
  devised a series of measures to structure local participation under the
  direction of an appointed governor, in the expectation that this would
  provide a grass-roots defense against the spread of "people's rights"
  radicalism. Governors could block local initiatives when they seemed
  undesirable; they could dissolve prefectural assemblies; and they could
  order local taxes without the approval of the assembly. Like the Meiji
  constitution, this set of laws for the organization of villages, towns,
  districts, and prefectures remained basically unchanged until 1945.
  Internal reform dominated the priorities of the 1880s, but issues in
  foreign affairs were by no means lacking. The galling inequality of
  Japan's treaties with the Western powers affected the leaders' priori-
  ties. A series of unsuccessful efforts to secure reform ran afoul of the
  powers' refusal to consider abolition of extraterritoriality in the ab-
  sence of the completion of modern codes of law. Government leaders'
  willingness to compromise on these points by suggestions to share
  jurisdiction with foreign judges inflamed nationalist opinion, costing
  one foreign minister his post and another, very nearly, his life. Efforts
  to work out a psychologically satisfactory relationship with Korea
  stirred Korean conservatives' resentment of Japanese interference. In
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  32 
  INTRODUCTION
  1882 and 1884, disorder in Korea brought on confrontations with
  Ch'ing China, which tried to maintain primacy in Korea under the
  tributary tradition. By a treaty worked out at Tientsin between Ito
  Hirobumi and Li Hung-chang, Japan and China agreed to mutual
  disengagement in Korea, with promises not to introduce military
  strength without formal notification to the other. In this lay the seeds
  of conflict a decade later once Japan's modern political institutions
  were in place.
  Selected chronology, 1880s
  1881 Government announces sale of Development Office assets in Hokkaido; Okuma leaves
  office.
  Imperial rescript promising constitution in nine years.
  1882 ltd Hirobumi leaves for Europe to study constitutional systems.
  Bank of Japan is established.
  Fukushima incident involves Liberal Party leader Kono Hironaka.
  1884 Peerage is created for former lords and court nobles.
  Chichibu incident leads to suppression of thousands of dissenters; Liberal Party dis-
  bands.
  1885 Cabinet system is established; Council of State is dissolved.
  1886 Police station network is developed for entire country.
  1887 ltd and commission work in seclusion to prepare constitution.
  Government bans 570 opposition leaders from having residences within three miles of
  imperial palace.
  Local government system is completed.
  Privy Council is established to rule on constitution, with Ito as its head.
  1888 Army and navy general staff systems separated.
  1889 Constitution is promulgated.
  1890 First national election is held.
  Imperial Diet convenes.
  Constitutional government
  The Meiji state was completed in the 1890s. In that year the constitu-
  tion went into effect with the first election, which found the political
  parties besting a jerry-built coalition that conservatives had designed
  in hopes that it would checkmate them. In the House of Peers sat
  members of the new nobility, created in 1884 from former court aristo-
  crats and feudal lords, together with a scattering of new peers named
  from among government leaders. Provision was also made for represen-
  tation of the growing plutocracy by setting aside a number of seats for
  the highest taxpayers in the land; term imperial appointees completed
  the body. Out of respect for the imperial sovereignty, however, the
  constitution made little explicit provision for executive power, and
  cabinets were selected behind the scenes. For the decade an alterna-
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  STAGES OF TRANSITION 
  33
  tion between Satsuma and Choshu, and to some degree between civil
  and military leaders, characterized the central government. At the end
  of the decade, however, the designer of the new institutions, Ito
  Hirobumi, concluded that it would be desirable to form his own politi-
  cal party in order to avoid relying on coalitions with party leaders.
  This represented an admission that the new institutions, which had
  been designed to "assist" and not to direct affairs, had provided genu-
  ine opportunity for participation, if only to hinder.
  Much of the Western world viewed Japan's experimentation with
  limited popular participation with profound doubt, uncertain that the
  product of centuries of Western institutional growth could be trans-
  planted to an Asian country. The Meiji leaders were well aware of this
  and were determined to show the outsiders to be wrong. Once they
  had done so, they knew, their prospects for abolition of the unequal
  treaties would be much improved. Events proved them correct. In
  1894 the existence of "Western" political and legal institutions made it
  possible to persuade England, and then the other powers, to imple-
  ment the treaty revision that had been sought at intervals since the
  1870s. Akira Iriye's discussion of Japan's rise to great-power status in
  Chapter 12 documents the course of Meiji diplomacy. It begins with
  the early Meiji delineation of national borders and culminates with
  Japan's victories over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, making possi-
  ble the annexation of Korea that brought Japan into the club of impe-
  rialist powers.
  A focus on cultural and intellectual trends would, of course, pro-
  duce a different periodization, and for those areas, a division of the
  Meiji period into decades is no more satisfactory than the division of
  Japan's longer history into centuries is for general history. Kenneth
  Pyle's discussion of the emergence of Meiji conservatism in the late
  1880s in Chapter 11 illustrates this. His account reminds us that in the
  1880s there was much more than institution building going on. For a
  time, government leaders tried to promote a "crash" program of cul-
  tural Westernization in their program to speed change and win foreign
  favor. Their failure to achieve treaty reform combined with wide-
  spread charges of toadying to the powers to produce a strong backlash
  of nationalist emphasis. The more interesting aspect of this came when
  Shiga Shigetaka and other writers tried to articulate a cultural identity
  and role for Japanese tradition. The vigorous battle of words and
  books that followed enriched Meiji cultural life. This development is
  best seen as one of a number of cycles of popular and official enthusi-
  asm. Some of the Meiji figures who promoted "Western" outlooks in
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  34 
  INTRODUCTION
  the early 1880s were concerned a decade later that the tides of change
  were running too fast, and they feared that they might soon be too
  strong to control. The popular enthusiasm for people's rights made it
  seem urgent to harness Japanese tradition in the cause of conserva-
  tism. According to Carol Gluck, the panoply of emperor-centered
  ideology was unfurled at the end, and not the beginning, of the Meiji
  period.l* The sovereign whose statements exhorted his subjects to
  reform and modernization in the early years of his reign sounded a
  good deal more traditional by the end of his rule.
  A focus on economic development, as Sydney Crawcour's discus-
  sion shows, might provide yet another chronology. The 1880s would
  be a period of preparation for the building of the infrastructure of
  modern capitalism, and genuine industrial development would be-
  come quantifiable only in the first decade of the twentieth century.
  Nevertheless, the stated aims and priorities of the Meiji leadership
  were focused on building central government strength through mod-
  ern political institutions, and for those efforts the periodization that
  has been adopted, distinguishing periods of unification, preparation,
  and implementation retains coherence and validity.
  Select chronology for the 1890s
  1889 Yamagata Aritomo heads first cabinet under the Meiji constitution.
  Civil code is announced, stirs opposition as too Western, and is deferred.
  1893 Imperial rescript required to get Diet to support costs of navy.
  1894 Treaty reform succeeds with England.
  War is fought with China over Korea.
  1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki is signed.
  Liberal Party joins ltd cabinet.
  18% Commercial treaty with China adds new concessions for all powers.
  1898 Revised civil code is adopted with strong powers for family head.
  1899 Bureaucracy is sheltered from political appointments.
  ltd Hirobumi begins formation of political party with lecture tour.
  1900 Service ministers are restricted to generals and admirals on the active list.
  Rikken seiyukai is formed under ltd.
  Japan joins Western intervention against Boxer disturbance in China.
  Electorate tax qualification lowered form ¥15 to ¥10.
  HISTORIANS AND N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y JAPAN
  History, politics, and values have intersected in interpretations of the
  development of modern Japan. It could hardly have been otherwise.
  13 Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  35
  The state that emerged from the nineteenth-century transition veered
  so sharply from parliamentary constitutionalism to militarism and
  then to pacifism, from the pursuit of national strength through arms to
  that pursuit through commerce, that no responsible historian could
  fail to ask why that was so. Contemporary Japanese are only two
  generations away from their Restoration forebears. The Showa em-
  peror, Hirohito (1901-), grandson of the Meiji founder of the modern
  state, has frequently traced the postwar democratic and "peace" consti-
  tution to promises made in the Charter Oath of 1868. The Tokugawa-
  Meiji transition is inevitably seen through contemporary attitudes and
  problems, and it has been explained and evaluated differently, first
  from the euphoria of military success and more recently from the
  trauma of political failure. In history-conscious Japan, the understand-
  ing of the Meiji Restoration has seemed central to the needs and hopes
  of each successive present.
  The official view, the way that the government leaders wanted
  things to be seen, was cast along the lines of a morality play of heroic
  dimensions. The "great work" (taigyd) of the Meiji Restoration con-
  sisted of the return of power to the throne and represented the culmina-
  tion of a long process of growing public affection for and loyalty to a
  long-neglected sovereign. Once in power he had shaped the policies of
  his ministers. His rescripts encouraged and praised his people and his
  ministers.1'* All successes were ascribed to his wisdom, and difficulties
  were eased by his compassion. The leaders felt themselves ennobled
  by having had the privilege of acting as his servants. In conversations
  and recorded discussions they usually checked themselves at the point
  of self-congratulation to emphasize their dependence on the imperial
  favor and charisma.
  The Meiji government was not long in following, in its own fashion,
  Chinese traditions of official historiography. An office for this was
  established as early as 1869, when the boy emperor prepared for Sanjo
  Sanetomi, then the chief minister, authorization to initiate a historio-
  graphical office charged with the proper preservation and compilation
  of Japanese history, presumably to free it from the shogunal bias that
  had slanted historical writing in the samurai world that was now pass-
  ing. The Fukko ki (Chronicle of the return to antiquity) was the prod-
  uct of a directive to "establish the merit of lords and subjects, make
  clear the speech of the civilized at home and the barbarian without,
  14 For the rescripts and their role, see Marius B. Jansen, "Monarchy and Modernization in
  japan," Journal of Asian Studies 36 (August 1977): 611-22.
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  36 
  INTRODUCTION
  and thereby contribute to virtue in the realm."1' The editorial board of
  this project represented leaders from the principal Restoration cen-
  ters, and it was clear that interests of those groups would not be
  slighted. In 1911 an imperial edict established the Society for the
  Compilation of Records of the Restoration and established it within
  the Ministry of Education. When the bill authorizing this was intro-
  duced in the Imperial Diet, representatives of the political parties
  expressed their misgivings about the probable political nature of a
  historical project sponsored by the Satsuma-Choshu men who ran the
  government. In response, the government spokesmen assured them
  that it was not the intent to write history so much as it was to compile
  the documentary record. Even so, the nature of the advisory board
  (Yamagata Aritomo of Choshu, Oyama Iwao and Matsukata Masayo-
  shi of Satsuma, Hijikata Hisamoto, Tanaka Mitsuaki, and Itagaki
  Taisuke of Tosa), showed how vigilant the authorities were to protect
  their interests. The presence of representatives of the principal lords
  and court aristocrats as counselors gave additional evidence of such
  concern. Baron Kaneko Kentaro, who chaired the commission to-
  gether with Inoue Kaoru of Choshu, personally checked and at points
  intervened in the summary narrative account of the Restoration, Ishin
  shi, that was issued in six volumes in 1938.l6
  For the most part, however, these institutions were true to their
  promise to compile sources and eschew interpretive narratives. The
  society's staff came to number nearly fifty specialists who gathered
  and checked relevant documents, many of them in family record collec-
  tions, to assemble one of the world's most massive collections of docu-
  ments.17 The project continued under the Ministry of Education and
  was located on the campus of the Imperial University of Tokyo (after
  1946, the University of Tokyo) until 1949, after which it was placed
  under the University of Tokyo as the Historiographical Institute. Ac-
  tual direction was in the hands of the university's professoriate of
  historians, who exercised strict standards for documentary authentic-
  15 Fukko ki, 16 vols. (Tokyo: Naigai shoseki, 1929-31). This is a printed edition of the original
  manuscript, begun in 1872 and completed in 1889, and thereafter housed in the collection of
  Tokyo Imperial University. Editorial responsibility lay with the Teikoku daigaku rinji hennen-
  shi hensan gakari, the forerunner of the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo.
  16 Some have gone so far as to relate the establishment of the society to the concern over the
  anarchist movement that led to the execution of Kotoku Shusui and other anarchists in 1911,
  for participation in an abortive plot on the emperor's life, and the publication of Ishin shi to
  the time of the outbreak of full-scale war with China. See Toyama Shigeki, Meiji ishin to
  gendai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968), pp. 16-17.
  17 For a brief description of the product, too vast for publication, see Conrad Totman, The
  Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862-186S (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980),
  pp. 549-52, who describes it as "one of the great historiographical triumphs of humankind."
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  37
  ity. Until the opening of private collections to research scholars in the
  years after Japan's surrender in 1945, these records, to which access
  was restricted, furnished the chief sources for Japan's mid-nineteenth-
  century history.
  Narrative and interpretive accounts on a more popular level did not
  become important until the latter part of the Meiji period. When the
  entire education system was in place, the preparation of standard
  textbooks for the lower schools required officially approved versions
  of past Japanese history, in which imperial loyalty was identified with
  morality. The textbook accounts represented a conscious effort to
  educate young Japanese in a heroic myth of nation foundation. Inevita-
  bly, the government leaders were important beneficiaries of this ef-
  fort. Men are rarely heroes to their contemporaries, and it was some
  time before a hierarchical structure of prestige developed in the Meiji
  period. There are accounts of sharp disagreements between the Iwa-
  kura ambassadors and the young charge at the Japanese legation in
  Washington in 1872, and as late as 1898, well into the era of parliamen-
  tary government, Hoshi Torn, minister to Washington, refused to
  follow the orders of his foreign minister.
  The elevation of the emperor by the institutions that were com-
  pleted in 1890 - the constitution, imperial house law, and education
  rescript - had as their corollary the elevation of his ministers. By the
  time the general-circulation magazine Taiyd appeared in 1895 with the
  capability of glossy illustrations, they were frequently photographs of
  ministers of state resplendent in their imperial decorations. The mem-
  oirs of Kozaki Hiromichi, a pioneer Christian pastor whose Kuma-
  moto peers shared his early distaste for the Meiji leaders, could note
  with gratification the inclusion of a high official's lady, "Princess
  Katsura," among his congregation.
  By the late Meiji years, however, the struggles of the 1860s were no
  longer divisive but inclusive in character. Tokugawa culture and the
  shogunal capital of Edo had become part of a romantic and nostalgic
  past. Yoshinobu (Keiki), the last shogun, was honored with the resto-
  ration of his court rank in 1880, was appointed to the highest rank in
  the new peerage in 1884, and was received in private audience by the
  sovereign in 1898. Saigo Takamori, a Restoration military hero whose
  exploits had begun with the surrender of Edo in 1868 and had ended
  with his suicide in rebellion in 1877, received a posthumous imperial
  pardon and court rank in 1889. An era of good feeling surrounded the
  events of the Restoration days with something like the nostalgic haze
  that gradually obscured Civil War antagonisms in the United States.
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  38 
  INTRODUCTION
  The Restoration violence gradually became a national epic that had
  been essential to the creation of a state structure capable of resisting
  the foreign threat. Its figures, losers as well as winners, had been
  activated by pure, though in some cases mistaken, concepts of impe-
  rial loyalty. Yoshinobu's memoirs, Sekimukai hikki, recorded between
  1907 and 1911, stressed the consistency of his loyalist motivations.
  The full elaboration of the myth of the creation of the emperor-
  centered state structure, the kokutai, was a product of the late Meiji
  state, essentially of the twentieth century. In the words of a recent
  study, "Whatever was completed in the years before 1890, ideology in
  national earnest had more truly just begun."18
  In one sense, the emphasis on national ideology in late Meiji times
  was created to offset an earlier and pervasive view that had been more
  concerned with fitting Japan's experience into that of world, Western
  history than with emphasizing its uniqueness. Fukuzawa Yukichi's
  Outline of a Theory of Civilization, published in 1875, spoke of imperial
  loyalism as having value chiefly because it could stir the national effort
  to improve the country. He argued that "we should venerate this
  union between the empire and our national polity not because it goes
  back to the origins of Japanese history, but because its preservation
  will help us maintain modern Japanese sovereignty and advance our
  civilization. A thing is not to be valued for itself, but for its function."
  And again, "Every country has its political legitimization; Japanese
  legitimation has frequently undergone change, and in this it is no
  different from other countries; thus there is no reason for boasting on
  this score." What mattered was the state of a country's civilization and
  the capacity of its inhabitants to respond to the spirit of the times.
  This had been a factor in the history of every country in the world:
  "Even had the American people been defeated and temporarily set
  back, they would have produced 480 great leaders [as successors to the
  original 48] and ten George Washingtons."1' For Fukuzawa and the
  writers of the 1880s, the problem was to fit Japan's experience into the
  larger patterns of Western history. Fukuzawa found his models in
  Buckle and Guizot. He used the word revolution for the Meiji change,
  but his view, though it included public dissatisfaction as an element of
  that' overthrow, was closer to the classical Confucian view of a change-
  over resulting from a changed spirit of the times in which a govern-
  ment loses its mandate. "In the end," he wrote, "public opinion
  18 Gluck, Japan's Modem Myths, p. 26.
  19 Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and
  G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1973), pp. 33,24,27,60.
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  39
  coalesced around the one slogan of 'overthrow the Bakufu,' the intel-
  lectual powers of the whole nation were directed toward this single
  goal, and the end result was the successful revolution of 1867. "20
  A decade later a group of writers saw the Restoration somewhat
  differently. Intent on the People's Rights movement of their day, they
  saw the events of the 1860s and 1870s as preliminary to a new stage of
  political change, and the Restoration as the first step in a process that
  had still to be completed. Political theorists like Nakae Chomin spoke
  of this with confidence, but the most thorough treatment of the theme
  came at the hands of generalists who wrote for a mass audience:
  Tokutomi Soho, Taguchi Ukichi, Ukita Kazutami, Yamaji Aizan, and
  Takekoshi Yosaburo.21
  These writers had been stirred by Macaulay and Carlyle, and they
  looked for indications that the change in Japan would go on to produce
  the betterment of life that had followed the English revolution. The
  emergence of the popular democratic movement seemed to suggest
  that Japan might in fact be following the path of Western liberalism
  and enlightenment. Unfortunately, the promise had remained unful-
  filled. No social revolution had followed the political overturn, and the
  government was still dominated by a restrictive regional clique. These
  writers of "Whig" history, as Peter Duus called it, saw it as their task
  to build sentiment for the work of a "second restoration" to complete
  the first, so that a commoner society would replace the one in which
  they lived. Tokutomi, for instance, relied on the work of Herbert
  Spencer to argue the inevitability of Japan's becoming an "industrial
  society" in which popular sentiment and ability would lay the founda-
  tion for a mighty "floating wharf in the Pacific," its sky black with the
  "smoke rising from thousands of smokestacks. . . . And all this will
  come just because there is this precious freedom."22 Tokutomi felt his
  society was ready for this because of the material and social develop-
  ments that had prepared the way for truly significant progress. Inexo-
  rable laws of social progress had brought down the bakufu; the causes
  of the Restoration were to be found in the development of basic discon-
  tents within Tokugawa society, and its course had been determined
  less by the brilliance of its leaders than by the social disorder generated
  by an oppressed people that could suffer no longer. These writers
  20 Fukuzawa, An Outline, p. 15. See also the recent commentary by Maruyama Masao,
  "Bummeiron no gairyaktt" oyonde, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1986).
  21 See Peter Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style: The Min'yusha Historians and the Meiji
  Restoration," Journal of Asian Studies 33 (May 1974): 415-36.
  22 John D. Pierson, ToktuomiSoho 1863-1957-' A Journalist for Modem Japan (Princeton Univer-
  sity Press, 1980), p. 114; and Irokawa Daikichi, Meiji seishinshi (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo,
  1964).
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  40 
  INTRODUCTION
  wrote with approval of the strength of a rural squirarchy (a class from
  which many of them sprang) which had developed resentments against
  urban samurai bureaucrats. These "country gentlemen" (inaka shin-
  shi) had dominated society in Kumamoto, where Tokutomi and Ukita
  had had their youthful schooling under the tutelage of the American
  Civil War artillery captain L. L. Janes, whose school had produced
  the "Kumamoto band" of Christian Westernizers.2*
  Tokutomi, Takekoshi, Ukita, Taguchi, Yamaji, and other "Whig"
  historians thus produced a "progressive" view of Meiji changes in
  which the accomplishments were possible because of social devel-
  opments and not because of the achievements of a leadership for
  which they had only limited respect. They were in fact suspicious
  that the leadership was reactionary and determined to retain its grip
  on power in the face of rising popular demand for participation, and
  they designed their histories as political statements. In turn, as Pro-
  fessor Pyle's discussion of Meiji conservatism shows, they had the
  effect of stimulating a more conservative opposition, one that valo-
  rized Japanese tradition more highly than they did themselves. Out
  of that crucible of contending views came the official textbook ac-
  counts of modern Japanese history. It was a struggle that went
  beyond the Meiji changes themselves, for loyalty rendered abso-
  lute made it necessary to rewrite much of the past to select the
  virtuous for praise. Political considerations in the first decade of the
  twentieth century made it advisable to rearrange accounts of four-
  teenth-century political history and resulted in rewording course ti-
  tles at the imperial universities.2''
  In a setting that politicized any matter related to the imperial court,
  academic historians were usually content to leave the events of the
  nineteenth century for other scholars. At the pinnacle of the educa-
  tional structure the state universities had no chairs in modern history,
  and students seeking topics for graduation theses were usually advised
  that the events of the Restoration were still too close to the present and
  better suited to politics and journalism.2* For the most part, the field
  was left to specialists in legal history and institutional history like
  Yoshino Sakuzo and Osatake Takeki, who led in the collection and
  publication of sources neglected by the official institute,26 and eco-
  23 F. G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L. L. Janes and Japan (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985).
  24 See H. Paul Varley, Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan (New York: Columbia University
  Press, 1971).
  25 Toyaira,Meiji ishin togendai, p. iy.
  26 Yoshino Sakuzo, Meiji bunka zenshu, 24 vols. (Tokyo: Ninon hyoronsha, 1927-30).
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  41
  nomic historians who focused on social and economic changes rather
  than political events.27
  In the 1920s and 1930s a new group of writers was drawn to nine-
  teenth-century themes precisely because they were political. World
  War I and its aftermath brought a new stage of industrial development
  to Japan as manufacturers seized the opportunities that resulted from
  the West's preoccupation with the conflict. Its aftermath brought new
  social problems; the postwar slump produced unprecedented numbers
  and sizes of labor disputes. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik revolution in
  Russia, together with its reverberations in postwar Europe, gave Marx-
  ist economic theory a new theoretical relevance. It now became possi-
  ble to relate the foreign ("capitalist") threat to Japan to the develop-
  ment of modern ("capitalist") Japan, thereby combining what had
  been discrete fields of inquiry. These concerns centered in economic
  history, a field that had already led in the examination of late Toku-
  gawa developments. Out of this context came two schools of interpreta-
  tion whose propositions divided and dominated most writing for the
  decades to come. Their arguments centered on the nature of the late
  Tokugawa economy, but they had relevance to Japan's political pres-
  ent and future.
  One group held that the Meiji Restoration, because of the leadership
  of members of the ruling class and the lack of popular participation, had
  resulted in an emperor-centered absolutism and that the step required
  for further social change was a move toward a bourgeois revolution.
  The classical collection in which this position was argued, the Lectures
  on the History of the Development of Japanese Capitalism,28 gave its adher-
  ents the name of the "Lectures" (koza) faction. A second group held
  that the changes of the nineteenth century, though incomplete, had
  nevertheless constituted a bourgeois movement and that it was conse-
  quently possible to work for further social progress through the existing
  political system. Its adherents worked with labor and farm groups, in
  publications and political organizations, to earn the "Labor-Farmer"
  \rdno) label. Growing political pressure in the late 1920s and 1930s
  gradually made difficult a more explicit pursuit of these Marxist
  themes, and so practitioners had to cope with censorship and persecu-
  tion by masking their arguments in prose that was increasingly opaque
  and convoluted. The controversy had direct relevance to the pro-
  27 For example, Honjo Eijiro, Nihon keizai shi gaisetsu and Kinsei hoken shakai no kenkyu, both
  published in 1928. Osatake Takeki was also the author of a standard narrative of the Restora-
  tion struggle, published after World War II: Meiji ishin, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hakuyosha, 1946-9).
  28 Nihon shihonshugi hattatsuski koza (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1932).
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  42 
  INTRODUCTION
  grams of the Japanese left. The term tennosei ("emperor system") fo-
  cused on the imperial institution as the keystone in the arch of comple-
  mentary interest groups - the "feudal" landed class, the military, and
  the great combines or zaibatsu - which combined to block democratic
  developments. Fear of impending militarism and continental war gave
  new relevance and urgency to scholarly analysis. In 1932, shortly after
  the invasion of Manchuria and the renewed suppression of the Japanese
  left, new theses of the Japan Communist Party called for an attack on
  the tennosei as the central problem facing the country. This coincided
  closely in time with the appearance of the first volume of the Lectures.
  Tennosei as a term had been used earlier, but from this point on it had a
  more specific definition. In terms of historical discussion, the impor-
  tance of this debate lay in the way that it forced its participants to go
  beyond and behind the political history that had been the chief focus for
  earlier scholars and to trace social currents and relationships on both
  sides of the Restoration so as to stress continuities. Wartime repression
  and solidarity provided little encouragement for the development of
  these themes, but it helped prepare for the explosion of scholarly activ-
  ity that followed the lifting of the taboos that had surrounded discus-
  sions of the imperial state before the surrender of 1945.
  In postsurrender Japan, disillusion and derogation of the military-
  imperial state combined with respect for the Marxists who had tried to
  resist that order and had predicted its disastrous end. Marxism was in
  fact almost unchallenged for a time, as real or apparent supporters of
  the old order were silenced by dismissal and purge. The sudden lifting
  of taboos on discussions of recent history produced an emphatic rejec-
  tion of the values of prewar Japanese orthodoxy and especially of the
  affirmation of loyalism that had been its center. A new and vehement
  denunciation of the "emperor system" led to efforts to find its origin.
  It was, wrote the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi, "a total mental and
  spiritual structure" and part of every Japanese who had grown up
  under its sway. "Seeing it as a part of our consciousness," he argued,
  "is the precondition for freeing ourselves from it."29
  The postsurrender turn to social history, most of it phrased in
  Marxist categories, had many aspects. In the early postsurrender years
  of hardship, little research of substance was possible, and Marxist
  categories offered an inviting framework for the facts that lay at hand.
  With economic and social recovery, however, a prodigious effort was
  poured into documentary, local, and regional study in an effort to
  29 Quoted in Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, p. 13.
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  43
  provide a better base for understanding what had gone wrong in mod-
  ern Japan. The "Lectures"-"Labor-Farmer" dispute of the 1930s
  revived in vigor amid an explosion of effort and produced a literature
  so voluminous that several histories of the debate were written.3° In
  the course of this dispute, positions came to be refined, merged, and
  even reversed, until their genealogy became tedious for all but the
  most committed participants. Some of the contentions were once again
  related to contemporary politics. Writers saw in the anticommunist
  measures that were taken during the Korean War of 1950-53, and in
  the debates about revision of the postwar constitution and about re-
  armament, a revival of militarism and ultranationalism, and made it
  their task to criticize the past. The Meiji Restoration and the Meiji
  state remained contemporary and relevant, and they contained por-
  tents of a future that could seem alarming.
  In the 1960s many American and some Japanese historians tried to
  extricate the discourse from categories that seemed to have become
  sterile by discussing nineteenth-century Japan in terms of "moderniza-
  tion" instead of "capitalism" and "absolutism." Japan's economic re-
  covery and its stability under its revised constitutional order seemed to
  place it much closer to the developed or modernized polities of the
  West and to make of it a contrast with the turbulence being experi-
  enced by the so-called Third World countries, especially mainland
  China. Modernization was in origin a neutral term, designed to de-
  scribe the maturation of scientific knowledge, bureaucratic organiza-
  tion of life in school, workplace, and politics, mass education, urban-
  ization, industrialization, and internationalization. For most of those
  who used it, the term represented an effort to avoid politics and to
  substitute one generalization for others, in the hope that it would
  prove more objective and more inclusive.
  Seen through the categories of modernization, nineteenth-century
  Japan became more nearly a unit, with a steady increase in education,
  urbanization, internationalization, and bureaucratization; the late To-
  kugawa efforts for self-strengthening by leading domains demon-
  strated a mode of rational planning that was centralized and intensified
  in the Meiji unification, and the commercialization of late Tokugawa
  society prepared the way for the capitalist institutions of Meiji Japan.
  That these could and did lead to unfortunate consequences as Japan
  30 For a recent discussions, see Yasukichi Yasuba, "Anatomy of the Debate on Japanese Capital-
  ism," Journal of Japanese Studies 2 (Autumn 1975): 63-82; and Germaine A. Hoston, Marx-
  ism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1986).
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  44 
  INTRODUCTION
  turned to the construction of an empire in the twentieth century was
  not at issue, but that they were nevertheless of critical importance in
  the construction of the advanced democracy of contemporary Japan
  seemed no less important. A series of conference volumes in which
  Western specialists explored these themes exercised considerable influ-
  ence as they reoriented thought along these lines.»'
  Meanwhile, economic historians in Japan, with new access to pri-
  mary materials and new instruments of statistical and demographic
  analysis at hand, took up quantitative studies that revised long-held
  postulates about immiseration in late Tokugawa Japan and in turn
  stimulated sweeping new hypotheses from Western scholars.**
  As could have been anticipated, these developments were contested
  by many Japanese scholars, especially those committed to the left-of-
  center political positions. They were offended by what seemed the
  substitution of a "positive" for a previously "negative" view of nine-
  teenth-century developments. Although those who wrote of modern-
  ization saw the term as neutral - Hitler's Third Reich, after all, was
  the product of a "modernized" society - their critics charged them
  with having a hidden agenda of support for contemporary capitalist
  Japan and denied the possibility or, indeed, the desirability of value-
  free analysis. For many Japanese the term modern was, furthermore,
  one that brought with it the opprobrium of prewar cultural and liter-
  ary struggles in which ideologists of Japanism had called for efforts to
  "transcend" modernity and Western materialism. Most directly, per-
  haps, they were alarmed by the possible political utility of the theme
  for Japan's governing conservatives who seemed to be restructuring
  the postwar polity by urging revision of the constitution of 1947,
  restoration of nationalist holidays, and especially rearmament. As the
  centennial of the Meiji Restoration approached in 1968, the influential
  historian Toyama Shigeki pointed to areas of agreement between mod-
  ernization analysis and prewar nationalist writing (a high evaluation of
  industrialization, the indiscriminate listing of criteria instead of valori-
  31 The conference volumes, all issued by Princeton University Press, are Changing Japanese
  Attitudes Toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (1965); The State and Economic Enter-
  prise in Japan, ed. William W. Lockwood (1965); Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan,
  ed. R. P. Dore (1967); Political Development in Modern Japan, ed. Robert E. Ward (1968);
  Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald H. Shively (1971); and Dilemmas
  of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James W. Morley (1971).
  32 For example, Hayami Akira, Nihon keizaishi e no shikaku (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha,
  1968); and Shimbo Hiroshi, Hayami Akira, and Nishikawa Shunsaku, Suryo keizaishi nyumon
  (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1975); Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and
  Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
  sity Press, 1977).
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  45
  zation of democratization, a lack of emphasis on imperialism, a favor-
  able view of the Meiji leaders, and the failure to relate modernization
  to imperialist developments) and made explicit the need to criticize the
  contemporary government's policies in any exposition of the Meiji
  Restoration. 33
  By the late 1960s the preoccupation of a new generation of Ameri-
  can scholars with the Vietnam War produced an almost identical repu-
  diation of the "modernization" school and its works. Now writings
  focused on the costs of modernization for the Japanese people and
  their neighbors and sought to relate such writings to American foreign
  policy.34 Generational conflict was at work on both sides of the Pacific,
  however, for although a younger generation of American Japanologists
  was finding new merit in the Marxist writings of senior Japanese
  scholars, their contemporaries in Japan, weary of the student wars of
  the 1960s that had borne little fruit, were turning away from the
  formulaic denunciations of their mentors.
  The newly sovereign Japan of the late 1950s and 1960s did not, in
  fact, seem to conform to the Marxist picture. Full civil and political
  rights had been extended; freedom to organize was at hand; civil rights
  had the full protection of law; and yet the masses did not seem to make
  use of them. The great campaign to prevent ratification of the United
  States-Japan Security pact that peaked with the demonstrations of
  i960 left Japan no closer to a Marxist model. New movements of
  political participation pursued local and practical issues like pollution
  instead of larger ideological goals. The arguments and controversies
  began to seem dated and irrelevant. The Japan Communist Party,
  which expelled several thousand intellectuals from its ranks after the
  i960 struggle, lost ascendancy and appeal. A history that spoke to
  Japan's new urban masses had to find new things to say.
  It is not surprising that a fully "modernized" Japan, conscious of the
  wrenching discontinuities with its past, turned to reexamine the prob-
  lem of national roots and distinctiveness. Prewar history that had fo-
  cused on important leaders was ruled out, but so were sterile Marxist
  categories that had little room for people at all. Instead, new currents of
  "people's history" came to the fore. By 1968 the annual gathering of the
  once solidly Marxist Association for Research in History (Rekishigaku
  kenkyukai) set its topic as "History of People's Thought," and in the
  33 Toyama, Meiji ishin to gendai, pp. 6-8.
  34 Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modem Japan (New York:
  Pantheon, 1982); and John W. Dower, Origins of the Modem Japanese State: Selected Writings
  ofE. H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 3-101.
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  46 
  INTRODUCTION
  following years more and more effort was devoted to finding,' publish-
  ing, and analyzing sources for the life, thought, and activities of ordi-
  nary Japanese. In this process the evaluation of categories through
  which the nineteenth-century past had been seen changed once more.
  When the scholar Otsuka Hisao translated and discussed Max Weber in
  the 1950s, it was his contention, then accepted by Marxists and liberals
  alike, that the "gemeinschaft" community (kyodotai) of Tokugawa
  times had been a bar to individualism and a hindrance to democratic
  development. In the 1960s, as rapid economic growth, urbanization,
  and industrialization brought impressive environmental pollution to
  Japan and as modernization became firmly associated with capitalism in
  ordinary speech, there was a preparedness to rethink and reevaluate the
  once-scorned "community" of the past. Individualism seemed a mixed
  blessing unless it retained the lateral cohesion and social solidarity of the
  premodern village that took care of its own. The hard-and-fast legal
  distinctions of twentieth-century Japan, the environmental degradation
  and anomie of modern society, made modernization less attractive as
  fact and as conceptual framework.
  In the intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s these consider-
  ations moved in parallel with a rising interest in ethnology and folklore.
  This was associated with a revival of interest in Yanagita Kunio (1875-
  1962) and peaked with the centennial of his birth. Yanagita, a poet-
  scholar and sometime government official, had devoted his life to estab-
  lishing folklore as a subject of academic study. He sought to elucidate
  the history of Japan by exploring and recording oral traditions in all
  parts of the country, thereby supplementing and strengthening the
  work of academic historians who relied on documents. "If there are no
  old records," he wrote, "we must search among the facts that have
  survived into the present."» Yanagita's valorization of the life and
  legends of ordinary people presented material for the observation of a
  Japan that was neither "good" nor "bad," a "success" or a "failure," but
  pregnant with possibilities for irrationality as well as orderly bureaucra-
  tization. His work contributed to that of the historians of "people's
  thought." These scholars were no less determined than were the Marx-
  ists to avoid the pitfalls for future error through the understanding of
  the roots of previous national aberrations. Within Marxist historiogra-
  phy as well, trends toward the same concerns and emphases replaced
  the rigid emphasis on the class struggle of the past.
  For these historians the centuries of Tokugawa rule produced impor-
  35 R. A. Morse, trans., "Introduction," The Legends ofTono by Kunio Yanagita (Tokyo: Japan
  Foundation, 1975), p. xxv.
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  47
  tant changes in the Japanese countryside that made the early modern
  village quite different from what it had been and equally different
  from the landlord-dominated village it was to become under twenti-
  eth-century capitalism. Obsequious deference to the military had all
  but disappeared during the prolonged absence of the samurai in their
  castle towns. The countryside had produced a natural elite of local
  notables whose education and responsibility prepared them for intellec-
  tual as well as social leadership. Government had increasingly relied
  on a traditional morality that depended on reciprocal respect among
  the classes, and village notables responded with a responsibility that
  was demonstrated by their willingness to defend and articulate local
  needs and expectations. In the "moral economy" of the countryside,
  diligence and propriety were expected, and oppression and greed from
  above brought resistance that was usually successful. Life was, in
  other words, less brutish and harsh than the Marxist proponents of
  immiseration had asserted, and the local elite less exploitive and grasp-
  ing than it it had been portrayed. Meiji capitalism, on the other hand,
  and the prescription of clear-cut obligations under modern law, en-
  forced by ubiquitous modern police, had changed these conditions for
  the worse as the local elite moved to the new cities and the inaka
  shinshi (local gentlemen) described by Meiji historians were replaced
  by, or degenerated into, exploitative employers.36
  The gloomy evaluation of twentieth-century developments in Japa-
  nese society has, however, been tempered by a number of recent
  studies of landlord-tenant relations in modern Japan.w The "moral
  economy" of the people's historians who have described a more pros-
  perous and caring countryside is probably not without its nostalgia for
  a better past, but the specific studies of rural discontent with Meiji
  policies and the evidence of vibrant possibilities for politics of an
  engaged and engaging rural elite that responded eagerly to the Peo-
  ple's Rights movement in the late 1870s and 1880s have transformed
  the understanding of the Japanese countryside.?8 These debates and
  concerns have been reflected, though also somewhat muted, in West-
  ern writing about nineteenth-century Japan. One symposium volume
  36 See Carol Gluck, "The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography,"
  Journal of Japanese Studies 38 (November 1978): 25-50.
  37 Ann Waswo, Japanese Landlords; The Decline of a Rural Elite (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
  University of California Press, 1977); and more particularly, Richard J. Smethhurst, Agricul-
  tural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1986).
  38 Irokawa Daikichi, Meiji no bunka (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970), translation edited by
  Marius B. Jansen as The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1985).
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  48 
  INTRODUCTION
  that combines the statistical work of economists and demographers
  with discussions of social organization and social scientists suggests
  some of the approaches called to bear in the effort to treat nineteenth-
  century Japan as a unit and the Meiji Restoration experience as transi-
  tion rather than cataclysmic innovation.*9
  Nineteenth-century Japan speaks differently to each generation of
  students who pursue its themes, and Japanese continue to seek in it
  clues to their society's past and future. The movement for "people's
  history" has unearthed documentary and private sources that crowd
  our shelves. Knowledge that local leaders in remote mountain villages
  met regularly to debate the content of model constitutions in the
  1880s, and evidence from private collections that shows how eager
  many people were to participate more fully in Japan's institutional
  growth makes it necessary to review long-standard generalizations
  about enlightened leaders who brought their backward countrymen
  into the modern world.*0 The tide of publications that illustrate the
  irreverent and even obstreperous communications with which ordi-
  nary people addressed and reproached their leaders gives the lie to
  sweeping generalizations about "inert commoners" who had no sense
  of larger issues.4'
  What was true in history has now become true of historians. The
  standard picture of the metropolitan scholar respectfully heard by
  obsequious provincials is changing today as centennial meetings to
  commemorate the inauguration of the People's Rights movement, and
  its milestones of the 1880s, attract participants who number in the
  thousands. The 1981 centennial of the founding of the Liberal Party
  drew seven thousand; the 1984 centennial of the Chichibu revolt at-
  tracted six thousand; and a 1987 centennial of the revival of People's
  Rights activities again drew as many. Founders of "people's history"
  have been astonished to find their country dotted with a network of
  local "people's history" societies as widespread as were the People's
  Rights societies of the 1880s. As was the case a century ago, local
  schoolteachers provide almost half the members and participants in
  these celebrations of Japan's modern history, and academic specialists
  make up the merest fraction. A field that E. H. Norman, almost half a
  39 Jansen and Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition.
  40 Irokawa, The Culture ofthe Meiji Period.
  41 See William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Princeton, N. J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985), for specific illustrations from Shonai. To date, six volumes
  have appeared of a massive project reprinting memorials addressed to the government by
  ordinary people: Irokawa Daikichi and Gabe Masao, eds., Meiji kempakusho shuset (Tokyo:
  Chikuma shobo, 1986-).
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  HISTORIANS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN 
  49
  century ago, described as fertile, fallow, and awaiting cultivation has
  brought different harvests for workers in many seasons, but its riches
  are far from exhausted. It is our hope that the chapters that follow will
  encourage still others to share in that bounty.42
  42 E. H. Norman, Japan's Emergence As a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific Rela-
  tions, 1940) p. 222.
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  CHAPTER 1
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH
  CENTURY
  The first third of the nineteenth century in Japan was dominated by
  personalities and policies that appeared on the scene in the last decade
  of the eighteenth century. The reform measures of Matsudaira Sada-
  nobu and the personal preferences of his shogun, Tokugawa Ienari,
  lent a considerable continuity to the Bunka (1804-18) and Bunsei
  (1818-30) eras.
  In contrast with the devastation and famine that the crop failures of
  the 1780s had brought, the quarter-century that followed seemed
  something of an Indian summer of Tokugawa rule. The years were
  marked by good harvests. The long continuity of Ienari, whose half-
  century in office marked the longest tenure of any of the fifteen Toku-
  gawa shoguns, was reflected in a lack of political surprises in bakufu or
  daimyo domains. Economic growth, both in agriculture and in the
  provision of materials for the great metropolis of Edo, a striking rise in
  the diffusion of schooling, and the impressive production of material
  for the growing reading public all contributed to the impression of
  well-being. Arbitrary status divisions laid down by the seventeenth-
  century founders had less relevance in a period of economic change
  and growth. At the top of the samurai ranks, hereditary income and
  privilege stood as a guarantee of continuity, but the great urban mer-
  chants lived as well as did the petty daimyo, and the lower ranks of the
  samurai military were considerably worse off than were the middling
  merchants and artisans. In the countryside a clear division between
  the landholding village leaders and the landless and tenants was mak-
  ing a mockery of the regime's "peasant" ideal.
  These developments also contributed to strains that had been build-
  ing through the eighteenth century. The blurring of class lines was not
  accompanied by any institutional resolution, with the result that the
  newly able were usually frustrated by the limits of opportunity open to
  them. The diffusion of literacy and the production of reading material
  came in a setting of censorship and suspicion that foreclosed all discus-
  sion of public and national policy and thus forced writers into the
  50
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  SHOGUN AND REGENT 
  51
  production of the ephemeral and the absurd. A culture of play, as
  Harootunian refers to it in a later chapter, was also one of avoidance.
  The regime in fact responded to innovation with increased rigidity and
  thereby fossilized a tradition that it professed to defend. Threatened
  by a diffusion of knowledge about the outside world, it responded
  with policies of censorship and tried to co-opt the scholars concerned.
  Puzzled by the advance of Western ships, it elevated "seclusion" into a
  cardinal policy of state. Consequently, the decades with which this
  chapter is concerned saw the growing contradiction between the
  growth of knowledge and of goods and the rigid restrictions caused by
  status and suspicion, and this often led to frustrations expressed in
  privatization and alienation in individual lives.
  SHOGUN AND REGENT
  The eleventh shogun, Tokugawa Ienari, was born to the Hitotsubashi
  (sankyo) cadet house in 1773, designated heir to Ieharu in 1781, and
  succeeded him as shogun in 1787. His fifty-year incumbency was the
  longest of the Tokugawa period, and even after he retired in favor of
  Ieyoshi (shogun from 1837 to 1853), he dominated politics from his
  retirement until his death in 1841. His reign began with the reforms of
  Matsudaira Sadanobu, inaugurated when the boy shogun was only
  thirteen, and went on to include a period of personal luxury and
  opulence that brought him the disapproval of later historians.
  Ienari was something of a rarity in shogunal history, in that he
  combined with his long tenure a willful personality that made him
  dominate a half-century of rule. He began with disapproval of the
  officials and policies of the Tanuma era. Ienari replaced that adminis-
  tration with the reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu, but the reform
  minister soon fell out with his strong-willed master. In part this was
  because Sadanobu, who blocked an effort by the Kyoto sovereign,
  Kokaku tenno, to give his father the honors and title appropriate to a
  retired sovereign (the songo, or Title incident), was no more inclined to
  honor Ienari's desire to install his own father, Hitotsubashi Harusada,
  in the Chiyoda Castle with honors appropriate to a retired shogun. In
  the case at Kyoto, Sadanobu first offered his resignation, and after it
  was rejected, he raised the father's income without granting him the
  desired status. Thereafter he took a strong line to emphasize the
  bakufu's concern with propriety and status by securing the punish-
  ment of the nobles who had encouraged the court in its confrontation
  with Edo. But when Ienari sought honors for his father, the case was
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  52 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  not as easy to handle. When Sadanobu submitted his resignation as
  chief minister in 1793, it was accepted. The young shogun then pro-
  ceeded to have his way with his father's residential arrangements.
  Ienari seems to have disapproved of Sadanobu's treatment of the
  Kyoto courtiers on other grounds as well. During his reign he accumu-
  lated some forty consorts and produced fifty-five children, maintaining
  what was probably the largest harem (ooku) in Tokugawa history, a
  record that has led some historians to characterize his rule as the "Ooku
  era." With so generous a supply of chessmen, Ienari was led to practice
  marriage politics on a scale previously unknown, placing sons and
  daughters in daimyo and kuge families. His principal consort was a
  daughter of the Satsuma tozama daimyo Shimazu Shigehide (1745-
  1833), who was first adopted into the great kuge house of Konoe, and he
  approved similar alliances between Tokugawa cadet houses and court
  families. Ienari further accepted for himself titles and office in the court
  hierarchy, becoming successively minister of the right (1816), of the left
  (1822), and minister of state (dajo daijin) in 1827. In consequence, the
  traditional restraints on ties between the shogunal family and the court
  aristocracy and with tozama daimyo that had been worked out by the
  Tokugawa system's founders in the seventeenth century were now dis-
  carded in favor of a more cosmopolitan and largely undifferentiated
  aristocracy. In the final decades of Tokugawa rule a number of major
  daimyo were closely related and at times half-brothers. This made for
  equanimity during the plentiful harvests and relatively smooth course
  of national events in the Bunka and Bunsei eras, but it probably also
  made it more difficult for the bakufu to rally its supporters in the crises
  of its closing years.
  THE KANSEI REFORMS
  The reforms carried out by Matsudaira Sadanobu are often compared
  with those of his grandfather, the shogun Yoshimune in the Kyoho
  (1716-36) era. Like Yoshimune, Sadanobu tried to return the polity
  to the simpler samurai standards of earlier days. Also like him, he
  failed in his object. But although the full severity of the reforms was
  moderated after the departure of Sadanobu from national politics in
  1793, their impact went well beyond his brief rule. Members of the
  Tanuma faction returned to high bakufu office in 1818, but the legisla-
  tion that had been instituted in the Kansei reforms was never fully or
  formally recalled. Most of Sadanobu's policies with respect to educa-
  tion and administrative competence outlived his tenure as regent. The
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  KANSEI REFORMS 
  53
  Kansei reforms thus made important and permanent marks on nine-
  teenth-century cultural and institutional life.
  Matsudaira Sadanobu was determined to curb what he regarded as
  the corruption and misgovernment of the Tanuma years and based his
  reforms on Confucian assumptions of probity in public office.1 He was
  also concerned with the primacy of the Edo over the Kyoto court, as
  the struggle about the tennd's father showed, and he was equally con-
  cerned with the economic dependence of Edo on western Japan. Im-
  ports from other areas had increased Edo's dependence on merchants
  who arranged those imports, and control of merchant profits was a
  natural corollary of his political purposes. Sadanobu responded to
  these problems by imposing measures of austerity that called for limits
  on administrative spending, restrictions on merchant guilds, and can-
  cellation of samurai obligations for loans contracted to merchants be-
  fore 1784. After a series of efforts to lower the price of rice, he ordered
  the prices lowered in 1791. He restricted foreign trade by reducing the
  number of foreign ships permitted to call at Nagasaki and lengthened
  the interval between the Dutch factor's visits to Edo. At the same time
  he worked for more able administration by calling for uniformity in
  official teachings of Confucianism and made the bakufu's school a
  national institution.
  As described in Chapter 9, the importance of Edo in the Tokugawa
  economy had been increasing throughout the eighteenth century as
  the metropolis progressed from being an importer of Kansei products
  to being a producer and arbiter of economic life in the Kanto plain.
  Sadanobu's measures reflected and built on these trends. In order to
  lessen Edo's dependence on imports of food, he ordered recent urban
  migrants to return to their villages and took steps to limit the number
  and weaken the monopoly rights of merchant guilds. Currency was
  strengthened by a recoinage that increased the proportion of precious
  metal and tried to lessen the price advantage of Osaka. Edo rice bro-
  kers for samurai (Judasashi) were restrained by the cancellation of
  loans to samurai and steps to control interest rates. House rents in Edo
  were controlled, and major merchant houses were selected as the re-
  gime's fiscal agents in an attempt to lower the cost of transporting rice
  and other essentials.
  Measures of this sort were designed to reduce the size of the me-
  tropolis and the independence of its merchant houses, but they also
  illustrated the importance of those merchants in the life of the citi-
  1 The reforms are also treated by Isao Soranaka, "The Kansei Reforms - Success or Failure,"
  Momanenta Nipponica 33 (Summer 1978): 154-64.
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  54 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  zenry and in fact provided new opportunities for merchant enter-
  prises. Sadanobu's officials issued directives designed to encourage the
  development of local sources for sake, oil, cotton, and paper that had
  been imported from western Japan, but these orders strengthened the
  Edo merchants and made the city and its surrounding plain a far more
  viable economic area. The importance of Edo for the bakufu bureau-
  cracy was also illustrated by a proliferation of offices and bureaus for
  control and information. Concerned by the evidence of social instabil-
  ity that had accumulated during the hardship years of the 1780s,
  Sadanobu built up the administrative structure in an effort to deal
  with poverty and the homeless. The Edo Town Office (Machi kaisho)
  grew in size as social services and official vigilance increased. New
  bureaus improved record keeping, surveillance, and security. After
  analyzing Edo's administrative expenses for the years before his taking
  up office, Sadanobu ordered a reduction by one-tenth. Of this he set
  aside one-tenth as a rebate to those who paid land taxes and 70 percent
  for aid and relief to the poor. Merchant houses were enlisted to aug-
  ment the sum. Much of this went for rice that was stored in specially
  built granaries, and the remainder of the cash reserve was used for
  emergency loans at interest. Under its bureaucratic and merchant
  management, the fund so established had grown to nearly half a mil-
  lion ryo by the 1820s, with an additional quarter-million ryo out in
  loans and close to a half-million koku of rice in reserve. Thus the
  minister who deplored official corruption under his predecessor
  launched his administration on forms of state activity that were as
  likely to encourage new excesses as they were to ensure "moral govern-
  ment." Additional administrative offices were also required for new
  measures to guard and repair the city's many bridges, improve and
  clarify judicial responsibilities, regularize record keeping, control
  fires, and increase undercover surveillance. Circulating inspectors
  were ordered to observe and report virtuous conduct and instances of
  outstanding longevity as well as infractions of behavior, with particu-
  lar attention to plans destructive to the polity. The result was a city
  much more carefully and predictably governed than it had been.2
  Calls for official rectitude extended to the rural areas that the
  bakufu controlled. A purge of daikan, the officials responsible for
  rural administration, saw eight officials punished in two years, in some
  cases for wrongdoing done by their fathers or uncles. The officials who
  survived or who were appointed were urged to perform in the manner
  2 Minami Kazuo, Edo no shakai kozo (Tokyo: Hanawa sbobo, 1969), pp. 22-35.
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  KANSEI REFORMS 
  55
  of model Confucian administrators. One such man, responsible for the
  rule of 182 villages that had been devastated by famine in the north
  Kan to plain, gained such fame for a program of birth statistics and
  special allowances for births which he instituted to control infanticide
  that he was posthumously enshrined as a deity (daimyojin). Daikan
  were ordered to prepareinjunctions to be read to village elders encour-
  aging ability, diligence, and self-denial and to offer public praise and
  reward for outstanding instances of filiality and loyalty in order to
  popularize proper Confucian behavior. Such steps were not, of course,
  new; similar measures had been taken by outstanding daimyo in other
  areas. Nevertheless, such measures were diffused more widely, and
  spoken of more generally, after Sadanobu's efforts. 3
  The educational and ideological references of the Kansei years pro-
  vided the most striking example of Sadanobu's determination to re-
  verse the presumed decline of the late-eighteenth-century trends and
  to reaffirm and reify a Tokugawa "tradition." Since the days of the
  first shogun, members of the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars
  had served as rectors of education (daigaku no kami) and directed a
  family school that stressed the teachings of Chu Hsi Confucianism.
  This association with bakufu appointment created a presumption of
  bakufu support for one philosophical position, and representatives of
  other intellectual traditions had never held the post. The early sho-
  guns, however, were relatively indifferent to philosophical distinctions
  and tended to favor a mixture of Buddhist and Shinto values. Ieyasu's
  enshnnement as the Great Deity of the East (Toshogu gongen) at
  Nikko, despite his personal affiliation with Pure Land Buddhism and
  the institutional favor he accorded the Zen monk Tendai, stand as
  proof of this eclecticism. In personal preference Matsudaira Sadanobu
  too was not markedly enthusiastic about Sung Neo-Confucianism.
  What mattered, he wrote before his access to power, was how one
  lived and behaved; practical administrators should not spare time for
  philosophical ratiocination.^
  But once in office, Sadanobu was concerned with order and soon
  decided that the luxuriant growth of competing philosophical schools
  in eighteenth-century Japan was a clear departure from the approved
  way. In the seventy-two years between 1716 and 1788, Chu Hsi teach-
  ers in domain schools barely outnumbered others (by a count of 273 to
  224); of the nonconformists, the great majority were followers of the
  3 Kumakura Isao, "Kasei bunka no zentei: Kansei kaikaku o megutte," in Hayashiya Tatsu-
  saburd, ed., Kasei bunka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 62-3.
  4 Kumakura, "Kasei bunka no zentei," p. 51.
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  56 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  rigorously philological teachings of Ogyu Sorai (118), and I to Jinsai
  (49). This seemed to Sadanobu to portend diversity and struggle for
  the future. He was encouraged in this fervor by some of the more rigid
  and self-assured advocates of Chu Hsi Confucianists who were associ-
  ated with the school of Yamazaki Ansai (1618-82), men who consid-
  ered themselves "orthodox" and all others "heterodox." They argued
  that growing diversity in interpretation and emphasis would lead to
  confusion in morality.
  In 1790 came the proscription of heterodoxy (igaku no kin). Sada-
  nobu instructed the Hayashi family head to purge his school of teach-
  ers who were not followers of Chu Hsi. His directive asserted that the
  learning of Chu Hsi had enjoyed the confidence of "successive genera-
  tions of the ruling house" since early Tokugawa days and that because
  "in recent times a variety of novel doctrines" had been preached, the
  prevalence of heterodoxy had ruined public morals. Hayashi was or-
  dered to accept new appointees to his faculty, consult carefully with
  them, "sternly forbid heterodoxy to the students," and make every
  effort to reach agreement with other schools to pursue the orthodox
  learning and "advance men of ability."' Sadanobu thus inaugurated,
  in the name of a "tradition" that he had substantially invented, official
  bakufu commitment to Chu Hsi orthodoxy. This remained official
  bakufu policy for the rest of the Tokugawa years. The domain schools
  followed the Tokugawa example by a process of attrition and appoint-
  ment. Thereafter, formal commitment to Sung Neo-Confucianism
  was the norm, even on the part of scholars whose personal preferences
  were for more eclectic inclusion of other interpretations that had flour-
  ished in the eighteenth century.
  This shift entailed official interference with the Hayashi academy,
  which became more of a national institution than it ever had been.
  That development was by no means welcome to its administrators.
  The new institution, henceforth to be known as the Shoheiko, soon
  included faculty members from Tokushima and Osaka. When Hay-
  ashi died, the bakufu selected as the school's new head the third son of
  the daimyo of Iwamura, who was first adopted into the Hayashi family
  and who served from 1793 to 1839. Confucianism thus became more
  narrow and restricted in deference to orders from above at the same
  5 See Robert L. Backus, "The Motivation of Confucian Orthodoxy in Tokugawa Japan" and
  "The Kensei Prohibition of Heterodoxy and Its Effects on Education," Harvard Journal of
  Asiatic Studies 39 (December 1979): 275-338, and 39 (June 1979): 55-106. For Yamazaki
  Ansai, see Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, /570-/6S0 (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  KANSEI REFORMS 
  57
  time that the school's clientele and faculty became more representative
  of Japan overall.
  Sadanobu's purpose was the phrase with which he ended his direc-
  tive, the advancement of "men of ability." Education had direct rele-
  vance to administrative service. Sadanobu instituted tests for military
  proficiency as well as examinations for literary competence. Under
  changing circumstances, officials returned to their books. There are
  stories of mature vassals who turned with determination to the disci-
  pline of study to prove themselves worthy of new or continued appoint-
  ment. Examinations for officials were modeled to some extent on those
  of China, but Sadanobu's advisers managed to blunt his purpose and
  secure the elimination of questions on Chinese prose and poetry. Nev-
  ertheless, Confucian studies became increasingly important to advance-
  ment in bakufu office.
  As with the bakufu, so with the domains. Samurai and official
  literacy was advanced nationwide by increased enthusiasm for found-
  ing schools throughout Japan. In this the reforms reflected trends that
  had begun before Sadanobu's rule: 59 domain schools were estab-
  lished between 1781 and 1803. But soon the pace accelerated. The
  next four decades saw the establishment of an additional 72 schools.6
  Domain schools represented an administrative response to the grow-
  ing maturity and complexity of a society in which literacy among
  commoners was growing rapidly. The establishment of private acade-
  mies and parish schools for commoners also accelerated dramatically
  in these years. Only 57 private academies (shijuku) were founded in the
  years before 1788, but between that date and 1829 an additional 207
  were established, and from 1830 to the end of Tokugawa rule, 796
  were begun. The trend with parish schools (terakoya) was the same.
  There were 241 before Kansei; 1,286 were established between 1789
  and 1829, and 8,675 between 1830 and 1867.7 Officials set higher
  standards for themselves, but the people over whom they ruled were
  becoming conscious of the importance of learning for themselves as
  well.
  Because the morality and values of the entire structure of education
  were broadly congruent, these trends could accommodate many em-
  phases without conflict. The development of national studies (koku-
  6 R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
  Press, 1965), the classic study; and Herman Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biogra-
  phy of Matsudaira Sedanobu, 1758-1829 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
  7 Richard Rubinger, Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
  sity Press, 1982), p. 5.
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  58 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  gaku) could, it is true, produce sharp altercations among intellectuals
  over the relative merits of Chinese and national learning. But much
  Shinto learning derived from Yamazaki Ansai's blend of Chu Hsi and
  Shinto, and elaborate etymological explanations were available to dem-
  onstrate the ultimate identity of truth, although for national status,
  Japanese learning, by virtue of Japan's sacred and unchanging line of
  sovereigns, represented a nobler and more final version of that truth.
  So too with Dutch studies (ydgaku or rangaku), which emerged as an
  individual discipline in the waning decades of the eighteenth century.
  For some clearheaded specialists it seemed to require repudiation of
  much of the traditional wisdom of China because of its superior knowl-
  edge of the physical world, but to others its practical emphases in
  medicine or ballistics, the two areas of greatest relevance, seemed fully
  assimilable with the morality of the East.
  Growing literacy rates and the burgeoning urban culture also pre-
  sented Tokugawa officialdom with problems of control. This was par-
  ticularly true of materials dealing with the outside world, but also with
  popular literature. The production of reading material for the literate
  sector of commoner society had had vigorous beginnings a century
  earlier in the Genroku era, as books and their production began to be
  commercialized. Publishers and lending libraries operated to speed
  the circulation of reading matter. Into the late eighteenth century,
  much of the popular literature was created by samurai intellectuals.
  Matsudaira Sadanobu himself, in fact, had had his own hand at such
  writing, with a short burlesque of a pompous daimyo.8 Such stories,
  usually well illustrated, also usually included pleasure in esoteric refer-
  ences comprehensible only to initiates, as well as situational humor
  and word play. Sometimes they could, of course, go on to become
  thinly veiled satires directed against the existing social order. At that
  point they became of interest to an authoritarian regime.
  Tokugawa publication was never free of censorship. From the first
  there had been three categories of concern. Works dealing with Chris-
  tianity were the chief target in the seventeenth century, gradually
  becoming less feared as the danger lessened. A second category con-
  sisted of works harmful to the political order. These were few at the
  outset of the period, but they became increasingly frequent in the
  eighteenth century. A third category, which concerned public morals,
  provided a basis for censorship of works considered pornography.
  Before 1720 there had been fifty-eight works banned in the first cate-
  8 Haruko Iwasaki, "Portrait of a Daimyo: Comical Fiction by Matsudaira Sadanobu," Monu-
  menta Nipponica 38 (Spring 1983): 1 -48.
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  KANSEI REFORMS 
  59
  gory, thirteen in the second, and twenty-eight in the third.9 The eigh-
  teenth century brought increased severity and detail in legislation.
  Yoshimune's provisions of 1720 ruled out discussions bearing on the
  kdgi, or polity, warned of agitating the public mind, forbade publish-
  ing genealogical listings that would reflect on the hereditary elite, and
  spoke vaguely of the danger of mezurashii koto (astonishing things) that
  might unhinge an easily misled and uninformed public. Thus it was to
  be expected that the Kansei reform years would reaffirm and expand
  these exclusions. Edicts appeared ordering all works to carry colo-
  phons making clear the issuing authority; infractions of guidelines
  would bring speedy judgment. New guidelines warned against useless
  novelty or unnecessary proliferation of publications and required ap-
  proval from the magistrate's office; they ruled out anything of contem-
  porary journalistic coverage or interest, warned against misleading
  readers, and forbade disturbing public morals with pornography.
  These guidelines were sufficiently broad to provide the basis for the
  punishment of Hayashi Shihei, whose books discussed the Russian
  advance. They were ideally suited to bring judgment against the au-
  thor Santo Kyoden, who had just published three popular works that
  were thinly concealed satires of the reform. The censors who had
  approved the works were dismissed, and the author and publisher
  were harshly punished. One-half the publisher's property was confis-
  cated, and Kyoden was sentenced to fifty days in handcuffs. A num-
  ber of other authors were similarly punished. Henceforth samurai who
  had written tended to shift to other topics, and commoners like
  Kyoden avoided the appearance of repeating their errors by develop-
  ing alternative forms of fiction.
  The Kansei reforms, like the Tempo reforms that Harold Bolitho
  takes up in Chapter 2 in this volume, have not had a good press from
  historians. Matsudaira Sadanobu was lavishly praised by the modern
  Japanese government in periods of official exhortation and moral pos-
  turing but was virtually ignored in the decades after World War II.
  Recent studies, however, have helped illustrate the complexity of
  Sadanobu's character and position. He emerges as a sensitive intellec-
  tual, as hard on himself as he was on his countrymen. For himself he
  set impossible standards of rectitude and sincerity, determined to over-
  come desire and self-gratification. Convinced of the importance of
  Confucian example for the realm, he privately harked back to the
  Shinto standards of earlier shogunal days and thought seriously of his
  9 Ekkehard May, Die Kommerzialisienmg derjapanishen Literature in spaten Edo-Zeit {1750-1868)
  (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983), p. 58.
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  60 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  own enshrinement as a kami. His edicts were by no means unprece-
  dented, although the severity with which they were enforced did
  mark a new high. Each aspect of his governance - management of
  the Edo economy, encouragement of education, and censorship of
  morality - represented a consolidation of trends already in progress
  more than it did a dramatic shift.
  But whatever the evidence of continuity, the reasons for selecting
  Kansei as the beginning of nineteenth-century trends are sound.
  Sadanobu's measures took the existing system as far as it could go in
  meeting its problems. His moves institutionalized and hardened tradi-
  tion and increased government control, and left a regime less flexible
  and more consciously concerned with preserving a tradition that had
  now been defined. Literary controls and educational requirements for
  office discouraged samurai authors of popular literature but provided
  openings for some of them in the world of literate politics. The same
  controls increased support for studies of the West while they also
  channeled it into politically approved paths. In each area, periods of
  relaxation lay ahead, but in terms of precedent and policy, the Kansei
  measures made a lasting contribution to the future allocation of energy
  and resources in the final half-century of Tokugawa rule.
  The Kansei era also marked, though it did not create, a greater
  richness and variety in social and educational life in Japan. The
  bakufu's espousal of education, quickly followed in the domains, led
  to a measurable increase in jobs for the educated. Increasingly, schol-
  ars were recruited for their ability, often from outside the domain. In
  their new roles as hired intellectuals, albeit with the perquisites of
  feudal status, such men were only nominally retainers of their new
  lords. Ability counted more than did status or place of origin. The
  domain of Hiroshima employed Rai Shunsui (1746-1816), a scholar
  who had been born into a merchant family. His son, San'yo (1780-
  1832), an eccentric but learned scholar and poet, violated most of the
  norms of Confucian conduct but wrote in Chinese An Unofficial His-
  tory of Japan (Nihon gaishi) which became one of the most important
  sources of nineteenth-century imperial loyalism. San'yo presented a
  copy to the long-retired Matsudaira Sadanobu in 1827, and after the
  work was printed in 1842, it passed through numerous editions.10
  Status consciousness and significance weakened. Some samurai schol-
  ars could equally well be considered artists. Watanabe Kazan (1793-
  10 Burton Watson, Japanese Literature in Chinese, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University
  Press, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 122 ff.; and Noguchi Takehiko, Rai San'yo: rekishi e no kikansha
  (Tokyo: Tankdsha, 1974).
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  KANSEI REFORMS 
  6l
  1841) of Tawara, and Kakizaki Hakyo of Matsumae (1763-1826) were
  better known for their paintings than for their politics. Hirose Tanso
  (1782-1856) of Hita, in Kyushu, of merchant stock, declined official
  appointment altogether but attracted the sons of many samurai to his
  private school. Horizontal ties began to compete with hierarchical
  obligations, and contractual relationships began to replace hereditary
  obligations. Daimyo engaged visiting scholars and preachers to speak
  throughout their realms, and educators could move from post to post.
  This trend became particularly marked as the century advanced and
  the daimyo and bakufu competed for the service of experts in eco-
  nomic and military policy.
  Once unswerving hereditary obligations mattered less than did abil-
  ity and willingness in the new intellectual climate, there was room for
  more individualism, friendship, and humanity in social relations. One
  can take as an example the case of Matsuzaki Kodo (1771-1844), born
  a farmer's son in Higo, who after an early education in the Chinese
  classics determined to enter the Buddhist priesthood. At fifteen he
  changed his mind and traveled to Edo to take up Confucian studies.
  There a Buddhist temple took him in and helped him enter the
  bakufu's Shoheiko, where he distinguished himself in scholarly compe-
  tition with the future Shoheiko teacher Sato Issai (1772-1859). Upon
  the completion of his studies Matsuzaki accepted employment with
  the lord of Kakegawa (a member of the bakufu's senior council) and
  used his first stipend to redeem the contract of a lady of the licensed
  quarter who had helped support him with her earnings during his
  student years. Matsuzaki's marriage to this woman brought him not
  shame but praise. His official stipend grew from rations for twenty to
  rations for fifty men, and Kakegawa refused to allow the domain of
  Higo (modern Kumamoto) to bid for his services. In scholarly life
  Matsuzaki held to the same unswerving standards of self-determined
  rectitude, and he was sharply critical of Sato Issai's cautious refusal to
  intercede with the bakufu for Watanabe Kazan in the affair that will
  be detailed later.11
  The diffusion of education led also to a diffusion in knowledge of
  and writing in Chinese. The post-Kansei years produced the greatest
  outpouring of verse in Chinese (kanshi) that Japan had ever known.
  Poetry circles and clubs at the capital and in the provinces included
  leading commoners as well as samurai, and well into the Meiji period
  kanshi specialists corrected and appraised the products of provincial
  11 Shin'ichiro Nakamura, "New Concepts of Life of the Post-Kansei Intellectuals: Scholars of
  Chinese Classics," Modern Asian Studies 18 (October 1984): 622.
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  62 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  poets anxious to improve their skills in versification. Kanshi, free from
  the limitations of the thirty-one-syllable waka or the seventeen-syl-
  lable haiku of the Japanese tradition, had resources of length and
  elegiac eloquence that permitted extended passages of description "for
  the treatment of philosophical, social, or political themes that could
  not, or by convention would not, be dealt with in native Japanese
  poetry. . . ." They became a "principal means of artistic expression
  for the scholars and patriots who led the movement to bring about the
  restoration."12 Not a few poets, including Rai Mikisaburo (1825-59),
  son of San'yo, paid with their lives for their political views and activi-
  ties. Kansei orthodoxy became a factor in the bakufu's rigid conserva-
  tism, but Kansei intellectualism and emulation of China also served to
  carry currents of revolutionary commitment and change.
  Shortly after the signing of the treaties with Perry, the Shimoda area
  was hit by destructive earthquakes. The Buddhist priest Gessho,
  friend of Choshu loyalists, greeted the news of these disasters with
  these lines in Chinese: "For seven miles by the river hills the dogs and
  sheep forage; the hues of spring visit the wastes of quake-ridden earth.
  Only the cherry blossoms take on no rank barbarian stench, but
  breathe to the morning sun the fragrance of a nation's soul."1*
  TOWNS, TRAVEL, AND URBAN CULTURE
  The role of cities in the late Tokugawa society is discussed in Chapter 8
  of this volume by Gilbert Rozman. The Bunka-Bunsei decades wit-
  nessed significant shifts in urban concentrations. Osaka and Kyoto, the
  metropolises of the Kansai, ceased to grow and had begun to lose popula-
  tion. Edo, too, had reached some sort of plateau in the late eighteenth
  century, but with the growth of the Kanto economy and the growing
  dominance of Edo over that plain, it grew in economic importance. By
  1800 "Edo ranked as one of the roughly 70 cities in the world (five were
  in Japan) with more than 100,000 residents, as one of about 20 cities
  (three in Japan) in excess of 300,000 population, and as probably the
  only city easily to surpass 1,000,000 inhabitants."'4 It had grown so
  large because of the political requirements that the bakufu had insti-
  tuted for the sankin kotai rotation of daimyo. Accompanied by vassals,
  servants, and hangers-on, this circulating elite had stimulated the enor-
  12 Watson, Japanese Literature in Chinese, vol. 2, pp. 12,14.
  13 Watson,^Japanese Literature in Chinese, vol. 2, p. 67.
  14 Gilbert Rozman, "Edo's Importance in Changing Tokugawa Society," Journal of Japanese
  Studies 1 (Autumn 1974): 94.
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  TOWNS, TRAVEL, AND URBAN CULTURE 
  63
  mous growth of service and trade organizations to supply their estates
  and needs, and commoners in search of the city's higher wages headed
  for the urban metropolis. Employment centers on the city's outskirts
  served to funnel the constant tide of newcomers into urban society, and
  each daimyo residence tended to attract a regional provincial service
  population that clustered around its walls in rented quarters.
  The splendor of the daimyo establishments struck many commenta-
  tors as excessive, and the traditionalists deplored this. The author of
  Seji kemmon roku, who may have been an Edo ronin, wrote under the
  name of Buyo Inshi an account of "events seen and heard" in 1816 that
  sums up his observations about samurai, farmers, priests, doctors, di-
  viners, the blind, and the courts. This author provides numerous and
  specific examples of the state of affairs midway between the reforms of
  Matsudaira Sadanobu and those of Mizuno Tadakuni. He was harking
  back to the presumed simplicity and probity of earlier days, and he
  decried the luxury and commercialism of his times. Nothing upset him
  more than the leveling out of class lines and distinctions. In earlier days,
  he wrote, samurai had found it possible to reprove the Kyoto aristocrats
  for their wasteful and lazy life-style, but now, alas, they were no better
  themselves. Even highly placed samurai advisers seemed to slant the
  counsel they gave to daimyo to emphasize immediate interests and
  profit. Samurai seemed to overspend, flatter, and curry favor with their
  lords; they sold their valuables, frequented pawn shops, and struggled
  with interest rates as high as 20 percent for a three-month loan. Some
  samurai even stooped to rent out their space in the Edo barrack when
  they were not there on duty. Debtor-creditor relations were the only
  roles in which they were proficient, and moneylenders were the only
  enemies they knew. Adoptions were arranged for money instead of for
  ability. Even the bakufu's own housemen, Buyo Inshi charged, served
  only four or five days a month and spent the rest of their time trying to
  earn a few additional coppers. They had little knowledge of weapons.
  They did not even hesitate to make free with their lords' things when
  the opportunity presented itself. Their needs rose constantly, as they
  wasted their substance on luxuries better left to Kyoto nobles. Conse-
  quently, samurai were no longer able to stir respect or fear. The entire
  Edo military establishment had declined in effectiveness and power;
  indeed, the very splendor of the Edo mansions concealed the weakness
  of those who resided in them.
  There are no longer limitations on the size of estates the daimyo maintain. In
  earlier days daimyo had to think about the number of men they could bring
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  64 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  with them to Edo, and so their mansions did not have to be very large; at that
  time they apparently limited themselves to what seemed appropriate. They
  say that daimyo used to be careful about the number of men they brought
  with them, because if they came with too large a detachment there might be
  disorder in the castle town they left behind; also, the domain would be in
  trouble because of the expenses incurred. But now, although the establish-
  ments are five or ten times as large as they used to be, and although the
  buildings are splendid and beautiful, the samurai who stay in those mansions
  are effeminate and weak; they are worth about one fifth or one tenth of the
  ones that used to be there. So in real terms their numbers are smaller. The
  entire force daimyo bring with them for sankin kotai duty is smaller, their Edo
  complement is smaller, there are fewer horses, fewer weapons, and less equip-
  ment for horses. Because of those reduced numbers, and the way they live, a
  hundred-thousand koku daimyo doesn't come up to a fifty-thousand koku lord
  of former days, ten thousand koku up to what used to go with five, or one
  thousand koku to what five hundred used to mean.1'
  Vigilance, courage, loyalty, and ancestral observances had gone by the
  board: Samurai had become like women, like merchants, or like work-
  ers; most of them knew neither shame nor duty, and only two or three
  out often still kept the faith.
  The glamour and splendor of life in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, all of
  them under bakufu control as part of the tenryo, and the constant
  movement of goods along the highways and coastal waters to provi-
  sion these great cities made them inviting targets for private and
  pleasure travel. Travel within Japan, whose volume had startled
  Kaempfer in the 1690s, grew until by the early nineteenth century,
  roads and station stops were more crowded than ever. Feudal authori-
  ties thought very poorly of this: A traveler, unless he were burdened
  with goods for the city, was absenting himself from productive work.
  By the early nineteenth century, most domains were legislating
  against anything that smelled of travel for pleasure, and the only
  acceptable excuse for travel was religious or medical. One could be a
  member of a fellowship bound for a ritual climb of Mount Fuji,
  could be headed for one or another temple and pilgrimage circuit, or
  even, on occasion, could join mass pilgrimages to the Grand Shrine
  at Ise. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of many of the im-
  mense number of pilgrims who chose these routes, but feudal authori-
  ties were probably well advised to note - as they usually did in their
  prohibitions, as Morioka did in 1813 - that "these days many people
  who petition for permission to visit the sacred places of Kinai really
  15 Buyo Inshi, Seji kemmon roku, ed. Honjo Eijiro and Takigawa Seijiro (Tokyo: Seiabo, re-
  print, 1966), p. 96.
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  TOWNS, TRAVEL, AND URBAN CULTURE 
  65
  want to sight see."16 The great Ise pilgrimage year of 1830, when 4.5
  million pilgrims are estimated to have visited the shrine between
  March and August, constituted an almost total breakdown of regula-
  tions in an outburst of religious fervor, that was, for many, a rite of
  passage into autonomy from familial and political responsibilities.
  In normal times, han restriction could limit the travel time allowed
  on tegata passports (in Okayama: twenty days for men, ten days for
  boys; fifteen days for women, seven for girls). But in periods of mass
  enthusiasm, travelers slipped out of villages and past check stations to
  throw themselves on the generosity of the villagers whose homes they
  passed. "Regular" travelers also increased in number and with them
  the production of travel accounts and guidebooks describing accommo-
  dations, food, scenery, and the availability of female entertainment.
  With guide books came sets of prints of scenic places by popular
  artists. The classic graphic records of travel along the major highways,
  especially the Tokaido, were soon recognized as masterpieces among
  the Japanese and became immensely popular with Western collectors
  later in the century.I7
  The great cities, and especially Edo, constituted popular goals for
  travelers from other areas. A tradition of guidebooks had begun in the
  seventeenth century as inexpensive pamphlets, printed in the Japanese
  syllabary, made the wonders of the city known to common travelers.
  Kyoto, the first to develop, led in this; its four hundred temples and
  shrines, with three thousand more in the city's environs, were self-
  evident attractions. By the middle of the seventeenth century, guide-
  books singled out eighty-eight, then over three hundred, places in the
  capital as particularly noteworthy. Similar guidebooks were written
  for Osaka, noting merchant specialties, local products, brothels, and
  courtesans; soon the skills of artists were added to illustrate the books.
  By the early nineteenth century, Edo too had become celebrated in
  popular fiction as well as in the guidebooks. As local and smaller
  centers grew in sophistication, the urban attractions of the great cities
  began to reappear, in muted form, elsewhere as well; that is, urban
  culture was gradually becoming national. Literacy, travel, and a lively
  economic interchange between areas had transformed and joined to-
  gether what had still been separated culture zones at the beginning of
  the Tokugawa years.
  16 Yokoyama Kazuo," 'Han' kokka e no michi," in Hayashiya, ed., Kasei bunka no kenkyu, pp.
  102-9, speaks of the rise of a "culture of travel" and gives numerous illustrations of attempted
  restrictions. See also Carmen Blacker, "The Religious Traveller in the Edo Period," Modem
  AswnStudies iS(October 1984): 593-608. 
  17 Blacker, "The Religious Traveller."
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  66 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  Legend and lore stressed the individuality of the three great cities,
  the santo. Kyoto was famous for its water, mushrooms, temples,
  women, textiles, and bean curd; Osaka for its shipping, moats and
  bridges, sake, guilds, and stones and trees; and Edo for its fish,
  daimyo mansions, onions, and nuns. Kyoto was famous for its pains-
  taking artisans and merchants, Osaka for the craft and parsimonious
  nature of its tradesmen, Edo for the samurai indifference to frugality
  that seemed to infect its merchants and drive them into bankruptcy.
  Each city had a different population mix: Kyoto its artistocrats, impe-
  rial court, temple priests, and private scholars and doctors; Osaka, its
  moats lined with the warehouses to which the daimyo shipped their
  surplus rice, its merchant princes to whom to that rice was consigned;
  and Edo its bushi population. Although Osaka and Kyoto were nomi-
  nally off-limits to the ruling class, samurai interest was in fact ubiqui-
  tous. Eighty-six daimyo maintained stations in Kyoto, even though
  they themselves could not enter the city, for access to the silks of
  Nishijin weavers, and many domains stationed representatives in
  Osaka because of its importance to their treasuries.18 But Edo was
  special. By the nineteenth century it had become the crossroads of
  Japan, celebrated in guidebooks and systematized in the handbooks
  that listed the crests, banners, income, and dates of residence of
  daimyo for the tradesmen who had to deal with samurai customers.
  Edo had long grown in response to migration, but by the nineteenth
  century the tide of entrants had slowed, and the Edo born were becom-
  ing significant in number among the townsmen. (Thanks to the hostage
  system under which daimyo families and heirs had to stay in the city,
  most daimyo had long been Edo born.) The "Edokko," or child of Edo,
  was a commoner, both of whose parents had been born in the city, and
  popular wisdom had it that they constituted about 10 percent of the
  city's population. Recruits from the countryside continued to perform
  the myriad service functions necessary to a premodern, labor-intensive
  economy, those of porters, bearers, peddlers, watchmen, and the like.
  But the Edokko also became the standard focus of much popular fic-
  tion. Emphasis was now less on the taste (tsu) of the urban dandy who
  had starred in eighteenth-century romances than on the vitality (iki) of
  the irreverent and cocky commoner. Obsequiousness in the face of
  samurai was no longer as likely for commoners who had grown up
  witness to warrior poverty, punctilio, and pomposity. Kirisute gomen,
  the right to strike down a disrespectful commoner, had become a thing
  18 Donald H. Shively, "Urban Culture," paper presented to the colloquium Edo Culture and Its
  Modern Legacy, London, 1981.
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  TOWNS, TRAVEL, AND URBAN CULTURE 
  67
  of the past in the city. The Edo chonin (townsmen) considered them-
  selves every bit as important to the realm as their samurai contemporar-
  ies were, and they also considered themselves superior to their counter-
  parts in other cities because they were at the center of the nation's
  politics and economics. The cost of living in Edo might be one or even
  two times that in Kyoto or Osaka; the rents charged for the shop with
  the narrow quarters behind it in the city's labyrinth of merchant quar-
  ters might consume most of the wages of even a good carpenter, but the
  Edokko was secure in his place and his importance.I9
  Popular fiction, inexpensive woodblock prints, and daily rumors
  brought the scandals of the theater and entertainment world to the
  attention of the population. Literacy was at its highest in the cities,
  and schools were most common in Edo if only because literacy was so
  essential to daily life and enterprise there. R. P. Dore estimates that
  "somewhat more than 40 per cent of all Japanese boys and about 10
  per cent of Japanese girls were getting some kind of formal education
  outside of their homes" by late Tokugawa times,20 and the Edo figures
  would probably have been higher than those elsewhere. If the cost of
  living was high in Edo, the standard of living was also higher. Buyo
  Inshi, the author of Seji kemmon toku, wrote that in his day, parents
  were becoming too proud to put their daughters out to service, that
  serving girls dressed as well as did their employers, and that parents
  continued to support them in their pursuit of salable arts and skills in
  hopes of getting them decently or at least inexpensively placed. Life in
  the city included high standards in dress, which meant an infinite
  variety of patterns and weaves and a luxuriance of taste. Food became
  more varied, and the variety of noodle and marine delicacies began to
  approach the standard of modern times. Life in the capital was also
  remarkable for the frequence and regularity of its festivals and proces-
  sions. When these paled, the growing profusion of small, semilegal
  akusho (evil places) where prostitution was available, or the daily expe-
  rience of the bustle associated with the approach of one of the hundred
  or more daimyo always resident in the city, gave Edo life the individu-
  ality of which its residents boasted.
  More important than the guidebooks was the outpouring of fiction
  with which publishers tried to win their readers' favor. There was an
  unappeasable hunger for reading matter among the inhabitants of
  Edo, who consumed everything that the publishers provided. The
  19 See the sample budget breakdown as constructed by Kitajima Masamoto, Bakuhansei no
  kumon, vol. 18 oiNihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Chud koronsha, 1967), pp. 264-5. Rents might be
  paid daily by the least privileged. 
  20 Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, p. 254.
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  68 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  spread of literacy and the lowering of printing costs, along with ad-
  vances in wood carving, put booklets written in the native syllabary
  (kana) within the reach of commoners. Shikitei Samba speaks casually
  of apprenticing a boy to a bookshop, and his stories' mothers boast as
  they gossip in the communal bath about their boys' precosity in gob-
  bling up the books in the house.21 Nevertheless, on the whole the
  margin of existence was too modest for most people to permit the
  growth of a book-owning public. Editions of the simplest kanazoshi
  (books written in kana) might go as high as seven thousand copies, but
  for works of substance and size, the answer lay in the spread of lending
  and renting libraries.
  Bakufu regulations record the licensing of a guild for book renting
  in Kyoto in 1716. By the turn of the century such shops were every-
  where in Edo and in the provinces, where the reading public was
  served by itinerant peddlars with boxes of books on their backs.
  Takizawa Bakin, perhaps the greatest and most successful of the au-
  thors of lengthy "reading books" (yomihon), wrote that his books were
  read even in distant Sado Island. Edo had some eight hundred book-
  lending shops (kashihonya) which were organized in twelve guilds in
  the Bunka era, and they rented books for periods of fifteen days.
  Assuming full utilization at some two dozen transfers a year, an edi-
  tion of 750 might thus reach 19,200 readers.22 Prefaces often make it
  clear that the author was aiming for the rental audience.
  Publishers worked closely with authors to time editions advanta-
  geously, and serial episodes had to be ready on time lest the market
  interest waver. Yomihon sections had a fifteen-day lead time, but
  ninjobon (romance books) needed less time and allowed only three
  days. Under such pressures a successful author was the center of a
  production team, with assistants and engravers at hand for the finish-
  ing touches and illustrations. In his diary Bakin reports that he and
  Santo Kyoden were probably the first authors to receive a regular form
  of payment, as opposed to the "thank you" gifts and banquets that had
  previously been the norm. Certainly they, Tamenaga Shunsui, and
  Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831) (whose books, Bakin wrote, were read
  21 Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, p. 111; and Robert W. Leutner, Shikitei Samba and the
  Comic Tradition in Late Edo Period Popular Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
  Press, 1985). Note also a mother's comment, "If you have two sons, you're in a perfect
  position to get the younger one adopted into some other family as an heir, aren't you?"
  22 Ekkehard May, Die Kommerzialisierung der japanischen Literature, p. 55, an excellent study
  from which these computations are taken; also Peter F. Kornicki, "The Publishers Go-
  Between: Kashihonya in the Meiji Period," Modem Asian Studies 14 (1980): 331-44; and the
  excellent study by Konta Yozo, Edo no hon'yasan: kinsei bunkashi no sokumen (Tokyo: NHK
  Books no. 299,1977).
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  TOWNS, TRAVEL, AND URBAN CULTURE 
  69
  even by daimyo) were immensely successful, prolific, and talented.2^
  Authors also had to exercise caution. Kyoden's punishment in the
  Kansei era, one that was to befall Shunsui in the Tempo reforms,
  underscored the need to keep a wary eye on the censors. This also
  affected content. Because it was impossible to discuss contemporary
  affairs, news from other countries, and recent history, authors were
  restricted to ribald or fanciful themes. Shikitei Samba (1776-1822)
  exploited the street humor of daily life in Edo in works placed in a
  setting of bathhouse gossip. Humor was situational rather than subtle,
  as in the case of Ikku's wandering rogues who fall into privies, encour-
  age others to step into scalding hot metal bathtubs, and lay siege to
  maids in roadside inns. All this was highly commercialized. Publishers
  did their best to retain the readers' attention for sequels, with writers'
  afterwords promising even more gripping adventures to follow. Small
  volumes, as in the eighty, and then eighty-four, facsimiles in which a
  Japanese translation of the Water Margin (Shui hu ch'uan) was issued,
  provided another way to minimize risks and hold a following. Sublimi-
  nal advertising often accompanied the texts: Kyoden's for his tobacco
  shop, Shunsui's for books, and Samba's for medicines.
  This satirical and situational humor, despite its lack of depth, can
  also be seen as a response to the strains and limitations in Edo society.
  It reversed the normal and accepted platitudes of duty and morality in
  the textbooks from which the commoners had learned to read. Kyo-
  den, Samba, Ikku, and others described a world of play filled with
  raucous laughter, physical indulgence, and crudity. Samba's bath-
  house patrons are a scruffy lot, remarkable for sores, flatulence, casual
  insult, and gross indecency. They live in a world in which people
  spend their lives in narrow quarters of the permissible and achievable.
  It is a society in which concern with the physical usually takes prece-
  dence over concern with the intellectual or spiritual.
  Bakin (1767-1848), the most important of the names that have been
  introduced here, illustrated in his life most of the themes of commer-
  cialization, travel, and frustration that have been described. Of samu-
  rai stock, Bakin resigned his modest commission and income in order
  to be a professional writer, only to dedicate the products of his efforts
  to finance the restoration of his son and, after the son's death, his
  23 Probably the longest lived and best known of the genre of "humor books" (kokkeibon) is
  Jippensha Ikku's Tokaido dochu hizakurige (Travels on foot on the Tokaido), published
  between 1802 and 1822 and translated into English by Thomas Satchell as Hizakurige or
  Shanks' Mare: Japan's Great Comic Novel of Travel and Ribaldry (Kobe: 1929 and subsequent
  reprints). See Donald Keene, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modem Era,
  1600-1867 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), pp. 412-14.
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  70 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  grandson to samurai status. Although he achieved a considerable
  amount of success as author of kibydshi (literally, "yellow covers,"
  illustrated tales notable for humor, irony, and satire) in close associa-
  tion with Santo Kyoden, even writing fiction for his mentor during his
  fifty days in handcuffs during the Kansei reform, Bakin despised
  frivolous literature and wanted desperately to concentrate his efforts
  on sterner stuff. His yomihon relied on Confucian values and Chinese
  precedents to glorify Japan's samurai tradition by creating a series of
  implausibly noble and selflessly loyal warriors whom he placed in pre-
  Tokugawa times. One of the major events of his life was a sight-seeing
  trip to Kyoto and Osaka that he described in detail in a travel account
  replete with comments on costs and the quality of food and women.
  He frequented the literary and cultural clubs in Edo, made the ac-
  quaintance of the Dutch scholar Sugita Gempaku, and requested his
  help in the investigation of "barbarian names." He was acquainted
  also with the painter Watanabe Kazan but knew better than to go to
  his defense when Kazan was swept up in the purge of Western schol-
  ars in 1839.
  Bakin's greatest success was with his masterpiece Nanso Satomi
  hakkenden, on which he labored from 1814 to 1841. In it a warlord
  besieged in his castle promises the hand of his daughter to anyone who
  can produce his enemy's head and is nonplussed to have his faithful
  watchdog meet the conditions of his promise. When one of his retain-
  ers, anxious to release the daughter from this strange alliance, kills the
  daughter by mistake, eight heads, each for a Confucian virtue, rise to
  the sky and subsequently appear in the surname (inu = dog) of a
  samurai superhero. Together they restore the fortunes of the maiden's
  father. Bakin's evocation of a vanished past of samurai glories was
  immensely popular. When one section was issued in a small number of
  copies by a bookseller in the depths of the famine of 1837, a crowd of
  hundreds of frustrated customers milled about demanding that more
  copies be made available.
  Bakin's needs for money to pay for his grandson's elevation to
  samurai status remained unmet, however, and in 1836 he agreed some-
  what reluctantly to a testimonial dinner of the sort common in his day.
  He went around the city in a palanquin to distribute the invitations
  and reserved most of a large restaurant for the occasion. In response
  there was a gathering of poets, entertainers, publishers, artists, writ-
  ers, printmakers, engravers, book and rental guild representatives,
  and government functionaries which required the provision of 1,184
  meals. The guests brought gifts in return for the fans and food they
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
  71
  received, and Bakin's finances were finally secure. Even so, his wor-
  ries were not at an end. When Mizuno Tadakuni inaugurated the
  Tempo reforms in 1841 with a series of measures similar to those of
  Matsudaira Sadanobu a half-century earlier, Bakin's long and im-
  mensely popular novel seemed a likely target for punitive action de-
  spite its content. One Shoheiko Confucian pedant did in fact propose
  to ban Eight Dogs, but moderation prevailed with the conclusion that
  its only fault was a few objectionable illustrations. Free of that con-
  cern, Bakin devoted his remaining years to the completion of his giant
  work. Blind in both eyes, he was finally forced to dictate to his
  daughter-in-law, but he finally completed one of the world's longest
  novels. All in vain: His twenty-year-old grandson, a samurai at last,
  outlived him by only one year.^
  THE COUNTRYSIDE: GROWTH, SURPLUS, AND THE
  PROBLEM OF CONTROL
  In the early decades of the nineteenth century the Japanese country-
  side retained the monochrome character of earlier Tokugawa years. In
  most villages one or two substantial buildings signaled the presence of
  the local elite, whether goshi (rural samurai) or gono (wealthy farmers).
  There were the men whose influence and affectations upset the Confu-
  cian political economists. Their wealth, literacy, and connections with
  authority made them the natural leaders in the establishment of village
  schools, the expression of village opinion, and the funding of village
  activities. Their white stucco storehouses stood out from the weath-
  ered gray of their residences and the handsome evergreens that domi-
  nated their small gardens. That same visibility made their residences
  the targets for occasional outbursts of village anger: At such times,
  storehouses, pine, and sake vats might be demolished after the crowd
  became unruly. Nevertheless, on the whole the village was drab.
  Sumptuary laws ruled out roofing tiles, and there was little ornamenta-
  tion, few windows, shoji, or flowers.
  In a sense the "Kasei era," as the Bunka-Bunsei years are often
  termed, was remarkable for plentiful harvests, relaxation of the sever-
  ity of Matsudaira Sadanobu's restrictions, and the flowering of a mate-
  rial and artistic culture in the great urban centers. When compared
  with the turbulence of Europe in these decades or with the slow atten-
  uation of Manchu power in China, Japan seems to have experienced a
  24 Leon M. Zolbrud, Takizawa Bakin (New York: Twayne, 1967).
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  72 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  period of respite. Domain schools were being founded more rapidly
  than ever before; private academies mushroomed throughout the land;
  and over a thousand parish schools for commoners appeared. Euro-
  pean visitors like Hendrik Doeff and Philip Franz von Siebold, at the
  two extremes of these decades, spoke with admiration of the order and
  prosperity they saw. Artists of the period, notably Katsushika Hoku-
  sai (1760-1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) who became celebri-
  ties through the skill and number of their genre paintings and prints,
  left a record of a peaceful and smiling countryside that has attracted
  travelers ever since.
  The social and economic history of the period nevertheless presents
  the historian with an abundance of problems that belie the apparently
  placid tenor of life. If the central fact of eighteenth-century Japan was
  the growth of merchant power and influence made possible by the
  growth of cities, nineteenth-century governments were no less trou-
  bled by their awareness of the growth of comparable commercialism
  throughout the countryside, especially near the great cities of Osaka
  and Edo. That spread was accompanied by a growing differentiation
  of wealth within the village, in the struggle of villagers for more respon-
  sive local government, in strains between village and metropolis as
  bakufu and daimyo tried to protect and control prices and distribu-
  tion, and between domains and bakufu as the latter found itself impro-
  vising measures to respond to economic trends that had not respected
  the division of domain and fief.
  The central fact of Tokugawa history was the bakufu's inability to
  improve the imperfect political controls with which it began the period
  throughout the two and one-half centuries of its rule. By accepting its
  role as the greatest of the feudal lords, the bakufu closed itself off from
  the possibility of devising a more rational centralized structure. At the
  same time its political controls, which centered on the rotation of the
  daimyo to the capital, led to ever-larger centralization in the market
  economy. With responsibility for the great cities but not for the areas
  that supported their needs, the bakufu had to deal with the effects of
  economic centralization without being able to respond with effective
  measures of allocation and control. In addition, the sixteenth-century
  measures that separated the samurai from the land made it impractical
  to control the countryside closely. Cadastral registers that were reason-
  ably accurate at the beginning of Tokugawa rule continued to provide
  the basis for the daimyo's ritual and service obligations long after
  economic growth had rendered them obsolete. In a land at peace, in
  which ritual and status constituted the center of political attention,
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
  73
  realignment would have caused repercussions comparable to those
  that follow reapportionment in contemporary democratic societies.
  Yet the daimyo themselves were seldom better off than the bakufu.
  Those that had lost territory to the Tokugawa victors had more war-
  riors than their castle town could accommodate; Satsuma scattered
  them throughout the realm and retained feudal control and discipline
  into the nineteenth century. In contrast, the bakufu and its principal
  vassals had experienced a vast increase of territory without a compen-
  sating increase in manpower. Consequently the environs of the great
  cities, the most commercialized and the most productive, were also the
  least garrisoned, enjoyed the best leverage in negotiation over tax and
  monopoly, and became the least "feudal." There was thus a disjunc-
  tion between political primacy and economic dependence, political
  rationalization and traditional decentralization. A rice-based revenue
  guaranteed that a regime with a grain-tax income would find itself
  disadvantaged in years when good harvests brought lower prices for
  rice. The Kasei period found this true.
  The hardening of seclusion as the national doctrine had an addi-
  tional impact on economic thought and policy. In late-eighteenth-
  century Japan a number of writers had envisaged the possibility of
  new economic measures that could promote expansion and increase
  productivity. Much of the fascination of European books for writers
  like Honda Toshiaki and other keiseika, as the political economists
  styled themselves, was the revelation of measures that might.be taken
  to increase productivity and contribute to the public good. The deci-
  sions against such innovations symbolized by Matsudaira Sadanobu's
  reification of seclusion as mandated by tradition, however, suggested
  a ceiling on the sum total of productivity possible under the existing
  system. Consequently it seemed that growth in any sector could come
  only at the expense of other sectors. Rural well-being and especially,
  as samurai commentators saw it, opulence could mean only that
  villagers were taking more than their share and impoverishing the
  cities where the samurai lived. If so, planning required measures to
  take this back from them and to keep commercial ventures in autho-
  rized channels. This view had consequences for struggles within the
  village, between village and city, and at times between domain and
  bakufu. That such projections were mistaken is something that long
  escaped analysts: Both Meiji historians and twentieth-century eco-
  nomic determinists alike were inclined to accept the gloomy view of
  the potential of the late feudal order implicit in the acts of the bakufu
  planners. More recent analysts, however, working with demographic
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  74 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  statistics, hold that as the nineteenth century began, an economy that
  had long been moribund slowly began to move again. Previously
  backward areas began to share in the economic growth that the urban
  plains had experienced earlier. A new trend of rising productivity
  was set in motion in the Kasei years that extended into the Meiji
  period.2' Contemporaries, however, did not sense this and acted on
  the basis of their perceptions of a constant sum of foodstuffs and
  goods.
  It has already been observed that below the high levels of society,
  class and status lines were blurred more than they had ever been. As
  education became more widely available, it was inevitable that ability
  would seek and sometimes find reward. The fixed income of the he-
  reditary stipends and rations to which most samurai were held made
  bushi status less desirable for many able youths, but at the same time
  political and status perquisites made that status attractive to mer-
  chants seeking to endow their sons. The frequency of adoptions into,
  and resignations out of, samurai status was widely noted. Many con-
  temporaries voiced a discouraging estimate of samurai martial compe-
  tence; it would require the national crisis of the mid-century years to
  rekindle the warrior spirit. For many, ambition could be realized only
  by abandoning the restrictions of fixed status. Hiroshige, the descen-
  dant of a Tsugaru samurai who gave instruction in archery, found
  himself a member of the Edo fire brigade. As soon as he could, he
  passed on his fire brigade duties to a son so that he could concentrate
  on his art. Meanwhile, not a few commoners found it possible to
  purchase samurai status.
  This flexibility of status arrangements might seem convenient to
  many, but traditionalists found it deplorable and alarming. Buyo
  Inshi, whose Seji kemmon roku has already been cited for its disap-
  proval of daimyo and samurai life-styles, went on to dismiss agricul-
  turalists. He described a countryside alarmingly divided between the
  wealthy and the exploited. The former, who seemed oblivious to their
  proper status,
  live luxuriously like urban aristocrats. Their homes are as different from
  those of the common people as day from night, or clouds from mud. They
  build them with the most handsome and wonderful gates, porches, beams,
  alcoves, ornamental shelves, and libraries. Some give money to the govern-
  ment and get the right to wear swords and take surnames . . . they wear fine
  25 Nishikawa Shunsaku, Edo jidai no poritikaru ekonomii (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1979), a
  masterful discussion with case studies from northern and western Japan.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
  75
  clothes and imitate the style and airs of samurai on occasions like weddings,
  celebrations, and masses for the dead.16
  The author's emphasis is on the deplorable indifference to status; a
  properly ordered society, the society that had once existed, should be
  based on status: "The lord nurtures the people with virtue; the people
  honor the lord by giving crops of grains and do not depart from the
  precepts of jinsei in the slightest."27 But with this fracturing of society,
  in which "fifty out of one hundred" were seizing the opportunity to
  improve themselves at the cost of the remaining fifty, some were able to
  ingratiate themselves with officials, bribing them at tax assessment time
  to base their rate on their worst paddies, thereby forcing others to bear
  the heavier burden. Farmers had become litigious, appealing decisions
  and heading for the courts at the slightest provocation.28 The poor,
  increasingly oppressed, had no recourse but to leave the villages for the
  cities; once out of agriculture they would never return. The wealth of
  the village elite was not only responsible for the indigence of the samu-
  rai, but in addition the poor were being driven to crime. The happiness
  of the few came at the cost of misery for the many. Not surprisingly,
  these conditions were farthest advanced near the great cities. Prosper-
  ous farmers in the vicinity of Edo had no hesitation to head for court,
  and they were no longer in the slightest fear of the magistrate's office.
  It has to be granted that there is supporting evidence for this view of
  social disruption in the nineteenth century. The extent to which soci-
  ety had come unraveled was shown in the response of some village
  elders to their lord's request for additional loans some decades later. In
  1856, a hatamoto with a holding rated at 700 koku received a response
  from three village leaders to his request for money that challenged him
  to prove that he needed and deserved the additional money. The
  statement pointed out he had made no effort to reduce his expendi-
  tures, that he was supporting a brother who was an "immoral idler,"
  and that he was supporting more maids and housemen than he
  needed. The villagers threatened to resign their posts as elders if the
  bannerman did not put his house in order soon.2'
  26 Nishikawa, Edo jidai no porilikaru ekonomi, p. 100. Noted also by Thomas C. Smith, The
  Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 176,
  whose translation has been adapted here. 
  27 Buyo Inshi, Seji kemmon roku, p. 125.
  28 Buyo Inshi, Seji kemmon roku, p. 108. See also on this point, Dan Fenno Henderson, Village
  "Contracts?' in Tokugawa Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), for discus-
  sion and examples of justiciable arrangements in the late Tokugawa decades.
  29 Example from Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship (Cam-
  bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 47-8, who translates the document.
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  76 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  In 1816 things may not have come to such a pass as yet, but there
  was little doubt in Buyo Inshi's mind that they were heading in that
  direction. He looked back wistfully to the reform spirit of Matsudaira
  Sadanobu, and he found little comfort in the society of his day. His
  jeremiad went on to complain of merchant wealth, the expense and
  demoralizing effects of popular amusement on stage and in books, and
  ended with a plaint that the feudal order, although clearly of divine
  institution, was being subverted by luxury and superstition. The Bud-
  dhist clergy was among his targets, and the image of Kyoto, with its
  unproductive luxury and pretensions to elegance, a particular bane.
  Seji kemtnon roku, in other words, provides a picture of Japan by
  someone whose self-image was adversely affected by the social change
  to which he was witness.
  We can be thankful for the evidence that many contemporaries felt
  differently and realized that economic differentiation was based on
  more than a diversion from approved channels of distribution. Books
  on economic management and growth were important products of the
  times and circulated in large numbers during the Bunka and Bunsei
  years. Okura Nagatsune (b. 1768) traveled widely in both the Kansai
  and Kanto areas, wrote on ways to increase yields of cotton and rice,
  and encouraged the cultivation of mulberrys to feed to silkworms. He
  served as a private commentator and as an adviser to several daimyo.
  He advocated sending experts into the villages and setting aside experi-
  mental plots of land in order to give the farmers a chance to see the
  results of new methods. Village leaders could then be persuaded to
  teach and persuade others. Okura and other writers stressed farm-
  family profits - exactly the kind of concern deplored in Seji kemmon
  roku - to urge on their readers. It was clear that such techniques
  would benefit the gifted and the energetic most immediately, but
  Okura wrote about lessening the labor of the masses and increasing the
  income of all. Agronomists like him did not, in other words, accept
  the view of a fixed total of agricultural productivity that animated the
  official moralists. With the spread of commoner literacy, such writings
  circulated widely as itinerant peddlars and lenders moved through the
  countryside with boxes of books on their backs. One book on seri-
  culture had a first printing of three thousand copies.3°
  30 Thomas C. Smith, "Okura Nagatsune and the Technologists," in Albert M. Craig and
  Donald H. Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
  sity of California Press, 1970), pp. 127-54; and Iinuma Jiro, "Goriteki ndgaku shiso no
  keisei: Okura Nagatsune no baai," in Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Kasei bunka no kenkyu
  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 397-416.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
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  Material of this sort circulated most regularly near Japan's great
  cities, but the men who produced it traveled widely, and they had
  readers in many areas. Nevertheless there must have been a great deal
  of difference between the confidence of the rural elite in the Kansai
  and Kanto plains and the attitudes permitted by harsher conditions in
  other areas. In the Kyushu coastal province of Higo, for instance,
  commercialization was by no means absent, but village stratification
  was more a product of the superiority of the lowland paddies to the
  more recently developed upland and marginal lands. Village councils
  were dominated by those who held the older paddies. The domain
  began selling samurai commissions in the eighteenth century as a way
  of raising income, and wealthy farmers had been able to change their
  legal standing in return for paltry stipends that brought the status of
  swords and surnames. In the nineteenth century the figures for such
  transfers were not impressive; thirty commissions were sold during
  Bunka, and thirty during Bunsei. Yet commercialization was by no
  means absent. The domain administration developed a banking sys-
  tem by establishing a depository that issued certificates of deposit,
  offered loans, and stored goods and promises of future goods. In 1802
  a desperate shortage of money in han coffers made it impossible to
  cover domain indebtedness and brought a collapse of consumer and
  creditor confidence that caused a run in which the "bank" building
  within the castle grounds was "besieged by hundreds of people from
  dawn till dusk who attempted to save what could be saved and even
  tried to force their way into the building. "*l Han administrators
  brought a halt to the run by the draconian device of publicly burning
  the instruments of deposit to indicate that they had no intention of
  honoring them. The next year the domain tried to recoup its prestige
  by shifting the system of tax assessment from the annual inspection
  (kemmi) system to an averaged (jdmeti) tax, using as the basis the
  figures for the previous thirty years. This brought a new wave of
  protests, now led by rural leaders, who presumably feared that a fixed
  rate would allow less flexibility. They may also have been afraid of the
  survey that would be required to set the new tax rates. The han
  prevailed.
  Clearly conditions were worse, and feudal authority was stronger, in
  Kumamoto than in the metropolitan areas. Visits of tax assessors from
  the castle town were of critical importance. They were greeted by
  village elders in formal dress with elaborate courtesy and food in the
  31 Heinrich Martin Reinfried, The Tale of Nisuke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, Studien zur Ja-
  panologie Band 13,1978), p. 189.
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  78 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  hope of softening their requirements. After the harvest was in, guards
  were set up on all roads to make sure none of it left the village without
  authorization; and when the tax rice was delivered to the authorities, a
  procession of villagers leading packhorses prepared for the nervous
  process of tests for quality.
  This tension was the subject of a samurai-administrator who noted
  the villagers' hardships in the account of an imaginary discussion he
  wrote in 1803. The participants in the discussion, entitled Tale of
  Nisuke, are a local official, a wealthy peasant, a village doctor and
  teacher, and two ordinary farmers who provide the foils for their wise
  contemporaries to instruct. The three men of standing agree strongly
  on one point: Buddhist priests represent idleness, waste, and supersti-
  tion. The peasants they address, however, remain disinclined to risk
  whatever harm that supernatural intervention may add to their mortal
  ills. The author noted the village's resistance to the domain's policies
  of afforestation and tried to allay fears that runoff from the conifers
  would poison their paddies. He tried to assure them that the j'omen tax
  was fair and explained its practicality. But he had to admit the evils of
  other aspects of the system: rapacious officials who underweighed the
  harvest tax, and officials and merchants who took advantage of the
  villagers' distress to offer supplemental loans at ruinous rates.
  Generalization is nevertheless difficult, for local variation in a Japan
  divided into hundreds of administrative principalities was inevitably
  very great. In the Shonai han on the northwestern coast of Honshu
  there were enormous contrasts within the han. The original fields were
  lightly taxed and their elite favored, but more recently reclaimed land
  had a harder time of it. Merchant money became landlord money, and
  by the early nineteenth century, the Homma family holdings were of
  an order that made massive loans to the domain government a regular
  affair. 32 Northern Japan - Morioka and Tsugaru - was perhaps least
  commercialized of all. The domain of Morioka, despite a climate un-
  suited for the production of rice, used its resources of iron, lumber,
  and horses to balance its books. The role of the merchant houses
  located in central Japan was important. As early as 1716 there is a
  record of an Osaka merchant who paid 55,000 ryo for the right to cut
  cypress, and an 1806 record speaks of the harvesting of almost 700,000
  trees in one district.33 Han efforts to get additional tax income out of
  32 William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985), a close study of Shonai finance and politics in the nine-
  teenth century.
  33 Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial
  Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 135.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
  79
  its hard-pressed farmers were often unsuccessful and led to a series of
  peasant revolts. Collaboration with merchant capital provided a better
  route for administrative stability. Morioka taxed imports and sold
  samurai rank, and as early as 1783 the han provided the convenience of
  a price list for status, from 50 ryd for wearing a sword to 620 ryd for full
  warrior standing. *» Such payments were, of course, beyond the means
  of most residents, and as the bakufu pressed the han for contributions
  to defenses in the north, the Morioka finances grew worse. Neverthe-
  less there are indications of a steady rise in differentiation and a de-
  cline in old-style bondage. Economic historians find evidence that the
  proportion of nago, the poorest category of agricultural dependent,
  declined.35 Even in Tohoku Japan, contemporaries complained about
  luxury in the village in much the same way that Buyo Inshi wrote
  about the Kanto plain. In 1830 a Morioka man wrote about Sendai:
  Everyone has forgotten the righteous way. Now everyone is working for
  profit. . . . In the villages we now have hairdressers and public baths. If you
  see houses you see flutes, samisen, and drums on display. Those living in
  rented houses, the landless, and even servants have haori, umbrellas, tabi,
  and clogs. When you see these people on their way to the temples, they seem
  better dressed than their superiors.'6
  Buyo Inshi could not have put it better.
  There were a number of responses to the acceleration of these trends
  in the early nineteenth century. One was internal to the village. Long
  subject to hereditary headmen or the purely formal alternation of
  headmen, villagers began to demand more of a say in the selection of
  their own notables. Usually the stimulus to such a demand was pro-
  vided by insensitive or obsequious action on the part of headmen
  whose eyes were on the domain or bakufu authorities. In the more
  highly commercialized parts of the country, a series of demands and
  demonstrations found villagers on the whole having their way. Increas-
  ingly, the offices of village headmen tended to be filled with some
  regard for the wishes of the villagers whose lives and livelihood those
  worthies would affect."
  Another result took the form of changes in village demonstrations
  and protests. In the Bunka years, village demonstrations averaged
  16.6 per year for all of Japan. In Bunsei this declined somewhat to
  13.3 annually, but the character of protests began to change subtly as
  they reflected complaints and strains within the village collectivity.
  More often than not the demonstration would end with the imposing
  34 Ibid., p. 140. 
  35 Ibid., p. 156. 
  36 Quoted in ibid., p. 158.
  37 Kitajima, Bakuhansei no kumon, p. 240.
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  80 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  houses of the wealthy in flames or demolished by the wrath of the
  crowd. This was noted by alarmed contemporaries. Matsudaira Sada-
  nobu, living in retirement, had this to say in 1815:
  When it comes to peasant revolts, there is no need to be concerned just
  because a lot of people are involved. And diat they are bitter about headmen
  (shoya) and lower officials (yakunin) and start riots to demonstrate about that
  doesn't amount to much either. But when they're close to starvation because
  of famine and decide to rise up rather than starve to death, and attack the
  homes of the wealthy and the rice dealers, or start setting fire to everything,
  it's time to look out. They are strongest when the fief holder's government is
  bad, for then they make him out to be the enemy. Moreover these risings are
  worst when there are additional complaints because of long-standing despotic
  government with heavy demands for taxation, transport, corvee, and forced
  loans.*8
  Village strains could also be affected by voluntary associations. The
  growth of young men's organizations (wakamono gumi or nakama) to
  some degree represented an assertion of rural autonomy in the face of
  an increasingly intrusive central government and economy. Such orga-
  nizations had begun as socializing agencies within the village, but in
  die early years of the nineteenth century, they also became agents of
  communal compulsion, demanding additional holidays on which no
  villager dared near his fields, assessing dues for festivals, and ensuring
  conformity to communal desires for entertainment in the form of
  contributions for itinerant troupes of kabuki actors and dancers.
  Wakamono gumi also assessed service duty for communal corv6e. In
  many parts of Japan the condition for achieving full membership in
  the community was passage through such an organization. The organi-
  zations used ritual, formality, and fear to magnify the importance and
  secrecy of the process. Early-nineteenth-century village life was lived
  in the tension between prescriptive communal forms and a jealous
  concern for familial interest and accumulation; inevitably families of
  property put a higher priority on die second. Arrangements for com-
  munal obligations such as the rescue of ships in distress, the preven-
  tion of fire, the transport of tax rice, the cutting of wood, and riparian
  projects found the organizations utilized to ensure equity and effi-
  ciency. Frequently income from part of a village upland or grassy
  areas was allotted to the youth groups by the village assemblies. On
  occasion the groups might also have separate and specific fields to
  provide them with steady income for their projects. The allocation of
  38 Quoted from Sadanobu's Kama hisetsu, in Tsuda Hideo, Tempo kaikaku, vol. 22 oiNihon no
  rekishi (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1975), pp. 80-1.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
  8l
  rest days gave the wakamono gumi particular power to influence the
  community. In some areas records indicate that upwards of seventy
  holidays, distributed throughout the year, were set aside as rest days,
  and any villager who went to work in violation of such pronounce-
  ments was likely to regret it.39
  Some of these customs brought village youth groups into conflict
  with members of the village elite, and many brought communal inter-
  est into direct conflict with the governing authorities. Ultimately it
  was the central political authorities who tired of the friction and de-
  cided to ban the youth groups.40
  Efforts for tighter regulation took place in a context of the need for
  law and order. Buyo Inshi had complained that class division and eco-
  nomic inequality were creating lawlessness in the countryside, and
  there does in fact seem to have been a rise in banditry and gambling,
  particularly in the Kanto area. In a number of cases, some celebrated in
  recent popular entertainment drawing its heroes from legendary Robin
  Hoods, chivalrous bandits attained almost mythical renown. The leg-
  endary Kunisada Chuji, a robber, bandit, and gang leader, won an
  instant response on the kabuki stage. The term "chivalrous figure"
  (kyokaku) represented illegality as well as idealism. Late Tokugawa
  kabuki authors, especially Tsuruya Namboku, specialized in the depic-
  tion of such types. Conventional standards of morality went by the
  board, as did conventional standards of law. Namboku's drama showed
  strange misalliances of bandits and the highborn, and his oeuvre culmi-
  nated in the spectacular Tokaidd Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost story of Yotsuya
  on the Tokaido) in 1825.41 A historian of manners cannot fail to note
  this fascination with the abnormal and the obsession with what was, in
  Confucian eyes, evil. Actor worship and the spread of prostitution
  quarters (akusho, "evil places") beyond the permitted areas to other
  parts of the great cities reflected this. So did the vogue for tattooing. In
  1837 this reached into the very highest circles when a Kanto-area
  daimyo was ordered into retirement for having had himself tattooed.*2
  39 Michiko Tanaka, "Village Youth Organizations {Wakamono Nakama) in Late Tokugawa
  Politics and Society," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1982.
  40 Kitajima Masamoto, "Kaseiki no seiji to minshu," (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, Twanami Koza
  Nihon rekishi, 1963), pp. 313ff.
  41 Keene, World Within Walk, pp. 456-69; Noguchi Takehiko, "/ifei" to Edo bungaku (Tokyo:
  Asahi shimbunsha, 1980), pp. 76ff. Abe Yoshio, in Meakashi Kinjuro no shogai (Tokyo: Chuo
  koronsha, 1981) provides a fascinating close-up of the forty-six-year career of an eighteenth-
  century petty informer who operated on the borderline between the worlds of the police and
  gambling and thus illustrates the compromises that a premodern government had to make
  with illegality.
  42 Kitajima, Bakuhansei no kumon, p. 248, for Kunisada, and p. 271 for the fad of tattooing.
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  82 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  In the 1820s the bakufu moved to tighten control by means of
  regulations that ranged from control of transport to sweeping police
  measures. It had become necessary to control the movement of com-
  merce as well as the movement of people. With respect to commerce,
  it was important to retain the profit for the officially sanctioned guilds
  of the metropolis. These could be ordered to contribute to special
  government levies, and having made such contributions, they ex-
  pected protection from their sponsors within the castle. The process
  can be followed in the Kansai plain before it took place in the Kanto.
  Near Osaka the villages in the provinces of Settsu, Kawachi, and
  Izumi had been the target of bakufu orders forbidding the retailing of
  oilseeds as early as 1797. Seeds were to be sold only to Osaka wholesal-
  ers, and the farmers were also ordered to purchase the oil they needed
  from Osaka dealers. Forty-one villages requested a free market in
  these goods that same year, only to be turned down. Village petitions
  grew in number as urban cotton guilds pressed their case for mo-
  nopoly rights. Outside merchants were forbidden entry into the prov-
  inces involved, and the farmers, presented with a narrowing market
  for their cash product, organized to protest. In 1822, sweeping bakufu
  regulations ordered the abolition of guilds that had handled consign-
  ments from thirteen provinces in western Japan to Hyogo and Edo and
  substituted Osaka as the only legitimate entrepot for vegetables and
  oil. The next year, 1,107 villages petitioned for a free market in these
  products, only to have their petition rejected. Next, 1,307 villages in
  Settsu, Kawachi, and Izumi petitioned again. The bakufu again re-
  fused, although the petitioning villages now constituted about three-
  quarters of the provinces involved. In all these cases the protests were
  clearly organized by village leaders, as they remained within bounds
  and used legal channels of request. Despite the formal bakufu rejec-
  tion, however, relaxation came in piecemeal fashion, particularly with
  regard to cotton after yet another request from 1,007 villages. It
  should be noted that requests from so wide an area had to come from
  villages subject to widely different jurisdictions and that those submit-
  ting them recognized the increasing centralization of the economy and
  considered their "lords" of secondary importance in matters of daily
  economic livelihood.43
  During these same years, the bakufu began to respond to the irratio-
  nality of Kanto landholding patterns with sweeping measures of con-
  trol. From the first, holdings near Edo assumed a crazy-quilt pattern
  43 Ibid., pp. 24off.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
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  that made police control difficult. The area constituted a large part of
  the shogunal tenryd, with many small fudai daimyo realms and numer-
  ous hatamoto and large gokenin villages included. Shrines and temple
  holdings also dotted the area. Much of the tenryd was administered by
  the Kanto gundai, a post long hereditary in the Ina family, which
  supervised other bakufu daikan (administrators). This important post,
  which was directly responsible to the Senior Council {roju), main-
  tained control over highway taxation, made government loans to farm-
  ers and merchants, and monitored security through a series of observa-
  tion elevations officially designated as Eagle Hunting Hills, yet its
  staff, including servants and foot soldiers, amounted to only 380 men.
  By the early years of the nineteenth century, commercialization was
  producing more and more travel for business and pleasure and with
  this came the development of hot springs, silk markets, and, inevita-
  bly, an increase of vagrants, robbers, and gamblers. Throughout Ja-
  pan, disputes between people of different jurisdictions were supposed
  to come before bakufu courts in Edo, but the Kanto jurisdictions were
  so confused that many holdings consisted of parts of several villages
  and so made neighbors in many villages subject to different petty
  lords. As a result, almost any dispute was likely to end up in the
  shogunal courts. Added to this was the bakufu's penchant for moving
  and transferring holdings among its favorites. One village in the west-
  ern outreach of the Edo plain, Godo, consisted of i n households,
  with a population of 536 and a rating of 1,239 koku at the end of
  Tokugawa rule. It was sectioned into six holdings, each with a petty
  fief holder who tried to maintain his Edo standard of living through
  direct administration. He had to work through the local notables, and
  their attitude toward his "rule" was more one of tolerance than of
  awe.44
  In 1798 the Ina family was relieved of its responsibilities, and the
  authorities tried for closer control. In 1805 steps were taken toward
  regional administration of law through the appointment of officials
  who were responsible for given areas, regardless of the stewardship of
  the villages involved. Eight circulating intendants were appointed
  from among veteran officials with ten or more years of experience.
  Each was given assistants, in some cases commoners, who were as-
  signed the duty of patrolling large areas on a regular circuit. This
  system too proved inadequate, for the forces of "lawlessness" (usually
  designated as "bandits and gamblers") were better organized, and
  44 Tanaka, "Village Youth Organizations," pp. 202-7.
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  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  probably more numerous, than were the new guards. As a result, in
  1827 a series of measures, which are usually termed the Bunsei re-
  forms, addressed the issue. The following year the wakamono nakama
  were banned. Local autonomy was being redefined.
  The declared purpose of the Bunsei measures was to provide guide-
  lines for the reactivation of five-family joint-responsibility groups and
  to use them to eradicate banditry and vagrancy. Villages were also to
  be assisted in controlling expenditures. The ban on young men's orga-
  nizations made it possible to restrain the proliferation of holidays and
  was designed to end the spending of village funds on entertainment
  like kabuki, sumo, dancers, and puppet plays. The regulations were
  also explicitly anticommercial. The Bunsei regulations established a
  vertically integrated judicial system in which a large village union,
  consisting of thirty to forty villages headed by a chief village at the
  center, would direct the activities of smaller groups of one to six
  villages. Their representatives were to meet every six months to coordi-
  nate financing for measures to maintain law and order. At the base of
  society, the regulations called for vigilance in maintaining the five-
  family units of mutual observation and control.
  Regulations were issued that were to be read at village assemblies,
  and signed statements of compliance had to be forwarded by male
  villagers. It seems possible that the measures helped prevent large-scale
  insurrections throughout the area and that local notables found in this
  structure a means for limited participation in local government.^
  The regulations provide fascinating evidence about the state of soci-
  ety. "In all villages there are households which have become wealthy
  because they have worked hard even on rest days," they state, and
  then go on to prohibit young men from harassing such villagers by
  spreading rumors about their daughters or by defiling their wells and
  houses. "Except for fishing, woodcutting and other traditional trades,
  no new businesses are to be established," says another regulation; the
  commentary goes on to discuss the virtues of productive simplicity.
  "Artisans of different trades are reported to be getting together to
  demand higher wages," says another, but this is forbidden; wages
  should be reduced and certainly not allowed to rise. "The number of
  beggars is rising greatly, causing difficulties for the population"; the
  solution proposed is to provide them no help and to arrest them if they
  try to force themselves upon villagers. "Rumor has it that in some
  places local officials gamble." If this is so, gambling will never be
  45 Tanaka, "Village Youth Organizations," pp. 2o8ff., and Kitajima, "Kaseiki no seiji to
  minshu," pp. 31 iff.
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  COUNTRYSIDE 
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  controlled; they are to be denounced. All lotteries are illegal as well.
  Again, "It is said that professional litigants {kujishi) in villages disturb
  the tranquility of the countryside." Avoid litigation and preserve har-
  mony, and denounce the would-be lawyers to the authorities. Addi-
  tional regulations set standards of austerity for prisoners' thongs, pris-
  oners' conveyances, and prisoners' food. The provisions end with the
  customary injunction to filiality and gratitude:
  The tenno has compassion for the people and is concerned to keep peace . . .
  the shogun has appointed new officials to serve good people. . . . No words
  are adequate to express our gratitude for the benevolence of the shogun.
  Village officials should understand diis situation, keep out of trouble, work
  hard and encourage farming so that you can pay more taxes in rice. Then your
  village will prosper. 46
  It will be seen that the paternalistic, Confucian spirit of the Kyoho,
  Kansei, and future Tempo reforms was alive and well. Read with a
  mirror, however, these injunctions have a good deal to say about social
  and economic change in the Kanto plain.
  There were also other and more constructive solutions proposed for
  rural poverty. Agrarian reformers like Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-
  1856) and Ohara Yugaku (1797-1858), the former of peasant stock,
  became known for communal self-help programs based on embryo
  cooperatives. Sontoku, who was plunged into poverty early in his life
  when his father died, first scraped out a living for himself and his
  brothers, next revived the family fortunes, and then went on to advo-
  cate improved agronomy, more saving, and cooperative credit unions.
  He did this in a highly moral tone of preaching that drew on the
  congruence of social values with respect to hard work, frugality, and
  gratitude for the benefits bestowed by ancestors, lords, and nature.
  His hdtoku (return of virtue) cooperatives were so successful in reviv-
  ing village economy and prosperity after the demoralization that ac-
  companied the great famines of the 1830s that his help was requested
  by neighboring domains and finally by the bakufu itself.
  Sontoku's evangelism for rural rationality and thrift made him a
  hero for future propagandists during the reactionary years of prewar
  Japan, but his teaching went far beyond the saccharine tones in which
  he was presented in school textbooks. He taught the importance of
  precise calculation of the water and fertilizer required for optimal
  yields. He argued that taxes should be reduced to encourage higher
  46 Tanaka, "Village Youth Organizations," pp. 272-309, provides translations of the injunc-
  tions.
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  86 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  effort and productivity. So too with Ohara Yugaku, born near Na-
  goya, who traveled widely throughout the country to teach fanning
  techniques and land reclamation. He too advocated thrift and dili-
  gence but added to these teachings a series of cooperative credit unions
  in which membership involved an investment contribution. These
  have been described as among the world's first industrial cooperatives,
  designed for the encouragement of small-scale enterprise as well as for
  agricultural improvements. The two reformers fared very differently:
  Sontoku became an ideal type for future state moralists, and Yugaku,
  investigated for possible subversion, met personal ruin during his long
  prosecution and finally committed suicide. Nevertheless they shared
  to a high degree views of self-help and rationality. In Sontoku's fa-
  mous phrase, "It is the Way of Nature to achieve great results by being
  careful about small things."47
  During these years the rational approach to accumulation found an
  even more effective spokesman in Kaiho Seiryo (1755-1817), a politi-
  cal economist who argued the justice and morality of calculation and
  profit. Though born to rank and privilege, Seiryo chose the path of
  private teacher, adviser, and traveler, perhaps from the disillusion of
  seeing his father's fall from domain elder to ronin. After a sound
  grounding in the Confucian teachings of Ogyu Sorai, Seiryo received
  and rejected opportunities for political office in favor of traveling
  throughout Japan to study geography, local resources, products, and
  customs. By the early Bunka years he was in the Kaga domain advis-
  ing merchants and samurai about problems of production and the
  domain economy; he then returned to Kyoto where he opened his own
  school.
  Kaiho Seiryo's writings used much of the language and many of
  the concepts of his predecessors in political economy, but he trans-
  formed their thrust to an advocacy of rationality. Everything, from
  material goods to personal service, he argued, was a commodity with
  an exchange value. Exchanges were to be based on a principle of
  precise calculation, equating name with content, that would permit
  objective measurement and help determine a just profit or interest.1*8
  47 Kitajima, Bakuhansei no kumon, pp. 253-260; and for Sontoku, Thomas R. H. Havens, Farm
  and Nation in Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 25-7,
  and sources cited there. It should be noted that kokugaku nativism in these years made much
  of agrarian improvement and used books on agronomy to spread its teachings among fanners.
  48 See Tetsuo Najita, "The Conceptual Portrayal of Tokugawa Intellectual History," in Tetsuo
  Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period: Methods and
  Metaphors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 23-24, for a discussion of
  Seiryo. See also Najita's more recent Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo
  Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  87
  This was a prelude to his advocacy of careful planning in order to
  generate wealth and profit. He argued that this was as important to
  domain administrators as it was to commoners whose profit lay in the
  exchange of goods or in the production of agricultural wealth. Seiryo
  noted that investment cooperatives were spreading from urban to
  rural areas, and he held up as models the calculation of merchant
  houses that based their profit on assiduous attention to small matters
  that, over time, combined to make a difference. The domain itself, in
  fact, should be thought of as a kind of enterprise, and its affairs
  should be administered with a view to maximizing income and mini-
  mizing waste.
  All of this was consistent with universal principles. To Seiryo it
  made more sense than did the moral posturing, classical affectation,
  and wasteful irrationality that characterized samurai life and ideals.
  Indeed, the conventional derogation of merchant activity was clearly
  wrong; the towns and communication centers were neither parasites
  nor problems but probably were more in tune with the course of
  human affairs than were the samurai who, at all but the highest levels
  of power and affluence, found themselves strapped into patterns of
  expenditure that they could not afford.
  Views of this sort, transformed by national emergency upon the
  coming of the West, could be related to domain and bakufu efforts to
  build wealth and strength (fukoku, kydhei). At the time that Seiryo
  espoused them, they constituted important examples of the way that
  political economists could turn to deal with the actualities of late
  Tokugawa life.
  THE IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD
  The Kansei and Kasei years also inaugurated a new awareness of
  possible danger from the Western world. That awareness began with
  knowledge of the Russian advance on East Asia from the north, and it
  intensified with information about the disorder that the Napoleonic
  wars had produced in the European state system. The major channel
  for such information was the Dutch trading station at Deshima (or
  Dejima) in Nagasaki, where the Dutch were required to submit regu-
  lar reports (fusetsugaki).
  It has already been stated that the Tokugawa system was hardened
  and systematized by the Kansei reform. This was equally true of the
  system of national isolation. Indeed, the very consciousness of those
  regulations as a "system" came only in the nineteenth century, and the
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  88 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  term for "closed country" (sakoku) was coined in 1801 by Shizuku
  Tadao when he translated the defense of the system incorporated in
  the closing chapter of Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan.« But by
  his day the limited number of apertures from which the West could be
  observed had had the effect of attracting viewers to those openings and
  probably of sharpening their focus. As that took place, the visits and
  materials of the Dutch, which had aroused little curiosity in the early
  Tokugawa years, began to make it possible to arrange structured ac-
  cess to books and information.
  From 1641, when the Dutch trading station was moved from
  Hirado to Dejima, that fan-shaped fill served as Japan's window on
  the world and the world's peephole into Japan. Nagasaki also had a
  slightly larger, but similarly enclosed, area for Chinese traders, and in
  the seventeenth century Korean imports carried out by way of Tsu-
  shima provided access to important Confucian texts.'0 The China
  trade was less structured, however, and lacked the official status ac-
  corded to the Dutch East India Company. Dejima was about 650 feet
  in its longer and 550 feet in its shorter dimension, connected to the
  mainland by a carefully guarded stone bridge. All sides were sur-
  rounded by a stone wall to prevent exits. The island itself provided
  two rows of two-story buildings that provided warehousing and living
  space for the Dutch detachment. That detachment was headed by the
  chief factor (or kapitan, as the Japanese termed the opperhoofd from
  their prior trade with Portuguese) of whom there were 163 in 315
  years. Normally there were also a few scribes, a barber-doctor, a
  butter maker - in all, from ten to fifteen men.
  The number of Dutch ships, which normally arrived in the summer
  and left in the fall, varied over time but diminished steadily. The ships
  brought Chinese and Southeast Asian cargo of silks, spices, and ex-
  otica and in return loaded Japanese copper. Tokugawa political econo-
  mists worried about the impact on Japanese coinage of the drain on
  copper, and periods of rigidity and reform at the beginning and end of
  the century included measures to reduce the volume and frequency of
  Dutch trade. Arai Hakuseki in 1715 and Matsudaira Sadanobu in 1790
  sponsored major restrictions. The number of Dutch ships permitted
  to come fell from five, to three or four, to three, to two, and finally to
  49 Ronald P. Toby, Stale and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the
  Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 13.
  50 The standard work on trade with Korea in Tokugawa time is by Tashiro Kazui, Kinsei Ni-
  Cho tsuko boekiski no kenkyu (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1981); and, more briefly, Kazui Tashiro,
  "Foreign Relations During the Edo Period: Sakoku Re-examined," Journal of Japanese Stud-
  ies 8 (Summer 1982): 283-306.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  89
  one per year. Similarly, the count of smaller Chinese ships dwindled in
  number from seventy to thirty and finally to ten. Even so, between
  1621 and 1847, a total of 715 Dutch ships reached Japan.
  The Dutch were merchants in Nagasaki, but as representatives of a
  structured order they were required to schedule trips of homage and
  service to the shogun's court in Edo. As with the Japanese daimyo,
  these trips were at their own expense. They involved the preparation
  of gifts of appropriate quality and cost for some twenty categories of
  officials and hosts, beginning with the shogun and his senior council-
  ors and extending to the masters of the inns prescribed for their use.
  The Dutch had to hire porters and provide for the needs of the inspec-
  tors and guards attached to their party as well as see to their own
  needs. The retinues moved slowly through the country, greeted, es-
  corted, and seen off by representatives of each daimyo through whose
  land they moved. From 1633 to 1764 these visits took place annually;
  from then until 1790 in alternate years, and from 1790 to 1850, the last
  trip, they came every fourth year.51
  Each year the Dutch were expected to file a report (fusetsugaki)
  about developments in the outside world. For many years these were
  perfunctory in content and aroused little curiosity in Japan, but when
  Japan began to experience direct contact along its coasts from north
  and south, the reports began to be scrutinized more carefully. The
  Dutch also imported books. For many years these had been checked
  chiefly to make sure that they did not contain any taint of Christianity.
  The same was true of books brought in by Chinese traders at Naga-
  saki, where systematic arrangements were made for the inspection and
  approval of material from overseas. Bakufu officials had the first
  choice of books, as they did with goods, and by the nineteenth century
  they were able to order specific volumes through orders {eischboek)
  that they gave to the Dutch. This process produced a body of experts
  in foreign matters. Initially it was the Chinese books that mattered, as
  they included direct or indirect results of the Jesuit movement in
  China. Throughout the eighteenth century there was a brisk trade in
  Chinese texts. Books from China in the nineteenth century included
  translations by Protestant missionaries, and in the fourth decade of the
  century, there were Chinese accounts of the Opium War. These were
  accessible to all literate Japanese, and their role in awakening Japan to
  51 The classic descriptions of such trips are the two provided by Engelbert Kaempfer in the
  1690s in vol. 3 of his History of Japan, 3 vols., trans. J. G. Scheuchzer (Glasgow: James
  MacLehose and Sons, 1896). Practical aspects of this contact are described by Kanai
  Madoka, Nichi-Ran koshoshi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Shibunkaku, 1986).
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  90 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  its danger has had too little emphasis in Western writing.'2 In the late
  eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, it was Dutch books
  that mattered most to Japan's image of the West, and as the body of
  men able to read them grew, a distinct tradition of Dutch (rangaku)
  and later "Western" (yogaku) studies came to matter in intellectual and
  political terms.
  An understanding of nineteenth-century developments in Japan's
  image of the outside world requires discussion of the way that Dutch
  books, study and translation, and government policy were related.
  There were two groups of intellectuals who had direct access to the
  Dutch. At Nagasaki there were professional (and hereditary) interpret-
  ers. Four senior interpreters {oppertolken, as the Dutch termed them),
  with assistants, apprentices, and students, supervised a community of
  many more. In the 1690s Kaempfer spoke of a group numbering "no
  less than one hundred and fifty persons"; in the early nineteenth
  century there were fifty-two interpreters divided into three ranks of
  seniority, and by the late Tokugawa decades (when, of course, addi-
  tional languages were required), Fukuchi Gen'ichiro described a
  group of one hundred and forty. These men enjoyed, and had it in
  their own interest to monopolize, whatever access the authorities per-
  mitted to the little group of resident Dutch. But access was not always
  helpful. The group of foreigners might include someone of intellectual
  quality and interest, but more often it did not. Only two of the chief
  factors left accounts that indicated a strong interest in things Japanese.
  Isaac Titsingh (in Japan from 1779 to 1784, in three visits that in-
  cluded two trips to Edo) and Hendrik Doeff (in Japan intermittently
  from 1799 to 1817, after 1803 as chief factor, unable to leave because
  of the interruption of contact with Holland) made major contribu-
  tions. Titsingh's stay in Japan came during a period when the curbs
  were relaxed, with the result that he was able to meet many scholars
  and daimyo. After his departure he corresponded with Edo scholars
  and Nagasaki interpreters.'? Johannes Edewin Nieman, who visited
  Edo as chief factor in 1838 and who met Watanabe Kazan, had studied
  geography in London, Paris, and Vienna. More important, however,
  was the role of the physicians attached to the Dutch settlement, who
  regularly accompanied the chief factor on his trips to Edo. Three of
  52 Oba Osamu, Edojidai ni okeru Tosen mochiwatansho no kenkyu (Suita: Kansai University, 1967)
  provides the basic study of books imported from China. Oba Osamu, Edojidai no Ni-Chii hitua
  (Tokyo: Toho shoten, 1980) includes accounts of imports relating to the Opium War.
  53 Titsingh is discussed in C. R. Boxer, "Isaac Titsingh, 1745-1812," chap. 7 of Jan Compagnie
  in Japan 1600-1850 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  91
  the most remarkable were nationals of other countries. These were
  Engelbert Kaempfer, a German doctor whose stay in Japan from 1690
  to 1692 included two visits to Edo and resulted in his celebrated
  History of Japan, Carl Peter Thunberg, a Swedish intellectual and later
  professor at the University of Uppsala, in Japan in 1775, and espe-
  cially the German Philip Franz von Siebold, whose stay in Japan
  between 1823 and 1830 included a period in which he gave instruction
  in a medical school set up for him in Nagasaki.54
  The Nagasaki interpreters enjoyed frequent access to these men,
  but their Edo counterparts were restricted to a few command occa-
  sions during the Dutch presence in Edo at the Edo inn where the
  missions were housed, the Nagasakiya. At Edo a larger group of schol-
  ars of Dutch learning was made up of doctors anxious to learn more
  about Western medicine and science.
  The seventeenth century, which saw trade at its high point, found
  Japanese interest in the West at a low point. Over the course of a
  century, as Dutch-Japanese trade declined in volume and profit, the
  cultural cargoes became more appreciated. Books increasingly dis-
  placed Chinese silks as imports, and Japanese exports came to feature
  Arita ceramics, known as Imari for the port from which they were
  exported, which contributed to the development of Delft and other
  European ceramics, ss The books that the Japanese imported had the
  greatest importance for future times. Thanks to these, "Dutch stud-
  ies," (rangaku) became a vital intellectual tradition in the later eigh-
  teenth century and a matter for government concern at the century's
  end.56
  Holland was, however accidentally, an appropriate bridge to the
  West for Japanese scholars. It was small enough to be unthreatening,
  squarely in the middle of European cultural exchange, and quick in its
  response to European learning, much of which was quickly translated
  into Dutch. Most of the major achievements of the Japanese transla-
  tions effort were translations of Dutch translations of English and
  continental learning. The first great monument, the Kaitai shinsho of
  1774, was a collaborative effort by three doctors: Sugita Gempaku
  (1733-1818), Maeno Ryotaku (1723-1803), and Nakagawa Jun'an
  54 Siebold is the subject of a magisterial biography by Kure Shuzo, Shiiboruto sensei, sono shogai
  cyobi kogyo (Tokyo: Hakuhodo shoten, 1926) and a journal launched in 1982, Shiiboruto
  kenkyu (Tokyo: Hosei University).
  55 See T. Volker, Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company 1602-1682, and The Japanese
  Porcelain Trade of the Dutch East India Company After 1683 (Leiden: Brill, 1954 and 1959.)
  56 See Marius B. Jansen, "Rangaku and Westernization," Modem Asian Studies 18 (October
  1984): 541-53-
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  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  (1739-1786). Their achievement was to translate the work of a Leiden
  professor, Gerard Dictin, who had translated the descriptive captions,
  but not the notes, of the 1722 work of the German physician, John
  Adam Kulmus, Tabulae anatomicae in quibus corporis humani. Sugita
  and his associates understood this project after viewing the dissection
  of an executed criminal and confirming their suspicion that the West-
  ern source was far more accurate than the Chinese texts in which they
  had been trained. Sugita later recalled, in memoirs written in 1815:
  On our way home we talked with excitement about the experiment. Since we
  had served our lords as doctors, we were quite ashamed of our ignorance of
  the true morphology of the human body, which was fundamental to the
  medical art. In justification of our membership in the medical profession, we
  made a vow to seek facts through experiment.
  The three agreed to seek no assistance and began a tedious process in
  which "we translated by conjecture, word by word, and gradually
  these increased in number. . . . After two or three years of hard study
  everything became clear to us; the joy of it was as the chewing of sweet
  sugarcane."57
  There had been earlier cases in which Japanese doctors had become
  aware of the discrepancy between anatomical facts and Chinese texts,
  which treated the body as the constituent part of a properly balanced
  cosmos, but this occasion remains highly important and historic. One
  notes the doctors' sense of shame that as specialist professionals, they
  had let down their daimyo. Their resolution to seek answers through
  experiment in the future and, by inference, to follow the facts where
  they might lead marked the real shift. This led to a readiness to
  relegate Chinese learning to its place as a great, but no longer the only,
  source of wisdom. When critics disparaged the conclusions of Sugita's
  work and forced him to respond, he did so in a dialogue in which he
  argued that China was only one country in the Eastern Seas and that
  true medical knowledge had to be based on universal grounds. The
  search for such knowledge led increasingly to Western books, until by
  the time of his memoirs, Rangaku kotohajime, Sugita could marvel that
  he had unwittingly launched an age of translation. As he put it,
  57 Described in Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
  University Press, 1969), pp. 22 ff.; and also discussed by Grant Goodman, "Dutch Studies in
  Japan Re-examined," in Josef Kreiner, ed., Deutschland-Japart Historische Kontakte (Bonn:
  Grundmann, 1984), pp. 69-88. The authoritative accounts in Japanese are by Sato Shosuke,
  Yogakushi kenkyu josetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964), and Yogakushi no kenkyu (Tokyo:
  Chuo koronsha, 1980). The notes were later added in a revised translation by Otsuki Gentaku
  (1757-1827).
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  93
  Today so-called rangaku is very widespread. Some people study it earnestly,
  and the uneducated talk about it thoughtlessly. . . . I never imagined that
  Dutch studies would become so important or make such progress. I think
  Chinese studies made only slow progress, but Dutch studies were more
  lucid and made rapid progress because they were written in plain and direct
  language.
  And yet, he concluded, in a striking willingness to compare the cur-
  rent of thought and effort in which he had participated with the far
  more massive effort to domesticate the wisdom of China a millennium
  earlier, it might be that the training in Chinese studies "developed our
  mind beforehand."*8
  The Edo doctors were a far larger group than were the Nagasaki
  interpreters. Through the lords they served they had opportunity to
  request and borrow Dutch books, and through their presence and
  common concerns in the great metropolis they became an important
  and vital group. Edo was the center of samurai learning and society,
  and the information that reached curious minds there could easily
  reach others, stir response, and produce sponsorship for ever-more
  ambitious efforts. At the same time, suspicions of a Western advance,
  exaggerated or misunderstood, could produce more results in Edo
  than they could in Nagasaki.
  The new awareness of danger from abroad began with news about the
  Russians. Russian probings to the north begun about a century before
  the Japanese became aware of them. The seventeenth and eighteenth
  centuries had brought a slow expansion of Russian activities into Siberia
  and the Amur region. Early Russian treaties with China (Nerchinsk,
  1686, and Kiakhta, 1727) formalized commerce on a basis of relative
  equality. Russian caravans contacted authorized Chinese merchants at
  frontier stations and in Peking, somewhat in the way that accommoda-
  tion with maritime foreigners was being worked out at Canton. 59 Forced
  to move north of the Amur basin by the Chinese presence in Manchuria,
  the Russians approached Japan from the north through Kamchatka
  and, after 1700, the Kurils. In 1702, Peter the Great ordered the subjec-
  tion of Kamchatka and the collection of information about Japan in
  preparation for commerce. The advance through the Kurils was not
  58 Discussed in Marius B. Jansen, Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change (Princeton,
  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Haga Toru, "Introduction," in Nihon no meicho:
  Sugita Gempaku, Hiraga Gennai, Shiba Kokan (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1971), pp. 9-84.
  59 Joseph Fletcher, "Sino-Russian Relations, 1800-1862," chap. 7 of John K. Fairbank, ed.,
  The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978),
  vol. 10: Late Ch'ing.
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  94 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  planned or coordinated, but it continued after Peter died in 1725. Two
  expeditions led by Bering and Spanberg, Danes in Russian service,
  explored the northern coasts and archipelago to make contact with
  Japan. Russian enthusiasm for seal pelts in the Kurils brought them
  ever farther south and into contact with the Ainu on the Kuril Islands.
  By 1770 Russians had completed their preliminary exploration and had
  been on almost every island in the Kuril chain.60 During the same years
  Japanese merchants and explorers were pushing north from southern
  Hokkaido, trading with the Ainu in a pattern that gradually brought the
  Ainu into substantial subjection to the daimyo of Matsumae. The
  daimyo in turn delegated commercial dealings to merchants from
  Osaka, Edo, and Sendai. By the latter half of the eighteenth century the
  Japanese were becoming aware of the "Red Ainu" to the north, and the
  Russians, from their knowledge of Ainu trade patterns, sensed a major
  country to the south. Kudo Heisuke, a Sendai physician, wrote two
  accounts in the early 1780s advocating colonization and trade expansion
  to the north. That served as spur to plans for action by the councilor
  Tanuma Okitsugu. Matsudaira Sadanobu, however, put an end to such
  developments when he came into power, on the grounds that a diver-
  sion of resources to the north would serve to impoverish the southern
  domains.61
  The Russian proximity was brought home to the Japanese in 1771
  when a Hungarian nobleman, Moritz von Benyowsky, who had es-
  caped from exile in Kamchatka, appeared in southern Japan with
  warnings that Russia was planning to attack Ezo (Hokkaido) from new
  fortifications in the Kurils. These warnings, quite without substance
  in fact, became further distorted in transmission and resulted in a
  good deal of alarm among those who learned of them. They contrib-
  uted to the argument of a Sendai scholar, Hayashi Shihei (1738-93),
  who wrote two works, Sankoku tsuran zuisetsu and Kaikoku heidan,
  warning of Russian designs and advocating stronger maritime defenses
  to the north. Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821), a more widely oriented
  student of political economy, responded with plans for the sponsor-
  ship of merchant activities to the north and the development of Ja-
  pan's natural potential there. Several of the memorials that he ad-
  dressed to Matsudaira Sadanobu on the subject were without effect,
  60 John J. Stephan, The Kuril Islands: Russo-Japanese Frontiers in the Pacific (Oxford, England:
  Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 50.
  61 Sato, Yogakushi no kenkyu, pp. 118 ff. for Tanuma's plans and their failure; John W. Hall,
  Tanuma Okitsugu (1J19-1788): Forerunner of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
  University Press, 1955), pp. iooff.
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  95
  but his writings, travels, and knowledge of the north, though never
  disseminated through publication, survived to influence later think-
  ers.62 Hayashi Shihei fared less well, for he had the temerity to publish
  his books in an attempt to recoup his finances. His advocacy of mari-
  time defense began to appear in 1787 in a few copies, and when the
  entire work was published in 1791, he was arrested under the provi-
  sions of the Kansei prohibition of publications on contemporary af-
  fairs. After a period of imprisonment he was sent to his domain of
  Sendai for confinement, and the plates for his books were ordered
  burned. He died the following year.6^
  But the Russian probings were not at an end. In 1792 and 1793
  another expedition, this one led by Adam Laxman, was sent by Cather-
  ine the Great. Laxman tried to use the return of castaways as the
  occasion to investigate the possibility of opening commercial relations
  with Japan. He was courteously received in northern Hokkaido where
  he spent the winter and continued on to Matsumae in the summer of
  1793 to confer with the representatives that the bakufu had sent there
  to head off any plans to visit Edo. The Japanese accepted the cast-
  aways, but not the credentials and letters. Matsudaira Sadanobu re-
  sponded to Laxman's request with a statement that Japan had been
  bound "from antiquity" by orders to seize or destroy ships from coun-
  tries with which it had no formal relations, that foreign ships, even
  when returning castaways, could call only at Nagasaki, that other
  foreigners were to be turned over to the Dutch for repatriation, and
  that intruding ships had to be destroyed and their crews imprisoned
  permanently. Curiously, however, Laxman was also given a permit to
  enter Nagasaki, from which he drew misleading conclusions.
  Sadanobu perhaps intended to communicate with him there, but
  Laxman took it as a sign of willingness to trade. What mattered,
  however, was that Sadanobu had now, as with his prescription of
  Confucian orthodoxy, identified a new policy - the armed expulsion
  of Westerners - as part of Tokugawa tradition.6*
  In 1798, with Sadanobu out of power again, the bakufu decided to
  send an expedition to investigate conditions in the north, and the
  following year it placed half of Hokkaido, including Kunashiri and
  62 Honda is the principal subject of Donald Keene's Japanese Discovery of Europe.
  63 Sato, Yogaku kenkyushijosetsu, pp. 106 ff., for the text of the indictment.
  64 Documentation and translation of Sadanobu's reply from Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anii-
  Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modem Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
  sity Press, 1986). The standard account of these events, based principally on Russian sources,
  is by George Alexander Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations,
  1697-1875 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).
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  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  Etorofu, under its own rule; eight years later the rest of Hokkaido and
  Sakhalin were decreed bakufu tenryo as well, and Matsumae was reas-
  signed elsewhere. This arrangement continued until 1821, when Mat-
  sumae was allowed to take over once again. During much of that
  period, programs of settlement and subsidization for the Ainu through
  the provision of clothing, food, metal, and road construction were
  carried out in the hope of solidifying Japanese control and erecting
  barriers to Russian infiltration south from Uruppu.
  The permit to enter Nagasaki that Laxman had received led to addi-
  tional Russian moves a decade later. In 1799 the Russian-American
  Company was established to administer northern territories and to in-
  crease trade, and its directors were made responsible for new efforts to
  approach Japan. In 1802 an ambitious expedition was launched to ex-
  tend Russian maritime contact with the Pacific coast, and as part of
  these plans Captain Nikolai Rezanov appeared at Nagasaki in 1804 with
  a letter from Alexander I formally requesting the privilege of trade with
  Japan. Rezanov was kept waiting in Nagasaki harbor between October
  1804 and April 1805 for a reply before his request, together with the
  presents he had brought, was refused.6* Rezanov left in anger and
  encouraged two young lieutenants, Khostov and Davydov, to take
  stronger measures in a misguided attempt to force the issue. They thus
  carried out a series of raids on Sakhalin and the southern Kurils in 1806
  and 1807 in the curious expectation that this would make the bakufu
  more amenable to talks about trade. The last raid was on Etorofu and
  routed the unprepared Japanese garrison, resulting in the suicide of its
  disgraced commander. The raids had not reflected formal Russian pol-
  icy so much as they had the enthusiasm and immaturity of proconsular
  ambition. The Japanese response, however, did. The northern daimyo
  were ordered to mobilize, and in 1808 over one thousand troops were
  landed on Kunashiri and Etorofu. The bakufu now gave up its plans for
  economic development in the area in the expectation of early conflict.
  Three years later a surveying expedition commanded by Captain
  Vasilii Golovnin appeared, anxious to avoid difficulty with the Japa-
  nese. It helped them little. Golovnin was captured during an effort to
  find supplies on shore, removed to Hakodate, and kept there for two
  years until he was exchanged for a Japanese merchant that his com-
  mand had kidnapped. His Narrative of a Captivity in Japan During the
  Years 1811-1812 and 1813 was an account of growing mutual toler-
  65 A scroll in the possession of the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo
  showing his procession to the magistrate's office to receive the bakufu's response is one of the
  best illustrations of the Nagasaki of his day.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  97
  ance and almost friendship with his guards. Local commanders on
  both sides realized the urgency of some agreement to demark Russian
  and Japanese interests. When Golovnin was released, letters from the
  Russian governor of Irkutsk and the commander at Okhotsk ex-
  pressed regrets for the attacks of a few years earlier and urged the
  establishment of a boundary, but no action was taken. The focus of
  Japanese concern gradually shifted to the south. In 1821, local adminis-
  tration of the north was returned to the daimyo of Matsumae, and
  from then to 1853 there was little action or tension in the north.
  Larger problems rose with reference to Europeans who came from
  the south. In the same year that the Japanese defenses were proving
  inadequate in the north, they were challenged in the south. In 1808
  the English frigate Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki harbor, threatened to
  attack shipping there if food was not supplied, and succeeded in hav-
  ing its way despite orders from the Japanese commander that it be
  attacked and burned. This was a minor but disturbing flurry in the
  disturbances of the Napoleonic years.
  During the 1790s a few private English vessels had attempted to
  trade along the Japan coast, but without success. The British East
  India Company had little interest in or expectation of trade with Ja-
  pan. Great Britain seemed unlikely to interfere with Japanese seclu-
  sion. Hesitation to alter this state of affairs led the Dutch chief factor
  at Deshima to minimize in his fusetsugaki the European disorders that
  followed the French Revolution. The news that French revolutionary
  armies had invaded Holland, that Napoleon's brother had been placed
  on the Dutch throne, and that the Dutch king had taken refuge in
  England would, the Dutch realized, have put Holland in a very poor
  light indeed. The Dutch at Batavia were able to charter American
  vessels to service their trade. During the ten years between 1797 and
  1807, American vessels flying the Dutch flag visited Deshima nine
  times, and five European vessels were leased. Meanwhile the Dutch
  reported as little about events in Europe as they could. The fusetsugaki
  of 1794 was the first to report that "great crowds of rioters have beset
  the French government, killed the king and crown prince, and thrown
  the realm into confusion. Neighboring countries including Holland
  have had to take up arms."66 In 1797 further news was provided to the
  effect that the royalists had won out and the revolution put down but
  that Holland had gone to war with England and lost some of its
  colonies.
  66 Surviving fusetsugaki have been edited by Iwao Seiichi as Oranda fusetsugaki skusei, 2 vols.
  (Tokyo: Nichi-Ran gakkai, 1976 and 1979). For 1794, vol. 2, p. 94.
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  98 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  Not surprisingly, the deception did not escape the Japanese very
  long. The American ships looked different; their crews spoke a differ-
  ent language; and they carried different goods: The Japanese interpret-
  ers at Nagasaki were soon aware that something was wrong. In 1803
  the Dutch admitted that the ship that entered port that year was a
  leased American vessel but provided no details. The matter was made
  worse by other American ships that soon appeared requesting trade.
  Java fell to the British in 1811, and from then to 1816 Deshima was the
  only spot where the Dutch flag still flew.
  Worse still, the bakufu did not realize that America had become an
  independent country and still considered it an English colony. This
  was straightened out in the aftermath of the Phaeton incident of 1808
  when a disturbed bakufu ordered the Nagasaki officials to prepare a
  special report on world affairs. In response to that order, the interpret-
  ers Ishibashi Sukezaemon and Motoki Shozaemon questioned opper-
  hoofd Hendrik Doeff on Deshima for days at a time. This finally
  brought the word of the colonies' success in extricating themselves
  from the rule of the English king and gave in outline form the struc-
  ture of the United States, the prominence of a man named Thomas
  Jefferson, and especially of a great commander named George Wash-
  ington whose fame was such that his countrymen, five or six years
  after his death, had constructed a new capital city named for him.
  Now for the first time it was possible to dismiss rumors that the ships
  calling at Deshima had really been English.6?
  After the Napoleonic interlude the East Indies were returned to
  Dutch sovereignty by an English government that had no interest in
  colonial involvement there. While Thomas Raffles served as governor
  of Batavia, he had tried to substitute his country for Holland in the
  trade with Japan, but he received little support from his political
  superiors or from the British East India Company itself. Suggestions
  that England seize the Bonins and make them a base for contacts with
  Japan and China were brushed aside.68
  The impact of these events on Western studies, and of those studies
  on government policy, now became clear. On the one hand, the
  bakufu's control and restrictions on the study of the West had been
  shown by Matsudaira Sadanobu's punishment of Hayashi Shihei.
  Though unresponsive to Honda and the prosecutor of Hayashi, how-
  67 Sato, Yogakushi no kenkyu, pp. 145-9.
  68 W. G. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan 1834-1858 (London: Luzac, 1951),
  p. 30.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  99
  ever, Matsudaira Sadanobu was not blind to the value of Western-style
  learning. He wrote in his autobiography:
  I began about 1792 or 1793 to collect Dutch books. The barbarian nations are
  skilled in the sciences, and considerable profit may be derived from their
  works of astronomy and geography, as well as from their military weapons
  and their methods of internal and external medicine. However, their books
  may serve to encourage idle curiosity or may express harmful ideas. . . . Such
  books and other foreign things should therefore not be allowed to pass in
  large quantities into the hands of irresponsible people; nevertheless it is
  desirable to have them deposited in a government library .*»
  Sadanobu had also reduced the number of Dutch ships permitted to
  enter Nagasaki, lengthened the interval between Dutch trips to Edo
  from two to four years, and restricted access to the Dutch while they
  were in Edo. Edo scholars had earlier been free to bring their students
  to the question-and-answer sessions with the Dutch doctors, but after
  Kansei, such access was limited to daimyo doctors. It all made for
  difficult communication. In 1794 Otsuki Gentaku, unable to get the
  floor in Edo with a question he had prepared for the Dutch, reflected
  stoically that he would have to wait four years for another opportunity
  to get it answered.70
  Some of the writings of rangaku scholars may be cited to illustrate the
  grounds for Sadanobu's decision that access to Dutch learning should
  be controlled. Kudo Heisuke's writings about developments to the
  north have already been mentioned; Sugita Gempaku, it will be remem-
  bered, as early as 1775 had written a dialogue in which he separated the
  country of China from the central cultural tradition of East Asia. He
  declared: "The earth comprises a single great globe, and the myriad
  countries are distributed upon it. Every place is the center. One can call
  any country the central country. China is only a small country on one
  border of the Eastern Sea." He then went on to say: "The books of
  China are concerned with techniques and not with principles; they are
  not lacking in principles, but the provenance of those principles is not
  clear." Dutch medicine, based on facts, was also based on principles,
  and those principles were equivalent to the true teachings of the sages,
  who sought to improve human life. Thus the practicality of Western
  medical science was fully compatible with explicit adherence to the
  Sages and the essence of the East Asian tradition.
  69 Quoted in Keene, Discovery of Europe, pp. 75-6.
  70 Tadashi Yoshida, "The Rangaku of Shizuki Tadao: The Introduction of Western Science in
  Tokugawa Japan," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1974.
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  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  But then in 1807, in Yaso dokugo, Gempaku made it clear that in his
  opinion Japan, no less than China, had departed from the wisdom of
  that great tradition. In a dialogue (presumably not published, as it
  ends with injunctions to maintain secrecy) Gempaku now called for a
  restoration (chuko) of the state before its illness should become termi-
  nal. Evidence of the problem was to be found in Russian encroach-
  ment on Japan's northern shores, followed by the appearance of
  Rezanov at Nagasaki in 1804. It was Japanese duplicity that had
  prompted the permit for Laxman to enter Nagasaki, and Rezanov's
  irritation on discovering that deception had led to the raids by
  Khostov and Davydov in the north. After all, the doctor's interlocutor
  in the dialogue explains, Russia is young and vigorous, an expanding
  nation that has accomplished wonders since its remarkable beginnings
  under Peter. In fact, its vigor is comparable to that Japan showed in
  the days of Hideyoshi and Ieyasu. Japan's leaders now face one of two
  choices: an affirmative response to the Russians' request, or prepara-
  tion for the war that will follow rejection of that request. Unfortu-
  nately Japan's fighting qualities have disintegrated under generations
  of peace. "Bushido has waned by stages, so that even among hatamoto
  and gokenin, who ought to be the first to come forward, seven or eight
  out often are like women. Their spirit is mean, like that of merchants,
  and they seem to have lost their sense of honor as samurai." The
  bakufu's samurai are unable to make an arrow fly two feet and cannot
  ride horses even "when the horses are more like cats than steeds"; they
  are hopelessly encumbered by urban luxuries and the debts that accom-
  pany them; and they are not even very effective against unarmed
  peasant rabble. The Russians, in contrast, have recently been able
  even to stand up against the might of K'ang Hsi to gain the treaty of
  Nerchinsk.?1
  Arguments of this sort reappeared in future debates. The immediate
  danger was exaggerated (the Russians did not reappear for almost a
  half-century), but the alarm was not entirely misplaced because the
  West as a whole would shortly become steadily more intrusive. Sugita
  realized that Japan was virtually defenseless but had no solution to
  propose. Like Tokugawa Nariaki after the coming of Perry, Sugita
  proposed using whatever time remained to
  foster the people, drill the troops, reform and sustain our customs, and put
  everything in order. . . . Our first priority is to save our world: if we are
  71 Haga, ed., Sugita Gempaku, Hiraga Gennai, Shiba Kokan, pp. 269-95, f°r text-
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  IOI
  forced to permit trade for now, we must, even though it is a disgrace; at a
  later time we will be able to redeem our honor.
  He then offered proposals for institutional reforms that would turn the
  clock back to an earlier day: Warriors should return to the land; there
  should be less commercialism; and the cities should be reduced in size.
  The bakufu should even out the distinctions between tozama and fudai
  daimyo in order to encourage a shared sense of crisis and duty, and it
  should make higher posts accessible to men of ability, even though
  their samurai rank might be low. Thus intellectual awareness of the
  West was accompanied by calls for retreat into an institutional past in
  order to hold that West at bay. A half-century later, similar reasoning
  would provide the first steps on a bridge to the reforms that produced
  modern Japan.
  For scholars of Dutch learning, the aftermath of the Kansei punish-
  ment for unauthorized publications like Hayashi Shihei's was a closer
  identification with authority. Because Sadanobu and his successors
  collected books and saw value in them, government employment pro-
  vided the best path to support and safety. Inevitably this had conse-
  quences for attitudes as well. The case of Otsuki Gentaku is instruc-
  tive. In 1803 Otsuki and a friend were ordered to translate Lalande's
  astronomical tables. Shortly afterward Nagasaki officials tried to use
  him as a channel to power brokers in Edo. In 1809, in the hope of
  easing the financial hardships that the merchants were suffering be-
  cause of the interruption of trade with the Dutch, the Nagasaki magis-
  trate got the Nagasaki interpreters to have Otsuki propose that trade
  with the Ryukyu Islands be authorized as a substitute. Otsuki's con-
  nection with authority soon became formal with the establishment in
  1811 of a separate Translation Office in the Bureau of Astronomy.
  Now began the recruitment of other linguists to work on a large-scale
  project to translate selected portions of a 1743 Dutch translation of
  Noel Chomel's Dktionnaire Oeconomique. The work in question, a by-
  product of the eighteenth-century encyclopedist tradition, promised
  information for every means "D'augmenter son bien et de conserver sa
  sant6" and appeared frequently on the order lists that were given to
  the departing Dutch vessels thereafter. Although the project was
  never completed, three hundred articles were produced in 135 Japa-
  nese hand-sewn volumes. For the scholars so employed, Western learn-
  ing (for from this time work also began on other European languages
  through the medium of Dutch) was no longer simply a matter of
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  IO2 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  indulging personal interest and following knowledge where it might
  lead; increasingly, it also involved the subordination of personal prefer-
  ence to official needs. For some men, Otsuki among them, this re-
  sulted in a surge of pride that what had been considered idle interest
  could now be put in the service of the country. Otsuki went beyond
  this to modify his earlier dismissal of Chinese medicine, to criticize the
  superficial preference for everything Dutch that he thought character-
  ized dilettantes like Shiba Kokan,72 and to argue that the new learning
  should be allowed to supplement the wisdom of the past where its
  superiority could be clearly demonstrated. He even lent his support
  for arrangements to control and monitor imported knowledge in order
  to prevent its use by the faddish and superficial who might otherwise
  gain a following by catering to the popular taste for novelty.73
  Otsuki's response may not have been universal, but it is reasonable
  to suppose that his was a frequent reaction among specialists proud
  that their learning was at last deemed worthy of government sponsor-
  ship and enhanced position. Private meddlers like Hayashi Shihei had
  at their hand only incomplete and frequently out-of-date knowledge,
  and generalists like Shiba Kokan might become so intrigued with the
  mix of artistry and technology that they garnered from Dutch books
  that they began to see the West as a distant Utopia of benevolence,
  learning, and well-being'. Responsible officials, men who shared their
  superiors' political priorities and took pride in their service to the late
  feudal state, should be made of tougher stuff.
  The new vision of Western affairs conveyed by better books and
  punctuated by Western incursions presented a sharper challenge to
  Japan. Earlier bakufu edicts had provided for supplying distressed
  vessels with provisions to enable them to make a peaceful departure,
  but in 1825 these were nullified by instructions for instant attack. The
  bakufu now went Sadanobu's warning to Laxman one better:
  Henceforth, whenever a foreign ship is sighted approaching any point on our
  coast, all persons on hand should fire on and drive it off. If the vessel heads for
  the open sea, you need not pursue it; allow it to escape. But if the foreigners
  force their way ashore, you may capture and incarcerate them, and if their
  mother ship approaches, you may destroy it as circumstances dictate. . . .
  [H]ave no compunctions about firing on [the Dutch] by mistake; when in
  doubt, drive the ship away without hesitation. Never be caught offguard.?*
  72 On whom, see Calvin L. French, Shiba Kokan: Artist, Innovator, and Pioneer in the West-
  ernization of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1974).
  73 Sato, Yogaku kenkyushi josetsu, pp. 117ff.
  74 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, p. 60. This is the "ninen naku uchiharau" (don't think twice!
  drive them out) edict.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  103
  This institutionalization of a zealot's stand came at the urging of the
  bakufu's director of the Translation Office. Takahashi Kageyasu
  (1785-1829) was the eldest son of Yoshitoki, a distinguished mathema-
  tician and official astronomer who had been commissioned to carry out
  the reform of the calendar in the Kansei period, had supervised
  Otsuki's translation of Lalande, and had sponsored a distinguished
  student, the geographer Ino Tadataka (Chukei, 1745-1818), whose
  geographical surveys of the north served as the basis for Japanese
  maps throughout the entire nineteenth century. Kageyasu began with
  his father's skills in Chinese and Japanese mathematics and astronomy
  and succeeded to the family headship and the post of official astrono-
  mer in 1804. He supervised and supported the exploratory travels of
  his older contemporary Ino Tadataka. He mastered Dutch, translated
  part of Kaempfer's history, and also worked on Manchu, English, and
  Russian. From Deshima sources he obtained Kruzenstern's account of
  his explorations in the north, and he also obtained and translated an
  account of the Napoleonic wars. Thus it was from a background of the
  most solidly international orientation available in Tokugawa Japan
  that the head of the Translation Office proposed in 1824 that an edict
  be issued requiring the immediate expulsion of foreign ships from
  Japan. The ninen naku uchiharau, "don't think twice" edict stands as
  the final extreme of the seclusion system. Takahashi's argument was
  that unauthorized whaling ships were becoming more and more of a
  menace. They were taking advantage of Japanese benevolence, and
  the only solution was one of total separation and expulsion. Unautho-
  rized landings and informal contact between Japanese commoners and
  foreigners would inevitably lead to forms of subversion in which the
  Westerners would take advantage of the credulity of ignorant common-
  ers and prey on their curiosity to spread Christianity. It was wasteful
  to mobilize large numbers of men to deal with occasional incursions,
  Takahashi argued, and much better to follow what was actually inter-
  national procedure: "When ships from a nation with whom diplomatic
  relations are not maintained try to enter, blank rounds are fired from
  the nearest cannon on shore. It is customary for those ships to leave
  the harbor after being informed in this way that entry is not permit-
  ted." The bakufu's order, when it banned entry by unauthorized
  foreign vessels, added a codicil affecting commoners: "If contacts with
  foreigners are covered up, the persons involved will be subject to the
  most severe punishment when the facts come to light."
  Takahashi's story is full of ironies. His personal relations with
  Dutch residents at Deshima were entirely cordial. Hendrik Doeff,
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  104 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  chief factor in the Napoleonic years, gave him, at his request, the
  Western name of Johannes Globius to honor his geographical achieve-
  ments. Thus the bakufu's most far-reaching ban on foreign contacts
  did not come from the ignorance or indifference of an earlier day but
  had its origin in the recommendations of the finest scholar of the West
  of the day. It was justified not in terms of the "Sacred Ancestor's"
  precepts but in terms of Takahashi's understanding of the interna-
  tional procedures of the day.75
  It is even more ironic that Takahashi himself next ran afoul of
  injunctions against purveying restricted information to foreigners and
  died while under investigation in the aftermath of the Siebold affair.
  Philip Franz von Siebold, mentioned as one of the most important of
  the doctors attached to the Dutch station at Deshima, arrived there in
  1823. His distinction as a doctor and intellectual had recommended
  him to his Dutch employers, who gave him a special title as "surgeon
  major, authorized to conduct a survey of the natural history of this
  realm." His Japanese hosts quickly recognized his superior qualities.
  Nagasaki's rules were relaxed enough to make it possible for him to
  teach in an academy, the Narutakijuku, on the outskirts of the city.
  He also maintained a Japanese mistress by whom he fathered a daugh-
  ter. In Nagasaki, Siebold lectured to a total of fifty-six students. Like
  many foreign teachers in Japan a half-century later, he had his stu-
  dents write essays in Dutch about their country, essays that provided
  material for his own publications about Japan. Thirty-nine such essays
  survive. Siebold himself drew up testimonial diplomas for his charges
  to certify their proficiency. Among his friends, and central to the
  breadth of his contacts, was Takahashi Kageyasu.
  From Siebold, Takahashi obtained copies of Dutch translations of
  English explorers' accounts and of Krusenstern, and in exchange he
  presented Siebold with copies of Ino Tadataka's maps of Japan. While
  in Edo, Siebold also met daily with Mogami Tokunai, a member of the
  late-eighteenth-century expeditions to the north some decades earlier,
  who was able to tell him much about Ainu life, language, and northern
  geography. When Siebold was about to leave Japan, it became known,
  via Mogami, that he had exchanged information with Takahashi, and
  the investigation that followed led to the discovery of the maps of the
  north. Upon this, twenty-three of Siebold's students were taken into
  custody in 1828. Takahashi, the most highly placed and the most
  responsible for delivering proscribed materials into foreign hands,
  75 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, pp. iO2ff.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  I05
  died under interrogation, and his corpse, preserved in brine, was sent
  to Edo for formal decapitation. Siebold himself was kept on Deshima
  for almost a year before being allowed to leave Japan. Alerted by his
  friends to what was coming, he had seized the short period of time
  available to copy the most important of the maps, so that they survived
  the confiscation and examination of his baggage.76
  Takahashi's case serves to illustrate some of the ambivalence and
  constraints under which the foreign experts worked, an ambivalence
  that has its parallel in historical evaluations of their role. Although
  some writers have emphasized the trends toward modernity and libera-
  tion implicit in what the Western experts read and wrote, others have
  preferred to stress the government's co-option of their abilities and the
  increasing concentration on matters of defense. The growing crisis of
  the nineteenth century made for the practical application of intelli-
  gence that had begun as joyful and often idle curiosity on the part of
  the first rangakusha. Yet throughout the period, the scholars showed
  personal esteem and even, when possible, friendship for the foreigners
  they would contact, however they might combine that friendship with
  scorn and reprobation for "barbarians" in the mass. Sugita Gempaku
  considered the Russians to be barbarians, but able and dangerous, and
  Takahashi in his memorandum used the unpleasant figure of barbari-
  ans swarming like flies over Japan's rice bowl. Through it all, how-
  ever, the intellectual curiosity of the best continued to be shown in
  translation efforts that were necessarily private, in fact covert, and
  hence unplanned and unsystematic. The most impressive product of
  all of this, Shizuki Tadao's rendition of a Dutch popularization of
  Newton, grew out of a letter from the translator, who was a Nagasaki
  interpreter, asking an Edo friend whether he knew of "any book you
  have there that describes stimulating and interesting theories of phys-
  ics or astronomy, whether in Chinese or a Western language. I would
  particularly like to see a mathematics book on logarithms you said you
  76 Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, provides sympathetic coverage of the affair, pp. I47ff.
  When the departure of the Perry flotilla for Japan neared two decades later, the United States
  Department of State requested its minister to The Hague to request copies of maps that
  Siebold was said to have brought with him, but neither the Department of Colonial Affairs
  nor the Dutch navy had knowledge of them. Siebold's book was at that time still in press.
  Manfred C. Vernon, "The Dutch and the Opening of Japan," Pacific Historical Review 27
  (February 1959). Siebold later helped with the letter that William II of The Netherlands
  addressed to the shogun in 1844 and also sketched out the lines of a modern treaty for
  Holland. See J. A. van der Chijs, Neerlands Streven tot OpensteUing van Japan voor den
  wereldhandel (Amsterdam: Muller, 1867). He visited Japan again in 1859 in service of the
  Dutch government, and his son Alexander was in British employ later in the decade. In this,
  Japanese suspicions of Western learning would undoubtedly have seen justification of their
  worst fears of a grand European plot.
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  IO6 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  were writing."77 Nor was intellectual curiosity incompatible with offi-
  cial service, as the resources of officially sponsored projects provided
  the greatest opportunities. In later Tokugawa years the future presi-
  dent of Tokyo Imperial University, Kato Hiroyuki, reminisced that
  after he entered the Bansho shirabesho (Institute for the study of
  barbarian books) that was established after the coming of Perry: "I
  found other books, books not available to anyone else. When I looked
  into them I found them very interesting: for the first time I saw books
  about things like philosophy, sociology, morals, politics, and law . . .
  in view of that my ideas began to change." The utilization of such
  materials could be fully compatible in private conscience with the
  "good of the country" that officialdom might interpret more narrowly.
  Nishi Amane, sent to Leiden in 1862, wrote his adviser that in addi-
  tion to his prescribed studies, he hoped to examine "those things
  advocated by Descartes, Locke, Hegel, and Kant, as "in my opinion,
  there are not a few points in the study of these subjects which will
  serve to advance our civilization. . . ."78
  But because the public advocacy of such catholicity of taste was
  impossible, this must also have brought frustration to many. The
  euphoria of Sugita Gempaku, who considered himself the founder of
  rangaku, did not extend to his grandson Seikei (1817-59), who was
  employed in the Chomel translation project. Otsuki Nyoden's history
  of Western studies notes that Seikei, having become acquainted with
  ideas of freedom (D. vrijheid) in his reading and being aware of the fate
  of scholars
  who had been seized for spreading foreign ideas, feared that he too was
  inviting trouble. He held himself in check and was very careful not to let the
  word vrijheid slip from his mouth. The only way he could find solace for the
  heaviness of his spirit was in drink, but when he was drunk he could not keep
  himself from shouting "Vrijheid!" "Vrijheid!"™
  A decade after the Siebold affair, the possibilities and limitations of
  rangaku under Tokugawa governance became dramatically manifest in
  what later became known as the "purge of barbarian scholars" (bansha
  no goku) of 1839. As with Sugita Gempaku's concern about the rejec-
  tion of the Rezanov mission, this had its origins in misinformed schol-
  ars' ungrounded fears that the bakufu was risking disaster by rejecting
  77 Yoshida, "The Rangaku of Shizuki Tadao."
  78 Marius B. Jansen, "New Materials for the Intellectual History of Nineteenth Century Ja-
  pan," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (December 1957): 592.
  79 Sato, Yogakushi kenkyu, p. 200, quoting Otsuki's Ydgakushi nempyo. This illustration was
  first brought to my attention by Haruko Iwasaki.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  107
  a Western approach that had already been turned back. Bureaucratic
  rivalry and police investigation led to serious charges and tragedy. In
  1838 an American owned merchant ship, the Morrison, sailed for Ja-
  pan from Macao with seven shipwrecked Japanese on board. In addi-
  tion to a cargo of goods, presents, and documents, the ship carried
  three China coast missionaries, Peter Parker, Charles Gutzlaff, and
  S. Wells Williams (who later served as a documentary interpreter for
  Commodore Matthew C. Perry). It was hoped, as Williams later
  wrote, that the castaways
  would form a good excuse for appearing in the harbors of that [Japanese]
  empire . . . [to create a] favorable impression of foreigners, and perhaps of
  inducing them to relax their anti-social policy. . . . It was hoped that the
  exclusive policy of that nation had become somewhat weakened since a for-
  eign vessel had [not] visited any port other than Nagasaki, and that the
  influence of curiosity, and the nature of the errand, would at least secure a
  courteous reception.80
  The bakufu was not impressed; the ship was driven off by shore
  batteries first at Edo and then at Kagoshima, and it returned to Can-
  ton with the missionaries and castaways still on board. About a year
  later the Dutch chief factor reported its identity to the bakufu on the
  basis of a Singapore newspaper story, mistakenly giving its nationality
  as British. Its possible return now became the subject for discussion in
  bakufu circles, and the story or some of it reached a circle of students
  of Western affairs.
  The center of that circle was Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), a lead-
  ing retainer of the Tawara domain. Tawara, a small fudai han on the
  Mikawa coast, was hence charged with defense of its coast. Kazan was
  an accomplished intellectual and artist, born and bred in the national
  capital. After he was named a han senior councilor (rdju) and placed in
  charge of its coast defense in 1832, he extended his earlier interest in
  Western painting to Western studies in general. He was not conver-
  sant with Dutch and so patronized and relied on men who were. His
  case marks a new step in Dutch studies, its extension beyond techni-
  cians of translation to statesmen of influence and position. Kazan's
  experts were Kozeki San'ei (1787-1839) and Takano Choei (1804-
  50). Kozeki was a physician attached to the Translation Office which,
  briefly abolished after Takahashi's trial, had been reconstituted. Ta-
  kano had been one of Siebold's best students; he had fled Nagasaki in
  80 S. Wells Williams's account, "Narrative of the Voyage of the Ship Morrison, Captain D.
  Ingersoll, to Lewchew and Japan, in the Months of July and August, 1837" (Canton: The
  Chinese Repository, vol. 6, nos. 5,8 [September, December 1837]; 1942 Tokyo reprint).
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  IO8 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  1828 to avoid implication with Takahashi, later set up a private medi-
  cal practice in Edo, and began meeting with Kozeki and Kazan a few
  years later. A bakufu daikan named Egawa Hidetatsu, responsible for
  shogunal territory in Izu and Sagami and Kai, which included coastal
  areas, interested himself in Kazan's circle through a shared interest in
  coastal defense. The group itself was broad, experienced, cosmopoli-
  tan, and sophisticated.
  Takano Choei's response to the Morrison affair was a pamphlet,
  Yume monogatari, which circulated widely in handwritten copies. In it
  he deplored the bakufu's determination to repulse the ship, which he
  thought was still on its way, and protested:
  Britain is no enemy of Japan . . . if the bakufu resorts to expelling them by
  force, Japan will be regarded as a brutal country incapable of distinguishing
  between right and wrong. The word will spread that we are an unjust
  country, and Japan will lose its good name as a country which respects
  propriety and courtesy. What disasters might befall us as a result are diffi-
  cult to predict.81
  Choei's errors, which included the impression that the expedition
  would be commanded by the China scholar and missionary Robert
  Morrison, were less important than his intent to maintain seclusion by
  more courteous means: He thought the bakufu should accept the
  castaways, explain the seclusion system to the ship's commander, and
  send the mission back. For him rangaku was, as he put it, "useful and
  urgently needed practical scholarship." As he looked back, he felt his
  pamphlet entirely reasonable. To die for rangaku would be one thing,
  but "to die for Yume monogatari is something I cannot face without a
  feeling of regret."82 Choei was sentenced to life imprisonment but
  escaped in 1844 and lived in hiding, supporting himself by translation
  for another six years. Kozeki, more nervous and quick to despair,
  committed suicide rather than face the rigors of examination and im-
  prisonment. Watanabe Kazan, with his friends within the bakufu and
  his larger circle of political and artistic acquaintances, was larger and
  more important game for the prosecution, which was responding to
  complaints by bakufu Confucianists.8*
  Kazan had written an essay on the state of international affairs for
  81 Yume monogatari appears in translation in D. C. Greene, "Osano's Life of Takano Nagahide,"
  Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 41 (1913), p. 3.
  82 From Wasuregatami, written in prison before Choei's escape. Cited in Sato Shosuke, Uete
  Michiari, and Yamaguchi Muneyuki, Nihon shiso taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), vol.
  55, p. 182. Also D. S. Noble, "Western Studies and the Tokugawa World View: Watanabe
  Kazan, Takano Choei, and the Bansha no goku," unpublished manuscript, January 1982.
  83 Torii Yozo, the scholars' chief accuser, was a member of the Shoheiko Hayashi family.
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  IMAGE OF THE WESTERN WORLD 
  IO9
  his friend Egawa, but at Egawa's request he had toned down the
  criticism in his first draft. After the arrests, a search of his quarters
  brought to light both the original version and a second tract, Shinkiron
  (A timely warning), which he had kept to himself. The West is ruth-
  less, he wrote, powerful, and threatening; Japan is the only nation
  attempting to refuse to conduct relations with these countries. Appeals
  to tradition can lead only to "trivial squabbling, and in the end [will]
  give them a pretext for filling their avaricious designs. One may call
  them barbarians, but they will not resort to arms without an excuse."
  Britain, in particular, simply "bides its time, carefully plotting and
  sharpening its claws. Britain's persistence in what it wants from us is
  like that of flies . . . one may brush them away, but they always come
  flooding back again."
  Kazan's discussion of the deeper roots of the crisis, however, was
  remarkable and forecast a fundamental reorientation of thought. Ja-
  pan had come to its present predicament because of its uncritical
  adherence to "grand and lofty abstractions borrowed from China." As
  he laid out his essays on the world situation, Kazan showed himself
  ready to universalize civilization. The five great teachings - Judaism,
  Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism - all had their ori-
  gins in Asia. But unfortunately the civilized lands of Asia had become
  soft and decadent, and "the world has entered an age in which it is
  dominated by the northern barbarians." In Asia, only Japan still re-
  tained its independence, China having been overrun by the Manchus,
  but the barbarians of today had become far more accomplished than
  had the nomads of the past. Those of the West, in particular, were
  different from the earlier predators, thanks to their accomplishments
  in the study of things, a sense of science, and a forward motion of
  events. "The root of this is their detailed knowledge of the world."
  Russia and the United States, in particular, represented a new dyna-
  mism. Russia had been raised under the dynamism of Peter into a
  source of raw power and strength. With regard to the United States,
  Kazan discussed the American Revolution and the establishment of
  the republic, to argue that it had become "the richest country in the
  world, apparently in the span of only fifty years." He went on to
  discuss the power of newspapers, public education, and the Ameri-
  cans' success in putting forward the "men of ability" sought by Confu-
  cian reformers in Japan. The Western structures that Kazan admired
  contained a congruence in which "the fundamental purpose of the
  natural sciences is to aid the other three major branches of knowledge
  represented by religion and ethics, government, and medicine, and to
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  110 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  extend the basis upon which rest the various arts and techniques that
  are subordinate to them." Added to this was a social flexibility, (unat-
  tainable for Kazan, an artist who had been forced into die government
  because of his samurai status). In the West,
  an individual may select his own goals according to the bidding of his inborn
  nature, and devote himself to the study of ediics and government on the one
  hand, or arts and techniques on the other. Therefore no one's aspirations are
  looked down upon, and people are condemned only for failing to apply
  themselves to the tasks for which they are suited by nature.
  As this shows, for Kazan the study of the West could lead ultimately
  to the path of complete transformation along Western lines. 8i»
  In the investigation that followed his arrest, Kazan protested that he
  was being tried and punished for some miscellaneous scraps of writing
  that he had meant to throw away; his supporter, Egawa, had decided
  against presenting Kazan's formal report to the government in any
  form. The intellectuals were as divided as were die officials: Matsu-
  zaki Kodo entered the lists with memoranda and letters arguing the
  injustice of Kazan's treatment, whereas Sato Issai, far from helping
  Kazan's cause, stood by his Shoheiko associates and looked the other
  way. Kazan was sentenced to permanent confinement in Tawara, a
  rustication he terminated with suicide two years later when it came to
  light that he had evaded the terms of his arrest by sending several
  paintings to Edo for sale.85
  Within the bakufu the struggle continued. Kazan's accusers pre-
  vailed upon the authorities for more stringent restrictions on the transla-
  tion and circulation of material from abroad. A series of edicts made it
  clear that such work should be limited to matters dealing with astron-
  omy, military arts, and medicine. Nevertheless these measures were
  only temporarily suppressive and ultimately failed. The reactionaries
  never gained full control of the bakufu councils. Within a few months of
  Kazan's arrest, the first news of the Opium War in China entered Japan
  to put greater urgency behind the collection of information about the
  West; Chinese books that entered Nagasaki were fully accessible to
  educated Japanese, sometimes reissued in Japanese editions, and par-
  ticularly important. But Western studies also profited from this new
  urgency. Dutch studies were further diffused through the great schools
  like that of Ogata Koan (1810-63)m Osaka, which opened in 1838 and
  84 Sato, in Nihon shiso laikei, vol. 55, p. 634, develops this point.
  85 The trial can be followed in detail in Bonnie F. Abiko, "Watanabe Kazan: The Man and His
  Times," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1982, pp. i8off., who includes portions of the
  trial transcript.
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  PROBINGS TOWARD SYNTHESIS 
  III
  became a mecca for students from all parts of the country. Partial
  records give the names of 637 students who passed through its gates,
  and the total in all probability exceeded 1,000. Dutch learning became a
  standard part of the training of physicians, and its relevance to national
  defense made it of increasing interest to samurai in many domains.86
  Ogata Koan's students included many who later played central roles in
  Japan's nineteenth-century modernization.
  PROBINGS TOWARD SYNTHESIS
  Our discussion has considered the 1790s as a bench mark between the
  eighteenth-century awareness that urban and rural diversification was
  producing strains within the feudal order and the intensity of the
  concern that was focused on those problems in the light of the Western
  danger in the nineteenth century. Although the Bunka-Bunsei de-
  cades seem something of a plateau in the progression to political crisis
  and upheaval at mid-century, they also provided many indications of
  what might lie ahead. In the countryside the unwillingness of large
  numbers of villagers to accept political direction that involved eco-
  nomic cost showed that future solutions would require a slackening,
  and could not be based on a tightening, of feudal discipline. But in any
  case the agents for a tightening of discipline did not seem to be at
  hand. Buyo Inshi's unflattering description of the samurai of his day
  found echo in the opinions of Sugita Gempaku. Institutions had not
  changed, but society was changing and becoming more modernized,
  diversified, and fragmented.
  What was still lacking was an overarching synthesis that could incor-
  porate elements of many strands of thought to provide a vision around
  which a program of future action might be built. This too was in
  formation, and this too was firmly based on elements of eighteenth-
  century thought.
  In Chapter 3 of this volume, Harry Harootunian describes the politi-
  cization of nationalist thought in late Tokugawa times. But for the
  purpose of our discussion it will suffice to place the synthesis of
  Aizawa Yasushi (Seishisai) (1781-1863), Shimon, in the context of
  Bunka and Bunsei.
  Mito daimyo had led in the sponsorship of studies in Confucianism.
  86 Rubinger, Private Academies, chaps. 4, 5; and Ban Tadayasu, Tekijuku o meguru hitobito:
  rangaku no nagare (Osaka: Sogensha, 1978), p. 89. For comments on the student body at the
  Tekijuku, Ogata's academy, and medical training, see Tazaki Tetsuro, "Yogakuron saikosei
  shiron,"5A«o (November 1979): 48-72.
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  112 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  With the counsel of the Ming refugee Chu Shun-shui, who was permit-
  ted to take up residence at Mito some years after the fall of China to
  the Manchus and who taught the importance of unswerving loyalty to
  the sovereign, Mito sponsored the compilation of a massive history of
  Japan, constructed along the lines of Chinese dynastic histories, that
  carried the story up to Tokugawa times. As this project was nearing
  completion, a remarkable group of scholars was emerging into promi-
  nence. Fujita Yukoku (1774-1826), his son Toko (1806-55), a°d
  Aizawa Yasushi (Seishisai) [previous p.] transformed a regional schol-
  arly tradition into one of national scope and influence.
  Mito-style Confucianism with its emphasis on loyalism assimilated
  well with kokugaku (national learning). It will be remembered that a
  group of scholars culminating in Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) com-
  bined literary and philological criticism with religious fervor to re-
  kindle interest in the native tradition of Shinto. The politicization and
  further spread of this was preeminently the work of Hirata Atsutane
  (1776-1843), who reached out for what was available from other tradi-
  tions and concluded triumphantly that Japanese learning was superior
  to all others because it incorporated elements of those others. At the
  same time, however, Hirata agreed fully that Japan's native traditions,
  best symbolized the unbroken continuity of the sovereign line, placed
  his country in a specially favored and divinely ordained position. In
  addition to politicizing kokugaku, Hirata also activated it. He devel-
  oped a linkage with agricultural manuals that reached leading villagers
  in many parts of the country. The manuals that Hirata edited and
  sometimes published provided access to rural notables and helped
  identify kokugaku ideology with agronomy.87
  Even apart from deliberate propaganda means of this sort, however,
  there is much evidence that a renewed interest in the national tradition
  and a heightened awareness of the imperial court had permeated rural
  leaders by the early nineteenth century. In the Shikoku domain of
  Tosa, for instance, resentment on the part of village heads (shaya)
  about the way they were regularly snubbed by petty samurai and
  urban representatives led to a demand, in 1832, for the dignity of
  surnames and swords. In the course of asserting their administrative
  importance, the heads used the ideology of imperial loyalism as the
  ultimate sense of authority. They complained about the "arrogant
  behavior of town officials" and charged that the treatment they were
  receiving constituted "a grave offense against the Imperial Way." In
  87 See the opening pages of Jennifer Robertson, "Sexy Rice: Plant Gender, Farm Manuals, and
  Grass-RootsNativism,"iWonum«ntoMpp<»!ica 39 (Autumn 1984): 233-60.
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  PROBINGS TOWARD SYNTHESIS 
  113
  the 1840s the Tosa village heads went on to form a league that circu-
  lated a secret document containing the startling assertion that the
  shqya who ran the villages were in fact more important than the urban-
  ized samurai. "Should we not say that the shqya, who is the head of the
  commoners, is superior to the retainers who are the hands or feet of
  the nobles?"88
  As one of the Tokugawa branch houses, Mito was in close touch
  with developments elsewhere in Japan, and its scholars linked such
  concerns with the foreign danger. Mito men were included in the
  bakufu's parties of exploration to the north, and they managed to get
  for their domain copies of the writings of Honda Toshiaki about the
  possibilities for Japan in the Kurils, Kamchatka, and Sakhalin.89 In
  old age Aizawa remembered learning from his teacher, Fujita Yu-
  koku, about the disquieting probes made by the Russians. He recalled
  that as a boy of eleven he had derived pleasure from lashing with his
  whip a crude image of Adam Laxman. At the age of nineteen Aizawa
  had studied enough to write an account of the Kurils, in which he
  explained Russia's expansion to Asia by the fact that enemies blocked
  its path in Europe. He believed that the Russian occupation of
  Kamchatka had deprived Japan of part of what was once its territory,
  and he wrote about the transformation of Siberia under Russian con-
  trol. Aizawa credited Russian dynamism to the ability of Peter the
  Great, who reformed his country and then extended its boundaries.
  Russia had done this not so much by conquest as through the enlight-
  ened tactics of suasion and bribery, in which innocent natives accepted
  gifts in return for allegiance to their new masters. Aizawa believed that
  the Russians made particularly adroit use of Christianity to capture the
  north and wrote that they now claimed all of Hokkaido as theirs. Such
  craft could be credited to Peter, who seemed dangerous precisely
  because of his great dedication and ability to inspire respect.
  Within a few years Aizawa was able to interrogate some Westerners
  when a party of English whalers landed on the Mito coast at Otsu-
  hama. Communication was imperfect. Aizawa knew no English and
  thought them Russian, for which he had prepared with a few phrases.
  But in several days' effort, he nevertheless gained enough impressions
  to confirm his suspicions of aggressive intent. This heightened his
  apprehension of the European advance. The Europeans, he con-
  88 Marius B. Jansen, 'Tosa During the Last Century of Tokugawa Rule," in John W. Hall and
  M. B. janxn, 
  eds., Studies in the Institutional 
  History of Early Modem Japan (Princeton, 
  N.].:
  Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 340.
  89 Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism, pp. 76-80.
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  114 
  JAPAN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
  eluded, "now endeavor to annex all nations in the world, The wicked
  doctrine of Jesus is an aid in this endeavor. Under the pretext of trade
  or whatever, they approach and become friendly with peoples in all
  areas, secretly probing to see which countries are strong and which are
  weak. "9°
  The following year, in Shinron (New theses, 1825), Aizawa put
  together his synthesis. He rejected the idea that the simple bakufu fiat,
  in terms of the "don't think twice" edict, would keep the foreigners
  away. Foreigners were neither curious nor misinformed but bent on
  serious mischief. "Though interpreters may understand the barbari-
  ans' speech and be able to read their writings, they cannot understand
  the true 'barbarians' nature.' "" Men like Takahashi had underesti-
  mated the barbarian problem, for the Westerners had built a mighty
  force that relied on spiritual as well as material incentives. Japan's
  danger was less a military invasion than a corruption of its commoners
  through Christianity, cultural assimilation, and economic involve-
  ment. Western generals first secured beachheads, spread their goods,
  and then enlarged their armies with the numbers of their prisoners and
  dupes. It was possible that the West would use the Ainu against the
  Japanese and then the Japanese against the Chinese.
  The only solution open to Japan was a counterstrategy of religious
  and cultural transformation combined with military strength. The use
  of Christianity as a state religion, and mass participation through edu-
  cation and conscription in the West could be offset only by the develop-
  ment of a similar dynamic in Japan. Japan had to emphasize its
  kokutai, or national essence.
  Shinron thus opens with a defiant assertion: "The sun rises in our
  divine Land, and the primordial energy originates here. The heirs of
  the Great Sun have occupied the Imperial Throne from time immemo-
  rial." By such emphasis, its author felt, it was possible (though still
  somewhat dangerous, given the innocence of ignorant commoners) to
  recruit peasants to supplement samurai levies. Aizawa's remedies, the
  reform of bakufu institutions and policies to permit the daimyo to
  pursue military strength, would not suffice by mid-century, but in
  1825 they constituted a mix of countermeasures based on the transfor-
  mation of traditional institutions. His ideology - the emphasis of a
  state religion - made him seem prophetic after the imperial Japanese
  state had developed its national indoctrination at the century's end.
  Wakabayashi summed up the significance of Western learning for
  90 Ibid., p. 90. 
  91 Ibid., p. 106.
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  PROBINGS TOWARD SYNTHESIS 
  115
  Aizawa in these points: recognition, however dimly, of the nature of
  the emerging state, of the way in which it could make demands on its
  peoples, of the necessity for gaining the voluntary support of its people
  in the quest of national greatness, and of the fact that Japan was
  hopelessly placed to do so in its present situation. The unity of govern-
  ment and religion, ceremony, ritual, and belief that characterized the
  Christian West constituted a danger for Japan, and it would have to
  restore its original unity by returning to its true essence.'2
  Aizawa thus drew on several traditions: the Confucian, in which
  Japanese scholars had assimilated and domesticated the classics and
  asserted for their own country the place and status of Chuka, the
  central efflorescence, and even more the Shinto, whose invocation of
  the sun goddess and imperial divinity and continuity established the
  claim to national superiority and uniqueness, and Western learning,
  for a doomsday image of future national crisis.
  In this manner the growing intrusions of the West, and the growing
  channels to information about the West, were to have as a result a
  growing affirmation of the importance of Japan and of the Japanese
  tradition.
  92 Ibid., p. 122.
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  CHAPTER 2
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  On the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of the year 1830, Japan
  entered a new era. By coincidence, that same afternoon, in a cottage
  not far from Shibuya, Matsuzaki Kodo, a Confucian scholar, observed
  a flock of white cranes, "skimming over the hill" (as he wrote in his
  diary)1 from the direction of Aoyama. He recorded their appearance
  the following morning, too, "wheeling northwards in the sunlight,"
  his unmistakable delight suggesting just how reassuring it was that
  these stately and auspicious birds should show themselves at such a
  time. No era could have had so propitious an opening. Matsuzaki was
  equally happy with the new era name itself - "Tempo," or Heavenly
  Protection. It was well known that selecting era names was a delicate
  business, for the least carelessness - the use of Chinese characters
  already encumbered with unhappy associations, or those inviting omi-
  nous paranomasia - could well prejudice the prosperity of the entire
  nation. In this case, there seemed nothing to fear. The two characters
  for Tempo, as the elderly scholar construed them, paid tribute to two
  previous eras, the first being the Tenna era (1681-83) and the second,
  the Kyoho era (1716-35). Matsuzaki did not need to remind himself
  that for scholars at least, both periods carried favorable overtones,
  suggestive of new hope, of depravity reformed, and of righteousness
  restored. This, too, augured well for the future.
  Unhappily, in the course of the next fourteen years, these expecta-
  tions were to miscarry. True, the Tempo era is remembered as one of
  Japan's great periods of reform. In the central government, the Toku-
  gawa bakufu, it ranks with Kyoho and Kansei as one of the "three
  great reforms," and equally significant, all around the nation, the
  provincial rulers, or daimyo, were also swept along on a wave of
  regenerative enthusiasm. Culturally, as well, the Tempo era saw one
  of Japan's great flowerings. This, after all, was the time of Hokusai's
  Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, his Eight Views ofOmi, and his famous
  1 Matsuzaki Kodo, Kodo nichireki, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1970-83).
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  TEMPO FAMINE 
  117
  waterfall series; when Hiroshige (whose Fifty-three Stages of the To-
  kaido began to appear in 1832), Kuniyoshi, Eisen, and Kunisada were
  at their peak. Some of Japan's most notable painters, too, men like
  Tanomura Chikuden, Tani Buncho, and Watanabe Kazan, were ac-
  tive in the 1830s. The famous Edo meishozue appeared in the Tempo
  era, as did large sections of two of Tokugawa Japan's runaway literary
  successes - Takizawa Bakin's Nanso Satomi hakkenden and Ryutei
  Tanehiko's Nise Murasaki inaka Genji; so did the complete version of a
  third, Tamenaga Shunsui's Shunshoku umegoyomi, which was pub-
  lished in 1832. Add to this the activities of thinkers as diverse as
  Hirata Atsutane, Ninomiya Sontoku, and Aizawa Seishisai, and we
  have a cultural profile as varied and distinguished as any part of the
  Tokugawa period can present.
  Nevertheless, despite its auspicious opening, its reforms, and its
  cultural achievements, the Tempo era was to prove calamitous for
  both the common people of Japan and those who ruled over them. In
  terms of human misery and social dislocation, only the Temmei era
  (1781-88) caused more havoc, whereas for damage inflicted on Toku-
  gawa Japan's system of government, the Tempo era had no peer.
  Indeed, Matsuzaki Kodo quickly came to have his doubts. Just a few
  hours after his cranes had wheeled off toward Aoyama, he found
  himself speculating on two extraordinary phenomena: first, there had
  been earth tremors in Kyoto, a city in which they were virtually
  unknown, and second, the cherry trees had come into flower with
  uncanny disregard for the season. He was both puzzled and afraid at
  these portents: "Our ruler is virtuous, and our habits upright," he
  wrote, "so there should be no reason for any disasters. . . . All we can
  do is pray for the Heavenly Protection of yesterday's new era name."
  Two days later he was still uneasy, filling his diary with notes on
  previous earthquakes.
  THE TEMPO FAMINE
  In fact, his unease was premature, for real tragedy did not strike Japan
  until 1833, the fourth year of the Tempo era, and when it came, it
  proved to have nothing to do with earthquakes. The problem was the
  weather. It was unusually cold during the spring planting of 1833,
  exceptionally so during the summer growing season (to such a degree
  that in some areas farmers were obliged to bring out their padded
  winter clothing), and the autumn saw abnormally early snowfalls.
  Whereas the spring had been dry, itself an ominous sign, the summer
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  Il8 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  was, unfortunately, wet, with high water covering the young rice
  plants for as much as four or five days at a time. The result was a
  general crop failure, in which rice, particularly sensitive to any but
  optimal conditions, was the chief victim but in which other staples like
  wheat, barley, and even bamboo shoots were also severely damaged as
  well.2
  As was always the case, the worst effects were felt in the northeast-
  ern part of Japan, the Tohoku. The cool climate there accommodated
  agriculture only grudgingly, and rice growing, needing an average
  temperature of twenty degrees centigrade during the crucial months of
  July and August, had always been particularly hazardous. In 1833, the
  Tohoku yielded only 35 percent of its normal crop, and in some
  specific areas - Sendai, for example - it was much less than that. Far-
  ther to the south and west, in places like Hiroshima, the harvest was
  also poor, s
  By itself, one bad season was an irritation rather than a tragedy. No
  doubt many would have reacted initially like the Sendai farmer at the
  beginning of 1834, writing laconically in his journal, "No New Year
  celebration; no sake."* Temporary suffering could always be alleviated
  by the distribution of food and seed. But tragically, 1833 was to be just
  the first in a run of bad harvests. The next two years were only
  marginally better, and the harvest of 1836 was infinitely worse. Even
  in Edo that year, as Matsuzaki Kodo's diary shows, it rained almost
  incessantly throughout the summer. It was cold, into the bargain; on
  July 13 and 14 (5/30 and 6/1 by the lunar calendar), Matsuzaki was
  obliged to wear his winter cape, and on the night of August 25 (7/13 by
  the lunar calendar), one of his friends saw city roof tiles encrusted with
  frost. Once again the effects of this extraordinary weather were felt
  chiefly in the Tohoku, where the harvest was estimated to be only 28
  percent of normal, but this time they were spread over a far wider
  area. At Mito, 75 percent of the rice crop and 50 percent of the wheat
  and barley crop were lost, whereas at Tottori, over on the Japan Sea,
  only 40 percent of the harvest was salvaged. Indeed, there were com-
  plaints of crop damage as far afield as Hiroshima and even Kokura, in
  Kyushu.
  There was a grim parallel to be drawn here, as contemporaries
  knew. Matsuzaki Kodo certainly did: "The weather this year is almost
  exactly the same as it was in 1786," he noted in his diary, and so did
  2 See, for example, Saitd Shoichi, Oyama-cho shi (Tsuruoka: Oyama-cho shi kanko iinkai, 1969),
  p. 101; Miyagi-cho shi, shiryd-hen (Sendai: Miyagi-ken Miyagi-cho, 1967), p. 700.
  3 Rekishi koron (Tokyo, 1976), vol. 9, pp. 33-4. 
  4 Miyagi-cho, shiryd-hen, p. 802.
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  TEMPO FAMINE 
  119
  Ninomiya Sontoku, observing what he called "the worst harvest in
  fifty years."s Just fifty years earlier, in 1786, a similar spell of weather
  had brought on the Temmei famine, with its legacy of deserted vil-
  lages, unburied corpses, and tales of cannibalism. This time the season
  was almost as bad. Indeed, in some respects it was worse, for the bad
  weather was more widespread and affected some areas left largely
  untouched by the earlier catastrophe, like Tottori, for example, where
  officials estimated what happened in 1836 to be "worse than the fear-
  ful Temmei famine."6
  As Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura have pointed out,7 it is not
  easy to estimate how many died in the famines of the Tokugawa
  period. In 1836, we are told, over 100,000 starved to death in the
  Tohoku, and in Echizen the following year the death rate was three
  times the normal figure. In Tottori, officials were claiming that of a
  total of 50,000 people in distress, 20,000 died. The difficulty is, of
  course, that these figures were all too often thrown together on the
  basis of hasty and confused impressions, as there was little real oppor-
  tunity for counting heads. Officials, moreover, safe in the knowledge
  that no one would ever check, could afford to exaggerate the distress
  in areas under their care; in fact they could hardly afford not to, as aid
  would go only where the need seemed greatest.8
  Nevertheless, there is ample evidence to suggest, if not prove or
  quantify, that the famine that reached its height in 1836-7 was a crisis
  of no ordinary proportions. The reports of people eating leaves and
  weeds, or even straw raincoats, carry a certain conviction; so do the
  instructions circulated in some areas to bury corpses found by the
  roadside as quickly as possible, without waiting for official permis-
  sion. Nor is there any reason to disbelieve reports of mass movements
  out of the countryside, with people descending on towns and cities
  "like a mist," to be greeted by gruel kitchens if they were lucky or
  otherwise by doors hurriedly barred with bamboo staves by nervous
  householders. There is, too, the evidence of some reliable figures. In
  1833, at the very beginning of the famine, the Tokugawa bakufu had
  received 1.25 million koku of tax rice from its widely dispersed hold-
  ings; in 1836, when the harvest was universally bad, that amount had
  dwindled to 1.03 million koku, an indication of something out of the
  S Kodama Kota, ed., Ninomiya Sontoku, vol. 26 of Nihon no meicko (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha,
  '97°)> P- 452- 
  6 Tottori-han shi (Tottori: Tottori kenritsu toshokan, 1971), p. 610.
  7 Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial
  Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 147.
  8 Rekishikoron op. cit; Touori-han shi, pp. 615,621.
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  I2O 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  ordinary. The price of rice is also suggestive. In Osaka, during the
  summer of 1837, it was fetching three times its 1833 price; in Echigo
  the cost had risen fivefold. In Edo, a little later, it was more expensive
  than it had ever been.»
  The effects of the Tempo famine were felt everywhere. They were
  felt first in the countryside, where those whose crops had failed were
  forced to compete for dwindling supplies with such little cash as they
  could muster. The cities were the next to suffer, as prices rocketed
  upwards. "What shall I do?" a despairing Matsuzaki Kodo asked in
  his diary as rice suddenly grew more expensive, "What shall I do?"
  Nor were the samurai unscathed. All around Japan domain govern-
  ments, anticipating lower revenues and higher costs, tightened their
  belts, reducing samurai salaries in the process. There was, too, a more
  general problem connected with the famine. "A sickness is spread-
  ing," wrote the Sendai farmer nervously in 1834, all thoughts of sake
  forgotten, and spread it did, right through the 1830s, in a variety of
  forms - pestilence, smallpox, measles, influenza - among those too
  weak to resist.10
  CIVIL DISORDER
  Not surprisingly, the people who suffered most from the hunger of the
  1830s quickly made their unhappiness known. Popular unrest had
  always mushroomed during famines, and the 1830s proved to be no
  exception. What was now exceptional was the depth of the resentment
  displayed, for in the frequency, scale, and violence of its popular
  protests, the Tempo era came to surpass any previous period in Japa-
  nese history. The people were unusually fretful in the 1830s, and their
  behavior showed it. Indeed, even before the famine there were symp-
  toms of abnormal ferment. As early as 1830, for example, there had
  been an extraordinary outbreak of okagemairi, the peculiar form of
  mass hysteria during which vast numbers of people, young farmers for
  the most part, spontaneously set off on a pilgrimage to the Grand
  Shrine at Ise. This in itself was not so unusual. Okagemairi had been
  erupting, at roughly sixty-year intervals, for a long time; the last one
  had taken place in 1771. By 1830, therefore, the sexagenary cycle
  having run its full course, Japan was due for another, so there was no
  9 Imaizumi Takujiro, ed., Essa sosho (Sanjo: Yashima shuppan, 1975), vol. 2, p. 311; Oguchi
  Yujiro, "Tempo-ki no seikaku," in Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
  1976), vol. 12, p. 329.
  10 Fujikawa Yu, Nihon shuppei shi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1969), pp. 62-3,110-11.
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  CIVIL DISORDER 
  121
  surprise when it came. Nor was there surprise at concurrent reports of
  such miracles as shrine amulets floating down from the sky. Rumors
  of prodigia like this, spreading from village to village, were the custom-
  ary call to pilgrimage. Rather, it was the scale of the 1830 outbreak
  that was so extraordinary. In 1771, two million had visited Ise; now
  within the space of four months, there were five million, jostling,
  singing, shouting, begging (or occasionally stealing), and all fighting
  their way into the shrine precincts.11
  The authorities naturally were nervous. They were never comfort-
  able when unruly bands of people strayed about the countryside, dis-
  rupting the placid agricultural round. But although they were not to
  know it, worse was to come. The 1830 okagemairi was soon to be
  dwarfed by developments that, if far less spectacular, were infinitely
  more threatening. From 1831 onwards, and particularly in 1836, Ja-
  pan was struck by a wave of unprecedented popular protest. Opinions
  differ on just how much there was, but Aoki Koji, whose research on
  the subject is by far the most detailed, has credited the Tempo era
  with a total of 465 rural disputes, 445 peasant uprisings, and 101
  urban riots, the two latter categories reaching their peak, like the
  Tempo famine, in 1836.12 There is general agreement that no matter
  how many incidents there were or how they are classified, Japan had
  never before seen such civil commotion.
  Mere numbers alone, however, do not explain why the disorder of
  the Tempo era was so remarkable. To understand this, it is necessary
  to look at certain aspects of the incidents themselves, for they dis-
  played features that were both new and alarming. The rural uprisings,
  for example, seemed to be of a new kind. Before, such protests had
  followed a fairly predictable pattern, with a delegation (normally com-
  posed of traditional village leaders), representing a fairly limited area
  (a few villages, at most), presenting local authorities with a list of
  demands - usually for tax relief, for freedom to sell their produce at
  the highest price, or for the replacement of officials seen to be dishon-
  est or unsympathetic. After a ritual show of solidarity, these demands
  would be put politely, in the expectation of at least some concession.
  Elements of this tradition persisted into the Tempo era, but they were
  overshadowed by unmistakable signs of something quite new.1*
  First, the scale was different. Now, instead of a few villages, whole
  11 Fujitani Toshio, "Okagemairi" to "eejanaika" (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, shinsho ed., 1968),
  pp. 32,78-9.
  12 Aoki Koji,Hyakushoikkisogonempyo(Tokyo: San'ichi shobo, I97i),app. pp. 31-2.
  13 Miyamoto Mataji, ed.,Han shakai no kenkyu (Kyoto: Minerva shobo, 1972), p. 535.
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  122 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  regions were caught up; in 1831, in Choshu, for example, a routine
  demonstration against the domain's cotton monopoly suddenly spilled
  over into fourteen similar incidents, in which more than 100,000 peo-
  ple terrorized the entire area.1* In 1836, too, during the famine, the
  Gunnai region north of Mt. Fuji saw an incident involving an esti-
  mated 30,000 angry, hungry protestors - an event without parallel,
  according to one contemporary observer, "even in old military histo-
  ries and chronicles." Just a month later, another 10,000 demonstrators
  plunged the province of Mikawa into uproar, while in 1838 almost the
  entire island of Sado - some 250 villages in all - rose in anger.1'
  Such numbers made it inevitable that the control wielded by tradi-
  tional village leaders over the direction of protest would crumble.
  Uprisings on this scale simply would not respond to direction, as one
  of the initiators of the Mikawa rising found to his dismay when rioters
  included his house on the list of those to be burned down. Further,
  because almost all the participants were poor and often desperate, they
  were not nearly so amenable to the wishes of their richer fellows. At
  Gunnai, indeed, where the unrest was initiated by an elderly farmer
  (one of the poorest in his village) and a peripatetic mathematics
  teacher, the poor provided leaders as well as followers, and that was
  not all. One of the features of that incident was the enthusiastic partici-
  pation of people from outside the area, "not just the poor," it was
  remarked, "but gamblers, vagabonds, and those posing as rdnin."16
  The new scale of rural protests may to some extent have reflected
  difficulties peculiar to the Tempo crisis, but their changing composi-
  tion spoke eloquently of the social polarization through which many
  country districts had been split irrevocably into rich and poor. So, too,
  did the violence, for these incidents, no longer directed by gentleman
  farmers, were anything but gentlemanly. In fact, as often as not, the
  gentleman farmer class was the object of mob hatred. It was their
  houses, stores, granaries, breweries, and pawnshops that were ran-
  sacked and burned during the Tempo unrest. This was so in Choshu,
  in Mikawa, and in Gunnai (where more than five hundred buildings
  were treated in this way); even on Sado Island 130 gentleman farmers
  felt the force of local discontent.17
  Sooner or later, all these incidents subsided or were put down,
  leaving the authorities free to step in and make a few examples -
  14 Aoki, Hyakusho ikkisogo nempyo, pp. 225,277-84. 
  15 Ibid., p. 242.
  16 Aoki Michio, Tempo sdddki (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1979), pp. 194, 197.
  17 Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modem Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
  sity Press, 1959), pp. 180-200.
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  CIVIL DISORDER 
  123
  torturing some, crucifying others, or imposing sentences of banish-
  ment or punitive tatooing. But all were concerned by the new kind of
  rural protest. "If we have another bad harvest," warned Tokugawa
  Nariaki, daimyo of Mito, in 1837, "I think there will be trouble."18
  They were to find urban unrest no less disconcerting. Tokugawa Ja-
  pan had three of the world's largest cities - Edo, with over a million
  people, and Osaka and Kyoto, with something less than half a million
  each - as well as a further fifty or so substantial provincial centers, all
  with at least ten thousand inhabitants. Such concentrations of people,
  most of them highly vulnerable to food shortages and price fluctua-
  tions, had proved volatile before, during the Temmei famine. In the
  hunger of the 1830s they were to prove so again, with an unprece-
  dented succession of riots, or uchikowashi, from the autumn of 1833
  onwards. The Osaka authorities had to cope with eleven such inci-
  dents, whereas even in Edo, despite its intimidating preponderance of
  samurai, the common people rioted on three occasions. Elsewhere,
  too, there was unrest - in Kyoto, Sendai, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and
  Kanazawa (where, in 1836, a mob of three hundred irate women broke
  into Zeniya Gohei's store demanding rice and money). Once again
  estimates vary, but Kitajima Masamoto claims no fewer than seventy-
  four urban riots for the Tempo era, a totally disproportionate 20 per-
  cent of all such incidents during the Tokugawa period.19
  This was bad enough, but in 1837 Osaka saw planned - and very
  nearly executed - the most menacing urban disorder of all, on a scale
  unseen since the great conspiracy of 1651. The instigator was Oshio
  Heihachiro, a former government official, then in his forty-fifth year.
  Some years earlier, allegedly disappointed at the corruption of his
  fellow officials in Osaka, he had surrendered his career as a police
  inspector to devote himself to reading, writing, teaching, and, appar-
  ently, collecting weapons. Then, early in 1837, at the height of the
  famine, he circulated copies of an angry document entitled Gekibun (A
  call to arms) to villagers around Osaka, summoning the common peo-
  ple to an attack on the city.20 He carefully disclaimed any general
  challenge to the government, but the implications were obvious. "We
  must first punish the officials, who torment the people so cruelly," he
  wrote, "then we must execute the haughty and rich Osaka merchants.
  18 Quoted in Kitajima Masamoto, Mizuno Tadakuni (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1969), p.
  208.
  19 Kitajima Masamoto, Bakuhan-sei no kumon, vol. 18 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Chuo
  koronsha, 1967), p. 418.
  20 I have used the version contained in Koga-shi shi: shiryo kinseihen (hansei) (Koga: 1979), pp.
  695-7-
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  124 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  Then we must distribute the gold, silver, and copper stored in their
  cellars, and the bales of rice hidden in their storehouses." These senti-
  ments, coming from one of Oshio's former rank and current reputa-
  tion, were disturbing. So, too, was the subsequent rising, in which
  Oshio and three hundred supporters tried to take over the city. It was
  suppressed readily enough, within twelve hours, and succeeded in
  changing the condition of the poor only insofar as it burnt down 3,300
  of their houses and destroyed an estimated forty to fifty thousand koku
  of rice.21 Nevertheless it provoked a widespread sensation. Its rever-
  berations were to be felt throughout Japan, in the "growing unease"
  noted by Fujita Toko among the official class and in a general under-
  current of excitement among the common people, where it was fed by
  rumors and copies of Oshio's Gekibun, surreptitiously distributed. It
  also found its emulators in smaller risings at Onomichi, Mihara, Nose,
  and, three months later, at Kashiwazaki, on the west coast of Honshu,
  where a group of insurgents, again led by a scholar from the samurai
  class, attacked government offices.22
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  In the midst of this mounting unrest, Japan had to confront yet an-
  other difficulty, a threat from abroad. The policy of national isolation,
  imposed early in the seventeenth century, had remained intact for two
  hundred years, but by the beginning of the Tempo era there seemed
  reason to believe that it might not do so for much longer. The West
  was drawing nearer, as the ever-more frequent sightings of foreign
  vessels in Japanese waters attested. Already, to counter it, the Toku-
  gawa bakufu had issued instructions in 1825 that all such ships were to
  be driven off at sight, but this was often more readily said than done.
  The Tempo era had hardly begun when Matsuzaki Kodo wrote in his
  journal of reports of an armed clash in Ezo between local residents and
  foreign sailors.
  The first really serious shock, however, came in the summer of
  1837, while the authorities were still digesting the Oshio rebellion. In
  August that year a privately owned American vessel, the Morrison, left
  Macao for Japan. On board were Charles King, an American business-
  man, whose idea the voyage was, and his fellow countryman, Samuel
  21 Oguchi, "Tempo-ki no seikaku," in Iwananri koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 12, p. 336; Koga-shi shi,
  p. 698.
  22 Okamoto Ryoichi, "Tempo kaikaku," in Iwanami koza Nikon rekishi (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1963), vol. 13, p. 218.
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  FOREIGN THREAT 
  125
  Wells Williams, a missionary; these representatives of God and Mam-
  mon were accompanied by seven Japanese castaways. Some days later,
  at a rendezvous in the Bonin Islands, the ship was joined by Dr.
  Charles Gutzlaff, a German missionary who had entered British em-
  ploy at Canton as an interpreter. Ostensibly, the Morrison's mission
  was to repatriate the castaways, but the trinity of God, Mammon, and
  Whitehall perhaps had other aspirations as well. Whatever they were,
  there was to be no opportunity to convey them - or the castaways
  either, for that matter - to the Japanese. On August 29, the Morrison
  anchored in Edo Bay, on the Tokugawa bakufu's very doorstep. The
  next morning, without any warning, it was driven off by gunfire from
  the shore batteries, a welcome that was repeated at Kagoshima a few
  days later. 23
  In itself, the Morrison incident, although unsettling to the Japanese,
  was of no great significance. Admittedly, they were taken aback to
  learn, the following year, that in repelling an unauthorized foreign
  vessel they had also, albeit unwittingly, condemned seven compatriots
  to permanent exile. This could never be construed as an act of Confu-
  cian benevolence, and the guilt was later to return, in grossly distorted
  form, to haunt them. Still, the memory of the Morrison was soon
  blotted out by more ominous developments. Later that same year it
  was rumored that Great Britain, already known as the reputed pos-
  sessor of vast wealth, an extensive empire, and a limitless capacity for
  violence, was about to annex the Bonin Islands, some six hundred
  miles to the south. The report, as so often the case, proved exagger-
  ated. British businessmen and officials had discussed the possibility in
  a desultory fashion for some years, but a survey in 1837 simply served
  to confirm what they all suspected: that annexation was pointless.2*
  Nevertheless, to the Japanese, aware of the survey but not of its
  outcome, it was undeniably disquieting.
  In 1840, when officials in Nagasaki received the first accounts of an
  armed conflict between China and Great Britain, the disquiet blos-
  somed into panic. This time the rumors were not exaggerated, for the
  skirmishing between the British and Chinese at Canton the previous
  year had developed into a full-fledged war. The British proceeded to
  win it with a dispatch that, reported faithfully in Edo, left the Japa-
  nese in no doubt that their great and powerful neighbor faced a humili-
  ating defeat. In the autumn of 1843, reports of the Treaty of Nanking
  confirmed their worst fears. Great Britain had come to the Far East to
  23 W. G. Beasley, Great Britain and the Opening of Japan, 1834-18S8 (London: Luzac, 1951),
  pp. 21-6. 
  24 Ibid., pp. 16-20.
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  126 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  stay, and Japan, committed to a policy of national isolation and now
  saddled with a reputation for barbarism (for who but a barbarous
  country would fire on its own returning castaways and those befriend-
  ing them?), could expect to come under foreign pressure as never
  before. Indeed, the Dutch in Nagasaki had been telling them as much
  for some time. Whether or not British policy toward Japan warranted
  such fears (and W. G. Beasley argues persuasively that it did not),2*
  the very fact of an armed British presence a mere five hundred miles
  from their shores reminded the Japanese of something they had
  tended to forget - just how small and isolated they were.
  CRITICS AND CRITICISM
  The Tempo era had produced two major problems: on the one hand,
  an unsettled populace whose dissatisfactions (not least among them
  hunger) goaded them to unprecedented violence; on the other, a diplo-
  matic situation more complex and threatening than at any time since
  the early seventeenth century. Alone, either of these would have been
  enough to dismay Japan's rulers. In combination, they brought on a
  crisis without parallel in Tokugawa history, shaking society to its very
  foundations.
  Inevitably, that crisis was felt most keenly among the country's
  approximately half a million samurai. As bureaucrats, working either
  for the Tokugawa bakufu or for any one of the 264 daimyo govern-
  ments, the peace and prosperity of the common people were in their
  hands.26 The famine and the disorder had already raised questions
  about their stewardship. Equally, as Japan's standing army, it was
  their duty to spring to their nation's defense. As the diplomatic clouds
  gathered, however, their military capability, too, became an object of
  concern. It was a situation of some embarrassment. For more than two
  centuries they had laid claim to status, stipends, and privileges on the
  assumption that their innate wisdom and bravery entitled - indeed
  obliged - them to guide and protect the common people. Now, in the
  crisis of the Tempo era, they found themselves unable to do either.
  The samurai class was at a very low ebb indeed.
  First, they had seen no blow struck in anger since the Shimabara
  Rebellion of 1637, so they were far from battle hardened. They were,
  into the bargain, undertrained and poorly equipped, simply because
  both training and equipment cost money, and nobody had any money
  25 Ibid.
  26 Daibukan (Tokyo: Meicho kankokai, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 798-808, lists 264 daimyo in 1833.
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  CRITICS AND CRITICISM 
  127
  to spare. Almost to a man, the samurai of the Tempo era were poorer
  than their ancestors had been.27 They had their stipends, but infla-
  tion and rising expectations had combined to make a mockery of
  them. At best, the samurai's stipends had remained unchanged since
  the beginning of the Tokugawa period; all too often they had actually
  been reduced, whether on a temporary or semipermanent basis, by
  daimyo trying to cope with some particular emergency. For most
  samurai - perhaps all - only the moneylenders offered any respite,
  and even that was temporary, as debts (unless canceled unilaterally
  by government fiat) always had to be repaid. By the Tempo era,
  therefore, the samurai, although they had increased in bureaucratic
  skills, were a ragged remnant of what they had once been: poor,
  unwarlike, addicted to gambling, and so demoralized that it was not
  uncommon for them to report drunk for duty.
  Those they served, whether the shogun or one of the 264 daimyo,
  faced similar problems and for similar reasons: the inroads of inflation
  combined with a more opulent life-style. More significantly, however,
  their incomes had shrunk. In part this was due to the damage inflicted
  regularly by fire, flood, and earthquake, and, of course, famines. But
  other factors, less obvious but even more detrimental, were also at
  work. The shogun and his daimyo were no longer milking the re-
  sources of their domains as effectively as they had once done, for
  taxation had failed to keep pace with either the speed or the direction
  of agricultural change. Throughout central Japan, in particular, the
  stable (and eminently taxable) population of subsistence farmers had
  long since begun to disappear, taking with it its absolute commitment
  to rice growing. In its place was a new kind of agricultural community,
  divided into wealthy landowners, at one extreme, and their tenants
  and laborers, at the other. Rather than producing for their own needs,
  farmers now grew commercial crops - cotton, tobacco, rapeseed, and
  indigo, among others - for sale. Some grew rich by it, and others did
  not; a fact that, as we have seen, helped transform the nature of civil
  disorder. But rich or poor, all were much more difficult to tax than
  their seventeenth-century forebears had been.28
  Japan's daimyo rulers, in consequence, met the Tempo crisis in
  circumstances of chronic overspending and perennial indebtedness.
  Examples of this abound, each more bizarre than the last. The sho-
  gun's government in Edo went through the 1830s spending, each year,
  over half a million gold pieces more than it earned. In Tosa, over the
  27 Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
  vard University Press, 1974), pp. 26-69. 
  28 Smith, Agrarian Origins, p. 160.
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  128 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  same period, domain revenues never met more than 75 percent of its
  running costs, and few other domains would have been significantly
  better off. Almost inevitably, they all found their way to moneylend-
  ers. Choshu, for example, amassed debts equal to twenty years' worth
  of domain income, and one-third of Kaga's revenue each year went to
  repay loans. These were not the conditions in which Japan's samurai
  would have chosen to meet the Tempo crisis, and they knew it all too
  well. "It is hard enough for us to keep going even under normal
  circumstances," acknowledged one daimyo morosely, "let alone in an
  emergency."29 Unfortunately, an emergency was precisely what they
  now faced.
  The general predicament was not new. Daimyo debts had been
  common in the eighteenth century, and so had bakufu penury; so, for
  that matter, had signs of decay among the samurai. Back in the seven-
  teenth century, when most samurai had already left the countryside
  for the castle towns, there had been complaints of the corrosive impact
  of city life, with its unaccustomed pressures, expenses, and tempta-
  tions. Their isolation certainly made the samurai less effective adminis-
  trators; no less certainly their new life-style made them less effective
  warriors. During the Russian scare at the turn of the century, Sugita
  Gempaku noted the decline: "Today's samurai have lived in luxury for
  nearly two hundred years," he wrote, " . . . and have seen no fighting
  for five or six generations. Their military skills have disappeared, . . .
  and seven or eight out often are as weak as women."30
  The situation was far worse by the Tempo era, for the Russian
  threat had receded too quickly to make any lasting impact on Japan's
  defenses, which therefore remained as inadequate as ever: some an-
  cient cannon (many unused for decades) at a few points along the
  coast, and a scattering of tumbledown towers, still known by the
  anachronistic title Karabune bansho, or watchtowers for Chinese ships.
  Japan's ships, cannon, and small arms, too, all were substantially as
  they had been for the previous two hundred years. They could still
  pretend to be efficient bureaucrats and even put on plausible military
  displays on ceremonial occasions, but they could not transform them-
  selves so readily into an effective fighting force. Before they could be
  confident of repelling foreign invaders or even of suppressing domes-
  tic rioters, the samurai class needed reorganization, a fresh sense of
  purpose, new weapons, and appropriate training. This all would cost
  29 Quoted in Miyamoto, Han shakai no kenkyu, p. 548.
  30 Numata Jiro, et al., eds., Yogaku (/), vol. 64 of Nikon shiso taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,
  1976), p. 296.
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  CRITICS AND CRITICISM 
  129
  extra money, and money was precisely what the samurai, en masse and
  individually, did not have.
  Nobody knew this better than the samurai themselves. They had
  greater access to information than anyone else did and, thanks to their
  education, a greater sense of historical perspective, so they could sense
  the dimensions of the problems facing them. As they knew all too
  well, the responsibility for doing something about it was theirs, so, in
  the Tempo era, they gave voice to their anxiety with an insistence, and
  to an extent, unique in Tokugawa history. Ironically enough, this
  criticism itself in its volume, scope, and variety added yet another
  element of uncertainty to an already unstable situation.
  In one sense, the criticism was remarkably diverse. After all, it came
  from people of disparate status and experience. Daimyo of the emi-
  nence of Tokugawa Nariaki, ruler of the Mito domain, had much to
  say, but so too did humbler people: Hirose Tanso, a country school-
  master, Takashima Shuhan, a provincial magistrate, and Oshio Heiha-
  chiro, the retired Osaka policeman. Watanabe Kazan the artist, too,
  added his criticism, as did Takano Choei the physiologist, Sato
  Nobuhiro the wandering scholar, and Sakuma Shozan the gunner. *•
  Naturally, too, all perceived the crisis in different ways. To Oshio, the
  major problem was the Tempo famine and the extent to which it had
  been mishandled by callous bureaucrats. Watanabe Kazan, on the
  other hand, gave his undivided attention to Japan's diplomatic situa-
  tion, compared luridly with that of "a hunk of meat left by the road-
  side" while Western predators prowled around it. Sakuma Shozan,
  too, concerned with the same issue, was afraid that his country might
  have to fight a war without "the least hope of winning." For Toku-
  gawa Nariaki - as for his adviser, Aizawa Seishisai, whose Shimon
  (New theses), written in 1825, circulated widely during the Tempo
  era - the crisis combined both foreign and domestic elements. "As
  you know," Nariaki warned in a memorial of 1838, "history shows us
  that internal disorder invites external difficulties, while external prob-
  lems provoke internal unrest." Similarly, the criticisms took different
  forms. Oshio's Gekibun was a public appeal, passed from village to
  village. The observations of Hirose Tanso and Sato Nobuhiro, on the
  other hand, circulated in manuscript, whereas Watanabe Kazan's
  31 Material in this section is drawn from the following: "Sato Nobuhiro," vol. 45, and
  "Watanabe Kazan" and "Sakuma Shozan," vol. 55 of Nikon shiso taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1974 and 1977); Koga-shi shi, pp. 695-7; Arima Seibo, Takashima Shuhan (Tokyo:
  Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1958); Konishi Shigenao, Hirose Tanso (Tokyo: Bunkyo shoin, 1943);
  Nakajima Ichisaburo, Hirose Tanso no kenkyu (Tokyo: Dai-ichi shuppan kyokai, 1943).
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  130 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  were kept secret until uncovered in a police raid in 1839. Other criti-
  cism assumed the guise of formal memorials, offered to daimyo (as in
  the case of Sakuma Shozan), specific officials (as with Takashima
  Shuhan), or the shogun himself (as with Tokugawa Nariaki). The
  tone, too, varied with the form. Oshio's Gekibun was as strident and
  inflammatory as one would expect a call to arms to be. The scholarly
  analyses and memorials, on the other hand, were suitably clad in their
  respective camouflages of academic decorum and deferential concern.
  Yet differences notwithstanding, there were some common threads
  running through the Tempo criticism, and one was dissatisfaction
  with the government. Oshio Heihachiro, observing that "when the
  nation is governed by unworthy men, disasters come one upon the
  other," was more outspoken than others, but the view was neverthe-
  less commonly held. Others also shared his conviction that govern-
  ment officials "accept bribes unashamedly"; both Watanabe Kazan, in
  his confidential Shinkiron (A timely warning), and Tokugawa Nariaki,
  in his 1838 memorial, said much the same thing. The latter, indeed,
  considered that "what we must first do is stamp out corruption, for
  unless this is done we shall succeed in nothing." Hirose Tanso, in his
  Ugen (Circumlocutions), written in 1840, extended his criticism to the
  daimyo and the entire samurai class, drawing attention to their beset-
  ting sins of arrogance and ignorance. Some, like Watanabe Kazan and
  Takano Choei, condemned Japan's policy of national isolation as too
  provocative for the nation's own good. Takashima Shuhan and Sa-
  kuma Shozan, on the other hand, endorsed it and drew attention
  instead to the lamentable state of national defense.
  Governments do not usually accept criticism readily, and the Toku-
  gawa bakufu was no exception. Adverse comment had been forcibly
  discouraged since the early seventeenth century, with considerable
  success, so the Tempo authorities were simply unprepared for what
  now poured in on them from all sides. They reacted in the conven-
  tional way. Watanabe Kazan and Takano Choei, together with some of
  their associates, were arrested during a purge of amateurs of Western
  learning. Takano was subsequently jailed, as, on a different occasion,
  was Takashima Shuhan. Sato Nobuhiro was ordered to stay away from
  Edo. Watanabe was exiled from Edo to his domain, a fate he shared
  with Sato Nobuhiro and even Tokugawa Nariaki, rusticated to his
  domain in 1841. Oshio Heihachiro, of course, had signed his own
  death warrant by launching a rebellion. He evaded capture for six
  months and, when he could do so no longer, took his own life.
  Still, the criticism itself persisted. The fears and the complaints that
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  CRITICS AND CRITICISM 
  131
  the Tempo crisis had awakened remained, to be passed from hand to
  hand and mouth to mouth. So, too, did suggestions for reform which,
  despite their heterogeneity, were all equally dramatic, revealing a gen-
  eral conviction that only desperate remedies could cure a nation so
  desperately ill. Here Oshio, demanding punitive carnage, was on his
  own; Japan was not quite ready for that. Yet other calls for change
  were in their own way just as radical. Several critics - Hirose Tanso,
  Sakuma Shozan, and Tokugawa Nariaki among them - urged that
  samurai be sent away from the cities back to the countryside, to lead a
  national defense effort in which the common people, too, would par-
  ticipate. In effect, this proposal struck at the very foundations of the
  Tokugawa social order. The diplomatic order, too, was threatened by
  the demands of those like Watanabe and Takano, who urged that the
  country be thrown open to the world.
  Other proposals were to attack the Tokugawa political order, calling
  into question the entire bakuhan taisei. Under this system, political
  authority was delegated by the emperor (whether he liked it or not) to
  the shogun, the head of the Tokugawa house. The shogun in turn,
  while commanding an establishment of his own to coordinate certain
  national functions like foreign affairs and defense, delegated much of
  the responsibility for local administration to 264 local rulers. These
  daimyo (or their bureaucracies) governed their own domains, collected
  their own taxes, and maintained their own armies. As vassals of the
  shogun, they were obliged to give him whatever assistance he might
  require, no matter what the cost to themselves, and so should they
  prove negligent or miscreant, their lands and rank were to be for-
  feited. At least, this was how it worked in theory. By the Tempo era,
  however, two hundred years of inactivity had seen the authority of the
  shogun and his government decline and the de facto independence of
  the daimyo grow. Few were ever called upon to do anything for the
  general good, and fewer still felt the sting of bakufu displeasure. For
  the most part the system worked well enough, as Japan's placid his-
  tory for most of the Tokugawa period shows. On the other hand, it
  lacked the coordination needed to cope with a national emergency.
  The Tempo crisis, with its famine and its massive popular unrest,
  displayed once more the deficiencies of a system that fragmented local
  authority into 265 separate jurisdictions.
  Much more significantly, however, the crisis drew attention to an-
  other and particularly serious inadequacy. Tokugawa Japan could not
  protect itself against invasion - not merely because the samurai class
  as a whole had grown indigent and flabby but, rather, because the
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  132 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  system itself did not permit it. The Tokugawa bakufu had long ago
  decided that it could maintain itself in power and keep the country
  from civil war only by limiting the military capacity of the daimyo. In
  the early seventeenth century it had therefore imposed several restric-
  tions on them. The sankin kotai system of alternate attendance at Edo
  was one, aimed at limiting their opportunities for rebellion by keeping
  them in Edo one year in every two. There was also the hostage system,
  designed to secure their good behavior by threatening their wives and
  heirs. More relevant to the present context, however, they were forbid-
  den to fortify their domains or to build vessels of warship dimensions.
  All these restrictions served Tokugawa Japan well. Without them, it
  is quite certain that its history would not have been nearly so tranquil.
  Yet, in the Tempo crisis, people came to realize that in restraining
  each other from civil war, they had also left themselves defenseless. To
  many critics, therefore, it seemed obvious that the system would have
  to change; indeed, Aizawa Yasushi's Shimon (written in 1825, but -
  wisely - not published until 1857) had already suggested this, demand-
  ing that domains be allowed to fortify themselves, acquire better weap-
  ons, and build larger ships. Tokugawa Nariaki, Aizawa's patron,
  spent much of the next twenty years saying the same thing. To
  Sakuma Shozan, too, it appeared time for the old restrictions to be
  relaxed. The prohibition against building large ships, he wrote, had
  been drawn up in the belief that it "would keep the nation peaceful in
  the future," but with circumstances so dramatically changed that "we
  need not hesitate to revise, for the common good, a law introduced for
  the common good."Behind all such suggestions lay the implicit asser-
  tion that Tokugawa Japan was far too centralized for safety. Aizawa
  had denounced Japan's defense system for "emphasizing the center
  and ignoring the periphery," and Sakuma Shozan, too, suggested that
  the bakufu should "lighten the burdens it imposes on the nation's
  daimyo, so that their domain finances may be made easier and they
  may devote themselves to defense."
  Yet there was an alternative to the decentralization they demanded,
  and this was to be found in the works of Sato Nobuhiro. His Suito
  hiroku32 and its subsequent elaborations and glosses suggested not that
  domains be set free to see to their own defense but the opposite. What
  Sato advocated was the creation of a state far more centralized than
  Japan had ever seen (or, indeed, was to see until the new Meiji order
  32 A title that defies an elegant, or even an inelegant, translation. Perhaps "A secret treatise on
  bequeathing an enhanced patrimony to posterity" suggests its purport. The most readily
  accessible version is found in "Sato Nobuhiro," vol. 45 of Nihon shiso taikei, pp. 488-517.
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  DOMAIN REFORMS 
  133
  thirty years later), a state in which every aspect of national life, includ-
  ing defense, would be made totally subject to unified central control.
  Each of the critics, in his own way, was calling on Japan to reform
  itself before it was too late - to bring about more honest government,
  to return to old habits of frugality, to try new kinds of diplomacy or
  social organization, and to acquire new and better kinds of weapons.
  The call did not go unheard, as the reforms of the Tempo era were to
  show, but it had unforeseen results, nowhere more so than for the
  issue of state organization. This particular issue, underlying all the
  others, was to prove the most intractable and, ultimately, the most
  divisive.
  DOMAIN REFORMS
  Traditionally, in Tokugawa Japan, crisis was followed by reform, and
  there was no reason that the Tempo crisis, for all its unaccustomed
  features, should have been any different. Reform, expressed variously
  as kaikaku, kaishin, or chuko, was the conventional response, reassur-
  ingly optimistic and comfortably vague. After all, who could possibly
  resist a program centered on (as such programs always were) economy,
  frugality, and the promotion of "men of talent"? It could not fail to
  appeal to domains in financial turmoil, as they all were to a greater or
  lesser degree, and unable to lay the blame anywhere but on human
  failings. In any case, economy and frugality were the most elastic of
  abstractions, able to be stretched in any number of directions, whereas
  the use of the term "men of talent" was nothing if not subjective; in
  practice most people tended to reserve it for themselves and their
  friends.
  Indeed, the concept of reform was vague enough to accommodate a
  variety of responses - progressive or reactionary, Utopian or prag-
  matic, self-seeking or altruistic - or even no response at all, provided
  that it was decently cloaked in the appropriate rhetoric. Just how
  flexible it was can be seen in the wide range of reactions to the events
  of the Tempo era, for though none remained untouched by them,
  Japan's 264 daimyo domains did not react alike. Nor was there any
  reason to expect them to do so. They were scattered over a country of
  considerable economic, climatic, and topographical diversity, so the
  crisis impinged on them in different ways and to different degrees. In
  central Japan, for example, the problems of rural unrest were quite
  unlike those in regions where commerce had developed more slowly.
  Then, too, the famine and its problems loomed larger in the northeast,
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  134 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  which had seen so much more devastation than elsewhere; the south-
  western domains, on the other hand, had much more reason to be
  concerned about foreign ships and the threat of invasion. Coastal do-
  mains, too, no matter what their location, tended to be more alert to
  defense issues than to those at a safer distance from the sea. One must
  also not forget that just as each domain had its individual problems, so
  too did it have its own range of options, and, to choose among them,
  its own administrators, with their individual preferences.
  For all these reasons, the Tempo reforms, as they unfolded in the
  daimyo domains, could hardly have been more diverse.« To some
  domains, as to some critics, it appeared that the kernel of the problem
  lay in the failings of the samurai class. So at Tawara, for example,
  Watanabe Kazan's reforms emphasized education, in the hope that the
  samurai might learn once again their traditional morality, with its
  virtues of loyalty and filial piety. Elsewhere, similar demands were
  accompanied by warnings against the insidious temptations of city life.
  "Each one of you must be frugal in all things," the Okayama authori-
  ties told their samurai in 1833, "avoid wasteful expenditures, and set
  your behavior to rights."
  In matters of economic policy, too, many domain reformers looked
  no farther than the traditional remedies. Programs of stringent econ-
  omy were common enough, and as usual, one of the most convenient
  places to begin seemed to be the samurai stipends. These had always
  been the easiest of game, as there was so little risk of protest. Samurai
  morality, even though it condoned opposition to a daimyo under some
  circumstances, would never have done so over anything so contempt-
  ible as money. Domains like Echizen, therefore, could begin their
  reforms confidently enough by halving all stipends for a three-year
  period. Still, even this avenue to financial health was not without its
  risks. For one thing, it was a two-edged weapon, as those samurai with
  less money would be less effective in a crisis. At Tawara, too, it was
  found that salary cuts simply goaded the samurai into absconding; all
  they had to lose, after all, was their status, apparently not worth
  much, and their salary remnants, now worth even less. No less tradi-
  tionally, daimyo saddled with crippling debts could choose the option
  of repudiating them. This was sanctioned, at least in theory, by the
  33 The term "Tempo reforms" is customarily used rather loosely, including not only those of the
  Tempo era (1830-44) but also those initiated slightly before or after. The information appear-
  ing here is drawn from a variety of sources, of which the most important are Miyamoto, Han
  shakai no kenkyu; Okubo Toshiaki, ed., Meiji ishin to Kyushu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1968); Inui
  Hiromi and Inoue Katsuo, "Choshu han to Mito han," in Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi (To-
  kyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), vol. 12.
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  DOMAIN REFORMS 
  135
  wide gulf in status between the merchant who did the lending and the
  daimyo who did the borrowing; the former could have no possible
  recourse against the latter, should he be determined to default. Do-
  mains like Choshu and Fukuoka, therefore, readily used this expedi-
  ent, and Satsuma and Saga came exceedingly close, the former with an
  announcement that although its debts (amounting to five million gold
  pieces) would ultimately be repaid, the process might take some
  time - 250 years, in fact. In the case of Saga, the domain authorities
  magnanimously offered to settle with one of their Edo creditors, pro-
  vided he was willing to accept just 20 percent of the principal. Yet this
  too, like slashing the samurai's stipends, had its dangers, for in prac-
  tice the right to repudiate debts had to be exercised with discretion.
  Few daimyo could risk alienating the business community on whose
  expertise, goodwill, and cooperation the economic life of their do-
  mains had all too often come to depend.
  In many parts of Japan the Tempo crisis seemed a signal to turn
  back the economic clock, with a reaffirmation of the agrarian roots of
  the bakuhan taisei. This, so reformers argued, could be done by
  restricting the private commercial developments that had polarized
  so many farming villages and, incidentally, cut deeply into domain
  tax revenues. Elements of such a policy are to found in areas as
  geographically, economically, and socially diverse as Mito, Satsuma,
  Choshu, and Saga. In some domains, too - Saga and Kokura, for
  example - the emphasis was on land reclamation, the most tradi-
  tional of all methods of augmenting income. There was, however,
  one other traditional step to financial health that the domains chose
  to ignore. They could have increased the land tax or else extended it
  so that it fell as heavily on undertaxed dry fields as on rice paddies.
  After all, in most parts of Japan, taxes had not been readjusted for
  more than a hundred years. But not even the Tempo crisis could
  tempt the domains to take such a dangerous step. It was discussed
  here and there but in the end was rejected. For one thing, the
  aftermath of the Tempo famine was obviously not the most oppor-
  tune moment. For another, everybody knew that more taxation
  would be interpreted in the villages as either a break with tradition or
  a breach of faith and vigorously - even violently - resisted.
  Together with these elements of conservatism in many of the do-
  main reforms, there were several new initiatives that suggest how
  seriously the Tempo crisis was viewed. Of course, a wholehearted
  swing to innovation was rare. Much more usual was a blend, some-
  times even a contradictory blend, of the novel with the traditional, but
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  136 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  nevertheless the new elements were unmistakable. There were, first,
  signs of a new approach to the chronic problems of domain finances,
  which, thanks to the Tempo crisis, had been moved from the category
  of irritatingly inconvenient to that of downright dangerous. At its
  most basic, this was revealed in a change of attitude, in which commer-
  cial development - under the proper auspices and for the proper pur-
  poses, of course - came to be encouraged. The pivotal influence of
  castle towns on the domain economy, for example, was to be recog-
  nized in many parts of Japan. At Fukuoka, it was judged important
  enough to justify an extraordinary volte-face. Elsewhere, the authori-
  ties were urging (and often compelling) their samurai to be frugal, but
  in Fukuoka, in an effort to develop the town center, they were encour-
  aged to patronize local theaters and wrestling matches and to buy
  lottery tickets. Similarly, at Kurume calls for frugality were perfunc-
  tory in the extreme and appeared as an afterthought at the very end of
  the domain reforms.
  The attitude of some domains toward the business community, too,
  seemed to be changing. On occasion this took an unusually peremptory
  form, in which domain officials, rather than wheedle loans from individ-
  ual mechants, were prepared to force money from them, either as
  "loans," or - in the case of Echizen, Kokura, and Funai, among
  others - as "gifts." Increasingly, though, and far more significantly, it
  took the form of cooperation, often symbolized by offers of samurai
  status to members of the business community in return for expert
  advice and assistance. Business expertise was at a premium in those
  domains already engaged in, or about to begin, enterprises of their own,
  like domain monopolies. Ever since the seventeenth century, a few
  daimyo had managed to monopolize certain key items produced within
  their domains, forbidding their sale to anyone but authorized buyers or
  at anything but the authorized price, kept artificially low. Not infre-
  quently, indeed, producers were paid in the domain's own currency,
  printed as needed and largely worthless in any other part of Japan. The
  produce was then sold at Osaka or Edo, and the profits brought back
  into the domain reserves of hard currency that it would otherwise not
  have had. Sendai rice, Awa indigo, Tottori wax, and paper from
  Tsuwano and Karatsu all earned substantial sums and helped cushion
  their domains from the general financial malaise. At Awa, indeed,
  where the indigo monopoly brought a profit of one million gold pieces
  in 1830, it was the major element in domain finances.
  Understandably, the older such monopolies, the more successful
  they were. Imposed later, on producers jealous of their profits and
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  DOMAIN REFORMS 
  137
  unaccustomed to interference, they often provoked resistance, most
  notably in the Choshu riots of 1831. The Tempo reform program in
  some domains in fact saw these monopolies relaxed in an attempt to
  pacify the fanners: Choshu, Usuki, and Funai all were obliged to do
  exactly that. Nevertheless, the prospect of controlling the domain's
  commercial produce was too strong for many daimyo to resist, and so
  the Tempo era produced a number of monopolies. Usually these were
  confined to products already well established - like cotton, wax, and
  seed oil - but not infrequently the daimyo were dazzled enough by the
  prospect to encourage experimentation with new products. At Mi to,
  for example, it was hoped to add some new enterprises to the paper,
  tobacco, and konnyaku that the domain already produced, and steps
  were taken to begin making pottery and lacquer and growing tea.
  Satsuma, too, while intensifying its sugar monopoly (to such an ex-
  tent, incidentally, that profit doubled during the Tempo era) also tried
  to introduce the production of silk, paper, indigo, saffron, sulfur, and
  medical herbs.
  There was also fresh activity as domains looked long and hard at their
  defenses. Few had reason to be pleased with what they saw: soldiers
  armed with the weapons - swords, pikes, muskets, decrepit cannon -
  of their seventeenth-century ancestors and with ideas on strategy and
  tactics to match. Clearly, some drastic changes had to be made. Some
  domains contented themselves with reintroducing maneuvers or, as
  Utsunomiya did in 1842, with reviving target practice after an interval
  of twenty-six years (during which it had been considered too expen-
  sive).34 Others, feeling more exposed, took stronger measures, stream-
  lining their chain of command, regrouping to give greater prominence
  to musketeer units, or even moving samurai out of the towns into
  garrisons along the coast and forming peasant militia units, as the
  Tempo critics had urged. Mito, where Aizawa Yasushi had been calling
  for just such measures, was one of the first domains to do so in the
  1830s. Some felt, with Takashima Shuhan and Sakuma Shdzan, that
  Japan needed new skills and new equipment to cope with the crisis, and
  this was particularly noticeable among the domains of the southwest.
  After its brush with the Morrison in Kagoshima Bay in 1837, Satsuma
  began to buy imported arms from Nagasaki dealers, to try making its
  own mortars, howitzers, and field guns, and to send men to be trained
  in Western gunnery at Takashima Shuhan's school. Fukuoka, Choshu,
  and Kumamoto were doing the same, and so was Saga, where the main
  34 Tokuda Kojun, ed., Shiryo Utsunomiya han shi (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo, 1971), p. 172.
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  138 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  thrust of domain reforms was toward self-defense. Saga began research
  into alternative artillery techniques in 1832 and, from 1835 onwards,
  produced a large number of high-quality homemade cannon.
  The diversity of the domains' responses to the Tempo crisis, then, is
  clear enough. There were, however, two other elements in these local
  reforms so common as to be almost universal. One was the extent to
  which the reform programs, despite all the reassuring overtones of the
  concept itself, aroused bitter disagreement, particularly when they
  meant abandoning long-established practice and when they involved
  innovation. Inevitably, given the atmosphere of general crisis, each
  domain had its skeptics, sometimes passive, sometimes not, and all
  needing to be persuaded or bullied into silence. Invariably the opera-
  tion demanded a high degree of daimyo support, so that in Choshu
  and Fukui, for example, their Tempo reforms could not begin until
  the daimyo had been replaced by one either more committed or more
  malleable. It was this factor that delayed the "Tempo" reforms of
  domains like Hiroshima and Tottori until the Tempo era had come to
  an end.3S Elsewhere, as in Saga, reform had to wait until the new
  daimyo had found his feet. In many cases, too, reinforcing the impres-
  sion of energy and unconventionality, the actual planning of the re-
  forms was entrusted to a new man, often of comparatively humble
  status, brought in as part of a larger administrative reorganization. For
  example, the key figure at Fukuoka was a physician, at Mito a scholar,
  at Tawara a painter, at Nakatsu and Satsuma tea ceremony atten-
  dants - even, at Tosa, a convert to Shingaku. To add to the ferment,
  technocrats like Ohara Yugaku and Ninomiya Sontoku could be
  brought in from outside. Understandably, factions would form, and
  feelings would run high. Reformers naturally saw themselves as the
  "men of talent" known to appear whenever a reform was begun; they
  customarily considered their opponents thoughtless at best or, at
  worst, stupid and corrupt. To their critics, on the other hand, the self-
  styled reformers, if radical, seemed power drunk and doctrinaire, or,
  if conservative, sycophantic and self-seeking. Politics was a super-
  heated business during the Tempo crisis, as many, given time to
  ponder their mistakes in jail cells, came to understand. Not even the
  daimyo always escaped unscathed, and Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito was
  one who came perilously close to being repudiated by a domain unable
  to countenance either his personality or his politics.
  The other common element in these local reforms was this. The
  35 Yamanaka Hisao, "Bakumatsu hansei kaikaku no hikaku hanseishiteki kenkyu," Chihoshi
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  139
  Tempo crisis had shown the domains some unpalatable truths: their
  tenuous control over the common people, their bankruptcy, their vul-
  nerability to outside attack. It had also made them aware that if they
  were ever to cope with this new and dangerous situation, it would have
  to be by their own efforts. Nobody else could help them, certainly not
  the bakufu, which had far greater problems of its own. The domains
  would have to husband their own resources, make their own money,
  and take care of their own defenses. No doubt it was a salutary lesson;
  rather, it might have been, had Japan some other form of government.
  As it was, it had the gravest consequences for the bakuhan taisei, that
  system of decentralized feudalism in which the Tokugawa bakufu and
  the daimyo domains joined to govern the country. The Tempo crisis
  forced domains onto their own resources as never before and obliged
  them to turn their attention inwards, to themselves and their own
  needs. The result was a surge of sauve quipeut domain nationalism. It
  surfaced during the famine, in the refusal of some domains to let food
  leave their borders, no matter how desperate were conditions else-
  where. # It surfaced as the domains began to use their monopolies to
  drive up prices and profits, competing with one another and with the
  bakufu, and, in the process, helping destroy the orderly commercial
  habits of two hundred years." It surfaced, too, in an arms race, begun
  during the Tempo era, in which domains scrambled pell-mell for new
  weapons and new techniques, shattering the fragile balance of power
  that had kept Japan at peace since 1615. This attitude, potentially
  more damaging than the crisis that produced it, outlived both the
  Tempo era and the bakuhan taisei itself.
  BAKUFU REFORMS
  Neither the Tempo crisis nor the domains' reactions to it were to go
  unmarked in Edo. The shogun, who lived there, and his adminis-
  tration, which was based there, faced all the common provincial
  problems - famine, civil disorder, inadequate defenses, and an army
  undermanned, underpaid, and ill equipped. In this respect the sho-
  gun was a daimyo like any other.
  But there was one crucial difference: The shogun administered,
  through his government, a far greater area than any other daimyo -
  almost six times as much as the largest provincial domain - and to that
  extent his responsibilities, in terms of taxes to collect, mouths to feed,
  36 Tottori hem shi, vol. 6, pp. 610,613.
  37 Osaka shisanjikai, ed., Osaka-shishi (Osaka: Seibundo, 1965), vol. 5, pp. 640ff.
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  I4O 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  area to police, and shores to protect, were that much more onerous.
  The resources of the shogun's domain were also much more difficult
  to coordinate - administratively, financially, and militarily - for
  where most daimyo domains were well-defined geographical units,
  Tokugawa land was scattered throughout forty-seven of Japan's sixty-
  eight provinces. Tax loss, therefore, and famine relief (whether in the
  form of reduced taxes in the villages or free gruel in the cities) bit
  heavily into bakufu finances, as depleted in 1836 as they had been for
  over a hundred years.*8 Civil unrest, too, had hit hardest at areas
  under bakufu control, in Gunnai in 1836; Osaka, Edo, and Kashi-
  wazaki in 1837; and Sadoin 1838.
  The crisis in foreign affairs also was uniquely the shogun's concern.
  His very title, supreme commander of the pacification of barbarians
  {sei-i tai shdgun), made it impossible for that particular responsibility
  to go to anyone else. The port of Nagasaki, Tokugawa Japan's solitary
  link with the world outside, was part of his domain, and all decisions
  on national diplomacy were taken within the bakufu, his own personal
  administration. So, too, were those decisions concerning the deploy-
  ment and coordination of all samurai, whether Tokugawa vassals or
  rear vassals. Therefore, as the foreign nations closed in during the
  1830s and the prospect of invoking powers unused for two hundred
  years became imminent, so did the burden of this responsibility grow
  heavier.
  The shogun's government, then, was caught up in the Tempo crisis
  to a far greater extent than was any single daimyo domain. Yet para-
  doxically, its reaction to that crisis seemed at first to lack a certain
  urgency. This is not to say that it remained passive in the face of mass
  starvation, civil disturbance, depleted resources, foreign penetration,
  and inadequate protection. No government could. The bakufu re-
  acted, but precisely as it had always done, by reducing taxes in the
  famine areas, securing food supplies for its cities, distributing rations
  to its needy, quelling its riots, debasing its currency, and despatching
  fact-finding missions to its coastal fortifications. These were the tried
  and true responses to familiar emergencies, but in a situation that
  seemed to call for an entirely new approach, they were undeniably
  anachronistic. Elsewhere, as we have seen, in the daimyo domains, the
  crisis of the 1830s inspired a number of new initiatives, but whereas
  some domains defied tradition by entering the market place, and oth-
  38 Furushima Toshio, "Bakufu zaisei shunyu no koko to nomin shudatsu no kakki," in
  Furushima Toshio, ed., Nihon keizaishi taikei (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1973),
  vol. 4, pp. 28-31.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  141
  ers by arming their peasants, the Tokugawa bakufu seemed to cling
  tenaciously to the status quo. Only in the middle of 1841, when three-
  quarters of the Tempo era had already passed, did the bakufu begin a
  reform program of its own.
  On the face of it, the delay seems inexplicable. There is no reason to
  imagine, for example, that bakufu officials were ignorant of the prob-
  lems confronting them. Individual ministers could hardly be unaware
  of popular unrest, and they were by no means insensitive to develop-
  ments overseas. Nor, for that matter, could they turn a blind eye to
  the sorry state of bakufu finances, now so anemic that only regular
  transfusions from currency debasement could provide relief. In any
  case, the Tempo critics, from Oshio Heihachiro to Tokugawa Nariaki,
  had been all too ready to alert the government to its shortcomings.
  In fact, many bakufu officials had recognized them and had already
  given thought to their solution. But before anything could be done,
  they had to wait for an opportunity, and in 1841 that opportunity
  came. As so often, it came with a change in government. Where
  reform in domains like Choshu and Fukui had waited for the accession
  of a new ruler, in the bakufu it followed the death of an old one - the
  extraordinary Tokugawa Ienari, the eleventh shogun, who had long
  dominated the Tokugawa political world. No other head of the Toku-
  gawa house had reigned for anything like his total of fifty years. None
  of them had lived nearly as long, either, for Ienari was in his seventy-
  ninth year when he died. Nor, apparently, did any live quite so fully;
  that is, at least, if numbers of concubines (estimated at forty) and
  children (fifty-five) indicate a full life.39 At a tender age, Tokugawa
  Ienari had come under the influence of Matsudaira Sadanobu, but he
  had resisted all his sanctimonious mentor's attempts to mold his char-
  acter. Instead, for the next fifty years Ienari, with the help of members
  of his personal household, had done much as he wished. Even after his
  retirement in 1837, his political grip did not slacken, but at the begin-
  ning of 1841 Ienari fell seriously ill with severe abdominal cramps, and
  within three weeks, despite prayers offered at Nikko and Zojoji, he
  died, leaving behind him a number of grieving concubines and a
  government suddenly reinvested with authority and initiative. For a
  time, there was little outward sign of change. As at all shogunal
  deaths, music was forbidden within the palace; officials had their
  heads shaved; and an obligatory period of mourning was announced.
  But then, within three months, came the first portents of something
  39 Kitajima, Bakuhansei no kumon, p. 295.
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  142 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  new. Three of Ienari's favorite officials, popularly known as the "three
  sycophants," were suddenly dismissed. Kawaji Toshiakira, writing in
  his journal-*0 that "although I was not particularly friendly with these
  men, I am still astonished," reflected the general surprise and unease.
  Over the next few weeks scores of officials were dismissed or resigned
  under various pretexts, and all were replaced by fresh appointees.
  There was a sudden convulsion, too, at the very highest official level.
  Of five senior ministers holding office at the beginning of 1841, only
  two remained by the end of the year. Their three colleagues had
  resigned, pleading ill health. This was a fairly common, and occasion-
  ally legitimate excuse, and in this instance one of those in question
  proved his good faith by dying a week later. The other two, however,
  did not, for one, Ii Naoaki lived until 1850, and the other, Ota
  Suketomo, was hale enough to find his way back to office some seven-
  teen years later, apparently little the worse for wear.
  Contemporaries, noting the haste of these changes ("since Ienari's
  death," observed one,*1 "it is as if everyone's eyebrows had been set
  alight")5 had little difficulty in deciphering their meaning. This was a
  purge, and on such a scale as to foreshadow some correspondingly
  dramatic change in policy. It soon came. On 5/15/1841, just two days
  after Ii Naoaki's departure, the government made a curiously unem-
  phatic announcement. It urged its officials to adhere to traditional
  principles and, in particular, "not to deviate from the policies of the
  Kyoho and Kansei eras."1*2 Only the reference to those two previous
  reform periods - the one under the eighth shogun, Tokugawa
  Yoshimune, early in the eighteenth century, the other more than fifty
  years later - under Matsudaira Sadanobu - intimated the onset of yet
  another paroxysm of reform. But there was no hint that this time the
  bakufu would be led into waters far deeper than earlier, more conven-
  tional, reforms had ever contemplated.
  This, however, lay more than a year away. As the bakufu began its
  Tempo reforms in the summer of 1841, despite the magnitude and
  urgency of its problems, it seemed anxious first of all to address itself
  to the perennial and abiding concerns of all Confucian states. In this
  40 Kawaji Toshiakira, Shimane no susami (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1973), p. 327.
  41 Quoted in Kitajima, Mizuno Tadakuni, p. 302.
  42 The following account of the bakufu's Tempo reforms derives largely, although by no means
  exclusively, from the following: Kuroita Katsumi, ed., Zoku Tokugawa jikki (Tokyo:
  Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1966), vol. 49; Naito Chiso, Tokugawa jugodaishi (Tokyo: Shin
  jimbutsu oraisha, 1969), vol. 6; Hoseishi gakkai, eds., Tokugawa kinreiko, 11 vols. (Tokyo:
  Sobunsha, 1958-61); Kitajima, Mizuno Tadakuni; Okamoto, "Tempo kaikaku"; Tsuda
  Hideo, "Tempo kaikaku no keizaishiteki igi," in Furusbima Toshio, ed., Nikon keizaishi
  taikei (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1965), vol. 4.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  143
  respect, much of the legislation that now issued from the Tokugawa
  bureaucracy might just as well have been written fifty or a hundred
  years earlier. Indeed some of it was, judging from the insistent refer-
  ences to, and, in many cases, direct repetition of, laws handed down in
  the Kyoho and Kansei eras.
  The bakufu appeared, for example, most concerned with the moral
  health of those over whom it ruled. Urban life held many tempta-
  tions - drink, gambling, prostitution, pornography, and frivolity of
  all kinds - and these were nowhere more evident than in Edo, the
  nation's largest city and the center of the bakufu's domain. No reform-
  ing government could ignore them, and one of the strongest strands in
  the Tempo reform program, and also the earliest to develop, was its
  effort - in a manner that Tokugawa Yoshimune and Matsudaira Sada-
  nobu would have recognized and applauded - to control them. "If we
  use this opportunity for reform and cleansing," wrote Mizuno Tada-
  kuni, the chief minister, "and restore dignity to our way of life, . . .
  we will succeed in setting things to rights."«
  Prostitution was a case in point. The Tokugawa bakufu had long
  since recognized this unruly industry as inevitable and, to minimize its
  impact on society, had segregated it, first in the Yoshiwara and then
  later in the Shin-Yoshiwara, on the northeastern fringe of the city,
  under the control of a group of officially recognized whoremasters. As
  with so much of Tokugawa Japan, however, by the Tempo era this
  tidy system had broken down. Edo's urban sprawl to the west and the
  south had gradually placed the official brothel quarter beyond the
  walking capacity of all but the most amorous. It was no more than
  natural, therefore, that people should seek consolation nearer home
  and that the forces of free enterprise, as irrepressible in this field as in
  any other, should mobilize to provide it. Consequently the Tempo
  government had to deal with irregular and unlicensed prostitution,
  scattered throughout the city in teahouses and restaurants where wait-
  resses were known to behave "in a lewd fashion." These were ordered
  to close in 1842, and any premises used for such purposes declared
  liable to confiscation. It also tried to restrict other avenues by which
  women could make themselves available, denying them access to a
  number of professions, from itinerant hairdresser, music teacher, ar-
  chery range attendant, and physician to cabaret artist (in which profes-
  sion women were known to get up on stage "quite shamelessly, and
  sing most unseemly . . . Gidayu ballads" to customers not conspic-
  43 Tokugawa jugodaishi, vol. 6, pp. 2869-70.
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  144 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  uous for their musical interests).44 Mixed bathing, too, was outlawed
  in an effort to bring cleanliness and godliness back together.
  Equally, there were other perils for the city dweller, and the
  bakufu, as it had always done, warned against them. Gambling was
  prohibited yet again, particularly among the samurai, as were lotter-
  ies. So, too, was the practice of decorative tatooing, an important
  element in the gambling life-style. The publishing industry also in-
  vited bakufu intervention. Certain publications - the novelettes
  known as ninjobon, for example, believed to have "a bad effect on
  morals," or erotica (even worse), or works on unorthodox religion, or
  ephemeral works on contemporary mores - were banned, and others
  were required to obtain prior approval and to carry the names of both
  author and publisher. Prints of a kind depicting either actors or prosti-
  tutes, too, were prohibited. Nor did the bakufu overlook the entertain-
  ment industry, particularly the large number of music halls, often
  unlicensed, in which diversions of an emphatically unimproving kind
  were offered. These were restricted in number, and their programs
  were to be confined to inspiring talks on religious and historical sub-
  jects. Nor did the legitimate theater (in itself a concept that Tokugawa
  Japan would not have recognized) escape attention. In 1842 appeared
  a nationwide instruction that itinerant actors, known for "ruining
  morals wherever they go," were to be reported to the authorities,
  while six months earlier the major Edo theaters had been forcibly
  removed from the downtown area. Their new home was to be at
  Asakusa, near the licensed quarter, where the two great hazards associ-
  ated with them - fires and the contamination of decent folk - would
  be of less consequence.
  Together with its attack on frivolity and immorality, the bakufu
  continued its constant war on other aspects of indecorum and in par-
  ticular on an ever-present source of unease: the fact that people were
  living and spending in a manner inappropriate to their station. The
  traditional status system had long since been reduced to tatters, but it
  nevertheless remained one of the major principles informing legisla-
  tive and administrative practice, and these reforms showed it. There
  was a torrent of sumptuary instructions: some of a general kind, some
  directed specifically at samurai extravagance, and others aimed at the
  farmers, among whom the least trace of self-indulgence seemed par-
  ticularly seditious. Less than a week after declaring its commitment to
  reform, the bakufu warned its local officials to keep farmers from
  44 Saito Gesshin, Buko nempyo (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1968), vol. 2, p. 102.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  I45
  spending too much on food, clothing, or festivities of any sort, commu-
  nal and private. From time to time, as it condemned extravagance in
  general, the government also drew attention to more specific areas -
  lavish decorations at the Tanabata festival, for example, elaborate hats
  and kites, costly children's toys, certain brands of fireworks, sumptu-
  ous clothing, gourmet specialties, and expensive houses and garden
  furnishings (including lanterns, basins, and trees). Linked with this,
  too, was the bakufu's insistence that people not only spend according
  to their station but that they also behave in a suitable manner - so, for
  example, it was judged inappropriate that ordinary townspeople
  should study the martial arts or wear long swords (as these were the
  prerogative of the samurai) or that farmers should leave their produc-
  tive (and taxable) calling to become factory workers, a position that,
  because it was regarded as neither worthy nor productive, was not
  taxed.
  None of this was particularly novel. The bakufu had always hoped
  to achieve social stability and decorum by telling its subjects, in pains-
  taking detail, just what they should and should not do. This was
  particularly marked during periods of self-conscious reform, but it
  was no less so in more normal times as well. The 1830s, for example,
  had seen a steady flow of just this kind of instruction. What does
  identify 1841 as the beginning of a bakufu reform period is, first, the
  mood of urgency, in which the steady flow of the previous decade
  welled into a flood and, second, a willingness, rather unusual in
  bakufu history, to make examples of those conducting themselves in
  an unseemly fashion. There were instances of mass arrest - thirty-six
  apprehended in connection with female cabaret performances in 1841,
  for example, and thirty extravagantly garbed girls from Asakusa jailed
  for three days the following year. In others, the bakufu deliberately
  fixed on celebrities, in the process making examples of Kuniyoshi and
  Tamenaga Shunsui, both of whom were put in manacles, the latter for
  his "obscene novelettes" and the former for caricaturing the shogun
  and his chief minister. Ryutei Tanehiko, too, author of the best-selling
  Inaka Genji, received a reprimand, and the matinee idol Ichikawa
  Ebizo (later the seventh Danjuro) was exiled for a life-style rather
  imperfectly attuned to economy and frugality.
  This all was the familiar stuff of Tokugawa reforms, a series of
  minutely detailed exhortations aimed at teaching people how to be-
  have and thereby restoring the moral fabric of the nation to that
  pristine condition that had obtained before two hundred years of peace
  and self-indulgence had taken their toll. The Kyoho and Kansei re-
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  146 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  forms had been aimed at precisely the same sorts of target. In other
  areas, however, the bakufu's Tempo reforms were rather more innova-
  tive, rather less directed at recreating the conditions of some legendary
  golden age, and rather more concerned with reaching an accommoda-
  tion, however painful, with changing circumstances.
  Traces of this new attitude can be seen in the question of foreign
  affairs. Admittedly, as far as defense issues were concerned, 1841
  marked no perceptible change in bakufu policy, for any subsequent
  foreign threat was handled precisely as before, that is, with a brief,
  nervous flurry of inquiries into defense capacity and contingency plans
  more or less based on them, but little practical result. On the general
  issue of foreign affairs, however, and in particular on the question of
  Tokugawa Japan's formidable xenophobia, the Tempo reforms do
  represent a slight, but significant, change of direction. During the
  1830s the government had seemed quite adamant, ushering in the
  decade by executing a man for giving a map of Japan to a foreigner
  and, at the other end, arresting a number of amateurs of European
  studies, Watanabe Kazan and Takano Choei among them. Yet in
  1841, just a month before the Tempo reforms were announced, the
  bakufu seemed suddenly to mellow. Takashima Shuhan, whose memo-
  rial had urged the government to adopt Western military technology,
  was granted an audience and then, a few days later, was permitted to
  mount a demonstration at Tokumarugahara, with twenty mortars, a
  howitzer, three field guns, and eighty-five men.« The bakufu showed
  its approval by rewarding him with two hundred pieces of silver,
  buying two of his best guns, and arranging for him to pass on his skills
  to some bakufu officials, one of whom, Egawa Hidetatsu, was the
  following year assigned the task of training one hundred musketeers
  along European lines.
  This in itself was a change of heart, but more was to follow. In 1842,
  after reports that Britain had lost patience with Japan's policy of seclu-
  sion, die bakufu issued the following directive:
  In 1825 it was ordered that foreign vessels should be driven away without
  hesitation. However, as befits the current comprehensive reforms, in which
  we are recreating die policies of the Kyoho and Kansei eras, the shogun has
  graciously intimated his wish that his mercy be made manifest. Therefore, in
  the event that foreigners, through storm-damage or shipwreck, come seeking
  food, fuel, or water, the shogun does not consider it a fitting response to other
  nations that diey should be driven away indiscriminately without due knowl-
  edge of the circumstances.*6
  45 Arima, Takashima Shuhan, pp. 146-51. 
  46 Tokugawa kinreiko, vol. 6, document 4085.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  147
  Hereafter, foreign ships were to be supplied with whatever they
  needed (before being sent away, naturally), a development that must
  have afforded some satisfaction to those who, like Takano Choei (now
  in jail at Demmacho), had been so critical over the Morrison incident.
  Such critics would have been equally pleased when, the following
  year, the bakufu changed its attitude to the repatriation of Japanese
  castaways, who could now be brought back in Dutch or Chinese
  vessels - an obvious response to the accusations of inhumanity circu-
  lating after the Morrison had been driven away. Obviously, too, the
  bakufu now felt that the Dutch and Chinese ghettos in Nagasaki had
  their uses, for in the same year questionnaires were issued to these two
  foreign communities asking for whatever information they could give
  on the size, strength, and disposition of British forces.
  There were to be some significant changes of direction, too, in the
  bakufu's conduct of its economic affairs, although they took rather
  longer to appear. No government of the Tokugawa period could turn
  its back on tradition altogether, particularly not one assuming the
  dignified mantle of reform, and so to a large extent at first the Tempo
  government simply perpetuated the conventional policies. There were
  the usual fitful attempts, some of them obsessively minute, to reduce
  costs, including warnings to works officials and kitchen staff to watch
  their expenses, and requests to everyone to avoid unnecessary wear
  and tear on the Edo Castle tatami. There was also the customary
  inquiry into the reasons for the decline in bakufu income, followed up
  with a number of purposeful, if conventional, initiatives. It was de-
  cided, for example, that the tenryd - the shogun's own land - required
  more efficient administration. Such conclusions were a part of every
  reform and, in this case, given the gradual decline in tax revenues
  since the mid-eighteenth century, were hardly unreasonable. With the
  assistance of Ninomiya Sontoku, the agricultural consultant from
  Odawara, the bakufu elected first to reform its local administrators -
  to whose complacency, inefficiency, and plain dishonesty the decline
  in tax receipts was attributed - and during 1842 more than half of
  these officials in eastern Japan (including all of those in the Kanto)
  were transferred or dismissed. Later that year twelve of them were
  expressly ordered away from their comfortable Edo residences and
  back to their districts, with warnings that land tax revenues would
  have to be restored to their former level.
  There was, too, the time-honored compulsion to bring more land
  under cultivation, to which end the bakufu had been canvasing local
  officials ever since the beginning of the reforms, looking for pockets of
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  148 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  wasteland that might be cleared or drained. In fact, as they all knew, the
  choicest of opportunities lay close at hand: Along the lower reaches of
  the Tone River, forty miles northeast of Edo, ten thousand acres of
  potentially rich rice-growing land lay waiting to be reclaimed. The
  difficulty was that it also lay, most inconveniently, under three feet of
  water. This was the Imbanuma, the great swamp that, could it be
  drained, was believed capable of producing another 100,000 koku of rice
  each year - as much as the average daimyo domain. The prospect was
  an alluring one. Tokugawa Yoshimune, the eighth shogun, had been
  tempted to do something about it in 1724, and Tanuma Okitsugu, sixty
  years later, had also tried his hand. Both had failed, but in 1843, noth-
  ing daunted, the bakufu undertook its third and last attempt.
  There were other initiatives equally conventional. For example, it
  had not escaped notice that falling revenues might be due as much to
  the decline in the number of taxpayers as to idle and corrupt officials.
  Large numbers of fanners had been selling their land and taking up
  employment as either agricultural laborers or workers in rural indus-
  tries of one sort or another, thereby removing themselves from the tax
  register. Others were deserting their farms altogether and moving into
  provincial towns or, worse still, into Edo itself, where, as the govern-
  ment noted in 1842, "many vagrants and vagabonds are roaming the
  city, and not a few of them are engaged in questionable activities."47
  Rural depopulation, although common throughout much of Japan at
  this period, was especially severe in the area around Edo, and the
  bakufu, which viewed every homeless immigrant as a drain on city
  resources, a potential criminal, and an absconding taxpayer, was not
  anxious to encourage it. To halt and, if possible, reverse this drift
  away from productive agriculture was therefore a matter of some ur-
  gency. The bakufu tried the usual remedies, many of them from the
  Kansei era - prohibiting employment in rural manufacturing indus-
  try, discouraging mendicant religious sects, and ultimately driving, or
  tempting, people back to their native villages.
  Naturally, the bakufu's economic responsibilities did not end there.
  It was equally committed to protecting those in charge from exploita-
  tion, whether stemming from their own folly (controllable, the govern-
  ment hoped, by sumptuary legislation) or the cupidity and duplicity of
  others. Here, too, on the whole, the Tempo administration trod a well-
  worn path. Confronted, for example, by an increasingly erratic market
  in which during the 1830s, the price of rice, despite violent fluctuations,
  47 Tokugawa jugodaiski, vol. 6, p. 2926.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  149
  had risen threefold, and the prices of other commodities, in their turn,
  were behaving more and more unpredictably, the bakufu ultimately did
  what its predecessors had always done - it blamed the business commu-
  nity. The solution, it was believed, lay in more intensive policing of the
  commercial world, including lowering the prices of some commodities
  and freezing those of others - foodstuffs, of course, but also bathhouse
  fees, fuel, and even horses (not to be sold for more than thirty gold
  pieces, and only then if they were of top quality). Similarly, it was
  forbidden to speculate in rice futures or to corner the market, and limits
  were imposed on interest rates, pawnbroking charges, the gold-silver
  exchange rate, and the level of shop rents. To make sure that these were
  observed, special squads of inspectors were to patrol the streets and
  shops of Edo and Osaka.
  None of this activity was particularly new, deriving to a large extent
  from standard bakufu policy both in its tone (which often simply
  echoed that of the Kansei era) and its general thrust, which was to-
  ward making the system work as its founders had intended. Yet there
  were some distinct changes of emphasis. Currency debasement, for
  example, anathema to earlier reformers, had now become far too im-
  portant to be jettisoned altogether; indeed, during the 1830s it had
  provided the bakufu with a third of its revenue. So although no new
  mintings were proposed during the period of the Tempo reforms,
  there was never any suggestion of currency reform along Kyoho or
  Kansei lines. There had been a similar modification too in the way that
  the bakufu had come to regard the business community. It was still
  seen as a nuisance, but no longer quite so unmitigated as before, as the
  bakufu, like some daimyo, had discovered it to be a source of revenue.
  Despite the unorthodoxy of such a practice, therefore, it was decided
  in 1843 that "to assist in Bakufu reforms," thirty-seven businessmen
  from Osaka, and several more from towns adjacent to it, would be
  obliged to "contribute" well over a million gold pieces to the treasury.
  Equally unorthodox, to help its samurai (acknowledged to be, as
  usual, "in difficulties, having borrowed money over many genera-
  tions") the government refrained from a general repudiation of samurai
  debts. The Kansei reformers had taken this way out, with no lasting
  results, other than one that was neither anticipated nor welcomed:
  severe financial embarrassment for the fudasashi, the rice brokers. The
  entire samurai stipend system depended on the services of these men,
  and the government knew it, and so this time it largely left them alone
  and, instead, itself entered the moneylending business. From an office
  at Saruya-cho, samurai were to be able to borrow, at 7 percent interest
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  150 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  (less than half the normal fudasashi rate) and could consider their debts
  discharged after twenty-five years of interest payments.
  Undoubtedly, however, the most abrupt departures from tradi-
  tional economic practice were in the field of price control. In the past,
  wherever possible, the bakufu had tried to regulate commercial activi-
  ties through a system in which craft guilds, business associations, and
  the professions (including, as we have seen, the oldest) were guaran-
  teed government protection in return for an annual fee. The fee itself
  was never particularly great, but that had never been too important:
  The value of the system was that it provided an avenue for government
  regulation. By the Tempo era, however, the emergence of indepen-
  dent, and more or less surreptitious, trade networks in the provinces
  had reduced the effectiveness of such semiofficial monopolies, where-
  as the current unease about prices made even a reforming government
  ready to question two hundred years of tradition.
  In 1841, therefore, the bakufu was responsive to a complaint from
  Tokugawa Nariaki, by then the nation's chief complainer, attacking
  one of the most influential of these monopoly associations, the tokumi-
  donya, a syndicate shipping such commodities as cloth, medicines,
  paper, and foodstuffs from Osaka, the commercial capital, to Edo, the
  consumer capital. As was his habit, Nariaki put his case in the most
  disinterested terms: "Would there not be some effect on rising
  prices," he suggested, "if they [the tonya] were totally abolished and
  all goods could be transported to Edo from anywhere in the land and
  sold freely?"1*8 It was quite disingenuous, of course, for his hostility
  was not toward monopolies in general but only toward those that stood
  in the way of his own. Whether or not the bakufu was aware of this, it
  fell in with his suggestion, accusing the tonya of unspecified dishon-
  esty and stripping them of their privileges. "There are to be no more
  associations calling themselves tonya, nakama, or kumiai," read the
  announcement, "and ordinary people may therefore trade freely in any
  of those goods shipped in the past, or indeed in any merchandise from
  anywhere in the land." The precise details were spelled out the follow-
  ing year in two notices, the second of which, observing in its preamble
  that "prices have increased of late, and the people are much distressed
  thereby" and predicting in its final sentence that goods would become
  cheaper, specifically linked the dissolution with the government's
  price policies.
  The need to stabilize prices also lay behind another related, and no
  48 Mito-han shiryo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1970), app. vol. I, p. 140.
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  151
  less controversial, measure. During his twenty months as Osaka magis-
  trate, a senior government official called Abe Masakura had investi-
  gated the whole subject of commodity prices and emerged with an
  answer. Prices were unstable, he said, because Osaka, once the distri-
  bution center for every kind of commercial product, was so no longer.
  Goods were going elsewhere, and Abe isolated two kinds of culprit.
  The first was the independent rural entrepreneur, thousands of whom
  were buying and selling, manufacturing and processing, with no refer-
  ence to the traditional Osaka-based market system. The second was
  the daimyo, alert now as never before to the profits to be won from
  commerce, and doing much the same sort of thing. "The commercial
  produce hitherto sent to Osaka wholesalers by farmers and mer-
  chants," went Abe's report, "has of recent years been bought up by
  daimyo . . . [who have also] been buying up produce from other do-
  mains, claiming it to be from their own, and probably in not a few
  cases sending it off to wherever they please; . . . truly what they are
  trying to do is unbecoming to warriors."49
  Back in Edo, the government had already precluded the first of
  these implicit recommendations. Whereas Abe wanted the govern-
  ment-sponsored monopoly system" to be intensified, the bakufu, acting
  before his report was finished, abolished it. On the other hand, the
  second made an impression. At the end of 1842, a year after disman-
  tling the merchant monopolies, the government turned on those oper-
  ated by the daimyo. "Of late," its order read, echoing Abe's findings,
  daimyo of Kinai, Chugoku, Saigoku, and Shikoku have been, by various
  methods, buying up the products not only of their own domains, but of other
  domains also; . . . sending them to their warehouses, and then selling them
  when the market price is high. . . . Consequently they are using their author-
  ity as daimyo to cause much mischief to commerce. . . . This is most irregu-
  lar, particularly bearing in mind our frequent instructions to reduce prices.
  Any daimyo continuing his monopolies was therefore to be reported
  and, presumably, made to regret it.5°
  It is perhaps not immediately apparent just how unusual this instruc-
  tion was. No doubt any government as committed to price controls as
  this one might have been expected to turn its attention sooner or later
  to domain monopolies. For that matter, few Tokugawa governments
  derived any joy from the sight of samurai buying and selling, particu-
  larly not during periods of reform, when all aspects of commerce
  49 Quoted in Harold Bolitho, Treasures Among Men (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
  1974), p. 26. 
  50 Tokugawa jugodaishi, vol. 6, p. 2924.
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  152 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  tended to come under censorious scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the con-
  text of the Tempo era, this particular prohibition was quite extraordi-
  nary. Monopolies were vitally important to the financial health, and
  therefore the security, of many domains; to others, they represented a
  hope - perhaps the only hope - for a stable future. The bakufu, itself
  administered by daimyo, can hardly have been ignorant of this. The
  prohibition of domain monopolies, therefore, carried implications far
  beyond any immediate issue of price controls. It implied, first, a
  certain disregard for regional needs and aspirations. More impor-
  tantly, however, it implied a certain reappraisal of the relationship
  between the bakufu and the daimyo domains.
  In 1642 there would have been nothing untoward about such inter-
  ference in domain affairs, but in 1842, after two hundred years of
  peaceful coexistence, the daimyo could have been pardoned for believ-
  ing that a strong central government was a thing of the past. Just a
  year earlier, in fact, the bakufu had been obliged to admit as much,
  publicly and humiliatingly: It had ordered three daimyo to exchange
  their domains and then suddenly retracted the order in the face of
  strong protests from daimyo all over Japan. "This was the first time
  such a thing had happened," noted the compiler of the Tokugawa
  jugodaishi, "and from it one can see that bakufu authority was no
  longer what it had once been."
  Nonetheless, expected or not, anachronistic or not, by forbidding
  access to commercial profit, the bakufu had reasserted its right to
  control the daimyo domains. During the next six months, from late
  1842 to mid-1843, it was to do much more, challenging domain inde-
  pendence in one measure after another as it had not been challenged
  for generations. Not only monopolies but also domain currency, the
  very token of economic independence, was soon to be threatened.
  Before the year was out, money changers had been instructed not to
  handle any copper cash minted in the domains, and an investigation
  had been ordered into hansatsu, the local paper currency used so effec-
  tively in underpinning domain monopolies.
  The onslaught assumed a slightly different form when in the spring
  of 1843, Ieyoshi, the twelfth Tokugawa shogun, left his castle for a
  period of eight days to worship at the tombs of his great predecessors:
  Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had founded the dynasty, and Tokugawa
  Iemitsu, who had consolidated it. This official progress to Nikko,
  ninety miles away, may seem to have been no more than filial piety of
  the most praiseworthy sort. Its implications, however, were very differ-
  ent. First, it placed heavy demands on a number of daimyo. Three of
  them, at Iwatsuki, Koga, and Utsunomiya, were obliged to house the
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  BAKUFU REFORMS 
  153
  shogun and his retinue, both on the way to Nikko and on the way
  back. The Utsunomiya domain records, which speak of "indescribable
  turmoil and confusion," suggest that this was no easy matter.5' Other
  daimyo had to provide the shogun with an escort, amounting to some
  150,000 men, and still others were given ceremonial duties, some
  guarding Edo Castle in the shogun's absence, or manning the Kanto's
  key strategic points - Usui Pass, Uraga, the Oi River, and Hakone
  (where the daimyo of Sendai sent six thousand men). Because they
  cost money that none could afford, such movements provided a head-
  ache for those domains directly involved and a matter of concern for
  others that, if not called on this time, might well be so in the future.
  Beyond the immediate financial problem, however, loomed something
  less tangible but, in its way, far more ominous. The shogunal progress
  to Nikko had once been an important, if intermittent, part of Toku-
  gawa ceremonial life. Whether in its ostensible objective - an act of
  homage to the architects of Tokugawa supremacy - or in tKe manner
  in which large numbers of men from the daimyo domains were placed
  at the shogun's disposal, it was a symbolic celebration of Tokugawa
  rule and an affirmation of Tokugawa authority. That this costly and
  wasteful ritual should be revived now, after a lapse of nearly seventy
  years, by a government otherwise dedicated to economizing and frugal-
  ity, was yet another tribute to the severity of the Tempo crisis and the
  extent to which it had goaded the bakufu into action.
  By the middle of that year, the pattern was clear. Within the space
  of fourteen days, the bakufu reformers gave warning of their inten-
  tion to restore not only conventional morality and economic stability
  but also the old early-seventeenth-century relationship between the
  Tokugawa shogun and his daimyo, characterized by unquestioned
  authority, on the one hand, and unquestioning obedience, on the
  other. One indication was the plan to drain the Imbanuma, for this
  project, designed to increase the shogun's own productive land, was
  to be carried out at the expense of five daimyo, who together were to
  share the cost of more than 200,000 gold pieces. It had been sixty
  years since daimyo had been forced to bear so heavy a burden for
  Tokugawa benefit.
  Nor was that all. The Imbanuma project was announced in the
  middle of the most ambitious rearrangement of daimyo land for more
  than two hundred years. On the first day of the sixth month of 1843, a
  number of daimyo and hatamoto had received an unusual notice. The
  details differed, but the wording was roughly the same in each case:
  51 Tokuda, Shiryo Utsunomiya turn shi, p. 177.
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  154 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  A measure has now been announced by which, for administrative purposes,
  all land adjacent to Edo Castle is to become bakufu land. Therefore you are
  ordered to surrender land producing at least X koku from your fief in Y
  County, Z Province. In due course you will be given land in exchange. . . .s2
  In short, the bakufu was resuming land originally given to daimyo in
  fief. This first round of reappropriations affected land producing some
  15,000 koku, but the next ten days were to see more, all in the vicinity
  of Edo. On the eleventh day, the scene shifted briefly to the west
  coast, with the appropriation of 600 koku of land from the Nagaoka
  domain - a relatively small area but a most important one, as it was
  the site of Niigata, the largest of the Japan Sea ports. Then, on the
  fifteenth day, came a further series of announcements, this time ad-
  dressed to sixteen daimyo with land near Osaka Castle, requiring them
  to surrender a total of 100,000 koku.
  In strategic terms, these measures, known collectively as agechi rei,
  were no more than reasonable. Obviously, if the nation were to face a
  foreign threat, then the land surrounding its two greatest fortresses
  should be under unified control, rather than, as was the case at Osaka,
  controlled by 165 different authorities. A similar case could have been
  made for joining Niigata to the other major ports - Osaka, Edo,
  Nagasaki, and Hakodate - under Tokugawa supervision. Nonethe-
  less, as with the prohibition of domain monopolies, the agechi rex were
  significant in other respects. The bakufu did not hesitate to admit, for
  example, that it was reshuffling these fiefs to enhance its own financial
  situation at daimyo expense: "It is inappropriate," read the official
  statement, "that private domains should now have more high-yield
  land than the bakufu."53 Therefore, the daimyo were to be required to
  give up their pockets of productive land around Edo and Osaka, tak-
  ing in return some of the low-yielding land held by the bakufu in such
  large quantities. Once again, these measures were well within the
  bakufu's formal power; having originally bestowed the land on the
  daimyo, it could also take it away. Yet, nearly two centuries of free-
  dom from interference had left the daimyo believing that despite for-
  mal subordination to the shogun and his government, their fiefs were
  inviolable, theirs to be held in perpetuity. Now they were reminded
  that this was not so and, ominously, informed that the bakufu contem-
  plated extending the agechi ret into a large-scale rationalization of its
  landholdings. To any daimyo, condemned to discharging a whole
  range of administrative responsibilities on a dwindling income, it was
  a notably cheerless prospect.
  52 Quoted in Kitajima, Mizuno Tadakuni, p. 425. 
  53 Tokugawa jugodaishi, vol. 6, pp. 2955 ff.
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  MIZUNO TADAKUNI 
  155
  Historians have often labeled the bakufu's Tempo reforms as conser-
  vative. In many respects they were. So much of the Tempo legislation
  was repetitious, self-consciously archaic, and irrelevant to the crisis
  that Japan faced. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the bakufu's reforms
  were extremely singular, and none more so than these efforts to rees-
  tablish its central authority over the daimyo and thereby to regain
  some kind of political and economic primacy. This, too, may have
  been conservative, as it was predicated on the revival of powers dor-
  mant since the mid-seventeenth century. Nevertheless it represents a
  dramatic departure from the pattern laid down by the earlier reforms,
  neither of which had compromised daimyo autonomy in any signifi-
  cant way. Here, at least, we can see the bakufu reacting appropriately
  to the demands of the Tempo crisis - appropriately, that is, from one
  point of view. With the nation fearful of civil unrest and foreign
  invasion, a central government - particularly one as weak as the Toku-
  gawa bakufu - could legitimately call for more power. Unfortunately,
  the daimyo domains, subject to pressures equally intense, were less
  ready to listen than ever before. The Tempo crisis had spurred the
  domains into new and potentially divisive forms of behavior; it had
  now done no less for the Tokugawa bakufu. More than that, it had
  brought the domains and the bakufu face to face with each other's
  aspirations in a particularly peremptory fashion, and neither could be
  reassured by what they saw.
  MIZUNO TADAKUNI
  If the bakufu reforms were unusual, the man who had charge of them
  was more unusual still. Traditionally, in Tokugawa historiography,
  the reformer assumes his role at birth, displaying, with preternatural
  speed, every quality expected of a Man of Destiny. Tokugawa Yoshi-
  mune, initiator of the Kyoho reforms, was tough, disciplined, and
  frugal; Matsudaira Sadanobu, father of the Kansei reforms, was tal-
  ented, conscientious, and wise beyond his years. By contrast, Mizuno
  Tadakuni (1794-1851), architect of the Tempo reforms, was all too
  human. He was, for example, rather greedy. Conger eel, prepared in
  the Kyoto style, was his favorite dish, but his all-embracing absorp-
  tion with food was well known, and Tokugawa Nariaki could contem-
  plate winning his favor with boxes of salmon sushi and wild duck
  tempura. There were other weaknesses, too, for his appetites by no
  means halted at his stomach. In 1840, less than a year before launching
  his campaign to restore the nation to moral health, Mizuno Tadakuni
  was reputedly obsessed with sex. "I have been making surreptitious
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  156 
  . 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  inquiries about [Mizuno's] tastes," reported one of Tokugawa Nari-
  aki's agents, "but at the moment he cares for nothing but women,"
  adding that the senior councilor was giving his servants money to
  make sure of a ready supply.54
  A weakness for food and women, however unexpected in a Confucian
  reformer, was not unpardonable, but in this case there were other,
  graver, defects. Tokugawa Nariaki, though refusing to condemn
  Mizuno's passion for women, nevertheless considered him unfit for
  public office, citing the fact that "he does not care for soldierly things
  and prefers the ways of courtiers; his interests lie in court ceremonial
  and antiquarian information, rather than in weaponry. . . ."Mizuno's
  own avowed ambition, expressed at the beginning of his career, "to
  become senior councilor as quickly as possible and then relax," suggests
  that this judgment was not without foundation. Beyond this, however,
  and most serious of all, is the matter of Mizuno's demonstrable partial-
  ity to money. As a young daimyo, first at Karatsu and later at
  Hamamatsu, his financial situation had always been one of his chief
  concerns, and as he readily confessed, he undertook an official career
  confidently expecting to make something out of it. To some extent he
  was right. Office brought him a richly decorated mansion in Aoyama,
  surrounded by gardens full of rare plants and unusual rocks - "so splen-
  did a residence," wrote a contemporary, "as to steal away the senses." It
  also brought something less welcome: a reputation for venality that
  most politicians, and reformers in particular, might have wished to
  avoid. "In the past people have asked [Mizuno] for favors," wrote one of
  Tokugawa Nariaki's informants in 1840, "and such is his nature that he
  has obliged them. He has, too, accepted bribes quite freely, although
  since this spring he has been wary and returned all gifts offered to him."
  Nevertheless, Tokugawa Nariaki considered him even more corrupt
  than the notorious Tanuma Okitsugu.
  It is undeniably difficult to associate such a man with orthodox
  Confucian reforms. Hypocrisy was never too far below the surface of
  Tokugawa period morality, but exhortations to self-restraint must
  have rung more than usually hollow in the mouth of a known glutton,
  debaucher, dilettante, and taker of bribes. Yet it is still more difficult
  to associate Mizuno Tadakuni with the other, unorthodox aspect of
  the Tempo reforms. He was, after all, a daimyo and therefore subject
  to all the pressures of the Tempo crisis. More than that, his sympa-
  thies on this issue had never previously been in doubt. As the daimyo
  54 Tsuji Tatsuya, "Tokugawa Nariaki to Mizuno Tadakuni," Jimbutsu sosho furoku, no. 154
  (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan).
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  MIZUNO TADAKUNI 
  157
  of first Karatsu and then Hamamatsu, he had consistently given prior-
  ity to domain interests. In government, which he entered in 1815, he
  had endured, but not endorsed, the rule of Tokugawa Ienari. Then
  with Ienari dead, he proceeded to purge all those who had followed the
  eleventh shogun on his capricious and autocratic way. Clearly, to
  Mizuno, as to almost all of his predecessors in bakufu office, the best
  government was one in which the shogunal prerogative was curbed by
  senior officials who, daimyo themselves, saw the value of regional
  autonomy. Such was certainly the intent behind Mizuno's memorial to
  the twelfth shogun, in 1841, urging that he work through his daimyo
  ministers, and not, as his father had done, through personal cronies.55
  This was not the kind of man suddenly to turn and savage his own
  class. But he did. His directives from late 1842 to mid-1843 - the
  abolition of guilds and domain monopolies, the shogunal progress to
  Nikko, the agechi rei, the draining of the Imbanuma - all threatened,
  directly or otherwise, the regional independence that the daimyo had
  enjoyed since the mid-seventeenth century. Why did he change? The
  question is reasonable and straightforward enough, but unfortunately,
  it cannot be answered with any finality. Mizuno, like all but a few
  politicians of the Tokugawa period, has left us no substantial clues to
  the workings of his mind. The chronicle of events alone offers some
  assistance, but even that is tenuous. What there is, however, is sugges-
  tive. Mizuno had come to maturity in a society accustomed to isola-
  tion; nothing in his background or his earlier career could have pre-
  pared him for the hard diplomatic decisions, the rumors, and the
  atmosphere of impending catastrophe waiting for him in the Tempo
  era. Together with the critics - Tokugawa Nariaki, Watanabe Kazan,
  Takashima Shuhan, Sakuma Shozan, and the rest - he would have
  shared fears of foreign invasion in 1838 and, like them, would have
  seen those fears, amorphous at first, take on British shape with news
  of the Opium War. "It is happening in a foreign country," wrote
  Mizuno, describing the affray in China in a letter to a subordinate,
  "but I believe it also contains a warning for us."56 With responsibilities
  and access to information far more extensive than any of the Tempo
  critics, his concern would have been no less than theirs. Nor can
  Mizuno have been ignorant of the implications of the Chinese experi-
  ence. If a great centralized state could be despatched so readily, then
  what chance had Japan - small, weak, and fragmented as it was? The
  55 Bolitho, Treasures Among Men, p. 215.
  56 Quoted in Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon gendaishi (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1967), vol. 1,
  p. 89.
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  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  unpalatable truth about the bakuhan taisei, as politicians and critics
  were beginning to realize, was that it was inadequate to the needs of a
  country threatened by invasion. It was either too centralized (because
  the daimyo were forced to squander their resources paying court to the
  shogun in Edo) or not centralized enough (because the bakufu had no
  firm control over them).
  There are indications that Mizuno, background and personal prefer-
  ences notwithstanding, had come to incline to the latter view. One is
  to be seen in the bakufu's changing attitude toward Sato Nobuhiro.
  Sato was the critic who, more than any other, stood for stronger
  central government. It was not a position that won him many friends;
  on the contrary, in 1832 he had been ordered not to come within
  twenty miles of Edo. Ten years later, however, as the government
  began to digest the lessons of the Opium War, his works came to be
  read again by bakufu officials, Mizuno among them. At the beginning
  of 1843 Sato was pardoned and allowed back into the city where in
  1845, at Mizuno's personal request, he compiled an abbreviated ver-
  sion of Suito hiroku, the work in which he had provided the blueprints
  for a unified nation-state.
  On its own, this is far from conclusive evidence of any change of
  heart. Yet taken in conjunction with Mizuno's policies, as they devel-
  oped from late 1842 to the middle of the following year, it suggests
  that of the two possible lines along which the bakuhan taisei might
  have been modified - either in the direction of more regional auton-
  omy or toward greater central control - Mizuno, for one, had made
  his choice. Events thirty years later vindicated his judgment, but this
  was far too late for Mizuno. All too soon he paid dearly for that choice
  at the hands of those infinitely less prescient.
  THE AFTERMATH
  It was one of the peculiarities of Tokugawa period reforms that they
  never reached a formal conclusion. How could they? They all began
  with a public commitment to precisely those virtues - honesty, frugal-
  ity, the recognition of talent - most highly prized in conventional
  morality; no government could possibly confess itself no longer inter-
  ested in such things. Nevertheless, all these paroxysms of reform
  subsided as quickly as they appeared. In the bakufu, the Kyoho and
  Kansei reforms faded imperceptibly into the inertia of Gembun and
  Kyowa. Domains like Tosa, proclaiming reforms in Genna, Kambun,
  Tenna, Kyoho, Temmei, and Kansei, saw them all come to a halt. It
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  AFTERMATH 
  159
  was a fact universally recognized but never openly admitted. With so
  much to be done before the golden age could be restored and human
  nature transformed, it would not have been politic to confess that
  reforms could ever end.
  The Tempo reforms proved no exception. In the domains they all
  ended, some whimpering their way into oblivion, others culminating
  in an explosion in which the reformers were dismissed (as with
  Watanabe Kazan at Tawara in 1837) and sometimes thrown into
  prison as well (as with Mabuchi Kahei at Tosa in 1843). Whatever the
  end, they were ignored until their resurrection as models for fresh
  reforms in the 1850s and 1860s.
  In the Tokugawa bakufu, the climax was more spectacular. Toward
  the end of 1843, just two years after Mizuno had declared his reformist
  intentions, one year after he had fired his first shots against domain
  autonomy, and one month after the salvo of agechi ret, Mizuno was
  tumbled out of office and disgraced in a spasm of conservative revul-
  sion. He was accused of "dishonesty," and his dismissal was said to
  have brought a crowd of irate citizens into the streets to pelt his house
  with stones. Exactly the same thing had happened to Tanuma Oki-
  tsugu, who had also tried to strengthen the bakufu at daimyo expense.
  Unlike Tanuma, however, Mizuno's career did not quite end there.
  Within nine months, in the middle of 1844, he was reinstated, the
  allegations of "dishonesty" and unpopularity forgotten in the confu-
  sion of yet another diplomatic crisis. The Dutch had just sent word of
  an important communication from their king, and Mizuno was re-
  called to deal with it. His rehabilitation was brief, however (just eight
  months), incomplete, and hampered by ill health (genuine, not as-
  sumed). Once again it terminated in humiliation, and Mizuno was
  obliged to resign for the second and last time. Before the year 1845 was
  out, he was forced into retirement, and 20,000 koku was stripped from
  his estates. Hori Chikashige, the only other senior councilor to have
  given him full support, was treated in much the same way, while two
  of Mizuno's subordinates were subsequently jailed, and a third was
  put to death. The bakufu's Tempo reforms, in this, the second year of
  the succeeding Koka era (1844-8), were well and truly at an end. In
  fact, they had never really survived Mizuno's first dismissal, in the
  intercalary ninth month of 1843.
  Did the Tempo reforms succeed or fail? This depends on one's
  perception of the reforms' aims and one's definition of success or
  failure. In their own terms, they failed. They made no lasting impact
  on human nature, certainly not to such an extent that the Japanese
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  160 
  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  people thereafter turned again to righteousness and resumed the sim-
  ple life they had once allegedly enjoyed. No reforms ever did. In
  Japan, as elsewhere, human nature was always ready to ignore or
  circumvent whatever arbitrary restrictions were imposed on certain
  inalienable rights (among them spending money, drinking, gambling,
  and pursuing sexual gratification, whether at the bathhouse, teahouse,
  or street corner). Incorrigible, the public continued to read frivolous
  and salacious books, and the publishers, after only a momentary
  check, continued to provide them. Printmakers, too, seemed largely
  to have ignored government prohibitions. In Edo, for example, there
  were more variety theaters than ever by 1845, and actors were no less
  in the public eye. Repression of this kind, whether originating in the
  bakufu or the domain governments, was always doomed to failure.
  To the extent that the Tempo reforms aimed at restoring a measure
  of peace and prosperity to the Japanese people in the wake of the
  Tempo crisis, they enjoyed a measure of success. Most of this, how-
  ever, was accidental, more a product of better seasons and increased
  food supplies than anything else. Government interference, wherever
  it took place, tended to be disastrous. In the case of the bakufu's
  dissolution of merchant associations, for example, insofar as these
  bodies ever complied with the government's order (and even this is
  questionable), the effect seems to have been not quite what officials
  had anticipated. In some areas it reduced the traditional commercial
  network to chaos, leaving "everybody engaged in trade much inconve-
  nienced," as one village official complained in his diary.57 It promoted
  confusion, shortages, and economic depression - even, ironically,
  higher prices, the very thing the bakufu had hoped to counter. On the
  other hand, it encouraged commercial and industrial activities of a
  kind even more difficult to control, whether in the hands of indepen-
  dent rural entrepreneurs or the daimyo domains. When this attempt
  failed, therefore, the bakufu promptly returned to more familiar mea-
  sures, only to see those fail in their turn. It simply did not have the
  means to enforce its price restrictions and by early 1845 had appar-
  ently come to doubt not only the feasibility of such an enterprise but
  even its desirability, observing lamely that "naturally prices will rise
  and fall according to circumstances and according to the volume of
  goods available."s8 What is certain is that prices had remained high
  throughout Mizuno's tenure of office and were still the object of offi-
  cial complaint in 1845, on the eve of his final departure from the
  political world.
  57 Essa sosho, p. 312. 
  58 Quoted in Okamoto, "Tempo kaikaku," pp. 239-40.
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  AFTERMATH 
  l6l
  Other social problems, too, remained untouched. It is debatable,
  for example, just what result was obtained by efforts to drive, or
  tempt, people out of the cities and back to their native villages. Some
  scholars deny any effect whatsoever; another detected a 5 percent fall
  in the population of Osaka between 1842 and 1843, but even this tells
  us little, as the measures were aimed not so much at reducing the
  number of city dwellers as replenishing Japan's farm population.59 In
  either case, one wonders what lasting effect was likely to be achieved
  by measures that attacked the symptoms of rural decline while so
  transparently ignoring the causes. Similarly, the system of bakufu
  loans for samurai would seem to have fallen well short of its mark,
  although in this case it is not easy to judge how effective it might have
  been, for like so many of Mizuno's initiatives, it had been in operation
  barely a year before it was hastily reversed by his successors.
  Insofar as the bakufu and the domains used their reforms to retrieve
  some sort of financial balance by reducing debts and expenses and
  increasing income, the judgment is a little less certain. Overall, it is
  difficult to escape the impression that they failed. Mito, for example,
  despite all its efforts at expanding and diversifying its economic base,
  really solved none of its problems. Echizen, too, continued to spend
  more than it made, prompting even the phlegmatic Yuri Kimimasa to
  complain that "you never see any money in Fukui," and this condition
  did not begin to improve until another set of reforms was instituted in
  the 1850s.60
  It would appear, however, that in at least some domains, the re-
  forms did work, and in this context, historians usually point to the
  great domains of the southwest, most notably Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa,
  and Hizen. This is not unreasonable, in view of these domains' later
  economic strength and their considerable political influence; it is,
  however, open to question. Satsuma is perhaps the exception. The
  commercialization of farming and the emergence of rural entrepre-
  neurs had never been a problem there; nor for that matter had peasant
  rebellions, which were virtually unknown. New crops and processing
  industries could therefore be introduced and closely supervised by the
  Satsuma government without provoking any local opposition, for their
  fanners apparently did not miss freedoms they had never enjoyed.
  Otherwise, however, there is room for doubt. Tosa had not one but
  59 Compare, for example, the views of Tsuda, "Tempo kaikaku," p. 316; and Okamoto,
  "Tempo kaikaku," p. 222.
  60 Quoted in Rekishigaku kenkyukai, eds., Meiji ishinshi kenkyu koza (Tokyo: Heibonsha,
  1968), vol. 2, p. 216.
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  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  two sets of Tempo reforms, both of which ended in disgrace - the first
  with the resignation of the daimyo in 1843, the second with the impris-
  onment of Mabuchi Kahei, the domain's financial expert, a few
  months later. Choshu, too, forced to abandon its plans of marketing
  domain products in 1843, saw Murata Seifu, its chief reformer, resign
  in 1844, his Thirty-seven-Year Plan in ruins. Like Echizen, Choshu's
  financial rehabilitation had to await further reforms in the 1850s.
  In the case of the bakufu, there can be no such doubts. Mizuno's
  attempts to restore bakufu finances were no more successful than was
  anything else he initiated. Ideas of developing and controlling the
  productivity of the bakufu's own domain dissolved in a storm of
  rural protest in which farmers, preferring to keep their agricultural
  surplus in their own hands, attacked government offices and de-
  stroyed their documents. Other initiatives, among them recoinage,
  levies on the business community, and the addition to the bakufu
  domain of land reclaimed from the Imbanuma, all were casualties of
  their author's fall from power. The final result, therefore, was a
  bakufu that had failed to restore itself to financial health. This was to
  have disastrous consequences in the future, particularly because do-
  mains like Satsuma had done so much better. For the present, its
  consequences were equally serious, simply because lack of money
  prevented the bakufu from reorganizing national defense. Had
  Mizuno remained in office longer, of course, the situation might well
  have improved. As it was, however, he spent just 2,739 gold pieces
  on defense, less than 3 percent of the cost of the shogun's progress to
  Nikko.
  There is one more measure of the success or otherwise of the Tempo
  reforms. The Tempo crisis, which had entangled daimyo and bakufu
  in civil unrest, financial malaise, and fears of impending diplomatic,
  and possibly military, confrontation, obliged them all to respond.
  Given their separate responsibilities, they could do so only from stand-
  points that were radically different and, ultimately, incompatible. The
  domains, looking to their finances and their defenses, saw the need to
  move outside bakufu control; the bakufu, equally preoccupied, began
  to reassert its right - indeed, its obligation - to control the domains as
  they had not been controlled for generations. Which side prevailed,
  then, in this most fundamental of struggles?
  In one sense it was the daimyo domains. Where Mizuno's policies
  could be defied or circumvented, they did so - most obviously, of
  course, with domain monopolies, which continued everywhere, de-
  spite official prohibition. When resistance appeared no longer possi-
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  AFTERMATH 
  163
  ble, then a concerted movement of daimyo - some inside the bakufu
  itself, others not - turned Mizuno out of office, crushing his policies
  in the process. The agechi rei, for example, were canceled six days
  before their author's dismissal; so potent a threat to domain autonomy
  could hardly have remained unconnected. Work on the Imbanuma,
  too, was allowed to lapse ten days after Mizuno's dismissal and never
  resumed, although the project itself had been on the verge of comple-
  tion. All that remained of the bakufu's attack on daimyo prerogatives,
  therefore, were the memories and the painful financial scars of the
  shogun's journey to Nikko.
  In Mizuno's place they ultimately installed a much more predictable
  successor. This was Abe Masahiro, whose qualities immediately com-
  mended themselves. He was sober, upright, conciliatory, and totally
  lacking in initiative. Abe made sure that once the controversial element
  of Mizuno's reforms had been dismantled, he would do nothing to
  offend anybody.61 His government proceeded to ignore its financial
  problems, as it ignored matters of defense and foreign policy. Mizuno,
  however maladroitly, had tried to do something about them; Abe, on
  the other hand, conferred endlessly and did nothing. All three issues
  were swept out of sight, as they touched on the contentious question of
  the relative powers of the bakufu and the daimyo. Watanabe Shujiro,
  Abe's biographer, observed that under his government, "all the daimyo
  were content."62 We may be sure that they were. But on the other hand,
  with all the hard decisions about Japanese political organization pushed
  to one side, the rest of Japan paid dearly for that contentment in 1853,
  when it faced Commodore Perry with no central government worth the
  name.
  There was another sense, however, in which the results of the
  Tempo reforms were not quite so well defined. True, the bakufu's
  reforms had been destroyed, and measures had been taken to see that
  daimyo interests would not be further threatened. But Mizuno had
  shown that the bakufu was not entirely without teeth, and several
  domains bore the marks for some time. Tokugawa Nariaki, for exam-
  ple, who never forgot an injury, had cause to remember this, for it was
  bakufu intervention that had aborted the Mito reform program. In
  61 Scholarly appraisals of Abe have varied markedly and will no doubt continue to do so. W. G.
  Beasley, in his Select Documents on Foreign Policy, 1853-1868 (London: Oxford University
  Press, 1955), p. 21, judges him "hardly the man best fitted to meet a serious crisis." By
  contrast, Conrad Totman, in The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Honolulu: University of
  Hawaii Press, 1980), p. xx, impressed by his "repeated displays of political skill," considers
  him to have been an "astute" politician.
  62 Watanabe Sha\iro, Abe Masahiro jiseki (Tokyo, 1910), vol. i,p. 52.
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  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  Chdshu, too, they had learned a lesson: Murata Seifu had felt it politic
  to restrict the domain's commercial activities, to avoid open conflict
  with the bakufu. As a result, the Choshu reforms had been ruined,
  and Murata himself was forced to resign. Mizuno, although he had
  lost, had alerted the daimyo domains to just how formidable an oppo-
  nent the bakufu could still be. By raising this specter and not laying it
  completely, the Tempo reforms had left Japan with its fundamental
  dilemma still unresolved. How was the nation to be organized to meet
  a troubled future? This particular legacy of the Tempo crisis remained
  to bedevil Japan for the next thirty years. Other aspects of the crisis
  could be resolved, superficially at least, by the return of fine weather
  and good harvests, but not this one. The foreign problem, with all its
  attendant internal difficulties, had arrived. No amount of sunshine
  was likely to alter that.
  THE IMPLICATIONS
  The Tempo era had been one of critical importance for Japan. Even
  historians who agree on little else agree on this, detecting in these
  years of crisis the beginning of a chain of events that culminated thirty
  years later in the dismantling of Japan's ancien regime. Beyond this, of
  course, they disagree. To some historians, perhaps the majority, the
  Tempo era's most important contribution to Japan's future ferment
  was the informal alliance concluded across class barriers by the coun-
  try gentry, on the one hand, and some sections of the samurai class -
  the so-called lower samurai - on the other, an alliance of the kind of
  men who, in 1868, put paid to an establishment that excluded them
  and installed themselves in its place.6* Other scholars, to whom the
  Meiji Restoration was far more the result of political developments
  than social ones, contrast the failure of the bakufu's reforms with the
  success of those carried out in domains like Satsuma, finding the seeds
  of future instability in the poverty of the one and the wealth of the
  other.
  My personal inclination is toward the latter view, yet not without
  some modification. Certainly the newfound affluence of the Satsuma
  government held serious implications for the bakuhan taisei. In the
  diplomatic crisis of the Tempo era, wealth was already equated with
  63 This aspect of the Tempo reforms has been much analyzed by Japanese historians, many of
  whom interpret it as a development tending toward "absolutism." I refer interested readers to
  Ishii Takashi, Gakusetsu hihan Meiji ishin ron (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1968).
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  IMPLICATIONS 
  165
  the acquisition of military power: new weapons, new ships, new train-
  ing. All were necessary, but because all were expensive, few could
  afford them. If Satsuma could and the bakufu could not, then the
  balance of power that had kept Japan at peace for more than two
  hundred years was at risk. Yet there was a far more serious and far
  more general threat. Satsuma's success with its Tempo reforms was
  exceptional. Other domains, Mito and Choshu among them, had tried
  and failed, their aspirations to wealth and power blocked by a central
  government that, too weak to offer them any protection, was at the
  same time too strong to allow them to prepare for their own. It is clear
  that such domains chafed at their economic impotence and at the
  military incapacity that inevitably accompanied it. The Tempo crisis
  had shown them all that the traditional balance of power was no longer
  workable, that one way or the other it would have to be changed; it
  had provided them with thesis and antithesis but, with the reforms so
  inconclusive, had suggested no synthesis. The dilemma was a real one.
  Obviously Japan needed to do something about its defenses, but no-
  body could decide what, because the subject was surrounded by too
  many uncomfortable issues. Who was to pay for the ships, the cannon
  and the small arms that Japan so desperately needed? Who would
  command them? How would they be used? Was there any guarantee
  that such weapons in bakufu hands would not be turned on the
  daimyo themselves, to complete by force the process that Mizuno had
  begun by edict? Conversely, if the daimyo acquired such weapons,
  might they not once again plunge the nation into turmoil? These were
  serious matters for a country in which regional autonomy had always
  been so prized, too serious for the Tempo era to produce a solution.
  In fact, Mizuno's bakufu had already made it clear that given a
  choice between a Japan armed to the teeth and one helpless against
  foreign attack, it would prefer the latter to the former, with its implicit
  threat to internal stability. So much was apparent in a remarkable
  exchange of letters between Tokugawa Nariaki and Mizuno's govern-
  ment in 1843. "If you allow daimyo and shipowners to build stout
  ships," Nariaki argued, "it will not cost you a copper," adding later
  that to prohibit large ships simply because they might be misused was
  "like forcing everyone to wear wooden swords because a madman has
  unsheathed his in the palace." It was a reasonable point, but so, too,
  was the counterargument: "If we permit everyone to build warships,"
  read the bakufu rejoinder, "who can tell what evils may ensue? The
  daimyo of the west country and elsewhere may begin to conspire and
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  THE TEMPO CRISIS
  build unorthodox vessels; this will have a significant impact on our
  administration of the law."6*
  This reply was both honest and accurate, but it was not likely to
  satisfy any domain preparing to defend itself against foreign invaders.
  Nor were the bakufu's various interdictions - its attempt to keep
  Takashima Shuhan from teaching his gunnery techniques to samurai
  from the daimyo domains, for example, or its warning to the Astro-
  nomical Bureau (where Western works were translated) that transla-
  tions of "calendars, medical books, works of astronomy, and all books
  on practical matters . . . are not to be circulated indiscriminately."6*
  Many domains reacted, therefore, with mistrust, deception, and eva-
  sion - experimenting with three-masted ships, importing foreign arms
  and manuals in secret through Nagasaki gunrunners, and offering
  shelter to fugitives with particular skills (as Uwajima did for Takano
  Choei after his escape from prison, and Satsuma for Torii Heishichi, a
  Nagasaki-trained gunner). It was an atmosphere in which the former
  tairo, Ii Naoaki, placing a translation of a Dutch work in his library in
  the autumn of 1843, could write on the box, in his own hand, instruc-
  tions that it "be kept secret for a long period."66 It was also one in
  which rumors flourished, particularly rumors involving those already
  viewed with official mistrust, "the daimyo of the west country."
  Satsuma, for example, was rumored in 1837 to have spirited Oshio
  Heihachiro away from Osaka and into hiding aboard one of its ships;
  six years later it was rumored to have engineered Mizuno's dismissal.
  The roots of the bakumatsu arms race, which pitted the bakufu and the
  domains against each other so disastrously, can be found in this cli-
  mate of mutual suspicion.
  New political alignments, too, had their origins in the Tempo crisis.
  During these years Tokugawa Nariaki, the daimyo of Mito, became a
  national political figure, gathering around him the men who domi-
  nated the politics of the next twenty years. Date Munenari, soon to
  become daimyo of Uwajima, married Nariaki's daughter in 1839. The
  young Matsudaira Yoshinaga, recently made daimyo of Echizen, vis-
  ited Nariaki at his Koishikawa mansion in 1843 with a list of questions
  on domain government and corresponded with him regularly thereaf-
  ter; Shimazu Nariakira was a visitor from the late 1830s, as were the
  daimyo of Saga and Kurobane. Abe Masahiro, the bakufu's inoffen-
  sive senior councilor, although sharing many of Nariaki's friends -
  particularly Shimazu Nariakira and Matsudaira Yoshinaga (whose
  64 Mito turn shiiyd, pp. 173-82. 
  65 Tokugawa jugodaishi, pp. 2855-6.
  66 Hikone-shi shi (Hikone: Hikone shiyakusho, 1962), vol. 2, p. 673.
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  IMPLICATIONS 
  167
  adopted daughter became his second wife) - took a little longer to
  warm to Nariaki, but the two men had nevertheless become allies by
  1846. The scholars in Nariaki's employ, Aizawa Seishisai and Fujita
  Toko, were also far from idle. While their master forged his faction to
  defend daimyo prerogatives, they supported him by laying down the
  ideological barrage that, known to contemporaries as Mitogaku (Mito
  learning), was attracting students from domains as distant as Saga and
  Kurume.
  As the political events of the 1850s and 1860s proved, this alignment
  of forces had particularly fateful consequences. So, too, did the issue
  of the arms race. The history of Japan would have been quite different
  without them. Yet the Tempo crisis produced something far more
  fateful than either. In 1837 Oshio Heihachiro had begun his Gekibun
  by lamenting the disappearance of the emperor from Japanese political
  life: "From the time of the Ashikaga," he wrote, "the emperor has
  been kept in seclusion and has lost the power to dispense rewards and
  punishments; the people have therefore nowhere to turn with their
  complaints." Before another decade had passed, this situation was to
  change dramatically, as the imperial symbol was the obvious refuge -
  indeed the only possible refuge - for those wishing to justify political
  opposition. Increasingly, during the Tempo era, they sought shelter in
  it, and none more persistently than Tokugawa Nariaki. Privately, he
  lobbied with the court in Kyoto; publicly, he displayed his boundless
  respect by demanding that the bakufu repair the imperial mausolea.
  His scholars meanwhile worked feverishly to remind the nation that a
  government established by imperial consent could be disestablished
  by the same means.
  In 1846, a year after Mizuno left office, the campaign had its effect.
  Sixteen years earlier, Matsuzaki Kodo, observing the cranes, had felt
  his heart lift at the sight. The crane, after all, was the traditional
  symbol of happiness and longevity. It was also, by a convention
  equally venerable, a symbol of the emperor. In the flowery language of
  the court, the emperor's palace became "the Palace of the Crane," his
  command, the "Missive of the Crane," his voice "the Voice of the
  Crane." This time, in 1846, in an event unparalleled in Tokugawa
  history, the Voice of the Crane made itself heard in a formal expres-
  sion of imperial concern that under Tokugawa leadership the nation
  was in grave danger. This time it presaged no thousand years of felic-
  ity; instead, the Voice of the Crane launched Japan on twenty years of
  turbulence, destroying in the process the last vestige of the Tempo
  world.
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  CHAPTER 3
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND
  THOUGHT
  THE CULTURE OF PLAY
  Japanese historiography has conventionally located the beginning of
  the end of the Tokugawa (bakumatsu) in the decade of the 1830s, when
  the regime and the several domains embarked on a series of reforms
  aimed at arresting economic failure and restoring public confidence.
  Historians who have concentrated on making sense of the signs of
  financial failure point to the implementation of the Tempo reforms as
  recognition of a gathering crisis. Some have established the revolt of
  Oshio Heihachiro in Osaka in 1837 as the turning point in Tokugawa
  history. But regardless of the many opinions concerning the beginning
  of the end, most discussions of the end of the shogunate have used
  economic signs, political events, or a combination of both as criteria
  for periodization. Yet to establish the beginning of the end in the
  18 30s obliges us to accept a concomitant assumption that cultural
  events constitute a second order of activity; one that avoids organizing
  the world in terms of a base-superstructure dyad but still sees culture
  and ideas as determined by material forces. Culture is then made to
  appear as a dependent variable of economic and political processes,
  and the observer is diverted from recognizing that the production of
  culture may in fact possess a logic of its own, one that seeks to resolve
  problems belonging to an entirely different class of events and facts.
  If we regard culture as something more than a pale reflection of
  changes detected earlier in the material realm, we will be persuaded to
  propose that the special culture of late Tokugawa culture did not begin
  in the 1830s, or even later, but probably in the late eighteenth century
  or the early 1800s.1 Sometime in the 1830s there appeared a historic
  conjuncture between new forms of self-understanding, which consti-
  1 This is certainly the argument of Naramoto Tatsuya, Nihon kinsei no shisd to bunka (Tokyo:
  Iwanami shoten, 1978), pp. 65-214; Maruyama Masao, Nihon seiji shisoshi kenkyu (Tokyo:
  Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1953); and the more recent essay by Sugi Hitoshi, "Kaseiki no
  shakai to bunka," in Aoki Michio and Yamada Tadao, eds., Koza Nihon kinseishi, vol. 6:
  Tempoki no seiji to shakai (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1981), pp. 17-70.
  168
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  CULTURE OF PLAY 
  169
  tute the content of culture, and the critical political and economic
  events that began to jar the viability of the bakufu-han system. The
  realization that the order was losing viability may well have been
  possible only after the formulation of new forms of self-understanding
  and the establishment of new modalities of relating things to one
  another.
  An essay by Professor Hayashiya Tatsusaburo offers the possibility
  of using the bakumatsu as a metaphor or historical trope.2 By construct-
  ing a model of bakumatsu, which draws on the common experiences of
  the late years of the Kamakura, Muromachi, and Tokugawa sho-
  gunates, Hayashiya has identified a number of conditions shared by
  the three and the cultural means whereby contemporaries sought to
  represent their own sense of an ending and recognized that they were
  living through a time of profound change. His metaphor thus tries to
  bring together political, social, economic, diplomatic, and cultural
  developments. In all three cases the dissolution of the political order
  was accompanied by a displacement of the authority of the military
  estates and wider participation in a broader arena of struggle. This
  explanation presupposes a theory of "crisis" that ultimately is ex-
  pressed in the occurrence of a "rebellion." Hayashiya noted vast social
  changes in the wake of this political event that signify transformations
  in the structure of values and norms, swiftly followed by the develop-
  ment of equally important economic forces, such as shifts in patterns
  of landholding, the circulation of currency, and new forms of ex-
  change and foreign and domestic trade. Finally, Hayashiya links to
  this the emergent cultural styles that characterize and shape the social,
  political, and economic transformations. These new styles were sym-
  bolized by terms like basara in the Kamakura period, kabuki in late
  Muromachi times, and ki and i in the Tokugawa. Basara referred to
  love of the gaudy and ornate and the self-indulgent and unauthorized
  behavior with which some warrior leaders set the example for their
  peers; kabuki meant "to lean" or "to tilt" and called forth the outland-
  ish and playful, often associated with debauchery and perversity; and
  in late Tokugawa, ki invoked the strange, curious, and eccentric,
  whereas i signaled the different, uncommon, and foreign. Thus in
  each bakumatsu the prevailing attitudes were inscribed in style and
  conduct previously signified as different and nonnormative, even un-
  thinkable and unimaginable.
  It is important to recognize that these new styles were not reflec-
  2 Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed., Bakumatsu btmka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978).
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  170 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  tions of more basic material forces. Rather, the real function of this
  metaphor is to establish a different relationship between material con-
  ditions and symbolic or cultural representation. The historical trope
  allows us to glimpse a unified world, a universe in which discon-
  tinuous realities are somehow bonded and intertwined with one an-
  other, thereby suggesting a network of relationships among things that
  first seem remote. The trope manages to establish a momentary recon-
  ciliation between the material and spiritual worlds without assigning
  priority to one or the other and persuades us to acknowledge disparate
  elements as equivalents in relationships whereby each determines and
  is determined by the other. It is as if the interaction resembled a form
  of dialectical traffic that permits a transaction between the language of
  social change and cultural form.3 Such an approach to late Tokugawa
  culture helps us read the content of the socioeconomic macrocosm, the
  massive substance of the "real," in terms of form and representations
  that appear as significations of it. Bakumatsu represents a rhetorical
  figure, a form in time, ordering a specific reality, but precisely at diat
  moment when the most disparate facts order themselves around a
  model that will later offer "meaning."
  In the late Tokugawa period we can note a confluence between the
  content of the real, transforming productive process and the produc-
  tion of new cultural forms that promised to make sense of what was
  occurring in social life. Yet the relationship between the effort to meet
  the consequences of newer productive forces and social relationships
  and the attempts to stabilize meaning between politics and culture had
  less to do with a simple reflection from one "base" to the "superstruc-
  ture" than with the operation of mediations. The massive transforma-
  tions in the social process were translated into the cultural sphere, and
  this placed great strains on the social image of Tokugawa Japan and its
  conception of cultural praxis.* The polity was called on to meet the
  contradictory demands of stabilizing conditions of private accumula-
  tion while responding to requests for social welfare. A search for
  3 Frederic Jameson suggested this conception of conjuncture in his Marxism and Form (Prince-
  ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 3-59-
  4 The idea of a social imaginary was advanced by Comeilus Catoriadis, L'Institution imaginaire de
  la soci&tf (Paris: Seuil, 1975); and Claude Le Fort, Les Formes de I'histoire: Essais d'anthropologie
  politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). The concept of a social imaginary, as used by these writers,
  refers not to a specular image submitted to reflection but, rather, to the indeterminate ways in
  which society organizes the production of material goods and the reproduction of its members.
  The domain of the social imaginary therefore conforms not to the fact that humans must have
  resources to survive and reproduce but to the variety of ways in which they are able to do so,
  which builds on but surpasses the basic material conditions of life. It is the way that a society
  seeks, through forms of signification, to endow itself with an identity different from those of
  other societies and from chaos.
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  CULTURE OF PLAY 
  171
  meaning and self-understanding in a changed environment was ex-
  pressed in calls for benevolence and greater political participation at a
  time when urban expansion and cultural participation required new
  definitions. New forms of cultural production accompanying the ex-
  pansion of cities collectively signified what we may call, from playful
  literature (gesaku), the "culture of play." By the end of the eighteenth
  century this had exceeded the limits of its own formal constraints to
  reveal in vague outline the possibility of constructing a social imagina-
  tion vastly different from the one authorized by the Tokugawa. The
  culture of play then turned into a play of culture committed to finding
  stable and permanent forms that might best accommodate new de-
  mands and expectations by reconstituting the whole.
  At the core of this cultural development was the search for new and
  different forms of knowledge and the search for ways to implement
  them. The explosion of new forms of knowledge in late Tokugawa
  Japan was increasingly difficult to assimilate to the categories of the
  existing political system. What occurred in the late eighteenth century
  was the recognition, first in the cities but soon exported to the country-
  side, that the opposition of ruler-ruled and external-internal had
  exhausted its productivity and was incapable of constructing a vision
  of the political that could accommodate the complexity and plurality
  of the social urban environment. The physical and demographic expan-
  sion of urban sites like Edo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagoya, not to men-
  tion lesser castle towns functioning as regional market centers, and the
  resulting differentiation of social and cultural life were presented as a
  spectacle of social surplus juxtaposed to the "rational" and organized
  structures of the Tokugawa "order" imagined by Confucian ideo-
  logues. According to Hayashiya this perception was proclaimed in the
  calls like Yoshida Shoin's for the "different" and the strange. 5 It was
  inscribed in countless practices associated with the new culture of
  play, and it called into question the suppositions of a political ideology
  rooted in the logic of similitude.6 That logic neatly divided the politi-
  cal and hence the cultural spheres between the rulers, who possessed
  mental powers, and the ruled, who labored manually. The former
  were supposed to know, and the latter were enjoined to follow. The
  social identity of the ruled was fixed in a closed, hierarchic chain,
  resembling elements in a stable structure that reflected the order
  5 The term social surplus is my reading, not Professor Hayashiya's, of the sociopolitical scene.
  6 On the logic of similitude, see H. D. Harootunian, "Ideology As Conflict," in Tetsuo Najita
  and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modem Japanese History (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
  ton University Press, 1982), pp. 25-61.
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  172 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  found in nature. Yet the material expansion of Edo as the hub of a
  world not yet imagined made it possible to challenge these fixed identi-
  ties through the proliferation of different subject positions. The multi-
  plication of needs and the differentiation of services contributed to the
  city's expansion and to the concomitant blurring of fixed distinctions
  between ruler and ruled.i
  At the heart of the culture of play was a system of signification that
  recognized that the fixed boundaries and social identities established
  to guide people had become increasingly uncertain as society grew
  larger and more complex. The new systems of meaning agreed that
  social space and differentiation of positions invalidated most earlier
  distinctions. With the observation that people who resided in the cities
  acquired multiple identities, the culture of play produced a threat to
  the social identity of society. When, for example, the Tokugawa au-
  thorities laid down the proscription of heterodoxy in the late eigh-
  teenth century, they were recognizing the threat to social identity that
  the new cultural forms were beginning to pose. But even Matsudaira
  Sadanobu, who promoted the prohibitions, acknowledged that "princi-
  ple" and "reading books" fell short of grasping the "passions of the
  times" and equipping the ruled with proper instruments to prosecute
  their managerial duties.8 What his edict disclosed was thus an acknowl-
  edgment of social surplus that seemed to elude the conventional forms
  of representing the social in the fixed dichotomy of ruler-ruled. His
  call for the promotion of men of talent and ability through the social
  formation still took for granted the received political divisions. Ironi-
  cally, the edict contributed to the problem of surplus and difference
  rather than to its solution, by encouraging the development and spon-
  sorship of new skills in science, medicine, and Japanese and Western
  studies that promised to supply the leadership with practical tech-
  niques to grasp the "passion of the times."
  If late-eighteenth-century Japan appeared as a scene of social sur-
  plus and blurred identities, its cultural praxis expressing play sought
  not only to displace fixed boundaries representing the real but also to
  show how the real, the differentiated masses living in the cities re-
  quired new modes of representation. Play (asobi) referred to a form of
  subjectivity that existed outside the "four classes" that operated within
  the space of the "great peace" taihei* A sense of liberation, closely
  7 See Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, Kasei bunka no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976),
  pp. 19-42- 
  8 Ib'd., pp. 43-So, 343-95.
  9 Hiraishi Naoaki, "Kaiho Seiryo no shisozo," Shiso 677 (November 1980): 52.
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  CULTURE OF PLAY 
  173
  resembling the nonrelated, insubordinated autonomy associated with
  the free cities of the late Middle Ages in Japan, demanded freedom from
  fixed positions as a condition for endless movement, best expressed in
  excursion narratives and tales of travel.10 Yet the reference to movement
  evinced still another meaning associated with asobi, which was to autho-
  rize crossing established geographical and social boundaries. According
  to Kaiho Seiryo (1755-1817), the ideal of this playful subject was the
  "gaze that disconnects and separates" (kirete hanaretaru moku): Once the
  "spirit" was separated from the "body," it would be possible to carry on
  "independent play."11 As a ronin (masterless samurai), Kaiho had aban-
  doned fixed positions of status in order to "play" within the "great
  peace"; as a traveler he journeyed to more than thirty provinces in his
  lifetime. The conception of play held by intellectuals like Kaiho was
  invariably related to the production of "playful literature," the deliber-
  ate decadence of "mad poetery," comic verse, and an inordinate taste
  for the different and exotic. This type of autonomous individual liber-
  ated from the collectivity in some sense resembled the person who buys
  and sells commodities as a condition of commercial capitalism, but the
  relationship was less causal than homologous. On numerous occasions
  Kaiho expressed best what many contemporaries believed and acted
  upon when he proclaimed that it was human nature for the self to love
  the body. He saw a world of universal principles dominated by substan-
  tiality, that is, things and bodies interacting with each other. In this
  arrangement, thing or object (mono) was increasingly identified with
  commodity (shiromono), and each person functioned as both buyer and
  seller. Rules that now constituted the social related more to calculation
  and self-interest than to moral imperatives of status, and they were
  mandated by the exchange of commodities.
  Late Tokugawa cultural practice seemed to converge upon the body,
  making public what hitherto had remained private, whether in eating,
  drinking, speaking, bedding down with either a man or a woman, or
  relieving oneself, and often led to gargantuan indulgences coming from
  the joys of the flesh. Despite the variety of forms of verbal fiction that
  proliferated in the late eighteenth century to meet the rapid diversifica-
  tion of tastes, pleasures, and demands for greater "consumption," the
  content of playful culture invariably focused on the activities of the
  body. This concern for the autonomy of the body, expressed in Kaiho's
  "independent spirit" of movement, constituted the subject matter of
  10 The argument is made by Amino Yoshihiko, Muen, kugai, raku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1978).
  11 Hiraishi, "Kaiho Seiryo no shisozo," pp. 52-3.
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  174 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  most of verbal fiction and woodblock illustrations. One of the distin-
  guishing features of the culture of play was its tendency to juxtapose a
  part, whether limb, organ, face, or body itself, to a larger entity, not as a
  substitute for the whole, but, rather, as an adequate alternative to it. To
  dismiss the whole in this way was clearly to discount it. Centering on the
  body and its activities emphasized the physical and the manual; by the
  same token it called into question the superiority of mental over manual
  skills on which the older distinction between ruler-ruled, external-
  internal, and public-private had rested its authority. Finally, the em-
  phasis on the body as the maker and consumer of things put daily life in
  the forefront and valued the things that composed it. Late-eighteenth-
  century Japan was a time when recalling Marx, "the frames of the old
  orbis terrarum had been broken" and "only now . . . was the earth
  opened up . . . ," when the search began to find ways to link real
  history, the daily life, to the space of the real earth.I2
  What the verbal fictions of the culture play first disclosed was a new
  form of time and its relationship to earthly space. This resulted in
  individualizing personal and everyday occasions, separating them
  from the time of collective life identified with the social whole, pre-
  cisely at that moment when there appeared one scale for measuring the
  events of a personal life and another for historical events. When Hirata
  Atsutane sought to figure a narrative that would recount the tale of the
  folk collectivity, he was reacting to a culture that had already divided
  time into separate units and differentiated the plots of personal life -
  love, marriage, travel - from the occasions of history. In texts that
  provided the plot of "history" and the private plots of individuals,
  interaction between the two levels took place only at certain points -
  battles, the ascension or death of an emperor, transgressions - and
  then ended as they proceeded on their separate ways. Although politi-
  cal economists sought to reapprehend the relationship between the life
  of nature and that of humans in order to retain the category of nature,
  and nativists tried to naturalize culture in an effort to restore it to a
  place of primacy, the two were increasingly uncoupled under the new
  regime. Now the various events making up daily life - food, drink,
  copulation, birth, death - were denatured and separated from the con-
  ception of a whole and integrated life to become aspects of a personal
  life. Existence became compartmentalized and specialized.
  Hence the life narrated in late Tokugawa fiction is presented as
  individual and separate sequences and personal fate. The social for-
  12 This quotation is from M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialectic Imagination, trans, and ed. Michael
  Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 206.
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  CULTURE OF PLAY 
  175
  mation was being differentiated into classes, groups, and specialized
  constituencies, each conforming to functional scales of value and each
  possessing its own logic of development. The activities of daily life
  that concentrated on bodily performance lost their link to common
  labor and a common social whole; instead, they became private and
  petty matters on which writers reported as though through a peep-
  hole. '3 Contemporaries increasingly saw that peephole as habit or cus-
  tom and deportment and went to great lengths to classify its range and
  variety. And yet to discover and categorize it so also presumed a
  conception of the whole, of society itself, even though the gesaku
  writers consistently apprehended personal affairs as mere particulari-
  ties that implied no conception of a larger whole or meaning.14 The
  impulse to "pierce" the crust of custom necessitated paying close atten-
  tion to detail. More often than not, tactility, rather than a discernible
  storyline, was figured as the plot of the narrative and usually told the
  tale that the author wished to pierce. The absence of any real story in
  many "narratives" in favor of continuous dialogue about the interac-
  tion of things attests less to a diminution of literary standards than to
  their being in contest. These literary productions of the culture of play
  managed to convey a sharp dissatisfaction with conventions of narra-
  tive closure. Writers seemed convinced that failure to attend to the
  way that things were arranged, people were dressed, and foods were
  presented risked losing any chance to penetrate the surface of affairs.
  Readers were required to recognize differing levels of meaning in
  order to plumb hidden intentions below the surface. By making the
  familiar objects that inhabited daily life seem "strange," they per-
  suaded readers to believe that they had been living in a hole, and not
  the whole, a rut whose very surroundings had obscured a recognition
  of the way that things really were. The texts (kokkeibon, amusing
  books) of Shikitei Samba (1776-1822) and Jippensha Ikku (1765-
  1831) offered an endless stream of snapshots of the most mundane,
  familiar, and trivial activities that townsmen encountered in their daily
  life and on the road. But by rearranging them so that they appeared
  unfamiliar, by forcing readers to look at activities that they performed
  habitually and objects that they took for granted, writers could jar
  them into seeing custom in a new and different light. Laughter was
  recognition of the familiar made to appear strange and even alien. The
  13 Nakamura Yukihiko and Nishiyama Matsunosuke, eds., Bunka ryoran, vol. 8 of Nikon
  bungaku no rekishi (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1967), p. 60; see also Mizuno Tadashi, Edo shosetsu
  ronso (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1974), p. 17; and Nakamura Yukihiko, Gesakuron (Tokyo:
  Kadokawa, 1966), p. 137. 
  14 Nakamura, Gesakuron, p. 137.
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  176 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  world of Ikku's Tokaido travelers is peopled by characters who, when
  they are not about to seduce a maid or slip out of an inn without
  paying the bill, are preoccupied with farting, soiled loin cloths, and a
  round of trivial involvement. The conversations that Samba records in
  barbershop and bathhouse relate to the most mundane affairs in the
  daily life of readers who now see and hear themselves speaking. Both
  writers emphasize the details and particularity of life in conversation
  or movement, such as eating, bathing, drinking, burping, and farting,
  in which the readers recognized their quotidian existence. Even in the
  more solemn historical romances of Bakin or the books of emotion
  (ninjobon) which were preoccupied with the trials of love, the effect
  was to confront the reader with the familiar in an entirely different
  context. Bakin's explorations into the grotesque and fantastic in the
  well-known Nanso Satomi hakkenden, for example, concern a dog who
  performs a meritorious act of loyalty and then demands the reward,
  which happens to be the daughter of his feudal lord. And Ryutei
  Tanehiko's Nise Murasaki inaka Genji monogatari retells the Genji
  story in a different historical setting and projects contemporary cus-
  tom and speech into the fifteenth century. At another level it still
  remained the world of the shogun Ienari, now identified with a famil-
  iar exemplar of corruption in the past.
  Although the focus on the body as a maker and consumer of things
  emphasized the parts, it ultimately drew attention to the idea of a whole
  and a conceptualization of the social order, but in terms that were new
  and different from the officially sanctioned version. Bodily imagery in
  both verbal and illustrated texts signified a different kind of social
  reality with an inverted scale of priorities for the Edo townsmen. It was
  an order that had as its head the genitalia or anus and as its heart the
  stomach. Often, verbal fictions described the body, with its mouth and
  arms as a devouring, consuming totality; humans appeared as bodies
  that related to the world through their orifices rather than through
  public duties demanded by fixed social status and disciplined intention.
  Moreover, the body's needs were never satisfied and never completed;
  people continued to eat, drink, speak, make love, and evacuate cease-
  lessly without any prospect of an end. To portray the infinite details
  involved in partying, with its random arrangement of empty cups,
  vomit, and half-filled bottles the morning after, or to pay close attention
  to foods, eating, and the accompanying conversation - all recognizable
  as appropriate subjects (not objects) for representation - dramatized a
  world of activity and things that no longer referred to anything outside
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  CULTURE OF PLAY 
  177
  it. Tokugawa verbal fiction and woodblock illustrations enforced a new
  awareness of a world that people had habitually placed in the back-
  ground by repositioning it in the foreground of represented experience.
  It also offered human alternatives to the world of public or official
  ideology. To the demands of the heavenly way (tendo), often satirized by
  writers, it provided space for play, laughter, and passion in anatomical
  representation, a veritable people's Utopia, an arcadia of flesh, joy, and
  pain experienced by the body, a ceaseless delight that came from end-
  less consumption and to the discharge of waste. In this regard, late
  Tokugawa fiction appropriated the common and customary to work on
  the dominant ideology in order to make it appear unfamiliar and to
  recast the somber requirements of official expectation within the world
  of play. By using immediate experience as its subject and making people
  aware of their daily lives and surroundings, writers were able to trans-
  form the quotidian experience into a system of knowledge that even the
  most common could possess and master. In this way, verbal fiction and
  the illustrator's art made the body into a text and reading an act of
  consuming knowledge.
  Finally, the mass readership of late Tokugawa times was far more
  interested in identifying and recognizing contemporary custom than in
  retrieving ethical lessons from a history that, according to one author-
  ity, probably assaulted their sensibilities.15 Early-nineteenth-century
  writers like Samba and Tamenaga Shunsui, for example, wrote with
  an eye for details and nuances of contemporary life among the differ-
  ent quarters of Edo. Their production of gesaku helped define the
  conception of a coherent social world signifying changing conditions
  propelled by the constant interaction of humans, making and consum-
  ing, even though it consistently opposed the pan to the whole. The
  early-nineteenth-century kabuki playwright Tsuruya Namboku por-
  trayed what he called a "world" (sekai) bounded by "living custom"
  (kizewa). But Tsuruya's world, often darkened by violence, blood-
  shed, and conflict, was still nothing more than a reminder that social
  life was the stage on which contemporaries acted out their encounter
  with custom. This increasing identification of the culture of play and
  the world of theater with society - life following art - was noted by
  contemporaries who could agree that "its plot resembles the puppet
  theater" and that "its world is like the kabuki."16
  15 Sugiura Mimpei, I shin zenya no bungaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967), pp. 3-22.
  16 Quoted in Maeda Ichiro, ed., Koza Nihon bunkashi (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1971), vol. 6, p.
  121.
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  THE PLAY OF CULTURE
  There were contemporary moralists and thinkers like Buyo Inshi (?-?)
  and Shiba Kokan (1747-1818) who alerted their contemporaries to the
  dangers inherent in conceptions of society grounded in play and enjoy-
  ment inspired by the world of theater. This new social criticism
  brought about a conceptualization of the whole, called seken or seji,
  that was able to accommodate the differentiation and fragmentation of
  life proclaimed by the culture of play. Whether such critics were
  openly opposed to contemporary social life (Buyo Inshi), saw in laugh-
  ter a problem and not its solution (Hirata Atsutane), or envisaged a
  new set of arrangements conforming to the changes that had taken
  place since the middle of the eighteenth century (Shiba Kokan), they
  believed that the culture of play had exhausted its productivity and
  imperiled the prospect of maintaining a stable public order. All
  seemed to agree on the necessity of restoring a conception of the social
  whole to counteract the baneful effects of the progressive particu-
  larization and privatization of life, but it was more difficult to reach a
  consensus on how the whole should be reconstituted. What concerned
  the critics most was the way that "custom" was generating new combi-
  nations of social relationships and eroding the older guarantees of
  solidarity. Buyo Inshi charged that the changes noted in his narrative
  of contemporary history (Seji kemmonroku, 1816) would inevitably
  undermine the political order by persuading people to turn away from
  their public duties for the private pleasures of the body.'7 Shiba
  Kokan's Shumparo hikki (1818), a lasting testament to contemporary
  changes in its recording of an excursion to the south, condemned the
  widespread prevalence of private desire less as evidence of moral bank-
  ruptcy than of insufficient knowledge, which made unknowing people
  vulnerable to the temptations of self-indulgence.18 Nobody would
  deny that changes in society had uncoupled the fixed relationship
  between culture as self-understanding and political purpose. Yet the
  resolution of the crisis, many believed, required a systematic effort to
  reconstitute society's self-understanding in such a way as to make it
  possible again to realign the various parts with a whole capable of
  instituting public order. Critics like Buyo Inshi looked to the seven-
  17 Buyo Inshi, "Seji kemmonroku," in Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryo shusei (Tokyo: Misuzu
  shobo, 1969), vol. 8, p. 656. See also Aoki Michio, Tempo sodoki (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1979),
  pp. 1-9, for a useful account of Buyo's jeremiad, as well as Sugiura, I shin zen'ya no bungaku,
  pp. 23-46.
  18 Shiba Kokan, Shumparo hikki, in Nihon zuihitsu hikki (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1936),
  vol. 1, pp. 4O4ff.,435.
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  PLAY OF CULTURE 
  179
  teenth century and to the even more remote past to find models for the
  present, whereas others, like Shiba, trained their sights elsewhere and
  began to envisage new possibilities for the eventual reunion of politics
  and culture.
  The specific grievance that agitated many critics was that the relent-
  less pursuit of private desire fed the process of fragmenting interests
  and blinded people to the necessity of collective purpose. Everywhere
  people seemed to be turning inward to satisfy private desires and
  human needs. Yet such behavior constituted a public act, for self-
  understanding came to mean self-indulgence. The crisis of self-
  identity underscored the need to find new forms of knowing and
  understanding that could offer meaning in the new social environment
  without compromising the chance for order and stability. Any recon-
  sideration of knowledge would have to account for the vast transforma-
  tions that had taken place in Japanese society since the middle of the
  eighteenth century, transformations that had been noisily announced
  by the culture of play: the discovery and valorization of daily life, the
  common world of things and objects, the particularity of experience,
  the dehistoricization of the present, the ceaseless obsession with the
  body, and the possibility of constituting subjects for knowledge. What
  ensued in the late Tokugawa period was a play of culture, which
  entailed finding the means to represent stable forms of identity and
  meaning in discourse and a coherent voice. Although social critics like
  Buyo Inshi and Shiba Kokan grasped the importance of knowledge for
  a resolution of the crisis of identity, they differed widely over its
  content. Predictably, Buyo called for a return to proper moral knowl-
  edge as a sure antidote to the "bad knowledge" of townsmen, but this
  meant excluding commoners as knowers in order to recast them in the
  role of the ruled and make the present look like the past again. By
  contrast, from his study of Western painting, Shiba favored a concept
  of empirical investigation based on the plurality of perspectives in
  viewing an object in order to open the way for new principles of the
  organization of knowledge and society. Shiba's promotion of perspec-
  tive offered the prospect of making knowledge accessible to any group
  or person.19
  What this play of culture inspired was a broad search for new forms
  of knowledge adequate to explain to certain groups the spectacle of
  surplus and why the social image of the past no longer applied to the
  early nineteenth century. Once these new forms of knowledge were
  19 Shiba, Shunparo hikki, p. 444; also Numata Jiro, Matsumura Akira, and Sato Shosuke, eds.,
  Nihon thiso taikei, vol. 64: (1) Yogaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 449,484-5.
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  structured, they would be able to authorize the establishment of cul-
  tural constituencies and the representation of interests and claims that
  had hitherto not been granted entry into official discourse. Yet almost
  simultaneously these new configurations sought to find political forms
  consistent with the content of culture that they wished to designate.
  The play of culture differed significantly from the culture of play in
  just this capacity to envisage stable or permanent political forms conso-
  nant with the new cultural constituencies. This coupling of culture
  and politics was mandated, and even accelerated, by the apparently
  rapid deterioration of domestic order and the appearance everywhere
  of events that seemed to signify the inevitability of decline. Catas-
  trophic events like violent and unseasonable rains throughout the
  Kanto area and elsewhere, earthquakes in Echigo and Dewa (1833),
  urban "trashings" (uchikowashi), and widespread peasant rebellions
  were taken as signs of uncontrollable and unmanageable disintegra-
  tion. Prevailing political forms seemed inadequate to prevent disorder
  and to provide assistance, relief, tranquility, and the semblance of
  safety to needy peasants. It was within this framework that the foreign
  intrusion, which had already begun at the turn of the century, was
  added as one more sign confirming the generally held belief that the
  realm was doomed. Thus whereas groups sought to represent knowl-
  edge of themselves in the will to form discourses, the new discourses
  invariably sought correspondences between culture and politics. A
  good deal of this activity was poured into efforts to stem disorder and
  to provide relief, security, and assistance. Virtually all of the new
  discourses of the late Tokugawa period - Mitogaku (Mito learning),
  national learning, Western learning, and the new religions - tried to
  unite a conception of culture with politics. This impulse is surely
  reflected in the Mito identification of ceremony and polity, in nativist
  conceptions of matsurigoto (government as ceremony), the emphasis of
  the new religions on a community of believers free from hierarchy,
  and Western learning's formulations of science and morality. More-
  over, when these new discourses spoke to vital issues of order and
  security, relief and assistance, equality and fairness, they were press-
  ing not only a claim to represent interests constituted as knowledge
  but also the right to speak on questions directly affecting their constitu-
  encies. Gradually their "business," their interest, became society's
  business, just as their conception of culture and political organization
  became a substitute for the social formation as a whole. The claim of
  right to participate in and resolve problems of common concern,
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  PLAY OF CULTURE 
  l8l
  which meant survival, order, and defense, became the condition for
  creating a public realm in late Tokugawa society.
  The new claims were often rooted in questions of productivity and
  security. When they were, groups were inadvertently led to challenge
  the authority of Tokugawa society, whether it was invested in the sho-
  gunal arrangement of power or in principles of a natural order of legiti-
  macy. Such acts invariably resulted in defection from the center, the
  Tokugawa polity, at a time when authorities were finding it difficult to
  meet their own responsibilities and satisfy demands for "order" and
  "relief." Such withdrawals to the periphery were usually prompted by
  the conviction that if the Tokugawa structure could not live up to its
  obligations, then the groups would have to take care of themselves.
  Thus what appeared from the 1830s onwards was a progressive retreat
  from the center to the periphery, not as explicit acts of revolutionary
  sedition, but as an expression of diminishing confidence in the system's
  ability to fulfill its moral duties. The new cultural disciplines provided
  justification for groups to perform for themselves tasks that the Toku-
  gawa polity was now unable to perform. This required the formation of
  voluntary associations, some of which ultimately flew in the face of a
  conception of a natural order that defined groups according to then-
  natural and expected function. The occasion for this massive impulse to
  secede was provided by the way that contemporary history was grasped
  by those who acted to arm themselves with self-definition. The move to
  emphasize the production of wealth, the centrality of daily affairs, the
  importance of the communal unity for nativist thought and new reli-
  gions, and the widespread concern of all groups with aid and relief,
  mutual assistance, equality in the distribution of resources, along with
  talent, ability, and utility did not so much "reflect" the conditions of
  bakumatsu as "interpret" such facts and events. Ultimately all these new
  cultural discourses sought to merge with power that knowledge based
  on principles of inclusion and exclusion of both objects and people. To
  appeal to new forms of knowledge that different groups could know
  meant talking about different conceptions of power. Each of these
  groups saw itself and its response to contemporary problems as a solu-
  tion to the social, and imagined that the part that it represented was a
  substitute for the unenvisaged whole. The proper kind of knowledge, it
  was believed, would lead to a solution of the problems agitating society.
  All assumed that a decision on one part would disclose the shape of the
  whole. Hence Mito turned to the primacy of the autonomous domain
  sanctioned by the national polity (kokutat); kokugaku (national learning)
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  concentrated on the self-sufficient village authenticated by its relation
  to the primal creation deities; yogaku (Western learning) celebrated a
  crude form of the mercantilist state, propelled by virtue and science;
  and the new religions announced the establishment of new forms of
  sacred communalism in their effort to give permanence to a conception
  of epiphany and the liminal moment.
  All of these new discourses were formulated in the early nineteenth
  century. All aimed to understand the world anew and lessen its prob-
  lems by offering solutions. Yet they contributed as much to bakumatsu
  problems as they did to their resolution. They all were generated by a
  will to knowledge that masked more fundamental considerations of
  power. Every manifestation of how the new discourse sought to fix
  rules of formation and discipline disclosed an accompanying and al-
  most obligatory concern for the foundations of knowledge and learn-
  ing. Every discussion of the status of knowledge and learning inevita-
  bly raised questions concerning the identity of the knowers and what
  should be known.
  GOOD DOCTRINE AND GOVERNANCE
  The problem of defining cultural context and finding an adequate
  political form for it was engaged first by a generation of samurai
  intellectuals from the Mito domain (Fujita Yukoku, his son Toko,
  Aizawa Seishisai, Toyoda Tenko, the daimyo Tokugawa Nariaki) and
  their spiritual associates, Ohashi Totsuan, Yoshida Shoin, and Maki
  Izumi. As early as the late eighteenth century, Mito writers began to
  search systematically for ways to enunciate a program of practical
  discipline and education. Mito had long been the center of an ambi-
  tious historiographical project, the Dai Nihon shi, a lightning rod for
  serious-minded philosophic speculation in the Neo-Confucian mode.
  But there was a difference, if not a break, in intellectual continuity,
  between the meditations of the so-called early Mito scholars and the
  discourse of the latter Mito school.20 Whereas the early Mito writers
  clung closely to a rather formal Neo-Confucianism, the later thinkers
  selected a syncretic position that mixed parts of Neo-Confucianism,
  nativist religious, and mythic elements to produce a comprehensive
  statement very different in structure and purpose from what had gone
  before. Politically, Mito was one of the three collateral houses of the
  20 Bito Masahide, "Mito no tokushitsu," in Imai Usaburo, Seya Yoshihiko, and Bito Masahide,
  eds., Nihon shiso taiket, vol. 53: Miwgaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973), p. 561. Hereafter
  cited as Miwgaku.
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  183
  Tokugawa family and thus occupied a relatively privileged position
  near the center of power. But in economic terms, Mito, like so many
  domains in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, encoun-
  tered problems that seemed to resist conventional solutions. Fujita
  Yukoku (1774-1826), a middle-ranking retainer trained in the Mito
  historiographical bureau, called attention to the diminishing domainal
  financial resources and the consequences for people and government.
  His student Aizawa Seishisai (1781-1863) later specified the cause of
  the contemporary "crisis" when he proposed that it had stemmed from
  the decision to move the samurai off the land into towns and the
  consequent growth of the use of money and the dependence on the
  market. Mito writers were especially concerned with the economic
  impact of these changes on the ruling class, who had incurred deep
  indebtedness to meet daily expenses, as they adopted luxurious life-
  styles inspired by the pursuit of private interests. What worried the
  critics was the way that these changes seemed to have affected agricul-
  tural productivity and contributed to the growing power of merchants
  and moneylenders who benefited from the samurai's need for cash.21
  Yet they were no less sensitive to the recurrence of famines and other
  natural disasters that undermined agricultural production. Both samu-
  rai and peasants suffered from the hardships caused by such events.
  Taxes were relatively high in Mito, Yukoku noted in his Kanno
  wakumon, and the population had decreased steadily since the middle
  years of the century.
  These developments were not unique or even exceptional for the
  times, but the Mito writers interpreted them as signs of impending
  disintegration. Yukoku complained that a fondness for money and
  usury had already led to a number of disrupting abuses in the domain.
  The most serious by far in his inventory was the growing frequency of
  peasant rebellions. Here, he advised the leadership to take stock of its
  responsibilities to rule "virtuously." Instead of relying on laws and
  ordinances, always a sign of slackening control, it was necessary to
  promote a leadership skilled in the art of governance. In the context of
  the late eighteenth century, what this meant was a redefinition of
  virtue into practicality, and the training of administrators who would
  be able to understand the requirements of the times. Years later,
  Aizawa expressed grave misgivings regarding the invasion of gamblers
  21 J. Victor Koschmann, "Discourse in Action: Representational Politics in the Late Tokugawa
  Period," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980, p. 30. Published as The Mito Ideology:
  Discourse, Reform, and Innovation in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1790-1864 (Berkeley and Los
  Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  and idlers into Mito and saw their presence as a manifestation of moral
  decay. He concluded that such unwanted guests had been permitted to
  enter the domain because of administrative laxity and ignorance con-
  cerning the way that they could corrupt village morals and encourage
  peasants to abandon work for drink, gambling, and expensive foods.
  Underlying this was the belief that ordinary people naturally loved
  profit and were eager to pursue private interest whenever they were
  given the slightest opportunity. Aizawa also feared the influence of
  new religions like the Fuji cult (Fujiko), which had recently estab-
  lished itself in Mito and was beginning to recruit large numbers of
  followers among the peasantry.22 But he reserved his harshest judg-
  ment for Christianity, a "cruel and unjust religion," which won over
  the minds of ignorant people and diverted them from the path of
  moral rectitude.
  The Mito writers were convinced that the problems threatening
  domain integrity resulted from inadequate leadership. If the masses
  lost their way, it was because the managerial class had abdicated its
  responsibilities to provide moral examples.2* Fujita Toko (1806-55)
  lamented that the way of loyalty and filiality had disappeared. Order
  could be restored by clarifying these principles once more and redirect-
  ing the rulers to govern the realm properly. Yet, he noted, this would
  require an understanding of the part and the whole, between the
  leader and the people, the domain and the realm.
  The sanction for the Mito effort to resolve the contemporary crisis
  lay in the reunification of learning and doctrine. Writers like Fujita
  Yukoku argued the necessity of knowing how to rectify names
  (seimeiron) and straightening the arrangement of duties so that name
  would correspond to responsibility (meibunron). In the rectification of
  names he saw the general problem of social decay as a failure of
  representation in language. In this Yukoku shared the assumptions of
  an eighteenth-century discourse that had already drawn attention to
  the problematic relation between words and the things they were sup-
  posed to denote. Because names and status no longer conformed to
  reality, it seemed imperative to realign name to truth.** A realignment
  along these lines made possible by language itself promised to retrieve
  the archetypical way of loyalty and filiality. According to Yukoku,
  In the realm, there are lords and retainers, and there are the upper and lower
  orders. If the designations of lords and retainers are not corrected, the divi-
  22 "Shinron," in Mitogaku, p. 105. Shinron has been translated by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi in
  Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modem Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
  University Press, 1986). 
  23 Koschmann, "Discourse in Action," p. 34.
  24 "Seimeiron," in Mitogaku, p. 10.
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  DOCTRINE AND GOVERNANCE 
  185
  sion between the aristocratic and nonaristocratic classes will blur, and distinc-
  tions between the upper and lower orders will vanish. The strong will come to
  despise the weak and the masses will be thrown into confusion and disorder.2'
  His son Toko went even further when, following the lead of contempo-
  rary nativists, he noted that even though in ancient times the Way had
  no name by which it was known, everybody naturally knew and under-
  stood its requirements. Although writing did not exist in that remote
  age, the meaning of the Way was conveyed through song and poetry (a
  point made earlier by Kamo Mabuchi in the Kokuiko), in manners,
  custom, deportment, education, and government. Yet when the effort
  was finally made to express the Way in written texts, its "true and
  original nature suffered."26 Both writers believed that rescuing the Way
  in language in their times was the supreme duty of leadership and the
  first principle of education. The Mito conception of the Way differed
  from the more established Neo-Confucian view of the conviction that
  the Way could not be found in nature but only through human effort, a
  proposal they shared with the eighteenth-century philosopher Ogyu
  Sorai. Victor Koschmann has argued, in this connection, that
  " . . . representation . . . means precisely the objectification of the
  'natural' state (the Way of heaven, unity between Heaven and Earth)
  through some form of'unnatural' (linguistic, instrumental, demonstra-
  tive) action. The object to be represented through human mediation is
  Heaven itself, not a temporary arrangement. "27
  By calling attention to the operation of rectification and designation,
  the Mito writers were able to demonstrate the primacy of the domain
  as an adequate space for the realization of the necessary alignments.
  Much of their formulation was powered by a strategy that reduced the
  parts to an essential and original whole, to the primal origins of the
  realm as expressed in the term kokutai (national polity or body).
  Kokutai was identified as the whole for which the parts stood. For the
  Mito writers, the concept represented the indissoluble link between
  status and loyal behavior (chuko no michi) and the corresponding net-
  work of designations and duties. It was their intention to show how
  the realignment of name and duty could again be implemented in the
  domain and how, in fact, the appeal to kokutai mandated the resuscita-
  tion of the domain along such lines. To argue in this fashion was to
  propose that a morally reconstituted domain serve as a substitute for
  the whole. This was surely the meaning of Yukoku's enunciation, in
  25 Takasu Yoshijiro, ed., Mitogaku laikei (Tokyo: Mitogaku taikei kankdkai, 1941), vol. 3,
  p. 382. 
  26 Koschmann, "Discourse in Action," p. 52. 
  27 Ibid., p. 61.
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  his Seimeiron, of the vertical ties of loyalty that stretched from the
  emperor down through the lower orders. But it is also evident that the
  lynchpin in this hierarchical chain was the domainal lord. "How can
  we strengthen the rectification of duties and designation," Yukoku
  asked rhetorically, "How is the country of the bakufu to be governed
  today? . . . At the top we live under the heavenly descendants, and at
  the bottom we are tended by the various lords."28
  With this strategy, the Mito writers were in a position to interpret
  the events they encountered in the early nineteenth century and make
  reality appear less problematic. They moved along a rather broad arc
  whose terminal points were marked by a profound distrust of the
  people and a moral sense of benevolence and compassion for them.
  Among the recurring anxieties expressed in their writings, none
  seemed more urgent and frightening than the prospect of imminent
  mass disorders in a countryside affected by foreign intrusion and, by
  implication, the incapacity of the Tokugawa bakufu to stem the swell-
  ing threat of mass civil disorder. The growing incidence of peasant
  rebellions since the late eighteenth century, they believed, related to
  the disabled status of the domain itself and reflected a widespread
  agreement that the general administrative machinery no longer func-
  tioned properly. Mito writers regularly complained that the shogunate
  had departed from its earlier role as the largest domain among equals
  to pursue policies deliberately designed to undermine the military and
  financial autonomy of its peers. By the end of the eighteenth century it
  was clear that these policies had made the domains more dependent on
  the bakufu. Resolving the domains' declining status required persuad-
  ing the bakufu to accept a less exalted position in the arrangement of
  authority. But this move was prefigured by the Mito insistence on
  rectifying names, duties, and designations as a necessary condition for
  the moral realignment of the system. If the bakufu fulfilled the expec-
  tations associated with its name, it would cease acting in a self-
  interested manner.
  Once the relationship between shogunate and domains was recti-
  fied, it would be possible to turn to the problem of the ruled. People
  can be governed, Aizawa announced, only when rulers rely on the
  Way of loyalty and filiality. This proposition was not based simply on
  a dim view of human nature - most members of the managerial class
  in Tokugawa Japan held that as an article of faith - but on a more
  complex conviction that because an agricultural population was neces-
  28 Takasu, Milogaku taikei, vol. 3, p. 388.
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  DOCTRINE AND GOVERNANCE 
  187
  sary to the survival and welfare of order, it must be made to acknowl-
  edge its duty to produce as a moral trust. This was also what Fujita
  Yukoku had meant when he proposed that "people are the basis of the
  realm. If they constitute a firm foundation, then the realm will also be
  stable."2' Aizawa, who constantly referred to the people in uncompli-
  mentary terms, believed that because they were predictably disorderly
  and forever prevented from acquiring the niceties of virtue, they were
  capable only of being led. But leading the people meant making sure
  they produced. "People properly should rely . . . on rules; they
  should not know them."3°
  Under the sanction of this conception of privilege, the Mito writers
  directed their rhetoric toward explaining the reasons that the people
  were "naturally" excluded from having knowledge and why they had to
  be ruled, which meant work. If the ordinary folk were left to their own
  devices and were not persuaded to perform their proper duties, Aizawa
  explained, they would act like children and pursue profit, pleasure, and
  personal luxury at every opportunity. The possession of knowledge
  entitled a few to rule and required the many to follow. Neither the
  exercise of coercion nor the accumulation of wealth was equivalent to
  knowledge as conditions for rulership. Those who "should not know"
  must always depend on the informed guidance of those who "know."
  This conception of knowing and knowers prompted the Mito writers to
  look harshly on all religions organized to enlist the people, because their
  doctrines invariably promoted forms of nonexclusionary knowledge
  accessible to all. Fujita Toko declared rather excitedly in his commen-
  tary on the establishment of an academy in Mito (Kodokankijutsugi) that
  heretical doctrines continue to "delude the people" and "bewilder the
  world." As a result, he discerned a causal relationship between the
  slackening of belief in the true Way and the dissolution of ties of depen-
  dence, currently reflected in the incidence of peasant uprisings. Yet he
  was convinced that these disturbances were only manifestations of new
  forms of knowledge that actually confused and confounded the people
  to embark on a course of disorderly conduct.
  Hence, the Mito writers viewed disturbances as expressions of pri-
  vate interest encouraged by new opportunities for the pursuit of self-
  indulgence and new religious doctrines promising rewards to all. To
  offset such threats they recommended the establishment of a regime
  devoted to benevolence and compassion and advised the leadership to
  "love" and "revere" the people. Once love and reverence were actual-
  29 Takasu, Mitogaku taikei, vol. 3, p. 179. 
  30 "Shinron," in Mitogaku, p. 147.
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  ized in concrete measures, they believed, the fears of the managerial
  class would diminish, and the incidence of "unhappiness" in the coun-
  tryside would disappear. Despite Aizawa's scarcely concealed contempt
  for "mean people," he remarked that "loving the people" required hard
  commitments from the leadership. He believed with his teacher
  Yukoku, who had earlier called for a program promoting people's wel-
  fare, in "assisting the weak and restraining the strong, fostering the old
  and loving the young, prohibiting laziness and idleness. . . ."3" He
  sided with Tokugawa Nariaki who, upon becoming lord of Mito in
  1829, announced the promise of a reform reflecting the leadership's
  duty to love and provide care for the people. "Virtue is the root,"
  Nariaki declared, "commodities the branch"; a virtuous leadership can-
  not "avoid bestowing blessings on the people."
  The issue that the Mito writers sought to resolve was how to in-
  crease productivity and exercise greater control. The "good teachings"
  of etiquette and civilization, which Aizawa believed only the leader-
  ship could know, were guarantees of permanent order and wealth. By
  equating the status ethic and its proper discrimination throughout the
  domain with "loving the people," the Mito thinkers could argue that if
  leadership "bestowed proper blessings upon the people," the realm
  would administer itself. Yet if the rulers abandoned "good doctrine,"
  the people would, according to Toko, "Avoid political laws as one
  avoids an enemy. Their yearning will be like that of a child for a
  mother's affection." When people are not under moral control, Toko
  noted, recalling Oshio's recent rebellion in Osaka in 1837, they will
  resemble a "product that first putrefies and then gives way to worms
  and maggots. People who are heretical are similar to those who are ill.
  Men who govern the sick will first promote their health; men who
  expel heresy will first cultivate the Great Way." Nariaki and later
  observers continued to assert that if the "peasantry bears a grudge or
  resents the upper class, it will not stand in awe of them." Control
  required providing assistance which, in this context, referred to restor-
  ing order in the Mito domain. "If we succeed in exhausting our inten-
  tions day and night to return the blessings, we will be able to sympa-
  thize with all our hearts. . . ." But control, through the blessing of
  conferring assistance and relief, required returning people to the land
  and. increasing their productive labor. Earlier, Fujita Yukoku had
  outlined a program for "enriching the domain" in Kanno wakumon,
  and in the late 1830s Nariaki and Toko worked out a comprehensive
  31 Takasu, Mitogaku utikei, vol. 3, p. 179.
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  land policy that included a land survey, a realignment of tax quotas,
  greater efforts for empathy to draw peasants and local officials more
  closely together, a study of new agricultural techniques, and, not least
  important, a recall of samurai from Edo back to Mito. This last plank,
  which announced the domain's intention to withdraw from the center
  for a reliance on its resources in the periphery, was more than enough
  to disturb large numbers of retainers who had become accustomed to
  city life.
  The lord of Mito thought that the times were ripe for a "restoration of
  the domain" (kokka o chukoshi) in the 1830s and a "renovation of custom
  for the unification of all." The purpose of the economic and educational
  reforms Nariaki announced in the late 1830s was to halt the fragmenta-
  tion of social life that had spread throughout the domain. Fragmenta-
  tion referred to "evil customs," and its elimination required economic
  and educational renovation. Aizawa had already indicated in Shimon
  (1825) that as loyalty and filiality become one, "the education of the
  people and the refinement of custom is accomplished without a word
  being spoken. Worship becomes government, and government has the
  effect of education. Thus, there is no essential difference between gov-
  ernment and the indoctrination of the people."J2 This sense of unifica-
  tion, realized through identifying teaching and doctrine, became the
  special task of the academy in Mito, the Kodokan, whose task was to
  instruct samurai and commoners (through a network of village schools)
  in how to "refine custom" and reinstate proper morality. Toko's com-
  mentary emphasized this sense of union in neat slogans designed to
  remove differences to reach the underlying similitude of all things: "the
  unification of Shinto and Confucianism," "the inseparability of loyalty
  and filiality," "sonnojoi" (revering the emperor, expelling the barbar-
  ian, a term first coined in the proclamation establishing the school; it
  meant renovating the domestic system in order to be able to withstand
  external interference), "the union of military arts and civilian skills,"
  and the "indivisibility of learning and practice." The purpose of the
  school was to reunify doctrine and government, which had become
  distinct in the course of the long peace. Duties and designation had to be
  reunited, and custom brought into line with morality.
  Following Yukoku and Aizawa, Nariaki used language that called
  attention to the basis, as against the unessential. The solution to the
  contemporary problem was to return to essentials. This meant reapply-
  ing the classic injunction of the "great learning": "The base of the
  32 "Shinron," in Muogaku, p. 56.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  realm is the family; the foundation of the family is moral discipline,"
  to the domain itself. In tightening moral relationships the domain was
  required to embark on far-reaching reforms in "custom" and "military
  preparedness." Aizawa observed in Shimon that a long peace had
  resulted in extravagant customs, indulgent lords, and the "bitterness
  of the poor," and Nariaki noted in his Kokushiden that
  with a tranquil realm we can never forget about rebellion . . . we have forgot-
  ten about the thick blessings that have been bestowed by peace today . . . and
  we have been concerned only with being well fed and well clad. The samurai
  have become effeminate and resemble a body that contracts with illness after
  exposure to cold, wind, or heat. They are idlers and wastrels among the four
  classes."
  In this way the Mito discourse came to see in the domainal space the
  only prospect for a genuine restoration. Toyoda Tenko, in an essay
  composed along restorationist lines in 1833, wrote that even though
  the "ancients wrote that 'a restoration is always difficult to accom-
  plish,' it must be even more difficult to do so today. "34 Yet he was
  convinced that the time and place were right. The ancients had linked
  the achievement of a restoration to the successful termination of a
  rebellion, but Tenko saw the recent decline of the domain as equiva-
  lent to embarking on the difficult task. The logic for this conception of
  restoration had been powerfully articulated by Yukoku in the late
  eighteenth century and was eloquently restated by Aizawa, who saw in
  the moment an opportunity that comes only once in a thousand years.
  Aizawa's proposals were propelled by his belief that the bakufu had
  willfully followed a policy of self-interest, in which the base had been
  strengthened at cost to the branches.« Aizawa charged that this repre-
  sented a distortion of Ieyasu's original intention. Ieyasu had strength-
  ened the center and weakened the periphery in order to head off
  rebellion and anarchy. He had done this by assembling the warriors in
  the cities, where their stipends were weakened, and by sheltering the
  people from a military presence.*6 "The military were lessened, and
  the masses were made into fools." But Aizawa believed that the time
  had now come to reverse this policy and to strengthen both the base as
  well as the ends by "nourishing" and "strengthening" the lords.37 If
  the lords were permitted to play the role originally designated to them
  by the emperor, Yukoku had asserted earlier, they could turn to the
  task of rectifying their own domains. Though he acknowledged the
  33 "Kokushiden," in Miiogaku, p. 211. 
  34 "Chuk6shinsho,"inAfttog<7*u, p. 197.
  35 "Shinron,"inMitogaku, p. 73. 
  36 Ibid., pp. 73-4. 
  37 Ibid., p. 78.
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  overlordship of the Tokugawa shogun, Aizawa wrote in the Tekii hen
  that there was a reciprocal relationship between lord and subject. The
  vertical relationships outlined by Yukoku thus gained new force in the
  context of domain reform in the formulations of Aizawa and Nariaki.
  The shogun should assist the court and govern the realm, just as local
  leaders should support the emperor and obey the bakufu's decrees in
  their provinces. But "the people who obey the commands of the
  daimyo are in effect obeying the decrees of the Bakufu."38 Because the
  bakufu was limited by the court, it had not absolute authority over the
  Mito domain. What this meant for Mito ideologues was the elevation
  of the domain and the virtual reversal of the base-ends metaphor.
  The intellectual sanction for this new edifice envisaged in the Mito
  discourse was the identification of the whole in a mystical body called
  kokutai. Elaboration of this seminal idea was provided chiefly by
  Aizawa in his Shimon. This construct was universal and absolute, but
  it could mobilize the rich tradition of Japanese mythohistory.
  The heavenly ancestors introduced the way of the gods and they have
  established doctrine; by clarifying loyalty and filial piety they began human
  history. These duties were ultimately transferred to the first sovereign and
  they have since served the great foundation of the state. The emperor joined
  these divine ordinances to his own body.'*
  Just as the emperor looked up to the virtue of the heavenly descen-
  dants, Aizawa continued, so the people received in their bodies the
  heart of their ancestors and respected and served the emperor for an
  eternity. When the emperor receives the will of their ancestors, there
  can be no change in history. Similarly, the emperor himself, wor-
  shipping his ancestor the sun goddess, has realized the principle of
  filial piety and reveals this obligation to the people. Because the princi-
  ple of loyalty and filiality had existed without needing to be articu-
  lated, daily practice - the practice of the body - signified the insepara-
  bility of worship, ceremony, and governance.
  Such an ideal had always been represented in ritual. In the first
  book of the Shimon, Aizawa discussed how ancient rulers displayed
  filiality by carrying out worship at ancestral tombs and in performing
  the solemn ceremonies and rites.40 The most important of these rituals
  was the daijosai, the great food-offering ritual performed by each new
  emperor at the time of the first harvest after his succession. The rite
  38 Koschmann, "Discourse in Action," p. 171; also Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual
  History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1974), p.- 305. 
  39 Koschmann, "Discourse in Action," p. 79.
  40 "Shinron," in Mitogaku, pp. 81 ff.
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  consisted of offering new grain to the sun goddess (Amaterasu), but
  the significance of the ritual was its reiteration of archetypal themes
  such as the divine creation of the land and the benevolence of
  Amaterasu toward her people. Aizawa noted that in the actual ritual,
  subject and sovereign experience the presence of Amaterasu and ulti-
  mately "feel like descendants of the gods." For a moment, history is
  frozen; past flows into present; and the great principles of loyalty and
  filiality - dramatized by the exchange between sovereign, who pre-
  sents the divine progenitor with riches she has made possible, and her
  subjects, who must return the "blessings" - are represented as time-
  less and universal norms. By invoking the example of this great ritual,
  Aizawa was able to show how mere history, a record of changing
  circumstances, differed from timeless truths reaching back to mythical
  origins. The daijosai annuls history; the primal moment restores to
  each participant presence and self-identity. The ceremony should
  unify sovereign, subject, and descendants and thus dissolve the divi-
  sion between governance and worship. "If the whole country reveres
  the heavenly deities, then all will know how to respect the emperor."
  If civilization in Japan was to withstand the erosion of history, it was
  important for the people to know how to express respect as repre-
  sented in ritual. The present was the appointed time, a unique oppor-
  tunity, Aizawa said, "to inform the people of this principle and purify
  the public spirit." When this great enterprise had been accomplished,
  "past will be united to present," sovereign to people.
  In this manner the essential national body, a mystical whole signify-
  ing origins and continual presence, validated the domain's claim to
  restore the great principles of loyalty and filiality. For the Mito writ-
  ers, the ideal oikokutai functioned at several levels. It represented the
  whole to which the parts - the domains - could relate; it also pro-
  vided the sanction for the domain, pledged to reinstate the timeless
  principles, to act as a substitute for the whole. Kokutai served to
  remind every generation of the essential beginnings from which all
  things had come and to which all things are reduced. This is surely
  what the Mito writers meant when they advised contemporaries "not
  to forget about the basis" and to "return the blessing to its origins."
  What could be more essential than the body of the realm, however
  shapeless, vague, and mystical, the karada (body) of the kuni (coun-
  try)? "What is this body of the country?" Aizawa asked, and he an-
  swered, "If countries do not have a body, it cannot be made by men. If
  a country has no body, how can it be a nation?"'" Aizawa envisaged
  41 Ibid., p. 69.
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  this body as a form that distinguished the idea of a unified realm from
  chaos. It was his purpose to link the sense of the whole to a new
  pohtical space represented by the autonomous domain. His actual
  proposals for reform were unexceptional and echoed Yukoku's earlier
  suggestions and Nariaki's later measures. Yet they confirmed the be-
  lief in the inseparability of representation and action, learning and
  practice.
  Changes in contemporary history altered the character of the Mito
  discourse. This is not to say that the Mito writers changed their minds
  about the veracity of their vision but only to suggest the possibility of
  varying emphases within the discourse. Whereas in the 1840s, Mito
  rhetoric was pressed into service to reconstitute the domain through a
  series of reforms, in the 1850s and 1860s, as the area of political space
  widened, the reformist impulse came to address national issues and to
  advocate direct action. Whereas the earlier goals aimed at rebuilding
  the domain without necessarily affecting the bakufu, the later course
  of action made the destruction of the shogunate a condition for realiz-
  ing domainal autonomy. The generation of samurai intellectuals who
  had been attracted to the Mito discourse in the Tempo period, not to
  mention the retainers of the domain itself, turned gradually to repre-
  senting the ideals in the form of direct action calling for a restoration
  of imperial authority and the destruction of the bakufu. Mito retainers
  themselves had taken matters into their hands in i860 when they
  participated in the assassination of the shogunal counselor Ii Naosuke.
  Four years later the domain was torn apart by civil war. Yet the
  theoretical justification for extending representation to include direct
  action was provided by thinker-activists like Yoshida Shdin, Ohashi
  Totsuan, and Maki Izumi. The general outline of this Mito theory of
  action was propelled by the recognition that in the new political arena
  of the 1850s, especially after the opening of the country (1854) and the
  subsequent signing of commercial treaties with Western nations, the
  bakufu no longer possessed either the authority or the will to speak for
  the nation as a whole. Such authority resided with the emperor, as the
  Mito writers had proposed earlier in their discussion of vertical rela-
  tionships, and it was he who must now lead directly in the great
  accomplishment of renovation.
  Yoshida Shoin (1830-59), a specialist in military instruction in the
  Choshu domain, saw the signing of the commercial treaties as the
  opportunity to dramatize the failure of the bakufu. What he de-
  manded of the shogunate was a domestic order that could withstand
  foreign contact. He recognized that the bakufu had succumbed to the
  treaties out of indecision and fear. But the new treaties affected the
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  nation as a whole, not simply the shogunate or the domains. "If prob-
  lems arise in the territory of the shogun," he wrote at the time, "they
  must be handled by the shogun; if in the domain of the lord, by the
  lord."*2 This was fully consistent with the Mito arrangement of author-
  ity and its corresponding definition of jurisdiction. The problems fac-
  ing Japan in 1856-7 were not restricted to the shogun or indeed the
  lord but involved both because they now related to the security of the
  imperial land itself. It was the emperor, not the shogun, who had the
  right to make authoritative decisions concerning foreign demands,
  because the crisis imperiled all of Japan. "This affair (the signing of
  the treaties) arose from within the territory of the emperor." Hence,
  the shogunate had shown not only weakness but had actually commit-
  ted treason by committing an act of lese-majeste.
  The bakufu had acted willfully and "privately" by agreeing to treaty
  negotiations. Yoshida proposed that its officials be punished and the
  institution dismantled for ignoring an imperial decree calling for the
  immediate expulsion of foreigners. The bakufu had committed a
  crime of unprecedented magnitude: "It has abjured heaven and earth,
  angered all the deities . . . it has nourished a national crisis today and
  bequeathed national shame to future generations. . . . If the imperial
  decree is honored, the realm will be following the Way. To destroy a
  traitor is an act of loyalty." To this end Yoshida, in his last years (he
  was a casualty of the Ansei purge of 1859) worked out a program that
  would best fulfill the requirements of direct action and loyal behavior.
  He called for a rising of "grass-roots" heroes, appealing principally to
  the samurai and independent villagers, willing to leave their homes
  and perform what he called meritorious deeds.
  If there is no rising of independent patriots, there will be no prosperity. How
  will these unaffiliated men reinstate the saintly emperor and wise lords? Men
  who follow my aims and are of my domain must follow this rising. Through
  the unauthorized power of the rising, small men will be excluded, evil men
  will be thrown out, and correct and able lords will be able to gain their
  placed
  Yoshida's call for an organization of grass-roots patriots willing to
  act directly was also the subject of Ohashi Totsuan's (1816-62) medita-
  tion concerning the contemporary situation. Ohashi, who came from
  the small domain of Utsunomiya, affiliated with Mito, and was contem-
  plating the possibility for direct action at the same time that Yoshida
  42 Quoted in H. D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
  California Press, 1970), p. 219. 
  43 Ibid., p. 237.
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  was seeking to call his own followers to arms against the bakufu.
  Ohashi was more consistently committed to classic Neo-Confucian
  arguments concerning the importance of differentiation between civili-
  zation and the barbarism represented by the West. Yet this philo-
  sophic conservatism merely elaborated Mito ideas on expulsionism
  (joiron). Ohashi's thinking on restoration first favored removing incom-
  petents from high shogunal offices. This effort to rob the bakufu of its
  top leadership (favored by Yoshida as well) showed the later restora-
  tionists how to dramatize the issue of able leadership and also how to
  paralyze the bakufu. The failure of this tactic later encouraged others
  to consider raising a small army for an imperial campaign against the
  shogunate, something that was first suggested by the Satsuma retainer
  Arima Shinshichi (in 1862) and tried by Maki Izumi a year later.
  Ohashi's most explicit statement on restoration appears in a work he
  completed in 1861 called Seiken kaifuku hisaku (A secret policy for a
  restoration of political authority). The work was written in response to
  the bakufu's attempt of i860 to unite court and shogunate by securing
  Princess Kazu no Miya as the consort of the shogun. His plan sought
  to extend the culturalism of his earlier writings.
  Since the coming of the foreigner and the expansion of commerce, the
  Bakufu's position has not been good; it has carried temporizing to extremes,
  and the arrogance of the barbarians has been rampant . . . Bakufu officials
  are afraid of them. . . . Even though only one barbarian was permitted to
  enter in the beginning, now several have pushed their way in. . . . Although
  trade is not yet three years old, the rising prices of commodities, the exhaus-
  tion of domainal resources, and the impoverishment of the lower classes must
  be viewed as disasters.**
  Ohashi was also convinced that the bakufu had systematically under-
  mined the "brave and loyal samurai" of "courageous domains." The
  only solution, he reasoned, was a call to arms under the "banner of an
  imperial decree."
  Like Yoshida, Ohashi believed that the decision to take Japan out of
  the hands of the barbarians belonged to the imperial court. Hence, he
  declared, all people, out of love of the emperor, lay waiting for the
  "august movement of the court. . . . As with the booming clap of a
  thunderous voice, once an imperial decree is promulgated all men
  must act, since all will be inspired. It will be like the collapse of a dam
  holding back a lake." Ohashi believed that the bakufu had violated the
  strictures of meibun and had acted out of contempt of the court. He
  44 Ibid., p. 270.
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  was convinced that nine of every ten men were alienated from the
  Tokugawa exercise of power. "The people of the realm," he urged,
  "must abandon the Tokugawa before it is too late, deepen their devo-
  tion to the imperial court, and move toward a revival of the emperor's
  power. The time must not be lost."
  Ultimately Ohashi's views on restoration melded into the organiza-
  tion of a small group of plotters - grass-roots heroes, recruited from
  Mito and Utsunomiya, willing to execute a plan to assassinate the
  shogunal counselor Ando Nobumasa. The plot was carried out in 1862
  and is known as the Sakashitamon incident. Ohashi saw the assassina-
  tion as the occasion for both a rising of patriots and the promulgation
  of an imperial decree condemning the bakufu. Although he played no
  direct role in the attempted murder (Ando was wounded), he was
  willing to accept responsibility for his part in its planning.
  The failure of Ohashi's theory of restoration prompted a shift to the
  second method, that of raising an army of loyalists prepared to embark
  on an imperial campaign. This method was developed chiefly by the
  Kurume priest Maki Izumi (1813-64), an enthusiastic follower of the
  Mito discourse. The locus of activity also shifted from Edo to Kyoto,
  the site of the imperial court and the emperor. Whereas Ohashi
  stressed the more formal Neo-Confucian elements in the Mito dis-
  course, Maki, owing to his Shinto education, emphasized the native
  mythohistorical dimensions of the discourse. Maki was also critical of
  the meditative and quietistic tendencies of Neo-Confucianism, which
  he felt contained little sense of practicality. Neo-Confucianism, like
  Zen, was too abstract to use in understanding the contemporary situa-
  tion. It was his intent to replace passivity, meditation, and self-
  cultivation with direct action.
  Maki also plunged into national politics in the early 1860s after
  spending years in house imprisonment for activities in the Kurume
  domain. Almost immediately, he began to develop a theory of an
  imperial restoration to arrest the "unceremonial" behavior of the bar-
  barians and to punish the "effeminacy" of the wavering bakufu. He
  was convinced that it was the court's duty to seize the initiative and to
  act. This was the moment, he wrote in 1861, to encourage the emperor
  to promulgate an expulsionist policy that would announce the restora-
  tion of imperial authority. In a letter to a Kyoto courtier, Maki out-
  lined the way to accomplish a restoration: (1) Select talented men for
  positions of political responsibility; (2) reward men who act for the
  court with status; and (3) preserve the "great polity of the realm" by
  "returning to the prosperity of antiquity." Here, Maki brought to-
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  gether two themes - kokutai and the heavenly ordinance, both familiar
  conceptions within the Mito discourse, and pressed them into the task
  of formulating a new theory of emperor. To see the emperor armed
  with the moral authority of heaven and the divinity of the national
  ancestors and personalized by history (a tactic that the Mito writers
  failed to promote) became the condition for Maki's call for restoration.
  His theory sought to actualize the Mito conception of representation
  by calling up the historical characteristics of ancient emperors (al-
  though Mito merely summoned the principle, not the principal, of
  imperial authority) and rescuing the sovereign from his seat "beyond
  the clouds," as he put it, in order to liberate him from court conceal-
  ment and return him to the world of politics. He believed that this
  conception of the emperor, now conforming to hard, concrete ele-
  ments derived from actual history, corresponded to the requirements
  of contemporary political reality more closely than to the bland and
  abstract image envisaged by the Neo-Confucians.45
  Maki saw the present as the moment in which to implement what he
  called, in his Kei-i gusetsu, a "great enterprise." He later translated the
  "great enterprise" into an "imperial campaign" against the bakufu.
  The idea of such an "imperial campaign," pledged to bring about a
  restoration, was authorized by historical examples. Emperors in the
  past had satisfied heaven's requirements to act. "Jimmu tenno had
  erected the great feudal system, established the teachings of Shinto,
  and unified the public spirit. . . . Temmu tenno expanded the skills in
  a hundred ways. He planned for the central administration, swept
  away abuses in the court, established a prefectural system . . ." An-
  cient imperial precedents showed contemporaries that current condi-
  tions necessitated a comparable response, what Maki called the "labor
  of the august Imperial Body." But completing this act in the present
  demanded commitment and heroism. In i860 and 1861 Maki con-
  ceived of a plan to organize an imperial campaign aimed at overthrow-
  ing the bakufu. In an essay called the Record of a Great Dream he
  argued that the time had arrived for the emperor to exercise direct
  authority by issuing an edict branding the shogun a traitor and
  usurper. The edict would also call for an imperial campaign led person-
  ally by the emperor from a new base of operations established in the
  Hakone mountains. There, the emperor would take up residence and
  assemble shogunal officials for punishment. Next, he would summon
  the young shogun Iemochi and demand from him the return of former
  45 Matsumoto Sannosuke, Tennosei kokka to seiji shisd (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1969), pp. 72-82.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  imperial possessions. Finally, the emperor would enter Edo and seize
  the shogun's castle, which would become the new imperial capital,
  and issue a "proclamation announcing a great, new beginning." Be-
  cause for Maki the whole purpose of the imperial campaign was to
  destroy the bakufu, he recommended a return to an antiquity before
  the shogun and military estates had appeared as a model for the pres-
  ent, even though he favored retaining the feudal order in form. As for
  the composition of the imperial campaign, the Gikyo sansaku (1861)
  advised that the first principle had to be the recruitment of loyal lords.
  Beyond appealing to feudal lords, Maki also looked to enlisting small
  guerrilla groups composed of samurai and upper-ranking peasants
  capable of carrying out lightninglike action. In the end, Maki, to-
  gether with men from Choshu, tried to bring about an imperial restora-
  tion in 1864 at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. It was a desperate plan,
  and it failed. But Maki's concept for restoration was to become a
  rehearsal for a real and successful performance in 1868. In Maki, the
  Mito discourse, which had begun with Confucian statecraft for do-
  main reform, had gone on to provide the validation of Shinto mythol-
  ogy for the organization of efforts for nationwide reforms and
  emperor-central revolution.
  THE RESTORATION OF WORSHIP AND WORK
  Just as the Mito discourse interpreted contemporary reality in order to
  establish the "real" and the "appropriate" as justification for the autono-
  mous domain, so the nativists (kokugakusha) advanced a theory of the
  self-sufficient village as the substituted part for the unenvisaged whole.
  The nativists operated under similar constraints but-sought, in contrast
  with Mito, to represent a different social constituency selected from the
  rural rich, such as the upper and middle peasantry and village leaders.
  They also proceeded from the assumption that the vast changes in the
  content of culture necessitated finding a political form adequate to the
  transformation. Like the Mito discourse, nativism originated at an ear-
  lier time in the late seventeenth century and initially concentrated on
  resuscitating the landmarks of the Japanese literary and aesthetic tradi-
  tion. National studies represented an effort to structure what we might
  call native knowledge and matured under the guidance of scholars like
  Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) in the
  eighteenth century. Toward the end of his life Motoori began to show
  sensitivity to contemporary conditions and recommended ways of avert-
  ing social failure. Although he was the most gifted and original practi-
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  tioner of kokugaku, a man whose range of interest was truly prodigious,
  it was one of his self-styled students, Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) who
  virtually transformed the nativist discourse in the late eighteenth and
  early nineteenth century into a discipline of knowledge addressed to
  specific interests.
  This transformation resulted in a radical shift from poetic studies
  (which were carried on by Motoori's adopted son and successor
  Motoori Ohira) to practical religiosity and a preoccupation with daily
  affairs. Under Hirata's reformulation, nativism left the cities, where
  people like Motoori had lectured to wealthy townsmen and samurai,
  for the countryside, where the message was appropriated and even
  altered by the rural rich as a response and a solution to the apparent
  incompetency of the control system to provide security against disor-
  der and assistance to the general peasantry. The immediate target of
  the peasants' discontent was invariably the village leadership and the
  rural rich. Thus nativism, as it became a discourse representing the
  leading elements in the countryside, constituted a break with its origi-
  nal purpose and character. This is not to say that Hirata and his
  followers abandoned their original tenets. Hirata had started his career
  as a conventional student of kokugaku, and his earliest writings in this
  idiom concentrated on poetry and aesthetics. Early in the nineteenth
  century he broke with the main line of kokugaku and began to empha-
  size a different position, but he was still very much dependent on
  earlier formulators like Kamo Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga. Hirata
  tended to give weight and emphasis to ideas and elements in nativist
  thought that had, in earlier studies, remained recessive. The result
  was a new mapping of nativism and a plotting of its structure of
  thought to make it appear different. Hirata's mapping was virtually
  transformed into a new discipline, the study of the Japanese spirit
  (yamatogokoro no gakumon), whose subject would now be the "ancient
  Way" (koddron) rather than language and poetry. Later followers like
  Okuni Takamasa (1792-1871) reshaped these new formulations into a
  systematic field of knowledge that Okuni called "basic studies"
  (hongaku) or into a unified doctrine that Yano Gendo (1823-87) re-
  ferred to as "the study of basic doctrine" (honkydgaku).
  Adopted into a family of doctors, Hirata Atsutane appeared on the
  scene in the late eighteenth century and opened a school in Edo. He
  claimed to have studied with Motoori, but there is no record that he
  did. Almost immediately he became known as an outspoken critic of
  contemporary custom and urban mores. Intemperate to a fault, excit-
  able but self-possessed, Hirata's special targets were scholars of all
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  stripes, but especially Confucians (bunjin), whom he identified with
  writers of verbal fiction, and vulgar Shintoists. In his discussions on
  the practice of worship (Tamadasuki, 1828) he struck hard against
  contemporary preoccupations with poetic parody, wordplay, and
  gesaku fiction. Thus although he excoriated writers of verbal fiction
  for confusing people, his own concerns aimed at providing the ordi-
  nary folk with more useful instruction. Ordinary people served as both
  the subject of his lectures and the audience or object. He talked to
  them about themselves and their daily lives. Texts like the Ibuki oroshi
  and the Tamadasuki employed the language of daily speech, often the
  same idiom found in gesaku, and projected a vernacular voice studded
  with references to both the "ordinary person" (bonjiri) and to things
  constituting their world. Yet it was precisely this juxtaposition be-
  tween the "ordinary" and "extraordinary" (emphasized by Motoori in
  his discussions of aesthetic sensibility) that Hirata hoped to dramatize
  in his denunciations of contemporary scholars, poets, and writers. To
  underline this stance, he rejected the status of scholar for himself, as if
  by doing so he was cementing his ties to an audience of ordinary street
  people.
  This humble person hates scholars. . . . The scholars of Edo do not devote
  themselves to bringing people together. Still, the ordinary people are not
  nauseating. Because it is good to assemble people together, I am fond of this
  kind of association. If you ask a commoner, he will speak, but ordinarily he
  does not like (to listen to) a scholarly tale.
  Hirata boasted that there were many like himself among the ordinary
  folk, who simply did not consider themselves as scholars.*6 Specifically,
  "scholars are noisy fellows who explain the Way. Such people as Confu-
  cians, Buddhists, Taoists, Shintoists, and intuitionists broaden a bad
  list indefinitely. . . . " Scholars feared obeying the "sincerity of august
  national concern" and avoid "emphasizing the court" in their studies.
  In the end, Hirata added, they poisoned the people's intention and
  neglected the emperor. "Even though there is an abundance of men in
  society who study, what fools they all are!" The reason for this "habit"
  was that there were simply too many men "who despise the eye and
  respect the ear." It was far better to study the "words and sayings of
  men who are nearby, men of our country, rather than the sayings of
  foreigners or only the deeds expressed by ancient men." Hirata's criti-
  cism sought to show that arcane knowledge monopolized by scholars
  had no relevance to large numbers of people; the immediate was more
  46 Haga Noboru, "Edo no bunka," in Hayashiya, ed., Kasei bunka, pp. 183 ff.
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  useful than the mediate, and knowledge of what was "nearby" was prior
  to what was distant, remote, and foreign.
  If Hirata left no doubt of his dislike for contemporary scholars who
  knew nothing about the present, he saw himself as a man devoted to
  studying the "true Way" and as one who possessed "extensive knowl-
  edge of the truth."47 He believed that despite the army of erudite
  scholars inhabiting Edo, most were addicted to the good life, the
  arcane, and the strange. They all were essentially ignorant of the real
  goals by which ordinary people lived. His own lectures were first
  directed to reaching townsmen, but by the 1830s, the rural popula-
  tion. "Men of high rank have leisure time to read a great many books
  and thus the means to guide people; men of medium rank do not have
  the time to look at books and do not possess the means to guide
  people. . . ."Yet the ruled must be offered assistance and the opportu-
  nity to hear about the Way, as it was as relevant to those who might
  not be able to read well as to those who did have leisure time. "I would
  exchange one man who reads books for one who listens," he an-
  nounced to his audience, "for those who hear the Way have realized a
  greater achievement than those who have reached it through read-
  ing. "*s Clearly Hirata was claiming the necessity of offering representa-
  tion of a different kind of knowledge to the merely ordinary - those to
  whom Motoori had referred as ideal but rarely had specified or tried to
  reach. Hirata's tactic for creating a discourse designed for the ordinary
  person resulted in a shift to discussing the "ancient way" and showing
  that its content was no different from that of daily life. "Great Japan,"
  he said, "is the original country of all countries; it is the ancestral
  country. From this standpoint the august lineage of our emperor has
  been transmitted successively and rests with the great sovereign of all
  nations. The regulations of all the countries are commanded and con-
  trolled by this sovereign." The bakufu and the managerial class were
  obliged to satisfy the "spirit of Japan," which came to mean fulfilling
  the "august obligation to the spirit of Tokugawa Ieyasu" by "serving"
  and "studying antiquity."
  The immediate purpose of Hirata's thought was to allay popular
  fears concerning death and to provide consolation to the people. He
  believed that the popular mind had become confused by fashionable
  explanations that made people susceptible to the temptations of licen-
  tious and private behavior. It was for this reason, after the 1790s, that
  47 Ibid., p. 184.
  48 Muromatsu Iwao, ed., Hirata Atstaane zenshu, vol. 1: Ibuki oroshi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan,
  1912), p. 2. Hereafter cited as Hirata zenshu, 1912.
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  he apparently turned his attention to the lives of the ordinary folk. Yet
  it would be incomplete to say that his only goal was to pacify the
  present. By centering on ordinary folk in discourse, Hirata provided a
  powerful warrant for independent action.49
  Hirata's aim to offer consolation to ordinary folk involved a compre-
  hensive strategy demonstrating the connection between all things and
  establishing a genealogy for that kinship. Connectedness showed fam-
  ily resemblances, and family resemblances revealed the relationship of
  all things, past and present, owing to the common and creative powers
  of the creation deities (musubi no kamt). By promising unhappy con-
  temporaries the prospect of consolation, Hirata and his followers re-
  sorted to a systematic classification capable of representing the relation-
  ship of all things. His own favored mode of relating was expressed in
  cosmological speculation (already pursued by a number of late-
  eighteenth-century thinkers) which presumed to explain why it was
  impossible for the spirits of people to migrate after death to the
  dreaded and foul world of permanent pollution (yomi). The purpose of
  this form of speculation was to provide comfort to the large numbers
  of ordinary folk who, Hirata believed, feared death and consequently
  expressed their anxieties and unhappiness in activities such as peasant
  rebellions, escape to the cities, and self-indulgence in the privatized
  pleasures of the culture of play. Hirata's explanation (articulated in
  Tama no mihashira, 1818) was rooted in a fundamental division be-
  tween "visible things" {arawanigoto) and "matters concealed and mys-
  terious" (katnigoto). Although this classification between the seen and
  the unseen had been initially authorized by the Nihon shoki, it now
  demanded apprehending phenomena as being related in the modality
  of the part-whole relationship, which permitted reducing one thing to
  function as a substitute for another. Nativists were able to make this
  move because they believed that both realms were ultimately pro-
  duced by the creation deities. Yet they valued the world of "hidden
  things" more than the visible world of the living and made the latter
  dependent on the actions of the former. Because the invisible realm
  had been originally identified with the kami's (deities') affairs, it was
  natural to see it as the source of the phenomenal world of living things.
  But by linking the visible to the invisible in this way and bonding
  conduct in the former to judgment in the latter, Hirata and his rural
  followers were able to offer representation and even meaning to the life
  49 Despite Hirata's apparent valorization of the ordinary folk, many contemporaries would have
  agreed with the writer Bakin's assessment that he (Hirata) was less concerned with common-
  ers than he was with self-aggrandizement.
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  WORSHIP AND WORK 
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  of groups who had remained outside or on the margins of official
  discourse. Judgment of performance based on an asessment of morally
  informed behavior usually meant work and productive labor. Each
  individual was obliged to perform according to the endowment (set)
  bestowed on him at birth by the heavenly deities. Whatever one did in
  life was important and necessary.
  Hirata's elaborate cosmology did more than simply enjoin the ruled,
  the ordinary folk whom he now called by the antique name aohitokusa,
  to fall into line and work hard.*0 The significant result of his reformula-
  tion of the relationship between divine intention and human purpose
  was to transform what hitherto had been regarded as an object into a
  knowing and performing subject. Accordingly, the ordinary folk now
  occupied a position of autonomy through the valorization of their
  quotidian life and the productivity of their daily labor. By arguing that
  the living inhabited the invisible world where the spirits and deities
  resided, Hirata was able to demonstrate the existence of a ceaseless
  transaction between creation and custom. Even though each realm was
  considered separate from the other, they were nonetheless similar in
  all decisive aspects, as the living were descendants of the spirits and
  deities. If creation was initially the work of the gods, it was maintained
  by humans who continuously created to fulfill their divine obligation
  of repaying the blessings of the gods. The two primal creation deities
  established the connection of the two realms at the beginning of
  heaven and earth.5' For thinkers like Hirata, the conception ofmusubi,
  creativity and productivity, established the divisions, the classes of
  events and things, inner and outer affairs, human and sacred, visible
  and invisible, yet such categories attested to the integrated wholeness
  of life and its continuation from one generation to the next. The
  archetypal example of the creation deities making the cosmos contin-
  ued to manifest its "necessity" down to the present in manifold ways:
  the procreation of the species, the production of goods, and the con-
  stant reproduction of the conditions of human community. Musubi
  also denoted linkages, the act of binding things together, and union,
  an observation made by Okuni Takamasa that served as the leading
  principle in the formulation of the theory of harmony (wagd).
  50 This is the argument of Matsumoto Sannosuke, Kokugaku seiji shiso no kenkyu (Osaka:
  Yuhikaku, 1957). Following Maruyama's interpretation of nativism as an irrational prop
  capable of eliciting voluntary submission of the ruled to the emperor, Matsumoto shows how
  kokugaku was made to serve the ideology of the managerial class.
  51 Tahara Tsuguo, et al., eds., Nihon shiso taikei, vol. 50: Hirata Atsutane, Ban Nobutomo,
  Okuni Takamasa (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973), p. 18. Hereafter cited as Hirata Atsutane,
  Ban Nobutomo, Okuni Takamasa.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  Above all else, the most explicit sign for the continuing activity of the
  creation deities was agricultural work. Work constituted the guarantee
  that the creation would be reproduced in every generation and appeared
  as the bond holding the community together. Here, nativists offered it
  as an alternative to securing social solidarity, fully as effective as mere
  political obedience because it was associated with the sacred. In this way
  Hirata and his followers succeeded in shifting the emphasis from per-
  forming specific behavior-satisfying norms to the essence of life activity
  itself, work, now authenticated by the archetypal event of creation, as
  the measure of all real conduct in the visible realm. By altering an
  argument based on abstract principles governing power relationships to
  valorize concrete and practical mundane activities, the nativists had
  found a way to highlight the means of social reproduction and its realiza-
  tion as the content of discursive knowledge.
  In rural Japan this nativist intervention had great consequences.
  The hidden world, once the domain of the gods, now became synony-
  mous with the departed ancestors of the living. This identification
  between the hidden and the space occupied by the spirits of the living
  increasingly served to encourage folk religious practices emphasizing
  guardian deities, tutelary beliefs, and clan gods. Yet it also induced
  the community to concentrate on its own centrality in the great narra-
  tive of creation and the reproduction in custom. In texts like the
  Tamadasuki and the starchy enjoinment to daily worship, Hirata out-
  lined in some detail the way that the most mundane forms of daily life
  interacted with worship and how the lives and activities of ordinary
  people represented a religious moment. Summoning daily life to such
  a discourse and linking it to worship and religious observances made
  archaism (kodoron) meaningful to wider audiences in rural Japan. To
  be sure, Hirata imagined these mundane activities as living examples
  of the archaic precedent and authoritative proof that no real disjunc-
  tion separated the present from the preclass, folkic past. In his exposi-
  tion the ancient Way, once identified with sincerity and ethics in
  poetry and theater, forfeited its privileged status to the ordinary folk
  living in the present. When peasant leaders who had passed through
  Hirata's school juxtaposed this concentration on the unity of work and
  worship, life and labor with their perception of rural unease, it ap-
  peared to offer a solution to unrelieved fragmentation, divisiveness,
  and the threat of decreasing productivity, as well as conferring a form
  of representation on their leadership. By rescuing the ordinary folk
  from the margins of official discourse, kokugaku could enforce a com-
  munity of interests among the upper and lower peasantry and over-
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  WORSHIP AND WORK 
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  come the apparent ambiguity stalking the relationship between the
  village leaders and their followers.
  That link was provided by the status of the ancestors and the central-
  ity accorded to the village deities in binding the various parts of the
  village into a whole. Together, they constituted a world of relation-
  ships more real and fundamental than those found in the visible realm
  of public power. For the flow of ties, transactions, and traffic between
  the hidden world of the ancestors and tutelary deities and the visible
  realm of work and social relations disclosed a commonality of interest
  and purpose that transcended ascribed status and mundane ethical
  duties. The logic for this connection between work and worship in the
  rural setting was plainly prescribed by Hirata's systematization of
  ancestor respect within the larger framework of folkic religious prac-
  tices. In these lectures, he was able to link people with their ancestors
  and the creation deities, explain the central importance of the clan
  deities (ujigami) and tutelary gods (ubusuna no kamt), and show why
  the creation deities were so vital to the agricultural project. These
  explanations also became elements in the formation of a theory of
  village rehabilitation and self-strengthening. By identifying increased
  productivity and agricultural labor with religious devotion, by making
  work itself into a form of worship repaying the blessings of the gods,
  and by projecting a theory of consolation that promised immortality to
  the spirits and certain return to the invisible realms after death, Hirata
  and his followers were able to strike deeply responsive chords in the
  villages of the late Tokugawa period and present the prospect of resolv-
  ing the problems of the countryside and reconstituting life anew along
  different lines.
  The most obvious contact with village life was provided by the cre-
  ation deities and the necessity to continue agricultural work. A variety
  of writers like Sato Nobuhiro (1769-1850) and Mutobe Yoshika (1798-
  1863) pursued this connection further by showing how wealth origi-
  nated in agricultural production and how rural life corresponded to
  cosmic categories. Hirata had already, in the Tamadasuki, established
  the necessary linkages among the creation deities, the ancestors, and the
  households (ie) as indispensable to reproducing the social means of
  existence. He argued that the spirits of the dead inhabited the same
  place as the living and that they fixed the essential similarity between
  the invisible and visible realms. In an afterword to his inventory of daily
  prayers, Hirata noted that it was as important to make observances to
  one's ancestors as it was to other deities. Men who carried out house-
  hold duties properly were also obliged to pray to the deities of the ie and
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  to the shelf reserved for the ancestors. One should also worship the
  various clan deities and the deities of occupations.'2
  If the household represented the most basic and essential unit in
  Hirata's conception of the invisible world, then the village denned its
  outermost limits. Village, household, spirits (ancestors), and distant
  deities reaching back to the creation gods constituted a series of con-
  centric rings, one within the other, linked by kinship. As Hirata's
  prayers to the ancestors called for protection and good fortune of the
  household, so his invocation to the tutelary gods and guardian deities
  served to secure protection and prosperity for the village community.
  "Grant all protection to this village (sato)," the prayer intoned, "Be-
  fore the great tutelary deities we offer prudent respect. Protect the
  village day and night, and grant it prosperity."» Hirata related these
  village shrines to the hidden realm. "Regional spirits (kunitamashii)
  and the tutelary deities have been directed to share the administration
  of the realm among themselves and to assist Okuninushi no kami,
  whose basis of rule is concealed governance." Authority was manifest
  in the tutelary shrines of the various locales. While the deities con-
  ferred protection and prosperity, a thankful community should offer
  prayer, supplication, and hard work. Prayer and work meant the dif-
  ference between continued wholeness (order) and fragmentation and
  decreased productivity (disorder). Indeed, in Hirata's thinking it was
  natural to move from formal religious observance to more enduring
  forms of gratitude, work. This identification of worship and work was
  refined by others, but it is clear that Hirata figured work as another
  way of talking about worship. His conception of work was rooted in a
  concern for repaying the blessings of the kami. This meant returning
  trust to the deities who had bestowed benefits. This trust, as he
  pointed out, meant both the land that produced food and the material
  from which clothing and shelter were made.
  This sense of a powerful, hidden realm directing the fortunes of the
  living represented a structural similarity with the world of the house-
  hold and rural community. It was a world symbolized by the authority
  of the tutelary shrines (which themselves represented a manifestation
  of the invisible world) and hence the place of the village, hidden,
  powerless in the realm of public authority, but nevertheless vibrant
  with "real" activity. Here the nativists, who, like the Mito writers,
  turned away from Edo, pitted a horizontal realm, close to nature and
  origins, against the vertical world of the Tokugawa daikan, daimyo,
  52 Hirata Atsutane zenshu kankokai, eds., Hirata Atsutane zenshu (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan,
  1977)) vol. 6, pp. 4-19. Hereafter cited as Hirata zenshu, 1977. 
  53 Ibid., p. 217.
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  WORSHIP AND WORK 
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  shogun, and even emperor. The hidden world of the village, deities,
  ancestors, and descendants was more "real" than was the visible world
  of power and consumption. Without the sanction of the hidden world,
  the idea of an autonomous village would not have been possible. At its
  most fundamental level, the world envisaged by the nativists was one
  of linkages and kin relationships. It was a realm where microcosm, the
  household and the village, served as a substitute for the macrocosm,
  the so-called national soil (kunitsuchi), where the emperor as a living
  deity met the tutelary deities and the ancestors administered by
  Okuninushi and where the vertical claim of public authority collided
  with the horizontal claims of village life.
  In its rural appropriation, kokugaku sanctioned the elevation of the
  village as a substitute for the whole, as Mito had projected the domain.
  The argument for an autonomous and self-sufficient village, removed
  from the centers of power, relied on people's recognizing their duty to
  return the "blessings" to the creation deities from whom all things
  literally flowed. This meant replicating the archetypal act of creation
  through agricultural work and reproduction. Judgment and final au-
  thority lay in the hidden realm administered by Okuninushi no kami,
  not the "living deity" who was the emperor. Duty was described as a
  form of stewardship that, as stated earlier, referred to the actual event
  in which the creation gods gave something to the other deities, the
  imperial descendants, and the land itself as a trust. Trust required
  repaying the divine gift with work. Late Tokugawa kokugakusha like
  Miyauchi Yoshinaga (1789-1843), Miyao (or Miyahiro) Sadao (1797-
  1858), and Hirayama Chueimon (?-?) (all priests or village leaders)
  saw the idea of entrustment as the means to emphasize the central
  importance of agricultural life. It was in this context that Miyao, a
  Shimosa village leader, argued that the realm was founded on agricul-
  ture and that the village was the appropriate instrument for organizing
  people to work together in the countryside. Others saw the village and
  the household as one and the same. Miyauchi responded to what he
  believed were signs of fragmentation in rural life as an example of
  neglecting the imperial doctrine imparted by the two creation deities.
  Evidence appeared everywhere in "rebellion," "disorder," and "wast-
  age," which Miyauchi attributed to improper leadership. Theoreti-
  cians like Okuni coupled this notion of proper village leadership with
  the idea of an administration pledged to taking care of the people
  (buiku). All agreed that kokugaku was a method for solving problems
  in the countryside. Even a high-ranking samurai nativist scholar like
  Ikuta Yorozu (1801-37) (who followed the route of rebellion) believed
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  that peasant disturbances would cease if good doctrine and leadership
  were administered to the villages. Such a method was dramatized in
  the formulation of a conception of relief and assistance (used also by
  the new religious groups) that would program stewardship. In the
  end, stewardship or entrustment became the grounds for village self-
  sufficiency and the justification for secession from the center.54
  According to the rural nativists, all of this would be possible if
  proper knowledge were available. Miyauchi, for example, saw knowl-
  edge as the proper definition of the boundaries of order, whereby all
  persons knew what they were required to do and what was sufficient
  for their livelihood. When people violated established boundaries,
  they invited disaster. "If one does not extend (through work) the
  boundaries imposed by the heavenly deities, one will surely neglect his
  productive duties and be impatient toward them. . . . In the end it
  destroys the household and is the source of disaster. "55 Miyauchi's To-
  oyamabiko (1834) is sensitive to the frequency of rebellions and disor-
  der, and the text's apparent purpose was to understand their causes in
  order to arrest their occurrence. The question Miyauchi asked was
  how not to forget what one was supposed to do. Selfishness undoubt-
  edly turned people away from the established divisions and tempted
  them to excess. Excess transcended boundaries and could lead only to
  unhappiness and ruin. Those who had "exceeded their own bound-
  aries," neglecting "household duties," had gone beyond "endeavor-
  ing" and had ceased to work. Working for the household brought
  order; work out of that context meant disorder. Such duty represented
  "entrustment" from one's parents and beyond them from ancestors
  and deities. Following the lead of Hirata, Miyauchi enjoined people
  not only to work but also to worship the ancestral deities and pray at
  the tutelary shrines. Like other rural nativists, he tried to remind
  contemporaries that because people had become so habituated to the
  uses of money, they had forgotten the source of wealth. Treasure
  (takara) was the word that many nativists used to designate the peas-
  ants (hyakusho), and by that they meant people working in the fields.
  Such people reflected a blessing of the gods, whereas offenders of
  divine injunctions, men who committed polluting acts (tsumibito), re-
  sembled "annoying pests" who gathered together to destroy the house-
  54 The idea of a self-sufficient village "movement" was developed by Haga Noboru in several
  essays and books but notably in "Bakumatsu henkakuki ni okeru no undo to ronri," in Haga
  Noboru and Matsumoto Sannosuke, eds., Nihon shiso taikei, vol. 51: Kokugaku undo no shiso
  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), pp. 675-84. Hereafter cited as Kokugaku undo no shiso.
  55 Ibid., p. 333-
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  hold. Such concerns led Miyauchi to examine the function of tutelary
  shrines as a focus for life, work, and worship, with a constant re-
  minder of the necessity to "repay the blessings" of continued good
  fortune.
  So powerful was this impulse to restructure village solidarity around
  the tutelary shrine that it became the basis of a nationwide movement
  in the 1840s. Another Shinto priest, Mutobe Yoshika, devoted his
  major texts to elucidating the connection between such shrines and the
  two creation deities. In his cosmological Ken-yujun koron, he proposed
  that the creation deities responsible for the procreation of humans
  were indistinguishable from the gods associated with the tutelary
  shrines. "These . . . deities reside in their gun, ken, mura, native place
  (furusato), and it is decreed that their ordinances are to be regulated by
  the tutelary gods."'6 Elsewhere he argued that the division according
  to fixed boundaries and deities representing various regions in the
  country meant that each place had its own tutelary god. The purpose
  of these deities, he declared, was that they informed people regularly
  of the "secret governance" of procreation and its administration. "In
  these places people daily grasp in their lives both the spirit of activity
  and calm from . . . the shrines."5? Although the invisible government
  was not seen by mortals, it was manifest symbolically in the precincts
  of the shrines. They represented a bonding between the invisible
  realm and the visible and a guarantee of the continuing presence of the
  former in the world of the living. "The shrines of tutelary deities are
  very important," Mutobe wrote in the Ubusunashako. "Because that is
  the case, we must first offer daily prayer to these deities; next we
  should make regular visits to these shrines."58 When such devotion
  and respect was carried out faithfully, it would guarantee prosperity
  and abundance. Guided by this conviction, Mutobe was prompted in
  the 1840s to call for the establishment of a countrywide movement
  pledged to worship the tutelary deities.
  Whereas writers like Miyauchi and Mutobe were shrine priests who
  emphasized the importance of worship, Miyao Sadao, who described
  himself as a "potato-digging village official," stressed the primary role
  of the village official. Yet his concerns for leadership and work reflected
  another way of talking about worship and respect and stressing the
  importance of making the village a self-sufficient economic and political
  unit. By advising peasants to understand and preserve the "commands
  of the nanushi, which are no different from the public ordinances (of the
  56 Mutobe Yoshika, "Ken-yujun koron," Shinto sosho 3 (October 1897): 2-3.
  57 Ibid., p. 3. 
  58 Kokugaku undo no shiso, p. 229.
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  210 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  lord)," Miyao was envisaging the role of village leadership (in the man-
  ner of Mito writers writing about domainal leadership) as a substitute
  for the entrustxnent represented by the emperor, shogun, and daimyo,
  not as a challenge to officially constituted authority. His intention was
  merely to recognize that within the jurisdiction of the village, officials
  "must make the administration of the peasantry their chief duty." Most
  rural nativists acknowledged that the village, especially in bad years,
  would have to take responsibility for the extension of relief and assis-
  tance. This idea had been promoted earlier by agricultural writers of
  such differing persuasions as Ninomiya Sontoku and Ohara Yugaku.
  But assistance and relief, real necessities for village survival in the
  hardship years of the 1830s and 1840s, also underscored the primacy of
  collective purpose over private interest. It was seen as a method
  whereby the village, following the model of the household, would rely
  on its resources and its own efforts to reproduce the necessities of social
  life and thereby achieve a sense of the whole. This preoccupation with
  relief and mutual assistance, leading to the achievement of village auton-
  omy and self-sufficiency, logically drew attention to the quality of local
  leadership. Promoting policies of strict economy meant urging the peas-
  ants to increase productivity for the sake of the village community as a
  whole under the informed guidance of agricultural sages, usually village
  officials, elders, and local notables (meiboka), instead of simply tighten-
  ing their belts. Yet such leaders - Ninomiya, Ohara, and rural nativists
  like Miyao believed - had to possess the right kind of knowledge of
  rural affairs in order to validate their authority.
  For the rural nativists, knowledge meant "knowing about the
  kami." But to "know" about the kami meant also knowing about the
  ordinary folk. In other words, knowledge of the customary life of
  ordinary people was equivalent to knowledge of the deities, and vice
  versa. Village leaders were obliged to know both the divine intent of
  the gods and the conditions of daily existence that might satisfy the
  purpose of creation. Miyao described his own appointment as a divine
  trust that bound him - and all officials - to the duty of promoting
  self-sufficiency and economic self-reliance. This formulation concern-
  ing the identity of divine and human knowledge represented a transfor-
  mation of an idea introduced earlier by Hirata. Whereas Okuni
  Takamasa catalyzed the formula into a discipline of learning in the
  1850s, the rural nativists had already made its "content" a criterion for
  proper and authoritative leadership. Miyao in his Kokueki honron ad-
  vised that the wealthy of the region properly instruct the people into the
  way of the kami. He shared with thinkers like Ninomiya and Ohara
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  WORSHIP AND WORK 
  211
  the conviction that people had to be inculcated with the spirit of the
  work by showing them how their daily life related to a world larger
  than mere day-to-day subsistence and the paying of taxes. This meant
  teaching them about the necessity of producing children to increase
  the labor force and to ease the financial burden on the rural popula-
  tions By the same token, village leaders must attend to famines,
  natural disasters, and the general well-being of the community. "Un-
  economical policies," he asserted, "result in shame for the village, and
  the shame of the village becomes the shame of the lord."6" Improper
  leadership always revealed a lack of knowledge and lack of piety before
  the deities. What Miyao feared most was the ever-present threat of
  conflict and division within the village. Its officials should promote
  harmony and "guide ignorant peasants." Their trust to administer
  well was even greater in hard times because they had "replaced the
  daikan." "During times of bad harvests," Miyao stated, "one cannot
  rely on the assistance of the regional lords and officials. One helps
  oneself with one's own savings and effort. One must understand that
  one should not bother or depend on the leaders in bad times."61 To say
  this was to recognize that local autonomy and authority prevailed in
  the countryside.
  Suzuki Shigetane (1812-63), a n independent student at the Hirata
  school and a casualty in the loyalist explosions of the 1860s, gave even
  sharper expression to this identification of trust and knowledge and
  the stewardship of local leadership. In Engishiki norito kogi (1848) he
  presented the idea that officials do not differ from the emperor inas-
  much as they are obliged to offer "mutual help and assistance in the
  great august policy . . . to preserve the household enterprises given by
  the gods and make substance for food, clothing, and shelter."62 Suzuki
  was referring to the rural elite assigned to administer the communities
  under their jurisdiction. Although he accepted a division within soci-
  ety, he was convinced that each sector exercised a sacred trust to fulfill
  the divine obligations "to make things for other people in hard times."
  His student Katsura Takashige (1816-71), a village leader in Niigata,
  constructed an argument whereby Suzuki's conception of "making the
  kunitsuchi habitable for the people" was enlisted to promote the pri-
  macy of village administration. In fact, writers like Suzuki and
  Katsura simply spoke of the village as if it were the larger realm
  59 Ibid., p. 293.
  60 Miyao Sadao, "Minke yojutsu," in Kinseijikaia keizai shiryo (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1954), vol.
  5, p. 317. 
  61 Ibid., p. 304.
  62 Suzuki Shigetane, Engishiki norito kogi (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1978), pp. 13-14.
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  (kunitsuchi). In Yotsugigusa tsumiwake (1848), Katsura envisaged the
  village as the equivalent or adequate political form for the realm as a
  whole and local leaders as exemplars for peasants. This should require
  no reliance on coercive measures, laws, or ordinances, as trust bound
  ruler to ruled. Such trust was conveyed to the people through "preach-
  ing" and "exhortations" from elders and superiors. He explained how
  this was to be done:
  First, depend on the Great August intention (heart) which deepens and wid-
  ens the kami learning of the people. . . . This learning is transmitted from
  court officials (priests) who have made their own intention identical with the
  Great August Heart, down to regional lords, county officials, village chiefs,
  and headmen, to the peasantry. The peasants also receive and transmit this
  intention to each household in the learning of the deities.6*
  The systemization of kokugaku into a discipline of knowledge was
  completed by Okuni Takamasa, who sought to show how "learning
  about the kamC amounted to "learning about the ordinary folk." The
  term, he believed, referred to the realm itself. In the age of the gods,
  he wrote in Hongaku kyoyd, there had been three instances of en-
  trustment, and two in the age of men. The first of these was from the
  heavenly deities to Izanami and Izanagi; the second from Izanami and
  Izanagi to Amaterasu (the formation of the moon and sun); the third
  was Amaterasu's entrustment to the imperial ancestor Ninigi no
  mikoto.6^ For the human world, the two great grants were to Sukuno-
  bikana and Okuninushi to solidify the realm and to make it habitable.
  Here was the basis for a theory meant for local leaders searching for
  the authority to establish an arrangement of mutual assistance and
  relief in the interest of a productive and harmonious life, as well as the
  larger sanction for a restoration of antiquity. At the mythic level, this
  link was forged in the example of the grant to Okuninushi to render
  and restore the national soil to human cultivation and habitation, and
  at the historical level it appeared in demands for the local leadership
  and peasantry to live up to this trust.
  Okuni structured these trusts and obligations within the framework
  of a discipline. He associated knowledge of the gods with knowledge
  of the ordinary folk, without whom the creation would be meaningless
  and "talk about ruling the realm useless." One must always view the
  times from the perspective of the ordinary people. No real distinction
  could be made between the customs of the gods and those of ordinary
  63 Katsura Takashige, Yotsugigusa tsumiwake (Niigata, 1884), unnumbered pagination.
  64 Hiram Atsutane, Ban Nobutomo, Okuni Takamasa, pp. 408-9.
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  WORSHIP AND WORK 
  213
  people. In Yamatogokoro (1848) Okuni wrote that the human species
  was divided into two categories. The Chinese called these two catego-
  ries "great" and "small" men, but in Japan it had been the learning of
  the gods and the customs of the ordinary people. "When one learns
  about the deities, then even the small person will become a lord and
  great man, and when the lord and great man learn about the aoi-
  hitogusa, they will become as ordinary people."65 A knowledge of
  origins (moto) thereby taught that the official was the base, and one's
  body, the ends. Together, they formed a reciprocal relationship. Yet
  in recent times, he continued, the ordinary people had reversed the
  order of things and had begun to consider their "bodies as the base."
  To do so resulted in pursuing pleasure and neglecting household du-
  ties. Moreover, this habit had affected the lords as well. Okuni warned
  the lower classes against imitating upper-class habits and advised them
  to "learn well the customs of the deities." He worried most about
  conflict and disharmony, division and fragmentation. Even though
  men had different faces and appearances, they were fundamentally the
  same because they were human.66 Owing to divine intention, all hu-
  mans were linked to one another by "mutual concern." When people
  conformed to this intention, times were good, but when they went
  against it, disaster ensued.
  "The deeds of the gods join base to ends." Actualizing divine inten-
  tion in practice resulted in the organization of a human community. But
  the ends of human activity represented the making of products from the
  natural material of the land granted by the gods. If the "customs of the
  ordinary people" (work, mutual assistance, relief) were successfully
  reunited with the customs of the gods, as specified in the ancient texts,
  then the true meaning of a harmonious union would be recovered and
  made manifest in the present. Indeed, the customs of the gods were
  equivalent to the "desires of the deities." The human impulse to help
  others expressed the desire and deeds of the gods. If the identification of
  godly deeds and human nature comprised the core of Okuni's thinking
  about politics, the installation of a harmonious community, wherein all
  were united by mutual assistance, became the form he envisaged for it
  as a displacement for contemporary institutions and administration.
  Because this form of human community existed before the establish-
  ment of all historical political structures and ordinances but had been
  forgotten in time, the present generation was appointed to restore it
  from memory to resolve the contemporary "crisis."
  65 Nomura Denshiro, ed., Okuni Takamasa zenshu (Tokyo: Yuko shako, 1937-9), vo'- 3>
  pp. 18, 43. 
  66 Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 32 ff.
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  The kokugaku conception of work and mutual assistance was
  brought to completion by another rural writer from the Shimosa re-
  gion, Suzuki Masayuki (1837-71). Suzuki's central text, written just
  before the Restoration, was the Tsukisakaki, which tried to demon-
  strate that work was fundamental to life and that activity and perfor-
  mance represented the fulfillment of the cosmic plan. He attributed
  the "generation of all living things" first to the primal creation gods
  and then to the ancestral spirits. The spirits, he believed, were actually
  kami who had formerly been humans. The meaning of creation was,
  therefore, related to the "generation of life." Since the beginning of
  time, all "have endeavored similarly for the enterprise of generating
  life." Such an enterprise prevented conflict and disharmony. Excesses
  everywhere, Suzuki noted, could be avoided if people pursued the
  completion of virtue by working to generate life. Yet the generating of
  life bespoke mutual assistance, much in the manner that it had been
  conceptualized by Okuni Takamasa. "To work by and for oneself,"
  Suzuki wrote, "will, in general, fail to bring about an accomplish-
  ment" of the great enterprise.6? Like many nativists, Suzuki appealed
  to the body as a model, not to specify never-ending pleasures, but to
  represent the unity symbolized by household and village. The eyes
  see, he declared, the ears hear, the mouth speaks, the hands hold, and
  the feet move; each part relies on "mutuality" in order for the whole -
  the body - to operate. Suzuki then projected this metaphor to de-
  scribe people working together as the key to realizing the great enter-
  prise. If any part fails to assist the other, the body will collapse into
  dysfunction, just as neglect of reciprocity in work will terminate the
  "generation of life" and plunge the realm into disorder.
  Suzuki was convinced that destruction of the work ethic would
  drive the realm into riot and rebellion, forcing people to turn against
  one another and transforming Japan into the image of China. Ultimate
  responsibility for the interruption of life-generating activity, however,
  belonged to the lords, and not to village officials. Lords obstructed
  and often prevented people from performing work. Suzuki went fur-
  ther than most nativists to portray the disruption and discontinuity
  between ruler and ruled and showed how kokugaku, in creating a
  discourse centering on the producer - the ruled - would hold the lead-
  ership responsible for interfering in activities necessary to the continua-
  tion of life. The lord, like the parent, provided the conditions for life-
  giving activity; the land constituted the basis of this activity. But
  67 Sagara Tom, ed., "Tsukisakaki," vol. 24 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: Chuo kdronsha, 1972),
  p. 387-
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  RELIGIONS OF RELIEF 
  215
  although this arrangement reflected a positive good, it could also turn
  into evil. Work and productivity could be misused by the lord for
  private and selfish purposes. Private desire drove the realm into a
  "deep valley." Higher loyalties to the land and to the deities should be
  repaid with life-generating work. Suzuki's explanation of private de-
  sire rested on the conviction that confusion was caused by "evil doc-
  trines." It was necessary to "jettison the evil and mistaken doctrines of
  foreign countries (China) and return to the original intention . . . to
  cast off contemporary abusive customs in order to study the ancient
  minds." In his last, post-Restoration text on local government, Suzuki
  pointed to the village as the crucible for carrying on life-generating
  activity and an autonomous administration as the surest defense of
  proper doctrine.
  RELIGIONS OF RELIEF
  Commenting on the contemporary religious situation, the author of
  Seji kemmonroku roared:
  In today's society, the representatives of Shinto and Buddhism resemble
  national traitors. All the kami have ascended to heaven; the Buddhas have left
  for the Western Paradise; and all present and other worlds have fallen into
  disuse. Providence and retribution have been exhausted. All the Buddhist
  priests have fallen into hell and have ended (their mission) by becoming
  sinners.
  Buyo Inshi's astringent condemnation of religious life in the Bunka-
  Bunsei area, like his sweeping renunciation of social life, may have
  been hyperbolic, but it signified a general playing out of older, more
  established religious forms at a time when people were beginning to
  search for new kinds of meaning and faith. Hirata Atsutane was al-
  ready in the streets of Edo denouncing the vulgar Shintoists, the
  deceiving Buddhists, and the "stinking Confucianists." Provincial life
  was beginning to show renewed interest in more basic, nativist forms
  of religious practice. In the spring of 1830 large numbers of people
  from several areas of Japan streamed toward the Grand Shrine at Ise.
  This mass movement, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, was
  the most recent of periodic pilgrimages to the shrine of Amaterasu.
  The pilgrimage disintegrated into disorder and violence. It had no
  disciplined structure (although many groups were organized as ko for
  this explicit purpose), and it is not clear who its leaders were. But
  people were prompted to leave their households and villages - men,
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  2l6 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  women, even children - to make the long and often perilous trek to
  Ise. The greater portion of pilgrims were from the lower classes, and
  even though they were proscribed from making the visitation, they
  nonetheless felt compelled to leave their work, families, children, par-
  ents, wives, and husbands to make the journey to Ise. Some writers
  proposed that the pilgrimages represented an enlargement of the late
  Tokugawa impulse for travel. If it is true that the pilgrim experienced
  momentary release, freedom, or even a sense of unconnectedness
  while traveling on the road, the pilgrimage was nonetheless religious
  or political in its intensity. Travel, propelled by religious zeal, offered
  temporary release from the harsh uncertainties of everyday life, the
  very same life that kokugaku scholars had made the centerpiece of their
  new discipline of learning. It also heightened awareness of the power
  that large groups could command. "We have stimulated an earthquake
  and unleashed the august virtue of the Grand Shrine; the heart moves
  Japan. We have unleashed the august good omen in the pilgrimage,
  and it is called an earthquake; the heart moves the country of Japan,"
  so announced a contemporary riddle.68 The pilgrimage of 1830 also
  dramatized questions of social surplus, fragmentation, poverty, and
  the prospect of even greater disorder. People went on such pilgrimages
  for many reasons. Some even had a good time, but many were driven
  by hopes of divine relief, assistance, and the desire for good fortune.
  The experience signified both a new religious zeal and a concomitant
  search for new forms of community. It also disclosed what had become
  disturbing and disquieting about the tenor of life for large numbers of
  ordinary people.
  It was in this context of a massive search for divine assistance and
  relief, and the quest for new forms of communitarian and voluntary
  association, that a number of new religious groups appeared in the late
  Tokugawa decades. Along with the establishment of new, syncretic
  religious organizations, some older sects, like the nembutsu sects and
  Fujikd, also underwent renewal and revitalization. But it is important
  to note that the new religions, like Mitogaku and kokugaku, repre-
  sented a departure from past and more established religious forms
  that, many believed, had been played out. Like other discourses in the
  late Tokugawa period, the new religious message reflected the opera-
  tion of a strategy that sanctioned bringing together older ideas, ele-
  ments, and practices into new combinations. Organizationally the new
  groups like Tenri, Konko, Kurozumi, and Maruyama sought to real-
  68 Quotation from Fujitani Toshio, Okagemairi to eeja nai ka (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968),
  pp. 168-9.
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  RELIGIONS OF RELIEF 
  217
  ize the promise of voluntary association (as against the involuntary
  association demanded by "nature") and horizontal relations by recon-
  stituting themselves as autonomous communities. These new religions
  recruited their followers from the broad stratum of society but ap-
  pealed largely to the lower classes. Their recruitment signified both
  the attempt of the people to represent themselves in a discourse, by
  centering themselves and their lives as its subject, and a criticism of
  Tokugawa social conditions. In this connection Professor Yasumaru
  Yoshio has written:
  In order to criticize society as a whole from the standpoint of popular
  thought, which tended to make humility, submission, and authoritarianism
  as its substantive element, a great leap was necessary. The mediation that
  made this leap possible took on a . . . character that was, in many cases,
  religious. The new popular religions offered an ideal . . . that transcended
  the authority of the contemporary feudal system.6*
  Like kokugaku, many of the new religions were disposed to blend
  elements of myth with contemporary history as a means to create new
  forms of expression and interpretation. Moreover, they were often
  driven by the same impulse to ascertain the "real." Their solution,
  which led to even more radical secessions, disclosed an obsession with
  autonomy and the desire to remove their followers from the contagions
  of contemporary history and the corruption of the center. The most
  extreme example of this obsession was the yonaoshi (world renewal)
  movements and eeja nai ka (ain't it grand?) outbursts of the last years of
  the Tokugawa period, whose constituencies were usually the same peo-
  ple against whom both Mito and kokugaku sought to find protection by
  granting relief and assistance. Recalling the intentionality informing
  both Mito discourse and nativism, the new religions consistently pro-
  jected an unpolitical stance in the promotion of new programs and new
  relationships based on different conceptions of knowledge, even though
  their activities resulted in political consequences. Adherents to these
  sects often saw themselves as providing pockets of productivity and
  relief in a context of scarcity and unrelieved hardship, rather than as
  challenging the established world of politics and public authority. But
  when they sought to eliminate the divisiveness of politics by dissolving
  the collectivity into autonomous religious communities, they instead
  contributed to the very political fragmentation that they were seeking to
  displace. In the move to establish the principle of autonomy and whole-
  ness, in which they apparently saw neither, the new religions withdrew
  69 Yasumaru Yoshio, Nikon kindaika to minshu shiso (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1974), p. 90.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  from the center and offered their own interpretation of contemporary
  history by rejecting it. At the periphery, they believed that they would
  find a place sufficiently removed from the corrosions of temporality to
  establish new political forms growing out of the content of culture. An
  apprehension of the world in this manner was equivalent to changing it
  in order to secure the necessary communal arrangements that con-
  formed to the new forms of knowledge and conceptions of human
  nature. Nowhere was this commitment to act and change the world
  expressed in greater extremity than in those groups yearning for "world
  renewal" (yonaoshi).
  If the new religions strove to recapture an original experience of
  wholeness, they also believed that the horizontal relationships that
  their belief authenticated came before the vertical ties demanded by
  the "discrimination of names" and the Tokugawa status system. This
  was their most distinctive and dangerous contribution to the general
  discussion in late Tokugawa society. All looked to the establishment of
  a genuine human order organized along horizontal relationships de-
  voted to realizing equality. By the same token the new religions
  showed sensitivity to the way that distinctions caused social inequal-
  ity. Consequently they announced their determination to find forms of
  organization calculated to diminish the reliance on hierarchy. The
  form favored by most recalled the traditional ko, groups of believers in
  which every member served as an equal partner, which characterized
  the groups participating in the okagemairi (i.e., Iseko) and merchant
  investment societies.70 Under the sanction of an egalitarian organiza-
  tion, the new religions projected an image of relief, mutual assistance
  to all followers, and even reform of existing structures by calling for
  the equitable distribution of land and resources. At the heart of their
  programs was the valorization of daily life and its importance for
  maintaining the solidarity of community. Although their organiza-
  tional principle emphasized human connectedness (the brethren) and
  the necessity of working and living together in mutual reciprocity as a
  solution to the fragmentation of more established social units that had
  taken place with the commercialization of the countryside, it also
  made equality the condition for sustaining community.71 The new
  religions sought to console the spiritually and materially poor who
  occupied the lowest rungs of the social scale of Tokugawa Japan. In
  their understanding of the times, people who were "poor" were also
  70 Murakami Shigeyoshi, Kinsei minshu shukyo no kenkyu (Tokyo: Hozokan, 1977), pp. 2iff.
  71 Yasumaru, Nihon kindaika, pp. i8ff.
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  RELIGIONS OF RELIEF 
  219
  "unhappy," and only association and mutual cooperation could allevi-
  ate that state.
  What enabled the new religions to interpret contemporary reality in
  this way and to claim interest in the poor and unhappy was a special
  conception of knowledge and of learning. They all substituted faith
  and belief in the powers of deity for conventional sources of solace.
  Faith and belief appeared to be comparatively rational, as the new
  religions made an effort to discourage believers from relying on super-
  stition and traditional magical practices.72 In parting from the more
  structured sects of Buddhism in which Tokugawa regulations had
  required villagers to register, they also represented a direct search for
  new forms of knowledge and belief, often promising health and happi-
  ness, that met the needs of daily life. In this they could be related also
  to the focus on utility that characterized Mito and kokugaku thought.
  Thus Konkokyo proposed that "learning (gakumon), without belief,
  never assists people," whereas the founder of Tenri, Nakayama Miki,
  advised her believers that only faith could enable people to know the
  exalted state and secure relief from contemporary suffering and hard-
  ships. Kurozumi Munetada, founder of the Kurozumi sect, constantly
  admonished his followers to stop "worrying about the Way" in order
  to "know and transmit the virtue of Amaterasu to people of the
  times."
  It is important to note that many of the new religions originated in
  localities where newer commercial arrangements were in the process of
  disturbing older modes of production and social relationships and
  where economic distress seemed to be the most severe. In large part
  this observation describes the frequency and distribution of peasant
  rebellions as well and suggests why the new sects often ended up
  recruiting the same kind of people who were willing to join rural
  jacqueries. Owing to the regional nature of economic hardship, many
  of the new religions enlisted local nativistic practices and traditions to
  familiarize their messages when recruiting a followership. Yet, it is
  undeniably true that many struck deep roots in regional and village
  religious practices associated with Shinto and shamanism and that
  they derived their authority from a broadened base of shrine Shinto
  and religious conventions related to agricultural life." But the appro-
  priation of older, local practices frequently betrayed the limited appeal
  72 Kano Masanao, Shihonshugi keiseiki no chitsujo ishiki (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1969), p. 138.
  73 Miyata Noboru, "Noson no fukko undo to minshu shukyo no tenkai," Iwanami koza Nihon
  rekishi, vol. 13 (kinsei 5) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977), pp. 209-45.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  of such groups and revealed the initimate relationship between re-
  gional hardship and the construction of consoling ideologies, even
  though many of these religions projected a universal message.
  In general, these sects promoted doctrines calling for the regime of
  relief everywhere, according to the blessings of a single and all-powerful
  kami who represented a first principle (or principal), whether it was
  Amaterasu Omikami of Nyorai and Kurozumi, Tenri Omikami of
  Tenri, Tenchikane of Konkokyo, Mt. Fuji of Fuji ko, or Moto no
  oyagami of Maruyama ko. Such deities supplied authority for claims
  promising to offer relief and assistance and contrasted dramatically with
  the rather discredited obligations of the feudal order to provide benevo-
  lence and aid in times of need. It is also true that nativists assigned a
  comparable role to the creation deities and to the tutelary shrines, even
  though they emphasized the human capacity for self-help. In many
  instances, these all-powerful gods were seen as creators of the cosmos
  and progenitors of the human species. And the reliance on a reliever
  who bore striking resemblance to the Buddhist Miroku (Maitreya) or
  simply one who possessed kami character explained to the poor and the
  beleaguered the necessity for help and assistance among humans and
  why it was absent in their time. The effectiveness of this explanation
  often depended on the powers of the founder of a sect to demonstrate
  the efficacy of his or her knowledge and charismatic powers. Unlike
  nativism, which often diminished the powers of the person for the spirit
  of the word (kotodama), the new religions relied principally on perfor-
  mance to validate the message. Part of this reliance on the performative
  act stemmed from a distrust for conventional forms of knowledge based
  on the primacy of words and abstractions, yet part of it was undoubtedly
  inspired by the emphasis on the body and on the importance of its
  movements, whether in play or in physical work, in late Tokugawa
  thought. What appears important is the emphasis on the performative
  powers of the body and its kinship with manual rather than mental
  activity. This projection, of course, reflected the primacy of daily life. It
  is, in any case, this factor that accounts for the difficulty in dissociating
  the religious career of the founders from the discourse that they helped
  construct and in separating actual demonstration and action from verbal
  utterance. Frequently, the performance model of the founder became a
  text for the followers to read, as a source for correct knowledge, just as
  the body served as a text in verbal fiction.
  The founder's performance depended on a successful appropriation
  of elements from shamanistic practice related to kami possession and
  healing spiritual powers. Many of the new religions resorted to the
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  convention of identifying the founder of the sect as a "living kamf'
  (ikigami), a designation that the nativists reserved for the emperor.
  The act of describing the founder as a living god, mediating between
  the primal voice and the followers and supplying his or her body as a
  vessel to convey the deity's wishes to the faithful, added authenticity
  to the autonomous doctrine that each was trying to articulate. The
  process whereby in most cases this new persona was realized began
  with the founder's illness (later interpreted as time spent with the
  primal deity), followed by divine intervention and speedy recovery,
  which led to a change in personality, which in turn bore fruit in
  miraculous cures among the local inhabitants and was accompanied by
  periodic trances to reinforce the new charisma. The ritualization of the
  founder's life into a drama of living kami undoubtedly served the same
  purpose as the Mito celebration of the timeless presence represented
  by the Daijosai and the nativist enshrinement of tutelary worship as a
  technique for securing continuous contact with the creation deities
  and the work of Okuninushi no kami.
  To explain a world based on knowledge that only initiates could
  know (closely resembling kokugaku's valorization of the activities of
  daily life) risked provoking conflict with the authority system, which
  had its own claims to a privileged knowledge entitling certain people
  to rule and its stated responsibility to provide benevolence. Even so,
  some of the new religions, like Tenri and Maruyama, developed doc-
  trines announcing "world renewal" in the present and the beginning of
  a new heaven on earth. So powerful was the appeal of this ideal that by
  the end of the epoch, world-renewing rebellions and ee ja nai ka
  disturbances in cities like Kyoto and Osaka were proclaiming their
  cause in slogans of relief and assistance to the people. Despite the
  world renewal project, such revolutionary utopianism usually drew
  attention to this-worldly temporal orientations. All of the sects, includ-
  ing the revitalized nembutsu organizations like the myokdninden, spoke
  of "extreme happiness in this world" and underscored the necessity to
  find contemporary answers to prayers requesting the kami to eliminate
  struggle and "correct illness and disease." Tenri insisted on making a
  "fresh start beyond death" and enjoined its followers to concentrate on
  their daily lives without fear or anxiety concerning their fate after
  death. Underlying this attitude was the conviction that humans, not
  nature, were the standard of action or behavior, just as the present,
  rather than some remote and transcendent sanctuary in the future or
  elsewhere, was the place for carrying out the duties of the daily life.
  Here again is a close resemblance to the claims of late Tokugawa
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  verbal fiction and woodblock illustrations with its own elevation of
  human subjectivity as the maker of society and custom. In the case of
  the new religions, primacy of the human, regardless of status, was
  intimately related to the process of becoming a kami. Doctrines like
  Konko and Tenri, for example, joined humans to the deities by em-
  ploying such familistic metaphors as "children of the kami" or "family
  of the deities." Yet such reference to the divine merely reinforced the
  essential kinship that it was believed all humans shared, regardless of
  status, class, sex, or even race. To be human meant promoting pro-
  grams of relief and assistance to all folk, whose destitute and often
  impoverished lives constituted the touchstone for recruitment into the
  new religions. Konkokyo constantly dramatized the importance of
  "men who assist other men" as the major criterion of being human,
  whereas Nakayama Miki exhorted her followers to "never forget other
  men" - not just people of abundance, the rural rich, merchants, and
  managers, but the diligent and nameless people about whom official
  discourse had been silent, who now inhabited the "bottom of the
  valley" (tanizoku). Social division itself, it was held, set people against
  one another and created the circumstances of conflict and struggle
  between the rich and the needy. The purpose of programs pledged to
  relieving the poor was a radical presumption of the equality of all
  individuals and between the sexes and the promise to redistribute
  wealth and land. Behind this call was the sustaining power of human
  love for others and a dangerously optimistic belief in the essential
  goodness of human nature.
  Among the late Tokugawa religions the most representative sects,
  which also captured the largest following, were Kurozumi, Tenri, and
  Konkokyo. Kurozumi was the earliest and was founded by Kurozumi
  Munetada (1780-1850) in Okayama prefecture. He was born in a vil-
  lage in Bizen, the son of a Shinto priest of the Imamura Shrine, a
  guardian deity of Okayama Castle. His mother was the daughter of a
  priest. When Munetada was in his thirties, he contracted tuberculosis,
  after losing his parents who apparently also died of infectious disease,
  and was confined for a year and a half. His illness and confinement
  solidified his resolve to devote his efforts to securing assistance from the
  sun goddess for the ill, diseased, and downtrodden. It has been reported
  that he aspired to become a "living deity" and felt cheated because of the
  imminent threat of death, deciding that after death he would become a
  deity devoted to healing the ill. But Munetada survived and recovered
  after experiencing unity with Amaterasu while venerating the rising sun
  at the winter solstice. Upon recovering, he began a new ministry of
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  cures, teaching his first followers the lesson he had learned about the
  sun and the benefaction and compassion of Amaterasu. Success led to
  disciples and the establishment of a formal organization.
  Kurozumi's doctrine was based on conversion to the sun goddess. He
  advised people to know how to concentrate their devotion on the august
  virtue of Amaterasu; the light of the sun goddess had not changed for an
  eternity and wanted the "august intention of Amaterasu" and the peo-
  ple's intention to become united.74 Like other founders, Kurozumi was
  convinced of the possibility of becoming identified with the deity. This
  devotion undoubtedly derived from his own religious background, but
  his focus on the singularity and superiority of the sun goddess also
  offered a way to overcome the claims associated with other deities preva-
  lent among traditional agricultural believers. Hereafter relief and assis-
  tance were to be related to the saving powers of a single deity. In time
  such relief came to range from simple cures to the prolongation of life,
  abundance, having children, easy delivery, increased success in trades
  and business, bumper crops, and larger fishing catches, all things that
  would make life easier.7* If Amaterasu were idealized as the sun and the
  source of life, then life itself would find meaning only within the con-
  fines of her powers. Hence Kurozumi advanced a conception of enclo-
  sure (found in other doctrines as well) bounded by belief and occupied
  by the faithful. In a letter he confessed that there "was no special way to
  relate this basic unity (between believer and sun goddess) outside this
  circle (O)."76 This imagery of the circle was scattered throughout his
  writings and referred to an enchanted enclosure free from desire and
  misfortune. In the early 1840s he wrote:
  The Way is easy to serve, even though we can see that some do not serve it
  easily. To serve this Way is to live in it. This Way, as I have repeatedly stated,
  is Amaterasu Omikami. That is, it is the circular deity. As I have said before,
  things should be entrusted to this circle. It is easy to leave things to this Way,
  and it is very strange that people in China and Japan have not been aware of
  this. They are perplexed by the name of the Way. Men who have been
  separated from the true Way are all under heaven. Not to be separated from
  the true Way is the Way I have been talking about."
  If all things were done gratefully, the "august intention of Amaterasu
  Omikami" would be satisfied.78
  To explain the grace provided by the circular enclosure made it
  74 Kano, Shihonshugi, p. 138. See also Helen Hardacre, Kurozumikyo and the New Religions of
  Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 
  75 Kano, Shihonshugi, p. 139.
  76 Ibid., p. 140; also, Murakami Shigeyoshi and Yasumaru Yoshio, eds., Nikon shiso taikei, vol.
  67: Minshu shukyo to shiso (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), p. 130. Hereafter cited as Minshu
  shukyo to shiso. 
  77 Minshu shukyo to shiso, p. 115. 
  78 Kano, Shihonshugi, p. 114.
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  appropriate to develop an idea of order faithful to its requirements.
  The central principle lay in the deity's capacity to fulfill all requests.
  When individuals entrusted themselves to the the sun goddess's ordi-
  nances, they were immediately relieved of evil. To enter the enclosure
  meant leaving the world of suffering and misfortune; and as the epoch
  came to a close, followers increasingly read that to mean the Toku-
  gawa social system. Kurozumi's message presupposed the power of
  the deity to deliver people's requests. By locating all blessings in the
  sun goddess, he was able to place his principal emphasis on the believ-
  ers' faith in the deity and their willingness to make the effort to
  improve conditions. Kurozumi held that the unification of the believ-
  ers' intention with that of Amaterasu meant that people themselves
  had to show by faith and goodness that they were deserving. Failure to
  secure grace or blessing revealed only one's unworthiness and lack of
  real faith. Next came the idea that all people were brothers and sisters.
  This, too, resulted from the conception of a united intention. "When
  assisting," he wrote in a poem, "there is life."79 Life was accessible to
  all. Kurozumi believed that all people were ultimately children of the
  sun goddess. "There are none who do not give thanks sincerely; one
  truth is that all in the four seas are brothers."80 With the universalistic
  thrust of this idea, its immediate purpose was to stem contemporary
  conflict and distrust. The idea promoted a powerful sense of equality
  and sharing. Things are important, Kurozumi wrote, but they do not
  constitute criteria by which to separate people between the esteemed
  and despised. Neither life nor death, high nor low can separate people
  from one another. In this connection Kurozumi sought to juxtapose
  the spirit of sun (light and happiness) to the principle of darkness.
  According to Kano Masanao, the dark, or in (yiri), principle was the
  symbol for the peasants' circumstances; it was precisely the association
  manifest in the status order that made the peasant low man in the
  hierarchy. "The august belief in the sun goddess (projecting the sym-
  bol of light -yd (yang) - increasingly dispells the spirit of darkness."
  If too much attention were devoted to darkness, to the exclusion of the
  principle of light, it would ultimately lessen and destroy the spirit of
  light. Kurozumi believed that a balance between the two would fulfill
  the expectation of a perfect and complete society, perhaps the circle he
  had drawn to dramatize the sacred space designated for believers. His
  conception of the social order was revealed in his meditations on the
  79 Ibid., p. 102. 
  8o Ibid., p. 116.
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  circle. For the circle, the sun, light, Amaterasu represented fullness,
  plenitude, presence, perfection - surely an attractive alternative when
  juxtaposed to the received arrangement of authority. Kurozumi saw
  the installation of this new age of the kami as a veritable Utopia glowing
  in the midst of progressive social darkness. "The age of the gods and
  of the present are one; they offer compassion to all at the end of the
  world."
  More than Kurozumikyo, Tenri was implicated in the trials of the
  oppressed and conveyed the sense that the present constituted a time
  of crisis. It was founded by a peasant woman near Nara, Nakayama
  Miki (1798-1887), who was oppressed by her family and her husband
  and knew hardship, pain, and personal suffering. Miki's biographers
  have attributed her zeal for helping people to her personal experience.
  But Nakayama Miki also had a keen grasp of political realities; she was
  a sensitive recorder of the Tempo famine and an understanding wit-
  ness of the okagemairi pilgrims who passed through her village on their
  way to Ise. The pilgrimage and the famine signified suffering for her
  and showed the necessity of finding ways to provide relief and assis-
  tance. As with Kurozumi Munetada, Miki's life unfolded as a series of
  cases of caring for the needy and the poor. Self-sacrifice, ascetic zeal,
  and a sense of injustice propelled her on her ministry. According to
  Carmen Blacker, Miki's ministry was marked by a number of impor-
  tant "tribulations" in which she was able to demonstrate her powers to
  heal the afflicted.81 In time she was credited with the powers of a local
  shaman (yamabusht). In one session, when Miki was beginning to
  chant the incantatory spells, her face began to contort, and she fell into
  a trance. While still possessed by a deity she replied to a question that
  she was Ten no shogun, "the true and original god who has descended
  from Heaven to save mankind."82 In the presence of her husband and
  others, the kami who had come to inhabit her body asked Miki to
  abandon her family to serve as the vehicle and messenger for the
  divine work of assistance. Should her husband refuse to comply, the
  deity threatened to cast the family under the pall of a curse. This
  trance lasted three days, and only after Miki's husband consented to
  the divine demand did Miki return to normal. She experienced subse-
  quent signs of divine origin as part of her passage into a new state. The
  sudden fits of possession and her erratic behavior as a condition for her
  81 Carmen Blacker, "MiUenarian Aspects of New Religions," in Donald Shively, ed., Tradition
  and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971),
  pp. 574-6. 
  82 Ibid., p. 575.
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  ministry led to ostracism and poverty, but her success in healing,
  especially with respect to painless childbirth, brought her followers
  and the beginnings of an organization.
  Miki's transformation into a divine vehicle for relief began when,
  commanded to give up her possessions, she decided to distribute her
  family land. The act dramatized personal attachment to land and the
  belief that ownership itself was the source of all inequality. Because
  equal distribution under conditions of ownership is impossible to real-
  ize, true equality can be realized only through abject landlessness.
  Miki's behavior underscored her teaching that "one must fall into pov-
  erty." Poverty and relief from pain became the axis of her vision. This
  vision was further reinforced within the structure of a cosmological
  myth, derived from native myth, legend, and history. According to
  this, the world originated in a muddy ocean (the salty brine of kokugaku)
  inhabited by a variety offish and serpents. Because the parent deities
  wished to create humans, they gave birth to myriads of people on the
  site of the Nakayama household in Japan. These grew to great size and
  died. After this, the deities had created birds and beasts and a variety of
  insects; these also died. All that was left were monkeys. From the
  monkeys, men and women were born; then heaven, earth, mountains,
  and plains were differentiated. Humans lived first in water for eons and
  eventually moved onto the land. It is interesting to compare this crudely
  evolutionary conception with Hirata's earlier assertion that all humans
  originated from the insect world. Although such notions were indispens-
  able to the peasant experience, steeped as it was in a firsthand involve-
  ment in the cycle of growth, they also showed how earlier concerns for
  natural history had become part of a prevailing consciousness.8* More-
  over, such an evolutionary process demonstrated the common origins of
  equality among all people and validated Miki's articulation of a Utopian
  vision in her hymn Mikagurauta (i 869).
  This long text, written in Nara dialect, focused on increased agricul-
  tural productivity. "The intention of everybody in the world requires
  fields and lands,"8* "if there are good fields, everybody in a row will be
  cleansed of desire,"8* and it would be possible to increase the abun-
  dance of Yamato through the unlimited powers of the deities.86 Miki
  also sang her expectations of social reformation: "Drum beat, the New
  Year's dance begins/ How wonderful; if we erect a structure for
  teaching/ What prosperity! revering the body and securing health/
  yonaori."*7 Related to the idea of "world renewal" was, of course, the
  83 See Kano, Shihonshugi, pp. 147-8, for an account of the Tenri mythology.
  84 Minshushukyo toshiso, p. 184. 
  85 Ibid., p. 185. 
  86 Ibid., p. 181. 
  87 Ibid.
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  ideal of mutual assistance which was the central theme of both the
  Mikagurauta and her instructions (Ofudesaki). The hymn opens with a
  celebration that all people will be one when they assist one another.
  Assistance will also confer the blessings of the spirit of light: ". . . If
  one speaks the faith in the wider world, one and then two will be
  cleansed by helping each other." Assisting people will bring freedom
  and an eternal abode in the heart of the kanti. Disturbances can be
  dispelled by recognizing the fundamental equality of all humans.
  "When one compares humans from the standpoint of the body," Miki
  wrote, "they all are the same, whether high or low." Once more, it
  should be noted, we encounter the metaphor of the body and its
  centering as subject, known by acting; it is the body, not status, that
  confirms humanity; not the trappings of civilization, but the blessings
  of the gods.
  To neglect the ordinances of the kami and to fail to work for univer-
  sal relief and assistance was to incur divine wrath. In order to ward off
  anger and forestall misfortune, repentance was necessary. In this con-
  text Miki pointed to the quality of late Tokugawa leadership and its
  failure to deliver relief and help. She characterized the leadership as
  high mountains, remote and distant from the ordinary folk who dwelt
  in the valleys and in the real world. But the power of the kami was
  vastly stronger than the power of "those who are high and make the
  world's conditions as they are; will they know about the misfortunes of
  the deities?"88 Indeed, she had no hesitation in calling attention to the
  "contrast in intention between the kami and those in high places." The
  false division between high and low constituted a sign of the way that
  things were and the conditions of life that had to be overcome. People
  would change, she was convinced, because humans were "the children
  of the gods" and possessed a good nature. Their problem was pride
  (hokori). Pride, for Miki, was the basic human evil and produced the
  "eight dusts" - desire, regret, sweetness, avarice, arrogance, hatred,
  rancor, and anger - qualities she associated with the powerful. The
  powerless were advised to trust themselves to the deity of world re-
  newal, who held out for them the promise of a renovated moral life.
  How the gods were to bring about this idealized world was already
  prefigured in Miki's conception of assistance and relief. It was, as
  Yasumaru Yoshio explained it, the world vision of small cultivators
  and encompassed diligent and frugal peasants bound together in a
  community of cooperation.89
  88 Yasumaru, Nikon kindatka, p. 83. 
  89 Ibid.
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  Konkokyo was established by a peasant named Kawate Bunjiro
  (Konko Daijin) (1814-83) in Bitchu, also part of present-day Okayama
  Prefecture. Adopted into a rural family, Kawate, unlike Kurozumi and
  Nakayama, was deeply versed in agricultural affairs. The area was
  marked by commercialization and a subsequent decline of small-
  holding fanners. The founder experienced a long life punctuated by
  hardship and poverty, and this undoubtedly prompted his deep con-
  cerns for the unrelieved hardship among cultivators of the vicinity. The
  boundaries of his own thought were marked by his desire to secure relief
  from contemporary circumstances and a zeal for bringing about order
  and prosperity. His religiosity was early revealed in a decision to make
  the trek to Ise with fellow villagers during the Ise okagemairi of 1830.
  Several years later (1846) Kawate made still another pilgrimage to the
  Grand Shrine. His personal ministry was interrupted by bouts of ill-
  ness, and it ultimately brought on a trance that disclosed to him his true
  identity as the brother of Konjin, one of the calendar gods of the yin-
  yang tradition observed in rural areas. In folk belief this deity was
  capable of inflicting great harm or abundant prosperity, depending on
  how he was worshiped. Kawate received the ordinances of this god into
  his body which, as with Nakayama Miki, became the instrument for the
  "august intelligence" (oshirase). Kawate also received permission from
  the deity to be called the "family Kane no kami's lower leaves" and to
  take the divine appellation of "Bunji Daimyojin."
  Once Kawate, or as he now came to be called, Konko Daijin, served
  as the vessel of Konjin's oshirase, the popular understanding of that
  kami was transformed. A figure that had been associated with curse and
  calamity became a kami of love who brought good fortune and abun-
  dance to those who followed his commandments. As the instructions of
  the kami proliferated and encouraged agricultural activity among believ-
  ers, the cult spread.*0 In 1859 Konko Daijin, on instructions from the
  kami, went into concealment. Empowered as a daimyojin, Konko Daijin
  now functioned as a living kami. Like Miki, he gave up all his posses-
  sions to demonstrate his faith in Tenchi Kane no kami. His new organi-
  zation coincided with the critical events of the pre-Restoration decade.
  In an environment charged with political struggle and shogunal failure,
  a saying went, "How many distressed ujiko (members) there are in
  society! But if the kami help, the people will be able to live."*1 Nine
  years before the Restoration, when he returned from his concealment,
  Kawate established a formal religious organization.
  90 Murakami, Kinsei minshu shukyo no kenkyu, p. 177. 
  91 Ibid., p. 179.
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  More than other founders, Konko Daijin stressed the importance of
  knowledge in the form of the oshirase. This is not to say that other
  groups were not interested in the question of knowledge. But Kawate
  was more systematic about the kind of knowledge that his followers
  should possess. While he served as the agency to transmit divine
  knowledge, the revelations he made in response to specific problems
  were not sudden. He received instructions in a conscious state, not in
  the circumstances of a trance, but he alone was able to recall the
  content of the divine instructions and interpret them to others.92 Shar-
  ing with the founders of the other sects a profound distrust of conven-
  tional knowledge, Kawate's central text for the faithful condemned
  learning (gakumori) as something that "consumes the body" and as the
  product of mere "cleverness" and contrivance.'? He freely granted
  that he did not have much formal learning and was not very literate:
  Today's society is one of wisdom and knowledge. By permitting humans to
  become clever, we risk losing the virtue of the body. In this age the principal
  pollutant is desire. Let us be released from the use of the abacus. It is said
  that we are clever but have no skills. We show off our cleverness and rely on
  artifice. Let us separate ourselves from cleverness, contrivance, and wisdom.
  Let us depart from the assistance and customs of society. By leaving society,
  we will be able to entrust our body to the kami.**
  Accordingly, acts of "listening" and "understanding" were supremely
  important. In the operation of listening and understanding, the body
  became the reservoir for intentionality and knowing similar to the way
  Konko used his own body as agency for divinity. It was the action of
  the body, not the contrivances and ruses of mere knowledge extracted
  from books and conventional instruction, that promised to secure
  people relief from society's afflictions. The Konko Daijin rikai re-
  ported that the founder disapproved of religious austerities and ad-
  vised that "eating and drinking are important to the body."9' The
  body required strength if it was to express its faith and belief by
  working and acting.
  The knowledge valued by Konko Daijin related to how people were
  to assist others. Like the other new religions, Konkokyo stressed relief
  and assistance for others as the condition for faith. No other kind of
  knowledge was required. Here again, this idea pertained to contempo-
  rary society and custom which had failed to provide relief to the
  distressed. Konko Daijin constantly called on people to leave society,
  92 Seto Mikio, "Minshu no shukyo ishiki to henkaku no enerugi," in Maruyama Teruo, ed.,
  Henkakuki no shukyo (Tokyo: Gendai jaanarizumu shuppankai, 1972), p. 67.
  93 Minshu shukyo to shiso, p. 364. 
  94 Ibid., p. 376. 
  95 Ibid., pp. 400,404.
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  with all its contrivances and fragmenting propensities, and to entrust
  themselves to the kami, whose grace would manifest itself in people
  helping people. "Men, assisting men, are human."96 Mutual help dis-
  tinguished humans from other species and represented a special form
  of thanks to the kami. Just as the deities, at times of illness and
  disaster, offered assistance to humans, so humans should assist the
  needy in times of distress.
  Such assistance was also based on the idea of human equality. Here
  Konko proposed two interrelated notions: All people are members of
  the "family of the deity" (kamisama no ujiko), and they are capable of
  becoming deities themselves. Together they represented a new con-
  cept of community. "All under heaven," he advised, "are the ujiko of
  the deities of heaven and earth. There are no other kinds of men."'?
  Because all were potentially ujiko, "one cannot look down on humans
  or befoul them." Closely associated with this sense of equality was the
  new status assigned to women. All the new religions elevated women
  to a status equivalent to men, and some, like Konko, even tended to
  exalt them. "Women are the rice fields of the world," Konko Daijin
  announced, and in the "teachings of the deities, if the rice fields are
  not fertilized and enriched, they will be of no value."98 Life itself
  would not be possible. Hence Konko proposed, employing familiar
  metaphors of samurai politics and power, that women were the karo
  (principal retainers) of the household; if there were no karo, there
  could be no castle. Thus women and peasants, precisely because they
  lacked access to the established disciplines of learning, became exem-
  plars of what was truly human. Belief came from women; they were
  close to the deities. No doubt valuing women in this way stemmed
  from an idealized agricultural respect for productivity. Both Kuro-
  zumi and Tenri also showed real concern for women physiologically,
  especially with reference to problems and pain incurred at the time of
  childbirth.
  Yet ultimately all people were capable of becoming godlike. "Deity
  and man," Kawate announced, "are the same." Whatever deity one
  worships, if he fails to correspond to the heart of man, he will not
  correspond to the heart of the kami; and if he fails to correspond to the
  heart of the deity, he will not conform to the heart of man."99 Konko
  Daijin wrote that as he had received the "august principle of yin
  ipkage) to become a living deity, so you (anatagata) will receive the
  principle as well." A living kami was nothing more than someone
  96 Ibid., p. 420. 
  97 Ibid., p. 401. 
  98 Ibid., p. 416. 
  99 Ibid.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  doing the work of the deity in a human moment and was a status
  available to all. Hence he constantly played down his own exalted
  status as an intermediary and acknowledged personal "ignorance," as
  he was simply a man who "tills the soil and does not know anything."
  Irony notwithstanding, Konko Daij in possessed the kind of knowl-
  edge necessary to make him and all followers living kami. The commu-
  nity of believers thus constituted a divine assembly, as "all receive
  their bodies from the kami of heaven and earth."100
  In its elaboration of a new community of believers serving one an-
  other and withdrawn from official society, Konko stressed, not least of
  all, the primacy of household work and agricultural cultivation. As he
  himself was a committed farmer, he paid close attention, as did the rural
  kokugakusha, to growing conditions and agricultural techniques. He
  was particularly interested in weather ("wind and rain" as he put it) but
  linked such conditions to the presence or absence of belief. He rejected
  the idea that a mere visit to the shrine would bring wind and rain at the
  right time. Proper conditions could be secured only if faith allowed the
  kami to enter one's body. Evidence of such faith was shown by attend-
  ing to one's household duties. The believer's sense of joy, he noted,
  would make him feel obliged to tend to his household duties.im
  DEFENSE AND WEALTH
  In the late Tokugawa period, Dutch studies, as it was first called,
  combined with eighteenth-century discussions on political economy
  (keisei saimiri) to create the possibility of a new discourse. Dutch stud-
  ies expressed an interest in the new sciences of medicine, anatomy and
  physiology, natural science, astronomy, physics, and geography. Po-
  litical economy aimed at uncovering the sources of wealth. As it was
  formulated in the early nineteenth century, the new discourse first
  emphasized maritime defense and related science and technology and
  then moved on to discuss national wealth. The impulses underlying
  such a discourse was the increasing presence of foreigners who were
  searching for adventure, trade, and empire, and the domestic eco-
  nomic failures, which the Tempo reforms were seeking to arrest. At
  the heart of this new discourse was a dissatisfaction, bordering on
  outright criticism, with the shogunal political arrangement and its
  evident incapacity to act decisively and effectively to find adequate
  sources of wealth for relieving the people (saimin).
  ioo Ibid. 
  101 Ibid., p. 366.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  Writers at the turn of the century had already alerted contemporar-
  ies to the foreign menace and the need for adequate coastal defense
  and a firm national policy. Discussions on defense turned on the
  question of adequate military technology, but any consideration of
  science and technology invariably raised the issue of political decision
  making. An early proponent, Kudo Heisuke (1734-1800), saw the
  installation of new maritime fortifications as the fundamental condi-
  tion for a new policy. "The first aim in governing the realm," he
  wrote, "is to deepen the power of our country. To deepen the strength
  of the country, we have first to allow the wealth of foreign countries to
  enter Japan." Trade was an absolute necessity, as it generated the
  wealth that many came to recognize as the key to a proper defense.
  Kudo went on to advocate the opening of new lands like Hokkaido
  and the systematic search for gold, silver, and copper. Another con-
  temporary, Hayashi Shihei (1738-93), author of a famous geographic
  miscellany, Sankoku tsuran zusetsu, shared a similar view and was even
  more insistent about the merger of defense and the search for wealth.
  It was Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) who first grasped in global
  terms the problem of wealth and formulated a coherent statement
  yoking wealth to defense:
  Because Japan is a maritime nation, crossing the ocean, transport, and trade
  are the primary vocations of the realm. In governing with the power of only
  one domain, the national strength weakens increasingly. This weakness af-
  fects the peasantry, and it is a natural condition for them to yearly decrease
  their productivity.102
  He was convinced that policy must reach beyond a single domain to
  represent and employ the resources of the whole. Trade and markets
  were also necessary. Once Japan was thrown into the global market
  network, it would have to compete with other countries in a struggle
  for scarce resources. Appearing as a good mercantilist, Honda was
  persuaded that the search for trade and markets was prompted by the
  domestic scarcity of goods, products, and natural resources. Yet it was
  in Japan's national interest to promote foreign trade if the realm was to
  survive and overcome chronic domestic difficulties. Honda noted that
  Japan differed from other Western nations only in its scientific and
  technological inferiority, but he was convinced that the gap could be
  closed. IO3
  102 Quoted in Maeda Ichiro, ed., Koza Nihon bunkashi (Tokyo: Misuzu shobo, 1963), vol. 6, p.
  58.
  103 Tetsuo Najita, "Structure and Content in Tokugawa Thinking," unpublished manuscript,
  P-54-
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  More than any other political economist, Honda recognized the
  relationship between trade as a source of national wealth and Japan's
  technological backwardness. To rectify both, he proposed in an unpub-
  lished essay, Keisei hissaku (1798), four urgent priorities: (1) the sys-
  tematic manufacturing of explosives for military and civil purposes;
  (2) the development of mining, as metals were the backbone of the
  nation's wealth; (3) the establishment of a national merchant marine
  that would enhance the national treasury by selling products abroad
  and help avoid domestic famines; and (4) the abrogation of seclusion
  for a policy of colonial enterprises in nearby territories.1O* Collectively,
  these proposals were meant to show that Japan had pursued an unnatu-
  ral course that had led to an economic dead end. Isolation was anachro-
  nistic, territorial decentralization destructive to the national interest,
  and agricultural primacy was a fiction in view of Japan's maritime
  position. Japan should promote a policy directed toward the opening
  of trade in order to meet, rather than to be subdued by, the European
  thrust in Asia.105
  Any consideration of defense and wealth entailed employing a new
  knowledge capable of developing military technology and finding new
  sources of wealth. When thoughtful men turned to this question, they
  embraced a form of inquiry that validated the investigation of first
  principles, but they were also mindful to balance the inherent formal-
  ism of first principles with a conception of historicism that accounted
  for changing circumstances. As did other contemporary discourses,
  Western learning used a strategy that required reducing things to
  origins in order to demonstrate how the principle of the past autho-
  rized changes in the present. Whereas Mito, kokugaku, and the new
  religions resorted to primal deities and archetypal events to specify
  first principles, Western studies referred to paradigmatic heroes in the
  remote past whose accomplishments reflected the conviction that each
  age demanded policies adequate to its requirements. The discourse on
  defense and wealth, owing to its commitment to defend the realm as a
  whole rather than as a domain or a region, inched toward abandoning
  feudalism for a conception of a larger political unity. Ultimately, the
  cultural content of the discourse came to suggest the political form of
  the early modern state to satisfy the imperatives of national wealth and
  defense. If other discourses searched for ways to deliver relief and
  assistance to the needy, the discussions on defense and wealth saw a
  104 Ibid., pp. 54-5; and Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe (Stanford, Calif.:
  Stanford University Press, 1969), for a partial translation of keisei hissaku.
  105 Najita, "Structure and Content," p. 60.
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  L A T E TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  mercantilist state as the form most able to realize this goal. Honda
  early perceived in the state the agency to supply such services when he
  observed that the "several European nations are kingdoms that pro-
  vide assistance to people; it is a heavenly duty of the kingdom to
  relieve hunger and cold with trade, overseas transport, and pas-
  sage."106 The state that such writers came to conceptualize was more
  mercantilist than despotic or absolutist and was based on social labor
  and productivity, manufacturing, and trade. In this regard, it was also
  more ethical than merely political, which many writers identified with
  the privatism of the Tokugawa bakufu. Although the practitioners of
  this discourse, as good mercantilists, shied away from thinking about
  an equitable redistribution of national resources, as did the Mito writ-
  ers, they displaced the egalitarian impulse by turning to merit, talent,
  and ability as criteria for recruitment and advancement. The demon-
  stration of talent (jinzai) depended on the mastery of expert knowledge
  useful to the necessities of the day. The discourse on wealth and
  defense envisaged human subjectivity as the maker of custom and
  history and agreed that the human species, even though people held
  different stations in life, originated from a single source. Although
  Western studies rejected the existence of qualitative distinctions
  among people, it did believe that status derived from the acquisition
  and demonstration of useful knowledge which constituted the only
  acceptable criterion of social and political preferment. But it also
  agreed with Mito that such knowledge was not available to all, even
  though it resisted making this conceit into a principle of preemptive
  closure. It is, furthermore, important to note that its followers fre-
  quently came from small and medium-sized domains, often fudai
  houses, and sometimes large merchant houses, men who were no
  doubt convinced that transforming the bakufu into a national organiza-
  tion devoted to promoting wealth and defense would save them as
  well.
  The maturation of the discourse on wealth and defense occurred in
  1830, with the establishment of the Shoshikai, two years after the
  famous Siebold incident. Two of the members of this group had previ-
  ously been Siebold's students. By resorting to examination of the
  foreign scientist as a "spy" and condemnation for his chief contact,
  Takahashi Kageyasu, the authorities had raised the stakes for anybody
  desiring to pursue the new knowledge independently. One of the
  106 Maeda, Koza Nihon bunkashi, vol. 6, p. 59.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  casualties of the incident and a former student of Siebold, Takano
  Choei (1804-50) remarked in the wake of the persecution that because
  of the bakufu's policies, the "school of Western scholars was momen-
  tarily frightened, and Western studies began to decline."10? As a re-
  sult, organizing an independent study group in Edo years later consti-
  tuted an act of calculated risk.
  The Shoshikai's agenda was to explore new kinds of knowledge that
  promised to yield practical solutions to contemporary domestic and
  foreign problems; its heyday coincided with the Tempo famine,
  mounting peasant disturbances, violent urban uprisings, and Oshio's
  Osaka rebellion. Writing years later in Bansha sdyaku shoki, Takano
  Choei explained that the society aimed to supplement traditional samu-
  rai learning which, emphasizing elegance and ornamentation in expres-
  sion rather than substance, prepared people for purely literary careers.
  He commented that this tradition "has not been useful for the relief of
  society" and recalled that when the group was founded, many believed
  it was necessary to "understand how to mend social abuses."
  Since 1833, famines have occurred among the lower classes in the cities and
  the countryside. One can only conjecture at what is happening in the country-
  side. In response, there have been expressions of regret, and many have
  produced books concerning relief and ruin. Because many of these [books]
  investigated specific conditions relating to political economy, several domains
  implemented policies [to rectify the conditions] and tended to question the
  nature of political affairs itself. But because the problems have become exceed-
  ingly complex and so difficult to resolve, we decided to establish the
  Shoshikai.'08
  In addition, news concerning the intention and appearance of for-
  eign ships, though frequently incorrect, seemed to appear more fre-
  quently during the 1830s and was used increasingly by shogunal critics
  to justify their demands for new policies.10? One such rumor circulat-
  ing throughout Edo prompted Takano and Watanabe to question the
  bakufu's expulsion policy. Takano's Yume monogatari (Tale of a
  dream) and Watanabe Kazan's report on foreign policy resulted in
  shogunal action leading to the dissolution of the society, imprisonment
  of its principal members, and Watanabe's eventual suicide. The inci-
  107 Kitajima Masamoto, Bakuhansei no kumon, vol. 18 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Chuo
  koronsha, 1966), p. 367.
  108 Sato Shosuke, Uete Michiari, and Yamaguchi Muneyuki, eds., Nihon shad laikei, vol. 66:
  Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, Hashimoto Sanai (Tokyo:
  Iwanami shoten, 1971), p. 190. Hereafter cited as Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei, Sakuma
  Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, Hashimoto Sanai. 
  109 Ibid., pp. 192,193.
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  dent became known as bansha no goku, or the purge of barbarian
  scholars.110
  It is important to note that the society, many of whose members
  had begun in Dutch studies with some proficiency in medicine, anat-
  omy, and natural history, shifted its focus to investigating knowledge
  that might be put into the service of the country. Guiding this deci-
  sion was the belief that appropriate policy could not be formulated
  unless it were informed by knowledge adequate to its objectives. This
  apparent coupling of knowledge and power was fully acknowledged
  by the society when it demonstrated how policies concerning famine
  relief drew attention to political conduct or when it made public the
  official insensitivity to questions relating to maritime navigation and
  defense. Yet it is important to add that the society's leading figures
  envisaged political criticism as an effect of a new conception of cul-
  ture. Takano Choei, for example, explained in his Wasuregatami
  (Torii no nakune) that it was possible to imagine changes in the con-
  tent of culture and necessary to pursue a critical course if such
  changes were to be enacted. As evidence, he offered the example of
  his associate Watanabe Kazan who had been transformed from the
  status of a high-ranking samurai noted for his literary and artistic
  interests into a serious and committed student of Western learning.
  Despite his considerable achievements in traditional disciplines, art,
  composition, and his exquisite sensibilities, Watanabe had changed,
  Takano reported, after observing places marked by disaster and fam-
  ine in recent years.
  What provoked Watanabe to make this cultural "sea change" was
  his search for reasons explaining contemporary hardship and disorder.
  The rich, he observed, seemed to get richer, while the poor slipped
  farther down the scale of poverty. Everywhere the poor were resorting
  to rebellion. "Because tumult has spread throughout the society for
  one reason or another," Takano wrote, "he [Watanabe], impelled by a
  grieving heart, began excerpting selections from Dutch books on the
  kokutai of all countries and political affairs and circumstances reveal-
  ing social conditions and the way people felt." Next, he had turned to
  examining the pros and cons of contemporary affairs, writing essays
  on the issues of the day and discussing these matters with other
  thoughtful men. "Even though he had studied the way of old, he had
  110 The novelist Ishikawa Jun wrote a moving account of this complex and concerned intellec-
  tual: Watanabe Kazan (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1964). Marius B. Jansen, "Rangaku and
  Westernization," Modem Asian Studies 18 (1984), also described this early Westernizing
  impulse, based on a survey of the recent secondary literature.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
  237
  become a person whose doubts could no longer be concealed.""1 In
  place of the traditional learning that served him so well before but that
  now fell short of providing an understanding of contemporary condi-
  tions, he sought to substitute science and technology. Watanabe him-
  self confessed as much in a letter in 1840 to Maki Sadachika in which
  he asserted that no division existed between the Way and the reality of
  custom.112
  Watanabe's views on Western culture confirmed the efficacy of this
  new content. Western learning represented a new orientation, he be-
  lieved, and thus required new methods to achieve it. In Gekizetsu
  wakumon, he complained that the traditional discrimination between
  "civilized" and "barbarian" was bound to cause serious trouble for
  Japan in the future as it affected Western nations. Times changed, and
  the present could never be the same as the past. Men who appre-
  hended the present from the standpoint of the past tried to anchor the
  koto (Japanese harp) to a support and were obliged to pull both harp
  and support when they moved. The learning of T'ang China was
  inapplicable to Japan's current needs and resembled a "dream within a
  dream." Watanabe relied on the explanatory powers of historicism to
  explain that great changes have occurred since antiquity. Among these
  changes, one of the most important had been the Western use of
  "things" (in physics). Although he plainly recognized a differentiation
  between practicality and doctrine (morality) in the Shinkiron, he also
  acknowledged that each could assist the other and form a complemen-
  tary relationship. When juxtaposing the "Way of the West" to the
  "Way of Japan," it might be supposed that they were different, but
  because both were informed by reason (don), they were ultimately one
  and the same. Study showed that what distinguished Western societies
  from Japan was their discovery and development and science and
  technology, not their favorable climates (as Honda Toshiaki had
  thought), rich lands, or even vast populations. Western superiority
  disclosed the difference between diligence and indolence. For Wata-
  nabe, diligence meant wisdom, knowledge, and effort. Western
  schools prospered in subjects like political studies, medicine, physics,
  and religion, whereas Chinese learning was moribund. "Because the
  Western barbarians have concentrated chiefly on physics, they have
  acquired detailed knowledge of the world and the four directions."
  Fearing the West, the Japanese "hear the thunder and block their
  ears. The greater evil is to shut one's eyes because one detests
  i n Watanabe Kazan, 
  Takano Choei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Skonan, Hashimoto Sanai,
  pp. 179-80. 
  112 Ibid., p. 123.
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  238 
  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  listening. It is our duty to investigate not only the principles of cre-
  ation but also the principles of all things and opinions."11? Technol-
  ogy, the application of scientific principles, as Watanabe understood
  them, was particularly important to this new endeavor, because it
  showed how to transform the physical landscape through methods of
  construction and excavation, to put up schools, hospitals, and poor
  houses; technology pointed to the way that culture might be changed.
  Watanabe's faith in the practical use of science and technology in-
  spired specific proposals. The foreign question had become particu-
  larly irksome, and Japan was the only country that did not have a
  relationship with the West. As a result, Japan has come to resemble a
  "piece of meat left along the roadside. How can the attention of wolves
  and tigers be avoided?" Without proper knowledge, Japan's security
  had acquired all of the "contentment of a frog in a pond."1"* Politics
  originated on the basis of what was considered reliable, whereas misfor-
  tune ushered in the smug assumption that nothing was wrong. Today,
  Japan existed only because of the happy accident of geography that
  offered protection by distance and the seas. But it was no longer
  possible to depend on what others had relied on in the past and to be
  consoled by solutions that had worked before. China, once a vast and
  powerful land, was already heaving under the impact of seaborne
  Western intrusions. Hence, the first task for Japanese was to abrogate
  the seclusion policy and then to embark on a program of maritime
  trade and defense.
  Watanabe saw that the globe had become a competitive arena for
  struggle among nations, but Japanese leadership had failed to see that
  Japan would involuntarily be drawn into this contest. T'ang learning
  had come to Japan in remote antiquity. Since that time empty studies
  had prospered continuously to divert men's minds from the real tasks
  at hand. The new learning demanded a commitment to preparing for
  the defense of Edo Bay. The bakufu's failure to recognize the necessity
  for such preparations revealed an even more basic incapacity to grasp
  the power offered by Western knowledge. Not even the bakufu's most
  reliable allies had yet been deployed to the region of the bay. Causti-
  cally, Watanabe described the situation as a sign of "domestic catastro-
  phe" (naikari), rather than "external disaster" (gaikan): a failure of
  nerve rather than an outside threat.115
  The threat of an invasion imperiling a defenseless Japan haunted
  Takano Choei as well. Unlike Watanabe, Takano was a professional
  113 Ibid., p. 78. 
  114 Ibid., pp. 69,72.
  115 Sato Shosuke, Yogakushi no kenkyii (Tokyo: Chud koronsha, 1964), p. 168.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  student and translator of Western learning and a leading proponent of
  the utility of the new learning. This interest in medicine fostered in
  the discourse on Western studies continued even after many of its
  adherents shifted their focus to questions concerning defense and mili-
  tary technology, and it represented an impulse comparable to the
  effort of relieving the ill and diseased found among the new religions.
  As a principal participant in the Shoshikai, Takano had begun in the
  1830s to direct his own interest toward resolving the perceived
  disjunction between the domestic policy of feudal fragmentation and
  the question of national defense. Upon learning of a proposed visit of
  an English ship in the late 1830s, he drafted an essay to express his
  alarm at the probable rejection of such a probe. Takano charged in
  Yume monogatari (Tale of a dream, 1838) that expelling the Morrison
  would be considered by the British as the act of a belligerent country
  that understood neither right nor wrong. The loss of virtue resulting
  from this action would result in untold disasters.116 Years later, Yokoi
  Shonan transformed this reading of national moral conduct in interna-
  tional affairs into a classic defense of trade and peaceful foreign rela-
  tions against the noisy claims of xenophobic expulsionists.
  While others joined the discussion on maritime defense in the early
  1840s, the issue came to command serious attention by shogunal offi-
  cials, who understood that a decision on defense meant a prior commit-
  ment to a different conception of knowledge. Even as Watanabe and
  Takano were trying to establish the outer boundaries of the discourse on
  defense, bakufu officials like Egawa Tarozaemon and Torii Yozo
  turned to formulating appropriate proposals for policy after making
  their inspections of Edo Bay. Egawa's views corresponded closely to
  those held by Watanabe, but Torii rejected any suggestion of entering
  into relations with countries like England. Torii (who has sometimes
  been portrayed as the archetype of malevolence) was not a simple
  witchhunter; his memorandum late in 1840 disclosed a keen awareness
  of weapons manufacture. But he also recognized that a new conception
  of the world was at the heart of the problem of defense. Unlike many
  contemporaries, he was not convinced of British technological superior-
  ity at this time and thought the English victory over China to be incon-
  clusive. What distressed him about proposals calling for new measures
  of defense and the implementation of Western technology was that they
  were linked to a larger view of the world whose acceptance he rejected as
  vigorously as he denounced colonialism. Although the cannons used by
  116 Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, Hashimoto Sanai, pp.
  168-9.
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  the West performed efficiently, he wrote, and might be especially useful
  for coastal defense, in Japanese warfare there had been little utilization
  of weapons useful chiefly for a precision strike applied in places where
  large numbers of men were concentrated in close quarters."7 This
  difference dramatized the profound distinction between Japanese and
  Western customs. The West planned only for the pursuit of profit, in
  contrast with a society intent on rites and rituals; it waged war to
  compete, rather than to defend morality. Owing to the disparity be-
  tween these two social orders, it was inappropriate for the Japanese to
  have any faith in Western science and technology. What Torn implied
  was that any acceptance of Western technique necessarily meant adopt-
  ing the culture that had produced it. Writers like Watanabe and Takano
  had already demonstrated that their interest in the West was not re-
  stricted merely to cannons but included the whole matrix of education
  and customs on which its culture was based. The dangers of a policy
  aimed at incorporating Western culture, Torii warned, were great.
  "The first principle of defense entails encouraging the strengthening of
  traditional military and civilian skills. At the same time, it is important
  to eliminate frivolous military discipline and esteem competence.""8
  In response to Torii's critique of the new Western learning, Egawa
  argued that Torii had deliberately misrepresented the nature of British
  activity in China and had misunderstood the knowledge they em-
  ployed. Although wise planning always involved the study and mas-
  tery of military skills, it also included an evaluation of methods that
  were strange and effective. In accord with the ancient advice to "know
  the other in order to know oneself," it was imperative for the Japanese
  to learn as much as possible about the English before formulating a
  policy. When the Chinese were confronted by the British, they had no
  knowledge of the adversary they faced. How could they have devised a
  wise plan? China's failure and its subsequent defeat by the British
  reflected a reliance on empty theories and useless knowledge. Egawa
  was confident that importing cannons and other hardware would not
  constitute a faddish whim. It was common knowledge that Confucian-
  ism and Buddhism had been imported from abroad, and it was well
  known that there were many foreign products esteemed for their con-
  venience and value. If such goods had a useful purpose, they were not
  fads. To favor trifling and useless toys might be a waste, but it was not
  whimsy to adopt useful items.
  In the ensuing debate, the real problem clearly lay in the relation-
  117 Sugiura Mimpei, Nikon no shisd, vol. 16: Kirishitan, rangakushu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo,
  1970), p. 353- 
  " 8 Ibid., p. 354.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
  241
  ship between employing foreign military technology for defense and
  adopting the whole system of knowledge that produced it. Torii
  rightly considered this enabling knowledge as a threat to the legiti-
  macy of the Tokugawa order, and he derived little solace from
  Egawa's thinly disguised effort to justify importing discrete items
  rather than the whole cultural matrix. Provoked less by charges of
  official incompetence (which he could easily acknowledge) than by the
  threat to Tokugawa claims to legitimacy, Torii recognized that the
  importation of military technology would inevitably lead to incorporat-
  ing the enabling culture and jeopardizing the foundations of the tradi-
  tional world order. His fears were systematized in classic manner by
  Ohashi Totsuan years later in a last-ditch defense of the Neo-
  Confucian conception of a natural order.
  In the last decades of the Tokugawa era, the discourse on defense
  was transmuted into a coherent theory of cultural purpose capable of
  combining the claims of a traditional world view with the principles of
  scientific discovery. This task was accomplished by Sakuma Shdzan
  (1811-64) and Yokoi Shdnan. Although they were initially prompted
  by the project to find a fit between Neo-Confucianism, however they
  understood it by this time, and Western learning, they contributed to
  reinforcing the primacy of the new knowledge as the fundamental
  condition for understanding the world and acting in it. Their effort to
  secure entry into the new knowledge through the agency of received
  philosophical idiom attests to the importance they assigned to finding
  a way of using both. Yet their ultimate solution was to lay the founda-
  tions for the subsequent dismissal of nature in favor of a history that
  was crucial to later Meiji efforts to establish a system of useful and
  instrumental knowledge.
  The key to this vast transformation lay in Sakuma Shozan's decision
  to recognize in Western knowledge a source of power as great as
  morality. Both Watanabe and Takano had taken steps in this direc-
  tion, but neither of them went as far as to propose systematically the
  equivalence between two different forms of knowledge. The nature of
  international events in the late 1840s and 1850s had changed consider-
  ably, and the frequent appearance of Western ships in Japanese waters
  undoubtedly persuaded Sakuma to conclude that the world had come
  to represent a stage on which nations acted out their claims. If Japan
  failed to compete in this struggle for power, it would be eliminated.
  Accepting Western learning under these circumstances, "controlling
  the barbarians with their own methods," resolved the problem of
  acquiring the necessary strength and power to compete effectively in
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  the coming contest. But power really referred to knowledge and its
  enabling cultural matrix. It was necessary to grasp the very principles
  that produced the techniques that now promised to protect the realm
  against Western colonialism. Without it, Sakuma warned, Japan was
  doomed.
  It is important to note that Sakuma's commitment to study Western
  weaponry failed to follow the usual course of appraising Neo-Confucian
  metaphysics first. During the 1830s he made two extended trips to Edo.
  On the first he studied with the prominent Confucian teacher Sato Issai
  (1772-1859), the mentor of many late Tokugawa figures. His second
  trip coincided with the controversy over the alleged Morrison visit,
  shogunal punishment of Watanabe and Takano, news of the first
  Anglo-Chinese war, and the continuing debate over the defense of Edo
  Bay, a debate fueled by Takashima Shuhan's memorial calling for a new
  program of cannon casting. During his residence in Edo, Sakuma also
  witnessed at firsthand Mizuno Tadakuni's shogunal reforms, which
  included the appointment of Shozan's lord Sanada Yukitsura to the post
  of naval defense. Sanada selected Sakuma as his adviser and com-
  manded him to begin studying military technology. In response,
  Sakuma enrolled in Egawa Tarozaemon's school. This sequence of
  events suggests that Sakuma did not enter into Western studies through
  Neo-Confucianism, as if it constituted a logical extension of his philo-
  sophical position, but found himself involved in the immediate and
  practical problem of coastal defense and cannon casting, thanks to the
  initiative of his lord. The identification of power as a new element in
  global policies, and the urgency to define practical programs enabling
  Japan to compete, prompted him to think about the relationship be-
  tween the claims of the new knowledge and Neo-Confucianism, his own
  intellectual endowment. Sakuma's appraisal of Neo-Confucianism pro-
  ceeded from his encounter with the new knowledge.
  Through his contact with Egawa, Sakuma learned of the imprison-
  ment of members of the Shoshikai and secured knowledge of Wata-
  nabe Kazan's writings. His own thoughts concerning European king-
  ship appear to be a replay of Watanabe's elaborate explanation of kings
  and their importance in the expansion of the state. Disappointed in
  Egawa, Sakuma soon left the school after deciding that it had nothing
  to offer comparable to the views articulated by Watanabe.
  Following a lead forged first by Egawa, Sakuma argued that the
  promise of an investigative method (kyurt) had been smothered by
  excessive concern for textual studies and that the true meaning of "the
  investigation of things" had been lost. Since antiquity, the Japanese
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  and Chinese had therefore been robbed of the fruits of investigation
  and had forfeited the means to build national power. He advised that it
  was essential to national survival to make the effort to know the en-
  emy, even though such knowledge had been forestalled by cultural
  conceit and complacency. "The urgency for preparing to meet a for-
  eign invasion does not begin just by knowing them (the foreigners).
  The method by which you know them lies not just in exhausting their
  skills but in combining their learning with ours."11' If they had large
  ships, Japan should construct large ships; if they had large guns, so
  should Japan. Sakuma warned against using outmoded and ancient
  methods that could not ensure victory. To use new technologies from
  the West was the condition for containing the foreigner. The expan-
  sion of the West and the war in China had shown that mere ethical
  propriety was no longer an adequate defense against colonization. By
  recognizing the centrality of power over morality alone, Sakuma dis-
  tanced his discussion from the Mito discourse and made the crucial
  distinction between the opportunity of power and moral opportu-
  nity.120 His recognition of power drove him to abandon a view that
  foreigners were mere barbarians who knew nothing of the niceties of
  morality and civilization.
  And yet Sakuma's concern with power compelled him to minimize
  the substantive difference between Japanese and Western societies.
  He condemned the Chinese for having lost to the British because of
  their unwillingness to see foreigners as something more than barbari-
  ans who were no different from birds and beasts. To slight the great
  powers as barbarous, he wrote to his lord in 1849, "is a principle of
  great injury and small benefit to the state." Ultimately, he saw no
  incompatibility between "customs of the West and Japan's conven-
  tions." "When . . . foreign studies are carried on prosperously, the
  beautiful customs of our country will gradually change," but "if there
  is distrust and doubt, then they (foreign studies) will be impeded."121
  Received learning, like any learning, had to demonstrate its universal-
  ity before its validity could be established. Attachment to rites and
  propriety should not be restricted to China and Japan alone. Knowl-
  edge knew no boundaries; nothing was foreign if it proved useful in
  preserving the independence of the realm.
  Thus Sakuma viewed the new knowledge as a form of power.
  119 Shinano kyoikukai, eds., Shozan zenshu (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi shimbunsha, 1922),
  vol. 1, p. 128.
  120 Uete Michiari, Nihon kindai shiso keisei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974), pp. 39-40.
  121 Shozan zenshu, vol. 2, p. 710.
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  Knowledge of military technology guaranteed power, and its mastery
  was mandated by the "welfare of the state." Although this view origi-
  nally restricted the adoption of Western learning to military matters,
  (trade, he still believed in 1843, would result in the importation of
  useless products), Sakuma was to change his mind. The positive in-
  ducement of Western scientific technique would result in the expan-
  sion of contact with other nations. If "strength" was the criterion, then
  any policy, including opening the country, would be justified if it led
  to the realization and completion of national power. This opinion
  marked Sakuma's thought after the Perry mission (1854) and the sub-
  sequent signing of commercial treaties. In the wake of these events, he
  began to advocate maritime travel and foreign trade. He considered
  the opening of trade between Japan and the outside world as a corol-
  lary to his conception of power. Military prowess needed a sustaining
  source of wealth, and trade was the only policy by which a small Japan
  could accumulate national power to strengthen its military capacity. In
  one of his last petitions (February 1862) Shozan eloquently made the
  case for greater contact with the West. "The skills and techniques of
  foreign countries," he wrote, "especially the inventions of Newton and
  Copernicus and the discoveries of Columbus, have progressed long
  distances and extended to things like physics, geography, shipbuild-
  ing, cannon casting, and the construction of fortifications." From
  their prosperous study of the steam engine, the Europeans had navi-
  gated steam-driven ships at sea and steam-driven trains on land. Such
  accomplishments depended on exploring for resources at home: iron
  for railways, and coals for foundries. "How can we enrich and
  strengthen the national power? We must deduce from the facts." In
  Japan, he continued, neither the bakufu nor the domains had made
  much of a start. "If, however, Japan exerts itself for the profit of trade,
  strengthens its national power, attends to preparing ships, casting
  cannons, and building warships, it will be able to resist any coun-
  try. . . . Should we not unite with the great countries and formulate a
  plan . . . ?" Knowledge and superior technology, he believed, would
  lead to "mutual refinement" and "mutual growth."122
  This argument rested on the conviction that countries such as Japan
  and China were inferior to the West in more than military ways. If Japan
  was to withstand the peril of the Western presence and preserve its
  independence, it would have to proceed from the basis of powerful
  knowledge and powerful learning. In the past the trouble had stemmed
  122 Watanabe Kazan, Takano Chbei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shdnan, Hashimoto Sanai, pp.
  322-3.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  from the failure to identify the essence of useful learning. This percep-
  tion was linked to Sakuma's understanding of the "investigation of
  principles." He now tried to restructure Neo-Confucianism by rescuing
  an earlier tradition of philosophic monism and by superimposing the
  idea of kyuri on Western natural science. Rather than investigating to
  satisfy the needs of ethics, he emphasized grasping the "principle of
  things" in the natural, material world. What he proposed was a "corre-
  spondence" between Chu Hsi Confucianism, which he never rejected,
  and Western natural science.
  The meaning of Chu Hsi's thought is to penetrate principle in conformity
  [with the needs of] the realm so as to increase knowledge. When the meaning
  of the Ch'eng-Chu school corresponds to such things as the investigation of
  Western conditions, the explanations of those two teachers will correspond to
  the world. If we follow the meaning of the Ch'eng-Chu school, even Western
  skills will become part of learning and knowledge and will not appear outside
  our framework.12'
  Sakuma saw no real conflict between Neo-Confucian claims to knowl-
  edge and Western skills. If conflict appeared, it would have meant
  postulating two distinct cultures, a "we" and a "they," which were
  foreclosed by his conception of power and global struggle. In a letter
  to a friend, he stated that "there are not two principles of the universe
  residing in different places. The learning skills developed in the West
  are conducive to the learning of the sages. . . ."I24 And to the sho-
  gunal official Kawaji Toshiakira, he wrote that because the Western
  science of investigating principles conformed to the intention of
  Ch'eng-Chu, their explanations should apply correspondingly else-
  where. In this reformulation of the traditional epistemology, Sakuma
  expanded the meaning of investigation to include measurement,
  proof, and evidence and concluded that they constituted the real bases
  of all learning, which was mathematics. All learning was cumulative,
  "refinement," as he put it. Because Sakuma saw no conflict or duality
  of principles but, rather, a correspondence, he was able to couple
  Eastern morality with Western science. His famous phrase in Seiken
  roku, bonding Eastern morality and Western science, was not an ac-
  knowledgment of a division but, rather, a recognition of particularistic
  manifestations of a universal science.
  Sakuma's view of knowledge as power and his construction of a
  scientific culture implied a conception of politics. At one level his con-
  stant admonition "to explore the five continents" for knowledge put
  123 Shdzan zenshu, vol. 2, pp. 549-51.
  124 Miyamoto Chu, Sakuma Shdzan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1932), p. 53.
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  Japan in a wider world. Greater knowledge of that world prompted him
  to accept what it could offer to bolster Japan's strength. Although he
  never went as far as Yokoi Shonan did to recommend complete political
  and social reorganization, he was willing to alter his view of political
  possibility to adhere to the requirements of a scientifically based cul-
  ture. Even though he willingly acknowledged that Japan was weaker
  than the Western nations, he added that such weakness was physical
  and material and demanded systematic correction. However good the
  "American political system was," he wrote, "it could not be carried out
  in Japan" because history inhibited such a transfer.12' The acceptance
  of Western knowledge did not mean abandoning the moral way. Just as
  science was universal, so, too, was the morality of the five relationships.
  Western nations did not yet possess these truths. By retaining the idea
  of a natural order with its specific sense of politics, Sakuma was pre-
  vented from envisaging a larger social entity. Ethics always ruled the
  inner realm, whereas the outer, the world of politics and history, was
  changeable and could be served only after making a proper investiga-
  tion of contemporary conditions. Although the idea of a prior natural
  order militated against actually substituting society for nature, Sa-
  kuma's commitment to science resulted in consequences for the Toku-
  gawa social imagination that he could not have foreseen.
  Contemporary events required new attitudes. Japan was facing an
  emergency. "However important the rules of the past have been,"
  Sakuma announced, "they have to be replaced because of the hard-
  ships they have brought." He was referring here to seclusion; it was
  natural to "reform the august laws that have been erected for the
  realm," as "it is a moral principle of Japan and China to follow ordi-
  nary law and procedures in ordinary times, and emergency measures
  in time of emergency."126 His advice to abandon "old standards" (re-
  markably similar to Watanabe's earlier plaint) foresaw the possibility
  of a new political form. He imagined something higher than the "dig-
  nity of the Tokugawa house" and the court itself and pointed to what
  he called the "welfare of the realm" as a principle of legitimation.
  From this point he constructed an image of a nation-state, no doubt
  derived from his observations of Western countries, devoted to defend-
  ing the wider realm and not just protecting the Tokugawa family.
  Sakuma, like many contemporaries, saw in Western knowledge the
  promise of immediate relief and assistance. The solution was a na-
  tional community (tenka kokka) that could compete with comparable
  125 Uete, Nihon kindai shiso keisei, p. 61. 
  126 Shozan zenshu, vol. I, pp. 98-9.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  nations "throughout the five continents." Ultimately, he proposed the
  establishment of some sort of comity of nations, whereby each country
  would retain a uniqueness insofar as it would not disturb the continua-
  tion of harmonious relations. The "divine land" would become the
  Japanese state, and Japan would earn for itself a place among the
  nations of the world through the exercise of the "correct principles of
  civilization." This conviction led him to propose internal reforms.
  These fell short of total reorganization, but the core of his program
  was rooted in the recognition that proper and able leadership preceded
  all other considerations. Although he retained the imperial office, he
  identified its occupants with national kings like Peter the Great and
  Napoleon. Here, Sakuma came close to earlier views that had linked
  national strength to the power of kings who could lead their countries
  to power and wealth.
  The intervention of Yokoi Shonan (1809-68) in the discourse on
  wealth and defense resulted in refashioning this conception of king
  and country into a theory of political formation that favored the mer-
  cantilist state. If Yokoi shared a discursive world with Sakuma and
  Hashimoto Sanai, his predecessor in Fukui han, he differed signifi-
  cantly from these two thinker-activists in crucial areas of experience
  and study. Sakuma and Hashimoto had immersed themselves in the
  study of foreign languages and rudimentary science, but Yokoi had
  had only the slightest exposure to these disciplines. Yokoi was more
  deeply committed to a traditional Confucian metaphysic, and his ex-
  amination of its claims derived from an internal struggle with its philo-
  sophical propositions rather than an awareness of a national crisis.
  Like Hashimoto, Yokoi served as an adviser to the lord of Fukui,
  Matsudaira Yoshinaga (Shungaku), who was himself a prominent fig-
  ure operating at the center of national politics during the late 1850s
  and early 1860s.
  Yokoi's philosophic differences with Sakuma are instructive and help
  explain the decision to denature the social as a condition for establishing
  a modern state in Japan. Whereas Sakuma envisaged the act of investi-
  gating principle as a form of natural science and even tried to reinterpret
  the scientific discipline as inquiry based on a rational and empirical
  method, Yokoi, closer to a received metaphysic, grasped the investiga-
  tion of principle and the concomitant "examination of things" {kaku-
  butsu) as the vital connection between "true intention" and a "correct
  heart."127 As a result, Sakuma moved toward an "investigation of the
  127 See Uete, Nihon kindai shiso keisei, p. 83.
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  natural world," whereas Yokoi rejected any tendency that sought to
  "make morality a small consideration and imprudent and to transform
  knowledge into extensive reading and memorization." This attitude
  toward knowledge would lead only to "vulgar Confucianism" and
  "mere uselessness." In actuality, the investigation of principle and the
  examination of things referred to grasping the "physics of daily use."
  Despite Sakuma's decision to couple kyuri with empirical investigative
  methods, he was never able to overcome the dilemma of studying a
  primary natural order with the techniques of a natural science. Un-
  doubtedly Sakuma recognized that the two categories of nature differed
  substantively, even as he tried to bring them together in an impossible
  synthesis. But Yokoi, who declared his fidelity to the true tradition by
  summoning the exemplar of the three dynasties and the ancient sages,
  found a transcendent way valid for all times and places. At the heart of
  his discovery was a reconstituted conception of the social now free from
  the responsibility of mirroring nature, which he believed conformed to
  the experience of the archetypal sages of antiquity, Yao and Shun.
  Their great achievement, Yokoi proposed, was to construct a viable
  social and political order adequate to the needs of their time alone and
  thereby to bequeath to future generations the universality of this par-
  ticular experience, not a timeless arrangement of authority. In this
  manner, the universalism of the ancient precedent liberated Yokoi from
  the Sung conceit of defending the idea of a static natural order as if it
  constituted a norm for all times to come. Even though Sakuma came
  close to making this move by positing his conception of universalistic
  principles, he failed to follow through on its consequences. By contrast,
  Yokoi explored the possibilities inherent in the universalizing of the
  ancient precedent and went on to conceptualize a new social image for
  Tokugawa Japan based on the production of wealth and the deployment
  of power.
  Yokoi shared Sakuma's conviction concerning the relationships be-
  tween knowledge and power. Early in his career, he drew attention to
  what he called the "vulgar learning of the useless" which he discerned
  in the contemporary practice to separate forms of knowing from politi-
  cal affairs. The essence of learning required disciplining the self for
  governance. If men failed to understand the site on which the ancients
  inaugurated their own project, they would inevitably become "slaves
  of antiquity." In Yokoi's thinking, the logic that identified knowledge
  with politics was provided by a commitment to understanding the
  practical details and necessities of daily life. That life itself exemplified
  the great lesson of antiquity and validated the very historicism autho-
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
  249
  rizing men in each generation to change and to prepare for new require-
  ments. Scholars of later generations, especially since Sung times, had
  missed grasping the importance of daily use because they had been
  consumed by efforts to understand books:
  When thinking about how one should study Chu Hsi today, you must think
  about how Chu Hsi himself studied. Without doing so, you will become a
  complete slave of Chu Hsi when you take to reading books. When one thinks
  about composing a poem and how it should become, you have to consider the
  kind of things that Tu Fu studied, which means going back to the Han, Wei,
  and Six dynasties.
  Underlying this approach was the deeper conviction that texts are
  constituted and subsequently implicated in the very time they have
  been produced. But their identity is not fixed for all times to come.
  Active thinking, not blind acceptance of established precedents and
  morally irrelevant pieties, must become the essential condition for all
  learning seeking the mastery of principle. Yet Yokoi recognized that
  the decision to abandon old precedents and cast off ancient abuses
  would not necessarily lead to an understanding of the "physics of the
  daily" unless it were accompanied by the proper intention, sincerity,
  and honesty, a kind of good faith motivating thoughtful men to
  investigate themselves first. Writing to a colleague, Yokoi asserted
  that despite living in a universe that is the proper place for "our
  thinking, our minds have not yet investigated the various things we
  encounter and penetrated their principle." When one practiced sin-
  cerity and relied on "daily experiences, then one will have movement
  or the exercise of minds."128 Self-examination prompted by sincerity
  invariably demands an investigation of the outer world and, accord-
  ingly, distinguishes between the act of merely knowing and genu-
  inely understanding.
  By constantly exercising the mind, men would reach a "true under-
  standing of the governing principles that are brought out from
  thought." The Sung theorists, Yokoi complained, remained mired in
  the pursuit of mere knowing and wrote learnedly about the act of
  investigation but never understood it as a technique for "improving
  the welfare of the people."129 In their hands, the examination of things
  and the investigation of principle, kakubutsu kyuri, served as an instru-
  ment for speculation and never as a tool for grasping the external
  world in its constant flux and inducing men to make the appropriate
  responses. Under the sanction of this conception of knowledge and
  128 Ibid. 
  129 Yamazaki Masashige, ed., Yokoi Shdnaniko(Tokyo: Meijishoin, 1942), p. 922.
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  understanding, there could be little room for the idea of a timeless and
  fixed natural order.
  "The conditions of past and present are different," Yokoi an-
  nounced in his discussions with Inoue Kowashi at Nuyama, when he
  was under house arrest, "and although today and yesterday corre-
  spond to principle, they are not the same." Here, following the his-
  toricist impulse of eighteenth-century political economism, he differen-
  tiated principle (n) from conditions (set).1*0
  Principle consistently guided men during times of change and en-
  abled them to grasp the reality of circumstances in order to devise
  appropriate courses of action. Compelling men to overcome the temp-
  tations of an inactive subjectivism, the idea of sincerity would moti-
  vate them to know their times and to "assist nature's work," which
  now meant political administration or what the classic of the Great
  Learning called "outward pacification." In this discussion, Yokoi re-
  vealed his own conception of political form. If a culture were ethical,
  as he surely believed, informed by sincere intent, "good faith,"
  prompting men to meet changing conditions head-on, then its form
  should also be ethical. Practical action undertaken to confront the
  challenge of changing conditions must always aim to actualize benevo-
  lence, which in the context of late Tokugawa times had become widely
  synonymous with the "public interest." What Yokoi was to imagine as
  the nation-state was principally an ethical space in which rulers pur-
  sued the public interest by serving the people's welfare. In this way,
  he realigned the conduct of political affairs with the larger conception
  of an ethical imperative. Behind this reformulation of place and pur-
  pose were the classic formulae that the "realm belongs to the public"
  and the "people are the base of the realm." "If there are no people,"
  Yokoi asked rhetorically, "how would it be possible to erect a realm?
  But if there is a realm, it must serve the people who make it up." In an
  i860 text, Kokuze sanron, Yokoi specified this conviction by calling
  attention to the Tokugawa failure. The Tokugawa household had
  acted as despots, he explained, demanding financial support from the
  several regions even when resources were scarce, thereby embarking
  on a "private management" that served only the "convenience of one
  family." Political doctrine alone never managed to tranquilize the
  realm by making people into children. "Perry was correct when he
  called this a nonpolitics." Real politics always assisted the people.
  130 Watanabe Kazan, Takano Choei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, Hashimoto Sanai, p. 506.
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  DEFENSE AND WEALTH 
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  [For to] govern the realm means governing the people. The samurai are the
  instruments used to govern the realm. Even though it is fundamental to the
  way to teach filial piety, honesty, and loyalty to the samurai and the people,
  doctrine must also aim at bestowing wealth. . . . Wealth must be the most
  important task.1"
  Good leadership must always make sure that its conduct and policies
  conform to the public interest. Profit should exist only on behalf of the
  people. "The usefulness of benevolence . . . reaches men in the form of
  profit. . . . To abandon the self is to profit the people. The ideograph
  for profit is the name for unprincipled (action) when it is used privately.
  When one profits the people, its use is benevolent."^2 In these circum-
  stances, the realm should encourage trade and maritime commercial
  relations in order to realize the requirements of the public interest.
  According the Kokuze sanron, agriculture remained the source of
  livelihood, even if it were only one aspect of it. Without the innumera-
  ble products that people needed for their daily use, life would be
  impossible. These products were obtained through exchange. Trade
  and the circulation of currency affected the whole country. Because
  such a system had not been put into practice, contemporary Japan was
  a comparatively poor country. As a result, every effort should be made
  to prepare for the development of a variety of products in several
  areas. But before this could be accomplished, there had to be a system
  of markets for the distribution of goods. A market system and the flow
  of currency would prevent stagnation by regulating the exchange and
  distribution of products. It would keep in check the activities in the
  economic realm. In fact, Yokoi's writings show a gradual shift of
  emphasis to the market over the national defense among Western
  enthusiasts once the opening of the country had made international
  relations possible. Yokoi chose the han (especially Fukui) as the unit
  in which the new economic arrangements should be implemented, but
  he also believed that the form of fukoku kyohei could be extended to
  other domains because the "proper administration of one realm can be
  expanded to the whole country." On the national level, Yokoi, like
  Sakuma, supported the project of large domains striving to bring
  about a reconciliation between the court and the bakufu in the estab-
  lishment of a new conciliar arrangement. The importance of his mer-
  cantilist program was that it could be applied to the broader national
  131 Ibid., p. 444. Kokuze sanron is translated by D. Y. Miyauchi in Monumenta Nipponica 23
  (1968): 156-86.
  132 Waianabe Kazan, Takano Choei, Sakuma Shozan, Yokoi Shonan, Hashimoto Sanai, p. 504.
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  scene. At this time, Takasugi Shinsaku was already seeking to estab-
  lish a comparable program in Choshu, and Okubo Toshimichi was
  trying to transform Satsuma into a wealthy and powerful domain.
  Eventually, as Yokoi became committed to finding ways to account for
  the existence of plural interests, he drew his political model from the
  example of the United States.
  Yokoi developed a coherent argument justifying claims for broader
  participation in issues relating to the welfare and security of society as
  a whole. The idea of "public discussion" (kdgiyorori) signified an effort
  to formalize this claim to speak about society's business. This arrange-
  ment meant that the bakufu should summon all talented men of the
  realm to Edo (because the "great urgency of the day is to confide in
  sincerity") "to bring together the able of the realm and its political
  affairs." This policy would "seek out the words of the people in the
  realm and transmit people's intention on benefit and injury, gains and
  losses."133 Yokoi particularly envisaged the form of a unified structure
  that still allowed for the expression of domain interests, resembling
  most the American Federal Republic which he came to admire. He
  hoped to install a hedge against the divisiveness of the bakuhan sys-
  tem, which inevitably invited "private management," by resorting to
  the idea of public discussions that would equate ability with efficacy or
  utility, informed by expert and specialized knowledge, and mediated
  by an awareness of changing times and a concern for the people's will
  and feelings. He believed that he had found the appropriate means to
  express the Confucian imperative that made the private morality of the
  lord ("disciplining and cultivating oneself") equivalent to governing
  the realm in the public interest. Knowledge came to replace morality
  as the necessary criterion for leadership. This was revealed in his
  recommendation to Matsudaira Yoshinaga (Shungaku) of Echizen in
  1862 which urged "the abandonment of the selfishness that the Toku-
  gawa bakufu has shown since it acquired countrywide authority." It
  was the season to "reform the nonpolitics of the Tokugawa house" and
  to "govern the realm" in the interest of a larger public.
  CULTURAL PRACTICE AND THE TRIUMPH OF POLITICAL
  CENTRALIZATION
  Among late Tokugawa writers and activists, none came closer than
  Yokoi Shonan to grasping in the "current situation" the play of differ-
  133 Uete, Nihon kindai shiso keisei, p. 83.
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  CULTURAL PRACTICE 
  253
  ences represented by new discourses, the destruction of received politi-
  cal identities, and the need to find a way to accommodate the plural
  claims that were being made in the explosive environment of the
  1860s. Yokoi's "reading" of contemporary circumstances proposed a
  resolution of the problems of security and assistance that involved
  installing a hegemonic arrangement capable of stabilizing the political
  order while retaining the differing articulations. In fact, the conjunc-
  ture of discursive claims ultimately became the terrain for a new hege-
  monic political practice.
  Since the turn of the century, the steady increase of discourses
  augmenting distinctly articulated practices presented the spectacle of a
  ceaseless play of what might be called cultural overdetermination,1** a
  process whereby multiple causes and contradictions reappeared regu-
  larly in condensed form to shape an image of rupture and fragmented
  meaning. The new practices all announced the importance of "differ-
  ence" which, since the late eighteenth century, had been associated
  with blurred social identities that demanded accommodation. The
  culture of play reflected an experience of fragmentation and division as
  the starting point of literary, artistic, and intellectual production. The
  collapse of a view that divided political space between ruler and ruled,
  the gradual dismissal of a meaningful cosmic order within which peo-
  ple occupied precise and determined places, and the replacement of
  this view by a self-defining conception of the subject combined to
  launch Japanese society on a constant search to reconstitute its lost
  unity. Each discourse, including Mito, acknowledged in its way the
  end of a simple division between ruler and ruled, which had autho-
  rized a hierarchic order accountable only to itself and directed by a
  metaphysic based on the paradigm of nature. Under the sanction of
  Neo-Confucianism, the social body had been conceived as a fixed
  whole. As long as such a holistic mode of social imagination prevailed,
  politics would remain a mere repetition of the hierarchical social rela-
  tions. What the several discursive "interpretations" disclosed was the
  recognition of the incessant need to find instruments for restructuring
  that society by identifying and articulating social relations. Each dis-
  134 The term overdetermination has a venerable genealogy that, for our purposes, goes back to
  Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, in which he applied the concept to describe the
  process when a dream's elements appear to have been represented in dream thoughts many
  times over. I am using overdetermination to refer to the presence of plural discursive represen-
  tations during the late Tokugawa period, whereby the same elements appear time and again
  in different form. In brief, those elements (fear of disorder, concern for productivity,
  anxiety over questions of security, the idea of community free from fragmentation, new
  concepts of authority and legitimacy, and the like) that seem to have the most numerous and
  strongest supports acquire the right of entry into the content of discourses.
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  course revealed an overdetermination implied in annulling the contra-
  diction among a growing number of differences, a plethora of mean-
  ings of the "social," and the difficulties encountered in any attempt to
  fix those differences as moments of a stable structure.
  All of the discourses proceeded from the presumption that the is-
  sues they sought to understand and speak to constituted society's
  business, not other people's business. Henceforth, questions relating
  to order, security, productivity, relief and assistance, the centrality of
  daily life, and the practical knowledge needed to reproduce social
  conditions of existence required a concept of the social capable of
  being mobilized for the realization of its goals. The creation of public
  opinion in late Tokugawa discourse as a condition for considering
  issues vital to the collectivity made it possible to conceptualize a new
  political space. All of the discourses shifted the terms of legitimation
  from cosmic and natural principles to the agency of human perfor-
  mance and productivity. In this they contributed their greatest chal-
  lenge to the established Tokugawa order, whose claims rested first on
  metaphysical principles and only second on the instruments of produc-
  tion. Driven by a common impulse to overcome the division between
  ruler and ruled, the several discourses all sought to place daily life in
  the forefront of attention by emphasizing the tangible and sensuous
  against the abstract. As a result, all of the discourses aimed at showing
  how knowledge derived from the daily life of a certain social constitu-
  ency entitled its knowers to the power to make decisions affecting
  their lives. An effect of these new systems of knowledge was the
  disciplining of the body, whereby the proper mental attitude was
  made to correspond to certain mutual intentions, in order to offset the
  baneful influence of received arrangements that insisted on separating
  mental from manual and more recent customs in which the body
  played and performed, often to excess.
  To make other people's business one's own required finding a differ-
  ent form of authority that would validate the act of centering on the
  activity of people who had hitherto been disenfranchised. Any discus-
  sion of politics or administration, as officially defined, among groups
  long considered ineligible because they lacked the proper knowledge
  risked danger; it also challenged the officials' claim to designate objects
  for political discourse. This move entailed displacing the center from
  politics to culture and rethinking the identity of social relations in areas
  of religion, science and technology, and economics in order to locate an
  arena capable of offering representation to such groups. By the same
  token the move to imagine a new arena of this sort permitted conceptual-
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  CULTURAL PRACTICE 
  255
  izing different political forms. Each one of the new discourses produced
  a vision of political form consistent with the social identity of the group
  that it wished to represent and that, it was believed, had emerged from
  the new content of culture. Mito emphasized the autonomous domain;
  the nativists projected the self-sufficient village; the new religions in-
  stalled the sacred enclosure or community of believers; and the propo-
  nents of defense and wealth promoted the nation-state. Yet for the most
  part the institution of envisaging a stable system of "differences" had
  become overdetermined, was directed at solving the problem of the
  whole by substituting a part for it.
  As a distinct process of articulation, the several discourses tried to
  move away from the center to a periphery, or envisaged a plurality of
  centers by creating a larger public space as a forum for discussing issues
  that affected society as a whole. This signaled both the dissolution of a
  politics in which the division of identities between ruler and ruled had
  been fixed for all time and a transition toward a new situation character-
  ized by unstable political spaces, in which the very identity of the
  contesting forces was submitted to constant shifts and calls for redefini-
  tion. In the late Tokugawa period the discursive field was dominated by
  a plurality of practices that presupposed the incomplete and open char-
  acter of the social. This signified challenging closure and finding a form
  of mediation between the general need to stabilize order and promote
  productivity and a local demand to guarantee the preservation of the
  various social identities produced by the will to discourse. Only the
  presence of a vast area of semiautonomous, heterogenous and unevenly
  developed discourses and the possibility of conflict made possible the
  terrain for a hegemonic practice competent to satisfy both order and
  difference. For many who belonged to the new discourses, the Restora-
  tion vaguely promised the possibility of accomplishing a hegemonic
  formation committed to stabilizing the social and preserving interests
  and fixed identities. Yet the existence of these various claims to interest
  and projections of social identity would soon become the problem, not
  the solution.
  In a sense, the initial stage of the Meiji Restoration, or as it was
  called, oseifukko, appeared at the moment when many believed it was
  necessary to find a form that would contain and even represent the
  various interests that undermined Tokugawa control. It should be
  noted that each of the movements discussed, in its efforts to discredit
  the center and replace it with centers, supplied its own conception of
  political restoration: Mito had already announced the goals of chukd
  (restoration); nativism lodged its appeal in an "adherence to founda-
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  tions" {mow ni tsuku); the new religions epiphanized their image of a
  new order in calls for "world renewal"; and proponents of wealth and
  defense sought in some sort of conciliar arrangement {dai kakkyo) a
  way of rearranging the constellation of political forces that existed in
  the 1860s. Nor least important, all could easily support a restoration
  symbolized by the emperor and court that promised nothing more
  binding than a return to the age of Jimmu tenno, a "washing away of
  all old abuses" and a search for new knowledge throughout the world.
  Here, for a brief moment, was the necessary fit between the forces that
  combined to bring down the Tokugawa and a hegemonic political
  structure that promised to reinstate order and security and to distrib-
  ute relief while preserving regional autonomy. Uncertain as to its
  future goals, oseifukko could project the image of a hegemony willing
  to take into account the interests of all groups by presupposing a
  certain equilibrium among the various forces. So powerful was the
  appeal of an oseifukko in 1867 that writers like Suzuki Masayuki were
  encouraged to declare (significantly in a choka, an archaic long poem):
  "Even the despised people, will not be lacking/ The emperor {oogimi),
  hidden in the shade like a night flower, will flourish increasingly/
  Everyone will rejoice in the prosperity of the august age."135 This
  sentiment seemed to be shared widely throughout society, and people
  everywhere saw in the Restoration, albeit momentarily, a representa-
  tion of their own hopes and aspirations.
  Yet before long, other voices were beginning to condemn the Resto-
  ration as a deception and a deathblow to their most cherished ideals.
  In Yano Gendo's short, elegiac lament for the vanished glories of
  Kashiwara and the promise of returning to its golden age, all that was
  left by 1880 was a "dream that will never be."1*6 Almost immediately
  after oseifukko, the prospect for a hegemonic formation of the Restora-
  tion polity disappeared in the construction of a modern bureaucratic
  state - the Go-Ishin - pledged to eliminating precisely the fragmenta-
  tion, difference, and overdetermination that had defeated the Toku-
  gawa system of control. The reorganization of an ensemble of bureau-
  cratic administrative functions arranged by criteria of efficiency and
  rationality after 1870 aimed at removing the very antagonisms that had
  surfaced in the discursive articulations of late Tokugawa and that were
  necessary for the installation of a hegemonic order. The very condi-
  tions that produced new political subjects demanding order, relief,
  135 Ito Shiro, Suzuki Masayuki no kenkyu (Tokyo: Aokishoten, 1972), pp. 287-8.
  136 This quotation from Yano's poem is from Hirose Tamotsu, ed., Origuchi Shinobu shu
  (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1975), p. 386.
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  CULTURAL PRACTICE 
  257
  assistance, security, and the subsequent withdrawals from the center
  now constituted a problem that many believed had to be resolved. The
  contest down to the 1890s consisted of an opposition between propo-
  nents of discursive practices insisting on preserving a measure of auton-
  omy, usually expressed in movements calling for local control, and a
  new leadership committed to the rational centralization of power and
  the elimination of all articulations requesting the reinstatement of a
  hegemonic arrangement in a genuinely constitutional policy. '3? This is
  not to say that the Meiji Restoration successfully terminated the sev-
  eral discourses. Mi to had already taken itself out of the political field
  as a result of a destructive civil war in the early 1860s, even though the
  later Meiji government appropriated parts of its program. Through
  the support of courtiers like Iwakura Tomomi, nativism briefly sought
  to control the course of events in 1867 and 1868 by proposing the
  implementation of a new restorationist polity based on ancient models,
  but it was too late for the construction of an order more religious and
  mythic than political and more self-consciously archaic and agricul-
  tural than modern and industrial. As a discourse, it was dissembled
  into a state-controlled sect promoting the worship of Okuni no nushi,
  the god housed in the Izumo. Shrine. Later it was transformed into a
  Japanese science of ethnology that once again was formulated to fore-
  stall the power of the new bureaucratic state. The new religions contin-
  ued a checkered course of withdrawals, staging confrontations with
  the state, recruiting larger numbers of followers, and generating newer
  and more radical communities like Maruyamakyo and Omotokyo.
  Finally, the older discourse on defense and wealth continued its own
  efforts to curb the centralization of the Meiji state by trying to give
  substance to ideas of broader political participation and local auton-
  omy, ending with a systematic attempt to "civilize" and "enlighten"
  Japanese society in the 1870s and 1880s as the condition for a perma-
  nent moral and rational order.
  Yet the Meiji state, as it was completed in the 1890s, was also a
  solution to the bakumatsu problems that have been addressed. It was
  precisely the loss of control in late Tokugawa decades that catalyzed a
  contest over how the center, and hence the whole, was to be reconsti-
  tuted. Fear of the continuing failure to arrest the disorder - first in the
  137 The terms of this contest between center and periphery are documented in Michio Umegaki,
  "After the Restoration: The Beginnings of Japan's Modern State," forthcoming. New York
  University Press, while the proponents of the localist inflection have been romanticized in
  Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, translation edited by Marius B. Jansen
  (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  LATE TOKUGAWA CULTURE AND THOUGHT
  countryside and the cities - and of the inability to meet the foreign
  threat, plus the clear need to put an end to centrifugal forces set in
  motion by secessions and withdrawals served to impel a search for
  more effective ways to restructure society. In this restructuring, the
  struggle was seen increasingly as one between authority and commu-
  nity, between the effort of various groups to attend to society's busi-
  ness and the belief that that business was too important to leave to the
  public. The modern state managed to exclude surplus social meaning,
  by fixing the identity of the public interest in its quest for order and
  security while relegating communitarian claims to the margins of other-
  ness. It should be recalled that all the late Tokugawa discourses pro-
  jected an image of assistance and relief, even when, as in Mito, that
  image was an ambiguous mix of loving and caring for the people while
  treating them as dependent children. But the Meiji leaders recognized
  that politics must determine the content of culture, rather than the
  reverse, and felt that social identities must be made to comply with the
  necessity of the state because an opposite course would have encour-
  aged a continuous generation of new subjectivities and divisive antago-
  nisms. Once the state had arrogated to itself the modes of cultural
  production, it was possible to remove culture from play and employ it
  as an ideological instrument to depoliticize the masses. That act re-
  quired reducing the polyphonic discourses of the late Tokugawa, with
  their many voices speaking about the same things, to the single voice
  of an authoritative discourse.
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  CHAPTER 4
  THE FOREIGN THREAT AND THE
  OPENING OF THE PORTS
  The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a new phase of
  European expansion into the non-European world, stimulated by the
  mercantilist ambitions of European governments and made possible
  by a growing technological superiority. One consequence was a series
  of attempts to develop a profitable trade with the countries of East
  Asia, most of which, bound loosely together in a political and eco-
  nomic system centering on China, had shown little inclination previ-
  ously to engage in commerce with other regions. Japan, committed to
  a policy of national isolation (sakoku) dating from the seventeenth
  century, gave no sign of responding to such overtures. With China,
  however, there grew up a trade in tea and silk that by 1800 was of
  considerable value. In the next fifty years or so, this trade became,
  first, the main focus of Western economic penetration in East Asia
  and, then, the raison d'etre for a set of institutional relationships,
  known as the treaty port system, which was eventually extended to
  most of China's maritime neighbors. As one of those neighbors, Japan
  became part of it.
  The nature of the treaty port system in the nineteenth century de-
  rived principally from the commercial policies of Great Britain. These,
  in turn, reflected a shift from the eighteenth-century doctrines of mer-
  cantilism to those of laissez faire, linked with the coming of the Indus-
  trial Revolution. In 1840, seeking above all an expanding market for the
  products of its factories, Britain seized the opportunity afforded by a
  dispute with China over the opium trade and the treatment of British
  merchants at Canton to demand the "opening" of China on terms of
  "equality," in accordance with the principles of free trade. What this
  meant in practice, as exemplified in the treaty settlement that ended the
  Opium War in 1842-3, was full access for British trade to specified
  Chinese ports; a low fixed tariff on goods entering and leaving those
  ports; and legal protection for British merchants in the form of extrater-
  ritoriality, that is, the right to be tried under British law, administered
  through British consular courts in Chinese territory. Support was given
  259
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  to these arrangements by the cession of Hong Kong to Britain as a
  colony and naval base. Other countries quickly negotiated similar agree-
  ments. The benefits accorded by these, insofar as they differed from the
  British model, were shared by all the powers through the device of a
  most-favored-nation clause, included in every treaty.
  The agreements proved harder to implement than had at first been
  envisaged. In the 1840s and early 1850s the China trade failed to expand
  as quickly as had been hoped. The merchants attributed this to two
  factors: lack of direct access to markets in the interior of China, and the
  reluctance of Chinese officials in the open ports to give full effect to the
  advantages granted to foreigners in the treaties. They accordingly per-
  suaded the British government to seek revision of the treaty terms in
  order to open additional ports, including some on the Yangtze River,
  and to provide for diplomatic representation in Peking, through which,
  it was believed, protests about the "obstructionist" behavior of Chinese
  provincial officials could be urged on the Manchu court. A chance to
  press these demands came in 1856, when a dispute occurred at Canton
  concerning a local vessel, the Arrow, registered at Hong Kong. Once
  again, as in 1839-40, local hostilities escalated into war. Once again,
  British victory - this time in alliance with France - led to a dictated
  peace. In the summer of 1858 the earl of Elgin concluded a treaty at
  Tientsin that incorporated the crucial features of the earlier settlement
  and added, despite strenuous Chinese objections, the opening of fur-
  ther ports on the Yangtze and in the north, as well as the right to
  establish a legation at Peking. This treaty, together with the supplemen-
  tary commercial articles negotiated at Shanghai later in the year, be-
  came in the eyes of foreign residents in China the embodiment of their
  privileges and aspirations there. For the rest of the century the mainte-
  nance of "ireaty rights" was the primary task that they expected their
  governments to undertake on their behalf.
  Events in China were of critical importance for the "opening" of
  Japan. They created in the minds of Western diplomats, businessmen,
  and missionaries a number of assumptions: that the instruments fash-
  ioned to carry out policy in China (gunboat diplomacy) could economi-
  cally and successfully be used against its neighbors; that the attempt to
  do this would encounter difficulties similar to those that had arisen in
  China; and that these could be overcome by the same institutional
  means (the treaty port system). What is more, China's defeat tended to
  condition Japanese officials to accept the inevitability of the extension
  of the treaty port system to Japan, making easier the foreigners' task of
  negotiating there. Even so, Japan's experience was not to be a carbon
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  CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION 
  26l
  copy of China's. Its position, domestically and internationally, was
  different. Hence Japan entered the treaty port system in a significantly
  different way.
  THE CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION
  One difference was that Japan was not opened by the actions of Great
  Britain, even though in the first half of the nineteenth century there
  were several British initiatives, both public and private, directed to
  that end. Essentially, this was because the Japan trade was of much
  less interest to Britain than was that of Canton. Historically, Japan had
  traded with China in two ways, directly through southern Chinese
  ports and indirectly through those of Southeast Asia. Since about 1640
  the direct link had been provided by Chinese junks sailing to Naga-
  saki. The indirect trade had been mostly in the hands of the Dutch
  East India Company, being carried in Dutch ships coming annually
  from Java. Neither the Dutch nor the Chinese had been able to de-
  velop a line of exports from Japan that had much prospect of finding a
  market in Europe or America. Both took the bulk of their return
  cargoes in Japanese copper, destined for Asian markets. Nor had they
  been able to create a substantial Japanese demand for anything but
  Chinese and Southeast Asian products. In fact, by 1800 the Dutch
  were generally thought to be continuing the connection morebecause
  of the profits it yielded to individual participants than for any larger
  advantages it might afford.
  Knowledge of these circumstances discouraged the British East In-
  dia Company from making any serious efforts to gain access to the
  trade, as was demonstrated during Stamford Raffles's attempt to estab-
  lish relations with Japan in 1813-14. Raffles was appointed lieutenant
  governor of Java when Britain took over the island from the Dutch in
  the course of the Napoleonic wars. Talented and ambitious, he saw
  British occupation as an opportunity to convert the Dutch trade with
  Nagasaki into a British trade, anticipating, as he explained to the
  governor general in India in April 1812, that "if we are successful in
  once obtaining a footing, there will be no serious difficulty in extend-
  ing the exportation to many commodities the produce of British India,
  for which there is no sufficient vend in Europe."1 In 1813 Raffles sent
  1 T. S. Raffles, Report on Japan to the Secret Committee of the English East India Company [Kobe,
  1929] (reprint, London: Curzon Press and New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), p. 11. I have
  given a brief account of the incident in Great Britain and the Opening of Japan 1834-1858
  (London: Luzac, 1951), pp. 5-7.
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  a ship to Nagasaki. However, his plans were thwarted by the Dutch
  opperhoofd there, who persuaded Raffles's representatives that they
  would be wiser to present themselves to the Japanese as serving Hol-
  land, not Britain. This, he said, was because there was a risk of
  Japanese reprisals, arising from the high-handed actions of a British
  frigate, the Phaeton, which had entered Nagasaki in 1808 during a
  commerce-raiding operation directed against Dutch ships.
  Raffles, undaunted, planned another voyage for the following year,
  noting meanwhile that at least the first one had shown a profit on the
  cargo of copper it had brought back. Officials in India doubted even
  this. The accountant general in Bengal, to whom the records of the
  venture were sent for comment, held that Raffles had overvalued the
  copper, as well as ignoring the commercial disadvantage of the fact
  that it would in any case compete with the British ore being marketed
  by the company in India. More generally, he argued, judging from the
  accounts of the company's attempts to trade with Japan in the seven-
  teenth century, it seemed likely "that the Trade with Japan can never
  become an object of attention for the Manufactures and produce of
  Great Britain."2 The governor general accepted the implications of
  this argument and forbade Raffles to make any further overtures. In
  May 1815 London concurred, noting that the trade's value and impor-
  tance had been overrated but leaving the door open for another at-
  tempt if there ever seemed a reasonable prospect that it would be
  successful:
  Such an intercourse has been so long held to be unattainable and at the same
  time so desireable, that tho' our own expectations of benefit from it, either to
  the Nation or the Company, have not been great, we are disposed to regard
  with approbation any fair attempt on the part of our Government in Java,
  which has that object for its ultimate end.3
  The incident had no sequel, as Java was handed back to the Dutch
  soon after, but the lack of any real enthusiasm for commercial pros-
  pects in Japan was to persist among East India Company officials for a
  generation or more. When the company lost its monopoly of the China
  trade in 1833, it transmitted this attitude to its Foreign Office succes-
  sors. Writing in January 1834 to Lord Napier, who was to be the
  British superintendent of trade at Canton, the foreign secretary, Lord
  Palmerston, having instructed him to take any safe steps that might
  enlarge British trade with China, added:
  2 Raffles, Report, p. 193. 
  3 Ibid., p. 210.
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  CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION 
  263
  Observing the same prudence and caution, . . . you will avail yourself of
  every opportunity that may present itself for ascertaining whether it may not
  be possible to establish commercial intercourse with Japan, . . . and you will
  report to this Department from time to time the results of your observation
  and enquiries.<
  That this was not just an oblique way of prompting the superintendent
  to take an initiative was soon made clear. In 1835 the Hudson's Bay
  Company suggested that three Japanese sailors, wrecked on Vancou-
  ver Island and rescued from the Indians, might be made the pretext
  for an official mission seeking trade with Japan. Palmerston would
  have none of it. Napier's successor was told tersely "to send these men
  quietly home in any Chinese junk bound for Japan."5 Nor did the fact
  that this proved impossible do anything to change Palmerston's view
  of the matter.
  The Opium War produced a more favorable atmosphere for action,
  or so it seemed. On the China coast, at least, it brought widespread
  acceptance of the proposition that Japan, like China, must eventually
  abandon its restrictive policies. The first official manifestation of it
  came in 1844, when the king of Holland sent a letter to the Japanese
  government, appealing for a more liberal approach to questions of
  foreign trade. For Japan to stand in the way of the commercial ambi-
  tions that the Industrial Revolution and rising populations had created
  in Europe, the letter warned, might well bring upon it the same fate
  that China had already suffered:
  The intercourse between the different nations of the earth is increasing with
  great rapidity. An irresistible power is drawing them together. Through the
  invention of steamships distances have become shorter. A nation preferring to
  remain in isolation at this time of increasing relationships could not avoid
  hostility with many others.6
  This kind of half-threat, half-persuasion was to become a familiar
  ingredient in Western diplomacy in Japan in later years. At this stage
  it had little effect. The Tokugawa bakufu simply replied that seclusion
  could not be abandoned: "Since the ancestral law has once been fixed,
  posterity must obey."
  Nevertheless, the dangers to which the Dutch referred were not
  illusory. In May 1845, Sir John Davis, British superintendent of trade
  and governor of Hong Kong, drafted secret plans for an expedition to
  4 Quoted in Beasley, Great Britain, p. 15. 
  5 Ibid., p. 24.
  6 D. C. Greene, "Correspondence Between William II of Holland and the Shogun of Japan A.D.
  1844," Transactions of the Asiatic Society ofJapan 34 (1907): 112.
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  Japan that would use the available naval force to mount "an imposing
  mission," capable of demanding for Britain the same kind of privileges
  in Japan as those obtained in China by the Opium War. Given that the
  Japanese knew about the war, he said, there was every reason to
  suppose that the bakufu would accede to his demands: "I can scarcely
  imagine the possibility of its doing otherwise than at once seeing the
  policy of consenting to a Treaty of Commerce, based in substance on
  the Treaty of Nanking. . . ."? The Foreign Office approved the pro-
  posal; but nothing came of it in the end, largely because a suitable
  naval force - deemed essential to the project, for fear that without it
  Britain might suffer a rebuff damaging to its prestige in China and
  India - proved not to be available at the time when Davis wanted it.
  The exchange of correspondence between Davis and the Foreign
  Office in 1845-6 confirmed that British policy had not fundamentally
  changed since the days of Raffles. To the British government and its
  representatives, trade with Japan was desirable but not worth any
  great effort. Merchant opinion, preoccupied with the problems and
  prospects of trade with China, which had much greater potential,
  made equally little push to bring about a more positive attitude toward
  Japan. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the United States
  announced its intention of sending an expedition there in 1852, the
  British response was one of acquiescence, not rivalry. Lord Malmes-
  bury - not a very forceful Foreign Secretary, to be sure - told his
  superintendent of trade that "Her Majesty's Government would be
  glad to see the trade with Japan open; but they think it better to leave
  it to the Government of the United States to make the experiment; and
  if that experiment is successful, Her Majesty's Government can take
  advantage of its success."8
  This statement serves to emphasize, directly or by implication, two
  characteristics of free-trade imperialism as it had begun to operate in
  East Asia. One was the importance of access rather than exclusive
  privilege. Entry to a market having been gained by one of the powers,
  it could then be shared by others through treaties embodying a most-
  favored-nation clause of the Chinese type. In this sense, at least, com-
  mercial competition would not inevitably create international rivalry.
  The other characteristic arose from the overwhelming importance of
  China in the eyes of Westerners, which made China not only a model
  of what was to be sought in other countries but in some respects a
  lightning rod, drawing danger away from them. It was to have this role
  7 Beasley, Great Britain, p. 59. 
  8 Ibid., p. 93.
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  CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION 
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  in Japan's relations with Russia, even though these were not primarily
  commercial in aims or character.
  Russian interest in Japan arose in the context of expansion into
  Siberia, the Amur region, and across the north Pacific into the Ameri-
  can continent. Like other forms of European expansion, this received
  fresh impetus in the closing years of the eighteenth century, though its
  outcome was sometimes more complex than its advocates expected.
  Penetration of the Amur basin, for example, because it threatened
  China's Manchurian frontiers, seemed at one time likely to put in
  jeopardy Russia's existing trade with China by the land route across
  the steppes. Similarly, exploration and settlement in the islands south
  of Kamchatka brought contact, sometimes conflict, with hunters and
  fishermen operating from northern Japan in areas that were not yet
  clearly defined as being under either Japanese or Russian rule. This
  created a danger of Russo-Japanese political disputes, which in turn
  made it more difficult for Russia to open trade with Japan, though
  such a trade was highly desirable as a means of obtaining foodstuffs
  and other supplies for Russia's colonies on the Pacific seaboard of the
  Asian mainland.
  In July 1799, Russian activities in the whole of this area were put
  under the control of the newly formed Russian-American Company,
  which, like the British and Dutch East India companies, was given
  powers (o administer territory as well as carry on a monopoly trade.
  One problem it soon recognized was that of supplying its Far Eastern
  posts, because of the difficulty of the land route across Asia. Accord-
  ingly, a plan was formulated in 1802 for opening sea communications
  with the Pacific coast, with a view both to solving the problems of
  supply and to developing a maritime trade with China. Included in the
  plan was a proposal for trade with Japan, partly as a source of provi-
  sions for the Russian settlements and partly as a supplement to the
  China trade, as Japan was thought to be capable of providing Europe
  with tea, silk, porcelain, and lacquer.
  An exploratory expedition set out from Kronstadt in 1803, com-
  manded by Captain Adam Krusenstern and carrying Nikolai Rezanov,
  a major shareholder in the Russian-American Company, as envoy to
  Japan. It reached Nagasaki in October 1804. The request for trade, in
  a letter from Czar Alexander I, was duly announced to Edo while
  Rezanov remained at Nagasaki, where he was shown scant courtesy.
  Finally, in April 1805, a Japanese official came to inform him that
  neither his proposals nor his presents could be accepted. Angry, he
  left the port and made arrangements for two of his subordinates to
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  carry out raids on Japanese settlements in Ezo, Sakhalin, and the
  Kurils, justifying this action to the Czar as being the only way "to
  force the Japanese to open trade."9
  The raids, carried out during 1806-7, did n°t induce a change of
  policy in Japan. All they achieved, in fact, was an increase in Japan's
  military awareness of the northern frontier, manifested in 1811 in the
  seizure of Vasilii Golovnin, captain of a Russian survey vessel operating
  in the Kurils. Golovnin was not released until 1813, when Russian
  officials disavowed their earlier military action. Thereafter, for a genera-
  tion or more, Russian interest in Japan was infrequent and was pro-
  moted by private individuals rather than sponsored by the government.
  For Russia, as for Britain, the Opium War prompted a reappraisal of
  Far Eastern policy. In 1842, Czar Nicholas I established a committee to
  review Russia's position in the Amur region and Sakhalin in the light of
  British gains in China. From it there came proposals for a mission to
  extend Russia's trade with both China and Japan, to be led by Rear
  Admiral Evfimii Putiatin; but the plan was eventually dropped on the
  grounds that Russia's commercial interests in the area did not justify so
  substantial an undertaking. All that survived was a modest expedition
  to survey the Amur estuary. Nevertheless, this proved to be the begin-
  ning of something more extensive, having important implications for
  Japan. In 1850 the officer in charge of the survey announced - without
  any authority - that Russia claimed "the whole Amur region down to
  the Korean frontier as well as Sakhalien." His superior, Nicolai
  Muraviev, governor general of Siberia, went further. Writing to the
  Czar in March 1853, he argued that just as it had proved impossible for
  Russia earlier in the century to prevent the extension of the United
  States' authority over the greater part of the North American continent,
  so "it is highly natural also for Russia to rule over the whole Asian
  littoral of the Pacific Ocean."10 The main obstacle, Muraviev noted, was
  that Britain might seek to check Russia's advance by preempting con-
  trol of Sakhalin and the Amur estuary, from which it followed that
  Russia must consolidate its hold on Sakhalin, "whence her trade will
  inevitably develop with Japan and Korea. . . ."In April, Alexander
  gave his imprimatur to this policy by instructing the Russian-American
  Company to occupy the island. The decision opened the way for a
  penetration of the Amur territory under Muraviev's leadership; this
  was to become Russia's principal preoccupation in the Far East in the
  9 The most useful account of this expedition, and of other Russian activities in the area, is in
  George A. Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations 7697-/875
  (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. I2iff. 
  10 Ibid., pp. 300-1.
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  CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION 
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  next few years. It culminated in treaties in 1858 and i860, by which the
  Amur became the frontier between Russia and China, and the Ussuri
  territory, including Vladivostok, passed into Russian hands.
  Japan's role in all this was secondary but not insignificant. The
  Japan trade was still seen to have importance to the Russian settle-
  ments in the north. More urgent, there had to be some agreement
  delineating a Russo-Japanese frontier in the islands if constant friction
  was to be avoided. Accordingly, the news that the United States was
  planning an expedition to Japan - potentially another challenge to
  Russia's position in the Pacific - prompted a revival of the Russian
  plans that had been abandoned in 1843. Once again Putiatin was
  appointed to carry them out. Early in 1853 he left Europe with a small
  squadron, bearing orders to ensure that Russia was not excluded from
  any opening of Japanese ports that the Americans might achieve, and
  to seek an agreement covering territorial questions concerning Sak-
  halin and the Kurils. He reached Nagasaki in August, a few weeks
  after Perry arrived in Edo Bay.
  To the Japanese, Russian moves in the north were a threat that
  matched, or even exceeded, the dangers arising from British commer-
  cial ambitions, as exemplified in China. Japanese debates about for-
  eign policy in the 1850s reverted constantly to these two themes. Yet
  Japan, as events were to demonstrate, was in reality no more central to
  Russian policy than it was to British. For both powers it was geographi-
  cally at the perimeter of an area of concern: China in one case; the
  region north and east of Manchuria in the other. It is for this reason
  that the opening of Japan was accomplished in the end by the United
  States, the only power to see Japan directly as a factor in its relations
  with China.
  America's interest in Japan, like Russia's, had a Pacific ingredient
  as well as a commercial one. After about 1820, whaling vessels, of
  which a large proportion were American, began to appear off the
  Japanese coast. The national isolation laws, which prevented the ships
  from calling at Japanese ports for water and supplies, plus occasional
  Japanese ill treatment of shipwrecked sailors, caused resentment in
  the United States, bringing some pressure for a treaty to overcome
  these difficulties. More important, however, was the growing recogni-
  tion, first voiced publicly at about the same time, that the acquisition
  of a Pacific seaboard by the United States would bring great economic
  opportunities, not least that of a possible trade between California and
  China. American trade with Canton, conducted from the East Coast
  via the Indian Ocean, was already of substantial size, second only to
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  268 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  that of Britain. The prospect of giving it an extra dimension therefore
  seemed attractive.
  Japan entered these calculations not only as a potential hazard to
  shipping but also as a useful staging point on the Pacific route to
  China. Thus when President Andrew Jackson sent Captain Edmund
  Roberts to China as his agent in 1832, he instructed him to open
  negotiations with Japan if he could do so without undue risk. Rob-
  erts obtained a treaty with Siam but died before attempting anything
  elsewhere, so nothing came of the initiative, except insofar as it may
  have encouraged a group of missionaries and merchants, who orga-
  nized a private voyage in 1837 (the Morrison incident), seeking to use
  the return of some Japanese castaways as a means of gaining entry to
  Japanese ports. Like others before them, they were turned away
  unceremoniously.
  The Opium War and the more extensive opening of China's ports
  seemed to some Americans, as it did to Britain's Sir John Davis, to
  make the opening of Japan both inevitable and easier to achieve.
  Accordingly, in May 1845, instructions were sent to the United States
  representative in China to test the prospects by making a visit to Japan
  or by sending the senior naval officer on the station, Commodore
  James Biddle, to do so in his place. He chose the latter course. Biddle
  duly went to Edo Bay in July 1846, only to find that the Japanese
  firmly rejected his overtures, reaffirming their policy of national isola-
  tion. Because he had orders to avoid any resort to force, Biddle was
  compelled to withdraw frustrated, despite an incident - he was jostled
  by a Japanese guard - that might have given him grounds to insist on
  some kind of concessions. China coast opinion saw the whole venture
  as having done more harm than good.
  The next few years, however, witnessed a significant change in the
  situation arising from the fact that the United States established for-
  mal authority in Oregon and California. As Secretary of the Treasury
  Robert J. Walker commented in 1848, this was an economic as well as
  a political gain: "By our recent acquisitions on the Pacific, Asia has
  suddenly become our neighbor, with a placid, intervening ocean, invit-
  ing our steamships upon the track of a commerce greater than that of
  all Europe combined."11 It was undoubtedly the China trade that
  Walker had most in mind, but Japan, too, had its place in the pattern.
  In 1849 Commander James Glynn of the USS Preble was sent to
  11 Quoted in T. Wada, American Foreign Polity Toward Japan During the Nineteenth Century
  (Tokyo: Toyo bunko, 1928), p. 59.
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  CHALLENGE TO NATIONAL ISOLATION 
  269
  Nagasaki to secure the release and repatriation of a party of ship-
  wrecked American sailors. Returning to New York at the beginning of
  1851, Glynn joined in a campaign, backed by shipping interests, to
  persuade Washington to send an expedition to Japan, pointing out
  that not only did that country have supplies of coal, mined near
  Nagasaki, but was also "directly on the line from San Francisco to
  Shanghai." This made it of major importance to any trans-Pacific
  steamer route. Finding these arguments persuasive, Secretary of State
  Daniel Webster approved the proposal in June 1851. The mission was
  to be carried out by Commodore John H. Aulick, whose instructions
  emphasized the necessity of securing for Americans the right to buy
  coal for steamers on passage between California and China; proper
  protection for shipwrecked sailors; and permission for ships to dispose
  of cargo at one or more Japanese ports of call. He was also provided
  with a letter from President Millard Fillmore, addressed to the em-
  peror of Japan, setting out these points and calling for "friendly com-
  mercial intercourse" between the two countries.'2
  In the event, the expedition was commanded not by Aulick but by
  Commodore Matthew C. Perry, whose squadron reached the entrance
  to Edo Bay on July 8, 1853. The long voyage across the Atlantic and
  Indian oceans had impressed on him anew the importance of coaling
  stations. It had also given him ample time in which to decide on an
  approach to his task. In the words of his official narrative: "He was
  resolved to adopt a course entirely contrary to that of all others who
  had hitherto visited Japan on a similar errand - to demand as a right,
  and not as a favor, those acts of courtesy which are due from one
  civilized nation to another. . . ."'3 Pursuing this policy, Perry insisted
  on handing over the president's letter at Kurihama with all appropri-
  ate formality and under the guns of his anchored ships; refused to go
  to Nagasaki to receive a reply, as the Japanese urged; and indicated in
  a letter of his own that although "as an evidence of his friendly inten-
  tions," he had brought only a small squadron on this occasion, he
  12 The text, given in ibid., is similar, though not identical, to that of the letter eventually
  delivered by Perry.
  13 F. L. Hawks, Narrative of an Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan,
  Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854 (Washington, D.C.: Beverley Tucker, Senate
  Printer, 1856), vol. 1, p. 235. This official narrative can usefully be supplemented by Perry's
  own journal: Roger Pineau, ed., The Japan Expedition 1852-1854: The Personal Journal of
  Commodore Matthew C. Perry (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1968). The standard account
  of United States policy toward Japan in this period is by P. J. Treat, The Early Diplomatic
  Relations Between the United States and Japan, 1853-1868 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
  sity Press, 1917).
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  270 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  intended, "should it become necessary, to return to Yedo in the ensu-
  ing spring with a much larger force."'4
  This plan he carried out, having decided it would be wiser to with-
  draw to the China coast for a time, rather than to give the Japanese a
  chance to keep him waiting for their reply. Hence February 13,1854,
  found him once again in Edo Bay, ready to negotiate. As on the
  previous occasion, he maintained a ceremonial aloofness, coupled with
  a firm refusal to give way on procedural points. The Japanese negotia-
  tors, for their part, had orders not to grant trade but to avoid precipi-
  tating hostilities. The result was an agreement, signed on March 31,
  1854, that gave Perry the substance of what he sought: the opening of
  Shimoda and Hakodate as ports of call for American ships, at which
  coal and other supplies could be obtained; just treatment for ship-
  wrecked sailors; the appointment of a United States consul at Shi-
  moda; an ill-defined right to purchase goods at the open ports; and a
  most-favored-nation clause. It was not in the full sense a commercial
  treaty. Nevertheless, as Perry said in his report, it was a beginning:
  Japan has been opened to the nations of the west. . . . It belongs to these
  nations to show Japan that her interests will be promoted by communication
  with them; and, as prejudice gradually vanishes, we may hope to see the
  future negotiation of commercial treaties, more and more liberal, for the
  benefit, not of ourselves only, but of all the maritime powers of Europe, for
  the advancement of Japan, and for the upward progress of our common
  humanity.1'
  These are free-trade sentiments, clearly enough. Written of China,
  they might have been held to reflect the aspirations on which policy
  rested. But applied to Japan, they were no more than a pious hope,
  seeking to give an attractive gloss to a treaty more concerned with
  facilities than trade. In much the same way, the British and Russian
  negotiations that followed Perry's were more political and strategic
  than commercial in motivation. Just as Perry had prepared the way for
  an American steamer route to China, plus ports of supply for whalers,
  so Putiatin settled problems associated with Russian expansion in the
  Pacific, and the British negotiator, Rear Admiral Sir James Stirling,
  established relations with Japan as a by-product of naval operations in
  the Crimean War.
  Stirling's agreement came first. News of the outbreak of war with
  14 The texts of the letters from the president and Perry are given in Hawks, Narrative, vol. I,
  pp. 256—9; and also in W. G. Beasley, ed., Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy 1853-
  1868 (London, England: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 99-102.
  15 Hawks, Narrative, vol. I, pp. 388-9.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1 8 5 7 - 1 8 5 8 
  271
  Russia reached Hong Kong in May 1854. As senior naval officer on the
  China coast, it became Stirling's task to protect British ships from
  attack by Putiatin and, if possible, to hunt down his squadron. In
  pursuance of this task he visited Nagasaki later in the year, seeking a
  Japanese declaration of neutrality that would deny the Russians refuge
  in Japanese ports. But his interpreter, a Japanese castaway, completely
  failed to make this clear. As a result, Stirling, though without diplo-
  matic credentials, was offered and accepted a convention on the Perry
  model, which was signed on October 14, 1854. His government duly
  ratified it, despite a good deal of criticism from the China merchants.
  Putiatin, as we have seen, had already been sent to Japan in 1853 to
  protect Russian interests in the new situation created by the Perry
  expedition and to seek an agreement on boundaries in the north. He
  delivered letters announcing his mission at Nagasaki in August and
  then, like Perry, decided to withdraw to China to give Edo time to
  consider them. Returning in January 1854, Putiatin found the Japa-
  nese ready to settle frontier questions but adamant on the subject of
  trade. Unwilling to accept this, he again left Japan while the bakufu
  considered his objections. At this point his plans were upset by the
  outbreak of the Crimean War, involving him in a game of naval hide-
  and-seek with Stirling in the north Pacific, and so it was not until late
  in 1854 that he returned to Japan. In December, negotiations were
  resumed, this time at Shimoda and in the knowledge of what Perry
  had achieved. Notwithstanding the destruction of Putiatin's flagship
  as a result of an earthquake and tidal wave, the talks were soon
  brought to a successful conclusion, a convention being signed on Feb-
  ruary 7, 1855, that divided the Kurils between the two countries -
  though leaving unresolved the boundary questions concerning Sak-
  halin - and opened Nagasaki, in addition to Shimoda and Hakodate,
  as ports of call for Russian ships.
  THE COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1 8 5 7 - 1 8 5 8
  If the attractions of the Japanese market proved too small to prompt
  any determined effort on the powers' part to secure access to it, it is
  equally true that the development of a commercial economy in Toku-
  gawa Japan did not produce within the country any significant politi-
  cal pressures to overthrow the policy of national isolation for the sake
  of trade. The events we have just described undoubtedly had impor-
  tant repercussions for Japan, but they were not related primarily to
  commerce. Among the samurai they brought a heightened awareness
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  of maritime defense, one first taken up by Hayashi Shihei and Honda
  Toshiaki; in the next generation by the Mito scholars Aizawa Seishisai
  and Fujita Toko; and after the Opium War by military experts like
  Sakuma Shozan. In a number of domains it brought experiments in
  iron founding and other industrial skills, which led to the manufacture
  of cannon and the building of Western-style ships. But notwithstand-
  ing the importance of this for Japanese modernization in the longer
  term, it did not produce significant moves to change the fundamentals
  of Japanese foreign policy until after the first treaties had been signed.
  All the writers that we have named recognized that defense had
  implications for domestic politics. Hayashi and Honda both urged far-
  reaching changes in Japanese society, designed to strengthen it against
  the foreign threat even at the cost of undermining the bakufu. Hayashi
  was arrested for publishing his views, whereas Honda survived only
  because he circulated his writings privately. The Mito scholars used
  much the same arguments to advocate a relaxation of bakufu controls
  over the great lords, which they saw as part of a "restoration" of the
  traditional social order, involving a reassessment of the role of the
  emperor. Sakuma envisaged the need for a new kind of patriotism and
  for the emergence of a nonhereditary leadership capable of putting it
  to use. In their various ways, all these proposals were symptomatic of a
  dissatisfaction with the Tokugawa regime and are relevant to any
  examination of the process by which it was brought down. However,
  they did not necessarily constitute an attack on sakoku, or the bakufu's
  policy of national isolation itself. Indeed, they did not all lead to the
  same conclusions about foreign policy. Hayashi, Honda, and Sakuma
  all thought it necessary for Japan to take initiatives of a broadly mer-
  cantilist kind, including the creation of a navy and a merchant marine,
  if it were to develop the means to defend itself. This implied at least
  the suspension of those sections of the national isolation laws that
  forbade Japanese to venture overseas. Mito, by contrast, was commit-
  ted to a policy of joi, or "expelling the barbarians," that is, keeping
  Japan's ports closed, pending a political regeneration that would make
  it safe to open them.
  Given these differences among its critics, the bakufu was able to
  keep its policies and its authority intact during the first half of the
  nineteenth century, though not without some equivocation. Between
  1799 and 1821 it took over from the feudal lord of Matsumae direct
  responsibility for the administration of Ezo, in order to improve the
  defenses of the area against Russia. In 1825, responding to clashes
  with whaling vessels in the previous year, it reissued the national
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1 8 5 7 - 1858 
  273
  isolation laws in a more severe form, announcing that foreign ships
  that approached the coast must be "driven away" (uchiharai). This
  policy was maintained until the Opium War, one of its victims being
  the American ship Morrison in 1837. Thereafter, a growing awareness
  of Japan's military weakness vis-a-vis the West, induced by knowledge
  of British victories in China, brought a note of caution. A decree of
  August 1842 renounced uchiharai, substituting an order that foreign
  vessels were, if necessary, to be supplied with food and fuel before
  being sent away and fired on only if they then refused to leave. Associ-
  ated with this was an injunction to officials to give greater attention to
  coast defense, designed to disarm criticism within Japan. Tokugawa
  Nariaki, daimyo of Mito and principal spokesman for joi, dismissed
  the decision as at best cosmetic and at worst calculated to induce a
  dangerous apathy. His influence contributed to Edo's uncompromis-
  ing rejection of Dutch overtures to trade in 1844. Even so, the bakufu
  showed itself willing in the next few years to turn a blind eye to various
  clandestine dealings with foreigners in the Ryukyu Islands, which
  were under the patronage of the daimyo of Satsuma.
  The Japanese debate over national isolation, which had earlier been
  intermittent and mostly private, was made urgent and public by the
  Perry expedition. In the expectation of such an eventuality, Abe
  Masahiro, the senior member of the Tokugawa council (roju), had
  gone to some trouble in the previous year or two to reach an under-
  standing with Tokugawa Nariaki, aimed at uniting men of influence in
  the Tokugawa house and bakufu behind the proposition that until
  coastal defenses could be made effective, the country's foreign policy
  had to be a cautious one. Following Perry's arrival in July 1853, he
  decided to try to extend this consensus to the feudal lords as a whole,
  by circulating translations of the letters that Perry had brought and
  asking for recommendations concerning them. What he hoped was
  that by the time Perry returned in 1854, there would be substantial
  support for a compromise agreement. What he achieved was to bring
  into the open the underlying divergencies of view within Japan's rul-
  ing class.
  The replies to the bakufu circular revealed three main segments of
  opinion. A majority supported national isolation in principle - not
  always honestly - but coupled this with a desire to avoid any hostili-
  ties while Japan remained weak. This is what Abe had hoped. How-
  ever, there were also two powerful and apparently irreconcilable mi-
  norities. One was led by key figures in the bakufu establishment,
  including Hotta Masayoshi, lord of Sakura, who succeeded Abe as
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  274 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  head of the council in November 1855, and Ii Naosuke, lord of
  Hikone, who became regent {tairo) in 1858. Their main argument was
  derived essentially from Hayashi, Honda, and Sakuma: that Japan's
  defense could be ensured only by adopting new techniques, especially
  of warfare, a knowledge of which depended on establishing relations
  with the West. As Ii put it, "It is impossible in the crisis we now face
  to ensure the safety and tranquillity of our country merely by an
  insistence on the national isolation laws as we did in former times."16
  As a temporary expedient, the Americans would have to be given
  access to Japanese ports for fuel and supplies, he said. Trade was quite
  another matter. Better by far that Japan should build a merchant
  marine to trade overseas than that foreign merchants should come to
  Japan. In this way the foundations could be laid for building a navy,
  possession of which would enable the bakufu to deal with the foreign-
  ers on its own terms, even, if necessary, closing the ports again.
  The alternative viewpoint was stated by Tokugawa Nariaki, sup-
  ported by other members of the Tokugawa house and its collateral
  branches. To Nariaki, too, Western military technology was an ele-
  ment in Japan's defense. More important, though, was morale. This
  could be maintained only if the bakufu led in rejecting foreign de-
  mands, no matter how great the resulting risk of war: "If there be any
  sign of the Bakufu pursuing a policy of peace, morale will never
  rise, . . . and the gunbatteries and other preparations will accordingly
  be so much ornament, never put to effective use."'7 Like Ii Naosuke,
  Nariaki wanted the bakufu to do something positive. But unlike him,
  he identified positive action above all with sounding a call to arms, not
  with modernizing Japan's military establishment. Between the two of
  them, given that both had immense political influence, Abe was in a
  position of some embarrassment.
  Early in 1854, facing an insistent Perry, he settled for a treaty that
  granted ports of refuge, but not trade. This overcame the immediate
  crisis but did not resolve the fundamental problem of foreign policy or
  reconcile the two groups that sought to shape it. There was nothing
  "positive" in it for either party, though Abe had enough political skill
  to ensure that the next phase of the debate between them did not come
  until Hotta had replaced him as senior minister at the end of 1855,
  16 Beasley, Select Documents, p. 117. The basic Japanese work on the subject of feudal opinion
  and foreign relations is by Inobe Shigeo, published in the 1920s and early 1930s; see, for
  , example, his Bakumatsu shi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 1927). Much of his research was
  later incorporated into the major political history of the period: Ishin shiryo hensan
  jimukyoku, eds., Ishin shi, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Ishin shiryo hensan jimukyoku, 1939-41); see
  vols. 1 and 2 for the treaties of 1853-8. 
  17 Beasley, Select Documents, p. 106.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1857-1858 
  275
  when it was soon overshadowed by new dangers, occasioned by the
  outbreak of hostilities between China and the West in the Arrow war.
  The first step toward reopening discussions was taken by the Dutch
  representative at Nagasaki, Donker Curtius. In January 1856, he se-
  cured a treaty granting some relaxation of the personal restrictions
  applied to Dutch residents hitherto and extending to them the privi-
  leges secured by other countries in their recent agreements with Ja-
  pan. Trade, however, was to continue on its former footing, that is,
  under close official supervision at Nagasaki. Some months later he
  took up this point in a long letter to the bakufu, setting out his
  expectation that Britain would soon be demanding a full commercial
  treaty with Japan and arguing that it would be to the latter's advantage
  to enter into a trade agreement with Holland, thereby establishing a
  model that Britain might also be persuaded to accept. After all, he
  pointed out, Japan could not hope to fend off Europe's commercial
  pressures indefinitely.
  Hotta found the argument persuasive enough to put it to bakufu
  officials for study early in September. The key role in the subsequent
  discussions was played by a group of "talented men," originally pro-
  moted by Abe and destined before long to become Japan's principal
  experts in foreign affairs. They quickly came to the conclusion that the
  opening of trade in some form was inevitable. To some of them, it
  even seemed desirable. The chief obstacle to any such policy, it was
  clear, was the likely opposition of Tokugawa Nariaki, but his objec-
  tions were made a good deal less weighty by news of the war in
  China - specifically, the British attack on Canton - which reached
  Japan in February 1857. On March 19, Hotta commented: "Any at-
  tempt on our part to cling to tradition, making difficulties over the
  merest trifles and so eventually provoking the foreigners to anger,
  would be impolitic in the extreme. . . . Therefore while we are still in
  safety we must make a long-term plan. . . ."l8 Hotta's statement set in
  motion the drafting of a series of memoranda within the bakufu,
  designed to identify the kind of terms on which trade might appropri-
  ately be granted. Ostensibly the issue was that of Japan's national
  interests, both international and economic. But in reality, most offi-
  cials equated it with the preservation of political society in its existing
  form, so that arguments about foreign policy also became arguments
  about domestic politics. The more cautious wanted Japan to proceed
  slowly in treaty negotiations, granting only such terms as the foreign-
  18 Ibid., pp. 130-1.
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  276 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  ers insisted on. Their reasons, as one document explained it, was that
  because national isolation was an accepted part of a political structure
  that included government, to change one would be to weaken the
  other:
  [T]o make a parallel between the national system and the construction of a
  house, for example, to change the superficial structure of the house according
  to the tastes of the moment will do no great harm to the building, but to
  change the framework or replace the pillars and foundation-stones is to intro-
  duce weaknesses and cause complete collapse."
  National isolation, as they saw it, was one of the pillars or foundation
  stones. Their more forthright colleagues, taking their cue from Hotta,
  responded that so negative an approach would make disaster sure. If
  Japan were to do no more than this, "all will fall to ruin," they said. By
  contrast, for the bakufu openly to commit itself to pursuing trade
  "would be a means whereby it could bring the whole country under
  control and also lay the foundations of national wealth and military
  strength."20
  Hotta, recognizing the grave political risks in affronting Nariaki,
  preferred to make no final choice between these rival viewpoints until
  there had been talks with Curtius. These took place at Nagasaki dur-
  ing the summer of 1857. They were intended to be preliminary discus-
  sions, but Curtius was able to persuade the officials who had been sent
  to him to turn them into proper negotiations, with the result that
  agreement was reached on a draft commercial treaty, which was duly
  sent to Edo for approval.
  This was at the end of August. There followed a long silence, reflect-
  ing continued uncertainty in the capital. Meanwhile, news reached
  Nagasaki - inaccurately, as it turned out - that a British fleet was on
  the point of sailing from China to bring an envoy to Japan. To the
  Japanese negotiators, this information made it urgent that they make a
  decision on the Dutch agreement, in order that it could be signed
  before the British arrived and so serve formally as a model of what
  they could be offered. Yet Edo still made no reply to their request for
  instructions. Then on September 21, Putiatin arrived. Because he
  immediately added his voice to that of Curtius in demanding a treaty,
  the pressures on the Nagasaki officials were still further increased.
  Finally, on October 16, they took the momentous decision to sign
  agreements with both Holland and Russia without waiting any longer
  19 Ibid., p. 138. 
  20 Ibid., p. 136.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1857-1858 
  277
  for bakufu approval. It was, as one of them wrote to colleagues in Edo,
  "an act of the greatest temerity," justified only by the overriding need
  to "preserve Bakufu dignity" and avert "complete national collapse."21
  The terms embodied in these treaties were the most that the more
  enlightened members of the bakufu, relatively well informed as they
  were about the world situation, could bring themselves to concede.
  Even so, they were essentially a modification of the conditions under
  which the Dutch had traded for two centuries or more, and not a
  complete break with the past such as would have been implied by
  treaties of the kind that the powers had imposed on China. There was
  no longer to be any limitation on the annual value of the trade at
  Nagasaki or on the number of ships that could call there. Transactions
  were not to be handled solely through the Nagasaki government of-
  fice, as heretofore, though that office retained a monopoly of certain
  Japanese exports, such as copper, and all payments for goods bought
  and sold were still to be made through it. There remained a number of
  restrictions on the movement of foreign ships and merchants in and
  around the port. Above all, the general level of tariff duties was set at
  35 percent.
  It is not surprising that such terms were anathema to Townsend
  Harris, the American consul general who had been established at
  Shimoda in September 1856, for his orders were to negotiate a com-
  mercial agreement of the China type. On one occasion he went so far
  as to describe the provisions of the Dutch treaty as "disgraceful to all
  parties engaged in making them,"22 though because he made the com-
  ment when arguing the advantages of free trade with Japanese offi-
  cials, one should perhaps not take his strictures too literally. At all
  events, Harris set himself very different objectives from those that
  Curtius had pursued. After some months negotiating at Shimoda,
  during which it was agreed to amend the Perry convention with re-
  spect to such points as rates of exchange and conditions of foreign
  residence in Japan, he turned to larger issues. He had already an-
  nounced his desire to visit Edo, so as to present a letter from the
  president and enter into discussion of "a most important matter affect-
  ing Japan." The fact that he had simultaneously made available a copy
  of the United States treaty with Siam suggested that trade was at the
  21 Ibid., pp. 146-9.
  22 M. E. Cosenza, ed., The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris (New York: Doubleday, 1930),
  p. 507. The journal of Harris's secretary is also available: Henry Heusken, Japan Journal
  185S-1861 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964).
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  278 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  heart of the matter, and so during the summer of 1857, against the
  background of the talks going on at Nagasaki, the bakufu tried cau-
  tiously to discover whether a treaty of the kind being discussed with
  Curtius would satisfy Harris, too. Harris declined to show his hand
  without an audience with the shogun. Fearing that if frustrated he
  might, like the British, summon warships, Edo gave way. Late in
  September, only two days after Putiatin's arrival precipitated a crisis
  at Nagasaki, the Shimoda bugyo told Harris he was to be permitted to
  have an audience in the capital toward the end of the year.
  Harris reached Edo on November 30, 1857, traveling in the state
  appropriate to a feudal lord. A week later he had his audience, hand-
  ing over the president's letter to Hotta in the shogun's presence. This
  opened the way for the discussion of diplomatic business, which was
  inaugurated at Hotta's official residence on December 12, when the
  American delivered a two-hour lecture on the state of the world and its
  implications for Japan. His theme was much like that of the Dutch
  letter of 1844 and the arguments recently advanced by Curtius at
  Nagasaki. The steamship, he said, would soon make the whole world
  "like one family." No country had the right to stand aloof from others
  in this family. What is more, Japan did not have the power to do so.
  Britain was willing to fight to impose on Japan the same conditions for
  trade that it had obtained in China. Resisting, Japan might well im-
  peril its own independence. It would be wise, therefore, not merely to
  abandon national isolation but to do so by making an agreement that
  would bring it into the family of nations without violence or dishonor.
  This was what America offered:
  If Japan should make a treaty with the ambassador of the United States, who
  has come unattended by military force, her honor will not be impaired. There
  will be a great difference between a treaty made with a single individual,
  unattended, and one made with a person who should bring fifty men-of-war
  to these shores.23
  The fact that similar arguments had for some time been used by
  some of Hotta's own subordinates made what Harris said more credi-
  ble; and in any case the bakufu had now committed itself in principle
  to opening commercial relations with the rest of the world. This left
  only the detailed arrangements for implementing the decision to be
  settled. A few days later Hotta made it clear that he was willing to
  enter into negotiations on the basis that Harris had proposed. In a
  23 Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 163-4, quoting a translation of the Japanese summary of what
  Harris said. The summary in Harris's journal is much briefer: see Harris, Complete Journal,
  pp. 485-6.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1857-1858 
  279
  notable analysis of the options open to Japan, he stated the view that
  simply to fob off the foreigners with a temporary agreement, accepting
  their demands in order to buy time for military preparations, was
  bound to fail, because "year by year we would lose ground." Equally,
  to precipitate war forthwith, as a means of uniting Japanese opinion,
  would inevitably leave Japan on the defensive, its strength steadily
  draining away. The only real chance of survival was to do what the rest
  of the world was doing, so as to build up Japan's own wealth and
  strength:
  I am therefore convinced that our policy should be to stake everything on the
  present opportunity, to conclude friendly alliances, to send ships to foreign
  countries everywhere and conduct trade, to copy the foreigners where they
  are at their best and so repair our own shortcomings, to foster our national
  strength and complete our armaments, and so gradually subject the foreigners
  to our influence until in the end, . . . our hegemony is acknowledged through-
  out the globe.2*
  Harris asked for two major concessions: the right for Americans to
  trade freely at a number of Japanese ports, and diplomatic representa-
  tion at the Japanese capital. On January 16,1858, Hotta informed him
  that the proposals were acceptable as a starting point for discussion,
  though in view of the dangers of popular resentment within Japan, the
  open ports would have to be fewer than Harris had envisaged. Thus
  established, detailed negotiations were begun with the Japanese repre-
  sentatives, Inoue Kiyonao and Iwase Tadanari. Harris began by pro-
  ducing a draft of a possible treaty. It was in fact the substance of the
  eventual agreement, but it was not admitted as such until Harris had
  been through a frustrating round of explanations and repetitions, de-
  signed to persuade the Japanese to accept the norms of diplomatic
  behavior and political economy as understood in the West. There were
  lengthy debates about whether a foreign envoy need reside in Edo
  instead of Kanagawa. There were arguments about the number of
  ports to be opened and whether merchants should have the right to
  live in the cities of Edo and Osaka. There was a complete deadlock
  over the proposed opening of Kyoto, about which Harris finally gave
  way. It all engendered in the American a good deal of impatience and
  irritability. Writing up an account of the negotiations in his journal
  afterwards, he prefaced it:
  I shall confine myself to die main leading facts of actual transactions, omitting
  the interminable discourses of the Japanese where the same proposition may
  24 Beasley, Select Documents, p. 167.
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  280 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  be repeated a dozen times; nor shall I note their positive refusal of points they
  subsequently grant, and meant to grant all the while; nor many absurd propos-
  als made by them, without the hope, and scarcely the wish, of having them
  accepted. . . .2'
  Notwithstanding these difficulties, by February 26, proposals for a
  treaty had been agreed. Its central point was that "Americans may
  freely buy from Japanese and sell to them any articles that either may
  have for sale, without the intervention of any Japanese officers in such
  purchase or sale, or in making or receiving payment for the same. . . ."
  (Article III).26 To this end, the following ports were to be opened, in
  addition to Shimoda and Hakodate: Kanagawa (Yokohama) and Naga-
  saki from July 4, 1859, Niigata from January 1, i860, and Hyogo
  (Kobe) from January 1, 1863. Trade in Edo and Osaka was to be
  permitted from January 1,1862, and January 1,1863, respectively. An
  American diplomatic agent was to reside in Edo, and consuls in any or
  all of the open ports. Americans committing offenses in Japan were to
  be subject to American law, administered through consular courts. The
  trade regulations, annexed to the treaty, provided for a tariff of 5 per-
  cent on Japanese exports and a variable rate for imports, under which
  supplies for ships, as well as raw silk, would pay 5 percent, and most
  other goods would pay 20 percent. Opium was prohibited, except small
  quantities for medical use.
  Any Western diplomat who had been involved in negotiations with
  China would have recognized most of this, apart from the ban on
  opium. Only the most-favored-nation clause was missing. Harris, there-
  fore, had good reason to be satisfied with his work. Yet events were soon
  to show that in Japan, as in China, securing a treaty was easier than
  enforcing it; and even getting it signed posed major problems.
  What Harris had done, using the argument of inevitable British
  insistence on freedom of trade, was to persuade the bakufu's key
  policymakers to accept a document that went well beyond their experi-
  ence and their concept of what was proper. The Dutch treaty repre-
  sented the limit of reasonable concession, as they saw it. The Ameri-
  can one took the Japanese into unknown and dangerous territory.
  What is more, it changed the terms of the debate within Japan.
  Whereas in 1853-4, Abe Masahiro had set out to establish a consensus
  among the feudal lords, in the light of which he could take decisions
  25 Harris, Complete Journal, p. 505. Harris is also the subject of Oliver Statler, Shimoda Story
  (New York: Random House, 1969).
  26 Treaty text in Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 183-9; see a'so Harris, Complete Journal, pp.
  578-89.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1 8 5 7 - 1858 
  281
  about negotiating with Perry, his successors found themselves on this
  occasion committed in advance to a detailed treaty, which they had
  somehow to get feudal opinion to endorse. The attempt to do so put at
  issue not only the nature of Japan's future relations with the West but
  also the extent of the shogun's authority in foreign relations.
  Before leaving Shimoda, Harris had been warned by the senior
  Japanese interpreter Moriyama Takichiro (Einosuke) that Edo opin-
  ion remained deeply divided about the opening of the ports. Omi-
  nously, a number of daimyo had protested the decision to grant him an
  audience. There was nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that
  when news of what was under discussion became more widely known
  during January and February 1858, it produced an outcry. The state-
  ment made by Harris to Hotta in December was circulated to officials
  and feudal lords for comment, much as Perry's letters had been. Of
  the replies, many proved to be routine recapitulations of traditional
  arguments, reflecting an awareness, though often unstated, that the
  bakufu had already taken its decisions and that this was its duty. A few
  lords were still adamant in supporting national isolation, arguing that
  to admit foreign trade and foreign religion to Japan would increase the
  risks of disrupting Japanese society and hence of political unrest.
  Rather more tried to identify expedients that offered a chance of mini-
  mizing Japan's concessions while avoiding war. There was nothing
  very new in this. Most men realized by this time that Japan had little
  liberty of choice in these matters. Even Tokugawa Nariaki admitted
  that a trade agreement of some kind could no longer be avoided,
  though he urged that instead of bringing foreigners to Japan, it should
  provide for a Japanese trade mission to be established overseas,
  headed by himself and composed of "unwanted" members of the com-
  munity, like lordless samurai and younger sons.
  Another 
  powerful 
  Tokugawa 
  relative, 
  Matsudaira 
  Keiei
  (Yoshinaga, Shungaku) of Echizen, argued that overcoming the crisis
  required above all a review of bakufu policies within Japan:
  [T]he service of capable men must be enlisted from the entire country; peace-
  time extravagance must be cut down and the military system revised; the evil
  practices by which the daimyo and lesser lords have been impoverished must
  be discontinued; . . . the daily livelihood of the whole people must be fos-
  tered; and schools for the various arts and crafts must be established."
  Specifically, he put these proposals in the context of choosing an
  acceptable candidate as heir to the ailing and childless shogun, Iesada,
  27 Beasley, Select Documents, p. 180. Nariaki's memorandum is on pp. 168-9.
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  282 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  a recommendation that had the support of Tokugawa Nariaki, several
  of the most able bakufu officials, and some influential tozama lords,
  like Shimazu Nariakira of Satsuma. How else, they asked, could the
  bakufu retain the prestige that would enable it to impose a necessary
  but unpopular decision on a reluctant country?
  There was in fact one way in which it might be able to do so, as
  Hotta realized: to seek the approval of the imperial court for what was
  proposed, postponing meanwhile the signing of the American treaty.
  This he decided to attempt. After all, powerless though the emperor
  was, an imperial decree would be an authoritative statement of na-
  tional policy, giving a formal authority to the bakufu's stand and
  helping silence its critics. Nor was there any reason to suppose that the
  court would refuse it. As the negotiators told Harris, when asking him
  to be patient for a while, the bakufu could always expect to get its own
  way in Kyoto and "had determined not to receive any objections from
  the Mikado."28
  Hotta's optimism proved ill founded. Sending first a representative
  and then going himself to Kyoto, he argued strongly in favor of the
  treaty, both as something that fell within the shogun's executive com-
  petence and as a step required to save Japan from a disastrous war. It
  was all in vain. On May 3, 1858, he was told officially that Edo must
  think again. Because the emperor feared that "to revolutionize the
  sound laws handed down from the time of Ieyasu would disturb the
  ideas of our people and make it impossible to preserve lasting tranquil-
  ity,"2' there must be further consultation with the lords, in order to
  establish agreed recommendations for the court to approve. In other
  words, having sought an imperial decree to unite the country, Hotta
  was told that he must unite the country before securing his decree. On
  June 1 he arrived back in Edo, his policy in ruins.
  Behind Kyoto's rebuff lay not so much the court's antiforeign senti-
  ment as its political caution. For an institution that over several centu-
  ries had had only a ritual function in politics suddenly to take sides in a
  matter that sharply divided the bakufu and the great lords was to
  invite catastrophe. Nor was it just the signing of the treaty that was at
  stake, controversial though that was. There was also the Tokugawa
  succession, an issue that was both sensitive and politically divisive.
  There were two candidates who might succeed Iesada. One, later to
  become shogun as Iemochi, was from the Kii branch of the house,
  closest by blood but very young. Traditionalists in Edo favored him.
  28 Harris, Complete Journal, p. 539. 
  29 Beasley, Select Documents, p. 181.
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  COMMERCIAL TREATIES OF 1857-1858 
  283
  The other, Hitotsubashi Keiki (Yoshinobu) was older, more able, and
  son to Nariaki, which made him the preferred candidate of those who
  wanted reform. Because they saw reform as a necessary concomitant of
  opening the ports - without it, they said, negotiations would be no
  more than an expedient for postponing foreign attack - their argu-
  ment linked the two great questions of the time. It was this, Hotta was
  convinced, that had bedeviled his talks in Kyoto.
  He was given no opportunity to test this belief by trying to achieve a
  compromise with Matsudaira Keiei and Nariaki over the succession.
  To conservatives in Edo, the situation he had brought about seemed to
  pose a threat to the bakufu itself, making it necessary now to use
  resolution rather than finesse. As a result, Hotta was swept aside. On
  June 4, Ii Naosuke became regent, setting himself the formidable task
  of saving the regime by selecting the orthodox candidate, Iemochi, as
  Iesada's heir while creating at least an appearance of unity among the
  daimyo on the subject of the treaty, so as to warrant a renewed applica-
  tion to the court.
  While moves to achieve this were still secretly in progress, there
  came news of the signing of a British treaty with China at Tientsin,
  heralding, it was said, the imminent departure of a British fleet for
  Japan. Townsend Harris brought the information, hurrying back to
  Edo Bay from Shimoda in an American warship. The American
  treaty, he argued, must be signed at once, both to protect Japan and to
  fulfill Hotta's promises. Ii Naosuke would still have preferred to wait
  for imperial sanction, as he recognized the great political risks of
  acting without it, having gone so far, but other members of the council
  saw the foreign threat as more immediate and compelling. On July 29,
  the regent reluctantly gave way to their arguments. The treaty was
  signed the same day.
  Harris was correct about Elgin's plans for coming to Japan, though
  not about the size of his fleet. On August 12 he arrived in Edo Bay
  with a single ship, bringing Harris's secretary from Shimoda as his
  interpreter. Putiatin and Curtius were already there. Within two
  weeks all had signed treaties modeled on that of the United States, but
  with the addition of a most-favored-nation clause: the Dutch on Au-
  gust 18, the Russians the next day, and the British on August 26. On
  October 9, Baron Gros for France followed suit, thereby completing
  the list of Japan's five original treaty powers.
  By signing these treaties, Ii Naosuke offended the adherents ofjoi
  and gave them a weapon to use against him, namely, his lack of
  imperial sanction for what he had done. By choosing the Kii candidate
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  284 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  in the succession dispute, he offended those lords who advocated
  reform, some of whom would otherwise have supported him on the
  treaty question. Thus isolated, he determined to carry matters with a
  high hand. Bakufu officials who sympathized with the Hitotsubashi
  party, including Hotta, were removed from office. Feudal lords who
  might be expected to give countenance to the opposition or intrigue at
  court against the bakufu were forced into retirement or put under
  house arrest. Tokugawa Nariaki and Matsudaira Keiei were among
  them. Two senior ministers of the imperial court were replaced,
  whereas others, thought to be more open to persuasion, received hand-
  some gifts. This done, a new emissary, Manabe Akikatsu, was sent to
  "explain" the treaties to the emperor. Despite the preparations, the
  process took some time.
  Manabe reached Kyoto late in October 1858 and, after some prelimi-
  nary sounding out of opinion, prepared a series of memoranda, de-
  signed to persuade the court nobility that the treaties, though undesir-
  able, had been wholly necessary. His task was made more difficult by
  the emperor, Komei, who let it be known that he was personally op-
  posed to the concessions that Edo had made. Manabe, informed of this,
  countered by claiming that the bakufu had done no more than carry out
  its public responsibilities and threatened that criticism, being politically
  motivated, would be firmly suppressed. Nor, he made it plain, could
  the treaty decision be reversed: "Whatever the orders of the court may
  be, to rescind the treaties at this time would be to invite both foreign and
  domestic dangers at once."3° Coupled with this, however, was a hint of
  compromise. The court need not approve the treaties, only recognize
  that the bakufu had had no option but to sign them, thereby validating
  the shogun's authority. Prolonged talks along these lines at last brought
  settlement. On February 2, 1859, the emperor, in return for a bakufu
  undertaking to seek a means of returning to seclusion as soon as practica-
  ble, formally acknowledged that Edo had acted under force majeure and
  agreed in the interest of national unity to "exercise forebearance on this
  occasion."'1 On the face of it, Ii Naosuke had weathered the storm. The
  ports had been opened; a foreign war had been avoided; and a major
  political attack on the bakufu had been contained.
  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION
  The opening of Japanese ports to trade - officially from July 1859,
  though a number of foreign merchants beat the starting gun - was
  30 Ibid., p. 191. 
  31 Ibid., p. 194.
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
  285
  accompanied by changes in the role of the various Western powers in
  the country's foreign relations. Russia, having achieved its immediate
  territorial ambitions in the north and lacking any great commercial
  interests in Japan, dropped more and more into the background dur-
  ing the following decade. So did the United States, largely because of
  its preoccupation with domestic politics and the Civil War: Washing-
  ton remained willing to support moves to put pressure on the Japanese
  government to maintain the West's commercial advantages but was no
  longer in a position to take the lead in doing so. This left the initiative
  in Japan, as in China, with Britain and France. Britain, in particular,
  dominant in Far Eastern trade and possessing the naval strength to
  defend its position, acquired in effect a power of veto over Western
  policy toward Japan. Without British cooperation, no action in Japan
  could succeed. France, as one would expect, found this situation irk-
  some, not least because Japan quickly acquired economic importance
  as a supplier of silk.
  In these respects, Japan's foreign relations lost some of their distinc-
  tive features, being absorbed into a wider international pattern center-
  ing on China. Indeed, they soon began to resemble China's foreign
  relations after the Opium War. In Japan, as in China, treaties reluc-
  tantly conceded proved difficult to enforce. In both, resistance brought
  conflict, involving the substantial use of force; and the outcome was a
  further period of negotiation, in which Western privileges were con-
  firmed and extended.
  One cause of controversy after 1858 was directly economic: Japa-
  nese criticism of the treaties arose in part from the stresses produced
  by bringing Japan's hitherto isolated economy into a relationship with
  that of the rest of the world. The currency disputes of 1859-60 illus-
  trate the nature of this conflict of interest and the way in which the
  West insisted on a solution conforming to its own economic ideas.*2
  During his treaty negotiations, Townsend Harris had maintained that
  trade would only develop if a proper exchange rate were established.
  This he identified as an exchange of appropriate Western and Japanese
  coins on the basis of weight for weight. Because the Mexican dollar, as
  used on the China coast, had a face value and an intrinsic value that
  were approximately equal, he foresaw no difficulties with this arrange-
  ment. Japanese officials, however, viewed things differently. Japanese
  silver coins, of which the most important was the ichibu, had a higher
  percentage silver content than did the Mexican dollar. Moreover, they
  passed in Japan at a face value that was not directly related to their
  32 The most useful account is by Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis (Cambridge,
  Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
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  286 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  intrinsic value, being notionally linked to monetary units whose value
  was defined in terms of gold. In Japan, the gold-to-silver ratio was
  about i to 5, compared with a world ratio of i to 15. Similarly, the
  silver ichibu was, by world standards, substantially overvalued in
  terms of copper. Thus, to relate the dollar and the silver ichibu on a
  weight-for-weight basis, as Harris required, was to enhance the value
  of the dollar with reference to Japanese gold and copper coins. By
  contrast, to have established an exchange rate based on Japanese gold
  values for the ichibu, as Japanese officials wished, would have raised
  the export price of Japanese goods to what foreigners would have
  regarded as an unacceptable level.
  Unwilling to revise Japanese gold-to-silver ratios to bring them into
  line with those of the rest of the world, because of the considerable
  disruption this would cause to the domestic economy, the Tokugawa
  government sought instead to circumvent the treaties' provisions. In
  June 1859, in preparation for opening the ports, it issued a new silver
  coin, called the nishu-gin, having the weight of half a dollar and the
  face value of half an ichibu. Under the treaty's exchange stipulations,
  this would mean valuing the dollar at one ichibu. Because the silver
  ichibu coin in use at the time when Harris made his proposals had
  exchanged by weight at approximately three ichibu to the dollar, the
  effect of introducing the new coin was to treble the price of Japanese
  goods to the foreign buyer.
  The trading implications of this did not at all perturb bakufu offi-
  cials, as they were not in the least concerned with promoting Japanese
  exports, but it alarmed the foreign representatives in the treaty ports.
  Both Townsend Harris and Rutherford Alcock, the newly arrived
  British minister, protested vigorously. In August the bakufu withdrew
  the new currency. In September it agreed to supply silver ichibu to
  foreign traders at a rate of three ichibu to the dollar, subject to restric-
  tions on the amount to be provided. This led to brisk competition
  among foreign merchants for supplies of coin, involving a host of
  fraudulent applications. It also brought a "gold rush" in the winter of
  1859-60, as foreigners used their ichibu to buy Japanese gold coins at a
  gold-to-silver ratio of 1 to 5 and then exported them to the China coast
  for sale at the prevailing ratio there of 1 to 15. Profits were high
  enough to justify foreigners' paying premium prices for Japanese gold,
  thereby making ineffective all the bakufu's attempts to halt the trade
  by banning the sale of gold coins in the treaty ports.
  The amount of gold lost to Japan by this means was probably less
  significant economically than were the measures adopted to check its
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
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  export. Attempts to end the transactions by cutting off the supply of
  ichibu in November 1859 brought further protests from Harris and
  Alcock, as this involved the stoppage of the entire Japan trade, in
  contravention of the treaty. They warned that the consequence might
  well be war. This threat left the bakufu with little freedom of action.
  Beginning in February i860, it began a complete revision of its cur-
  rency arrangements, reminting old coins and issuing new ones, so as to
  bring Japanese coinage into line with world gold-to-silver-to-copper
  ratios and to ensure a rough correspondence between face value and
  bullion content. Once completed, this checked the export of gold
  coins. However, it did so at the cost of further debasing the currency
  and dislocating the structure of commodity prices, thereby contribut-
  ing to the rapid inflation of the next few years. The treaties had other
  economic consequences, too. Foreign trade created a demand for Japa-
  nese tea and silk, which Japanese producers, despite increasing out-
  put, could not readily meet. This inevitably pushed up prices. In a
  different context, preoccupation with the needs of defense on the part
  of both the bakufu and the feudal lords led to heavy expenditures on
  Western-style weapons and military technology. After 1863, armed
  clashes with the West led to demands for indemnities, whose payment
  placed a further burden on feudal revenues and gave additional impe-
  tus to inflation. It is not surprising, therefore, that many Japanese,
  seeking reasons to justify their dislike of the "unequal treaties,"
  should have seized on economic factors as one of them. It became
  almost a cliche of Japanese politics in the 1860s that rising prices could
  be blamed on the presence of foreigners. There was some substance in
  the argument, though it was not in itself a sufficient explanation.
  Nevertheless, the main Japanese objections to the treaties had politi-
  cal rather than economic roots. 33 At one level they reflected the fears of a
  feudal ruling class that change would undermine the existing social
  order. At another they were manifestations of cultural conservatism,
  commonly taking the form of ritual repetition of inherited prejudice
  against Christianity ("ritual," because in the absence of any large body
  of missionaries to provide a focus of hostility, anti-Christian feeling in
  Japan acquired neither the emotional nor the popular appeal it had in
  contemporary China). There was, however, a more modern ingredient
  as well, in the form of incipient nationalism. Japanese, especially samu-
  rai, were becoming increasingly aware that what was at risk was not just
  a culture or a social and political order but a territory and a nation.
  33 I have discussed this topic and related matters at some length in The Meiji Restoration
  (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1972), esp. chaps. 5,6,7.
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  They differed widely in the means they proposed for defending them,
  but almost all recognized that a decision required political action. As a
  result, attempts to influence the foreign policy of the Tokugawa gov-
  ernment became a major concern of politically minded Japanese as
  soon as the terms of the treaties became widely known.
  A court noble, feudal lord, or bakufu official could hope to influ-
  ence policy by more or less legal means, that is, through memorials or
  family connections. Lesser men, as Ii Naosuke had sharply demon-
  strated in 1858, could not. If they were to act at all, it had to be by
  either manipulating their superiors or creating a situation in which
  their superiors were forced to act for themselves. This meant violence,
  either terrorism or rebellion. Thus the opening of the ports coincided
  with an upsurge of violence in Japanese politics, as groups and indi-
  viduals committed themselves to overturning the decisions on foreign
  policy already taken by the shogun's ministers.
  One way in which they did so was to attack those ministers and the
  men who served them. The most famous such incident was the assassi-
  nation of Ii Naosuke outside the gates of Edo Castle in March i860, an
  event that gave great encouragement to all those activists who had
  taken as their slogan the phrase "honor the emperor, expel the barbar-
  ian" (sound jot). As regent, after all, Ii had flouted the wishes of the
  emperor by signing treaties that admitted the barbarians. It seemed
  just that he should pay the ultimate penalty. So should foreigners.
  There were a number of individual attacks on foreigners and their
  employees in Yokohama. In January 1861, Townsend Harris's secre-
  tary, Henry Heusken, was murdered in the streets of Edo. Most such
  acts were motivated by simple resentment and frustration, but in July
  1861, there came a more organized affair, involving a night attack on
  the British legation at Tozenji by a band of samurai, in the course of
  which two members of the British staff were wounded and a number
  of Japanese, both guards and attackers, were killed. Action on this
  scale was clearly intended to do more than wreak vengeance on the
  foreigners. It was a political move, designed to embroil the bakufu in
  disputes with Britain.
  The response of the foreign representatives to this situation was to
  insist on the bakufu's obligation to defend them and their country-
  men, while taking such steps as they could to defend themselves.*»
  34 For detailed accounts of the diplomatic events of these years, see Grace Fox, Britain and
  Japan 1858-1883 (Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1969); Treat, Early Diplomatic Relations;
  and Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Regime
  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). The most important Japanese work on
  foreign relations in this period is by Ishii Takashi, Zdtei Meiji Ishin no kokusaiteki kankyo, rev.
  ed. (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1966).
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
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  After Heusken's murder, for example, the British and French minis-
  ters ostentatiously withdrew to Yokohama, refusing to return until
  their safety could be guaranteed (a gesture that was made less effective
  by Townsend Harris's refusal to join them). After the Tozenji inci-
  dent, Alcock landed marines to act as a legation guard, replaced later
  by an army detachment sent from Hong Kong. For the rest, they
  continued to insist that the treaties' provisions must be implemented
  fully. In particular, they condemned the bakufu's attempts to limit the
  economic effects of foreign trade by putting it - like much of domestic
  commerce - as far as possible in the hands of monopoly merchants
  under official patronage, a practice that in Alcock's view was reminis-
  cent of Chinese restrictive practices earlier in the century at Canton.
  The bakufu's response was to try to turn the turbulence to its own
  advantage. The rise in commodity prices and the emergence of politi-
  cal unrest reinforced official dissatisfaction with the original treaty
  settlement, providing additional motives for trying to modify it. They
  also furnished arguments that might be used to persuade the foreign-
  ers to relax their defense of it. In May 1861 the shogun's council put
  their case to the foreign envoys in Edo. "The price of things," they
  argued, "is daily increasing, in consequence of the large quantity of
  products which is exported to foreign countries." The result had been
  to strengthen the resentments already provoked by the abandonment
  of policies of national isolation, "deeply rooted in the national spirit,"
  and thereby to produce a state of popular disquiet in which "it is very
  difficult, even for the power and authority of the government, so to
  manage that each one should clearly understand the future advantage,
  and so cause them to endure for a time the present grief. "35 The
  solution proposed was to postpone the opening of further ports and
  cities as laid down in the treaties (Edo, Osaka, Hyogo, and Niigata), to
  give time for Japanese resentments to die down and for the bakufu to
  win wider acceptance of the treaty arrangements. To this end, a mis-
  sion was sent to Europe to discuss the question with the governments
  of the treaty powers.
  The subsequent negotiations were conducted principally between
  the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, the British minister,
  Rutherford Alcock, and the senior member of the bakufu council,
  Kuze Hirochika. Both Alcock and Russell were willing to make conces-
  sions for the sake of continuing the trade, as the alternatives seemed to
  be withdrawal from Japan or to use naval force, as in China, to main-
  tain treaty rights (which the value of the trade did not justify). They
  35 A contemporary translation, published in British Parliamentary Papers in 1862, is given in
  Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 208-11.
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  29O 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  required in return compensation for the attack on the legation at
  Tozenji and such guarantees as it was possible to devise for the future
  conduct of trade relations with Japan. This much was agreed in Edo.
  Alcock then returned to London to take part in talks with the Japanese
  mission, led by Takeuchi Yasunori. These became little more than a
  formality. Russell's original instructions to Alcock on the subject had
  been that "so far from restricting or abandoning the trade of Japan,
  you are to maintain and, if possible, enlarge it."*6 Accordingly, the
  protocol signed in London on June 6, 1862, not only postponed the
  opening of further ports and cities until January 1, 1868; it also im-
  proved on the original treaties by reducing the import duties on wines,
  spirits, and glassware, as well as providing for the establishment of
  bonded warehouses. More widely, it embodied a promise by the
  bakufu to end all restrictions, "whether as regards quantity or price,
  on the sale by Japanese to foreigners of all kinds of merchandise,"
  together with all restrictions "limiting the classes of persons who shall
  be allowed to trade with foreigners," including, specifically, feudal
  lords.37 Failing fulfillment of these conditions by the bakufu, the
  powers would be entitled to require the immediate opening of the
  additional ports and cities under the terms of the 1858 treaties, revok-
  ing the postponement agreed in the protocol.
  In the event, the London Protocol did not prove an instrument for
  solving the problems of the Japan trade, as Russell and Alcock had
  hoped. It was designed, in accordance with the principles of gunboat
  diplomacy, as worked out in China, to put pressure on a Japanese
  government, recognized as "legitimate," so as to persuade it to enforce
  the treaties within Japan. To this extent it reflected an ignorance of
  Japanese politics. It is true that within the bakufu, men in authority,
  especially those whose duties gave them direct knowledge of foreign
  affairs, had by this time come to accept that there were serious restric-
  tions on Japan's freedom of action in dealing with the West. However,
  the further one moved from the centers of responsibility, whether
  inside the bakufu or outside it, the less this recognition obtained.
  Thus a number of powerful feudal lords, led by Shimazu Hisamitsu,
  father of the daimyo of Satsuma - although they were fundamentally
  in favor of developing relations with the West - tried consistently to
  exploit the shogun's difficulties by exacting a price for their concur-
  rence in his policy. That price was a greater share of power within
  Japan, or at least a greater measure of independence from central
  36 Russell to Alcock, November 23, 1861, in Parliamentary Papers, 1862, vol. 64 (2929),
  pp. 72-73. 
  37 The text is printed in Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 216-17.
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
  29I
  control. By contrast, samurai activists, concerned above all about the
  "national dishonor" occasioned by the treaties, sought to transfer re-
  sponsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs from the bakufu to the
  imperial court and its feudal associates, in the expectation that this
  would ensure a less compliant attitude toward Western privileges. Both
  movements, backed as they were by terrorism or the military resources
  of the domains, constituted a threat to bakufu authority. For this reason
  they produced divided counsels in Edo. Some officials continued to
  regard the West as potentially the greater danger. By implication, this
  meant that domestic opposition must be controlled or suppressed for
  the sake of avoiding a disastrous foreign war. Others, including power-
  ful relatives of the Tokugawa, like Matsudaira Keiei, saw Edo's first
  priority as being to come to terms with domestic opposition in such a
  way as would establish national unity and provide a basis for agreement
  on foreign policy. This implied in the short term a temporizing ap-
  proach to the question of the treaties. These disagreements were essen-
  tially those of the 1850s, now spread more widely through Japanese
  society and backed by force. Until they were resolved, Japan was un-
  likely to achieve a stable relationship with the outside world.
  Even while the London Protocol was being negotiated, moves were
  afoot in Kyoto to force a public change in bakufu policy. The first to
  materialize was the dispatch of an imperial envoy to Edo, escorted by
  Shimazu Hisamitsu, in an attempt to bring about a basis for a court-
  bakufu agreement by securing the appointment of Matsudaira Keiei
  and Hitotsubashi Keiki to high office. This objective was achieved
  during July and August 1862, but hopes that it might provide a better
  atmosphere for the discussion of foreign policy were dashed by an
  incident that took place during Shimazu's journey back to Kyoto. On
  September 14 a party of foreigners from Yokohama, riding through
  the nearby village of Namamugi, fell foul of part of the Satsuma escort
  and were attacked. One, a British merchant called Richardson, was
  killed, and two were wounded. The affair brought an immediate up-
  roar in Yokohama. When reported to London, it persuaded Russell
  that the making of concessions, as manifested in the London Protocol,
  had been taken by the Japanese to be a sign of weakness or indiffer-
  ence, as Satsuma refused to hand over the men responsible for the
  killing and the bakufu had shown itself unable or unwilling to seize
  them. Accordingly, Russell required exemplary satisfaction. His dis-
  patch to the British charge, St. John Neale, on December 24, 1862,3*
  38 Parliamentary Papers, 1864, vol. 66 (3242), pp. 1-2.
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  demanded a full formal apology and an indemnity of £100,000 from
  the bakufu. Moreover, arguing that Satsuma and other powerful lords
  "who could not easily be coerced by the Japanese government" must
  not be allowed to "escape, on that account, the penalty of their mis-
  deeds," he specified that Satsuma must not only execute Richardson's
  murderers in the presence of British naval officers but must also pay a
  separate indemnity of £25,000. The senior officer of the British naval
  squadron in the China seas would be authorized to take appropriate
  measures "of reprisal or blockade, or both," against the bakufu and
  Satsuma if these terms were rejected.
  Although Neale avoided threats of blockade, because he thought
  that foreign merchants at the treaty ports would be the chief sufferers
  from it, he made it clear to the bakufu on April 6, 1863, that on this
  occasion "Great Britain will not tolerate even a passive defiance of its
  power. "39 Because action would be taken directly against Satsuma in
  the event of "refusal, delay, or evasion," on the part of its feudal lord,
  he recommended that Edo send a senior official there to advise against
  "any obstinate or ill-advised conduct." This was the language of gun-
  boat diplomacy, applied fully to Japan for the first time by Britain. It
  was backed by the assembly of a powerful naval squadron in Yoko-
  hama, eventually totaling seven ships mounting over a hundred guns.
  Satsuma ignored all representations made to it. The bakufu's own
  response was bedeviled by what was happening in Kyoto. As a result
  of Shimazu's mission in the summer of 1862, followed by another
  under the patronage of Choshu later in the year, it had been agreed
  that the shogun should go to the imperial capital in the spring of 1863,
  accompanied by his highest-ranking officials, to settle outstanding
  political issues, including that of foreign policy. Once he arrived there
  (April 21), he and his advisers became subject to heavy pressure,
  backed by renewed terrorism, to fix a date for the expulsion of foreign-
  ers from Japan. Deprived of any Satsuma support, partly because of
  the Namamugi dispute, and reluctant to use force on the scale that
  would have been necessary to restore control over the palace, they
  finally chose June 25 as the date for action, making the unstated
  assumption that because implementation of the decision would be the
  bakufu's business, "expulsion" could in practice be turned into a
  series of time-consuming negotiations with the treaty powers.
  It was in the light of a knowledge of all this that the officials left
  39 Ibid., pp. 40-4. Text printed in Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 236-40. Because of the time
  taken in communication by sea via the Indian Ocean, Russell's instructions did not reach
  Neale until the middle of March 1863.
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
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  behind in Edo had to deal with Neale. They were in no doubt at all
  that an indemnity would have to be paid. On the other hand, to pay it
  while the shogun was in Kyoto would seriously undermine what their
  superiors were attempting there. They managed to spin out the talks
  until the end of May, when one of Hitotsubashi Keiki's advisers, Oga-
  sawara Nagamichi, arrived from Kyoto to take charge of the final
  stages. By this time Neale's patience was exhausted. Even so, Oga-
  sawara held him off until June 24, when the first installment of the
  indemnity was at last handed over. The same day he notified all the
  foreign representatives that the bakufu wished to enter into negotia-
  tions for closing the treaty ports. Neale was predictably indignant.
  Edo must realize, he wrote,
  that the indiscreet communication now made . . . is unparalleled in the his-
  tory of all nations, civilized or uncivilized; that it is, in fact, a declaration of
  war by Japan itself against the whole of the Treaty Powers, the consequences
  of which, if not at once arrested, it will have speedily to expiate by the
  severest and most merited chastisement.*0
  While the bakufu was considering the implications of this response,
  Neale completed his preparations for an expedition against Satsuma.
  On August 6 he left Yokohama with the British squadron, reaching
  Kagoshima five days later and presenting an ultimatum that embodied
  Russell's demands. Receiving an unsatisfactory reply, he ordered the
  seizure of three Satsuma vessels lying in the anchorage, intending to
  hold them against the payment of the indemnity. But in moving to
  carry out these orders, the squadron came under fire from shore batter-
  ies, and a general engagement followed. A good part of the city of
  Kagoshima was damaged or destroyed. Ships of the British squadron
  also suffered damage, causing their withdrawal to Yokohama to make
  repairs. Thus both sides were able to claim a measure of success.
  Reflecting this, discussions between them at Yokohama in the autumn
  brought an agreement, signed on December 11, by which Satsuma
  was to pay an indemnity (borrowing money from the bakufu for the
  purpose) but, for the rest, promised only that the Namamugi attackers
  would be punished in the presence of British officers, if and when they
  were found. Because they had been present at Kagoshima during
  Neale's negotiations, this was disingenuous, to say the least.
  The repercussions of "expulsion" on June 25 proved to be more
  complicated. On that date, Choshu, taking the emperor's orders liter-
  ally, opened fire on an American vessel passing through the Shi-
  40 Parliamentary Papers, 1864, vol. 46 (3242), p. 75.
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  294 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  monoseki Straits. There were similar attacks on French and Dutch
  ships during the following weeks. This produced local punitive action
  from French and American warships, plus a vigorous protest to the
  bakufu from the representatives of the powers, but it quickly became
  apparent that the bakufu could do nothing and that Choshu could be
  coerced only at the risk of widespread hostilities. None of the foreign
  envoys was willing to take this risk without the approval of his home
  government, so for the time being the straits remained closed to for-
  eign shipping. Trade between Yokohama and Shanghai had to pro-
  ceed by a route to the south of Kyushu.
  At the end of September, Satsuma, its prestige within Japan much
  heightened by its reputedly successful resistance in the face of British
  attack, joined with the bakufu to expel the Choshu men and their
  terrorist allies from the precincts of the imperial palace in Kyoto. The
  bakufu promptly exploited the situation by proposing a new basis for
  national agreement on foreign policy, which took the form of a plan to
  close Yokohama at the bakufu's initiative. This, it was thought, would
  be a gesture of reconciliation with the antiforeign movement, which
  might also be made acceptable to the powers as an alternative to
  closing Japan's ports entirely. It would have the further advantage of
  reaffirming the shogun's prerogatives in matters of foreign affairs,
  which had been seriously challenged by the actions of Satsuma and
  Choshu during the summer.
  Steps to implement this plan were taken during the early months
  of 1864. First, a mission was sent to France in February, in the hope
  of being able to win European acceptance of the closing of Yoko-
  hama, or at least to make negotiations on the matter last long enough
  to give the bakufu a worthwhile breathing space. Second, the shogun
  went to Kyoto again to undertake talks on outstanding issues, this
  time from a position of strength. Neither demarche produced quite
  the results that had been hoped. In Kyoto, Hitotsubashi Keiki, act-
  ing for the shogun, secured imperial approval to substitute his new
  proposal for the more "reckless" forms of expulsion advocated in the
  previous year but did so only at the cost of an open quarrel with
  Shimazu, who argued that the whole idea was unrealistic. The break
  with Satsuma that this initiated greatly reduced the chances of get-
  ting the policy accepted by feudal opinion at large. In Paris, Ikeda
  Chohatsu, the bakufu envoy, met with a flat refusal to contemplate
  any such action as the closing of Yokohama. Questions of prestige
  apart, France was by this time becoming dependent on Japanese
  supplies of raw silk - almost entirely shipped through Yokohama -
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  PROBLEMS OF IMPLEMENTATION 
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  because of silkworm disease in Europe. Ikeda therefore accepted the
  inevitable, signing a convention on June 24 that promised that the
  bakufu would open the Shimonoseki Straits again within three
  months, if necessary with French naval help. He then set off for
  Japan again, far sooner than Edo expected.
  Meanwhile, on March 2, 1864, Rutherford Alcock had returned to
  Japan after several months' leave in England. Because the govern-
  ments of Britain, France, Holland, and the United States all had
  agreed to leave decisions concerning Shimonoseki to their representa-
  tives in Edo, it was open to him to persuade his diplomatic colleagues
  of the course of action he thought best. Alcock himself quickly came
  to the conclusion that naval action against Choshu would not only be
  legal, in view of the bakufu's denial that there was any official policy of
  expulsion, but also expedient, because it would help strengthen the
  "legitimate" Japanese government against its domestic enemies. On
  May 30, at his suggestion, the four ministers sent identical notes to the
  bakufu, rejecting the closing of Yokohama and calling for action to
  remove "the continuing obstruction to commerce" by Choshu. This
  produced no more that a reiteration of earlier bakufu statements on
  the subject, but no further steps were taken immediately, pending the
  arrival of enough British reinforcements to ensure the defense of the
  foreign settlement at Yokohama in the event of general hostilities. The
  arrival of fifteen hundred marines in June, followed by a foot regiment
  from Hong Kong in July, gave assurance. Accordingly, on July 22 it
  was decided to act as soon as the naval commanders were ready. As a
  precaution against an attempt by any one of the powers to exploit the
  expedition to its own advantage, the document recording this decision
  included an undertaking by each of the ministers "neither to ask for,
  nor to accept, any concession of territory, nor any exclusive advantage
  whatever, either in the open ports or elsewhere in Japan," and to
  "abstain from all interference in the jurisdiction of the Japanese au-
  thorities over their people."41 Behind this lay an awareness of what
  had happened when Britain took punitive action in China and France
  in Annam. In Japan, it was hoped, imperialism was to be more truly
  cooperative.
  At this point two events intervened to postpone naval operations.
  The first was the return to Yokohama of two Choshu samurai, Ito
  Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru, who had been studying in London. They
  offered their services to Alcock as intermediaries to bring about a
  41 Parliamentary Papers, 186s, vol. 57 (3428), pp. 62-6.
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  296 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  settlement between Choshu and Britain, an offer that was at once
  accepted. Alcock sent them to Choshu in a British warship, bearing a
  letter in which he set out his own views on the implications of the
  crisis.*2 Britain, it stated, was not concerned about the distribution of
  political power within Japan. If the Japanese believed that the treaties
  needed "the formal assent of the Mikado to make them legal and
  binding," or if the feudal lords wished to end the monopoly of foreign
  trade enjoyed by the bakufu, there was nothing in such proposals to
  cause difficulty to the foreign powers. Rather, what the latter wanted
  was recognition of "some sovereign authority" with whom treaties
  could be made in the expectation that they would be binding. By
  contrast, "a persistent attempt to expel foreigners from Japan, or even
  from Yokohama, . . . may bring armies to Kioto as similar conduct
  led the armies of Great Britain and France victoriously to Peking not
  five years ago."
  Ito and Inoue lacked the influence in Choshu to bring about a
  settlement on the lines envisaged in Alcock's letter. By August 12 it
  was evident that their intervention had failed. A week later, Ikeda
  Chohatsu arrived in Yokohama, bringing the convention he had
  signed in Paris, by which the bakufu was bound to open the Shi-
  monoseki Straits within three months. Again preparations for an expedi-
  tion were suspended while the foreign envoys awaited Edo's reactions.
  These were prompt and clear: Ikeda was dismissed, his agreement
  repudiated. If they were to implement the convention, the shogun's
  council agreed, "civil war would immediately break out."« This deci-
  sion removed the last reason for delay. A joint squadron of seventeen
  ships - nine British, three French, four Dutch, and one American -
  sailed for Shimonoseki under the command of Vice-Admiral Kuper,
  carrying out attacks on the Choshu batteries in the straits during the
  first week of September. On September 14 Choshu representatives
  concluded a truce on terms dictated by Kuper, stipulating the opening
  of the straits and the disarming of the batteries, plus a promise to pay an
  indemnity as ransom for Shimonoseki and reimbursement for military
  costs. This became the basis of a convention between the bakufu and
  the powers concerned, signed on October 22. It fixed the indemnity at
  three million Mexican dollars, to be paid in six equal installments.
  However, the foreign representatives, in a clause that reflected primar-
  ily the commercial interests of Great Britain, expressed themselves
  willing to consider the opening of Shimonoseki or another suitable
  42 Ibid., pp. 72-3. The text is also found in Fox, Britain and Japan, pp. 133-4.
  43 Parliamentary Papers, 1865, vol. 57 (3428), p. 84, bakufu note of August 25,1864.
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  SETTLEMENT 
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  port as an alternative to payment of the indemnity, were the bakufu to
  propose it. The legal basis for holding the bakufu responsible in this
  way rested on documents captured in Choshu. These showed that the
  orders for expulsion of the foreigners in 1863 had been issued by the
  imperial court with the shogun's knowledge and consent. In effect,
  this destroyed Edo's last tactical advantage, that is, its ability to keep
  negotiations with the West and negotiations with the court apart,
  holding them secret from the other party.
  SETTLEMENT
  Justifying his actions to a somewhat skeptical Russell late in 1864,
  Alcock produced a classic statement of the case for resorting to gun-
  boat diplomacy in China and Japan.** Treaties negotiated under
  threat, he argued, could not be maintained "by a religious abstinence
  from the use of force":
  It is weakness, or the suspicion of it, which invariably provokes wrong and
  aggression in the East. . . . Hence it is that all diplomacy in these regions
  which does not rest on a solid substratum of force, or an element of strength,
  to be laid bare when all gentler processes fail, rests on false premises, and
  must of necessity fail in its object - more especially, perhaps, when that end
  is peace.
  He was also able to claim success for what he had done: "A catastrophe
  has been averted, the danger of a war indefinitely deferred, if not
  altogether prevented, and our position at Yokohama secured from all
  immediate risk." To Russell, conscious of criticism in Parliament, the
  argument was not altogether convincing, though he accepted it. He
  was beginning to realize that the political situation in Japan was suffi-
  ciently unlike that in China to make the policies appropriate to the one
  inappropriate to the other. The essential issue, as Alcock's dispatches
  revealed, was that of the shogun's authority to conclude and enforce
  treaties. Accordingly, Russell's instructions to Alcock's successor, Sir
  Harry Parkes, when he was appointed in March 1865, required him to
  pursue the question of securing the emperor's confirmation of the
  treaties if that seemed desirable.
  As it transpired, Parkes's task had been made a good deal easier by
  the bombardments at Kagoshima and Shimonoseki. Once they had
  taken place, there was no longer any significant group of officials in Edo
  willing to argue in favor of resisting foreign demands. In Satsuma and
  44 Ibid., pp. 148-54, Alcock to Russell, November 19, 1864.
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  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  Choshu, the hotheads, who had been willing to risk the consequences of
  attempting to expel the foreigners for the sake of political gains, had
  been discredited by the demonstrable disparity of strength between
  their domains and the West. Their successors took a more realistic view
  of what was feasible in foreign affairs. Moreover, an attempted coup
  d'etat in Kyoto in August 1864, spearheaded by Choshu men and
  checked after heavy fighting by troops from Satsuma and Aizu, had led
  to the deaths or flight of most of the radical leaders associated with the
  court. As a result, the whole tone of the foreign policy discussions
  changed. The few members of the court - including Emperor Komei -
  who still clung to ideas of expulsion found themselves isolated and
  increasingly helpless. Thus although antiforeign sentiment remained a
  tactical weapon for use in the domestic struggle, the only real policy
  question to which it had relevance from this time on was not whether,
  but in what way, Japan should come to terms with the "unequal"
  treaties. This was demonstrated in 1865, when Parkes made his bid for
  their ratification by the emperor.
  Parkes's experience before coming to Japan had been entirely in
  China. He was a good Chinese linguist; he had served as one of the
  commissioners administering Canton when it was occupied by British
  and French forces during the Arrow war; and he had been British
  consul in commercially the most important of the Chinese treaty ports,
  Shanghai. He was, therefore, both a well-informed and a convinced
  exponent of the kind of policies that had built up Britain's position of
  dominance on the China coast. These defined his objectives. For the
  means of attaining them he relied heavily on the advice of Alcock,
  under whom he had served when young and who had been his prede-
  cessor at Shanghai as well as in Edo. Alcock's views we have already
  touched upon. Parkes largely inherited them.
  In April 1865, about two months before Parkes arrived, the bakufu
  had informed the foreign representatives that it did not wish to exer-
  cise the option of opening Shimonoseki instead of paying the indem-
  nity of $3 million. Simultaneously, however, it asked that the payment
  of the second and subsequent installments of the indemnity be de-
  layed, because it was having difficulty in raising so large a sum. The
  foreign envoys referred this request to their governments. Winchester,
  the British charge, reporting it to Russell, took the opportunity to
  argue for a different approach entirely. As he saw it, the money for the
  indemnity could be raised only by imposts on the trade, which would
  be much to Britain's disadvantage. He therefore proposed that Britain
  offer to waive two-thirds of the indemnity, in return for the following
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  SETTLEMENT 
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  concessions: (1) the opening of Hyogo and Osaka earlier than had been
  specified in the London Protocol; (2) the emperor's ratification of the
  existing treaties; and (3) a reduction of import duties, establishing the
  basic rate at 5 percent. Russell's instructions approving this proposal
  reached Parkes in Japan in October 1865.
  Because the indemnity convention had been a four-power agree-
  ment, it was necessary for Parkes to work in cooperation with the
  American, Dutch, and French representatives. The first two offered
  no objections, but the French minister, Leon Roches, was beginning
  to develop a line of his own with reference to policy in Japan, which
  did not entirely accord with that of Britain. Essentially, Parkes, follow-
  ing Alcock, sought to avoid committing Britain to any one group in
  Japanese politics, even the bakufu, preferring to await the outcome of
  the power struggle and then to secure acceptance of the treaties from
  the victorious party. Roches saw greater advantages for France in
  recognizing the bakufu as a legitimate government and supporting it
  accordingly. This implied avoidance, where possible, of any action or
  diplomatic pressure that might serve to weaken the shogun vis-a-vis
  his political rivals. Roches was wary of the British plan, on the
  grounds that it might further lower the bakufu's prestige.45
  Parkes's determination, plus recognition that the proposals, if ac-
  cepted, would greatly benefit all the treaty powers, not merely Britain,
  finally won over Roches. On October 30, 1865, the four ministers
  jointly replied to the original bakufu request for postponement of the
  indemnity payments, offering to accept it on the terms put forward by
  Britain. At the same time, noting that the shogun and his senior
  officials were again absent - this time in Osaka to organize a punitive
  expedition against Choshu - they observed that this circumstance
  would render negotiations in Edo "if not impossible, at least illu-
  sory."46 They therefore announced their intention of transferring the
  talks to Osaka. On November 4 they arrived at Hyogo with a squadron
  of nine ships. The letter embodying their demands was presented to a
  senior bakufu official at Osaka three days later and gave a limit of
  seven days for a reply.
  The discussions that followed during the next two weeks are of
  interest chiefly for the light they throw on developments in Japanese
  45 The rivalry and political maneuvers of Parkes and Roches in Japan have long been a subject of
  controversy, but they are not directly relevant to the theme of this chapter. The most recent and
  detailed discussion can be found in Fox, Britain and Japan, chap. 7, and Medzini, French
  Policy, chaps. 8-14. lshii, ZoteiMeijilshin, chaps. 5 and 6, also discusses this at length.
  46 The French text of the memorandum is given in Beasley, Select Documents, pp. 293-6.
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  3OO 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  politics. The bakufu council, having demurred, briefly and ineffec-
  tively, over the opening of Hyogo and Osaka, because of the difficul-
  ties this might cause to Kyoto, accepted the terms on November 13,
  only to find Hitotsubashi Keiki insisting that for the bakufu again to
  act without the court's approval in a matter of such sensitivity would
  be politically disastrous. The council reluctantly agreed. Keiki se-
  cured a promise from the foreign representatives of an extra ten days
  to accomplish the task, then set out to win imperial consent. Hostility
  from remaining antiforeign groups in the palace was something he
  expected and could confidently ignore, given the support of senior
  court officials, most of whom owed their appointment to the shogun's
  favor. More alarming was the stubborn opposition he encountered
  from Satsuma. It was not so much that Satsuma objected to the foreign
  proposals in themselves. Rather, it was that Okubo Toshimichi,
  Satsuma's key political figure in Kyoto, was determined that the
  bakufu must not be allowed to use the crisis to establish a position of
  dominance at court that would strengthen it against the great lords.
  Consequently, to Keiki's insistence on consulting the court he added a
  demand for consultation of the daimyo, notwithstanding the time it
  would take. He even offered to approach the foreigners directly, or
  through the court, to secure their consent to the delay.
  One factor in resolving the resulting deadlock was Parkes's impa-
  tience. On November 21 he wrote a letter to the shogun threatening all
  kinds of evil consequences if the matter were not settled: "[Disunion
  must bring upon your country the most grave disorders, as our Govern-
  ments are firmly resolved to insist upon the faithful and complete
  observance by all parties, whether our enemies or our friends, of every
  condition of the Treaties. . . ."& More immediately significant, how-
  ever, was a remarkable closing of the ranks within the bakufu itself.
  On November 18 the shogun, Iemochi, offered to resign in favor of
  Keiki. He accompanied this gesture with a memorandum that not only
  recommended acceptance of the demands presently being made by the
  foreign envoys but also urged an entirely new line of approach to the
  West,, that of borrowing Western techniques to build up Japanese
  strength. Japan, he argued, must "follow the example of the foreigners
  in using the profits from trade to construct many ships and guns,
  adopting the strategy of using the barbarian to subdue the barbar-
  ian."1*8 The idea was not new, for many Japanese had been advocating
  something of the kind in the years since Perry, but never before had
  47 Ibid., pp. 299-300. 
  48 Ibid., pp. 297-9.
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  SETTLEMENT 
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  the bakufu given countenance to such a policy publicly in its dealings
  with the court. Backing it up, the senior bakufu officials in Kyoto,
  including Keiki, formally warned the court in a joint memorial that if
  Japan provoked hostilities over this issue, "we should have not the
  least hope of victory. "49
  Faced with this unanimity, the court gave way. The emperor gave
  his consent to the treaties, commenting that "unsatisfactory provi-
  sions" in them needed to be revised.'0 He refused to authorize any
  action regarding Hyogo and Osaka, though the bakufu, in communi-
  cating with the foreign representatives, assumed this to mean that they
  could be opened in accordance with the London Protocol. There was
  to be further disagreement on this subject in 1867, when the court
  became aware of what had been said. No statement was made about
  tariffs, which had at no time been mentioned in the Japanese discus-
  sions. The fact reflects a characteristic of the treaty port system that
  was common to both China and Japan at this stage: Whereas the West
  saw the system in terms of commercial advantage, both Chinese and
  Japanese were preoccupied with the political disabilities it imposed on
  them. They made economic concessions almost without thought.
  This is borne out by the bakufu's subsequent behavior. Because it
  had not met all the West's demands, it accepted the necessity of
  paying the whole of the Shimonoseki indemnity. Moreover, it agreed
  to negotiate a revision of tariffs. When talks about this began in Janu-
  ary 1866, Parkes, who took the lead in the matter on behalf of the
  powers, promptly expanded them to include arrangements concerning
  currency, which was still causing difficulties; the establishment of
  navigation aids, such as lighthouses; and the removal of all those
  restrictions on trade to which reference had been made in the London
  Protocol. He refused to contemplate any further delay in the indem-
  nity payments until a satisfactory agreement had been reached on
  these points. This was not to be until June 25, 1866, when a conven-
  tion was at last signed by Britain, France, Holland, and the United
  States, to come into force at Yokohama on July 1 and a month later at
  Hakodate and Nagasaki.
  The convention was in effect an addendum to the 1858 treaties,
  spelling out free-trade doctrine as it applied to Japanese conditions.
  Goods imported into and exported from Japan were to be subject to
  customs dues calculated at a general level of 5 percent, either in the
  form of specified amounts or ad valorem. Some items, such as books,
  49 Ibid., p. 301, memorial of November 22,1865.
  50 Ibid., p. 304, court decision of November 22,1865.
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  3O2 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  gold and silver, coal or grain, could be imported free of duty. Only
  opium was a prohibited import. Rice, wheat, barley, and saltpeter
  were prohibited exports, and unminted gold, silver, and copper could
  be sold only by the Japanese government. Export duties on tea and
  silk were to be subject to review on the basis of 5 percent ad valorem at
  any time after the first two years. The remaining duties were open to
  revision after^July 1872. Other articles contained provisions concern-
  ing matters ancillary to trade that had been causing difficulty: bonded
  warehouses, provision of Japanese currency, navigational aids, and
  details concerning transactions at the open ports. More far-reaching
  were Articles VIII, IX, and X. The first of these permitted Japanese
  citizens to buy "every description of sailing or steam-vessel," save
  warships (which could be sold only to the Japanese government).
  Under Article IX the bakufu declared that "Japanese merchants and
  traders of all classes are at liberty to trade directly . . . with foreign
  merchants, not only at the open ports of Japan, but also in all foreign
  countries. . . ." Completing the pattern, Article X provided that all
  Japanese "may travel to any foreign country for purposes of study or
  trade," subject only to being provided with passports.51
  Given that the emperor had confirmed the treaties and that Edo had
  been browbeaten into an almost routine compliance with foreign de-
  mands, the tariff convention of 1866 could be said to have completed
  the opening of Japan to foreign trade. Foreign diplomats began to find
  their advice more welcome and their problems easier to solve; and
  when Keiki became shogun, following the death of Iemochi in the
  autumn of 1866, he was careful to grant audiences to both Parkes and
  Roches. They reminded him that the time was approaching for open-
  ing Osaka and Hyogo in accordance with the London Protocol. He
  made no demur. Indeed, he promptly raised the matter at court.*2
  Once again, he was opposed by Satsuma there, this time on the
  grounds that a settlement of the dispute with Choshu must take prior-
  ity over the opening of Hyogo. Once again, as in November 1865, he
  successfully forced a decision in the bakufu's favor. On June 26,1867,
  the emperor granted permission for the shogun to fulfill his treaty
  obligations.
  These events were an important stage in the process by which Keiki
  broke finally with the great lords, contributing to his resignation and
  fall from power later in the year. From the point of view of the country's
  51 The text of the convention and the new list of tariffs are given in Parliamentary Papers, 1867,
  vol. 74 (3758), pp. 1-6. There is a summary of the negotiations in Fox, Britain and Japan,
  pp. 182-5. 
  52 SeeBeasley,Select Documents, sec. 8, for a discussion of this incident.
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  SETTLEMENT 
  303
  foreign relations, however, they raised the question - substantially the
  point at issue between Parkes and Roches - whether a successor re-
  gime dominated by the bakufu's enemies would be able or willing to
  uphold the treaties that the West had signed. For a time it looked
  doubtful. During the crisis weeks of early 1868, when the bakufu was
  overthrown and Japan was plunged into civil war, there was an attack
  on foreigners in Hyogo, followed by another in Sakai, which suggested
  that the expulsion movement was still very much alive. So it was, if
  one is to judge by the views of the loyalist rank and file. Yet the men
  who were now beginning to take charge of government in the em-
  peror's name were by no means so naive or inexperienced as to believe
  that they could ignore pressures that the bakufu had found impera-
  tive. On the last day of February 1868, the six powerful feudal lords
  who had played the most conspicuous part in events in Kyoto submit-
  ted a joint memorial to the court calling for a fresh approach to foreign
  policy.53 Japan, they said, must avoid "the bad example of the Chi-
  nese, who fancying themselves alone to be great and worthy of respect,
  and despising foreigners as little better than beasts, have come to
  suffer defeat at their hands." Expulsion had been shown clearly
  enough to be impracticable. It would therefore be more sensible to
  enter on "relations of amity" with the foreigners, summoning the
  foreign representatives to an imperial audience "in the manner pre-
  scribed by the rules current amongst all nations" and making the fact
  known publicly throughout Japan.
  No significant group at court was likely to oppose the men who by
  this time provided the imperial government's only effective fighting
  force, though a few court nobles still had to be persuaded of their own
  helplessness. Hence the emperor's reply, dated March 10, recognized
  realities: "[T]he stipulations of the treaties . . . may be reformed if
  found to be hurtful, but the public laws observed by all nations forbid
  wanton disturbance of those arrangements as a whole. . . . The Impe-
  rial Government feels itself therefore compelled to entertain amicable
  relations under the treaties concluded by the Bakufu."54 Realism had
  proved to be transferable. The effect was a little spoiled by an attempt
  to assassinate Parkes on his way to the imperial audience that followed
  this exchange, but the culprits were promptly punished and "amicable
  relations" remained undisturbed. If the new regime survived, it could
  be expected that the treaties would survive with it.
  53 The text is translated in J. R. Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo [1881] (London:
  Trubner, reprint edition, 2 vols., 1968), vol. 2, pp. 178-81.
  54 Text in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 181-3.
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  304 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  TRADE RELATIONS UNDER THE TREATY PORT SYSTEM
  Because of a preoccupation with the study of modernization, much
  recent writing on Japan in the nineteenth century has tended to over-
  look the fact that for the first twenty-five years after the signing of the
  treaties, Japan's political and economic relationships with the outside
  world were very much like China's. Indeed, the two were closely
  linked. The treaties negotiated in 1858 had been "Chinese" not only in
  the sense of applying to Japan a number of policies and institutions
  that the powers found useful or appropriate on the China coast but
  also incorporating Japan into a treaty port system that essentially fo-
  cused on China. For example, the consular courts established in Japan
  to try cases involving foreign residents were modeled on those already
  created in the Chinese treaty ports. Britain, the only country that tried
  to give the system an element of professional expertise, established a
  Supreme Court in 1865 to act as a court of appeal and exercise general
  supervision. It had jurisdiction in both countries but sat as a rule in
  Shanghai. The consuls who administered the local courts, few of
  whom in the early years had had legal training, had often begun their
  careers in China. So had the merchants with whom they had to deal.
  One consequence was that the foreign community in the Japanese
  ports tried to reproduce on a smaller scale what had been done in
  places like Shanghai, Tientsin, and Canton. Within a year or two of its
  opening, Yokohama had its club, its racecourse, and its chamber of
  commerce. In 1862 the local residents organized a municipal council
  to deal with matters like sewage, street lighting, and local police in the
  area set aside for foreigners, but for a variety of reasons the arrange-
  ment was never very successful. In 1867 most of these functions re-
  verted to the Japanese local officials, acting through a foreign munici-
  pal director until 1877 and thereafter directly in their own official
  capacity. Kobe (Hyogo), which with Osaka was opened on January 1,
  1868, was the only other foreign community of significant size. Profit-
  ing from knowledge of the mistakes made at Yokohama, its settlement
  was better organized, surviving as a separate entity until the revision
  of treaties in 1899, but it never approached the scale and complexity,
  or the influence, of the foreign communities in China.«
  55 Useful information on these matters can be found in Black, Young Japan; and Fox, Britain
  and Japan. The only specialist study is by J. E. Hoare, "The Japanese Treaty Ports, 1868-
  1899: A Study of the Foreign Settlements," Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1971. Edo
  (Tokyo) was not opened to foreigners until January 1, 1869, because of the civil war; its
  foreign settlement was of negligible- importance, as from an early date, foreigners were
  allowed to live outside it.
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  TRADE RELATIONS 
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  The total number of foreign residents in Japan grew from approxi-
  mately one thousand in 1868, when the great majority were at Yoko-
  hama and most of the rest in Nagasaki, to just under ten thousand in
  1894, when about half were in Yokohama and about one-fifth in
  Kobe. Of these, more than half were Chinese. This partly reflects the
  continuing development of traditional Sino-Japanese trade, but it was
  also due to the China connections of many Americans and Europeans.
  Merchants coming from the China coast to set up branch houses or
  new companies in Japan brought with them not only household ser-
  vants, trained to cater to Western needs, but also compradors and
  other trading assistants. Yokohama soon acquired a Chinese quarter,
  as Nagasaki had had throughout the Tokugawa period. The nature
  and organization of Japan's foreign trade was certainly influenced by
  this Chinese presence. Chinese experts in the tea and silk business
  helped make Japan, already a producer, into a substantial exporter of
  these products (taking over part of China's market in the process). It is
  also possible that because the Chinese were established in these special-
  ist capacities, the Japanese were inhibited from entering the kind of
  symbiotic relationship with Western merchants that is nowadays com-
  prised under the label comprador. At all events, Japanese merchants in
  the tea and silk trades, originally serving only as a link between the
  domestic producer and the Western exporter in the treaty ports,
  quickly developed their own separate export channels to Western mar-
  kets. The process was spearheaded by the Mitsui Bussan trading com-
  pany, founded in 1876, though the diversion of Japan's foreign trade
  in general from Western to Japanese hands did not make much head-
  way until after 1890. In 1887, it has been estimated, nearly 90 percent
  of it was still handled by foreign merchant houses. *6
  Turning to the scale and composition of the trade, one encounters
  the problem that no reliable statistics exist for the years before 1868."
  Ishii's estimates suggest that Japanese exports rose from something
  over $4 million in i860 to an annual average of about $14 million for
  56 The most detailed study of the organization of foreign trade in this period is by G. C. Allen
  and Audrey Donnithorne, Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development: China and
  Japan (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954). See also Fox, Britain and Japan, chap. 12. An
  example of how the Japanese bypassed Western merchants at the treaty ports can be found in
  Hani Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
  Press, 1986), in the chapters on Rioichiro Arai.
  57 There are detailed studies of the trade for 1859-68 in Japanese: Ishii Takashi, Bakumatsu
  boekishi no kenkyu (Tokyo, 1944); and Yamaguchi Kazuo, Bakumatsu boekishi (Tokyo, 1943).
  Statistics from 1868 onward are available in a number of works, of which the most detailed is
  Oriental Economist, The Foreign Trade of Japan: A Statistical Survey (Tokyo, 1935). A useful
  summary (with statistical tables) can be found in G. C. Allen, A Short Economic History of
  Modem Japan 1867-1937, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972).
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  306 
  THE FOREIGN THREAT
  the five years between 1863 and 1867. Imports were less than $2
  million in i860 but averaged over $15 million annually in 1863-7, the
  rise taking place chiefly in and after 1865. By comparison, exports
  averaged $21.7 million a year between 1873 and 1877 and $34.5 mil-
  lion between 1883 and 1887, whereas imports stood at an average of
  $26.1 million for 1873 t o 1877 and $27.2 million for 1883 to 1887.
  The character of trade changed little over this twenty-five-year pe-
  riod. The earliest exports to develop on any scale were tea and silk.
  Most of the tea went to the American market, where it competed with
  China's. Raw silk and silkworm eggs found a ready demand in Europe
  in the 1860s because of silkworm disease in France and Italy.'8 These
  markets were supplied both directly and through British firms. Later,
  the American market for raw silk became increasingly important, so
  that it dominated Japan's export trade, other than that with China, by
  the end of the century. Exports to China were initially of Japanese
  natural products like seafoods, a pattern that did not change until the
  growth of the Japanese cotton textile industry in the 1880s.
  Of imports, the most important during these early years were West-
  ern manufactured products. There was a steady Japanese market for
  cotton and woolen textiles. This was briefly supplemented in the late
  1860s by a demand for ships and munitions, reflecting the political
  disturbances of those years. Then as the new government began a
  program of industrialization, Japan began to import significant quanti-
  ties of machinery and other capital goods, much of which came from
  Britain. During most of this period, the value of imports regularly
  exceeded that of exports; Britain had the largest share of Japan's
  import trade, and the United States was Japan's best customer.
  To summarize, until the 1880s Japan was as much a client state of the
  West as China was, which is what one would expect from the nature of
  the "unequal treaties" and the manner in which they had been made.
  Western citizens had legal privileges in Japan - often more than the
  treaties implied, because of the inefficiency of the consular courts -
  and lived in designated residential areas, where they assumed the right
  to organize their own police and public services. Their way of life was
  Western, even to having their own newspapers in the treaty ports.
  Their diplomatic representatives occupied legations guarded by their
  own troops and usually had gunboats at call. For ten years Britain
  maintained a large infantry force in Yokohama. Commercially, foreign-
  58 On French trade, see Medzini, French Policy, chaps. 6, 10.
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  TRADE RELATIONS 
  307
  ers traded on favorable terms under a tariff structure that the Japanese
  government could not change at will. They sold Japan manufactured
  goods from the countries of Europe and America and bought in return
  natural products like silk and tea. Most of the trade was handled by
  foreign firms and carried in foreign ships.
  It was a relationship that modern Japanese scholars call "semi-
  colonial." Yet beneath the exterior of subordination there were factors
  making for change, factors that distinguished Japan from China and
  made the subsequent histories of the two countries diverge sharply.
  The overthrow of the Tokugawa in 1868 brought to power in Japan a
  group of men who had the political will and the political backing to
  attempt radical reform. They greatly increased the authority of the
  central government, acting in the emperor's name. They turned to the
  West for models of military technology and organization. They encour-
  aged commerce, set up pilot industries, and revised the tax structure.
  Thus while maintaining in due form the treaty system, they were
  taking steps toward the kind of national strength that would enable
  them to challenge its inequality. Some of those steps were premature
  and ineffective. In 1871 Japan's leaders tried without success to negoti-
  ate with China a treaty that would give them a modicum of Western-
  style privileges in the China trade. In 1871-2 their first overtures for
  revision of Japan's own unequal treaties were rebuffed in America and
  Europe. Nevertheless, they learned from their mistakes and had the
  patience to wait for better opportunities. In 1875 Japan concluded an
  agreement with Russia settling frontier problems in the Kurils and
  Sakhalin by an exchange of territory. In 1876 Japan imposed on Korea
  a treaty similar to what Perry had extracted from the bakufu in 1854.
  In the same year Mitsui Bussan was founded. In 1878-9 came the first
  negotiations in which Japan's treaty revision proposals could be said to
  have been taken seriously by the powers, even though nothing came of
  them. Few foreign observers, however well informed, seem to have
  recognized these straws in the wind for what they were. All the same,
  by 1880 Japan was well on the way to recovering from the setbacks it
  had experienced in the closing years of Tokugawa rule. Unlike China,
  the disabilities that Japan suffered under the treaty port system were
  relatively short-lived.
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  CHAPTER 5
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  The Meiji Restoration stands as one of the turning points of Japanese
  history. Although the actual events of 1868 constituted little more
  than a shift of power within the old ruling class, the larger process
  referred to as the Meiji Restoration brought an end to the ascendancy
  of the warrior class and replaced the decentralized structure of early
  modern feudalism with a central state under the aegis of the traditional
  sovereign, now transformed into a modern monarch. The Restoration
  leaders undertook a series of vigorous steps to build national strength
  under capitalist institutions and rapidly propelled their country on the
  road to regional and world power. Thus the Restoration constituted a
  major event for Japanese, East Asian, and world history. The process
  whereby this came about has inevitably become a central issue in
  Japanese historiography, for verdicts on its content and nature condi-
  tion all appraisals of the modern state to which it led. The work of
  historians has been undergirded by a vast apparatus of sources pre-
  served by a history-minded government concerned with its own ori-
  gins, and the scholarship that has been produced illuminates the intel-
  lectual history of Japan's most recent century.
  TROUBLES WITHIN, DISASTER FROM WITHOUT
  Japan's political crisis of the 1860s was preceded by serious internal
  difficulties and foreign danger that brought to mind formulations of
  Chinese historians who habitually coupled internal decline with border
  incursions made possible by that decline: "troubles within, disaster
  from without" (naiyu gaikan). A great deal of historical inquiry has been
  directed to the questions of how severe the first would have been in the
  absence of the second. Once the ports had been opened, there was no
  mistaking the complementary vibration between internal and external
  problems, but in the absence of foreign aggravation, the possibility of
  an internal upheaval sufficient to bring about the collapse of the feudal
  order remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that the almost total
  308
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  TROUBLES WITHIN, DISASTER WITHOUT 
  309
  isolation of Japan before its "opening" by the West served to magnify
  the consequence of the foreign impact in the public imagination.
  The regime's internal difficulties came into striking focus during
  the years of the Tempo period (1830-44), which receive detailed treat-
  ment in Chapter 2. During those years Japan was devastated by crop
  failures that caused ruinous famines in central and northern areas.
  These combined with governmental inefficiency and unresponsiveness
  to encourage or provoke popular resistance. The most spectacular
  revolt of this period was one led by a model Confucian samurai official
  in Osaka, Oshio Heihachird, whose emotional call to insurrection
  made him a hero for later historians who sometimes dated the loyalist
  revolts from his manifesto. Oshio's uprising resulted in little more
  than the burning of large areas of Osaka, but the striking incompe-
  tence shown by bakufu officials in its suppression contrasted with his
  own courageous (though equally maladroit) performance to symbolize
  what was wrong with the regime. Oshio's revolt, led by samurai and
  centered in the second most important city of the land, provided a
  national shock,1 but it was only one of many risings in that period.
  Peasant insurrections and urban "smashings" had tended to grow in
  size with the interrelationships of Japan's increasingly close-knit econ-
  omy, and popular risings often moved rapidly along lines of communi-
  cation. An added phenomenon of the period was the increase of
  chiliastic and millenarian movements. The world renewal (yonaoshi)
  uprisings were frequently led by a self-sacrificing individual who will-
  ingly martyred himself for the eventual good of his fellows. Oshio,
  too, came to take on such an appearance in popular thought.2
  Nevertheless, the insurrections of the period proposed few alterna-
  tives to the social and economic system that gave them birth. Manifes-
  toes and petitions usually focused on recent or threatened violations of
  what had come to seem as acceptable, though admittedly burdensome,
  government demands. Communication routes were natural conduc-
  tors for such protest, as the villages along the right of way were ex-
  1 Tetsuo Najita, "Oshio Heihachird (1793-1837)," in Albert M. Craig and Donald Shivery, eds.,
  Personality in Japanese History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
  1970), pp. 155-79; and Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of
  Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 180-216, provide the best cover-
  age in English of the man and his revolt.
  2 Two essays that suggest the dimensions of the problems in such uprisings are Irwin Scheiner,
  "Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Toku-
  gawa Japan," in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa
  Period: Methods and Metaphors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 39-62; and
  Sasaki Junnosuke, "Bakumatsu no shakai josei to yonaoshi," in Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi,
  vol. 13 (kinsei 5) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977), pp. 247-308.
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  3IO 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  pected to provide the sukego porter service that moved travelers and
  transport on human and animal backs. Needs for such services in-
  creased in late Tokugawa times.
  Rural order was also reinforced by an interesting group of nonoffi-
  cial rural reformers whose teachings of sobriety, thrift, mutual co-
  operation, and agricultural improvement were designed to give farm-
  ers a better livelihood. The agricultural technologist Okura Nagatsune
  (1768-1856), the rural reformers Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856),
  with his plans for mutual cooperatives, and Ohara Yugaku (1798-
  1858) all worked to restore the health of the rural areas. Significantly,
  all three focused on the reclamation of land left fallow, whether by bad
  government or famine or migration. Their teachings were usually mor-
  alistic and pietistic, stressing the maintenance and care of land as an
  essential part of filial piety and ancestral obligation. Such efforts,
  though surely helpful to the government, were also evidence of the
  government's inability to fulfill the paternal role it had long ago set for
  itself. Equally important, the appearance of genuine rural leaders of
  this sort testified to a rising level of scholarship and leadership among
  the commoner elite throughout the Japanese countryside. 3
  The bakufu's response to these troubled times took the form of the
  Tempo reforms launched by the roju Mizuno Tadakuni in 1841. As
  Harold Bolitho points out in Chapter 2, the reforms, which included
  edicts against migration from country to city, provided relief for
  bakufu retainers' debts, abolished merchant guilds, and attempted to
  rationalize and concentrate bakufu landholdings within a set radius of
  Edo and Osaka, struck at vested interests of townsmen and vassals,
  and ended in failure. Simultaneous reforms in some of the larger
  domains, notably Satsuma and Choshu, were somewhat more success-
  ful, but none fully met its goals. The bakufu's failure was particularly
  important, for its inability to raise its revenues augured ill for the
  greater crises that lay ahead. Nevertheless the ambitious, though abor-
  tive, plans for more intensive bureaucratic control of society have
  provided the basis for some historians' interpretations of the Tempo
  years as inaugurating late-feudal nineteenth-century "absolutism." Al-
  though judgments of these issues differ sharply, undoubtedly the fu-
  ture Meiji leaders, "men of Tempo" who experienced that turmoil in
  their early years, built on those lessons to their loss or gain.
  The bakufu that had to deal with these problems was in many ways
  3 Thomas C. Smith, "Okura Nagatsune and the Technologists," in Craig and Shively, eds.,
  Personality in Japanese History, pp. 127-54; and Miyata Noboru, "Noson no fukko undo to
  minshu shukyo no tenkai," in Iwanamikoza Nihon rekishi, vol. 13 (kinsei 5), pp. 209-45.
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  TROUBLES WITHIN, DISASTER WITHOUT 
  311
  a less flexible and less adequate instrument of government than it had
  been. Although the eighteenth-century administrators had felt able to
  experiment rather widely within the pattern of the past, the language
  of the nineteenth-century leaders increasingly stressed the "obliga-
  tions of the past" (sono sujisuji no gohoko) in a rigid adherence to
  tradition. Central authority, as Harold Bolitho's study of the fudai
  daimyo points out, had not grown;* if anything, the shift from strong
  to weak shoguns had resulted in bureaucratic immobility. Mizuno's
  effort during the Tempo reforms to reclaim some vassals' holdings
  roused a storm of complaint, and yet his abortive efforts anticipated
  the measures that would be found necessary by future reformers when
  the crisis deepened in the 1860s. The once pragmatic bakufu had
  become a rather fine-tuned instrument that found it difficult to pro-
  ceed without the cooperation of a number of distinct interest groups.
  Institutionally it remained premodern. The senior counselors (rqju)
  served on cycles of monthly rotation, and the adoption of regular
  responsibilities and the abolition of the rotation system came only on
  the eve of the Tokugawa fall in 1867. Internal disaffection and bureau-
  cratic rigidity may not have reached the levels that characterized con-
  temporary China, but both regimes operated in a setting in which
  custom and precedent placed limitations on central power. More im-
  portant, both regimes were limited by an inadequate governmental
  share of the nation's product. The precedents set by the ancestors and
  the barriers set by established and deeply routinized patterns of admin-
  istration made it difficult to initiate radical change. The bakufu,
  though charged with the responsibility for the national defense, had
  access to only the income of its own lands. A shogunal procession to
  Kyoto in the 1860s required most of its regular cash income for that
  year, and the cost of restoring traditional preparedness and purchasing
  modern arms was soon to become prohibitive.5
  The crisis in foreign affairs that followed the Tempo years is treated
  by William Beasley in Chapter 4. As he points out, it was a crisis that
  had been developing for decades. A growing consciousness of the
  foreign danger had been one of the unsettling elements in the nine-
  teenth-century climate of opinion among informed intellectuals. The
  defeat of China in the Opium War of 1838-42 brought this conscious-
  4 Harold Bolitho, Treasures Among Men: The Fudai Daimyo in Tokugawa Japan (New Haven,
  Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).
  5 Conrad Totman, The Collapse of ike Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862-1868 (Honolulu: University of
  Hawaii Press, 1980), provides excellent brief discussions of bakufu finances in the 1860s, pp.
  I9off.
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  312 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  ness home to a far larger public. The Japanese had ready knowledge of
  that disaster through the messages brought by Dutch and Chinese
  merchants to Nagasaki, and Chinese accounts of the problem, notably
  Wei Yuan's Hai-kuo fu<hih, went through many editions in Japan,
  where they were immediately accessible to all who had received formal
  education. In a secluded island country whose great metropolises were
  collection points for the literate elite of all sectors, speculation inevita-
  bly led to uneasy fears that imperialist flotillas would next come to
  Japan.6
  Such consciousness had also been advanced by changes in the world
  of thought, which are treated by Harry Harootunian in Chapter 3. The
  nativist thought of national scholarship (kokugaku) moved in increas-
  ingly extreme directions in the nineteenth century. In the teachings of
  Hirata Atsutane and his disciples, it combined an increasingly assimila-
  tive and syncretic utilization of non-Japanese thought with a religious
  fervor focusing on the sun goddess Amaterasu as a national deity. A
  new and compulsive ethnicity was in formulation. Still premodern and
  perhaps only protonationalistic, this thought lay at hand as a potent
  incitation to alarm and indignation when once the sacred soil and
  sparkling waters of Japan might be sullied by foreign boots and hulls.
  Knowledge about the West, and consequently informed awareness
  of its capability, was also available through the rise of Western learn-
  ing (rangaku). A practice of translating Western books, launched in
  1771 with the discovery by several doctors that the human anatomy
  conformed more closely to Dutch than to Chinese anatomical charts,
  grew so rapidly that at the time of his death in 1817 Sugita Gempaku,
  one of the doctors involved, compared it with the translation move-
  ment from Chinese a millennium earlier. The bakufu did its best to
  channel such learning and also to appropriate that part of it that
  seemed useful, but restless minds and figures soon carried it beyond
  the bound of the permissible. In the Morrison incident of 1837 a group
  of "Dutch scholars" concluded that the rude rejection of an English
  emissary would subject Japan to great danger. The ship in question
  had in fact already been repulsed successfully, but political criticism of
  this sort provided the impetus for political repression of the scholars in
  the purge of 1839.
  A third, and ultimately the most important, development in the
  thought world of the nineteenth century was a growing concern with
  the imperial institution, which was the product of the kokugaku tradi-
  6 Oba Osamu, Edojidai ni okeru Ckugoku bunkajuyo no kenkyu (Tokyo: Dohosha, 1984), pp. 388
  ff., for bakufu orders of Wei Yuan's work.
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  TROUBLES WITHIN, DISASTER WITHOUT 
  313
  tion. This cut across all groups, but it found its most forceful and
  powerful formulation in a blend of ethnic and Confucian teaching that
  associated loyalism with morality and justified - and even required -
  participation in the political process under its imperative. In the slo-
  gan "revere the emperor, drive out the barbarian!" (sonno-joi), loyal-
  ism wedded to antiforeignism became the most powerful emotion of
  mid-century Japan.
  Historical scholarship has often limited its consideration of emperor-
  centered thought to treat it as a political tactic without considering its
  substance, in good measure as a result of and in reaction to the use made
  of the institution by the modern state.? In fact, however, it can be
  demonstrated that the development of loyalist thought had a long conti-
  nuity in Tokugawa intellectual history and was not without its roots in
  Chinese thought as well. The dominant stream of Tokugawa Confucian-
  ism drew on the Neo-Confucian thought of Sung China, which devel-
  oped at a time when the foreign danger in the form of northern barbari-
  ans was at the forefront of scholars' consciousness. The antiforeign
  thrust of Chu Hsi Neo-Confucianism became blunted in a China ruled
  by Manchus, but in Japan the nonfunctioning throne became idealized,
  and it ended as the focus of ethnic nationalism. In samurai minds the
  identification of "country" with "virtue" tended to make absolutes of
  duty and action. "Loyalty" (chugi) became a "great duty" (taigi) and the
  supreme test of the moral individual. This primacy of political values
  became the more powerful because, as Maruyama Masao has pointed
  out, it carried with it the implication that it was the vassal's responsibil-
  ity to "correct" or "admonish" as well as to "obey" his superior.8 In the
  nineteenth century, Tokugawa Confucian scholarship stressed a hierar-
  chical scheme of obligations in which sovereign came to stand above
  shogun. Chinese civilization gradually came to seem distinct from the
  country of its birth, particularly after the fall of the Ming to the Man-
  chus in the seventeenth century. Indeed, many nineteenth-century writ-
  ers referred to Japan as the central country.
  There were also trends in Tokugawa policy that gave impetus to this
  trend of imperial loyalism. In the eighteenth century, the bakufu,
  increasingly responsive to Confucian morality, demonstrated its re-
  spect for the court by protecting and maintaining the imperial tombs
  7 Nagahara Keiji, "Zenkindai no tenno," Rekishigaku kenkyu 467 (April 1979): 37-47; and Bito
  Masahide, "Sonno-joi shiso," Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 13 (kinsei 5), pp. 41-86. See
  also Hershel Webb, The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period (New York:
  Columbia University Press, 1968).
  8 Maruyama Masao, "Chusei to hangyaku," in Kindai Nihon shisoshi koza (Tokyo: Chikuma
  shobo, i960), vol. 6.
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  314 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  and by increasing the miserly stipends that the early shoguns had
  provided for the court and courtiers. Whereas Ieyasu and his immedi-
  ate successors had taken care to sever the ties the court had had with
  the military class up to that time,9 awards of imperial rank and title to
  the Tokugawa cadet houses now became expected. Gradually ex-
  tended to other leading daimyo, such titles became a matter of prestige
  and pride and helped lead to daimyo-court connections against which
  the early shoguns had guarded. Gradually and almost imperceptibly,
  the bakufu's "virtue" came to be identified with its ability to protect
  and insulate the court and country from outside contact. Sakoku,
  begun as a measure to ward off domestic dissidence in the mid-
  seventeenth century, ended by becoming a criterion of shogunal loy-
  alty and performance.
  Intellectually this package of patterns and ideals found its most
  persuasive setting in the writings of a group of scholars in Tokugawa
  Nariaki's domain of Mito. Aizawa Seishisai's Shimon (1825) provided
  in particularly compelling form a warning of the power of the West,
  insistence on the sacred nature of Japan and its imperial polity, and
  reminders that that superiority was based on the benefits of the impe-
  rial family. Mito thought, and especially Aizawa's book, became
  widely read in the 1840s and 1850s, at a time when the Mito daimyo
  began to take a vigorous part in urging measures of moral and material
  rearmament and in extending his political contacts to the Kyoto court.
  THE HARRIS TREATY AND ITS AFTERMATH
  The opening of Japan to international contact, described by Professor
  Beasley in Chapter 4, produced problems that were made more diffi-
  cult by these strains. Economic difficulties and military unprepared-
  ness made it important for Japan to avoid military conflict until prepa-
  rations had been advanced. This required information (gathered by
  the Bansho shirabesho, the new Institute for Western Learning estab-
  lished in 1855), money (collected through new taxes, forced loans, and
  government economies), and political consensus to provide a time of
  quiet during which plans could be prepared. The search for that con-
  sensus brought efforts to consult, and thereby to educate, the daimyo
  and the Kyoto court. That consultation had the effect of activating
  first them and then their vassals and subordinates. A broadening circle
  of concern among people who were often poorly informed about for-
  9 See Asao Naohiro with Marius B. Jansen, "Shogun and Tenno," in John W. Hall et al., eds.,
  JapanBefore Tokugawa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 248-70.
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  HARRIS TREATY AND ITS AFTERMATH 
  315
  eign affairs but who were anxious to use those issues for internal affairs
  came close to paralyzing government processes.
  The bakufu's first response to the news of the Opium War was to
  relax its standing orders for the prompt repulse of foreign vessels and
  to order that supplies be provided for them when they requested
  them. This order, issued in 1842, brought a reminder from Emperor
  Komei four years later to be careful about coastal defense. However
  mild its wording, it was an early indication that the court would
  consider itself involved in matters of foreign policy and defense. A
  letter of warning from the king of Holland in 1844 and the Biddle
  mission of 1846 were successfully turned aside, but no one doubted
  that more such would follow. Bakufu orders to daimyo to be vigilant
  about coastal defenses were issued in 1849, but because of the general
  financial stringency of the times, no real advances had been made
  when the Perry mission arrived in 1853.
  Abe Masahiro, an able conciliator who had been rdju since 1845,
  sent the Perry letter to the court for information and to the Tokugawa
  vassals with requests for advice. Abe was aware of the need for change;
  he had promoted a number of low-ranking officers to key posts. He
  also had a keen awareness of Japan's military weakness and had estab-
  lished an office of coastal defense over which he himself presided and
  which he manned with his own followers. Abe tried to outmaneuver
  the leading exponent of exclusion, Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito, by
  appointing him to a key defense post. The opinions that the bakufu
  received from daimyo and lesser vassals revealed a wide range of views
  on the American request, but for the most part they agreed that con-
  flict should be avoided. The bakufu made its decision without a great
  deal of reference to the views that came in; it was a full year before it
  sent the text of the Shimoda treaty that its negotiators had worked out
  with Perry to the daimyo and the court. At the same time its orders to
  the daimyo had sharp reminders of the importance of coastal defense,
  and police officials (metsuke) were given sharp warnings about the
  importance of quick and ruthless action to prevent contacts between
  foreigners and ordinary Japanese. Abe seemed to have resolved the
  first step, but even his political agility could not conceal the change
  that was to come. In 1854 the court issued an order to melt down
  temple bells for guns, the first time in the entire Edo period that
  Kyoto had taken it upon itself to issue a national directive. Matsudaira
  Shungaku (Yoshinaga, Keiei), the collateral house (shimpan) daimyo
  of Fukui, Abe's father-in-law, and a leading figure in national politics
  from then on, wrote to remind Abe that daimyo respect for the bakufu
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  316 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  was contingent on the bakufu's respect for Kyoto. In the future, the
  bakufu's desire for daimyo support in difficult decisions would find it
  consulting them more frequently, and the court itself developed the
  tactic of suggesting that daimyo, or at least leading Tokugawa vassals
  like the gosanke, should be consulted again.10
  The Commercial Treaty of 1858 negotiated by Townsend Harris
  marked the real opening of Japan to trade and residence. Harris drew
  his most effective arguments from the disasters that China met in the
  second round of warfare (the Arrow war) that ended with the Tientsin
  treaties in 1858. Oddly enough, the bakufu's fear of following the
  course of China into foreign subjection led it to accept treaties almost
  identical to those inflicted on China."
  The debates about the Harris treaty next became inextricably inter-
  woven with the problem of shogunal succession. Tokugawa Iesada,
  who died in the summer of 1858, had no successor, and so adoption
  procedures had to be set in motion. The leading candidates were
  Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu (Keiki), an able young man who was in fact
  one of the many sons of Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito, and a still-
  immature descendant of the Tokugawa house of Kii (Wakayama), the
  future Tokugawa Iemochi. Iemochi's selection would be the more
  conventional, and in the maneuvering that took place, reference to an
  "able" heir was code language for choosing Hitotsubashi (later Toku-
  gawa) Yoshinobu.
  Hotta Masayoshi, who had succeeded Abe Masahiro as chief bakufu
  official, informed Townsend Harris that the regime would need the
  formality of court approval of the new treaty before signing it, and he
  arrived in Kyoto to secure that approval in the spring of 1858. To his
  astonishment, the court instructions he received a half-month later
  instructed the bakufu that because this was of utmost importance to
  the country, it should take up the matter once more with the three
  cadet houses {gosanke) and the daimyo. This marked the first time in
  the Tokugawa years that the court had presumed to disagree publicly
  with bakufu policy. What had happened was that a number of leading
  daimyo, among them Tokugawa Nariaki, had recognized in the com-
  10 Abe's tactics and ability have received poor marks from most historians, but more apprecia-
  tive verdicts are rendered by Conrad Totman, "Political Reconciliation in the Tokugawa
  Bakufu: Abe Masahiro and Tokugawa Nariaki, 1844-1852," in Craig and Shively, eds.,
  Personality in Japanese History, pp. 180-208; and Bito Masahide, "Bushi and the Meiji
  Restoration," Acta Asiatica, 49 (Tokyo, Toho Gakkai, 1985): 78-96.
  11 The point is Ono Masao's in "Kaikoku," Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 13 (kinsei 5), pp.
  1-39. Nakamura Tetsu, "Kaikokugo no boeki to sekai shijo," however, points out that the
  Ansei treaties were superior to the Tientsin treaties because they did not legalize opium or
  permit missionaries and provided better tariff arrangements, pp. 108-9.
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  HARRIS TREATY AND ITS AFTERMATH 
  317
  mercial treaty an issue on which they could use die court's xenophobic
  instincts to influence bakufu policy in the matter of shogunal succes-
  sion. Henceforth diey would propose that the court couple reluctant
  approval of the treaty with the condition of selecting an "able" and
  mature heir to the shogun.
  When Hotta addressed his second request for approval to the court,
  he was close to having his way when eighty-eight Kyoto nobles joined to
  protest. As a result, instructions to consult the vassals were handed
  down a second time. With this the lines were drawn for a showdown.
  House succession went to the heart of Tokugawa policy and was an
  internal Tokugawa matter. As the/Wai daimyo of Hikone, Ii Naosuke,
  put it in a letter, selection according to ability might be the "Chinese
  way," but it was not the way things were done in Japan. Last-minute
  bakufu lobbying blocked a court plan to call for an able shogun.I2
  The court's second rebuff came in a context of growing exasperation
  with Kyoto xenophobia and obstruction, and it brought hard-liners to
  the fore in Edo. Shortly after Hotta's return from Kyoto, Ii Naosuke
  of Hikone became regent (tairo) and took over the leadership role in
  the Edo councils. He now began a period of personal leadership that
  had no real precedent in the history of shogunal ministers. It seemed
  to him that the reassertion of bakufu control over dissidents was a
  matter of the highest priority and that other issues were secondary.
  On June 25, Harris was promised that the treaty would be signed by
  September 4. Once again letters were sent off to the daimyo in appar-
  ent conformity with imperial instructions. But when Townsend Harris
  brought word of the Treaty of Tientsin and speculated that the British
  and French warships would probably proceed to Japan next, the treaty
  was hastily signed on July 29 before the results of the new survey were
  in hand and without court approval. Ten days later the bakufu an-
  nounced that shogunal succession had gone to the young Iemochi of
  Kii. Thus Ii Naosuke had decided the two burning questions of the
  period within ten days, and quite on his own authority.
  Ii now moved against the opposition. Bakufu moderates and foreign
  affairs specialists who had come to office under Abe and who had
  favored a cooperative and conciliatory policy toward the daimyo were
  dismissed, demoted, or moved to less important posts. The great
  12 George Wilson, "The Bakumatsu Intellectual in Action: Hashimoto Sanai and the Political
  Crisis of 1858," in Craig and Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese Hisuny, pp. 234-63,
  quotes Ii's retainer Nagano: "To nominate a lord because of his intelligence is to have
  inferiors choose their superior and is entirely the Chinese style . . . the custom of our empire
  must be to respect the direct line of descent," p. 260. But Nagano was too dogmatic in this;
  the adoption system permitted great flexibility in succession to secure ability.
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  3l8 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  daimyo who had lobbied through their agents in Kyoto for the succes-
  sion of Yoshinobu as heir were driven into retirement and, usually,
  house arrest. Matsudaira Shungaku of Fukui, Tokugawa Nariaki of
  Mito, Tokugawa Yoshikumi of Owari, and Yamauchi Yodo of Tosa
  were only the most eminent of those punished.
  Emperor Komei was furious at this flouting of his sentiment and
  even considered abdication to demonstrate his frustration. He ordered
  that the head of one of the three cadet houses (gosanke), or the tairo
  himself, come to Kyoto, only to receive the response that the house
  heads were being punished and that the tairo was too busy with na-
  tional affairs to absent himself from Edo. A lesser roju, Manabe
  Akikatsu, was designated as emissary, and even that worthy delayed
  almost two months before setting out for Kyoto. The court struck
  back; its directive to the bakufu, in a totally unprecedented breach of
  channels and security, was transmitted to the Kyoto representative of
  Mito and sent on to Edo by him to the consternation of the bakufu,
  which forbade Mito to divulge its contents to other quarters. At
  Kyoto, low-ranking agents of the daimyo who had favored the Hitotsu-
  bashi cause urged on inexperienced courtiers in misguided efforts to
  have the court insist on a reversal of bakufu policy, the dismissal of Ii,
  and a reversal of the Harris treaty. Ii Naosuke had his own agent in
  Kyoto, one Nagano Shuzen, who reported all this activity to Edo and
  helped provoke the counterstrokes that followed.
  By October, bakufu arrests of those agents began. Umeda Umpin,
  Mito agents, and others were arrested in Kyoto. Hashimoto Sanai,
  Matsudaira Shungaku's chief emissary, was arrested in Edo. The men
  arrested in Kyoto were transported to Edo in cages and under heavy
  guard, and once there they were severely interrogated by a judicial
  board of five that sat for only the most serious offenses. The sentences
  handed down were unexpectedly severe and made this one of the
  largest crackdowns in the history of the bakufu. Over one hundred
  men were sentenced. Eight were condemned to death, and six of them
  were beheaded like ordinary criminals.
  While all this was in progress, roju Manabe was working to wring
  approval from a sullen and reluctant court for the treaty that had
  already been signed. His hand was strengthened as bakufu punish-
  ments approached the court itself, with a round of changes and retire-
  ments in courtier positions there. In the end the reluctant sovereign
  agreed that because the treaties had been signed, it was too late to stop
  them.
  Ii Naosuke has had harsh treatment at the hands of historians,
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  HARRIS TREATY AND ITS AFTERMATH 
  319
  especially those who wrote before 1945. His personal rigidity and
  harshness were untypical of bakufu procedure and, indeed, of most of
  Japanese administrative history with its preferences for collegia! deci-
  sion making. Moreover, his victims included some of the ideal types
  revered by the future Meiji state. The Fukui counselor Hashimoto
  Sanai, trusted assistant of Matsudaira Shungaku, was clearly carrying
  out instructions from his lord. In character and attainments he had
  won universal respect and admiration. Despite this, his sentence read:
  He "should have remonstrated with his lord that this was a serious
  matter . . . and he acted without respect for Bakufu will."1*
  Even more serious and tragic in popular imagination was the fate of
  the Choshu scholar-teacher Yoshida Shoin. Yoshida began as a low-
  ranking but brilliant student of military science. After traveling to
  Nagasaki and elsewhere he concluded that these places would not
  suffice to protect Japan. He came under the influence of the modern-
  izer Sakuma Shozan and tried to persuade Perry to take him back to
  America with him for a period of study in 1854. After Perry main-
  tained his commitments to the shogunate and refused this request as
  illegal, Yoshida was discovered, arrested, and sent back to Choshu.
  There he was given partial freedom to teach in a village academy that
  came to number among its students many of the future Meiji leaders.
  Furious at what he considered bakufu disrespect to Kyoto and the
  servility to foreigners shown in signing the Harris treaty, Yoshida
  schemed with Umeda Umpin to engineer the assassination of Manabe
  on his way to Kyoto. Arrested and extradited to Edo, Yoshida was
  executed after his fellow inmate Hashimoto Sanai. He became posthu-
  mously exalted as a martyr for emperor and country.
  Postwar historians, however, have been kinder to Ii Naosuke. Freed
  from the compulsion of earlier historiography to side with those who
  fell in the "Ansei purge" and able to see courage and intelligence on
  both sides of the struggle that was to rend the political fabric of mid-
  century Japan, later writers have softened their denunciations. Yet in
  any case, Ii Naosuke did not long survive his triumph. On a snowy day
  in March i860, as his entourage approached the Sakurada gate of the
  great Edo Chiyoda Castle, a group of swordsmen, seventeen from
  Mito and one from Satsuma, cut through his guards, whose swords
  were covered to protect them from the late winter snow, and took the
  tairo's head. The assassins' manifesto attacked the regent personally
  rather than the government he had headed, but it made it very clear
  13 Wilson, "Bakumatsu Intellectual: Hashimoto Sanai." The Japanese text charges Hashimoto
  with disrespect for the kogi.
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  32O 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  that Ii's crime had been that of indifference to the imperial will, and it
  urged all Tokugawa retainers to turn with shame to the sun goddess of
  Ise in penitence. The loyalist years had begun.
  THE LOYALISTS
  The purge that Ii Naosuke carried out had resulted in his murder; the
  persecuted loyalists had retaliated by assassinating the chief bakufu
  minister. These events ushered in a period of violence and terror that
  transformed the setting of late Tokugawa politics. The loyalists,
  known to their contemporaries and to history as shishi - men of high
  purpose - became an explosive element in local and national affairs
  and ended by serving as ideal ethical types for the ideology of the
  modern imperial state and also as models for young radicals in future
  periods of instability.
  Shishi tended to be of modest rank, status, and income. Lack of status
  meant that they were little encumbered by official duty and office,
  which were reserved for higher samurai rank. They lived in a world that
  was less structured by ritual than was that of their superiors, and com-
  munication with men from other domains was also easier for them than
  it was for their superiors. Because the shishi were at the outer circumfer-
  ence of the ruling class, frustrations of limited opportunity and ritual
  humility often made them suspicious and critical of their cautious supe-
  riors. Poorly informed about the context of national diplomatic and
  political issues, they were inclined to the simplistic solutions of direct
  action. Calls for preparedness that accompanied the opening of Japan
  produced a lively expectation of war and led to a setting that was alive
  with rumor and that put new emphasis on the importance of the martial
  arts. Swordsmanship academies were crowded as never before with
  students, and together with tournaments they became settings for politi-
  cal bravado and self-assertion. The shishi were men of the sword.
  The lower samurai's frustrations often meshed with the discontent
  of the rural samurai and village leaders. In the countryside, pseudo-
  samurai pretensions were symbolized by swords, surnames, and rudi-
  mentary scholarship. These could combine with the experience of
  administrative responsibility to encourage critical attitudes toward
  urban-based but underemployed samurai, sometimes with the conclu-
  sion that it was the leadership of the farm villages that really mattered.
  In Tosa, for example, a Shoya League of the 1840s produced com-
  plaints that summed up many of the frustrations and that harked back
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  LOYALISTS 
  321
  to a past order in which village leaders had carried out the court's
  commands without interference from castle town samurai. Tosa shishi
  included sons of rural leaders as well as lower samurai.14
  Shishi learning varied widely, but it tended to include assertion of
  the primacy of sincerity demonstrated through action. The Satsuma
  hero Saigo Takamori was steeped in the views of Wang Yang-ming
  Confucianism which stressed the identity of knowledge and action.
  Others drew on popularized teachings of Chu Hsi and Mencius to
  emphasize the meaning of sincerity and a well-ordered polity and to
  draw quick conclusions from bakufu concessions to the imperialist
  powers and its apparent disregard of the wishes of the court. Although
  they were drilled in the virtue of loyalty and subordination (meibun) as
  the highest duty (taigi) of all, the shishi also accepted the retainer's
  obligation to correct his superiors when convinced of their errors. The
  bakufu itself accepted this in its death verdict against Hashimoto
  Sanai. He "should have remonstrated with his lord" instead of blindly
  carrying out his instructions in Kyoto. By the same logic, the shishi
  were ready to condemn bakufu officials for carrying out shogunal
  instructions in defiance of the sovereign's wishes. A popular history of
  Japan that was written from the standpoint of Confucian loyalism, Rai
  San'yo's Nihon gaishi (Unofficial history of Japan) circulated in increas-
  ing volume, first in its Chinese original and then in Japanese transla-
  tion, to spread the praise of loyal servants of the court in former days.
  Rai Mikisaburo, a younger son of the historian, was executed in 1859,
  one of the victims of Ii Naosuke's purge.
  The shishi began as loyal retainers, convinced of the identity of their
  lord's wishes and the desires of the court. Ii Naosuke's punishment of
  the daimyo who had advocated the Hitotsubashi cause and did then-
  best to block the Harris treaty turned them against the bakufu minis-
  ter in the name of loyalty to their lord. In the southwestern domain of
  Tosa, for instance, an oath signed in blood committed a group of
  young swordsmen to a loyalist party in the fall of 1861 with a state-
  ment that combined indignation at the humiliation of Japan by the
  barbarians and the punishment of "our former lord . . . who, instead
  of securing action, was accused and punished." "We swear by the
  gods," the statement concluded, "that if the Imperial Flag is once
  raised we will go through fire and water to ease the Emperor's mind,
  14 Marius B. Jansen, "Tosa During the Last Century of Tokugawa Rule," in John W. Hall and
  Marius B. Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan (Princeton,
  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 340-1.
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  322 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  carry out the will of our former lord, and purge this evil from our
  people."1'
  At the outset, ethnic nationalism, retainer loyalty, and imperial rever-
  ence could be combined in a devotion that was relatively free of moral
  dilemma. But once feudal loyalty seemed at variance with imperial
  reverence - when the daimyo chose the path of caution and pulled back
  from the loyalist cause - the shishi faced a difficult personal choice.
  Large numbers resisted renewed subordination to their superiors
  through flight from the domain jurisdiction, seeking protection and
  employment under the aegis of a domain perceived as more committed
  to the imperial cause (Choshu long served as a protector of men from all
  over the country) or entering the employment of court nobles in Kyoto
  who had need for bodyguards, agents, and messengers as the political
  cauldron heated up. Participation in politics in this way was dangerous
  and often tragic for men who gave up the security of family, home, and
  safety, but it also proved stimulating and ennobling for many who
  contrasted the excitement of their new life with the tedium of the ritual-
  ized subordination that they had known at home. The Tosa activist
  Sakamoto Ryoma wrote his sister to contrast the importance of his
  activities with this old life at home, "where you have to waste your time
  like an idiot"; at another time he asserted that "the idea that in times like
  these it is a violation of your proper duty to put your relatives second,
  your domain second, to leave your mother, wife, and children - this is
  certainly a notion that comes from our stupid officials. . . . [But] you
  must know that one should hold the Imperial Court more dear than
  country, and more dear than parents."16
  The loyalists did not have a structured view or program toward
  which they were working. They had slogans (of which the most impor-
  tant was sonno-joi - revere the emperor! drive out the barbarians!) but
  not programs. They were opposed to their authorities but not to au-
  thority; they were full of ethnic nationalism but only dimly aware of
  the possibilities of a true nation-state in which the two-sworded class
  would not stride forth as a special repository of virtue and privilege.
  This point requires further comment. E. H. Norman's pioneering
  study of the Restoration17 perceived a coalition of "lower samurai" and
  "merchants" at the center of the political movement, with implications
  15 Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1961), pp. 108-9. 
  '6 Jansen, Sakamoto, pp. 174-5.
  17 E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence As a Modern State: Political and Economic Problems of
  the Meiji Period (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940 and later printings).
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  LOYALISTS 
  323
  for future social change, but more recent writers have differed sharply
  over the utility of this as an analytical distinction. The "merchant"
  participation has proved even more difficult to examine, much less
  establish. W. G. Beasley's masterly summary of Restoration politics
  examined the evidence in a number of the most important domains to
  conclude:
  There is, therefore, a valid connection between low-rank - rank below that of
  hirazamurai, which qualified a man for domain offices of some responsibil-
  ity - and rebellion, terrorism, or the threat of violence. The ronin who were
  the placard-posters, the demonstrators, the conspirators, the assassins were
  characteristically men of lower standing than the "politicians."
  The same argument extends, Beasley wrote, to others whose "claim to
  samurai status was tenuous or even nonexistent: the village headmen,
  rich farmers, and merchants who had perhaps bought the right to use
  a family name and wear a sword."18 Tokugawa status divisions had no
  provision for the political participation of such individuals, and to
  participate at all was to set aside authority and to ally oneself with
  kindred spirits who had at least some claim to status. Thus the Tosa
  loyalists included a goodly number of rural samurai (goshi) (including
  Sakamoto) and village heads or their sons whose normal horizons of
  political awareness would have been expected to be limited to the
  valley within which their acreage lay.
  Albert Craig, who restricted his focus to Choshu, found the "lower
  samurai" phrase imprecise and without analytical value. "Almost any
  large movement of samurai would by necessity be a lower samurai
  movement," he wrote, and the conventional definition of "upper"
  would fit only seventy or eighty (out of five thousand, or counting rear
  vassals, ten thousand) Choshu samurai families. Moreover, in Choshu
  there were high-ranking loyalists and low-ranking conservatives. "The
  samurai class," Craig concluded, given its disparity, "could not act as
  a class, a gentry class, with common class interests."•' Thomas Huber,
  who also studied Choshu but limited his attention to the students of
  Yoshida Shoin's academy, defined "lower" as an income of two hun-
  dred koku or less to conclude that the Choshu movement, which in-
  cluded commoner village administrators, represented the interests -
  18 W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972), p.
  171.
  19 Albert B. Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
  Press, 1961), pp. 112-13; and "The Restoration Movement in Choshu," in Hall and Jansen,
  eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modemjapan, pp. 363-73.
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  324 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  or at least the discontents - of the "service intelligentsia," thus refin-
  ing and improving Norman's argument and position.20
  Even when one grants the frustration and occasional fury of low-
  ranking members of the Tokugawa military elite and grants the impor-
  tance of their enthusiasm and violence in energizing a political situa-
  tion theretofore torpid and somnolent, one is reminded that the story
  that unfolded after the loyalist years was one of action and decisions
  taken by domains. Loyalists as such were brought under control after
  1864 and required the cooperation of men who held power. Han policy
  was set by men of rank with access to the narrow elite that monopo-
  lized the highest offices. That elite seldom moved until it was con-
  vinced that the perils of inaction outweighed the risks of participation.
  At the last, the danger of failing to join a common front was that of
  exclusion from a new political order and structure. Regional and fam-
  ily self-interest had to be calculated with the greatest precision by men
  who inherited status, authority, and wealth. The shishi helped create
  an atmosphere in which movement was possible. Many, perhaps most,
  of them, perished in that work. Those who inherited the fruits of their
  labors were for the most part middle- and upper-ranking samurai who
  moved their han into positions in the years that followed.
  Han policy and the logic of events seemed to enroll most samurai in
  some domains, notably Choshu, under the loyalist banner before the
  Tokugawa fall. But in 1867 Choshu had the most to lose and the most
  to gain. In other areas the scales were balanced differently. But just as
  many - indeed, far more - similarly placed samurai in other domains
  responded differently in other contexts, remaining aloof or following
  other banners. The bakufu responded to disorder and terror in Kyoto
  and Edo by recruiting and organizing shishi or ronin who, seeing the
  Choshu-Satsuma force as regional and "selfish," proved potent instru-
  ments of counterviolence. Lower samurai of the Tokugawa domain of
  Aizu, who served to keep the peace in Kyoto through the final Toku-
  gawa years, were subject to the same class interests and frustrations as
  were their Choshu counterparts and probably included as many advo-
  cates of exclusion and imperial loyalism among their number. But they
  responded to different regional and historical affiliations, and their
  domain provided the single most effective counter to Satsuma and
  Choshu military strength until the Aizu castle was put to the torch in
  20 Thomas M. Huber, The Revolutionary Origins of Modem Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
  University Press, 1981)-
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  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE 
  325
  the desperate siege of Wakamatsu in 1868 that ended the Aizu pres-
  ence on the national scene.
  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE
  The domains of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen furnished the
  early Restoration leadership. With the notable exception of Mito,
  which destroyed its strength in a civil war, remarkably few other han
  achieved a clear-cut presence or identity in the Restoration movement.
  Among these, Saga was a latecomer and was co-opted only after 1867.
  It may have joined the charmed circle chiefly because its proximity to
  the port of Nagasaki, which it was required to defend, helped bring
  some able and experienced leaders to the fore. Consideration of the
  sources of Restoration leadership therefore leads immediately to in-
  quiry into the special characteristics of a very small number of do-
  mains. If samurai constraints and frustration were roughly comparable
  in all parts of Japan, what additional factors distinguished those south-
  western domains and the few others that counted in the late Tokugawa
  years?
  Factors of size and location come to mind immediately. Satsuma was
  second, Choshu ninth, Saga tenth, Mito eleventh, and Tosa nineteenth
  in assessed productivity among the feudal domains. Distance and tradi-
  tion helped create pride and autonomy. Large-scale resources were
  necessary for mounting a significant military force through the pur-
  chase of Western ships and guns in the 1860s. Satsuma, Choshu, and
  Tosa also had disproportionately large numbers of samurai. Satsuma
  and Choshu had been on the losing side in the struggles that brought the
  Tokugawa to power in the early seventeenth century; they suffered a
  loss of territory and had compressed a large military force into a reduced
  area. Also, the three domains were integrated territorial units with
  defensible borders along land communication routes that permitted
  vigilance over contacts with contiguous areas. Satsuma, at the extremity
  of southern Japan, was particularly famous for its own exclusion sys-
  tem. Each was a tozama domain, although Tosa's status was special
  because the Tokugawa founder had installed a man of his own selection
  after expelling his predecessor. Consequently, the Tosa lord sought
  some way of combining gratitude with warning and worked out the
  suggestion for shogunal resignation. Elsewhere, compunctions of loy-
  alty were weaker. The entire samurai class of Satsuma and Choshu and
  the lower ranks in Tosa, many of them rear vassals who had served the
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  326 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  previous daimyo, harbored a centuries-old resentment of Tokugawa
  rule.
  Remoteness and secure borders made for a greater degree of auton-
  omy and of self-consciousness. "Han nationalism," to use Albert
  Craig's term, guaranteed that strong competitive urges operated to
  drive men on and to exacerbate fears of being left behind or out of
  whatever new political order might eventuate. Remoteness also made
  for a smaller role and presence in Edo, for higher costs and greater
  inconvenience attached to the central bakufu control mechanism of
  sankin-kotai, and for reliance upon the Osaka market over that of the
  shogunal capital. Distance and size made possible relatively autono-
  mous responses to bakufu and imperialist demands, as when Satsuma
  refused to make amends for the murder by its retainers of an English
  trader who happened along its line of march on horseback (the Rich-
  ardson, or Namamugi incident), and when Choshu tried to expel the
  foreigners by shelling ships along its shores without bakufu authoriza-
  tion. These incidents brought both domains face to face with the
  superiority of Western military technology, demonstrated by the Brit-
  ish fleet against Kagoshima in 1863 and a foreign flotilla against the
  Choshu Shimonoseki batteries the following year.
  Remoteness had other consequences. At a time when money econ-
  omy, economic change, and social dissolution were making the domains
  along the main-traveled parts of the Osaka and Edo plains, most of them
  held by Tokugawa houses, less feudal, social and economic relation-
  ships in southwestern Japan were still backward and traditional. The
  higher ratio of samurai to commoners in southwestern Japan could also
  be used to inhibit commoner complaint or participation; this was par-
  ticularly so in Satsuma. Traditional authority structures provided an
  effective base for efforts to bolster the domain economy, tap more of its
  surplus for the regime, and speed military reforms. The Tempo reforms
  failed in bakufu territory, but Tempo fiscal and economic reforms in
  Satsuma and Choshu left those domains in much stronger position for
  the competition that lay ahead. In Saga, too, the mid-century decades
  witnessed a successful campaign to redistribute land equally once again
  on the lines of the old Heian kinden system, a "land reform" program
  that spoke volumes for the ability of the feudal administration to control
  its most important resource.21
  At mid-century the great fiefs of the southwest also enjoyed strong
  and able leadership. Throughout Japan able daimyo were few and far
  21 See, for Choshu, A. M. Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration; for Tosa, M. B. Jansen,
  Sakamoto Ryoma; and for Satsuma and other han, Ikeda Yoshimasa, "Bakufu shohan no doyo
  to kaikaku," inIwanamikozaNihonrekishi, vol. i$(kinsei$), 174-207.
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  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE 
  327
  between in the late Tokugawa years, and in Edo itself shogunal power
  was entirely in the hands of surrogate bureaucrats during the reigns of
  Iesada and Iemochi. In Satsuma and Tosa, however, a fortunate acces-
  sion to power of able men, products of the adoption system, intro-
  duced strong direction at the center. Saga too had an able daimyo,
  though the Choshu lord was a cypher. What counted was the presence
  of a generous number of unusually able and adroit subordinates in
  each fief, men who did not hesitate to speak their minds.
  This combination of historical, geographical, and economic circum-
  stances helps to account for the few domains that took leading roles.
  But it does not explain why so few other domains, some more or less
  comparably endowed, took vigorous part in national politics. In Mito,
  where the loyalist teachings of the Confucianists and the personal
  prestige of Tokugawa Nariaki made for a leading role in the 1850s, an
  internal power struggle that destroyed domain unity combined with a
  Tokugawa affiliation to remove the han once Tokugawa Yoshinobu
  became a bakufu leader. In Fukui, also a related Tokugawa house
  (shimpan), Matsudaira Shungaku's early leadership gave way to watch-
  ful waiting and hoping for the moment when political conciliation
  would again be possible. But most daimyo - and indeed most upper
  samurai - witnessing the dangers that could accompany wrong judg-
  ments, preferred to conserve their resources and keep their counsel
  until the situation was clarified. There was no "anti-imperial" party,
  but there was a good deal of suspicion, much of it well founded, that
  those who professed loyalty to Kyoto were chiefly interested in their
  own advantage. For Tokugawa adherents, on the other hand, the
  twists and turns of bakufu policy made it both difficult and dangerous
  to follow a consistent and active line.22
  The assassination of Ii Naosuke was followed by a series of efforts to
  bring court and bakufu together in a new and more cooperative struc-
  ture. It did not succeed. For Edo, as Beasley points out, it meant "a
  bolstering of bakufu authority by the use of the imperial prestige,"
  while to the great lords involved "it implied a renewed possibility of
  intervening in politics in the Emperor's name so as to achieve, among
  other things, an increase in baronial privilege."23 Yet these efforts
  were important, for they led to the Bunkyu reforms of 1862, reforms
  which so changed the political balance of power that a recent study
  begins its consideration of the Tokugawa fall at that point. Meanwhile
  for others the hopes they engendered returned at the last to inspire the
  22 Totman, "Fudai Daimyo and the Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu," Journal of Asian Studies
  34 (May 1975): 581-91.
  23 Beas\ey,Meiji Restoration, p. 177.
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  328 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  Tosa proposal under which the last shogun agreed to surrender his
  powers in 1867.
  The proposals are usually grouped under the slogan kobu-gattai, for
  reconciliation of court (kd) and camp (bu). The first of these to be
  proposed was put forward by Choshu, where the official Nagai Uta
  persuaded his daimyo to urge that a new agreement make it clear that
  the shogunate ruled "in accordance with the orders of the court,"
  which would thus set policy while the bakufu carried it out. Having
  secured agreement with this in Kyoto, Nagai proceeded to Edo for
  negotiation. But there he was soon overtaken by a Satsuma proposal
  and mission that seemed to promise Kyoto a good deal more. This
  proposed pardon for all those who had been punished by Ii Naosuke in
  1858 and dismissal of the principal bakufu leaders who had held office
  since then. More important, the court would designate certain daimyo
  to represent its interests in Edo; the two principal figures of the succes-
  sion quarrel, Matsudaira Shungaku, daimyo of Echizen (whose vassal
  Hashimoto Sanai had been executed for advancing the candidacy of
  Tokugawa Yoshinobu), and Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki) himself
  were to be appointed to newly created offices. Yoshinobu, who had
  been denied the shogunate, would serve as guardian (koken) for young
  Iemochi, while Shungaku would be Supreme Councillor (seiji sosai).
  This set of proposals was brought to Edo by the court noble Ohara
  Shigetomi, and the escort was provided by a large Satsuma military
  force headed by the regent Shimazu Hisamitsu.
  These plans had antecedents in thinking that began in the years
  following the arrival of Townsend Harris under the urgency of mili-
  tary reform. The great lords who had lobbied for the succession of
  Tokugawa Yoshinobu wanted cooperation to replace the costly control
  measures of the Tokugawa system. Yamauchi Yodo, the Tosa daimyo,
  had proposed a seven-year moratorium on sankin-kotai duty for
  daimyo at that time, and many large domains had developed steps for
  financial reform to make military spending possible. Saga had pushed
  the implementation of its land division program, and Tosa and
  Satsuma had developed programs for central merchandising of re-
  gional specialties to increase domain income - Satsuma with sugar
  from its southern islands and Tosa with its camphor and indigo. Modi-
  fication of the ritualized alternate attendance at Edo would be the best
  possible economy measure.
  Unfortunately the strains generated by Ii Naosuke's purge and the
  enforced absence through punishment of several of the daimyo who
  were most important to the Ansei reforms had changed this pattern of
  planned cooperation into one of competitive assertion and rivalry. The
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  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE 
  329
  Ohara-Satsuma mission itself was soon followed by a third, this time
  accompanied by troops from Tosa.
  While Yamauchi Yodo was still in forced retirement, his chief minis-
  ter had been assassinated by loyalists, who promptly moved to the
  center of the decision structure that surrounded the young successor
  daimyo. Takechi Zuizan, the leader and founder of the Tosa Loyalist
  Party, now proposed in his young lord's name that the court nobles
  Sanjo Sanetomi and Anegakoji Kintomo proceed to Edo with orders
  from the court that the bakufu prepare to expel the foreigners immedi-
  ately. These plans went on to propose establishing the Osaka-Kyoto
  (Kinai) plain as the private realm of the court, granting the court clear
  political primacy, ending sankin-kotai so that the daimyo could spend
  their money for defense, establishing seven or eight of the daimyo of
  southwestern Japan in Kyoto as support for the court, and establish-
  ing a private defense force of courageous rdnin from all parts of the
  country to defend the court. Costs of all this would be met by ordering
  wealthy merchants in the Osaka area to put up the money. This pro-
  posal was one of the most sweeping the loyalists put forward, and it
  serves to illustrate the way thinking became radicalized. But it did not
  get much farther, for much to Takechi's surprise his former daimyo,
  Yamauchi Yodo, moved skillfully to oust the Tosa loyalists after he
  was released from house arrest. After lengthy interrogation Takechi
  was ordered to commit suicide in 1865 for insubordination.24
  The Choshu and Satsuma initiatives, however, produced results
  before the Sanjo-Tosa procession had reached Edo, and the changes
  that came are known as the reforms of the Bunkyu era. These
  changed the political setting so basically that a recent study of the
  Tokugawa fall begins with the assertion that "the Tokugawa bakufu's
  time of troubles began early in 1862 . . . [when] a series of political
  changes . . . reduced the bakufu to a secondary role in national poli-
  tics."25 In terms of politics, the most important changes were the
  implementation of the Ohara mission proposals: Matsudaira Shun-
  gaku of Fukui was appointed seiji sosai (Supreme Councillor) and
  Hitotsubashi (Tokugawa) Yoshinobu koken (guardian), the latter ap-
  pointment specifically announced as made at "imperial request." Ja-
  pan's problems with the imperialist powers, the extent of court disaf-
  fection, the insecurity of top-level bakufu officials, several of whom
  had been assassin's targets, and the appearance of the strong Satsuma
  military force in Edo to accompany Ohara had combined to suggest to
  24 Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma, pp. 131-7, and Ikeda, "Bakufu shohan," pp. 184-6.
  25 Totman, Collapse ofthe Tokugawa Bakufu, p. 3.
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  330 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  bakufu officials the wisdom of retreating from Ii's insistence on tradi-
  tional bureaucratic direction of bakufu and national affairs. Shungaku
  and Hitotsubashi were in any event from Tokugawa houses, and the
  appointments did not at first seem an undue participation by outsiders
  in bakufu and national affairs.
  Unfortunately for those who thought in these terms, Shungaku saw
  his appointment as a first step in a sharing of power by the great lords
  who had been his allies in the succession dispute a few years earlier.
  He began by insisting on a general pardon for those who had been
  punished by Ii; having carried his point he went on to demand punish-
  ment for the bakufu officials who had helped direct the purge. There
  followed a stream of demotions. The house of Ii lost its mandate as
  protector of Kyoto, and Ii's retainer and adviser Nagano Shuzen was
  ordered to commit suicide. Soon additional pressures represented by
  the Sanjo-Tosa mission persuaded bakufu officials of the need to show
  good faith with the court by extending the punishments to almost all
  officials who had worked with the successor governments that fol-
  lowed the murder of Ii and to the men who had negotiated the treaties
  with the foreigners. In considering the remarkable equanimity with
  which most Tokugawa fudai saw the bakufu collapse a few years later,
  it is well to keep in mind the demoralizing effect that turnabouts of
  this sort must have had on vassals' loyalty and resolution.
  The 1862 reforms went on to a series of steps that were cumulatively
  disastrous to bakufu primacy. The first of these was the moderation
  and virtual abolition of the system oisankin kotai, undertaken in order
  to permit economies to facilitate domain military preparedness. The
  period of daimyo residence at Edo was reduced to one hundred days in
  three years. Many of the lords, freed from duty at Edo, now trans-
  ferred their attention to Kyoto, which thereafter competed with Edo
  as center of a national politics. Within a year bakufu officials were
  trying to undo the effects of this; two years later the bakufu asked all
  daimyo to send their families to Edo as before. Some lesser lords
  complied, but the more important domains showed no interest in
  returning to the restrictions of earlier times. By 1865-6 the great lords
  hardly granted the bakufu the courtesy of a reply to its summons, and
  a bakufu survey of Edo mansions turned up the fact that some of the
  lesser lords had gone so far as to rent their residences to commoners.26
  Another step that was undertaken to repair relations with Kyoto
  involved a visit to the imperial court by the young shogun Iemochi.
  26 Ibid., p. 141.
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  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE 
  331
  No shogun had visited Kyoto since the third shogun Tokugawa
  Iemitsu had traveled south with a mighty retinue in 1634 to demon-
  strate his power. Iemochi's trip to Kyoto was a dramatic contrast to
  that of his ancestor. Iemitsu had gone to Kyoto to show his might; he
  had acted to sever daimyo connections with the court, and redirected
  daimyo residence and attendance from Kyoto to Edo.2? Iemochi, how-
  ever, went to Kyoto as part of an attempt to gain strength from recon-
  ciliation at a time when daimyo attention was shifting from Edo back
  to Kyoto. In one point the visits were comparable. Iemitsu had taken
  an imperial princess as consort, and the same course was now sug-
  gested for Iemochi. In an effort to further cement relations with the
  court an imperial princess (Kazu no Miya) was proposed as consort for
  the young shogun. The arrangements were made in apparent disre-
  gard of her own reluctance and that of the Emperor Komei, and the
  matter served to inflame loyalist indignation further as a demonstra-
  tion of shogunal disrespect.
  Iemochi's trip was planned to be a short one for reasons of economy
  and politics; bakufu optimists hoped that his presence would serve to
  reestablish the awareness of bakufu primacy in Kyoto. It worked out
  quite differently; before the young shogun could be extricated from
  the intrigues at the imperial capital four months had gone by. He was
  obliged to show ritual humility in processions to imperial shrines, and
  his ceremonial deference to the emperor left little doubt of his subordi-
  nate position. In 1634, in contrast, it was the emperor who had called
  at the shogun's Nijo castle. The shogun's position had always de-
  pended in the last analysis on force; it was therefore significant that
  bakufu ministers now thought it desirable to secure a specific court
  authorization of shogunal authority. Unfortunately, that commission
  included orders to drive out the barbarians. Further instructions re-
  minded Iemochi to consult with daimyo on major questions and to
  respect "lord and vassals" relations. "Not since the Muromachi pe-
  riod," Totman observes, "had a shogun been given such a patently
  empty title of authority."28
  The shogun's visit was an important step in the growing transfer of
  political centrality to Kyoto. Within months of his return to Edo
  proposals for a second visit were underway; he was to die at Osaka,
  still a youth, on his third visit in 1866. More and more daimyo now
  established headquarters in the ancient capital. Kyoto became a prime
  27 Asao Naohiro, "Shogun seiji no kenryoku kozo," in Iwanami koza Nikon rekishi, vol. io
  (kinsei 2), pp. I3ff.
  28 Totman, Collapse, p. 58.
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  332 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  object of political and military planning for the southwestern domains.
  It was preeminently the preserve, at least until 1864, of the radical
  loyalists and shishi who made its streets unsafe for suspected enemies.
  In one celebrated instance of symbolic rebellion, they lopped the
  heads off statues of the Ashikaga shoguns. In order to retain control of
  the capital the bakufu appointed Matsudaira Katamori, young lord of
  Aizu, protector (shugo) of the city in 1862, and as a result he became an
  important actor in the politics of the next decade. So important did
  Kyoto become to Edo policy that the fifteenth and last shogun, Toku-
  gawa Yoshinobu, spent his entire period in office in the Kyoto area
  and never once felt free to take time for a return to Edo. All this added
  urgency to the bakufu's economic problems. The Kyoto visits of
  Iemochi were ruinous for bakufu finances, and the necessity of main-
  taining an ever larger force and presence three hundred miles from the
  Tokugawa heartland worsened an already difficult situation.
  A fourth product of the Bunkyu reforms was cooperation with the
  great daimyo. This had indeed been at the very heart of the program
  of proposals grouped as kobu-gattai from the first, and it constituted
  the platform on which the last shogun based his resignation in 1867.
  The great lords that mattered included, in addition to Matsudaira
  Shungaku and Tokugawa Yoshinobu, a number of leading lords:
  Yamauchi Yodo of Tosa, Shimazu Hisamitsu of Satsuma, Date
  Munenari of Uwajima, Mori Yoshichika of Choshu, and Matsudaira
  Katamori of Aizu. They were intermittently drawn into conference
  to discuss court-bakufu relations and diplomatic problems. In theory
  this was supposed to prevent unilateral, "selfish" bakufu direction.
  But the meetings, which began in 1862 and continued sporadically
  thereafter, produced no real results. There was no agreed-upon pro-
  gram of procedure, and the lords themselves were at least as "selfish"
  as the bakufu, usually retiring to their domains when things did not go
  well. The Tokugawa members, meanwhile, inherited the suspicion of
  bureaucratic "regulars" in Edo. The first attempt ended particularly
  badly when Matsudaira Shungaku, Supreme Councillor who had
  brought the whole program into being, resigned and returned to
  Fukui, followed by a bakufu order that he place himself under house
  arrest. He was pardoned by the summer of 1863 and remained a major
  figure, but then and later his program of conciliar cooperation had no
  real basis in regional interest and bureaucratic politics. As far as
  bakufu leaders in Edo were concerned, Shungaku and the others were
  outsiders whose interest in and loyalty to the Tokugawa cause was
  quite different from their own. In addition, haughty daimyo had great
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  COURT AND CAMP, DAIMYO STYLE 
  333
  difficulty in controlling irritation and overcoming disagreement. Con-
  frontation was not a congenial mode of resolution for them. A system
  without provisions for retreat and conciliation found them bargaining
  by absence and boycotting meetings. Most important of all, however,
  was the fact that the Western pressure left no slack for the resolution
  of differences. The insistence of court xenophobes on undoing the
  treaties clashed directly with the deadlines that had been agreed upon
  with the Western powers.
  The Bunkyu program foundered most importantly on the issue of
  foreign policy. Throughout most of the negotiation about restructuring
  power between Edo and Kyoto, Japan was facing diplomatic problems
  and military threats that required more effective central-government
  decision making at the very time that power was becoming more dif-
  fuse. Important figures at the Kyoto court never wavered in their dis-
  taste for the treaties that had been signed with the Western powers, and
  an inevitable effect of the increased attention to court wishes in the
  rhetoric of 1862 and 1863 was subscription to promises, however am-
  biguously worded, to get rid of the foreign plague.
  The Ansei treaties opened to foreign trade Yokohama (Kanagawa),
  Nagasaki, and Hakodate; within four years (by January 1863) Osaka,
  Hyogo (Kobe), Niigata, and Edo were to be opened. Hakodate proved
  of little importance, and foreigners soon lost interest in Niigata, but
  Osaka was a national center and located, together with Hyogo, close to
  the imperial court at Kyoto. In the spring of 1862 the bakufu sent a
  mission to Europe to ask for delay in the opening of additional ports,
  and an attack on the life of Ando Nobumasa, just after the mission had
  sailed, underscored its assertions about domestic difficulties as grounds
  for the request. Trade had not yet assumed major proportions, and even
  Rutherford Alcock, British consul general and later minister, thought
  the request reasonable. A protocol delaying further openings until 1868
  was worked out as a result.2*
  The agreement unfortunately unraveled quickly. Within Japan com-
  petitive jockeying for favor at court produced more extreme demands
  for exclusion of foreigners, while on the spot "exclusion" in the form
  of samurai and ronin terrorist attacks on foreigners (and, in 1863, on
  the British legation itself) produced a negative response on the part of
  the imperialist powers. At Kyoto demands for exclusion were set in
  motion to embarrass the bakufu, which then confounded its critics by
  29 Beasley, Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy 1853-1868 (London: Oxford University
  Press, 1955), pp. 1-93,'provides the most incisive account.
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  334 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  agreeing to exclusion even after many great lords had backed away
  from the prospect of unsuccessful war.
  The Satsuma regent, Shimazu Hisamitsu, emerged as a force for
  moderation. On his way into Kyoto in 1862 his men crushed a ronin
  conspiracy in which his retainers had taken a leading role, and upon
  his return from Edo (whither he had conducted the court noble Ohara)
  he warned of the impossibility of exclusion. Unfortunately his samurai
  had also taken a major step in strengthening English policy by their
  murder of Richardson on the way back to Kyoto. Thereafter Hisa-
  mitsu was preoccupied with the impending threat of British reprisal
  (which took the form of shelling and burning of his castle town of
  Kagoshima), and he helped destroy the hopes for a successful council
  of great lords by leaving Kyoto for Satsuma.
  In Choshu during this same period the pendulum swung from con-
  servatism to radicalism. The initial Choshu initiative represented by
  the proposals of Nagai Uta had failed before the more sweeping coun-
  ter initiative of Satsuma; Nagai was disgraced, retired, and ultimately
  ordered to commit suicide. By summer of 1862 Choshu stood as the
  principal protector and instigator of radical shishi and ronin activities at
  Kyoto. In the latter part of 1862 Choshu strength was joined by that of
  Tosa after the loyalists had taken control of that domain.
  Thus it happened that, as has been described, the Tosa-Sanjo mission
  to Edo carried with it the clearest call yet for immediate and uncondi-
  tional exclusion of foreigners from Japan. The chief bakufu representa-
  tives in Kyoto, Matsudaira Katamori (guardian of Kyoto) and Toku-
  gawa Yoshinobu (shogunal guardian), were inclined to the view that the
  bakufu would have to announce agreement with this demand to show
  sincerity, and meanwhile look for some way of delaying its implementa-
  tion, but the regular bakufu officials at Edo were aghast at the dangers
  involved in even a verbal pledge of exclusion. Edo leaders were operat-
  ing under the guns of foreign warships in Edo bay and in fear of an
  English bombardment of their city when they hurriedly agreed to pay
  over to Great Britain an indemnity for the murder (by Satsuma men, it
  will be remembered) of Richardson in the spring of 1863, just as Toku-
  gawa Yoshinobu was returning from Kyoto where he had agreed to a
  court demand for a promise of expulsion. It seems probable that
  Yoshinobu and other officials hoped they could avoid a clear deadline
  for action, and that even when they accepted, reluctantly, the court-
  imposed date (June 25, 1863) they thought of it as a date on which
  negotiations would commence (and inevitably fail). In any event they
  passed it along to the daimyo but with instructions to avoid hostilities.
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  TREATY PORTS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
  335
  In Choshu, however, the extremist-dominated administration seized
  the opportunity for full compliance and opened fire on an American
  merchant ship at anchor in the Shimonoseki straits and later on French
  and Dutch vessels as well. Thus the kdbu-gattai program ended in a
  shambles: the Satsuma lord in Kagoshima vainly trying to prepare for a
  British attack on his city; Matsudaira Shungaku, author of the pro-
  gram, in retreat in his domain in Fukui; the bakufu verbally committed
  to exclusion at the same time that it was paying damages to Great Britain
  for actions it had not committed; and a defiant Choshu determined to
  carry out exclusion on its own.
  THE TREATY PORTS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE
  The Western powers had created the bakufu's political problems, and
  they remained to complicate them by their presence in the ports that
  had been opened. From the time that Yokohama, Nagasaki, and
  Hakodate were opened to trade in 1859, the bakufu found itself faced
  with insoluble dilemmas in having to yield to foreign pressures at the
  same time that it was being pressured to end the foreign threat. The
  foreign presence, however, also contained elements of hope for the
  bakufu: Tariffs provided a new source of central income, and the pur-
  chase of foreign weapons and foreign assistance in training soldiers and
  sailors was more easily available to the bakufu than to other govern-
  ments in Japan. But arrangements for capitalizing on these opportuni-
  ties were slow in being planned and worked out, and long before they
  might have helped restore Tokugawa political and mihtary primacy, the
  negative aspects of the foreign presence had dealt mortal blows to some
  of the institutional aspects of Tokugawa power.
  In some ways, however, the Tokugawa political institutions proved
  surprisingly resilient in their capacity to accommodate the problems
  that the mid-nineteenth century brought, for the tradition of seclusion
  contained few of the expectations of international hierarchy and na-
  tional centrality that bedeviled contemporary Chinese efforts to accom-
  modate institutions to international society.30
  From the first, Abe Masahiro entrusted negotiation with the Ameri-
  cans to men he had selected for their ability. By the summer of 1858 a
  new magistracy was set up to specialize in foreign affairs, the gaikoku
  30 See, for China, Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, China's Entrance into the Family of Nations: The
  Diplomatic Phase, 1858-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); and
  Masataka Banno, China and the West: 1858-1861, The Origins of the Tsungli Yatnen (Cam-
  bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
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  336 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  bugyo, with the appointment of five men to serve in a collegial capac-
  ity. From then until 1867, when a more streamlined and responsible
  structure was worked out, a total of seventy-four officials served in it.
  This also demonstrates a difficulty: Institutional flexibility was there,
  but political instability and uncertainty made the post hazardous to
  occupy. Policy shifts required new teams, and the magistracy changed
  its occupants like a revolving door. The individual and career patterns
  of virtually all late-Tokugawa high officials show the political hazards.
  The board oiroju showed a 100 percent turnover with the substitution
  of Ii for Hotta. Ambassadors sent to the United States in i860 to ratify
  the Harris treaty disappeared into a (probably well deserved) obscurity
  upon their return to Japan. Lower-level interpreters and "technicians"
  like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Fukuchi Gen'ichiro, on the other hand,
  survived to travel again and become the commentators and pundits of
  the future.*1
  The bakufu sent a series of missions to the West in the 1860s. They
  became more frequent, more professional, and more serious. The
  first, in i860, included seventy-seven men. The discovery that life was
  possible in the West without mountains of straw sandals and the full
  panoply of ritual that accompanied Tokugawa society made it possible
  to be more selective with future missions. In 1862, thirty-eight men
  went, the interpreters for a second time; this group stayed longer,
  worked harder, and learned more. Mission followed mission, and a
  sixth was abroad at the time of the shogun's fall in 1867. By then a
  number of leading domains, including Satsuma and Choshu, had
  smuggled students abroad to study. It will be remembered that
  Yoshida Shoin, the Choshu martyr, had himself wanted to sail with
  Perry to learn about the West. The shogunate too sent students to
  Leiden to study. Upon his return, one, Nishi Amane, was charged
  with drawing up a modern charter for the shogunal regime. Japan had
  an exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1867, as did Satsuma, which sent
  its own exhibit and tried to work out independent status as ruler of the
  Ryukyu Islands. The bakufu rescinded its ban on the construction of
  oceangoing ships as early as 1853: It permitted Japanese exhibitors to
  go to Paris and buried the last of the seclusion provisions in June 1866
  with a tariff convention that removed all restrictions on Japanese trad-
  ing at the open ports, on Japanese purchase of foreign ships and
  employment of foreigners, and on Japanese travel abroad. In legal
  31 For figures of officials, Dokushi sdran (Tokyo: Jimbutsu oraisha, 1966), pp. 648-51. Eiichi
  Kiyooka, trans., The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1948),
  and many other studies. For Fukuchi, James L. Huffman, Fukuchi Gen'ichiro (Honolulu:
  University of Hawaii Press, 1979).
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  TREATY PORTS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
  337
  and institutional terms, in other words, the bakufu was able to move
  speedily to dismantle the barriers it had established between Japan
  and the outer world.
  Politically it was another matter. The readiness of the bakufu offi-
  cials to build bridges with Kyoto at the cost of the careers of the
  officials who had negotiated and approved the early stages of the
  opening meant that foreign affairs specialists' careers showed a dizzy-
  ing, roller-coaster sequence. Obscurantism and xenophobia among the
  two-sworded men who cursed the foreign presence meant that it was
  dangerous to be known as an expert in the new specializations associ-
  ated with the West. Fukuzawa Yukichi found himself in fear of his life
  when he returned from Europe and America with the material that he
  made into his best-selling book, Seiyo jijo (Conditions in the West).
  Prominent consultants like Sakuma Shozan and Yokoi Shonan who
  had the ear of decision makers were murdered on suspicion of being
  pro-Western and even, in Yokoi's case, pro-Christian. The most
  trusted retainer could find himself ordered into suicide when the wind
  changed for his lord.
  Yet for those who had access to foreign travel or, in time, the
  products of such travel in books like Fukuzawa's, the power of Japan's
  overseas adversaries provided convincing proof of the need to open
  Japan in order to strengthen its institutions and arms. Nor was the
  evidence all baleful. Fukuzawa found much in the West to praise:
  George Washington was almost a culture hero in late Tokugawa Ja-
  pan; so, too, was Peter the Great. The West offered attraction as well
  as repulsion. Repulsion was close to hand on the Shanghai coast.
  Japanese who traveled to Shanghai on missions to buy ships and arms
  for their domains saw in the conditions at Shanghai a glaring example
  of humiliation and insult they were determined to avoid for their own
  country. Others recognized power: Inoue Kaoru, a Choshu loyalist
  and future Meiji leader, recognized in the "forest of masts" in the
  Shanghai harbor sure evidence that exclusion could never succeed,
  and Takasugi Shinsaku, his superior in that movement, was shocked
  by the incidence of Western arrogance and superiority he encountered
  in Shanghai.
  Nevertheless few Japanese made that trip, and none were more
  consistent in xenophobic instincts than the court nobles and their
  loyalist allies. Iwakura Tomomi, who had worked for the success of a
  reconciliation with the bakufu and helped arrange the shogun's mar-
  riage with Kazu no Miya, found himself out of office and forced into
  hiding to protect himself from angry shishi.
  The representatives of the Western powers were quick to credit the
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  338 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  erratic course of Japanese politics to dishonesty and deception. Ruther-
  ford Alcock, who initially favored accommodating the bakufu's re-
  quests to delay the openings of additional ports, changed from an
  advocate of accommodation to one of retribution. Japan's inability to
  protect foreigners was seen as bakufu unwillingness to do so, and
  security was sought in the presence of foreign detachments - Britain's
  came to number fifteen hundred men, and French units added several
  hundred more. These inevitably brought new problems and resent-
  ments with them. In 1864 the arrival of Harry Parkes as British minis-
  ter brought to Japan one of the most vigorous and choleric of the
  China-coast specialists in gunboat diplomacy. Parkes soon developed
  contempt for the bakufu's inability to control the daimyo and domes-
  tic violence, and before long he added doubts about the bakufu's de
  jure authority to the clear evidence of its deficiencies in de facto author-
  ity. Leon Roches, the French minister who preceded Parkes by a few
  months, on the other hand, never showed the slightest doubt about
  bakufu legitimacy and detected an opportunity for French leadership
  in providing military assistance, economic advice, and institutional
  suggestions to the Tokugawa leaders. Yet even Roches was quick to
  join his colleagues in joint demands for bakufu concessions, and he
  warned Tokugawa officials that it would be folly for them to try to
  stand against the foreigners' wishes. The foreign presence thus pro-
  voked antiforeign incidents, which in turn brought demands for addi-
  tional concessions, with the result that the imperialist presence be-
  came a one-way ratchet opening Japan. It was a process that wounded
  the bakufu more than it did the daimyo, for it was the bakufu that
  claimed, but could not exercise, full authority. Meanwhile, the evi-
  dence of foreign influence and the fears of more to come stimulated
  and fed a sense of danger and crisis among the Japanese elite. This was
  only natural. In addition to the background information about the fate
  of China, there were stories closer at hand. There was a Russian
  "occupation" of Tsushima for several months in 1861, and the possibil-
  ity of future danger in a contest between Great Britain and France for
  leadership, the one favoring the great lords and the other helping the
  bakufu.
  The. economic impact of the opening of the ports on the social
  unease and political turbulence of mid-century Japan requires particu-
  lar attention. Japan entered the world trade system at its point of
  greatest growth and at a time when the English Industrial Revolution
  was the chief locomotive of the trade expansion. The nineteenth cen-
  tury saw an exponential growth in the rate of world trade: Beginning
  with the 1820s, the growth rates for the successive decades were
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  TREATY PORTS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
  339
  roughly 33 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent, 80 percent (for the 1850s),
  and 44 percent for the 1860s, when the Civil War in the United States
  slowed trade. Exports constituted an ever-larger part of England's
  product, surpassing 60 percent in the 1850s. The unequal treaties with
  non-Western countries were important instruments of that advance.
  Persia (in 1836 and 1857), Turkey (in 1838 and 1861), Siam (in 1855),
  China (in 1842 and 1858), and Japan (in 1858), entered that system in
  quick succession. Commercial arrangements that had been worked out
  for other areas were easily and speedily applied to Japan. The Penin-
  sula and Oriental Steamship Company (founded in 1840) steamers
  added Yokohama to their calls. At Yokohama and, secondarily, at
  Nagasaki, the trading houses, agencies, and banks that had been set
  up along the China coast extended their networks and assigned their
  men to the newly opened ports of Japan.
  From the first the Japan trade exceeded the modest expectations
  that had been held of it. In i860, imports stood at 1.66 million and
  exports at 4.7 million Mexican dollars, respectively; five years later,
  exports had quadrupled, and imports were up ninefold. At a time
  when world trade was complicated by the American Civil War and the
  China trade was disturbed by the Taiping Rebellion, the unexpected
  growth of Japan drew pleased surprise from British consular and trad-
  ing representatives and doomed any hopes that bakufu optimists
  might have had of Western willingness to accept reduction or forgo the
  planned opening of additional ports.*2
  Japan's trade grew rapidly because of the integration and efficiency
  of the national market. Goods flowed naturally and easily to the new
  markets at the new ports. The same flow complicated and ultimately
  defeated bakufu efforts to control the course of trade and channel its
  profits into politically desirable hands. Indeed, foreign trade in open
  ports served to accelerate a shift from metropolitan commerce, chan-
  neled through authorized guilds, to regional centers of production.
  This shift was long in process, and it had long been a subject of
  contention and dispute.« Unfortunately for the bakufu, the metropoli-
  tan guilds were important to its control of the economy and to the
  profits of the merchant houses whose forced loans (goyokin) it called on
  to meet the rising need for cash. An effort was made to channel trade
  through Edo in i860, when "five products" (thread, cloth, wax, hair
  and lamp oil, and grains) were to be shipped through Edo. But as the
  32 Nakamura Tetsu, "Kaikokugo no boeki to sekai shijo," in Iwanami koza Nikon rekishi, vol.
  13 (kinsei 5), pp. 95-6,111.
  33 For a dispute of 1823 in which 1,007 villages resisted the jurisdiction of Osaka guilds, see
  William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai
  Cotton Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 97ff.
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  340 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  trade grew, its largest items were raw silk and tea. In 1863, at a time
  when the bakufu was ostensibly committed to closing Yokohama, the
  silk thread guild sought relief from taxes levied on its products that
  did not move through Edo, and for a time it virtually managed to close
  Yokohama by boycotting shipments. A year later the bakufu tried to
  reassert its authority by banning the planting of additional mulberry
  trees on lands under its control. Such efforts drew quick protests from
  the representatives of the foreign powers, so much so that some histori-
  ans suggest that the naval demonstration against Choshu in 1864 had
  as a secondary aim the intimidation of the bakufu's efforts to channel
  trade. The foreigners' demand coincided with that expedition and
  brought abandonment of the ruling that products move through Edo
  channels. The following year the powers succeeded in getting tax and
  tariff agreements against the imposition of internal transit taxes on
  goods bound for the ports. Foreign trade thus had the effect of weaken-
  ing the bakufu's ability to control domestic commerce and opened
  Japan to the ports as well as opening the ports to the foreigners.**
  The market for Japanese silk was made larger by the European
  silkworm blight that resulted in large exports of cards of silkworm
  eggs in 1865 and 1866. The consequence was a dramatic rise in the
  price of eggs and thread for the Nishijin weavers of Kyoto, whose raw
  material prices doubled almost overnight. The unemployment that
  resulted became an element in several urban riots. Urban handicraft
  laborers and fixed-income groups were the chief victims of price insta-
  bility in products that had long seemed stable.
  Foreign trade was, however, only one element in a wild inflation
  that sent the prices of all essentials spiraling upward in the early 1860s.
  The major element in this instability was the bakufu's need to recoin.
  A closed country had been able to maintain a 1:5 gold-to-silver ratio as
  long as neither could be exported. But the open ports brought in a
  flood of Mexican silver dollars from nearby Shanghai, where the inter-
  national rate of 1 to 15 prevailed. The disruption that followed, in
  what one author called the "great gold rush," was countered by the
  bakufu in a basic recoinage program that was punctuated by charge
  and countercharge between foreigners and Japanese officials. Gold,
  silver, and copper coinage all were devalued. At the same time the
  hard-pressed bakufu grew more liberal with its permission to the
  daimyo to mint their own coin and to print paper currency. Currencies
  of this sort were not supposed to circulate beyond domain borders, but
  the integration of Japan's commercial economy guaranteed their
  34 Ishii Takashi, Bakumatsu boeki shi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1943).
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  TREATY PORTS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
  34I
  spread. Satsuma, for instance, minted millions of copper coins and
  profited hugely from them. Counterfeit coinage added to the problem.
  At the time of the Restoration there were sixteen hundred issues of
  paper money in addition to the multiple varieties of coinage in circula-
  tion. 35 An economy that had always known a multiplicity of issues -
  the bakufu had first debased its coinage in the late seventeenth century
  and did so fairly periodically thereafter - in the short space of a decade
  now enormously increased the number, variety, and quality of its
  issues. Regular requirements of large payments to the foreign
  powers - for equipment, military needs, and indemnities - worsened
  the problem by skimming off a significant fraction of the gold and
  silver bullion available; such payments wer# assayed with the greatest
  care and exactness.
  The consequence of all this was a galloping inflation that drove up the
  price of essentials, particularly rice, For the daimyo and upper samurai
  who measured their income in koku, this posed no discomfort, but the
  vast majority of the warrior class had long since had their incomes
  commuted to money. Emergency levies in the form of stipend reduc-
  tions added to the injury. City dwellers were equally distressed. As early
  as 1862 the Edo city magistrate reported that inflation had raised com-
  moners' living costs by 50 percent. Placards denouncing merchants and
  foreigners contributed to the tension and growing level of violence.
  During one month in 1863, "some twenty people were murdered in the
  city (Edo), and uncounted others were attacked and threatened. . . .
  One worrisome aspect of the situation was the extent to which the
  keepers of the peace were becoming the breakers of the peace."s6 In
  addition to undisciplined members of ronin units, the bakufu had co-
  opted to cope with policing problems, "members of the new Bakufu
  infantry units were suffering from demoralization, and some of them
  also became engaged in brawls and abuse of city folk." Open ports also
  brought disease. A major cholera epidemic coincided with the opening
  of the ports. Nationwide, births in 1861 were 12 percent fewer than the
  year before, and in some central provinces they were as much as 80
  percent lower." If one adds the earthquakes in Edo in 1854 and 1855
  and the severe crop failures in 1866 and 1869, it becomes clear that the
  last years of Tokugawa rule were difficult for most Japanese.
  35 This astounding count of currencies reflects the fact that none was ever fully withdrawn or
  retired, so that the money chargers had a constantly changing ratio to work out. See John
  McMaster, "The Japanese Gold Rush of 1859,"Journal of Asian Studies 19 (May i960): 273-
  87; and Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 36
  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 
  36 Totman, Collapse, p. 94.
  37 Akira Hayami, "Population Movements," in M. B. Jansen and G. Rozman, eds., Japan in
  Transition: From Tokugawa toMeiji (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
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  342 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  Finally, mention must be made of the monetary payments that the
  bakufu had to make to the foreign powers. The Richardson indem-
  nity, paid for Satsuma violence, came to £100,000. The Shimonoseki
  indemnity was set at an astounding 3 million Mexican dollars. "Dur-
  ing the early days of the seventh month of 1865," Conrad Totman
  noted, "officials at Edo secretly transported to Yokohama some 30,000
  to 40,000 ryo per day for delivery to the foreigners as another $500,000
  payment on the indemnity. "38 Even this was only part of the very large
  sums that were shipped to the ports to pay for costs involved in new
  shipyards, guns, batteries and missions abroad in the next few years.
  National politics, the visits of the shogun to Edo, support to needy
  daimyo, rebuilding the Kyoto palace (destroyed by fire in 1854) and
  Edo castle (destroyed by fire in 1863), and the movement of troops to
  the Kyoto area - all, or most such expenses, could be described as
  direct or indirect consequences of the opening of the ports. As the
  inflation worsened, all impoverished the city dwellers and also those
  on fixed incomes, and all weakened the political posture of the bakufu.
  Confidence can hardly have been raised by the series of impressive
  drives for special loans from merchants that were launched between
  1862 and 1867; some specified numbers and amounts expected, and
  others established classes of contributions, for a total of 2.5 million ryo
  of gold, or three times the bakufu's regular annual income in specie.
  BAKUFU RALLY
  In 1863, loyalists at Kyoto and in the domains overplayed their hand.
  Satsuma recalcitrance against the English brought on the bombard-
  ment of Kagoshima, and Chdshu insistence on implementing exclu-
  sion without waiting for bakufu instructions resulted in the four-
  power naval demonstration at Shimonoseki and doomed the bakufu's
  efforts to stave off the opening of additional ports and to take up the
  closing of Yokohama. The Tosa loyalists' efforts to seize the initiative
  in the name of their former lord resulted in their punishment and
  elimination on grounds of insubordination after Yodo was free to turn
  his attention again to the direction of domain affairs.
  This series of miscalculations enabled the bakufu leaders in Kyoto
  to claim to be more effective implementers of the imperial orders for
  exclusion programs and to oust the loyalists from Kyoto. Their col-
  leagues at Edo took heart from these developments and tried to
  38 Totman, Collapse, p. 193.
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  BAKUFU RALLY 
  343
  reassert Tokugawa control more broadly. The latter part of 1863 and
  most of 1864 saw the bakufu leaders advocating reconciliation with
  the court, but this time to their own, and not to the great lords',
  advantage.
  The loyalist military and political setbacks came in quick succes-
  sion. In September 1863, Aizu troops staged a successful coup with
  the assistance of Satsuma to drive Choshu units out of Kyoto and
  thereby make it impossible for Choshu loyalist leaders to communicate
  with and claim the authorization of the court. In the Kyoto area two
  loyalist risings, one led by a Tosa figure and the other by a Fukuoka
  shishi, were crushed by bakufu units when they tried to rally rural
  leaders to the loyalist cause and set up a regional political base. Nearer
  to Edo, in the summer of 1864, a loyalist movement led by elements of
  the Mito samurai class that began as the product of confusion over
  bakufu purposes was exacerbated by obtuse leaders and erupted into
  full-scale civil war. When it was finally crushed five months later, the
  domain of Mito was for all practical purposes eliminated as an effective
  political force. Over one thousand men died in the fighting, and hun-
  dreds of the holdouts who had been taken prisoner were executed the
  next year. Also during the summer of 1864, Choshu loyalist units tried
  to avenge their setback by staging a military invasion of Kyoto that
  was driven back, though at immense loss of property in the fighting
  and fires that swept through the ancient capital. Leading loyalist court
  nobles fled to Choshu with the defeated loyalists, thus ridding the
  court of some of its most troublesome elements. 39 Though discomfited
  by the way that suppression efforts had revealed its military ineptness,
  the bakufu stood to gain from this new evidence of loyalist rashness
  and insubordination, and it now tried to demonstrate its own loyalty to
  the court's instructions. During the shogun's first visit to Kyoto, the
  bakufu had accepted the imperial order for exclusion, and Tokugawa
  Yoshinobu had been named supreme commander of Imperial De-
  fense. Yoshinobu now assumed a steadily larger role in Kyoto, though
  not without incurring the suspicions of Edo bureaucrats that his appar-
  ent acceptance of expulsion was wrongheaded and impractical.
  For a few months after the shogun's return to Edo in the summer of
  1863, the bakufu basked in the discomfiture of its Choshu critics.
  Unfortunately, however, Kyoto's approval still hinged on the imple-
  39 The fullest account of the Mito rebellion in English can be found in Totman, Collapse, pp.
  108-21. Choshu loyalist reverses can be followed in Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration, pp.
  208-46; Tosa in Jansen, Sakamoto, pp. 145-52; and loyalist reverses more generally in
  Beasley, Meiji Restoration, pp. 197-240.
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  344 
  T H E MEIJI RESTORATION
  mentation of promises of expulsion that were clearly impossible to
  keep. Within months the shogun was in receipt of an imperial order
  directing him to return to Kyoto to report on the progress he was
  making in closing Yokohama. Edo bureaucrats put off compliance as
  long as they could, citing the pressure of diplomatic efforts and na-
  tional politics. Their arguments had a good deal of substance, for the
  early stages of the unrest that would result in the Mito rising were
  evident, and a disastrous fire had reduced much of the shogunal castle
  complex to ashes. But by early 1864 the shogun was back in Kyoto,
  now in much higher favor, privileged with a number of audiences with
  Emperor Komei and able, through his appointment of Matsudaira
  Katamori of Aizu as guardian of the capital and the exclusion of
  Choshu, to exert exclusive authority over access to the court.
  Unfortunately these "gains" were still premised on promises of ex-
  pulsion. When the bakufu informed the daimyo that it had been de-
  cided to work toward the closing of Yokohama, it encouraged some to
  press for stronger measures at the same time that it convinced the
  foreign emissaries of its mendacity. And when bakufu bureaucrats
  tried to extend their reassertion of control over Kyoto with steps to
  move toward a return of daimyo residence at Edo, they received lame
  excuses that should have told them that their old political primacy
  could not be restored.
  The high point of the new bakufu enthusiasm for kdbu-gattai - on
  its own terms - came in 1864 after the impetuous attack of the Choshu
  loyalists had resulted in a devastated Kyoto and an indignant court
  purged of its most extremist nobles. Ironically, the bakufu's decision
  to punish Choshu, which was demanded by the court in late summer,
  was made more attractive because of the prior demands of the foreign
  powers, who wanted retribution for the shelling of their vessels. At
  first the bakufu tried to tie that punishment to the closing of Yoko-
  hama, only to have the imperialist powers respond that they would
  then undertake it themselves at bakufu expense. They did so in late
  summer, before the bakufu expedition got under way, and submitted
  as their bill the demand for the indemnity of three million Mexican
  dollars, which they offered to waive in return for immediate opening
  of an additional port. Bakufu administrators, committed by their
  promises to the court to have fewer and not more ports, saw no alterna-
  tive but to agree to pay the indemnity, although doing that also
  strained their understanding with the court.
  The court now insisted that the bakufu go ahead with its own
  punishment of Choshu, thereby adding further expenses to the heavily
  burdened regime. A ponderous allied force commanded by the Toku-
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  REGIONAL REFORM 
  345
  gawa daimyo of Owari, with Saigo Takamori of Satsuma as his chief of
  staff, got under way and seemed for a brief moment to represent the
  return of the kind of Tokugawa-led coalitions that had been formed in
  earlier centuries. Yet the conditions were very different; it was not in
  the interest of allied daimyo to deplete their own forces for bakufu
  purposes or to provide precedents for the future by crushing the
  Choshu dissidents. Consequently, a compromise, one that disap-
  pointed both court hard-liners and Edo traditionalists, was worked
  out. The expedition was declared a success, and the armies were dis-
  banded before Edo had given its full approval. Under the terms,
  Choshu was to offer a formal apology, suppress the irregular militia
  companies that had attacked Kyoto, turn over the loyalist court nobles
  who had fled to Choshu to Fukuoka for custody, and order the suicide
  of the three domain elders (karo) who had been responsible for the
  mistaken loyalist attacks. The nobles were duly transferred and the
  apology delivered, together with the heads of the three karo.
  This settlement was acceptable to the bakufu leaders in Kyoto, but
  men in Edo anxious to reassert full Tokugawa primacy did not find it
  punishment enough. They wanted the terms strengthened to include
  the bringing of the Choshu daimyo and his heir to Edo, as a symbol of
  submission and as a prelude to the return of other major daimyo to
  residence there. In short, the squelching of loyalist dissidence in the
  Kyoto and Edo areas and the encouraging evidence of ascendancy over
  Choshu had brought personnel shifts that saw the hard-liners again
  take over bakufu policy positions. Some were seasoned specialists in
  foreign affairs, wanted an end to the charade of exclusion, and thought
  the time had come for closer coordination of policy planning and
  implementation. Fudai traditionalists in Edo were fully supportive of
  this and desirous that the influence of the "outsiders" who represented
  the Tokugawa cause in Kyoto be lessened. This medley of purposes
  produced a consensus that led to the preparation of a second Choshu
  expedition, the death of young Iemochi in Osaka where he had gone to
  "lead" his armies, and the disasters of the second Choshu campaign of
  1866. By then daimyo awareness of Tokugawa purposes had also pro-
  duced a very different political climate, one that made all such plans
  depend on a convincing military victory.
  REGIONAL REFORM
  With central power diminishing, the future of Japan was to be decided
  by a contest among regional powers, and the chief contestants were the
  great domains of southwest Japan and the bakufu itself. Preparation
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  346 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  for the struggle was primarily military and secondarily administrative.
  What counted was the ability to marshal resources and to use them
  effectively within a social context of obsolescent status distinctions.
  Military reforms had been anticipated in some of the frantic prepara-
  tions for possible war that followed the coming of Commodore Perry.
  In the domain of Tosa in the 1850s, for instance, desperate efforts
  were mounted to procure and produce better weapons. Officials were
  sent to Satsuma to study efforts that had been made to build a re-
  verbatory furnace for arms production. The most important Tosa
  innovation was probably the decision to form a people's corps (mim-
  peitai) made up of commoner formations commanded by rural samurai
  (gdshi). But these efforts were abandoned after a few years' experience;
  war with the West had not eventuated; and Yoshida Toyo, the adminis-
  trator who had sponsored these efforts, was assassinated by the loyal-
  ists. The loyalists who succeeded him in control of domain fortunes
  were men of the sword and not of the gun.
  In Choshu, however, loyalist extremism accommodated Western
  arms and methods. In that domain, military reforms began in the
  1860s, and as extremism drove the han into solitary opposition to the
  bakufu and its allies, the sense of crisis served to speed up military
  reform. The innovation for which Choshu was to become best known
  was the recruitment of militia companies (shotai) with complements
  drawn from both samurai and nonsamurai; of these the Kiheitai are
  the most famous. Some of these companies were set up by government
  action, and others collected around extremist samurai who lived away
  from the castle town. All the companies were made up of samurai and
  commoners. The commoners showed a wide range of origin (hunters,
  mountain priests, townsmen, and fishermen), but the largest category
  seems to have been sons of village headmen. Thus the leaders of these
  companies were the sort of men who exercised effective, as opposed to
  formal, authority in the countryside. The companies also included
  rdnin from other areas. In the fighting that followed in 1866 and 1868,
  these units fought with tenacity and even ferocity. They must have
  known that if they failed, neither the bakufu victors nor the highly
  placed Choshu conservatives would have shown much compassion.
  More than any other domain, Choshu was becoming a small-scale
  "nation in arms" of the sort that the Meiji modernizers wanted.
  The capitulation of the Choshu government to the first expedition
  mounted by the bakufu displeased loyalists of many sorts in Choshu,
  but none more so than the military units that were to be disbanded by
  the terms of the settlement. One of these, led by Takasugi Shinsaku,
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  REGIONAL REFORM 
  347
  revolted and seized a government office in Shimonoseki before the ink
  was even dry on the agreements, thereby producing an offer from the
  bakufu negotiators to provide a body of troops to help the domain
  regulars suppress them. The Choshu administration, confident in its
  own ability to subdue the militia, declined, but its confidence proved
  misplaced. Within a short time, additional shotai victories had pro-
  duced an advance on the castle town itself and a strong sentiment of
  criticism against the domain administration that had let the civil war
  come about. This situation was resolved by the emergence of a new
  domain administration in the early spring of 1865 that represented a
  coalition of extremist and moderate samurai. This group led the do-
  main on its collision course with the bakufu and into the early Restora-
  tion government.
  The Choshu violence had elements of class or at least of status
  conflict, and yet it was not a contest between upper and lower in any
  simple sense. The new administration produced a commitment to the
  loyalist cause, yet it was also staunchly Choshu centered in values and
  objectives. It was nominally antiforeign and exclusionist in its goals,
  and yet places of influence were beginning to be found for individuals
  who knew the West. ltd Hirobumi, one of the future leaders of the
  Meiji state, symbolized the course of a leadership generation in the
  shifts of his career: a student of Yoshida Shoin, then a student in
  England, an interpreter and translator in the concluding stages of the
  foreign bombardment of Shimonoseki, next a commander of a militia
  company, and finally a proteg6 and trusted lieutenant of Kido Taka-
  yoshi, probably the single most important figure in the new Choshu
  administration. Ito was of modest rank and origin. Responsibility and
  opportunity sobered judgment, and information about the outer world
  gradually moderated the extremism of the young warriors. Yet what
  seemed to their elders reckless "extremism" had brought them to
  power within Choshu, and their pursuit of the bakufu was not likely to
  be more conciliatory.
  Satsuma, unlike Choshu, experienced no internal violence or politi-
  cal upset. Its samurai numbers were large and needed no supplement
  of commoners; distinctions of rank and income within its samurai
  ranks were so large that rifle-bearing companies could be mounted
  with little of the status compunctions that hampered the bakufu levies.
  Most importantly, however, the Satsuma regent Shimazu Hisamitsu
  was able to maintain political control and enlisted the talents of Saigo
  Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi, men who had been tempered by
  danger and punishment in 1858. They helped suppress Satsuma ex-
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  348 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  tremists at the beginning of the kobu-gattai movement in 1862, and by
  1865-6 they recognized and acted on the need for the domain to know
  more about the West. Fourteen students were selected and sent to
  London under the guidance of domain officials. Once in Europe the
  students were set to studying a variety of technological and military
  specialties. Before long they were joined by a second group. Satsuma
  officials in Europe tried to secure for their domain status as an indepen-
  dent country for the Paris Exposition of 1867, citing as reason the
  domain's control of Okinawa. They negotiated a number of agree-
  ments for industrial and mining operations, and although little came
  of most of these, the purchase of five thousand rifles added important
  strength to the Satsuma military. Thus, whereas Choshu, under great
  military pressure from without, underwent a political upset that
  placed power in the hands of "extremists" who had use for the advice
  of the Western-experienced Ito and Inoue Kaoru, Satsuma, without
  the goad that military crisis provided for administrative change in
  Choshu, was, thanks to the English bombardment of Kagoshima, no
  less alert to the need for Western equipment. Expulsion, one may
  conclude, was now a dead letter (though it remained a useful slogan)
  after the shellings of Kagoshima and Choshu. The overthrow of the
  bakufu, which was not a practical proposition before the reforms of
  1862, had become a goal of many men by 1865.
  The changes of the early 1860s had made the bakufu itself a regional
  power. No set of reforms was more impressive and more extensive than
  the changes that the Tokugawa leaders initiated in their Kinai and
  Kanto territories. The Osaka and Edo plains were under full foreign
  and Japanese observation and hence subject to all the interference that
  national and international politics could provide. These territories were
  also divided between those under direct bakufu administration and the
  lands of minor daimyo and hatamoto who administered their holdings
  independently. Cumulatively the largest holdings of any daimyo in the
  Tokugawa structure, the Tokugawa tenryo was also the most affected by
  urban and national commerce and communications, the most "mod-
  ern" in economic developments, and the most lightly invested by resi-
  dent samurai. In Tokugawa lands, samurai as a percentage of domain
  population were relatively few and highly urbanized. The bakufu thus
  faced particular problems in its military modernization.
  The bakufu's Bunkyu reforms of 1862 included administrative and
  military changes as well as the relaxation of daimyo controls that have
  already been discussed. On the whole, the administrative changes
  were more successful than the political changes. New procedures were
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  REGIONAL REFORM 
  349
  developed for the rapid promotion of able men. Unessential jobs were
  eliminated; so many, in fact, that the unemployment that resulted
  required special programs of aid and relief for the newly unfortunate.
  Military reforms found the bakufu (and its rivals) struggling to
  acquire the most lethal weapons at a time when firearms were undergo-
  ing rapid change in the Western world. A second problem was to
  transform the corps of house retainers {hatamoto and gokenin) into rifle
  companies. This last was easier to do in theory than in practice, for the
  urbanized samurai, who were essentially an army of occupation that
  had spent many generations in peace and quiet, often resisted drill.4°
  Extensive plans were worked out for a modern army and navy
  within the confines of the troop strength that retainers were expected
  to be able to provide. Efforts were made to correlate income to the
  rank structure of the modern forces, and planners set the goal of
  drawing one-half of those forces from the bakufu's house retainers.
  Thus it was assumed from the outset that it would be necessary to
  augment samurai with commoner strength.
  Naval training got its start when a small Dutch training contingent
  came to Nagasaki in the 1850s; in the early 1860s Katsu Kaishu was
  assigned the responsibility of organizing a naval training school at
  Hyogo. Katsu's tendency to recruit his men from many areas alarmed
  bakufu conservatives, who saw the institution becoming a nest of
  loyalists, and so Katsu was replaced in 1864. The point is significant:
  Bakufu reformers tended to draw on men of many areas, but the great
  southwestern han could be exclusive and probably had more esprit de
  corps. Sustained efforts were devoted to the land arm of the new
  military structure. By 1864 some ten thousand weapons had been
  imported through Yokohama, and from then to the end of the bakufu,
  gunrunning to Yokohama and to Nagasaki (for the southwestern do-
  mains) proved one of the most lucrative aspects of trade at the ports.
  As the second expedition against Choshu drew near in 1865, bakufu
  leaders were beginning to realize that their reliance on their retainers
  (and especially the landholding hatamoto) would have to change. First
  they tried to get them to provide conscripts as part of their feudal
  military service requirement, but before long it became clear that a
  better system of recruiting commoners was needed. As the forces took
  shape, the composition of the principal rifle-bearing units gradually
  40 For Satsuma, Beasley, Meiji Restoration, p. 246; for bakufu military reforms, Totman, Col-
  lapse, pp. 25-7: (for Bunkyu), p. 182 (for 1864), and p. 199 (for 1865). Totman's discussion
  of technological changes involved in muzzle loaders, Minie rifles, breech-loading rifles, and
  multishot pistols, p. 25, is particularly useful.
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  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  became commoner based. By degrees, hatamoto military service re-
  quirements were becoming commuted to a money tax that was used to
  cover the costs of conscripting and training peasants. All of this af-
  fected only part of the Tokugawa vassal armies, but it was that part
  that indicated future trends.*1
  The Tokugawa military reforms required extensive foreign coopera-
  tion, but as the nominal government of the entire country, the bakufu
  had the best access to foreign assistance. Its first moves were by way of
  the traditional link with Holland, and in the fall of 1864 three navy
  officers were sent to the Netherlands to study shipyards and other
  Western military developments. Negotiations for a shipyard were be-
  gun with the Dutch and also for a warship; talks also began for the
  building of a warship (the future Stonewall) in the United States.
  But the most important channel of foreign assistance was that with
  France. Minister Leon Roches, who arrived in Japan in April 1864,
  worked unceasingly to consolidate for his country the role of principal
  source for military - and, he hoped, political - reform in Japan.
  Those plans developed gradually; they represented Roches' enthusi-
  asm and not that of his government. Foreign aid never assumed the
  dimensions that the bakufu's domestic rivals feared it would, because
  neither Tokugawa nor French leaders were prepared to take risks. Yet
  the plans were extensive and stand as reminders of the possible impact
  that imperialist competition could have had on a developing Japan.1**
  Roches began with specific goals: The French silk industry was in
  dire need of help from Japan because of a silkworm blight, and that
  made him the bakufu's most importunate customer. But he was free
  with additional suggestions. Before long he had secured the appoint-
  ment of Kurimoto Joun as special liaison officer between himself and
  the roju, and by the end of 1864, bakufu officials had requested his
  help in planning for the construction of a naval yard and arsenal at
  Yokosuka. Gradually confidence in Roches' intentions developed. In
  1865 a mission was sent to Europe to seek military assistance as well as
  machinery and equipment for Yokosuka. Arrangements for a mint
  and a military training mission took shape, and bakufu officials began
  to develop hopes of a special source of access to the technology and
  training they knew they needed.
  41 Totman, Collapse, p. 182. For purposes of brevity, this discussion telescopes changes that
  came at different speeds in different periods and areas.
  42 Mark David Ericson, "The Tokugawa Bakufu and Leon Roches," Ph.D. diss., University of
  Hawaii, 1978, p. 243, improves on the earlier work of Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan
  During the Closing Yean of the Tokugawa Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
  Press, 1971)-
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  REGIONAL REFORM 
  351
  These experiments gathered momentum with proposals for an offi-
  cially sponsored trading company that would generate funds for
  bakufu purchases abroad. The banker Fleury-Herard was invested as
  the bakufu representative in Paris and put in charge of purchasing
  equipment for a foundry and mint. French advice (though not, it
  should be noted, French money), began to pour into Tokugawa circles
  about ways to restructure Japan's economy and administration in or-
  der to speed modernization and build up power. Long before much
  could come of this, however, the Tokugawa forces were gathering in
  Osaka to carry out the second punitive expedition against Choshu.
  When hostilities broke out in the summer of 1866, it was still a largely
  traditional congeries of bakufu vassal forces that tried to contest the
  issue with the more highly motivated Choshu units.
  The second war with Choshu proved a disaster. Although elements
  of the bakufu's new units were employed, they were fielded together
  with old-style units from other han. The bakufu army was a coalition
  of vassals' armies, as had always been the case, enabling the Choshu
  warriors to select their target and attack the Tokugawa forces where
  they were weakest. Bakufu efforts to attack Choshu at each of its
  borders were poorly coordinated, and the forces were poorly led.
  While all this was in progress, the young shogun Iemochi died at
  Osaka.
  When the full scale of the military disasters became clear, Toku-
  gawa Yoshinobu, now the ranking figure on the bakufu side, reluc-
  tantly decided that the battle would have to be broken off and seized
  upon the shogun's death as a face-saving reason for a cease-fire. Yet
  the cease-fire left Choshu troops occupying areas of bakufu and fudai
  land, and it dealt the shogunate a blow in prestige from which it never
  fully recovered.
  The defeat of the bakufu armies by Choshu gave the Tokugawa
  modernization movement new urgency. The last year of the Tokugawa
  shogunate saw sweeping changes that portended centralization, rational-
  ization, and bureaucratization. Once Yoshinobu was fully invested as
  shogun, with full honors and titles, the reconstruction of the bakufu
  began in earnest. Foreign relations were regularized. Permanent mis-
  sions were set up in capitals. Yoshinobu's younger brother Akitake was
  sent to France as the bakufu representative at the Paris Exposition of
  1867, and plans called for him to spend years of study there to prepare
  him for future leadership. Appointive changes brought to office some of
  the most effective of the modernizing officials of the recent half-decade.
  The entire foreign diplomatic corps was invited to Osaka for an audi-
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  352 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  ence with the new shogun, who entertained them at a dinner prepared
  by a newly employed French chef. Western dress replaced Japanese at
  the shogunal court for that occasion.
  Numerous requests for advice were addressed to Roches, and he
  answered during long sessions with senior officials and a private audi-
  ence with the shogun Yoshinobu himself. The list of questions cov-
  ered administrative changes, taxes, military development, mineral re-
  source development, economic growth, queries about Switzerland and
  Prussia, and questions about the abolition of feudalism by European
  countries.-" Administrative reforms followed; these set up a sort of
  cabinet system with specialized responsibilities replacing the monthly
  rotation of all-purpose generalists that had been the pattern. New
  personnel practices were designed to facilitate the selection of compe-
  tent officials, with a regularized salary system for government depart-
  ments. A great deal of time went into the preparation of diagrams
  laying out specific administrative responsibilities and procedures, and
  initial steps working toward the commutation of vassal lands and sti-
  pends developed. Shogunal power in the Edo area was strengthened
  by measures to call in small nearby fiefs in order to rationalize and
  centralize administrative procedures. Military reforms were pushed
  particularly rapidly. A French military mission arrived in January
  1867. Western uniforms were adopted; obsolete forces were dis-
  banded; and steps were taken toward the substitution of a monetized
  tax on house vassals as the basis for a peasant conscription system.
  Nishi Amane, newly returned from study in Holland, was ordered to
  draw up a more modern scheme of government and produced a parlia-
  mentary draft that envisioned a division of power among the court, an
  executive branch, and a bicameral legislature with an upper house of
  daimyo empowered to dissolve the lower house.
  As a result, it can be asserted that the bakufu leaders were launching
  a modernization program - perhaps a "Tokugawa restoration" - that
  would in time have emulated at many points the programs adopted by
  their successors in the Meiji government. Seen in this light, it can be
  said that the civil war of 1868 was fought over the issue not of whether
  Tokugawa feudalism would survive but whether its demise would be
  presided over by Tokugawa or anti-Tokugawa leaders. It was no
  longer a matter of saving the bakufu system but of replacing it, now
  that it was collapsing. As Totman said of the period immediately
  before the summer war, "there was no longer in Japan an authority
  43 Ericson, "The Tokugawa Bakufu and Leon Roches," pp. 238ff.
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  RESTORATION 
  353
  symbol capable of moving the feudal lords. There was no national
  polity; the bakuhan system no longer existed."44 Ironically, however,
  these needs were probably seen more clearly by the bakufu leaders
  than by the southwestern lords who opposed them.
  RESTORATION
  The changes launched in Edo are difficult to evaluate, for they did not
  mature in time to help the bakufu; it is always easier to sketch reforms
  than to carry them out. Nevertheless, the fear that they would result in
  a greatly strengthened shogunate was an important factor in impelling
  leaders in Satsuma and Choshu to try to anticipate such success with
  efforts of their own to overthrow it. What they particularly feared was
  that the administration of Yoshinobu would use French military and
  administrative assistance to build a central government capable of
  destroying the daimyo, with the shogun serving as its chief executive
  officer.
  In 1867, the death of Emperor Komei of smallpox brought changes
  at the court as well. Though consistently antiforeign, Komei had usu-
  ally been well disposed toward the bakufu as represented by Toku-
  gawa Yoshinobu, with whom he had established relations of consider-
  able trust. With the succession of the boy Mutsuhito, the future Meiji
  emperor, court nobles had a new field for political maneuver. The
  most able and important of those courtiers was now Iwakura Tomomi,
  a shrewd judge of events and possibilities. By the fall of 1866 Iwakura
  was writing that the court had the choice of siding with the bakufu
  against Choshu and, possibly, Satsuma, or maneuvering to make itself
  the center of a new united polity. Because bakufu prestige and power
  were in decline, he suggested that "the Emperor should issue orders to
  the Bakufu that from now on it must set aside its selfish ways, acting
  in accordance with public principle; that imperial rule must be re-
  stored; and that thereafter the Tokugawa house must work in concert
  with the great domains in the Emperor's service." To restore national
  prestige and handle the foreigners, the country would have to be
  united, and "for policy and administration to have a single source, the
  Court must be made the center of national government." In additional
  documents Iwakura sounded more and more like the Satsuma leaders
  with whom he communicated, as when he wrote: "In the heavens
  there are not two suns. On earth there are not two monarchs. Surely
  44 Totman, Collapse, p. 291.
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  no country can survive unless government edicts stem from a single
  source. . . . Hence it is my desire that we should act vigorously to
  abolish the Bakufu" and relegate the Tokugawa house to the ranks of
  the great domains.« Some of this language was echoed in future pro-
  posals, as in a Satsuma-Tosa document worked out in the summer of
  1867:
  There cannot be two rulers in a land, or two heads in a house, and it is most
  reasonable to return administration and justice to one ruler. . . . It is evident
  that we must reform our regulations, return political power to the court, form
  a council of feudal lords and conduct affairs in line with the desires of the
  people . • . only then can we face all nations without shame and establish our
  national polity.-*6
  These notes of national danger, international prestige, and the need
  for an effective, single center of government recur in many pronounce-
  ments of late Tokugawa days. In fact Japan now had not only two
  governments but even two bakufus, given the presence of Yoshinobu
  in Osaka/Kyoto and the more Tokugawa-centered world of the bureau-
  crats at Edo.
  Although such divisions of power seemed impossible to men like
  Iwakura and many others, they also made it troublesome for foreign
  representatives who wanted firm guarantees of their privileges and a
  clear understanding as to the channels of power. Roches accepted the
  bakufu as a legitimate national government and devoted his efforts to
  help it become a more effective one. His British counterpart Harry
  Parkes was not sure and suspected that Japan would not have a real
  government until basic changes in Edo-Kyoto relations took place.
  Though junior to Roches in time of residence, Parkes proved a ruth-
  less competitor, on one occasion forcing his way into a private meeting
  between Roches and Yoshinobu to insist on equal treatment as Her
  Majesty's representative. When the bakufu requested postponement
  of the second installment of the enormous indemnity exacted for Shi-
  monoseki because of the costs that had been incurred in the prepara-
  tion of the second campaign against Choshu, Parkes demanded an
  accounting of those costs. When the bakufu argued court opposition
  as grounds for delay on Hyogo, Parkes demanded - and secured -
  explicit court approval of the treaties by staging a demarche at Osaka
  in November 1865. When he saw the bakufu's difficulties with its
  recalcitrant daimyo, Parkes concluded that England, in a spirit of
  neutrality, should cultivate those daimyo as possible future power
  45 Beasley, Meiji Restoration, pp. 261, 266-7. 
  46 Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma, p. 300.
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  RESTORATION 
  355
  holders, and he alarmed bakufu officials by visiting several castle
  towns in the southwestern domains, including Kagoshima. Parkes's
  interpreter Ernest Satow, probably the best informed foreigner in late
  Tokugawa Japan, maintained close friendships with the leaders of the
  southwestern hart and wrote a pamphlet (which was immediately trans-
  lated into Japanese) arguing that English policy should work toward
  the creation of a council of great lords, of whom the Tokugawa head
  would be one, under the emperor, in order to secure binding guaran-
  tees of foreign privileges and rights. This private opinion was widely
  taken to represent English policy and seemed to be in the process of
  implementation by the actions of Harry Parkes. Thus foreign as well
  as court and daimyo opinion was working to exacerbate unstable na-
  tional politics.
  As the great domains shook off their subordination to bakufu leader-
  ship, they began to negotiate private agreements among themselves.
  These were no longer the personal discussions of daimyo, as in the early
  years, but policy decisions reached by the bureaucratic leaders who
  staffed han administrations. The most important of these was an agree-
  ment between Satsuma and Choshu that was worked out early in 1866 to
  lessen the possible dangers for Choshu in the approaching second
  bakufu punitive campaign. The agreement was made possible by the
  efforts of Sakamoto Ryoma and Nakaoka Shintaro of Tosa who pro-
  vided their good offices. In February 1866, Kido Takayoshi, for
  Choshu, and Saigo Takamori, for Satsuma, agreed that Satsuma would
  provide its help in mediating for Choshu at court; it would do its best to
  prevent the bakufu from crushing Choshu; it would secure Kyoto if
  necessary; and it would join with Choshu, once that domain had been
  pardoned, in working for "the glory of the Imperial country."
  After the defeat of the bakufu armies at the hands of Choshu, the
  Satsuma-Tosa agreement that has been mentioned added another
  agreement. The two domains agreed on a program for politics: The
  court should have full authority, and a council with two houses would
  be established in Kyoto, one chamber staffed with daimyo and the
  other made up of "retainers and even commoners." The shogunate as
  such would be abolished. New treaties would be drawn up with the
  foreign powers "on the basis of reason and justice"; institutions would
  be revised and brought up-to-date; and self-interest was everywhere to
  take second place to the consciousness of the larger national good.
  This optimistic view of an unselfish future, clearly a legacy of the
  kobu-gattai persuasion, represented a Tosa plan to secure a peaceful
  solution to Japan's political crises. Choshu, flushed with its victories in
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  356 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  the summer war, was still technically under the ban of both court and
  bakufu and determined to exploit its military advantage in further vio-
  lence. Simultaneously, the treaty powers were demanding action on the
  opening of Hyogo, which was scheduled for the summer of 1867. Once
  again the great lords assembled to discuss the crisis. Matsudaira
  Shungaku, Shimazu Hisamitsu, Yamauchi Yodo, and Date Munenari
  proposed to Yoshinobu that the bakufu combine a solution to the two
  and proposed to the court a pardon of Choshu together with court
  approval for the opening of Hyogo. Yoshinobu, however, was inclined
  to hold out for the impossible condition of an apology from Choshu, but
  because Hyogo could not wait, he preceeded to wrest approval from the
  court for that opening on grounds of pressing national danger.
  This stance confirmed Satsuma's discouragement with even a re-
  formed bakufu and helped produce a new Satsuma-Choshu agreement
  for a military coup against the shogunate in the summer of 1867. The
  Tosa leaders, holding a median position, still tried to head this off with a
  peaceful solution. Tosa's size made it fearful of losing out in a military
  showdown. Its relationship to the bakufu, which had treated the
  Yamauchi house favorably, was also one of obligation and loyalty. All
  this reinforced hopes of a negotiated settlement by which the shogun
  would agree to step down and become one of the great lords in a new
  conciliar structure under the aegis of the throne. Similar hopes had been
  at the heart of the kobu-gattai movement since 1862. Matsudaira
  Shungaku reappeared on the scene once again. Sakamoto Ryoma, once
  a Tosa loyalist and then an associate of the bakufu official Katsu
  Kaishu, subsequently sheltered by Satsuma and central to the Sa-
  tsuma-Choshu agreement of 1866, now worked out an eight-point pro-
  gram that contained Tosa hopes for a negotiated settlement. The
  Satsuma leaders who willingly subscribed to this program in endorsing
  the Satsuma-Tosa compact in the summer of 1867 were quite willing to
  help propose the bakufu's voluntary dissolution and were prepared to
  use force if a peaceful settlement should fail.
  These currents converged in November 1867. While Edo moderniz-
  ers were pushing reforms to produce a more effective bakufu and
  Choshu and Satsuma leaders were readying their troops for a military
  showdown, Tosa representatives in Kyoto presented Yoshinobu with
  Yamauchi Yodo's proposal that he resign his office and titles. The
  proposal contained eight parts: The court would rule, but a two-house
  council, made up of daimyo and court nobles, would be established;
  new treaties would be worked out; an imperial army and navy would
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  RESTORATION 
  357
  be established;1" "errors of the past" in procedure and institutions
  would be abolished; "wrong customs" in the court would be reformed;
  and once again, self-interest would be put aside.
  Yoshinobu accepted the proposal. He did so without consulting the
  Edo government leaders and after almost no consultation in Kyoto.
  Clearly he saw it as a way of escaping his predicament of responsibility
  without power and retaining the power base that his reforms were
  building at Edo. Once the court accepted his resignation as shogun,
  the Tokugawa polity of 267 years formally came to an end.
  But there was still nothing to replace it. The council of daimyo did
  not materialize, for uncertainty was so widespread that only sixteen
  daimyo arrived in Kyoto in response to a court request for attendance.
  Kobu-gattai proved no more viable in 1867 than it had been in 1862.
  Soon large contingents of samurai were being sent to Kyoto; parts of
  the Choshu domain army, still unpardoned, were nearing the city.
  The Satsuma-Choshu plans for a military coup were still intact, and
  tension grew steadily. On January 2 and 3, 1868, an assembly at the
  court was convened, dominated by Iwakura and Satsuma men. Yoshi-
  nobu and his closest supporters, suspicious of what was planned,
  declined to attend. The meeting resolved to transfer the palace guard
  from bakufu to non-Tokugawa hands, to abolish old offices, and to
  demand the surrender of Tokugawa domains to the "court." Yoshi-
  nobu, in doubt as to his next step, withdrew to Osaka.
  For over three weeks, things were at a standstill. Court representa-
  tives ordered Yoshinobu to appear in formal contrition and surrender,
  only to have him propose that all daimyo dedicate a comparable frac-
  tion of their income and land to the court. Roches offered Yoshinobu
  such French aid as he could muster, an offer that was not accepted,
  but neither was the advice of bakufu leaders who wanted to fight. A
  powerful document from Yoshinobu to the court calling attention to
  Satsuma's duplicity and his own exemplary behavior was kept from
  the young emperor. The former shogun's indecision began to cost him
  the support of even Tokugawa houses. Finally, in late January 1868,
  Yoshinobu decided to return to Kyoto with a body of troops to remon-
  strate. His commanders did not expect to have to fight their way back;
  their formations and composition represented an unlikely mixture of
  modern and premodern companies. To their misfortune they were
  47 The proposal read: "We must have a force which will have no equal in the world."
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  358 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  opposed and ambushed by modern Satsuma and Choshu units that
  stopped them and drove them back. The civil war had begun; force
  would decide the issue.
  Fighting at Fushimi-Toba went on for four days and produced a
  casualty count of five hundred dead and one thousand to fifteen hun-
  dred wounded. On both sides, units fought well, but the leadership
  and determination of forces committed to the Kyoto cause was supe-
  rior to that on the bakufu side. The bakufu commanders seem to have
  let a fear of popular disorder keep them from using all their Western-
  trained and armed troops at the front, whereas their adversaries had
  their best units at the right places. The bakufu units, trying to advance
  along two narrow roads, one on either side of the Yodo River, had the
  harder task to carry out. In some units, morale was a problem, but
  others, notably those of Aizu, fought with dash and courage.
  When the dimensions of this new disaster were apparent, Tokugawa
  Yoshinobu and his bakufu army headed north for Edo. Within two
  weeks the former shogun had decided against further resistance to his
  enemies, despite Roches' encouragement and advice that he try again.
  The bakufu army was dismantled as the daimyo took their units to
  their own domains, some to join and others to apologize and submit to
  the "imperial" armies that advanced from the south. In the spring of
  1868 Edo itself was surrendered by the bakufu official Katsu Kaishu
  to an imperial army commanded by Saigo Takamori.
  But the war was not over, for the fighting known as the Boshin
  conflict went on until May 1869, when the Tokugawa naval units that
  had sailed to Hokkaido and held out there under the command of
  Enomoto Takeaki surrendered. The war in the northeast had been
  carried on by a daimyo alliance headed by the Sendai domain. Its
  cause was really not that of the Tokugawa, which was clearly doomed,
  but, rather, that of its region against the distrusted southerners from
  Satsuma and Choshu. This "Northeastern League," in fact, claimed
  that its members were more loyal to the emperor than were the "selfish
  and self-serving" southerners. The most fierce battle of the campaign
  came at Aizu castle in Wakamatsu, where the men of Matsudaira
  Katamori, former shugo of Kyoto and long a thorn in the side of
  Satsuma and Choshu, fought desperately. The castle was put to the
  torch, and Aizu lost almost three thousand samurai in the war, more
  than the combined total of the opposition. After its defeat, the domain
  was broken up, and its ruling family was moved to a niggardly and
  inhospitable plot of ground unable to support the remnants of its
  former retainer force. Katamori himself was made a Shinto priest,
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  RESTORATION 
  359
  guardian of the Tokugawa burial shrines. No other domain was
  treated as harshly, though a number of recalcitrant daimyo were
  forced into retirement and others into house arrest. Tokugawa Yoshi-
  nobu himself was ordered to retire as house head and withdrew to
  Numazu in Shizuoka where he did his best to maintain his retainers.
  By the 1890s he had been received by the emperor and restored to
  honor. His successor, Iesato, was first head of the House of Peers.
  The regime that replaced the bakufu, as Chapter 10 makes clear,
  underwent many changes before becoming the Meiji government .** Its
  first institutional probings came in the January meetings that maneu-
  vered Yoshinobu into opposition. The same meeting that declared
  bakufu offices abolished established a new three-tier structure of swat,
  gijo (councilors), and san'yo (junior councilors) and named Prince
  Arisugawa sosai in order to make the greatest possible use of imperial
  legitimacy. Gradually, however, status and office filtered downward to
  the samurai leaders of the southwestern han whose lords dominated
  the original table of organization, and as that process matured, the
  Meiji government took form.
  In a basic sense, the program of the new government was enunci-
  ated as early as the spring of 1868, at a time when the regime was still
  seeking to reassure the doubtful and to enlist the wavering. In April,
  one day after Katsu and Saigo negotiated the surrender of Edo, the
  young emperor was presented with what became known as the "Char-
  ter Oath," five articles that bridged the transition from the Tosa pro-
  posals of 1867 to the constitutional order of the modern Japanese state.
  These articles promised the creation of "deliberative councils" and the
  determination of policies on the basis of "general opinion," the co-
  operation of all classes in carrying out the administration of affairs of
  state, full opportunity for commoners as well as for officials, and the
  abolition of "evil customs of the past." They also proposed basing
  everything on the "just laws of nature." Finally, a search for knowl-
  edge "throughout the world" would follow in order to "strengthen the
  foundation of imperial rule." This was a document couched in terms
  sufficiently general to conform to the social structure of its day, but it
  also held out the possibility of changes so basic that it could still be
  cited as authorization for the democratic institutional changes that
  followed World War II.
  48 See Albert Craig, "The Central Government," Marius B. Jansen, "The Ruling Class," and
  Michio Umegaki, "From Domain to Prefecture," chaps. 2, 3, and 4 in Jansen and Rozman,
  eds., Japan in Transition.
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  THE RESTORATION IN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
  If the definition of the Meiji Restoration is limited to the events of
  1867 and 1868, it constituted little more than a coup that shifted rule
  from one sector of the ruling class to another. But when it is consid-
  ered as a larger process, one that began before mid-century and that
  culminated in the modern state at the century's end, it can be seen to
  have brought revolutionary changes in Japanese society. Studies of
  these events during the century that followed them have inevitably
  been intertwined with the climate of opinion within which they were
  carried on. The nature of the nineteenth-century historical process,
  and the motive forces involved, have provided basic problems of classi-
  fication and analysis.
  The orthodox view of Japanese history before 1945, and one that is
  by no means dead, was based on interpretations that emphasized the
  maturization of currents of imperial loyalism through the Tokugawa
  period. With the coming of Perry and the foreign danger, the text-
  books explained, selfless patriots - the shishi - fought to reverse their
  han policies and to defeat the bakufu by wakening long-slumbering
  imperial and national consciousness. Saigo, Okubo, Iwakura, Kido,
  and all the heirs of Yoshida Shoin were portrayed as though foretold
  by anguished loyalists of earlier times. Laudatory biographies told
  their stories as they themselves would have wished to be remembered.
  Official historiographical institutes provided proportional representa-
  tion for the southwestern han to make certain that the praise would be
  allocated equitably. These views were spread by a modern education
  system that was centered on patriotism and loyalty, reinforced by the
  popular press, and fortified by scholarly compilations. So brief a sum-
  mary risks distortion. There was enough of substance in the commit-
  ment of Restoration figures, enough romance and color in what they
  did, and enough national pride in what they produced to retain for the
  loyalist leaders a secure place in any historiography. But the identifica-
  tion of their success with morality and patriotism also introduced a
  strong bias in much that was written in a highly nationalistic setting.
  Yet the nationalist emphasis of prewar history had developed in a
  context of much more critical writing. By the 1880s, historians had
  begun to fit Japan's experience into international models of liberal and
  capitalist societies, and some were becoming troubled by the dispari-
  ties they sensed between the "deliberative councils" that had been
  promised and the reality of the Imperial Diet they saw approaching.
  Japan seemed to be eclipsing the timetable of other countries in mod-
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  RESTORATION IN HISTORY 
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  ernization, but the reforms granted "from above" were somehow dif-
  ferent from the reforms won from below. By late Meiji times the
  conservative and pragmatic government leaders in power also seemed
  quite unlike the hotheaded, two-sworded idealists of romantic mem-
  ory. To some, they were becoming Japan's new problem, and judg-
  ments of the bakufu softened as a result. By the early twentieth cen-
  tury a new generation of writers had begun to separate the leaders
  from what they had brought about, to minimize the conflicts, and to
  explain the Restoration and modernization programs by showing the
  material advances that had taken place in Japanese society under Toku-
  gawa rule. Tokutomi Soho argued that it was not the Meiji leaders but
  inexorable trends that had created the new Japan. He and others
  stressed the fragility of feudal society, and the growing independence
  of stouthearted rural leaders, as the critical factors in the overthrow of
  Tokugawa feudalism. In turn, such interpretations were usually re-
  lated to political advocacy and the desire to find legitimacy for liberal-
  ism and to advance social reform in Japan.*? By the 1890s, however,
  the flush of victory over China, soon to be followed by the conquest of
  Russia, the maturation of the ideology of the imperial state, and the
  completion of the network of national schools all combined to re-
  inforce the official orthodoxy with its sanctification of the modern
  state. Tokugawa Yoshinobu himself, in his memoirs (1915) and in an
  authorized biography (1918), became a loyalist.
  After World War I, Marxist analysis provided a new and powerful
  teleological expectation of what the Restoration should or could have
  produced. Economic instability culminating in the world depression,
  increased political and intellectual surveillance consequent to the for-
  mation of the Japan Communist Party in the form of the Peace Preser-
  vation Act of 1925, and the aggressive course of Japanese foreign
  policy all combined to encourage new evaluations of Japan's recent
  past. Marxist historians divided into the Labor-Farmer (rono) group,
  which was prepared to describe the Restoration as a basically bour-
  geois movement that had ended feudalism in Japan, and the gloomier
  Lectures {kozd) group which held that feudal relationships had lived
  on in the countryside through noneconomic and non-contractual
  49 See Jiro Numata, "Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modern Tokyo Tradition of Historical Writ-
  ing," in W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleybank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London:
  Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 264-87, for the evolution of Meiji historiography within
  inherited, Chinese tradition; and Peter Duus, "Whig History, Japanese Style: The
  Min'yusha Historians and the Meiji Restoration," Journal of Asian Studies 33 (May 1974):
  415-36.
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  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  restraints on tenants as the basis of a new "absolutism" built around
  the "emperor system," a term that was utilized in the Japan Commu-
  nist Party theses of 1932. Like their Meiji predecessors, these histori-
  ans were directing and relating their views to problems of political
  advocacy.'0
  Japan's surrender in 1945 freed the air of "emperor system" ortho-
  doxy (although it replaced it with equally compulsive derogation for a
  time) and produced immensely important work that retained some of
  the Marxist categories without repeating the simplistic formulas of
  much of the earlier writing. Nevertheless, the presentist orientation of
  historical evaluation continued, and many writers' concerns were to
  identify and eliminate feudal remnants and advance democracy.*'
  When the focus of research is brought closer to the decade in which
  the bakufu was toppled, problems still outnumber answers. The prin-
  cipal actors among the leaders have been clearly delineated, but the
  source of their backing remains a matter of dispute. Shibahara Takuji,
  after summarizing movements of popular discontent and disorder in
  Restoration times, did not hesitate to term agrarianists the "moving
  force" of the Restoration and saw popular antifeudal sentiments as the
  key historical ingredient in the events of the decade. On the other
  hand, Conrad Totman's analysis of the bakufu's fall, though recogniz-
  ing commoners' antifeudal attitudes, concludes:
  This anti-feudal mentality did not become an anti-Bakufu mentality, how-
  ever, and the reason seems to be that the political contest of the 1860s was
  pitting some parts of the ruling or feudal elite against others. . . . In conse-
  50 The immediate prewar years saw publication of authoritative summaries of the positions
  mentioned here: Tokutomi Iichiro, Kinsei Nihon kokuminshi for Duus's "Whig History"; the
  monument of government historiography, Ishin shi, 6 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1941); and
  the definitive statement of the koza position that gave the school its name, Nihon shihonshugi
  haltatsu shi koza, 7 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1932-3). For a recent and cogent analysis
  of the Marxist struggle, see Yasukichi Yasuba, "Anatomy of the Debate on Japanese Capital-
  ism," Journal of Japanese Studies 2 (Autumn 1975): 63-82. See also Germain A. Hoston,
  Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1986), for its analysis of prewar Marxist writing.
  51 See, for a brief comment on the contributions of Maruyama Masao, Otsuka Hisao, and
  Kawashima Takeyoshi in the postwar climate, Nagahara Keiji, Rekishigaku josetsu (Tokyo:
  Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1978), pp. 5iff. The most influential postwar summary of
  Restoration scholarship was Tdyama Shigeki, Meiji ishin (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1951),
  which argued the "absolutist" thesis. Most recent and influential is a "people's history" that
  emphasizes the indigenous and internal development of Japanese history, focusing (as did
  Tokutomi to some extent) on rural elites at mid-century. Carol Gluck, "The People in
  History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography," Journal of Asian Studies 38 (November
  1978): 25-50. An important statement of this school, Irokawa Daikichi's Meiji no bunka
  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970), has appeared in translation as The Culture of the Meiji Period,
  ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  RESTORATION IN HISTORY 
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  quence one finds commoners in all camps and on all sides of major dis-
  putes. . . .**
  One statistical examination of the incidence of popular revolts between
  1865 and 1871 (a total of 545) found that they were least prevalent in
  future "Restoration-led" areas and most common in Tokugawa-ruled
  or related areas and related this to the relative prosperity and productiv-
  ity of the Tokugawa areas and the relatively depressed and suppressed
  state of the antibakufu domains. Effective anti-Tokugawa political ac-
  tion cannot be related to such popular discontent, but Tokugawa efforts
  to maintain control and counter nonsamurai resistance were, presum-
  ably, hampered by the relatively less stable social base of the Tokugawa
  territories. 53
  No one can doubt the evidences of commoner restlessness and move-
  ment. Recent studies of a bizarre movement that swept the principal
  communications routes of central Japan during the final months of
  Tokugawa rule provide fascinating evidence of a widespread and
  rather joyous spirit of revelry and mischief that was so troublesome for
  Tokugawa forces of order that some were prepared to blame the out-
  breaks on loyalist suggestion and stimulation. Yet the mood of the
  crowds was overwhelmingly optimistic, more appropriate to festival
  than to fury, and more social than political. The wealthy, who were
  expected to provide food and entertainment because the gods had
  favored them with talismans of good fortune, paid the bills.'4 Nonethe-
  less, it is clear that the bakufu leaders interpreted such movements as
  threatening their control of society. Spontaneous, large-scale febrile
  movements like this also related to the rising trend of popular pilgrim-
  age to Ise in the nineteenth century. Occasionally they became associ-
  ated, at least briefly, with sentimental homage to loyalist shishi killed
  in the Restoration violence.55 There was much political satire in occa-
  sional wall writings and shrine placards, but these phenomena do not
  seem to have been sufficiently focused to grant them a very significant
  role. The search for an independent merchant interest and role has
  also been unprofitable. Some merchants did assist the shishi: Shiraishi
  Shoichiro, a Shimonoseki shipping guild merchant, was a man
  52 Tot man, Collapse, p. 458; Shibahara Takuji, "Hanbaku shoseiryoku no seikaku," in
  Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 14 {kindai 1) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1962), pp. 169-212.
  53 Yoshio Sugimoto, "Structural Sources of Popular Revolts and the Tobaku Movement at the
  Time of the Meiji Restoration," Journal of Asian Studies 34 (August 1975): 875-89.
  54 Takagi Shunsuke, Eejanaika (Tokyo: Kyoikusha rekishi shinsho, 1979), pp. 209-34.
  55 Onodera Toshiya, "Zannen san ko: Bakumatsu Kinai no ichi minshu undo o megutte,"
  Chiikishi kenkyu 2 (June 1972): 46-67, discusses pilgrimages to the tombs of Yoshimura
  Torataro and Yamamoto Bunnosuke around the time of the Restoration.
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  364 
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  of culture and means whose diary includes the names of four hundred
  shishi, to whom he was generous with food, drink, and lodging. But
  even more merchants, whether or not by choice, assisted the bakufu,
  which based a good deal of its emergency financing on massive loans.
  It seems logical to conclude that in a setting of widespread disaffection
  with the state of political and social order, many commoners favored
  those who promised change. But it is also true that regional loyalty -
  and distrust - affected commoners as well as samurai.
  Another series of debates centers on the foreign threat. The increas-
  ing intimacy of Leon Roches with the bakufu leaders in the closing
  years of their regime and the bluster with which Harry Parkes ob-
  structed that contact have led many to emphasize the danger of impe-
  rialist competition for influence in Japan. There was at one point
  negotiation for a French loan that would be predicated on Hokkaido's
  resources, and Roches apparently offered Yoshinobu the services of
  the small French military mission after the Fushimi-Toba disaster in
  January 1868. But the danger of foreign intervention has probably
  been exaggerated. Satow's influential pamphlet on English policy was
  written, as his memoirs make clear, without the knowledge of his
  short-tempered chief, and Roches seems consistently to have extended
  his personal diplomacy, as he called it, beyond the authorization of his
  government, which had all the imperialist problems it could handle in
  Mexico and in Southeast Asia during those years. Even if the bakufu
  leaders had decided to commit themselves to French assistance, they
  would have found that there was very little to be had: Far from being
  able to negotiate loans, they had to pay for everything in advance and
  in cash. Yet it has also to be granted that none of this lessens the
  perceptions of foreign danger that the Japanese held in the 1860s.
  That impression itself was a fact impelling men to action, and the fear
  of entangling loans and foreign leverage lasted throughout the decades
  of nation building in the Meiji period.
  The importance of the imperial institution and the role of the court
  present further problems for historical analysis. The policy of the
  Meiji government to keep that court area sacrosanct and to accept it as
  a basic element in national character and history produced an under-
  standable reaction in post-World War II days when authors mini-
  mized its substance and stressed its use as a tactic and artifice of the
  Meiji planners. Yet clearly there was more than tactic involved. Al-
  though the Restoration leaders frequently lamented popular indiffer-
  ence to the existence of the court, they themselves clearly kept it
  uppermost as the quintessential center of national identity, and that
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  RESTORATION IN HISTORY 
  365
  emphasis was later diffused among the people through centralization,
  mobilization, and education. The emotion generated among the shishi
  by charges that the bakufu had somehow allowed the emperor to be
  disturbed - heightened at court, where nobles knew that the emperor
  was in fact indignant - was a powerful solvent of ordinary discipline
  and restraint. Yet the court itself, after the loyalist frenzy of the early
  1860s, was much less a factor than it had been at the beginning of the
  process. As Totman put it: "It was shishi who gave effective voice and
  real content to this sonno-joi rhetoric, and so the prominence of the
  imperial role is primarily attributable to shishi success in making their
  views heard."'6
  The historian turns finally to the Restoration leaders, men of mod-
  est rank but immodest self-assurance, who gloried in the opportunity
  to establish for themselves, their friends, and their domain a visibility
  that had been denied them under the constraints of feudal discipline
  and status, and who saw their cause as pure and selfless because it held
  out the hope of winning for their emperor and country the place they
  felt they deserved among the nations. Those hopes were great and
  almost the reverse of the circumstances of their time. For a country
  humiliated by Western powers, they wanted a leading role in the
  world; for a sovereign restricted to secluded impotence, they de-
  manded full authority over a country his ancestors had once ruled; for
  their domain, they wanted a full share in national politics instead of
  second-class vassalage and, for themselves, honored status as imperial
  servitors instead of vassals' rear vassals.57
  Yet in the final analysis, most of this concerned the locus of leader-
  ship and not its goals. Most Tokugawa partisans wanted much the
  same thing. One is struck by the convergence of planning between
  bakufu and Restoration leaders in the last decade of Tokugawa his-
  tory. Indeed, the bakufu leaders, charged with responsibility, ap-
  proached the steps that their adversaries worked out later. Discussion
  of shogunal resignation and substitution of a council of great lords
  began in Edo quarters, found its way into Tosa councils by that route,
  and came to fruition in the Charter Oath's promise of "deliberative
  councils"; later it was integrated into Meiji political institutions. Mili-
  tary reforms found the bakufu, like its southwestern vassals, discover-
  56 Totman, Collapse, p. 462.
  57 Hopes and expectations of course changed dramatically with the intensification of political
  conflict and the revelation of bakufu incapacity during the 1860s. See Yoshio Sakata and John
  W. Hall, "The Motivation of Political Leadership in the Meiji Restoration," Journal of Asian
  Studies 16 (November 1956): 31-50; and Sakata Yoshio, Meiji ishinshi (Tokyo: Miraisha,
  i960).
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  THE MEIJI RESTORATION
  ing that samurai hauteur went poorly with the discipline and drill
  required for infantry companies and substituting, by steps, a person-
  nel and then a money tax as basis for a conscription system that would
  displace the samurai altogether. The bakufu planners who worked this
  out were, like their adversaries from the southwestern han, of middle
  rank within their status hierarchy, hatamoto or petty daimyo who set
  about disestablishing their fellows. Needs of administrative retrench-
  ment and rationalization produced programs for integrating the vassal
  domains nearest to the metropolitan centers, leading to rumors that a
  system of postfeudal, effective centralization was being prepared. The
  Meiji government, which used the Tokugawa lands as its own without
  parceling them out to daimyo after the civil war of 1868-9, kept them
  as the core for the centralization that was consummated by the return
  of feudal registers in 1869 and the establishment of prefectures in
  1871. In brief, the pressures posed by opening and reconstruction
  revealed to friend and foe alike the impossibility of long continuing
  with the institutional structure of the bakuhan system and the need to
  replace it with the structure of a central state.
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  CHAPTER 6
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY
  MEIJI, 1868-1885
  Like all the great revolutions of the modern era, the Meiji Restoration
  generated intense opposition from groups and classes displaced and
  disadvantaged by revolutionary change. What sets the Meiji Restora-
  tion apart, however, is the apparent ease with which opposition to the
  revolutionary regime was defeated or co-opted. Peasant riots over the
  new conscription law, village protests against the land tax revision,
  revolts by disaffected samurai, early campaigns for representative gov-
  ernment, and uprisings by dispossessed farmers all were contained or
  suppressed. The original leadership group stayed in charge and did
  not change its basic policies. Viewed positively, Japan enjoyed extraor-
  dinary continuity and stability in government; viewed negatively, con-
  servative and bureaucratic politics prevailed.
  Japanese and Western historians disagree sharply when explaining
  the failure of opposition movements to oust the ruling oligarchy or
  force changes in its agenda. Scholars in America and Great Britain
  influenced by modernization theory have generally viewed Japan as a
  model of peaceful transition from feudalism to modernity, a transfor-
  mation in which core values of consensus and loyalty to emperor kept
  dissent within manageable bounds.1 On the other hand, most Japanese
  and some Western historians credit the failure of the opposition move-
  ments to the authoritarian character of the Meiji state, emphasizing
  the incorporation of oppressive semifeudal structures into the Meiji
  polity and the oligarchy's control of the new state's efficient state
  security apparatus.2
  Although there is some truth to both interpretations, neither of
  which is as simple as this summary might suggest, neither adequately
  explains the complex interaction between modernizing reforms and
  1 John W. Hall, "Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan," in Marius B. Jansen,
  ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1965), pp. 7-41.
  2 E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence As a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific
  Affairs, 1940); and Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (Berkeley and
  Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
  367
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  class interests, and neither takes into account the diverse nature of the
  social forces represented within the various opposition movements.
  The following analysis focuses on the social factors involved in politi-
  cal mobilization and the structures and conditions that restricted mass
  collective action.
  EARLY RURAL PROTESTS
  If the number of village protests and disturbances is a meaningful
  indicator of the degree of social unrest, rural Japan was anything but
  peaceful in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. According to Aoki
  Koji's data, there were 343 incidents between 1868 and 1872.* Peasant
  protests, which had increased steadily at the end of Tokugawa,
  reached a historical peak of n o in 1869. Beginning in 1870, however,
  the number of incidents declined rapidly, and in 1872 only 30 inci-
  dents were recorded.
  What does this large number of rural disturbances signify? To put
  the data into perspective, nearly half of the incidents were local con-
  flicts engendered by the malfeasance of village headmen, landlord-
  tenant relations, hoarding of rice, foreclosure of loans, and other is-
  sues that affected the popular welfare but did not directly involve the
  central government. Of the remainder, the most frequent cause was
  the land tax. It can be argued that in these protests, the peasants
  expressed their frustration that the overthrow of the Tokugawa ba-
  kufu had not brought relief from feudal levels of taxation. Shortly
  after the imperial coup d'6tat of January 1868, the new government, at
  the urging of Saigo Takamori, issued an edict promising tax reduc-
  tions of up to 50 percent in territories belonging to the shogun. Subse-
  quent edicts promised that the emperor would "alleviate the suffering
  of the people," and commoners were invited to petition the proper
  authorities in order to rectify the "evil practices" of the Tokugawa
  bakufu.4 These early expressions of benevolent concern for the farm-
  ers' welfare were commendably Confucian and reflected a degree of
  genuine concern for the plight of poor peasants. The promise of tax
  reduction, however, was a deliberate strategy to foment rebellion in
  the shogun's home provinces and thereby weaken the bakufu's capac-
  ity to wage war. After the Tokugawa family and most vassal daimyo
  surrendered in the spring of 1868 without fighting a single battle, no
  more was said on the subject, for with victory assured, the new govern-
  3 Aoki Koji, Meiji rwmin tojo nenjiteki kenkyu (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1967), p. 36.
  4 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
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  EARLY RURAL PROTESTS 
  369
  ment's most urgent need was to pay its bills. Meiji officials temporar-
  ily lowered taxes in districts where extraordinary conditions made
  relief unavoidable. In Aizu, for example, the war had disrupted farm-
  ing and devastated crops, and farmers were granted reductions of 50
  percent in that year's taxes.5 Moreover, in areas that had experienced
  climate-related crop loss, officials accepted petitions for tax relief.
  Thus, the policy initially adopted by the Meiji government with re-
  spect to the land tax was to leave the feudal fiscal structure in place
  and permit traditional appeals for temporary aid.
  If early Meiji tax officials were in fact behaving very much like their
  feudal predecessors, did protests over the land tax signify the farmers'
  discontent that things had not changed for the better? In some peti-
  tions, the villagers respectfully but forthrightly reproached the govern-
  ment for unfulfilled promises. A January 1869 petition from villages in
  the Chichibu district began by citing two years of destructive floods in
  requesting tax reductions and also commented on the government's
  failure to carry out a general tax reduction: "A benevolent order was
  issued at the time of the Restoration that the [tax] rate be made lower
  than last year's, but it was not carried out; in the end nothing more
  was heard of it."6 However, the language, content, form, and senti-
  ments of these petitions were identical to those of the peasant appeals
  of the Tokugawa era that asked for tax reductions when forces beyond
  their control drastically reduced harvests. Because of generally high
  rates of taxation under the kokudaka system, peasants farming small,
  subsistence-size holdings depended on daimyo benevolence to miti-
  gate the effects of natural disasters, for without tax reductions and
  loans, many small farmers would be forced to mortgage their land or
  leave farming altogether. Realizing the daimyo's interest in retaining
  population and thereby protecting his tax base, the peasants fre-
  quently organized illegal "direct appeals" (0550) and staged large and
  raucous demonstrations (goso) before the castle in the expectation that
  public embarrassment and fear of greater disorder would move the
  authorities to grant concessions.7 Economic conditions in fact explain
  the large number of land tax-related protests in early Meiji. Beginning
  in 1867, Japan experienced three consecutive years of crop failure; by
  1869, the peak year for disturbances, many rural districts were eco-
  5 Shoji Kichinosuke, Yonaoshi ikki no kenkyu (Tokyo: Azekura shobo, 1970), pp. 319-22.
  6 Aoki, Meiji nomin sojo, p. 17.
  7 Especially in the early Tokugawa period when new land was being brought into cultivation, it
  was in the interest of the daimyo to provide sufficient aid and tax relief to keep peasants on the
  land. Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley and Los
  Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  nomically exhausted, although famine was rare. We find the greatest
  concentration of protests in the districts of western Japan that had
  suffered the most severe crop losses, and in general the incidence of
  rural protests in early Meiji correlates with the timing and extent of
  crop failures.8 Indistinguishable from the Tokugawa peasant move-
  ments in most respects, these protests did not indicate opposition to
  the Meiji Restoration.
  Beginning in 1870, agriculture revived, and the number of protests
  and disturbances declined dramatically. However, during the first
  years of Meiji, farmers gained little from the change in government.
  Indeed, in some districts administered directly by the new regime,
  taxes had actually increased. When the government abolished feudal
  domains in 1871 and appointed governors to replace the daimyo, farm-
  ers sometimes protested. For example, in August 1871 villagers in
  Hiroshima tried to prevent the daimyo's entourage from leaving the
  domain. In September there were demonstrations in Takamatsu and
  Fukuyama, and in November over three thousand people gathered in
  Okayama to demand both the reinstatement of the former daimyo and
  lower taxes. However, in these and other demonstrations, the villagers
  linked their appeals for the return of their daimyo to the issue of
  taxation, much like the Tokugawa peasants who protested when the
  appointment of a new daimyo presaged higher taxes.' But their actions
  did not signify a preference for feudal administration as such.
  The Conscription Act of January 10, 1873, gave rise to the most
  violent rural disturbances of this period. The law decreed compulsory
  military service of three years in the regular army and four in the
  reserves for commoners, thereby ending the long tradition of a heredi-
  tary (and privileged) warrior class. Many samurai were naturally dis-
  pleased by the loss of an ancient birthright. But why did the farmers
  protest?
  Most of the sixteen antidraft protests occurred in the spring and
  summer of 1873, soon after the law was made public.10 Although the
  circumstances of each disturbance differed, the uprising in Misaka
  district illustrates their salient features. First, the villagers misunder-
  stood the meaning of a passage in the edict and charge that "Western
  people call this a blood tax. This is because one protects his country
  verily with blood." The intended meaning of the wording of the edict,
  of course, was that the citizen soldier should be prepared to die in
  8 Aoki, Meiji nomin sojo, pp. 39-40.
  9 See Shoji Kichinosuke, Tohoku shohan hyakushd ikki no kenkyu: shiryo shusei (Tokyo: Ocha-
  nomizu shobd, 1969), pp. 186-8. 
  10 Aoki, Meiji nomin sojo, p. 38.
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  EARLY RURAL PROTESTS 
  371
  battle to defend his country. As one of the leaders of the Misaka riots
  testified, however, many believed that the army drained the blood of
  conscripts for sale to foreign countries. Even before publication of the
  conscription law, villagers in Misaka had become greatly agitated by
  recent edicts that either imposed additional financial burdens or of-
  fended local custom. They objected to the cost of compulsory educa-
  tion, the slaughtering of cows, the liberation of the outcaste communi-
  ties, and new hair styles. When they first learned of the Conscription
  Act, the villagers discussed the possibility of voicing their concerns
  through traditional grievance procedures but concluded that petitions
  to officials in Tokyo would surely go unanswered. Suddenly rumors
  abounded that men dressed in white were coming to round up con-
  scripts. Anxious farmers met and resolved to organize a demonstra-
  tion. A few days later, amid new rumors of the imminent arrival of the
  "blood tax man," they convened a mass meeting at a local shrine at
  which the villagers also complained vociferously of the outrageously
  presumptuous behavior of former outcastes and demanded a return to
  old customs. According to a prearranged plan, someone reported hav-
  ing seen a man walking in the nearby mountains dressed in white and
  carrying a large glass bottle. Great commotion ensued, and those as-
  sembled were easily persuaded to march to the district magistrate's
  office. On the way, they attacked the homes and shops of wealthy
  farmers, moneylenders, and merchants; entering the town of Tsu-
  yama, they surrounded the prefectural office. When officers appeared
  and attempted to quiet the crowd, farmers armed with hunting rifles
  and bamboo spears attacked, killing one official and injuring a second.
  As soon as the police fired back, the crowd scattered, but subse-
  quently disturbances spread to every district in the prefecture, as
  crowds attacked schools, slaughterhouses, village headmen, outcaste
  communities, and government buildings."
  Ignorance and prejudice contributed to the Misaka "blood tax" riots
  and violent "antimodernization" protests triggered by laws that of-
  fended local customs and beliefs. If we look only at the immediate
  causes, we can dismiss such incidents as irrational reactions to modern-
  ization. Examined more closely, however, the demonstrations reveal a
  complexity of motivations and objectives. In Ikuno and Harima vil-
  lages near the present-day city of Kobe, farmers first protested laws
  relating to outcastes but went on to demand tax reductions; next they
  drew up an eight-point list of grievances and vented their anger at the
  11 Tanaka Akira, Meiji ishin, vol. 24 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1976), pp. 275-9.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  government by destroying machinery at nearby state mines. Finally,
  they destroyed the property of wealthy commoners, especially money-
  lenders, merchants, and village officials. Thus one finds in these inci-
  dents a mingling of political and social grievances, for to some degree
  ordinary farmers harbored suspicions, which were not entirely ground-
  less, that the new laws benefited the rich. Although the draft law
  contained a provision for hardship cases, poor farmers realized that
  the burden of conscription would fall most heavily on their shoulders.
  A wealthy farmer could buy exemption from military service for his
  sons by paying ¥270, a luxury that no ordinary farmer could possibly
  afford. But if a poor farm family lost a son's labor for three years, its
  very survival would be threatened.
  These protests reveal understandable suspicions regarding laws
  that, it must be remembered, were promulgated by the central govern-
  ment without public discussion or consultation. To understand why
  poor farmers in Misaka called for a return to the old ways, we should
  recall that the Meiji Restoration did not bring popular participation in
  the political process. If anything, the centralization of authority made
  it more difficult for the villagers to influence the very policies that
  most affected them. With respect to the land tax, the most frequent
  cause of conflict, the Meiji state was infinitely better prepared to resist
  protest than was the bakufu or daimyo. Not infrequently, the peas-
  ants' protests in the Tokugawa period had succeeded in wringing
  concessions from lords, even though the leaders of illegal protests
  might be severely punished. However, the creation of an efficient
  national bureaucracy and modern police and army drastically under-
  cut the efficacy of traditional forms of protest. In the case of the
  Misaka riots, the villagers considered petitioning the Tokyo govern-
  ment but decided that their appeals would be fruitless and so took
  matters into their own hands instead. Hence, the apparently irrational
  "blood tax" riots and related disturbances stemmed from the peasants'
  justified fears that political centralization had actually increased their
  powerlessness and vulnerability to the new government's arbitrary
  decisions.
  THE MEIJI LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS
  After abolishing the feudal domains in 1871, the Meiji leadership
  grappled with the problem of how to reform the feudal land tax system
  to meet the demands of national development. The enormous financial
  costs of pensioning off the daimyo and samurai made their task all the
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  LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS 
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  more difficult. How the government persuaded daimyo to surrender
  peacefully their ancient rights and powers will be discussed in the next
  section. What concerns us here is the economic constraints on fiscal
  policy incurred by pensioning off the ruling class, for stipends and
  domain debts alone consumed most of the government's revenue in
  the early 1870s.12
  There were few sources of additional revenue that the government
  was willing or able to tap. It rejected borrowing abroad because of the
  obvious perils to national security in case of subsequent default, and it
  was determined to tax commerce and industry as lightly as possible in
  order to speed capital formation. Meanwhile, the commercial treaties
  forced on Japan by the West had fixed tariffs at uniform low rates that
  limited the revenue from foreign trade.'*
  Although the leaders saw no alternative to maintaining the high taxes
  on agriculture, they could not afford to alienate the farmers' allegiance
  to the state. There was little reason to fear rural revolution. But even
  passive resistance in the form of withholding taxes would strain the
  treasury, and small, nonviolent protests always had the potential to
  escalate. Memories of yonaoshi (world rectification) and uchikowashi
  (urban smashing) uprisings that had erupted in the mid-1860s were still
  fresh. If the farmers violently protested the new tax, prefectural offi-
  cials would be forced to mobilize ex-samurai bands to restore order.
  Unemployed retainers were only too willing to unsheathe their swords,
  but the central government judged the risks of unleashing them to be
  unacceptably high. Whatever the changes made in tax and property
  rights, the government needed the farmers' acquiescence.
  The dilemma facing the Meiji government was how to ensure the
  farmers' cooperation with the new tax system without substantially
  reducing land tax revenues. Part of the solution involved eliminating
  feudal restrictions on landholding and legalizing capitalist relations of
  production, changes welcomed by most farmers and particularly bene-
  ficial to large landholders. In 1871 the government abolished the cus-
  tomary restrictions on land use. Early in 1872 it legalized the sale of
  private holdings and prohibited the daimyo and retainers from expro-
  priating farmland in their former domains. Next, new land surveys
  were ordered, and certificates were issued. Finally, in July 1873 the
  government promulgated a law that fundamentally restructured the
  12 Niwa Kunio, "Chiso kaisei to chitsuroku shobun," in Iwanami koza: Nihon rekiski, vol. 15
  (kindai 2) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1962), pp. 145-6.
  13 The United States and the other major Western imperialist powers had forced the bakufu to
  sign commercial treaties that limited import and export duties to a flat rate of 5 percent.
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  374 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  land tax system while maintaining the old levels of taxation. It de-
  serves closer scrutiny.
  The Meiji land tax established uniform procedures for assessing
  taxes based on the market value of land as a fixed investment. The
  Tokugawa land tax had been based on estimates of productivity mea-
  sured in output of rice, and both nominal and real rates of taxation
  varied considerably from fief to fief. However, the new tax was set at a
  uniform 3 percent of the monetary value of each parcel of land as
  determined by a complex formula that included estimates of land
  fertility, commodity prices, fixed production costs, and reasonable
  rate of return. The tax was paid in cash directly to the state by each
  owner; it was a fixed tax that initially made no provision for reduction
  in the event of natural calamities. In return, taxpayers were given title
  deeds that conferred full rights of ownership. No attempt was made to
  regulate landlord-tenant relations: Landlords were responsible for
  paying the yearly tax, after which they were free to charge whatever
  rents the market would bear.
  Inasmuch as the 1873 revision of the land tax altered every feature
  of the old tax system, we should expect conflicts to have arisen. Ac-
  cording to Arimoto Masao's data, there were ninety-nine rural protests
  between 1874 and 1881, the period during which the reform was
  carried out. Why did farmers protest, and how did they mobilize?
  Initially, the most frequent complaint was not the tax rate itself but
  the way that the local tax commissions had determined land values and
  interim taxes. Often villages disputed the prices used to calculate the
  cash value of crops and to commute taxes previously collected in kind;
  for the lower the price, the lower the assessment. And because rice
  prices fluctuated from year to year and from one district to the next,
  some villages were likely to feel unfairly treated, especially if local soil,
  climate, and market conditions lowered the price of their crop.
  One of the larger protests occurred in the Naka district of Waka-
  yama Prefecture in i876.Ii» In February, Kodama Shoemon, the eldest
  son of the mayor of Nakayama village, petitioned the governor to
  complain that in commuting taxes formerly collected in kind, the tax
  commission had overcharged villages by assuming an unrealistically
  high rice price. Spurred by Shoemon's appeal, the mayors of twelve
  neighboring villages petitioned jointly and voiced the same complaint.
  When the governor responded by rejecting the petitions, Shoemon
  made yet another appeal in which he insisted that although the official
  14 Arimoto Masao, Chiso kaisei to nomin tdso (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1968), pp. 600-10; and Goto
  Yasushi, "Chiso kaisei hantai ikki," Ritsumeikan keizaigaku 9 (April i960): 109-52.
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  LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS 
  375
  price accurately reflected conditions in other districts of Wakayama,
  the prices in his district were in fact considerably lower. Anticipating
  the objection that the procedures must be uniform, he lectured the
  governor on the proper function of laws: "Laws are made for the
  people, not people for laws."
  At first, the villages disputed only the assessment of interim taxes,
  but they soon broadened their demands to include land values. As
  before, they insisted that the official rice price was too high and cited
  examples of more favorable treatment afforded by other tax commis-
  sions. In their petitions they also played on the fears of popular distur-
  bances. Reminding the governor that the mayors stood "between the
  officials and the people," they warned of the hardship caused by the
  tax revisions, hardships so severe that "even the blind can stir up the
  people."1'
  Only after twenty-nine mayors and assistant officials had tendered
  their resignations did the governor attempt a compromise. He refused
  to accept the resignations and authorized a 5 percent reduction in the
  official price, about half of what the mayors had requested. However,
  instead of ending the protest, his actions stirred the hope of even
  greater concessions and swelled the ranks of the protesters. In April,
  177 village officials jointly petitioned the governor to demand that
  prices be determined on a case-by-case basis according to the condi-
  tions in each district.
  By contesting the use of uniform procedures, the protest threatened
  to cause interminable delay. As compromise had not produced a settle-
  ment, the governor now took a hard line. The mayors were summoned
  to a meeting and admonished; when they still objected, he fired them
  and arrested five ringleaders. Although the arrest of popular village
  officials provoked a large demonstration, within a few days the local
  authorities had restored order without resort to force. A company of
  infantry had been dispatched to Wakayama, but it was not necessary
  to deploy it in the countryside. Later large-scale arrests were made to
  set an example: Over 1,000 people were arrested, and 688 were con-
  victed of encouraging public disturbances.
  The protest of Wakayama was unusual in that most disputes that
  arose in conjunction with the tax law revision were resolved without
  fines or mass arrests. How, then, did the tax officials gain the consent
  of recalcitrant villagers, for the law required owners to agree to new
  assessments? The fate of the protests in Tottori suggests some of the
  answers.'6
  15 Arimoto, Chiso kaisei, p. 605. 
  16 Ibid., pp. 618-29.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  In Tottori, more than twenty villages in the Yatsuhashi and Kume
  districts rejected the new tax assessments, and an equal number post-
  poned making a decision. Hoping to quell the resistance before the
  revolt spread, the tax commission ordered representatives of the vil-
  lages to the prefectural capital where they were subjected to intense
  pressure to give their consent. Most of the bullying was verbal, but
  one man reported being held ten hours a day in the back of the jail for
  eight consecutive days. Not surprisingly, some of the representatives
  gave in and agreed to the assessments; soon only seventeen holdouts
  remained. But then several villages that had previously consented
  reversed their decision and joined the protest. In December, thirty-six
  villages filed suit in the district court challenging the assessments, and
  the pendulum swung the other way. By February 1876, 112 villages
  were holding out. Again, the officials did their best and convinced
  eight powerful landlords to break ranks and sign individual consent
  orders. Because their holdings spanned many villages, the effect was
  to undermine resistance, especially by their tenants.17 As a result, the
  number of holdouts had dropped in half by spring.
  Opposition collapsed in July when the local tax commission invoked
  a recently adopted amendment to the land law that authorized binding
  on-site assessments as a last resort.18 The commission appointed a
  committee of local notables to investigate conditions in the eight vil-
  lages that had been at the forefront of die protest. To the surprise of
  no one, they reported that conditions in the villages did not warrant
  special consideration, a finding that gave ample warning of what to
  expect from on-site assessments. Soon after, most of the villages aban-
  doned the protest. The reduction of assessments for seven of the
  remaining holdout villages ended all opposition. By December the tax
  commission reported to the main bureau in Tokyo that its work was
  done.
  The largest number of protests occurred in the latter half of 1875
  and 1876. Although revision of the land tax had begun in the spring of
  1874, initially there were few protests, for in areas such as Hiroshima,
  Chikuma, and Yamaguchi local notables participated in the commis-
  sions, and the new assessments were generally lower than the old.
  However, in May 1875 a special agency was established in Tokyo to
  supervise the work of the local commissions and to speed implementa-
  17 Almost half of all the land in the Yatsuhashi and Kume districts was tenant cultivated, and a
  few landlords controlled immense holdings. Their acceptance of the commission's assess-
  ments undermined resistance in all of the villages.
  18 The law was amended in April 1876 to authorize assessments without consent when based on
  inspections carried out by the local commissions. Because the new assessments were generally
  lower than the old, in most cases it was necessary to invoke this provision.
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  LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS 
  377
  tion. Thereafter, state interests tended to predominate.19 Assessments
  were less generous to the farmers, for the commissions were given
  target quotas that, though not absolute, influenced their decisions.
  And to discourage villages from protesting, in May 1876 an amend-
  ment authorizing on-site inspections was adopted.
  The tougher policy produced a sharp increase in protests. At the
  same time, however, samurai revolts erupted in southwestern Japan,
  and soon the government adopted a more conciliatory posture toward
  the farmers.20 In January 1877, the land tax was lowered from 3
  percent of market value to 2.5 percent, a reduction of 17 percent in the
  yearly tax. Later in the year, the law was further amended to permit
  reductions when crop loss due to natural disasters exceeded 50 per-
  cent. Finally, farmers in villages distant from marketing centers were
  allowed to pay part of their tax in produce.
  The adoption of these measures was followed by a noticeable decline
  in protests, but it did not eliminate all resistance. The most stubbornly
  contested dispute over revised assessments occurred in the summer of
  1878 in Ishikawa Prefecture.21 Initially, 232 villages in seven districts
  refused to accept the newly published assessments, but as the prefec-
  tural commission applied pressure, resistance dwindled. In the 28
  villages that continued to hold out, opposition was led by a group of
  very wealthy local notables who did not back down when the tax
  commission invoked the threat of on-site inspections, a tactic that had
  worked well against poor villages in Tottori. Rather, they borrowed
  the rhetoric of natural rights to justify their refusal to accept the new
  assessment, lecturing the authorities that "if liberty be our right, we
  will never accede to what is not just." To strengthen their hand, they
  sought outside support and made contact with the Risshisha, a liberal
  political society headed by Itagaki Taisuke that was campaigning for
  an elected national assembly and that sent Sugita Teiichi to help their
  movement. Experienced in legal matters, Sugita filed various suits on
  behalf of the villagers, and it is likely that the linking of the two
  movements caused the government considerable alarm.
  Perhaps because the government feared the involvement of the
  Risshisha in land tax-related protests, the dispute was settled in To-
  kyo by Okuma Shigenobu, chief of the Finance Ministry, who ordered
  that the entire process be redone, starting with new surveys. When
  19 Niwa Kunio, "Chiso kaisei," in Nihon rekishi gakkai, ed., Nihonshi no mondai ten (Tokyo:
  Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1965), pp. 297-8.
  20 Fukushima Masao, Chiso kaisei (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1968), pp. 188-92.
  21 Arimoto, Chiso kaisei, p. 631.
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  378 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  these were completed one year later, the result was not an unqualified
  victory for the landowners, for although the new assessments were
  substantially lower, the administrative costs charged to the villages
  amounted to more than twenty times the yearly savings in the land
  tax.22
  What does this brief survey of resistance to land tax revision reveal?
  What can we conclude with respect to rural opposition to the Meiji
  land tax, an institution that fundamentally shaped the development of
  the Meiji state?
  First, the revision of the land tax must be judged a political as well
  as an economic success. Given the magnitude of the changes and the
  interests involved, conflict was inevitable. It was naturally in the farm-
  ers' interest to seek lower assessments, although the government could
  not afford substantial reduction in revenue. In the light of these facts,
  the total number of protests was small: ninety-nine incidents between
  1874 and 1881, of which thirty-seven were landlord-tenant conflicts
  and did not directly involve the state. Most of the disputes over assess-
  ments were eventually settled through negotiation and compromise
  without arrests or resort to armed force. In a handful of cases, the local
  officials were sufficiently alarmed to call in the national army and
  mobilize samurai bands. But compared to the "blood tax" uprisings,
  these were tame and orderly affairs.
  The principal effect of the Meiji land tax was to equalize and ratio-
  nalize tax assessments according to market value and thereby to elimi-
  nate the arbitrary factor in Tokugawa taxation. Under daimyo rule,
  the actual rates of tax extraction varied considerably depending on the
  rigor of fief administration; rice fields (suiden) were more heavily taxed
  than was unirrigated land Qiatake), as was arable compared with resi-
  dential and commercial land. By making the land tax fall more
  equally, Meiji tax assessments provided some relief to the majority of
  landholders.^
  Not all classes of landholders benefited equally, however. The Meiji
  land tax caused special problems for the poor.2* The tax had to be paid
  in cash, a provision that forced subsistence producers into greater
  22 The land tax is discussed in economic terms in Kozo Yamamura, "The Meiji Land Tax
  Reform and Its Effects," in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition:
  From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 382-99;
  and is described in James Nakamura, Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of
  Japan 1873-1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 177-96.
  23 Arimoto, Chiso kaisei, p. 637.
  24 Norman, Japan's Emergence Asa Modem State, pp. 138—44.
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  LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS 
  379
  dependence on the market and increased the risk of bankruptcy. Sub-
  sistence producers also lost the protection previously afforded by
  daimyo benevolence - the granting of tax reductions to mitigate the
  effects of crop failure. Farmers on the margins of the market economy
  had the greatest need of short-term aid, as they did not have the
  resources to withstand severe shortfalls. The Meiji land tax, however,
  initially allowed no exemptions at all and, when amended, permitted
  reductions only if the crop loss exceeded half of the harvest.
  At the same time, the revised land tax system worked to the advan-
  tage of large farmers and especially landlords. The corporate features
  of the Tokugawa land tax were eliminated, as was payment in kind,
  and both of these changes gave capitalist farmers greater access to the
  market. Second, the feature of the Meiji land tax that caused the
  greatest hardship to poor farmers - the fact that taxes were held
  constant - proved highly profitable to those farmers who, through
  investment and technological innovation, boosted output and income,
  for taxes were not tied to profits. Of course, innovation and produc-
  tion for the market were not limited to the wealthy. Nevertheless,
  landlords and farmers with large holdings naturally reaped the greatest
  benefits of the decline of the land tax as a fixed cost of production.
  Third, as noted earlier, taxpayers were given full rights of ownership,
  even to the mortgaged land and paddy fields that tenants (or their
  ancestors) had brought into cultivation, and conditions of tenure
  would no longer confer customary right to permanent tenancy. Fi-
  nally, landlords were legally free to sell land and renegotiate rents.
  Although the landlord who cared about social esteem was unlikely to
  put out all his holdings to the highest bidder, the courts and police -
  both vastly more efficient than were their feudal counterparts -
  would back him up if he did.
  It is not surprising, therefore, that in the latter phase of land tax
  revision, and particularly after the general reduction ordered in 1877,
  the number of disputes between tenants and landlords increased. Be-
  tween 1877 and 1881, twenty-nine of the forty-nine incidents recorded
  were landlord-tenant conflicts. The major issues of contention were
  rents and the customary rights of cultivators. The issue of rents was
  connected to the revised assessments because tenants expected re-
  duced rents when taxes were lowered, but tended to resist rent in-
  creases if the tax had been increased. Customary rights were a more
  volatile issue. The best-known, and certainly the bloodiest, dispute
  over proprietary rights involved tenant farmers in Shindo village,
  Kanagawa Prefecture, who had mortgaged land "in perpetuity" - a
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  380 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  Tokugawa practice whereby the mortgagor retained use rights.2'
  When the tax commission awarded title to the mortgage holder, a
  powerful landlord and village mayor, the tenants contested the ruling
  through the courts, persisting with appeal after appeal over a two-year
  period. Finally, after a direct but fruitless appeal to the Ministry of
  Finance, they attacked the landlord's house in frustration, killing him
  and seven of his relatives and servants. Despite the murders, it was the
  dispossessed cultivators who won the sympathy of local opinion.
  When they were brought to trial, fifteen hundred villagers signed a
  petition pleading for leniency.
  Taken as a whole, village protests against land tax revision reveal
  the pivotal role of the local notable igono) class of farmers in represent-
  ing to the state the interests of the rural communities. With the excep-
  tion of disputes between landlords and tenants, opposition to land tax
  revision was spearheaded by mayors and local notables. That they
  assumed this role is not surprising, for throughout the Tokugawa
  period, headmen had represented the village in all dealings with fief
  authorities. Under the Tokugawa tax system, taxes were assessed on
  the village rather than on individual householders, and it was the
  responsibility of the headman to see that they were paid. Legally
  responsible for all financial relations between the corporate village and
  the state, headmen were also perceived by the community to be, and
  themselves felt, morally responsible for safeguarding their communi-
  ties' well-being. If landholders suffered crop failure or the lord in-
  creased taxes, it was the headman's duty to petition the authorities; if
  permissible appeals failed to achieve redress of grievance, the village
  head had a moral obligation to continue the petitioning process, even
  if this entailed breaking the law. Hence, we find the tradition oigimin,
  the extreme case of leaders who risked (or lost) their lives protesting
  onerous taxes and officials' malfeasance.26
  To understand the political dynamic of village protest against land
  tax revision, we should remember that the headmen and notables had
  traditionally assumed responsibility in all matters involving the vil-
  lage's fiscal obligations and other financial dealing with the state.
  25 Irokawa Daikichi, "Konminto to Jiyuto," Rekishigaku kenkyu, no. 247 (November i960): pp.
  5-6.
  26 Irwin Scheiner, "Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants," in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin
  Scheiner, eds. Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period (Chicago: University of Chicago
  Press, 1979), pp. 39-62; and Anne Walt hall, "Narratives of Peasant Uprisings in Japan,"
  Journal of Japanese Studies 42 (May 1983): pp. 571-87. See also Yokoyama Toshio, Hyakusho
  ikki to gimin denshb (Tokyo: Kyoikusha rekishi shinsho, 1977).
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  LAND TAX AND VILLAGE PROTESTS 
  381
  Thus, mayors and notables acted out a familiar role when they partici-
  pated in the implementation of land tax revision by overseeing the
  enormously elaborate and time-consuming work of surveying, grad-
  ing, and registering the thousands of parcels of land in their communi-
  ties. Although the Finance Ministry determined policy objectives,
  prefectural commissions necessarily relied on the cooperation of vil-
  lage heads and prominent citizens to supply the data used to calculate
  the new assessments. This gave heads and notables both power and
  responsibility to ensure a satisfactory outcome. Hence, most of the
  disputes between villages and local tax commissions involved issues
  that affected the interests of all farm households, regardless of the size
  of their holdings. The collective interests of villagers in lowering land
  evaluations and interim taxes permitted political mobilization within
  the tradition of Tokugawa village protests. As we saw in the conflicts
  in Wakayama, Tottori, and Ishikawa prefectures, when principled
  mayors and notables felt that the commissions had done them an
  injustice, these otherwise law-abiding citizens resisted stubbornly.
  We can now analyze the political dynamic in village protests against
  land tax revision. First, responsibility for initiating protest rested with
  the village heads and local notables, and they acted only when the
  interests of all landholders were affected by the rulings of the tax
  commissions. The relatively small number of protests is therefore
  explained by the fact that the revised assessments, though higher than
  desired, were usually somewhat lower than the Tokugawa tax rates.
  Second, because high-status villagers assumed responsibility for repre-
  senting the community's interests to the state and relied on petitions
  and legal process, the protests tended to be orderly and restrained.
  Generally, they did not mobilize the village poor - the most volatile
  and potentially most militant social class. With few exceptions, village
  protests against tax revision were settled through negotiation and com-
  promise. Despite confrontation and the testing of wills, conflict oc-
  curred within the larger context of economic reforms that were wel-
  comed by the majority of rural producers. One does not see villages
  protesting the principal provisions of the Meiji land tax, only specific
  rulings of the prefectural commissions. This limited the scope and
  intensity of the conflicts.
  The real hardships caused by the Meiji land tax did not readily lead
  to collective action. The social classes affected most adversely - subsis-
  tence farmers forced into bankruptcy and cultivators dispossessed of
  customary rights - were relatively powerless. Because capitalist farm-
  ers profited from the system of unqualified ownership rights and fixed
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  382 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  monetarized taxes, the village as a whole did not share a common
  interest in opposing these provisions of the Meiji tax. Moreover, the
  political obligations of the headmen and notables did not extend - or
  did so in only attenuated form - to hardship arising out of contractual
  and commercial relations; as landlords and moneylenders, they them-
  selves might be party to such disputes. Thus the dispossessed were left
  to fend for themselves. Although uchikowashi and yonaoshi uprisings
  provided a model of collective action by the poor against both the rich
  villagers and the state, conditions favorable to the mass mobilization of
  small farmers did not materialize until the mid-i88os, well after the
  revision of the land tax had been completed.
  SHIZOKU REVOLTS
  In contrast with the generally peaceful and limited opposition move-
  ments of rural commoners during the first decade of Meiji, samurai
  opposition initially took the form of armed uprisings that sought to
  topple the government. The underlying cause of the rebellions was
  profound discontent and considerable economic distress within the
  former warrior class caused by early Meiji reforms that dismantled the
  feudal polity and all but abolished samurai elite status. To the extent
  that the rebellions expressed the frustration and resentment of former
  samurai, they represented the clearest and most forceful example of
  resistance to modernization in the early Meiji period. Viewed as the
  organized, political response of a dispossessed social class, the half-
  dozen shizoku rebellions between 1874 and 1877 c a n be explained as
  the predictably violent reaction of a traditional elite displaced by a
  modern revolution. There can be no doubt that materially and psycho-
  logically the samurai bore the major burden of rapid modernization;
  and because they were systematically disadvantaged by early Meiji
  reforms, they had an obvious interest in joining counterrevolutionary
  movements.
  Nevertheless, important aspects of shizoku rebellion do not readily
  fit the mold of counterrevolution. The leaders of the rebellions were
  not defenders of the ancient regime, nor had they lost power and
  status as a result of the Meiji Restoration. Without exception, the
  rebellion leaders were young samurai from southwestern Japan who
  had early joined the anti-Tokugawa movement and continued to iden-
  tify passionately with the imperial cause. Outstanding members of the
  revolutionary elite that seized power in 1868, they had been richly
  rewarded for their services. In fact, the leaders of the largest rebel-
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
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  lions - Eto Shimpei, Maebara Issei and Saigo Takamori - all had
  served on the Council of State, the highest decision-making body,
  before breaking with the government. Before resigning in 1873 to
  protest the cancellation of the Korean invasion, Eto and Saigo sup-
  ported, if somewhat grudgingly, sweeping reforms that all but ended
  feudalism and laid the foundations for subsequent modernization.
  As we shall see, the shizoku rebellions were complex events that
  incorporated various political impulses. Insurrections led by disaf-
  fected leaders, they reflected personality conflicts and bureaucratic
  rivalry within the ruling elite; local protests against the increasing
  power and assertiveness of the government in Tokyo, they expressed
  sectional opposition to political centralization. Nevertheless, at least
  among the rank and file, the underlying impetus to armed resistance
  was the opposition to the loss of traditional warrior status and class
  privilege. Whatever the motivation of individual leaders, the social
  basis of antigovernment shizoku ferment in the mid-1870s was resis-
  tance to early Meiji reforms that, by dismantling the feudal polity and
  building a modern army and a centralized state bureaucracy, elimi-
  nated samurai class privilege.
  The young samurai who came to power in 1868 had experienced the
  frustration of subordinate rank in feudal society, and they quickly
  ended the social distinctions based on hereditary status.27 Having
  come to the realization that the traditional status system was an obsta-
  cle to national unity, they dismantled it one step at a time. Beginning
  in 1869, the government ordered the profusion of hereditary ranks
  within the samurai class reduced to two, shizoku (knight) and sotsu
  (foot soldier), and ended the archaic division of commoners into status
  groups - peasant, merchant, and artisan - based on occupation. Two
  years later, it freed outcaste communities from legal prescriptions that
  had enforced strict segregation. All commoners were required to adopt
  surnames and were informed that public acts of deference toward
  samurai, such as prostration, were no longer necessary or desirable.
  Samurai, on the other hand, were told that they need not wear swords
  in public, an oblique request that they abandon their swaggering ways
  of old. For the first time, warriors were authorized to take up farming,
  industry, and trade and were offered capital for starting new enter-
  prises if they gave up their hereditary stipends. Samurai were also
  advised to cut off their topknots and adopt Western headdress, and
  27 Some of the leaders of the sonno jot movement were discontented with the Tokugawa class
  system and ideologically committed to a meritocracy. See Thomas M. Huber, The Revolution-
  ary Origins of Modem Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981).
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  soon Western-style clothing was encouraged - indeed required of cer-
  tain government officials, as a final step toward eliminating the visible
  marks of traditional status.
  The abolition of the feudal domains in 1871 accelerated the decline of
  the warrior class. Overnight, the samurai lost their traditional perqui-
  sites as retainers and sinecures as soldiers, functionaries, and adminis-
  trators. The most dramatic and far-reaching of the early Meiji reforms,
  the transformation of the polity from feudalism to centralized nation-
  state did not so much spring from a social critique of feudalism as from a
  concern for national strength. The Meiji leaders realized that the Toku-
  gawa political order, based on parcelized sovereignty, was fundamen-
  tally incompatible with the political and military mobilization required
  to preserve Japan's independence in the world of nineteenth-century
  imperialism. Kido Takayoshi, who among Restoration leaders was the
  most conscious of Japan's precarious international position and need to
  "hold its own in the world," early advocated greater centralization of
  state power and soon convinced Okubo Toshimichi of Satsuma and
  Itagaki Taisuke of Tosa. The central government was still too weak to
  compel the daimyo to give up power, but Kido, Okubo, and Itagaki
  persuaded the lords of their respective domains - who were moved as
  much by traditional rivalry as by patriotic duty - to surrender voluntar-
  ily their han registers, symbols of daimyo authority, to the emperor. As
  other daimyo followed their example, they were appointed "governors"
  and granted one-tenth of fief revenue as personal income, and the To-
  kyo government paid all the administrative costs. If anything, the
  daimyo were probably better off financially, and outwardly their power
  had not diminished drastically.28
  Nevertheless, not all diamyo agreed to give up their hereditary
  rights and privileges, and the government waited two years before
  compelling compliance. In the meantime, Choshu, Satsuma, and Tosa
  combined forces to create the embryo of a national army, the ten-
  thousand-strong Imperial Guard subject to the sole authority of the
  Tokyo government. With an army at their command, the Meiji leaders
  felt sufficiently secure to abolish the fiefs entirely. In August 1871, the
  emperor issued an edict that proclaimed the end of daimyo rule.
  Daimyo were offered various inducements: appointment as governors
  of their former domains, generous pensions, state assumption of fief
  debts, and, in time, titles of nobility in a new peerage. Later in 1871,
  the government eliminated the last vestiges of daimyo administration.
  28 W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp.
  335-49-
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  Daimyo were ordered to take up permanent residence in Tokyo; fief
  armies were disbanded; and many local officials were dismissed. Gov-
  ernors appointed by the Home Ministry, who were often outsiders and
  proteges of leading ministers, now administered the countryside.
  Even a cursory account of the process by which the Tokugawa feudal
  polity was abolished suggests some of the reasons for the slow develop-
  ment of counterrevolution in the Meiji period. First, the daimyo class,
  which had little capacity for collective action, was divided vertically
  along traditional sectional lines as large southwestern fiefs, whose clans-
  men dominated the national government, were played off against one
  another, and then against the more numerous, but smaller, fiefs of
  eastern and northeastern Japan. Second, and more importantly, the
  preferential treatment of the elite ranks divided the warrior class hori-
  zontally, thereby vitiating the kashindan - hierarchically organized
  corps of retainers - as a vehicle of antigovernment mobilization. Dai-
  myo and fief elders received lavish pensions, in addition to ranks and
  titles, and possessed a strong material incentive to accept the loss of
  traditional status without protest. On the other hand, the pensions of
  most samurai were less than subsistence livings, and even these were
  commuted to interest-bearing bonds in 1876. Thus, nonelite samurai
  had every reason to resist, but without the sanction of the domain
  leaders they could not use the existing (feudal) structures of collective
  action. Before the samurai could act in defense of their traditional rights
  as warriors, they would have to find a new basis for collective action.
  If shizoku privilege was to be preserved, the new national army was
  the logical place. A minority within the leadership clung to the feudal
  ruling class conceit that as the inheritors of a thousand years of mili-
  tary service, the samurai were uniquely endowed with the requisite
  martial virtues - courage, loyalty, and honor. Maebara Issei wanted
  the army to be entirely shizoku. Kirino Toshiaki and Shinohara
  Kunimoto, Saigo's chief lieutenants and commanders of the Imperial
  Guard, violently opposed the induction of commoners and resisted all
  attempts to integrate conscripts into their force. Others saw the draft-
  ing of unemployed shizoku as a solution to a pressing social problem.
  Torio Koyata, a general from Choshu, proposed that 20 percent of the
  revenue be set aside to create a standing army and national reserve
  large enough to enlist all shizoku between the ages of twenty and forty-
  five. Tani Kanjd of Tosa advocated first conscripting the sons of
  shizoku and, only later, after all able-bodied shizoku had been in-
  ducted, opening recruitment to commoners.29 However, majority opin-
  29 Masumi Junnosuke, Nihon seito shi ron (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1965), vol. 1, p.
  113.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  ion within the oligarchy supported universal conscription - in part
  because it was the system used in the West but mainly because of its
  intrinsic merits. Yamagata Aritomo, who succeeded Maebara Issei as
  head of the army, foresaw that samurai virtues were a mixed blessing
  in a modern army. Shizoku might well be fierce and brave fighters, but
  they were also likely to be fractious, undisciplined, and more loyal to
  their clansmen than to the central government. High regard for
  ascriptive status and particularistic loyalties were as much as part of
  bushido as was unflinching courage. Yamagata correctly anticipated
  that the first task of the national army would be to suppress internal
  revolts and reasoned that among the shizoku, their strong emotional
  identification with fief and clansmen impaired unity.*0 Even as sol-
  diers of the imperial army, the shizoku might act and think in terms of
  old loyalties.
  Promulgated on January 10, 1873, the Conscription Act made all
  twenty-year-old males liable for seven years of military service - three
  in the regular army and four in the reserves - and required men be-
  tween the ages of seventeen and forty-five to register for possible call-
  up. The immediate aim was to create a truly national army loyal to the
  central government and suited to the highly regimented military sys-
  tem recently adopted from the West, but the adoption of universal
  conscription widened the distance between conservatives who insisted
  that the shizoku remain the military and political elite and those who
  viewed ascriptive status as being incompatible with modern national
  development.
  Saigo Takamori was the leading conservative in the Meiji govern-
  ment. In 1871 he submitted two memorials outlining a model of
  economic and political development very different from the "iron
  and coal" model favored by the majority of the oligarchs. The first
  memorial advocated not only the adoption of Shinto as the state
  religion but also the proscription of Buddhism and Christianity; a
  national tax on agriculture based on the feudal norm of half to the
  lord and half to the people; and a tax on manufacturing to pay in full
  all warrior stipends under 100 koku. The second memorial proposed
  specific measures to revitalize the rural economy: hiring foreign ex-
  perts; appointing especially diligent farmers as headmen to instruct
  villagers in the virtues of filial piety, frugality, obedience, and sincer-
  ity; setting up agricultural research stations; selecting the best tech-
  nologies of traditional farm practices and Western agronomy; invest-
  30 Roger Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan, 1838-1922 (Cambridge,
  Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 61.
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
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  ing public funds in irrigation and flood control; and providing credit
  to individual farmers.31
  Whatever the merits of specific proposals aimed at improving agri-
  culture, Saigo's conception of political economy was thoroughly tradi-
  tional. The 50 percent land tax he proposed would impoverish all but
  the richest farmers and inhibit investment and growth. Instead of
  promoting industrialization, the manufacturing sector would be heav-
  ily taxed to support the socially unproductive shizoku. In later propos-
  als, Saigo came to support and even advocate reduction in the level of
  shizoku support, but there remained little common ground between
  his thought and the "iron and coal" school of modernization.
  The issue that split the original leadership group ostensibly involved
  foreign relations rather than domestic policy. When Korea refused to
  open diplomatic and trade relations with Japan, Saigo proposed a
  venture in gunboat diplomacy that he secretly hoped would lead to
  war and the immediate mobilization of unemployed samurai.*2 He was
  supported by Itagaki Taisuke and Goto Shojiro of Tosa and Eto
  Shimpei and Soejima Taneomi of Hizen, who agreed that Japan
  should invade Korea and impose diplomatic and trade relations, as the
  West had done to Japan fifteen years earlier. However, Iwakura
  Tomomi, Okubo Toshimichi, and Kido Takayoshi, who had recently
  returned from an extended tour of the United States and Europe,
  argued forcefully against Saigo's plan. They did not object on grounds
  of principle: They agreed that it was Japan's destiny to rule the back-
  ward nations of Asia, if only to protect them from the predatory West.
  But they realized that despite the abolition of feudal political institu-
  tions, Japan remained weak and vulnerable compared with the coun-
  tries that the Iwakura mission had visited between 1871 and 1873. The
  possibility of Chinese or Russian intervention if Japan invaded Korea
  raised the stakes considerably, for the costs of fighting a prolonged
  war would jeopardize the development of the very institutions on
  which Japan's future as a major power depended. Although initially
  outvoted, the "peace" party managed to reverse the vote in the Coun-
  cil of State in October after Iwakura was appointed chairman. With
  his group now in the majority, Iwakura reintroduced Saigo's plan,
  which, of course, was voted down; and despite vehement protests
  from the war party, he immediately presented the results to the em-
  peror. Humiliated and outraged by tactics that violated the spirit, if
  31 Goto Yasushi, Shizoku hanran no kenkyu (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1967), p. 28.
  32 Saigo volunteered to head an uninvited diplomatic mission to Korea, fully expecting to be
  attacked and very possibly killed, thereby precipitating war.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  not also the letter, of collective rule, Saigo, Itagaki, Goto, Eto, and
  Soejima resigned from the Council of State and left Tokyo. So did
  many of their followers in the bureaucracy and army.
  Underlying the debate over policy toward Korea was the acute so-
  cial crisis confronting the shizoku class. Even though the pensions paid
  to the shizoku provided less than a subsistence living, they drained the
  treasury of revenue needed to finance national development.33 Clearly,
  the government could not live indefinitely with this arrangement; in
  1873, before the debate over Korea, the Finance Ministry had intro-
  duced a plan for the voluntary conversion of pensions into lump-sum
  payments in interest-bearing bonds. Ideally, the shizoku would invest
  in farming, trade, or manufacture and thereby enhance economic de-
  velopment while freeing tax revenues for public investment. But rela-
  tively few shizoku accepted the offer, and of those who did, many soon
  lost all their money. As their economic situation deteriorated, they
  became increasingly alienated and restive. Saigo had earlier written to
  Okubo, who was in London with Iwakura, that he felt as though he
  was "sleeping on a powder keg," because of the dissatisfaction of the
  Satsuma men in the Imperial Guard. Perhaps he exaggerated; never-
  theless, the prospect of immediate employment and the excitement
  and adventure of war seemed to offer a temporary solution. The army
  had only just begun to conscript commoners, and the shizoku consti-
  tuted the only segment of the population with military training. In
  addition to providing immediate employment and salary, mobilization
  for war promised to resuscitate traditional martial values and to restore
  the shizoku to a position of honor and respect. War might also
  strengthen the hand of Saigo and Itagaki, the "old soldiers," against
  the professional bureaucrats.
  Of the six councilors who resigned in the fall of 1873, all but
  Soejima ended up leading antigovernment movements. In January
  1874, Itagaki and Goto submitted a memorial to the emperor (Eto and
  Soejima also signed) asking the throne to establish an elected national
  assembly. Rebuffed, they returned to Tosa and began a national cam-
  paign for constitutional government. Saigo immediately sailed for
  Kagoshima. Renouncing all political involvement, he retired to the
  Satsuma countryside. Although three years later he would lead the
  greatest of all shizoku revolts, the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, his first
  inclination was to withdraw entirely from politics.
  After resigning from the Council of State, Eto Shimpei returned to
  33 Masumi, Nihon seito, p. 124.
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
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  Saga where he led the first major rebellion against the Meiji state. By
  birth a lower-ranking Hizen samurai, Eto had defied the orders of his
  daimyo while still a young man to leave Saga to join the ranks of
  activists leading the loyalist cause against the Tokugawa shogunate.
  He rose steadily within revolutionary circles, even though as a native
  of Hizen, he was something of an outsider. Appointed to the Council
  of State in 1873, Eto also held key posts in the ministries of Education
  and Justice. During his tenure as chief of the Ministry of Justice, he
  oversaw work on legal codes that laid the foundation of the Meiji legal
  system. He was personally responsible for several humanitarian re-
  forms: outlawing the sale of women into prostitution and putting
  restrictions on contracts of indentured laborers.34 However, he advo-
  cated an aggressive foreign policy in the belief that only forceful dem-
  onstration of Japan's military power would end extraterritoriality. Con-
  vinced that Japan's failure to chastise Korea would be interpreted as a
  sign of weakness, Eto sided with the war party.
  The decisive factor in Eto's move from opposition to rebellion was
  his involvement with the Seikanto (Attack Korea Party), one of two
  shizoku groups in Hizen openly critical of the Tokyo government. The
  larger group, the Yukokuto (Party of Patriots), was headed by Shima
  Yoshitake. Shima was also a veteran Restoration activist, revolution-
  ary, and after the defeat of the bakufu he initially held several middle-
  ranking posts in the Meiji government. Unlike Eto, however, he
  lacked the skills and temperament to be a successful bureaucrat. He
  was also violently opposed to reforms that smacked of Westernization.
  The political program of the Yukokuto was xenophobic and reaction-
  ary. In addition to restoring fiefs and warrior rule, the party advocated
  the proscription of Christianity to prevent contamination of the na-
  tional gods, the revival of traditional martial arts as part of a program
  of moral self-strengthening, and a massive military buildup. The
  Seikanto, on the other hand, focused its criticism of the government
  entirely on foreign policy. It was made up mainly of young shizoku
  who hoped to escape poverty and tedium by enlisting for the war with
  Korea; they were sufficiently desperate to resolve to carry out an
  invasion on their own, even without government authorization. Meet-
  ing for the first time in December 1873, the society enrolled more than
  one thousand members. Soon after it sent a delegation to Tokyo to
  confer with Eto, who agreed to assume leadership.
  It is by no means certain that Eto returned to Hizen with the intent
  34 Sonoda Hiyoshi, Eto Shimpei to Saga no ran (Tokyo: Shin jimbutsu oraisha, 1978), pp. 89-
  92-
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  39O 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  of leading a rebellion. Rather, the government, alarmed by reports of
  an imminent uprising in Saga, forced his hand by sending an expedi-
  tionary force into the prefecture. Previously, the Yukokuto disdained
  any association with the Seikanto, but its members too felt compelled
  to resist the entry of government troops. Ironically, Shima had gone
  back to Saga at the express request of Iwakura to forestall rash action
  by his compatriots when he learned en route that the government had
  already sent a force to occupy the prefectural capital. Meeting at
  Nagasaki on February 12, Shima and Eto agreed to organize armed
  resistance, even though they realized that they faced certain defeat.
  Eto had already received word of Saigo's refusal to join forces, and
  without Saigo, it was hopeless to expect the support of Itagaki and the
  Tosa faction. Although a rebellion limited to Saga could not possibly
  succeed, Eto decided the issue by exclaiming that because the govern-
  ment had already ordered troops into Saga, "we have reached that
  point where there is no room for discussion. Rather than die with
  hands at our sides, isn't it better to seize the initiative?"^
  Two days later the Seikanto set up headquarters at a temple five
  miles north of Saga. There was little consultation with the Yukokuto,
  which had commenced its own preparations. The rebellion started by
  chance at dawn on February 16 when a party of Yukokuto warriors
  exchanged fire with sentries posted by the vanguard of the govern-
  ment force that had entered the city a few hours earlier. A successful
  attack on the army garrison followed, but this was the only rebel
  victory. Three days later the main body of the expeditionary force led
  by Okubo in person linked up with the garrison troops, which had
  managed an orderly retreat. The Imperial army counterattacked and
  quickly gained the upper hand. In addition to more than five thousand
  soldiers from the standing army, the government had enlisted an equal
  number of shizoku volunteers from neighboring prefectures who were
  more than willing to aid in the suppression of the rebellion. Regional
  and class loyalties helped the Saga rebels not at all. In fact, at least
  several hundred Saga shizoku led by Maeyama Ichiro turned against
  their clansmen and joined the government forces.*6
  The revolt lasted less than two weeks. Faced with certain defeat, the
  rebel soldiers surrendered or deserted after the first pitched battle. Eto
  and his lieutenants fled to Kagoshima where they made a final appeal
  to Saigo. They went on to Tosa where they were tracked down and
  returned to Saga, brought to trial, and summarily executed. Punish-
  35 Ibid., p. 154. 
  36 Ibid., p. 157.
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  ment of the rank and file of the rebel force was relatively lenient. Of
  the several thousand who took up arms, about one hundred were given
  sentences ranging from three to ten years.
  Two and a half years elapsed between the Saga rebellion and the
  next major shizoku insurrection, the Shimpuren uprising. That the
  Saga rebellion was not the last attempt by the shizoku to overthrow the
  Meiji government should not surprise us. During the intervening
  years the position of shizoku had become increasingly insecure finan-
  cially and psychologically as the government pushed ahead with poli-
  cies that eliminated the last vestiges of warrior privilege. Moreover,
  Western culture and customs were spreading beyond the treaty ports
  and largest cities to the provincial towns and even villages. The expan-
  sion of diplomatic relations with the West caused great displeasure to
  nativists for whom the pre-1868 revolutionary slogans, "revere the
  emperor" and "expel the barbarian" were not separable. At the same
  time the central bureaucracy, now dominated by Choshu and Satsuma
  men, asserted itself in more conspicuous and decisive ways in local
  affairs. Thus, a variety of factors fed shizoku discontent in the mid-
  1870s.
  The leaders of the Shimpuren were lower-ranking samurai in Kuma-
  moto who had joined the movement to overthrow the bakufu but
  remained passionately committed to Shinto nativism. Their mentor,
  Hayashi Oen, was a Shinto priest and scholar who had advocated
  resisting all demands from the West to enter into trade and diplomatic
  relations, whatever the short-term consequences. Like many loyalists
  in the bakumatsu period, he acknowledged Japan's military inferiority
  and foresaw initial defeat but held that defeat would prove salutary:
  Samurai of all ranks would unite in the traditions of old, and fierce
  resistance would make occupying Japan too difficult and costly for
  distant invaders to maintain for long. Having expelled the West, Japan
  could then freely decide the terms on which it would relate to the
  outside world."
  Hayashi died shortly after the Meiji Restoration, but his disciples
  founded a nativist political society in Kumamoto and remained true to
  his teachings. Many were Shinto priests who vehemently opposed
  Westernization and denounced diplomatic relations with the West as
  dangerous, offensive, and cowardly. They were especially aroused by
  the arrival in Kumamoto of a young American, Leroy L. Janes, the
  first teacher at the newly established foreign school. Janes was a dy-
  37 Araki Seishi, Shimpuren jikki (Tokyo: Daiichi shuppan kyokai, 1971), p. 123.
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  392 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  namic and popular teacher and impressed many of his students with
  the virtues of Christianity. Not only staunch conservatives were
  shocked when in January 1876, thirty-five of Janes's pupils publicly
  swore an oath to "enlighten the darkness of the empire by preaching
  the gospel," if necessary at the sacrifice of their lives. *8
  In mid-1876 the government eliminated the last privileges and ves-
  tiges of warrior elite status. First, the commutation of shizoku pensions
  with bonds was made compulsory; in March the wearing of swords in
  public was prohibited, and in June schoolchildren were required to
  cut off their topknots and wear their hair short in the Western fashion.
  For the Shimpuren the provisions outlawing swords provided the
  final impetus for rebellion. The sword was the very soul of the samu-
  rai, they declared, and carrying two swords was a sacred national
  custom without which life was not worth living. Recent government
  policies threatened to destroy Japan's unique polity, but if they rose
  up in the spirit of righteousness, brave and loyal warriors would rally
  from all sides. Even if the revolt failed and all perished, this was their
  destiny. After consulting an oracle and receiving an affirmative re-
  sponse, they began active preparations that initially included efforts to
  coordinate their rising with insurrections in neighboring prefectures.
  Shimpuren leaders met with Miyazaki Kurunosuke of Akitsuki and
  with leaders of bands of disaffected shizoku in Saga, Fukuoka, Tsuru-
  zaki, and Shimabara. In Choshu they made contact with Maebara
  Issei, a former leader of the Choshu shishi movement who had left the
  government in the early 1870s. These efforts met with some success as
  both Miyazaki and Maebara promised support.
  However, the Shimpuren leadership placed more faith in the wis-
  dom of gods than in the benefits of acting in concert. After again
  consulting the oracles, they advanced the date of their uprising to
  October 24, which did not give their confederates in Akitsuki and
  Choshu sufficient time to complete their preparations. They also re-
  fused to use rifles in the assault on the army garrison because firearms
  were of foreign origin. Nor did they enlist the support of the Gakkoto,
  a rival conservative shizoku party in Kumamoto equally committed to
  overthrowing the Tokyo government. As a result, the uprising proved
  to be little more than a suicidal insurrection. Striking without warn-
  ing, they succeeded in killing the commanding officers of the Kuma-
  moto garrison and mortally wounding the prefectural governor. But
  vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they were quickly defeated, with
  38 F. G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L. L. Janes and Japan (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
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  most members committing seppuku to avoid capture. The Akitsuki
  and Hagi uprisings were also quickly suppressed.
  The last shizoku revolt, the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, was by far the
  greatest. Unlike the minor insurrections that preceded it, the Satsuma
  Rebellion is rightly considered a civil war.» Commanded by Saigo
  Takamori, the Satsuma army fought unrelentingly for seven months.
  Although confined to the southern half of Kyushu, the scale and
  intensity of combat were far greater than in the Restoration wars.
  Defeat proved to be decisive, for the annihilation of the Satsuma army
  extinguished the threat of counterrevolution in the foreseeable future.
  The leader of the "war party" in the debate over relations with
  Korea, Saigo had resigned from the Council of State and given up his
  commission as supreme commander of the armed forces immediately
  after his proposal for armed intervention was defeated. Enraged by the
  tactics employed by Iwakura and Okubo, Saigo realized that in the
  near future he would have little power to influence policy. If he re-
  mained in the government, his principal role would be the un-
  rewarding and morally distasteful task of reconciling former comrades
  at arms in the army and bureaucracy to policies that further undercut
  the position of the shizoku class.40 Saigo was disgusted by the preten-
  tiousness, venality, and vanity of many of his colleagues. He had
  publicly insulted Inoue Kaoru, Kido Takayoshi's protege^ over his
  unsavory connections with the business world, and his relations with
  Yamagata, whom he respected, had recently become strained owing to
  the Yamashiroya incident.*1
  After resigning, Saigo insisted that he wanted nothing more to do
  with politics and refused to support either Eto's revolt or Itagaki's
  campaign for an elected national assembly. However, whatever his
  initial intentions may have been, the possibility of his living out his life
  as a gentleman farmer was greatly diminished by the actions of his
  followers. As soon as Saigo's break with the government became
  known, a large contingent of officers and soldiers from the Imperial
  Guard picked up their weapons and followed him back to Kagoshima.
  Soon they were joined by more than three hundred clansmen from the
  newly formed national police, who, like the guards, pointedly ignored
  appeals from the emperor not to desert. Together they formed the
  39 Japanese historians use the term teinan senso (southwestern war) rather than Satsuma Rebel-
  lion. 
  40 Masumi, Nihonseud, p. 116.
  41 Hackett, Yamagata, p. 71. Yamashiroya, a military supplier that Yamagata had trusted and
  favored, had embezzled funds.
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  394 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  nucleus of a potential rebel army; the only question was what Saigo
  would do.*2
  Saigo had not encouraged his followers to defect and may have been,
  as some argue, more dismayed than pleased by their actions. Neverthe-
  less, six months after returning to Satsuma, he established a system of
  "private schools" (shigakko) which closely resembled military acade-
  mies. The success of the shigakko was due in no small part to Saigo's
  patronage: He provided funds for the schools from the large salary he
  still collected from the government; his popularity among the Satsuma
  shizoku had only been enhanced by the circumstances surrounding his
  break with the government; and his status as a "founding father" of the
  Meiji Restoration contributed to the schools' prestige. Equally impor-
  tant was the support of the shigakko system provided by local govern-
  ment officials. Governor Oyama Tsunayoshi, a close friend of Saigo,
  used prefectural funds to pay the salaries of the schools' staff and to
  provide rations to students, and he even purchased guns and ammuni-
  tion which were distributed throughout the shigakko system. The direc-
  tors of the schools served under Oyama in the prefectural administra-
  tion, and many graduates of the schools were appointed to positions in
  the lower ranks of the provincial bureaucracy. Before long the entire
  administrative apparatus of Satsuma was staffed by shigakko people or
  by senior officials like Governor Oyama who were in complete sympa-
  thy with the antigovernment movement.*3
  As the line separating public and private institutions became increas-
  ingly blurred, the authority of the central government in Kagoshima
  all but disappeared. Satsuma officials openly criticized, and even dis-
  obeyed, the policies and directives of the central government. Gover-
  nor Oyama ignored instructions from the Finance Ministry to pay the
  shizoku stipends in cash rather than rice, and he refused to impose a
  surtax on shizoku income. Opposed to universal primary education
  and the progressive features of the Meiji land tax, he refused to imple-
  ment either law. But most egregious was the use of the shigakko to
  recruit, equip, and train an army hostile to the central government.
  The first academies established in Kagoshima were known as the
  "infantry" and "artillery" schools; the teachers and most of the stu-
  dents were former officers and soldiers of the Imperial Guard. The
  curriculum included academic subjects such as the study of Chinese
  42 Tamamuro Taijo, Seinan senso (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1958), p. 11. See also Charles L. Yates,
  "Restoration and Rebellion in Satsuma: The Life of Saigo Takamori (1827-1877)," Ph.D.
  diss., Princeton University, 1987. 
  43 Tamamuro, pp. 29-39.
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
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  classics, but the daily regime stressed physical fitness, military tactics,
  drill, and troop maneuvers conducted on land donated by the prefec-
  ture. By 1876, branch schools had been set up in every district to
  enroll goshi, rural samurai. For military-age males, attendance became
  practically compulsory.44
  Nearly one-quarter of the population of Satsuma were shizoku who
  provided a very large pool of potential recruits to the antigovernment
  movement. The extraordinarily large proportion of the population in
  Satsuma that claimed samurai status was due to the fiefs policy of
  including goshi, "rustic warriors," within the warrior classes In most
  fiefs the goshi had lost their warrior status at the beginning of the
  Tokugawa period and were assimilated into the wealthy farmer (gono)
  class. However, the Satsuma goshi were accorded elite status and
  continued to think and act as warriors. They served the fief as rural
  administrators - district magistrates, policemen, and, most com-
  monly, village headmen. Goshi headmen governed hamlets of up to
  twenty households and lorded over the peasants like the estate manag-
  ers of the medieval period. Elsewhere in Japan during the Tokugawa
  period, villages enjoyed considerable autonomy, and peasants ac-
  quired de facto proprietary rights to the land they cultivated. How-
  ever, in Satsuma, the goshi headmen strictly supervised the village
  economy and treated the peasants like tenant farmers. They had the
  authority to assign land to individual cultivators and adjusted the tax
  rate from year to year to take from the peasants all but what was
  needed for subsistence.46
  Meiji reforms struck at the very heart of goshi privilege. Like castle
  town samurai, they were accustomed to thinking of themselves as an
  elite, superior in status, if not always in wealth, to commoners. And as
  the lowest-ranking status group within the warrior class, they perhaps
  felt even more keenly the loss of the symbols of elite status, such as the
  right to bear arms. More concretely, the 1873 land tax revision threat-
  ened their socioeconomic power in the village. By conferring owner-
  ship rights on peasant farmers and taxing individual proprietors, the
  Meiji land tax eliminated the feudal role of the Satsuma goshi as petty
  overlords. Not surprisingly, they flocked to the shigakko once branch
  schools were established outside the city and later joined the rebel
  army in large numbers.
  44 Masumi, Nihon seito, p. 156.
  45 Elsewhere, samurai numbered 5 or, at most, 10 percent of the population.
  46 Tamamuro, Seinan, pp. 18-20; and Robert K. Sakai, "Feudal Society and Modern Leader-
  ship in Satsuma-han," Journal of Asian Studies 16 (May 1957): 365-76.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  The government did not attempt to counter the shigakko movement
  until late 1876, in part because it remained ignorant of the actual state
  of affairs. Prefectural officials, who would normally inform Tokyo of
  antigovernment activity, were in complete sympathy with the move-
  ment; they remained silent and, if questioned, denied that there was
  any cause for alarm. Furthermore, Okubo and the other Satsuma men
  in the oligarchy did not want to believe that Saigo and their clansmen
  in Kagoshima were capable of sedition. As late as November 1876,
  Okubo argued that Saigo's refusal to support the Shimpuren, Aki-
  tsuki, and Hagi uprisings was sufficient proof of his loyalty and honor
  and held that as long as Saigo remained in command, Satsuma would
  never rebel. Events soon proved Okubo wrong, but he was not en-
  tirely mistaken in his estimation of Saigo's character, for Saigo autho-
  rized rebellion only after the actions of government agents forced his
  hand.
  Late in 1876, the government sent police spies into Kagoshima to
  infiltrate the shigakko. It appears that their mission was to gather
  intelligence, foment dissention, and in other ways undermine the
  movement. A few weeks after arriving in Satsuma, the spies were
  exposed and apprehended. Under torture, one agent confessed that he
  had been sent to assassinate Saigo. The only evidence was his confes-
  sion, but the officers and many of the students of the shigakko desper-
  ately wanted an excuse to go to war, and Saigo appears to have be-
  lieved the facts as reported to him.
  Because of the increasingly tense situation in Satsuma, the govern-
  ment next tried to remove munitions stored at the Kagoshima arsenal.
  Although a commercial steamship and civilian crew were employed to
  disguise the operation, shigakko students soon discovered what was
  going on. Without Saigo's knowledge, they broke into the arsenal and
  began carting off guns and powder. The local police did not try to stop
  them; emboldened, the students went one step further and forcibly
  prevented the ship's crew from loading cargo. The captain immediately
  set sail and, upon reaching Kobe, telegraphed the news to Tokyo.
  Although angered by the students' rash action, upon learning of the
  raid on the arsenal, Saigo met with his lieutenants and authorized
  preparations for war. His intention was to topple the ruling oligarchy
  headed by Okubo. Believing that opposition to the oligarchy was suffi-
  ciently great to realize this goal with a minimum of force, he tried with
  vague public announcements to maintain the appearance of legality.
  On February 9, Saigo, Shinohara, and Kirino formally notified Gover-
  nor Oyama that they would "shortly leave the prefecture," taking with
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
  397
  them "a number of former troops." Oyama obliged by announcing
  that Saigo was proceeding to Tokyo in order to investigate the plot
  against his life, that a large force of former government troops would
  accompany him, and that the emperor had been fully informed. Al-
  though clearly in rebellion, Saigo and his officers wore their old Impe-
  rial army uniforms, and Saigo issued orders as commander in chief. At
  first he even refused to enlist volunteers from neighboring prefectures
  in order to avoid charges of having entered into a confederacy, w
  By using the shigakko system, mobilization was carried out with
  great speed. By the end of the first week in February, even before
  Saigo had notified Oyama of his intentions, armed men from the
  schools had begun to assemble in Kagoshima. Within a week, the
  vanguard and a four-thousand-strong First Division completed mobili-
  zation and departed the capital; soon after, the Second Infantry Divi-
  sion, rear guard, artillery, and finally Saigo's bodyguard started the
  march north. On February 20 the Satsuma army crossed into Higo
  Prefecture. Defeating an advance party of troops from the Kumamoto
  garrison, they marched into the city and laid siege to the former
  domain castle that now served as the army headquarters. Almost imme-
  diately, two local bands of shizoku - the Gakkoto and the Kyodotai -
  came over to Saigo's side. It was an auspicious beginning.
  After a final attempt to dissuade Saigo, the government mobilized
  for war. Three thousand troops from the Tokyo garrison were immedi-
  ately transported by ship to Kobe, and the Osaka and Hiroshima
  garrisons proceeded directly to Fukuoka in northern Kyushu. Prince
  Arisugawa assumed command of the hastily assembled army and im-
  mediately dispatched two divisions to block further advance by the
  rebel force. Thereafter, the Imperial army steadily gained the upper
  hand. Despite being outnumbered, the Kumamoto garrison did not
  capitulate, and contrary to Saigo's expectations, it repulsed repeated
  assaults. Meanwhile, the government not only mobilized the standing
  army and called up reserves, but it also enlisted thousands of shizoku
  volunteers as "police" auxiliaries. Fresh units arrived daily, and the
  well-equipped Imperial army counterattacked. After several days of
  fierce fighting, on March 20, the government forces captured the key
  pass at Taharazaka. Both sides suffered heavy losses. The Satsuma
  army executed an orderly retreat and set up a new line of defense.
  During the next two weeks, the Imperial army assaulted this line while
  additional units advanced on Kumamoto from the south. Threatened
  47 August H. Mounsey, The Satsuma Rebellion (London: Murray, 1879), p. 119. Reprinted by
  University Publications of America, Washington, D.C., 1979.
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  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  with encirclement, Saigo abandoned the siege and retreated. Although
  not yet defeated, the rebellion had clearly failed. The government
  controlled all of northern and central Kyushu, which severely cur-
  tailed the recruitment of additional forces. Most ablebodied shizoku
  from Satsuma had already enlisted, and Saigo was forced to conscript
  peasants, who had little incentive to fight on behalf of the shizoku, and
  convicted criminals, who were not likely to be dedicated soldiers.
  Nevertheless, Saigo and what remained of his army continued fighting
  through the summer. By September, only Saigo and a few hundred
  troops were still in the field. On September 23, 1877, confronted by a
  vastly larger government force in the hills north of Kagoshima, Saigo
  refused a personal plea from Yamagata to surrender. The next day the
  army attacked; the rebel force was annihilated; and Saigo committed
  suicide on the battlefield rather than allow himself to be captured.48
  Unlike previous shizoku uprisings, which were small and poorly
  organized, the Satsuma Rebellion severely tested the government's
  capacity to wage war. To defeat the large and well-trained rebel forces,
  the government had to mobilize the entire standing army and reserves
  and enlist an additional 7,000 shizoku as "police" auxiliaries. Of the
  65,000 soldiers sent to the front, 6,000 were killed in action, and
  10,000 were wounded. The financial cost of prosecuting the war was
  staggering. Direct expenditures totaled ¥42 million, a sum equal to 80
  percent of the annual budget.
  However costly the war had been to the government in men and
  coin, the oligarchy had reason to view the outcome with considerable
  satisfaction. The annihilation of the Satsuma army - eighteen thou-
  sand rebel troops were killed or wounded, and Saigo and his lieuten-
  ants died in battle or by suicide - eliminated the only shizoku force
  capable of threatening the central government. Moreover, the perfor-
  mance of the Imperial army vindicated the government's decision to
  adopt universal military conscription. Approximately two-thirds of
  the Kumamoto garrison were conscripts; although outnumbered and
  short of supplies, they withstood a fifty-day siege, thereby preventing
  Saigo's army from moving into northern Kyushu. To say that the
  victory proved commoner conscripts to be superior to samurai is
  nevertheless an oversimplification, for the majority of government
  soldiers were also shizoku. The Imperial Guards and "police" auxilia-
  ries, which were exclusively shizoku, bore the brunt of the fiercest
  fighting. Nevertheless, the overall efficiency with which the govern-
  48 The most detailed account of the military campaigns of the Satsuma Rebellion is contained in
  Mounsey, The Satsuma Rebellion, pp. 154-217.
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
  399
  ment prosecuted the war amply demonstrated the advantages of mili-
  tary modernization and particularly of centralized command and na-
  tional recruitment.
  The Satsuma Rebellion marked the final attempt by disaffected
  shizoku to overthrow the Meiji government. What does the failure of
  the greatest revolt reveal about the limits of shizoku rebellion?
  After the first three weeks, Saigo's army was outnumbered and
  outgunned. The core of the Satsuma army consisted of six infantry
  regiments of 2,000 men each, in addition to artillery and the rear-
  guard. After entering Kumamoto, they were immediately joined by
  two bands of local shizoku, the politically conservative Gakkoto and
  the Kyodotai (an association of nominally progressive shizoku affiliated
  with the Popular Rights movement) and an additional 5,000 volun-
  teers from nearby provinces.49 Thus, at peak strength the rebel forces
  numbered no more than 22,000.
  In contrast, the government initially fielded an army of 33,000 and
  sent an additional 30,000 before the end of the war. The rebel army
  was short of guns and munitions throughout most of the war. The
  looting of the Kagoshima arsenal secured an initial stock of guns and
  powder, but when the army marched out of Kagoshima in February,
  each soldier carried only one hundred bullets, enough for two to three
  days of combat. Attempts were made to purchase arms abroad, but
  even if the negotiations had succeeded, the Imperial navy's control of
  the sea would probably have prevented their delivery. The govern-
  ment occupied Kagoshima in April, cutting off the overland supply of
  munitions that were manufactured locally.
  Tactical miscalculations, and especially the decision to lay siege to
  Kumamoto Castle, undoubtedly hastened defeat. Because of the strate-
  gic advantages enjoyed by the government forces, it was unrealistic to
  expect victory in a prolonged war. The best hope lay in a rapid ad-
  vance to link up with sympathizers and create the impression of suc-
  cess before the government had time to mobilize. If Saigo had pro-
  ceeded directly to Fukuoka and thereby carried the rebellion into
  northern Kyushu, additional groups might have declared for the rebel-
  lion. As the Shimpuren, Akitsuki, and Hagi uprisings of the previous
  autumn had demonstrated, shizoku disaffection was intense, and the
  decision of the "liberal" Kumamoto Kyodotai to join Saigo when it
  appeared that the rebellion might succeed suggests that the timing was
  indeed a critical factor. How long would Itagaki and the Risshisha
  49 Tamamuro, Seinan, p. 139.
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  400 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  have held off if Saigo's army had crossed the Inland Sea? One does not
  have to be a cynic to recognize that opportunism was a powerful
  determinant of political alignments in the early Meiji period. But by
  failing to stay on the offensive, Saigo forfeited his one chance of
  victory - a general uprising against the Tokyo government.50
  However, military defeat was inevitable given the very narrow politi-
  cal base of the rebellion. Although Satsuma had been made into a
  bastion of counterrevolution, the high level of mobilization achieved
  there between 1874 and 1877 depended on a combination of factors
  unique to the domain: size and composition of the warrior population,
  virtual autonomy from central authority, sanction and support of
  prefectural officials, and Saigo's prestige as a "founding father" of the
  Meiji Restoration. Because these conditions could not be duplicated,
  Satsuma stood alone. In fact, its strength was also its weakness, for the
  leadership's parochial political loyalties stood in the way of horizontal
  alliances. From Saigo's return to Kagoshima in the fall of 1873 until
  the attack on the Kumamoto garrison in February 1877, mobilization
  had been carried out entirely within the prefecture; no effort was made
  to encourage, aid, or link up with like-minded shizoku bands outside
  Satsuma. As we have seen, Saigo steadfastly held aloof, even in the
  autumn of 1876 when the disaffected shizoku in nearby Kumamoto,
  Akitsuki, and Hagi went on the offensive. When Saigo finally moved
  against the government and authorized sending emissaries in search of
  allies, the optimal moment for a general uprising had passed. Potential
  allies had already committed themselves to local uprisings, which pro-
  duced little more than suicidal insurrections. Lacking advance notice
  of Saigo's rising, in some cases sympathizers were not able to act
  quickly enough.5'
  In short, Saigo failed to capitalize on his greatest asset. Arno Mayer
  observed that counterrevolutions are similar to revolutions in that
  both "feed on socio-economic dislocations, discontents and cleav-
  ages."52 But despite widespread disaffection, frustration, and despair
  among the shizoku nationwide, the antigovernment movement in
  Satsuma remained stubbornly parochial. This doomed it to defeat.
  Because mobilization was restricted to Satsuma and did not tap shizoku
  discontent nationwide, Saigo's rising produced a formidable, but geo-
  graphically limited, military threat. As Goto Yasushi has observed,
  despite geographical proximity, similar grievances, and a common
  50 Ibid., pp. 134-5. 
  51 Goto, Shizoku hanran, pp. 174-84.
  52 Arno J. Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956 (New York: Harper &
  Row, 1971), p. 59.
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  SHIZOKU REVOLTS 
  401
  enemy, the shizoku rebels were incapable of acting in concert; dis-
  persed and isolated, each was defeated.53
  The Satsuma leaders also failed to mobilize politically disaffected
  commoners. Class itself need not determine the scope of counterrevolu-
  tionary mobilization. Historically, recruitment to counterrevolution
  has depended on the degree to which "segments of different classes
  experienced or were apprehensive about declassment, defunctional-
  ization, or alienation." It is not simply displaced elites and formerly
  dominant classes who make up the cadre of counterrevolution, but
  strata of all classes, "whose fears and anxieties [are] heightened by
  crisis conditions."54 However, the Satsuma leaders showed no interest
  in propagandizing and agitating the rural poor, who, no less than the
  impoverished shizoku, constituted a "crisis stratum" whose grievances
  and fears might have been turned against the government. As we have
  seen, small landholders and tenants gained little benefit from Meiji
  land policies; indeed, in some areas they had violently opposed its
  social, educational, and religious policies. How great the potential was
  for inciting rural uprising and what effect extensive social disorder
  might have had on the outcome of the Satsuma Rebellion cannot be
  known. But when the Satsuma army first entered Higo and laid siege
  to Kumamoto, the poor farmers in the Aso district carried out wide-
  spread attacks against the homes and property of local landlords and
  moneylenders. Although not encouraged in any way by the rebel
  army, they apparently assumed that the Satsuma army represented the
  poor and disadvantaged and associated the Imperial army with the
  rich. Against a background of resentment of the new land tax and
  allegations of malfeasance by village headmen, rumors circulated that
  Saigo had abolished the land tax and canceled outstanding debts. But
  the Satsuma army showed no interest in the peasants, except as suppli-
  ers of food, labor, and draft animals. In fact, they treated the local
  population so roughly that before long opinion swung against them. 55
  Counterrevolution was defeated because none of the rebellions drew
  on more than a fraction of the potential recruits to the antigovemment
  cause. Because the leaders did not develop models of collective action
  suited to mass mobilization, they failed to tap the vast reservoir of
  discontent among the declassed samurai nationwide. Generally, the
  revolts replicated the patterns of mobilization that characterized the
  tobaku (overthrow the bakufu) movement: voluntary associations of
  like-minded men, on the one hand, and the domain as the territorial
  53 Goto, Shizoku hanran, p. 64. 
  54 Mayer, Dynamics, p. 41.
  55 Tamamuro, Seinan, p. 157.
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  402 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  and emotional unit of collective action, on the other. However,
  whereas limited mobilization of shishi (men of spirit) and militant
  action by Choshu succeeded in toppling the Tokugawa bakufu in the
  crisis conditions of the mid-i86os, a decade later the fully centralized
  Meiji state managed to suppress any single group that rose up against
  it.
  THE POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT
  Liberal opposition to the Meiji oligarchy can be traced back to the
  splintering of the original leadership group in October 1873. Unlike
  Saigo Takamori and Eto Shimpei, Itagaki Taisuke and Goto Shojiro,
  the leaders of the Tosa faction, rejected rebellion; instead, they orga-
  nized a public campaign to establish an elected national assembly.
  Calling themselves the Aikokukoto, "Public Party of Patriots," in
  January 1874, they enlisted a handful of prominent Restoration lead-
  ers - among them Eto Shimpei and Soejima Taneomi - and drafted a
  memorial urging the adoption of "a council chamber chosen by the
  people."5* Although it was rejected by the government, the memorial
  raised for the first time a liberal challenge to the incumbent leadership
  and signaled the opening round in what became a decade-long cam-
  paign by a socially and politically diverse coalition known as the "Peo-
  ple's Rights" (Jiyu minken) movement. Espousing liberty, equality,
  and the right to elect government officials, the People's Rights move-
  ment brought together at various times former Restoration leaders and
  intellectuals, urbanites and villagers, shizoku and wealthy commoners,
  and, finally, radicals and impoverished farmers - all who shared an
  interest in opposing oligarchic rule.
  As suggested by the circumstances leading up to the Aikokukoto
  petition, Japan's first "liberals" were members of the original leader-
  ship who had lost out in the power struggle of 1873. Indeed, there is
  reason to question the depth of their commitment to liberalism as a
  political doctrine, for their interest in representative government coin-
  cided with their loss of power. Moreover, they were prone to jingoism
  and rarely passed up an opportunity to denounce the government's
  handling of Japan's international relations, insisting on early revision
  of the "unequal" treaties, an aggressive pursuit of national interests in
  Asia, and favorable resolution of territorial disputes with Russia. They
  also repeatedly protested high taxes, especially the land tax. What,
  56 Text in Walter W. McLaren, "Japanese Government Documents, 1867-1889," Transactions
  of the Asiatic Society 0} Japan 42 (1914): pr. 1, p. 428. Hereafter cited as JGD.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  403
  then, was the connection between specific grievances and advocacy of
  an elected national assembly?
  The most prominent feature in the Aikokukoto memorial was its
  criticism of the oligarchic and cliquish character of the government.
  The petitioners charged that the incumbent leadership, much like the
  hateful Tokugawa bakufu, monopolized power, thereby excluding
  both the emperor and the people. "When we humbly reflect upon the
  quarter in which the governing power lies, we find it lies not with the
  Crown (Imperial House) on the one hand, nor with the people on the
  other, but with the officials alone."57 Officials acting in the name of
  the emperor ruled in an "arbitrary" and "partial" manner, to the
  detriment of the imperial institution, which was losing prestige, and of
  citizens, who could not express legitimate grievances. The conse-
  quence, the memorial asserted, was internal conflict and discontent
  which imperiled the nation; the remedy lay in government by "public
  discussion." Representative government, it was urged, would fortify
  the nation, for national strength depended on "the people of the em-
  pire being of one mind."*8 If entrusted with political rights, the people
  of Japan would willingly assume the many duties of citizenship, mani-
  fest a new unity of purpose, and develop the spirit of enterprise that
  was known to exist among the populations of fully civilized countries.
  One finds in the Aikokukoto memorial many of the themes and
  contradictions that permeated liberal thought in the Meiji period. In
  support of representative government, the petitioners emphasized the
  likely benefits to national strength rather than the value of individual
  rights. Instead of directly challenging the principle of absolute monar-
  chy, they denounced "despotic officials" who stood between the em-
  peror and the people. By claiming the imperial and popular will to be
  harmonious, they argued that the expression of public opinion would
  eliminate dissension between ruler and ruled. To this extent they
  implicitly invoked Confucian concepts to justify liberal reforms. At
  the same time, however, they called on the authority of natural rights
  theory, boldly citing the "universally acknowledged" principle accord-
  ing to which payment of taxes conferred rights of representation on
  citizens.
  Although rightly criticized by modern scholars as shortsighted and
  opportunistic, the tactic of evoking the emperor's authority to legiti-
  mate demands for representative institutions reflected the realities of
  the contemporary political landscape.« Although theoretically abso-
  57 Ibid., pp. 427-8. 
  58 Ibid., p. 430.
  59 Goto Yasushi, Jiyu minken: Meiji no kakumei to hankakumei (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha), p. 43.
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  404 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  lute in every realm of public life, imperial authority had not yet been
  marshaled against progressive forces by conservative politicians and
  ideologues; the process of associating the throne with specific authori-
  tarian structures had only just begun. On the other hand, the Meiji
  emperor symbolized the recent triumph over feudalism and Toku-
  gawa-style despotism. Liberals, therefore, could make a strong claim
  to being the legitimate heirs of the 1868 revolution. After all, the first
  article of the Meiji Charter Oath - the most authoritative, if deliber-
  ately vague, statement of Restoration aims - promised deliberative
  assemblies and public debate of affairs of state. Nor were out-of-power
  politicians the only proponents of liberal reform. Generally, officials
  not aligned with the dominant Satsuma and Choshu cliques favored
  broader political participation. In fact, the Sa-in, the lower chamber of
  the state council, formally adopted the Aikokukoto argument, declar-
  ing that "the subject of the establishment of a council chamber chosen
  by the people is an excellent one" and urged the Council of State and
  Home Ministry to take appropriate steps.60
  However, the oligarchs were not yet prepared to share power with
  elected officials. They ignored the Sa-in's favorable recommendation
  and replied that the great majority of the people were "ignorant and
  unlearned." Although some segments of the former warrior class were
  advancing intellectually, "the peasant and merchant classes are still
  what they have always been . . . satisfied in their stupidity and igno-
  rance, and it has not yet been possible to arouse in them the spirit of
  activity."61 To avoid disaster, public opinion would have to be guided
  and educated before representatives of such people could be entrusted
  with the power to make laws. Although they admitted that govern-
  ment in principle existed for the people, not the people for govern-
  ment, the most they were prepared to offer was an experiment with
  prefectural assemblies chosen by shizoku and well-to-do commoners
  that would be allowed to discuss, but not legislate, local matters.
  Nevertheless, the oligarchs were sufficiently astute to recognize that
  the issue of representative government was a likely rallying point for the
  opposition, and they tried to forestall the growth of a broadly based
  movement by co-opting key leaders. They were most concerned about
  the activities of Itagaki Taisuke, who, after Saigo, ranked second
  among the military heroes of the Restoration. Itagaki and his clansmen
  had returned to Kochi in February 1874 to build up a local party. There
  they founded the Risshisha, an association that functioned both as a
  60 McLaren, JGD, pp. 432-3. 
  61 Ibid., p. 436.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
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  self-help society for former samurai and as a vehicle for promoting
  liberal political thought. The Risshisha charter proclaimed that all Japa-
  nese were equally endowed with rights to life, liberty, property, liveli-
  hood, and the pursuit of happiness - rights that "no man can take
  away." To educate members to this new political philosophy, the asso-
  ciation sponsored public lectures and talks that introduced the thought
  of Locke, Mill, Rousseau, and Bentham. Although the society was
  generally unsuccessful in managing economic enterprises, which in-
  cluded forestry, tea plantations, and credit unions, it attracted a large
  and enthusiastic following among the Tosa shizoku.62 Consequently, the
  government became worried when the Risshisha tried to link up with
  other groups of disaffected samurai, as it did in 1875 by organizing the
  Aikokusha, a national "association of patriots." To deflate the challenge
  and restore a semblance of unity within the leadership's ranks, Okubo
  Toshimichi, the dominant figure in the oligarchy, agreed on the eve of
  the conference to issue an imperial edict promising "gradual progress"
  toward an elected national assembly. In return, Itagaki, Goto, and Kido
  Takayoshi of Choshu reentered the government.63
  The agreement between Okubo and Itagaki is noteworthy, less for
  its immediate consequences than for what it revealed of the oligarchy's
  attitude toward the liberal opposition. The majority of the top leaders
  were not opposed to a constitution, or even in principle to limited
  representation. They were, however, determined to dictate the sub-
  stance and pace of liberalizing reforms and to keep executive and
  bureaucratic power in their hands; as pragmatists they had no diffi-
  culty making token concessions to recent colleagues.
  The announcement of the agreement between Okubo and Itagaki
  and the promise of progress toward an elected assembly upstaged the
  first meeting of the Aikokusha. However, inasmuch as Okubo and his
  colleagues had a very restricted notion of what constituted "progress,"
  renewed conflict was inevitable. In October, Itagaki, by now con-
  vinced that he would have no real influence in the government, re-
  signed once more and returned to Tosa. The stage was set for a resur-
  gence of liberal agitation.
  During the first phase of the People's Rights movement, that is,
  from 1874 to 1878, the Tosa leaders did not actively seek the support
  62 Nobutake Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
  University Press, 1950), pp. 61-5.
  63 Kido, the senior member of the Choshu faction, had resigned in 1874 after failing to dissuade
  Okubo from sending a punitive expedition to Taiwan. Bringing Kido back into the govern-
  ment was essential to preventing a further narrowing of the oligarchy.
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  406 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  of commoners, for they too believed that former samurai, those with
  education and experience as administrators, were the people worthy of
  political representation. However, as wealthy farmers and local not-
  ables took up the liberal cause toward the end of the decade, the
  political and social character of the movement changed dramatically.
  The turning point came in the summer of 1879 when Sakurai Shizuka,
  a commoner farmer of moderate means from Chiba, published an
  appeal in which he denounced the oligarchy's failure to institute repre-
  sentative government and invited prefectural assembly delegates and
  concerned citizens throughout the country to join forces in a new
  campaign. Sakurai published his appeal in the Choya shimbun, a To-
  kyo daily newspaper, and mailed thousands of handbills. The re-
  sponse was immediate and overwhelming. In Okayama, the prefec-
  tural assembly unanimously endorsed Sakurai's plan and authorized a
  mass petition campaign. From Iwate Prefecture in the northeast to
  Hiroshima in the west, assemblymen raised their voices in support and
  began circulating similar petitions.64
  The stunning success of the petition movement was largely due to
  the broad support it received from the traditional village elite -
  headmen, landlords, and small-scale entrepreneurs who lent their pres-
  tige and influence to the campaign, thereby ensuring its success.6' In
  March 1880, when the Aikokusha convened its semiannual meeting,
  ninety-six representatives from twenty-four prefectures attended,
  bringing petitions bearing a total of 101,161 signatures. Reconstitut-
  ing themselves as the Kokkai kisei domei, "League for Establishment
  of a National Assembly," they authorized Kataoka Kenkichi and
  Kono Hironaka to present the petitions to the government. Supremely
  self-confident, the delegates pledged to carry the campaign to a suc-
  cessful conclusion. Recognizing the importance of grass-roots sup-
  port, they vowed to organize up to fifty new societies of over one
  hundred members each.66
  With the national petition campaign of 1879, the initiative within the
  People's Rights movement passed to hundreds of local political soci-
  eties, many located in villages and small towns. Among the earliest of
  the societies was the Sekiyosha, established in 1875 in Ishikawa, a small
  and out-of-the-way mountain town in southern Fukushima. Kono
  Hironaka, the founder of the Sekiyosha, had been born into a once-
  prosperous goshi family of Miharu fief and began his political career as a
  64 Ei Hideo, Jiyu minken, vol. 25 of Niton no rekishi (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1976), pp. 80-5.
  65 Irokawa Daikichi, Jiyu minken (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981), p. 26.
  66 Goto, Jiyu minken, pp. 100-1.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
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  district officer in Ishikawa. If we can believe Kono's autobiography, he
  read a translation of John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty while en route
  to his new post. Perhaps directly influenced by Mill, or possibly follow-
  ing the lead of Itagaki Taisuke, Kono organized within the year a
  political society dedicated to promoting popular rights and representa-
  tive government. The charter of the Sekiyosha boldly proclaimed: "We
  have come together because government is for the people . . . and
  inherent rights of hie and personal freedom, which are higher than the
  mountains and deeper than the sea, will endure forever on this earth."6?
  Unlike the Risshisha, which had restricted membership to Tosa
  shizoku, the Sekiyosha welcomed all persons who supported the soci-
  ety's goals, irrespective of "class, wealth or station." In addition to
  discussing current political issues, its members studied political sci-
  ence, economics, history, and even the natural sciences, relying for the
  most part on translations of European and American texts. At weekly
  meetings, which were open to the public, they discussed such classics of
  Western political thought as On Liberty, The Spirit of the Laws, The
  History of English Civilization, andSocialContract.
  Four years after founding the Sekiyosha, Kono took a new position
  in Miharu district. There he established a second political society, the
  Sanshisha, and an academy, the Seidokan. Before long, the Seidokan
  graduated young men imbued with ideas of liberty, equality, and
  democracy who set up popular rights organizations in nearby villages,
  including one mountain village with a mere forty households.
  The burgeoning political activity in rural areas that began in the
  late 1870s is one of the remarkable developments of the Meiji period.
  According to recent data, 303 societies sprang up in the six provinces
  around Tokyo, at least 120 in the northeastern region of the country,
  and approximately 200 in western and southwestern Japan.68 To be
  sure, the political and social character of the societies varied consider-
  ably. Not all actively supported the popular rights movement or even
  considered politics to be their main activity; some restricted member-
  ship to men of similar social and economic status; and others were
  founded with the express purpose of enhancing the leaders' prestige.
  Nevertheless, most of the societies were influenced to some degree
  by the Popular Rights movement and supported the constitutional
  movement.
  We have seen that shizoku popular rights leaders Itagaki Taisuke and
  Goto Shojiro saw representative government as a vehicle for regaining
  67 Takahashi Tetsuo, Fukushima jiyu minkenka retsuden (Fukushima: Fukushima mimposha,
  1967), p. 140. 
  68 Irokawa.Jiyu minken, p. 17.
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  408 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  influence in the national government. Although this was not their only
  motivation, their commitment to the concept of representative govern-
  ment was inextricably bound up with hopes of regaining their former
  positions as leaders of the Meiji government. This was not true, how-
  ever, of the thousands of local notables who provided leadership and
  financial support for the constitutional phase of the Popular Rights
  movement. How, then, can we explain their commitment?
  To some extent these men were reacting to political centralization, a
  process that reduced their local status and authority, especially after
  the government promulgated the so-called Three Laws on Local Gov-
  ernment in 1878. The first of these invested the power to appoint
  prefectural governors in the Home Ministry and authorized prefec-
  tural governors to appoint district officials, thus giving the central
  government control over all but the village and town councils. The
  second law added a prefectural tax of up to 20 percent to the national
  land tax without granting taxpayers a say in how these revenues would
  be used. The third law provided what the more Liberal-minded oli-
  garchs hoped would be a first step toward institutionalizing limited
  popular participation in the governing process by establishing elected
  prefectural assemblies that had the right to discuss, but not initiate,
  legislation and to review the annual budget.
  During the Tokugawa period the village headmen had performed
  many of the functions that now came to be carried out by the state
  bureaucracy. The erosion of their authority began in 1871 with the
  abolition of private fiefs, and by the latter half of the decade the
  extension of the powers of the state bureaucracy was becoming appar-
  ent. It is not surprising, then, that they were attracted to the doctrine
  of natural rights which accorded the propertied classes not only guaran-
  tees of private wealth but political participation as well. Moreover,
  natural rights justified both participation and the right to resist.*9
  However, neither the eclipse of traditional authority nor the desire
  to promote their economic interests accounts fully for the grass-roots
  support among local notables for the constitutional movement. We
  should not overlook the cultural dimension of the political ferment in
  the countryside that characterized this phase of the Popular Rights
  movement. As Irokawa Daikichi has argued, political activism at the
  village level expressed the desire of Japan's new citizens to transcend
  the narrow world of feudal culture.70 Intellectually and socially, the
  Popular Rights movement opened up avenues of activity long denied
  69 Bowen, Rebellion, pp. 303-13. 
  70 Irokawa, Jiyu minken, p. 49.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
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  to commoners, a phenomenon that Irokawa's research on the commu-
  nity of Itsukaichi, a small market town located in the mountainous
  Nishitama district northwest of Tokyo, amply illustrates.
  Early in 1880, the mayor of Itsukaichi and the heads of locally
  prominent families - the former mayor, the supervisor of the village
  school, the mayor of a nearby hamlet - founded the "Learning and
  Debating Society." According to the first article of the society's char-
  ter, its members pledged to "work together with indomitable spirit to
  develop liberty and improve society" and to relate to one another "as
  brothers of the same flesh and bone, with love and respect as if one big
  family."?1 Much like the Sekiyosha and Sanshisha, politics began with
  self-education. Using translations of Western classics and secondary
  works, the members avidly absorbed the "new knowledge." In 1881,
  when the movement to draft a national constitution reached its climax,
  these mountain villagers, ostensibly the "ignorant and unlearned"
  whom the oligarchs declared "satisfied in their stupidity," eagerly
  debated the shape and substance of Japan's future constitution. A list
  of subjects discussed by the society included fifteen topics concerned
  with drafting a national constitution, nine with the legal system, and
  six with civil rights.72 Several of the younger members of the society
  became accomplished political orators who campaigned actively on
  behalf of popular rights. One member, Chiba Takusaburo, produced a
  complete draft of a national constitution which, in terms of protection
  of citizens' rights, ranks high among the more than thirty extant draft
  constitutions. 73
  Intellectuals, most of whom were former samurai, played an instru-
  mental role in publicizing natural rights theory and kindling enthusi-
  asm for political reform. Nakamura Masanao and Fukuzawa Yukichi
  were pioneers of the Meiji "enlightenment" whose translations and
  essays first introduced Western culture and political institutions; youn-
  ger, more radical thinkers like Ueki Emori, Nakae Chomin, and Oi
  Kentaro were ideologues as well as political activists.74 But we should
  also note the contribution of many young intellectuals who dedicated
  themselves to the constitutional movement. Beginning in the late
  1870s, scores of Tokyo journalists and amateur orators carried the
  71 Irokawa Daikichi, Kindai kokka no shuppatsu, vol. 25 of Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo: Chuo
  koronsha, 1966), p. 91.
  72 Irokawa Daikichi, Meiji no bunka (Tokyo: Iwanami shot en, 1970), p. 105. Translation issued
  by Princeton University Press in 1985 as The Culture of the Meiji Period, ed. Marius B.
  Jansen. For a chart of organizations formed in villages near Tokyo, see p. 49.
  73 Irokawa, Meiji no bunka, pp. 107-8. 
  74 Irokawa, Kindai kokka, pp. 86-90.
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  410 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  constitutional campaign directly to the people. Dressed dramatically
  in black capes and broad-brimmed hats, they popularized a new kind
  of politics - barnstorming.
  Because of the comparatively high rates of literacy and urbanization
  at the start of the Meiji period, journalism provided a vocation for
  politically ambitious young men excluded from government service.
  Numa Morikazu and his colleagues in the Omeisha, an intellectual
  circle founded in 1873to discuss Western legal institutions, exemplified
  this new type of urban intellectual. Numa, who had fought on the
  Tokugawa side during the Restoration wars, bought the Tokyo-
  Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun in 1879 and immediately used the paper as
  a forum for the constitutional movement, publishing twenty-seven edi-
  torials between November 1879 and January 1880 that advocated the
  early convening of a national assembly. At the same time, the Omei
  Society established a network of provincial branches that promoted
  discussion and debate of political issues. Some highly committed mem-
  bers toured villages and market towns; traveling by ricksha, horseback,
  and even on foot, they lectured at temples, schools, storehouses, and
  wayside shrines, wherever they could assemble a crowd. One young
  journalist delivered over twenty speeches during a two-month tour that
  took him as far north as Sado Island in the Japan Sea.7*
  With the support of hundreds of local political societies and count-
  less dedicated individuals in villages and towns across the country, the
  constitutional movement generated a deluge of petitions. As we have
  seen, organizations affiliated with the Kokkai kisei domei had col-
  lected over 100,000 signatures by the spring of 1880, and although the
  government repeatedly refused to accept petitions, enthusiasm for the
  campaign showed no sign of abating. Even after the highly publicized
  failure of Kokkai kisei domei representatives Kataoka Kenkichi and
  Kono Hironaka that April, leaders of provincial petition movements
  came streaming into Tokyo, if anything more determined to succeed.
  From Sagami came Amano Seiryu who arrived in Tokyo in June and
  vowed not to return home until the government received his country-
  men's petition. Furuya Senzo of Yamanashi first sought an audience
  with Prince Iwakura and, when rebuffed, threatened to take his de-
  mands directly to the emperor during the next imperial tour, thus
  emulating the English nobles who had forced King John to sign the
  Magna Charta. And in an episode that symbolized both the remark-
  75 Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, pp. 237-8.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  4II
  able achievements of this phase of the Popular Rights movement and
  the limits of its power, Matsusawa Kyuraku persevered for fifty days
  in a futile effort to present petitions containing more than 25,000
  signatures from his native Shinano.76
  The constitutional campaign thus succeeded beyond all expecta-
  tions in mobilizing popular support: sixty petitions and a quarter of a
  million signatures by the end of 1880, a mere year and six months after
  Sakurai Shizuka's seemingly naive appeal to his countrymen. Not
  surprisingly, this mass mobilization alarmed conservatives. In an
  often-quoted letter to Ito Hirobumi dated July 4, 1879, Yamagata
  Aritomo, chief of the army general staff, noted the growth of the
  Popular Rights movement and predicted, "Every day we wait the evil
  poison will spread more and more over the provinces, penetrate the
  minds of the young, and inevitably produce unfathomable evils."77 In
  the same letter he voiced the fear that popular rights leaders hoped to
  overthrow the government when the time was right. Yamagata did
  not, of course, fear an armed rising. Until the mid-i88os the move-
  ment eschewed violence and at no point constituted a credible military
  threat, in marked contrast with the shizoku counterrevolution. Rather,
  what Yamagata and other conservatives feared was loss of control: The
  constitutional movement had given birth to new organizations, ideolo-
  gies, and class alliances; it presented the ominous specter of the people
  acting not merely to protect parochial interest but also to demand a
  voice in determining the future of the nation. Consequently, conserva-
  tive and pragmatic leaders favored concessions to preempt the goals of
  the mass movement while preserving the principal structures of oligar-
  chic rule.
  Until the mid-1870s the Meiji government had only local opposition
  movements with which to contend, but not a hostile public; no issue
  or party had transcended the various community, class, and status
  barriers to popular mobilization that were inherited from Tokugawa
  feudalism. But once opponents voiced demands for alternative institu-
  tions and the press joined the campaign, the oligarchs began to restrict
  free expression of opinion and citizens' rights to organize. The first
  target was the press. In 1875 a nd 1877 the government promulgated
  press and libel laws that were used to silence dissident journalists. As
  the Popular Rights movement gained momentum, the number of ar-
  rests increased, rising from approximately sixty in 1875 and 1876 to
  more than three hundred in 1880. Freedom of assembly was also
  76 Irokawa, Kindai kokka, pp. 103-4. 
  77 Translation from Ike, Beginnings, p. 93.
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  412 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  restricted. The Ordinance on Public Meetings, published on April 5,
  1880, while the first meeting of the newly formed Kokkai kisei domei
  was still in session, gave the police considerable authority to investi-
  gate and regulate the activities of political groups. All associations
  were required to submit membership lists and charters and to obtain
  permits before convening public meetings. Uniformed police attended
  all rallies and speeches and intervened if the speaker deviated from the
  approved topic or made statements "prejudicial to public tranquility."
  The law also denied soldiers, police, teachers, and even students the
  right to appear at political meetings.78 Employed selectively but force-
  fully when the occasion demanded, the press and public meetings laws
  provided a legal framework for political repression. According to po-
  lice records, 131 political meetings were disbanded in 1881 and 282 in
  1882. Many more never took place because the police simply denied
  permits to assemble. In addition, editors and journalists critical of the
  government were fined or jailed, sometimes for seemingly modest
  proposals. For example, the editor of the Azuma, a Tokyo newspaper,
  was sent to jail for two years and fined ¥200 merely for voicing the
  opinion that the emperor, no less than other government officials, was
  a public servant.79
  Nevertheless, the constitutional movement was ultimately defeated
  without resort to systematic repression. No such coercion was needed,
  for the oligarchs neatly defused the mass movement by conceding the
  very issue that had so aroused public enthusiasm. After extensive
  consultation among the leading ministers, consultations that revealed
  fundamental differences among them, Okuma Shigenobu, the only
  advocate of the early establishment of an English-style parliament and
  cabinet, was expelled from the government on October 12, 1881, at
  the very moment that the delegates to the semiannual meeting of the
  Kokkai kisei domei were debating proposals for convening a constitu-
  ent assembly, and the government announced that the emperor would
  graciously grant a constitution and convene a national assembly before
  the end of the decade.80
  Although much more than a tactical move to stem the tide of popu-
  lar agitation, the imperial proclamation struck the Popular Rights
  movement at its most vulnerable point. From the beginning, liberal
  opponents of the oligarchy had steadfastly insisted on the harmonious
  78 McLaren, JGD, pp. 495-9. 
  79 Ike, Beginnings, p. 90.
  80 The controversy within the oligarchy over the constitution is described in detail in George
  Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Japan, 1868-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.:
  Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 31-67.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  413
  relationship between the imperial and the popular will and staked
  their claim to legitimacy on the proposition that representative institu-
  tions would fulfill the aims of the imperial state by eliminating "des-
  potic ministers" who stood between the emperor and the people, that
  is, barriers between ruler and ruled. Rhetorically committed to justify-
  ing liberal reform in the name of imperial sovereignty, advocates of
  popular rights were trapped when the oligarchs, speaking through the
  Meiji emperor, appropriated the issue of constitutional reform for the
  throne. Leaders of the Popular Rights movement could not continue
  agitation without disputing the imperial prerogative, even though it
  was apparent to all that in writing the imperial constitution, the oli-
  garchs would be able to dictate the form and content of the new body
  politic. To reject this would have required a radical redefinition of
  liberal ideology and goals and a fundamental critique of the Meiji
  state. No leader, theorist, or faction subsequently demonstrated the
  capacity to reconstitute liberalism as a mass movement, and having
  failed to transform popular enthusiasm for representative government
  into institutions of independent political power, the liberals "won" a
  constitution while losing the war against oligarchic rule.
  After October 1881, the Popular Rights movement splintered.
  There were at least four distinct developments: formation of national
  political parties, agitation for greater power in local and prefectural
  government, rise of an insurrectionist faction, and the emergence of a
  radical populist movement.81 None enjoyed more than temporary suc-
  cess; each was suppressed or chose to disband well before the conven-
  ing of the first elected national assembly.
  The creation of a national political party to replace the Kokkai kisei
  domei came after the announcement of an imperial constitution in
  October 1881. Proposals for such an organization had been made the
  previous year, but disagreement between those who advocated build-
  ing up local affiliates and those who wanted a strong metropolitan
  party had delayed implementation. The issue was first debated at the
  October 1881 plenary session of the Kokkai kisei domei, but no sooner
  had discussion begun than the delegates learned that the oligarchs had
  announced a specific date for promulgating an imperial constitution.
  In an atmosphere of urgency and confusion, the Tosa faction took
  control. Itagaki Taisuke was elected party president, and his allies and
  81 Many historians consider the various conflicts between 1882 and 1885 as constituting a
  separate phase of the popular rights movement and label them collectively as "incidents of
  extremism" (gekkajiken). See Bowen, Rebellion, "Introduction."
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  414 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  Tosa followers filled the executive postions, virtually excluding the
  rural and commoner contingents.
  Although the record of the Liberal Party (Jiyuto) is mixed, on the
  whole it probably did more to hinder than to promote effective opposi-
  tion to oligarchic rule. On the positive side, 149 local societies affili-
  ated with it, thus creating for the first time a political party with
  elected leaders, a party platform, a permanent secretariat, and a na-
  tional membership. In addition, it published a newspaper, set up a
  legal bureau, and provided at least some funding and advice to local
  movements. On the other hand, because the Tosa faction monopolized
  the top positions, factional rivalries intensified. Competing for public
  support with an eye to future elections, the Jiyuto leaders put as much
  effort into attacking the Constitutional Progressive Party (Rikken
  Kaishinto), a rival liberal party headed by the Saga leader Okuma
  Shigenobu, as it did the government. Moreover, although he was
  undoubtedly a charismatic figure, Itagaki was at best an unsteady
  leader who often appeared to have been more interested in promoting
  his career than his party. He caused irreparable damage in 1882 when
  he allowed himself to be co-opted by the government for a second time
  after being persuaded by Goto Shojiro to embark on an extended tour
  of Western nations, one year after assuming the party presidency,
  apparently at government expense.82 To make matters worse, he left
  Japan at a time when violent repression of the Fukushima Jiyuto and a
  deepening agricultural recession created demands for direct action by
  the party rank and file. Leaderless, the Jiyuto neither aided nor con-
  trolled radical groups acting in its name.
  If the national Jiyuto failed to define new goals, in some localities
  party leaders revived the mass movement by contesting the state bu-
  reaucracy's control of local government. The most effective local
  Jiyuto leader was Kono Hironaka, who, in the spring and summer of
  1882, skillfully rallied liberal delegates to the Fukushima prefectural
  assembly. Kono's campaign provoked a strong reaction, and eventual
  repression, at the hands of the governor, Mishima Michitsune, a loyal
  servant of the Home Ministry. What happened in Fukushima deserves
  our attention, for it illustrates both the strength of opposition move-
  ments supported by local elites and the limits to dissent that the state
  was prepared to tolerate.83
  82 Goto, Jiyu minken, p. 95. In fact, the money was provided by Mitsui interests at government
  request.
  83 The conflict in Fukushima is given a different interpretation in Bowen, Rebellion, pp. 8-28.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  415
  When he was elected chairman of the Fukushima prefectural assem-
  bly in 1881, Kono's first act was to introduce motions calling for
  universal male suffrage and the election of district magistrates and
  opposing recent increases in prefectural spending, especially for the
  governor's office and police. However, the issue that Kono chose to
  dramatize was largely symbolic: the refusal of the governor to acknowl-
  edge the legitimacy of the popularly elected assembly's role as a forum
  for the expression of political opinion. Governor Mishima, a Satsuma
  samurai and former protege of Okubo Toshimichi, ignored the assem-
  bly and failed to answer two assembly requests that he attend its
  discussion of the budget. Kono called for a vote of no confidence with
  a speech that vividly expressed the tenor of the confrontation:
  This assembly was established to represent public opinion, and therefore
  public policy should be carried out in accord with its opinions. Let there be
  no mistaking that today's world is not the world of the past and that today's
  people are different from the people of former days. . . . Yet, [Governor
  Mishima] has not attended one session of the assembly; not only has he failed
  to take the will of the people into consideration, but he has shown his con-
  tempt for this precious public assembly.8*
  After Kono's oration, the assembly voted to suspend debate until the
  governor appeared in person in the assembly chamber. Mishima, who
  had allegedly warned against "robbers, arsonists, and the Jiyuto"
  when he took office, refused to back down. The battle lines were
  drawn.
  Because the assembly lacked the legal authority to reject the budget
  or withhold appropriations, the vote to suspend debate amounted to a
  strong vote of censure and marked the beginning of an aggressive
  campaign by the Fukushima Jiyuto to create a groundswell of popular
  support, comparable to the earlier petition campaign, that the oli-
  garchs would not be able to ignore. In this they succeeded, for local
  Jiyuto speakers were soon attracting large and enthusiastic crowds.
  Governor Mishima responded by turning to the police, who frequently
  refused to issue permits for political meetings and who intervened as
  soon as criticism of the government was voiced. What happened at a
  Jiyuto rally in Ishikawa district in August was typical. Speaking to the
  topic "Who Is to Blame?" a local activist developed the theme that
  repressive government bred revolution. Arguing that English misrule
  had brought on the American independence movement and that tyran-
  nical emperors and aristocrats in Russia had given rise to anarchism,
  84 Goto Yashushi, Jiyu minken undo (Osaka: Sogensha, 1958), p. 88.
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  416 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  he then turned his attention to Japan: "Do not the police seize on a
  single word or phrase to throw the speaker in jail and disband the
  meeting?" he asked. At this the policeman on the podium stepped
  forward and declared the meeting a threat to public order. The speak-
  ers were ordered to step down, and the audience was dispersed.85
  Concurrent with, but independent of, the campaign led by Kono
  Hironaka, the Aizu Jiyuto in western Fukushima organized local oppo-
  sition to a major road construction project that Governor Mishima had
  assigned top priority. Residents of Aizu wanted the roads built; in
  fact, they had already approved additional taxes and corvee labor as
  part of an agreement on funding that had been negotiated with Mi-
  shima's representatives. But when it was discovered that the central
  government was paying considerably less than had been promised and
  that the residents would have no say in planning the route, the local
  Jiyuto mounted a petition drive and tax boycott. Because the Aizu
  Jiyuto was made up of the local notables and many party members
  were village mayors, it was able to mount large and effective protests,
  at least in the countryside.86
  Backed by the Home Ministry, Governor Mishima ordered his subor-
  dinates to break the boycott. Two hundred and thirty policemen were
  sent to Aizu; homes were raided; property was seized; and leaders were
  harassed and arrested. Strong-arm tactics intimidated some of the party
  members, but they also aroused popular passions. Although the local
  Jiyuto leadership tried to avoid violent confrontation, on a fateful day
  late in November a large crowd of villagers, urged on by young Jiyuto
  activists who had recently arrived in Aizu, marched on the district jail in
  Kitakata where two leaders of the boycott were incarcerated. In the
  course of the demonstration, someone in the crowd, very possibly an
  agent provocateur, threw stones at the station, breaking several panes of
  glass. Immediately the police, swords drawn, charged and attacked the
  unarmed crowd, killing one demonstrator and wounding several oth-
  ers. Mishima, who was in Tokyo when the incident occurred, seized
  upon the incident as a pretext for legal action against the Fukushima
  Jiyuto. He immediately sent a secret communique to his secretary
  which began: "The rioting of the scoundrels in Kitakata provides an
  excellent opportunity to arrest them all, bar none."8? Within less than a
  week, one thousand Jiyuto party members and sympathizers in Fuku-
  shima had been arrested; many were tortured; and some died while in
  85 Takahashi, Fukushima retsuden, p. 47.
  86 Shimoyama Saburo, "Fukushima jiken shoron," Rekishigaku kenkyu, no. 186 (August 1955): 5.
  87 Takahashi Tetsuo, Fukushima jiken (Tokyo: San'ichi shobo, 1970), p. 187.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  417
  police custody. Most of them had never set foot in Aizu during the
  period of the protest.
  In incidents that are collectively known as the "Fukushima inci-
  dent," Jiyuto-led resistance to Governor Mishima is usually consid-
  ered the first of the so-called gekkajiken, violent incidents that marked
  the final stage of the Popular Rights movement. Yet in most respects,
  Jiyuto activity in Fukushima shared more with the second phase of the
  Popular Rights movement, the constitutional movement, than with
  subsequent insurrections. As in the campaign for constitutional gov-
  ernment, the majority of its leaders were of the local notable class,
  respectable and solid citizens who naturally inclined toward peaceful
  politics within the law. But despite such limited goals and peaceful
  tactics, the authorities had responded with violence, finally bringing
  the full weight of the judicial system to bear on the opposition.88
  Nevertheless, the Fukushima incident was indeed a turning point
  in the Popular Rights movement, for the authoritarian face of the
  oligarchy had been revealed for all to see, causing a decline in sup-
  port for the Jiyuto among more cautious party members to whom
  commitment to representative government was not worth the risks of
  continued agitation. In this sense, the "incident" was both an end
  and a beginning. Mishima broke the power of a deeply entrenched
  local opposition movement, as he had allegedly been instructed to do
  upon taking office; and to young radicals, who continued the strug-
  gle against oligarchic rule, violence now appeared to be politically
  and morally justified.
  In the last years of the Popular Rights movement, opposition to the
  Meiji oligarchy turned violent. It is essential, however, to distinguish
  between popular uprisings driven by acute economic distress, as in the
  Chichibu revolt of 1884, and the several insurrectionist plots of which
  the Kabasan incident is perhaps the best example. Whereas local lead-
  ers in Chichibu who had only recently joined the Jiyuto organized
  thousands of destitute farmers around economic issues, the sixteen
  Kabasan rebels acted without popular support in an ill-conceived at-
  tempt to bring about revolution by assassination. Whereas the princi-
  pal goal of the Chichibu uprising was debt relief, revenge and despair
  with conventional politics motivated the young Jiyuto radicals of
  Kabasan. Hence it is the contrasts between Chichibu and Kabasan
  88 Fifty-seven party members of the Fukushima Jiyuto were charged with treason. Although six
  party members, including Kono, had signed a "blood oath" to overthrow the oligarchy, there
  was no other evidence that any of them were actually plotting an insurrection.
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  418 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  that are of the greatest significance, for each movement possessed
  elements of revolutionary mobilization while it lacked other, essential
  ingredients.
  For the majority of the Kabasan conspirators, the initial motive was
  to assassinate Mishima Michitsune and thereby avenge the brutal sup-
  pression of the Fukushima Jiyuto. Twelve members of the Kabasan
  group were natives of Fukushima and had either been arrested in 1882
  or witnessed the crackdown. Still, revenge was not their only motive,
  and the assassination of government ministers was conceived to be
  more than an act of terrorism. The Kabasan rebels proceeded on die
  assumption that the simultaneous assassination of high-ranking offi-
  cials would cause the government to fall and set the stage for a revolu-
  tionary seizure of state power. Nor were they alone in thinking that
  direct action was the only road open to opponents of the authoritarian
  state. After 1882, a sizable group in the Jiyuto headed by Oi Kentaro
  had begun to advocate insurrection, a strategy that proved to be pro-
  foundly wrong but that reflected the despair of many of the most
  committed party members.8' The constitutional movement and the
  mass movement it had spawned were dead; the Jiyuto party secretariat
  was controlled by the ineffectual and compromising Itagaki; and the
  naked use of state power against the Fukushima Jiyuto had demon-
  strated the perils, as well as the futility, of legal agitation. Thus, the
  Kabasan group was exceptional in its choice of tactics - plans to use
  homemade bombs to kill officials attending a public ceremony - but
  not in its frustration with conventional politics.
  The particulars of the adventures and misadventures of the Kabasan
  conspiracy need not detain us, for they have been recorded elsewhere
  and illustrate only the many pitfalls that await an amateur band of
  political assassins.90 The more significant failure of the Kabasan group
  was the scant attention that it (and most of the radical Jiyuto) paid to
  organizing support among the people. To some extent, its failure to
  recruit the local population to the cause of revolution reflected practi-
  cal limitations - primarily the need to maintain secrecy - that the
  group's choice of tactics imposed. Moreover, most of the conspirators
  were shizoku or sons of wealthy farmers and not natives of the locale in
  which they established their headquarters. But most of all, the band
  proved to be naive in its expectations, believing that it could raise an
  89 Goto Yasushi, "Meiji jushichinen no gekka shojiken ni tsuite," in Horie Eichi and Toyama
  Shigeki eds., Jiyu minken ki no kenkyu: minken undo no gekka to kaitai (Tokyo: Yuhikaku,
  1959), vol. 1, p. 208. 
  90 Bowen, Rebellion, pp. 31-49.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  419
  army of sufficient size to march on Tokyo simply by appealing to the
  rural poor, recruiting gangs of miners, and freeing convicts, all with-
  out prior political work to explain the purpose of the revolt. Com-
  pletely cut off from reality, they never posed a serious threat to state
  power.'1
  The conspirators' lack of interest in organizing the people is all the
  more surprising in light of the desperate economic situation of many
  small farmers and the signs of incipient unrest. Beginning in 1882, a
  severe depression that lasted more than four years racked the country-
  side. The collapse of the rural economy had been precipitated by
  antiinflationary policies adopted at the recommendation of Finance
  Minister Matsukata Masayoshi in the fall of 1881 to curb inflation and
  promote capital accumulation and industrialization. Over the next
  four years the government withdrew 36 percent of the paper currency
  in circulation and increased excise taxes more than fivefold. Prefec-
  tural and local taxes also rose as the costs of public works and services
  were transferred to prefectural and local government. At the same
  time, the government reduced expenditures, in part by selling off to
  private concerns most of the industrial enterprises it had established
  and run as state industries.
  In purely economic terms, Matsukata's policies must be judged a
  success. Nearly bankrupt in 1881, the government increased the ratio
  of reserves to currency in circulation from 8 percent to 37 percent by
  1886; the nation's balance of trade swung from a deficit to surplus;
  and interest rates declined, all of which encouraged long-term invest-
  ment in a manufacturing sector with growing capital requirements.
  On the other hand, what benefited industry hurt agriculture, particu-
  larly the small and marginal producers who produced cash crops and
  had experienced the gains of the previous inflation of prices. The
  immediate effect of the deflation was to depress commodity prices,
  thus reducing farm income. Rice prices fell from a post-Restoration
  high of ¥14.40 per koku in 1881 to ¥4.61 per koku in January 1884;
  raw silk and cocoons, the principal cash crop in many districts of
  eastern Japan, declined by one-half between 1882 and 1884. At the
  same time that the farmers' incomes were falling, taxes rose. There
  were new taxes to pay on consumer goods, but in addition, the real
  burden of the land tax increased as commodity prices declined. Paid in
  cash, the land tax consumed a far greater portion of total household
  91 Most of the insurrections of the period were discovered by the police well before the conspira-
  tors could act.
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  42O 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  income, rising from an average of 16 percent of the national harvest in
  1877 to 33 percent in 1884.92
  All farmers suffered to some extent as a consequence of the Matsu-
  kata deflation. However, small-scale producers of cash crops, and
  especially farmers who customarily relied on short-term debt, were hit
  the hardest. Caught between the government and the local money-
  lender, saddled with drastically reduced income but high fixed costs,
  such farmers struggled to stave off bankruptcy. Even moderately well-
  to-do farmers caught in the same predicament often had to mortgage
  their land. As the full effects of the depression took hold, bankruptcies
  soared, rising nationally from 33,845 households in 1883 to 108,050 in
  It is not surprising then that rural unrest was on the rise. Beginning
  in 1883, hardpressed farmers in eastern Japan began to agitate for debt
  relief, typically banding together to demand debt rescheduling or sus-
  pension of interest payments. These locally organized movements,
  self-styled "debtor parties" (shakkinto) and "poor people's parties"
  {komminto), appeared most frequently in sericulture districts among
  small producers for whom debt management was as much part of the
  productive cycle as was nurturing silkworm larvae and harvesting
  cocoons. According to one survey, there were sixty-two incidents of
  collective action by debtors in 1884, the trough of the agricultural
  depression, with the greatest concentration in Kanagawa and Shi-
  zuoka. These efforts were not entirely unsuccessful, for there were
  several cases in which creditors rescheduled loans and reduced interest
  rates.**
  For the most part, the Jiyuto, whose rural membership consisted
  largely of local notables and wealthy farmers, kept aloof from the
  debtor movement; some party members, moneylenders, and wholesal-
  ers in the silk trade were themselves the targets of agitation. But in
  Hachioji, a market town west of Tokyo, Ishizaka Korei, a local leader
  of the Jiyuto who had himself fallen into debt, organized a community
  92 Irokawa Daikichi, Kindai kokka, pp. 345-6, who bases himself on the research of Niwa
  Kunio.
  93 Ibid., p. 353. This is, however, an area of continuing controversy, its parameters outlined by
  Bowen's estimate of three million bankruptcies in the mid-1880s {Rebellion, p. 104) and a
  recent assertion that much of the increase in tenancy was for newly reclaimed land and that
  "real income per farm worker fell only 9.2 percent from 1879-1881 [inflationary years] to
  1882-1884." Richard J. Smethurst. Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan
  1870-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 60.
  94 Irokawa Daikichi, "Komminto to Jiyuto," Rekishigaku kenkyu, no. 247 (November i960): 1-
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  421
  effort to mediate between debtors and local creditors with Jiyuto con-
  nections. Although Ishizaka achieved only moderate success, it is
  likely that events in Hachioji stimulated the much more vigorous
  movement that developed to the north in Chichibu, a movement that
  culminated in a full-scale uprising a few months later.
  In Chichibu, a mountainous sericulture district northwest of To-
  kyo, debt-related protests developed into armed resistance by local
  farmers whose three-thousand-strong "Poor People's Army" sacked
  municipal offices and attacked moneylenders and credit companies.9*
  The rebellion far exceeded the previous popular uprisings of the Meiji
  period, in terms of organization, militancy, and ideological articula-
  tion if not in numbers of participants. The Chichibu rebellion raises a
  number of questions. Why was its mobilization so successful? How
  radical were its goals and ideology? What was its relationship to the
  Jiyuto, nationally and locally? And what, finally, does the Chichibu
  revolt tell us about opposition to oligarchic rule at the end of the
  People's Rights movement?
  Debt relief, the issue around which the people of Chichibu orga-
  nized, spoke to their most pressing need. In the 1880s, 70 percent of
  all households in Chichibu raised silkworms, and the local economy
  was devastated by the sharp drop in silk prices after 1881.96 However,
  in contrast with the debtors' movements which originated among the
  poorest farmers and lacked politically sophisticated leadership, the
  Chichibu movement was led by middle and small farmers who had
  only recently fallen on hard times. The three men who initiated the
  campaign for debt relief in Chichibu - Ochiai Toraichi, Sakamoto
  Sosaku and Takagishi Zenkichi - represented the middle stratum of
  village society: literate but without much formal education, economi-
  cally self-sufficient but certainly not wealthy, respected by their peers
  but lacking the prestige and influence of local notables. Whatever
  their prior interest and involvement in the Popular Rights movement
  might have been, the first we learn of their political activity is a
  petition delivered to the district magistrate in 1883 urging measures to
  regulate usury. The next spring, discouraged by the government's
  failure to act on the debt issue and impressed by speeches denouncing
  the government's economic policies made by Oi Kentaro during a
  recent tour, they joined the Jiyuto. Nevertheless, when they organized
  a mass movement around the debt issue in August, they did not turn
  to the Chichibu Jiyuto for help. Instead, they approached hard-
  95 Bowen, Rebellion, pp. 49-67.
  96 Inoue Koji, Chichibu jiken (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1968), p. 12.
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  422 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  pressed small farmers like themselves and made the village the unit of
  recruitment and mobilization. By September, they had mobilized a
  core of more than one hundred committed supporters. The Chichibu
  Komminto (Poor People's Party) had been born."
  The Chichibu Komminto decided on armed resistance only after the
  police and courts refused to do anything about the debt crisis and local
  creditors rejected conciliation. Its leaders had tried to postpone the
  revolt as long as possible, first, in the hope that continued agitation
  would produce tangible results and, second, to allow sufficient time
  for preparations. The head of the Komminto, Tashiro Eisuke, and
  several of his lieutenants wanted at least one month to plan the upris-
  ing, arguing that success depended on simultaneous risings in neigh-
  boring provinces. However, they were forced to act prematurely be-
  cause local fanners faced imminent foreclosures; by October Chichibu
  moneylenders had begun to call in their debts.'8 The final decision for
  revolt was made on October 25, and one week later the Komminto
  army assembled to hear Tashiro read out the orders of battle.
  The brief success of the rebel army and its subsequent defeat were
  described and analyzed by Roger Bowen.w What concerns us here is
  not the collapse of the rebel army but the political character of the
  rebellion. Consider its military organization. The formal command
  structure contained a clearly articulated hierarchy of staff positions
  descending from Tashiro, the commander in chief, to batallion lead-
  ers, establishing clear lines of authority needed to formulate and imple-
  ment strategy. In addition, the goals of the revolt were clearly outlined
  and were supported by the rank and file, many of whom insisted on
  the rightness of their actions even after their arrest. At least some units
  followed orders and fought spiritedly, even when outnumbered and
  outgunned. These and other facts suggest a level of political conscious-
  ness greater than that found in Tokugawa peasant revolts or the rural
  protests of the early Meiji period.
  On the other hand, the sophisticated conception of military organiza-
  tion evident in the formal command structure broke down once the
  Komminto army took the field. On the third day of the revolt, when it
  was learned that the Imperial army was closing in, the batallion com-
  manders disobeyed orders, creating such confusion that further at-
  tempts to coordinate operations ended. When Tashiro absconded the
  following day, the greater part of the army, which had grown to over
  five thousand men, melted away. As in traditional peasant revolts,
  97 Ibid., pp. 41-43. 
  98 Ibid., p. 72. 
  99 Bo wen, Rebellion, pp. 59-67.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  423
  participation was neither individual nor entirely voluntary; to a large
  extent it represented a collective decision made by each village. And if
  there is evidence that some of the rank and file understood their
  actions in explicitly political terms, there is also evidence that many
  used the traditional language of yonaoshi (world rectification) to "equal-
  ize wealth," "aid the poor," and create "the kingdom of peace and
  tranquility" to describe the purpose of the revolt. They also raised
  banners proclaiming Itagaki Taisuke, "lord of world rectification" and
  referred to the Jiyuto as "poor people's gold." This is not to argue that
  the entire movement in Chichibu was predominantly traditional or
  millenarian, but there can be no doubt that outside the ranks of the
  leaders, pre-Meiji concepts of resistance to authority still informed
  political consciousness.100 According to the transcript of Tashiro's in-
  terrogation, the purpose of the uprising was to force the government
  to protect farmers threatened with foreclosure, to control usury, and
  to reduce local taxes. Armed resistance was the means, but the strat-
  egy was to use force to compel the government to accept their de-
  mands. More immediate objectives included punitive attacks against
  unscrupulous moneylenders, raising funds for local relief by threaten-
  ing the rich, and attacking courthouses to destroy debt vouchers,
  mortgage deeds, and tax records. For most of the local leaders, the
  goals were economic and limited in scope. This was not true, however,
  of Kikuchi Kambei and Ide Tamemichi, Jiyuto activists from neigh-
  boring Nagano Prefecture who went to Chichibu late in October.
  They interjected a broader political vision with demands for reduction
  of the land tax and the immediate convening of a national assembly, on
  the one hand, and a rhetoric of revolution that had little to do with the
  popular movement, on the other. The distance between the radical
  faction, most of whom were from outside Chichibu, and the majority
  of the local Komminto leadership was made clear at the first meeting
  between Tashiro and Kikuchi. Tashiro insisted that the principal ob-
  jective was debt rehef, and Kikuchi was so disappointed that he tried
  to persuade Ide to return home.101
  Finally, the role of the Jiyuto remained marginal. A number of the
  leaders of the Chichibu Komminto had recently joined the Jiyuto or,
  as in the case of Tashiro, were associated though not formally enrolled
  in the party. But the Jiyuto group in the Komminto was not at all
  representative of the party membership, either locally or nationally.
  They had joined the Jiyuto in 1884 out of concern for the plight of
  100 Moriyama Gunjiro, Minshu hoki to matsuri (Tokyo: Chikuma sbobo, 1981), p. 113. See also
  Irokawa, Culture of the Meiji Period, pp. I59ff. 
  101 Inoue, Chichibu jiken, p. 73.
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  424 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  impoverished farmers at the hands of local moneylenders. In the
  course of the campaign to negotiate relief measures, they had come to
  see the role of the state as the guardian of private property and con-
  tracts. In other words, they drew the crucial connection between state
  power and economic structure, and this gave a political dimension to
  their uprising. But the majority of the Jiyuto members in Chichibu
  came from the well-to-do local notable class and took no interest in the
  campaign for debt relief. The same pattern prevailed in the Sakyu
  district of Nagano, which bordered Chichibu to the west. When
  Kikuchi led a force of several rebels there, hoping to attract new
  recruits, the well-established Jiyuto gave them no help at all. Neither
  did Oi Kentaro, head of the radical Jiyuto faction in Tokyo. Informed
  of the rising in advance, Oi sent a messenger with instructions to
  cancel the revolt. Nationally, Jiyuto leaders condemned both Kabasan
  and Chichibu in an effort to disassociate themselves from the violence
  that they felt discredited the party. In fact, meeting in Osaka just
  before the Chichibu rebellion, the party executives voted to disband,
  partly out of recognition that they could not control radical groups
  acting in the party's name.102
  With the voluntary dissolution of the Jiyuto and the suppression of
  the Chichibu rebellion, the Popular Rights movement ended. Al-
  though Jiyuto radicals plotted several more insurrections, each was
  discovered, and the conspirators were rounded up before they were
  put to the test.10* What did the liberal movement accomplish?
  Very little. The decade of agitation and ferment that began with the
  memorial of the Aikokukoto in 1874 ended without achieving the
  institutional reforms needed to establish a democratic polity. It is true
  that the government, as it had promised, delivered a constitution in
  1889 that provided the framework for limited representation at the
  national level. But the constitution written by the oligarchs so circum-
  scribed the power of the elected lower house that it was another twenty
  years before the political parties gained a share of ministerial power,
  and it was 1918 before a parliamentarian became prime minister.
  Hence politics in the first half-century of modernization, the period in
  which the basic pattern of institutional and ideological articulation
  took shape, was bureaucratic and authoritarian. In most respects the
  102 Irokawa, Kindai kokka, p. 241.
  103 The final episode involved plans to send armed forces to Korea to aid the progressive faction
  in that country to seize power, thereby setting the stage for revolution in Japan. Marius B.
  Jansen, "Oi Kentaro: Radicalism and Chauvinism," Far Eastern Quarterly 11 (May 1952):
  305-16.
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  POPULAR RIGHTS MOVEMENT 
  425
  society created by the Meiji oligarchy was "modern," being capitalis-
  tic, meritocratic, and scientific, but also politically and socially repres-
  sive and increasingly chauvinistic and militaristic. In the light of
  Japan's difficult task as an Asian nation industrializing in the preda-
  tory world of Western imperialism, it is impossible to predict how
  modernization might have differed under more liberal political leader-
  ship.104 What we do know is that the liberals were excluded from
  power at the time when there was the greatest opportunity for pro-
  gressive change.
  Among the factors limiting the effectiveness of the People's Rights
  movement were factionalism, weak and compromising leadership, and
  a generally united oligarchy that did not hesitate to use the police and
  courts to harass and intimidate its opponents. But perhaps the funda-
  mental weakness of Meiji liberalism was its acceptance of the imperial
  institution as the fountain of all legitimate political authority. Not only
  liberal polemics against the oligarchs but every constitution made pub-
  lic during the Popular Rights movement placed the imperial institu-
  tion at the center of the new polity and stipulated joint rule by the
  emperor and the people.
  The reliance of popular rights leaders on the Meiji emperor as a
  legitimizing institution signified an ideological commitment and not
  just a political stretegy aimed at swaying public opinion. Although it
  was opportunistic as well, in a more basic sense the linkage of the
  imperial with the popular will in the rhetoric of the Popular Rights
  movement points out the all-too-real confusion on the part of the first
  generation of Japanese liberals about the relationship between impe-
  rial and democratic institutions and demonstrates the limiting histori-
  cal conditions that they faced. The emperor was the one political force
  that transcended all the particularistic social divisions of rank, class,
  domain, and family inherited from centuries of feudalism. Needing an
  emotionally compelling symbol of progressive political relationships,
  popular rights thinkers and activists wholeheartedly accepted the
  Meiji emperor. But though they were free to lay claim to the imperial
  will, they had no control over the institution to which they hitched
  their star. For the Meiji emperor, as well as being a potent symbol of
  the modern era, was also a political actor controlled by the oligarchs.
  As such, he could be used with devastating effect against any group
  that appealed uncritically to his authority.
  104 The political parties that emerged in the Taisho period were scarcely less chauvinistic than
  most other groups in Japanese society and overall more jingoistic than the bureaucracy.
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  426 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  CONCLUSION
  The leaders of the Meiji Restoration never surrendered power during
  their lifetimes, and despite attacks from both progressive and reaction-
  ary political forces, they stuck to their agenda of rapid, top-down
  transformation of political, social, and economic institutions. To un-
  derstand why the leaders prevailed, we need to consider the social
  character of the opposition forces, their interests, and the choices the
  oligarchs made. Put simply, they made tactical concessions that re-
  duced the friction between the emerging middle class and the state but
  crushed movements by socially marginal classes.
  Confronted with protests against the land tax and the campaign for
  constitutional government, movements that mobilized propertied and
  educated segments of the population, the oligarchs offered conces-
  sions addressing the long-term class interests of these groups. By
  reducing the land tax in 1877, subsequently shifting the tax burden
  from property to consumption, and writing a constitution that gave
  substantial fiscal and legislative power to the elected lower house, the
  oligarchs deflected demands for more progressive reforms without
  either surrendering power or permanently alienating the future mid-
  dle class. Despite relatively heavy property taxes and exclusion from
  the government, the wealthy farmers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and
  the commercial and educated classes benefited enormously from the
  progressive reforms of Meiji - especially reforms that brought citizen
  equality, meritocracy, protection of private property, and promotion
  of capitalist economic growth.
  Early in this chapter we observed that historians in the West tend to
  credit traditional values such as consensus and loyalty to the emperor
  with minimizing "dysfunctional" conflict in Meiji, whereas most Japa-
  nese historians emphasize the repressive role of the state. But at least
  in the case of liberal opposition movements, it is interests rather than
  values that are salient. The propertied and educated had a sufficient
  material stake in the emerging social order to keep them from launch-
  ing a truly radical attack on the government. Their class interests
  dictated compromise rather than unrestrained confrontation; they
  faced selective, and not massive, repression by the state.
  However, the classes marginalized by the Meiji reforms, groups that
  were losing social power as a result of modernization, faced an entirely
  different situation. The traditional warrior and small-scale subsistence
  fanner did not fit into the new order, and the government sacrificed
  their social needs quite ruthlessly to speed national integration and
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  CONCLUSION 
  427
  capital accumulation. Victims of the particular development strategies
  pursued by the Meiji government, these groups suffered severe and
  irreversible decline in socioeconomic status. They had every reason to
  revolt, but why did their rebellion fail?
  Historically, the ability of governments to repress rebellion has been
  profoundly influenced by interaction with world political and economic
  systems.10* Japan in the mid-nineteenth century was no exception. In
  the decade preceding the Meiji Restoration, military and economic
  pressures of Western imperialism hastened the collapse of the Toku-
  gawa bakufu. Commodore Matthew C. Perry's warships undermined
  the legitimacy of the shogun and created a sense of national crisis within
  the ruling class. Faced with a possible loss of national independence, the
  bakufu was forced to authorize a military mobilization that strained its
  own resources and strengthened the hostile daimyo. The commercial
  treaties imposed on the bakufu by the Western powers disrupted finan-
  cial and commodity markets. Rampant inflation, food shortages, hoard-
  ing, and rice riots further weakened Tokugawa authority. In the end,
  only a few of the hereditary vassals of the Tokugawa house were willing
  to fight on its behalf. Overall, the victory of the tobaku (overthrow the
  bakufu) movement was due less to its own strength than to the crippling
  effects of Western imperialism on the traditional bases of Tokugawa
  strength. In the absence of the acute foreign crisis, the tobaku forces,
  which were numerically small, internally divided, and ideologically
  diverse, could not have seized power in 1868 without first achieving a
  much higher level of mobilization.
  Conversely, in considering the defeat of opposition movements in
  early Meiji, we should not overlook the fact that the oligarchs were not
  subjected to new pressures from the imperialist powers. The commer-
  cial treaties imposed specific constraints on economic policy and re-
  duced state revenues, and extraterritoriality continued to be a cause of
  national humiliation. But during the critical first decade of political
  and social reform, when tension between the government and the
  former samurai class was the greatest, the Western powers did not
  make new demands for diplomatic, trade, or territorial concessions.
  There is no doubt that the relaxation of external pressure enabled the
  government to push ahead with modernization. Fighting a major war
  in the 1870s would have strained the government's resources while
  strengthening the exponents of reaction both inside and outside the
  105 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
  Press, 1979), pp. 23-4.
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  428 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  oligarchy; a prolonged conflict would have necessitated mobilizing the
  shizoku. Once the traditional warrior class had been rearmed, it is
  unlikely that the government could have eliminated its stipends and
  class privileges. And without these reforms, the basis of the alliance
  between the oligarchy and wealthy commoners and progressive shi-
  zoku - meritocracy, lower property taxes, and the 1889 constitution -
  would have vanished.
  The second contextual factor that aided the government was the
  sequential, rather than simultaneous, rise of opposition forces. The
  oligarchs faced challenges from both reactionary and progressive move-
  ments, but they did not have to confront both at the same time. Al-
  though the shizoku revolts overlapped with protests against the land tax,
  the constitutional movement reached its apogee well after the danger of
  shizoku rebellion had passed. Moreover, the liberal phase of the Popular
  Rights movement coincided with a period of general prosperity. From
  the defeat of the Satsuma Rebellion to the Matsukata deflation, good
  weather, the strong export demand for silk, expansive monetary poli-
  cies, and inflation that reduced the farmers' real taxes created unprece-
  dented prosperity in the countryside - conditions more favorable to
  reformist politics than to radical movements. Finally, when the Matsu-
  kata deflation brought severe hardship to the villages in the 1880s, the
  constitutional movement was already in full retreat. And because the
  principal demand of the rural poor was debt relief, the Jiyuto ignored
  them. Leaderless except in Chichibu, poor farmers did not mobilize
  effectively.
  Without a conjuncture of external and internally destabilizing forces,
  revolts by shizoku and poor farmers could not possibly succeed so long
  as they remained localized movements. Mass mobilization along class
  lines was a precondition for success, yet in the end only a minority of
  shizoku and impoverished farmers took up arms against the state.
  The very limited scale of antigovernment mobilization, despite the
  substantial decline in socioeconomic wellbeing nationwide, is the sa-
  lient factor in the defeat of armed opposition to the Meiji oligarchy.
  Unlike the groups that rallied around the issues of property taxes and
  representative government, declassed shizoku and subsistence fanners
  had gained little and lost a great deal as a result of Meiji moderniza-
  tion. They had ample cause to take up arms, but comparatively few
  did.
  There is very little evidence to support the claim that loyalty to the
  emperor, one of the traditional values assumed to have reduced politi-
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  CONCLUSION 
  429
  cal conflict in Meiji, had a decisive impact on the political behavior of
  ex-samurai who were faced with the dilemma between acquiescence in
  loss of status and social redundancy or revolt in defense of traditional
  privilege. As we have seen, the shizoku rebels of the 1870s had once
  been at the forefront of the Restoration movement, and there is no
  reason to believe that they were any less patriotic or that they regarded
  the imperial institution with less reverence than did the samurai who
  served the oligarchy. On the contrary, had they not already demon-
  strated a greater degree of personal commitment than had most of
  their peers?
  If loyalty to the emperor was not the decisive factor inhibiting
  shizoku rebellion, then what was?
  Shizoku in the 1870s lacked the organizational resources to mobilize
  around class interests because Meiji reforms had crippled traditional
  samurai structures of collective action. For nearly three centuries the
  feudal kashindan (daimyo retainer band) had defined the political
  world of the samurai. Living within pyramidal, rigid status hierar-
  chies, samurai were subject to the absolute authority of daimyo and
  fief elders; stratified by hereditary rank within the domain, they were
  segregated from the samurai of other domains because of affiliation
  with a single military house. At least until the emergence of the activist
  shishi bands in response to the foreign crisis in the bakumatsu period,
  the kashindan stood as the only legitimate forum for political action.
  Consequently, when the government ordered the abolition of private
  fiefs in 1871 and disbanded the kashindan, it deprived the middle and
  low-ranking samurai - the strata least adequately compensated for the
  loss of traditional income and privilege - of familiar and authorized
  organizations for collective action. If they were to resist, they would
  first need to create new ideological and organizational structures. The
  vast majority were not able to do that.
  Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that disaffected
  veterans of the tdbaku movement and not, for instance, Tokugawa
  loyalists led the shizoku revolts in the early Meiji period. Unlike their
  more conservative peers, they had already participated in voluntaristic
  political associations which to some degree transcended ascriptive sta-
  tus. Having once rebelled against established political authority, they
  could more easily authorize their own actions in terms of higher princi-
  ples, even when this entailed breaking the emperor's laws. They did
  not, however, foresee the need to go beyond the organizations of the
  tdbaku movement, and they never developed class-based structures for
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  430 
  OPPOSITION MOVEMENTS IN EARLY MEIJI
  political action. As we have seen, they continued to rely on local
  associations of like-minded "men of spirit," and these proved inade-
  quate against the newly centralized state.
  Meiji reforms also undercut the social basis of traditional village
  mobilization. As seen in village protests against the Meiji land tax,
  sustained opposition depended on the leadership of headmen and local
  notables. Although by no means entirely contingent on shared eco-
  nomic interests, the tradition of village officials leading protests
  against oppressive taxation was integrally bound up with the corporate
  features of the feudal tax system. But the Meiji land tax eliminated the
  village as a fiscal unit; landholding was fully privatized, and the pay-
  ment of taxes was made an individual responsibility. Under these
  conditions, the impending bankruptcy of small farmers unable to pay
  the land tax became a class issue and ceased to be a matter of collective
  village concern. Moreover, the modernization of the legal system and
  security apparatus strengthened the position of the landlords and mon-
  eylenders. Unlike the bakufu and daimyo, the Meiji state provided
  policing at the village level, laws that protected private property, and
  courts to enforce them - all of which reduced local constraints on
  individual acquisition.
  The sharp and permanent rise in tenancy during the agricultural
  depression of 1882-6 stands out as the most decisive change in rural
  relations in the early Meiji period. Deprived of the thin margin of
  protection that village solidarity had once provided, impoverished
  farmers suffered massive loss of land as a direct consequence of mone-
  tary and fiscal policies enacted by the oligarchy to spur capital accumu-
  lation and investment in industry. But only in Chichibu did they take
  up arms.
  The conditions that made rebellion possible in Chichibu suggest the
  nature of the obstacles that existed elsewhere. In contrast with the
  situation in most areas, some, though not all, members of the local
  Jiyuto took up the cause of indebtedness and foreclosures, thereby
  providing leadership. Second, the social structure favored collective
  action by the poor, inasmuch as a majority of farmers were threatened
  with bankruptcy. Nearly 70 percent of Chichibu farm household
  heads were small landowners who reared silkworms as a cash crop. In
  contrast with the cotton and rice export regions where subsistence
  farmers had already lost their land and become tenant farmers, most
  peasants in Chichibu were still struggling to keep their status as mar-
  ginal cash-crop farmers. Third, as recently as 1866, under similar
  conditions of economic hardship and indebtedness among small-scale
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  CONCLUSION 
  431
  producers, the peasants of Chichibu had carried out massive attacks
  against moneylenders, local rice and silk dealers, and village officials
  in the name of "world rectification" (yonaoshi).106
  In Chichibu, all the ingredients needed to pursue collective action
  were present: local leadership, a mass base, and familiar structures for
  peasant mobilization. However, whereas yonaoshi-type mobilization
  allowed the poor to carry out retribution against local propertied
  classes, it could not be sustained for a long period of time and had no
  chance of toppling the central government. The uprising dramatized
  the plight of impoverished farmers, but it did nothing to change the
  actual conditions of their lives.
  It is part of the lore of Western historiography of the Meiji Restora-
  tion that in Japan, tradition aided rather than obstructed moderniza-
  tion. Although there is some truth to this interpretation, like many
  theories, it obscures even as it enlightens our understanding of histori-
  cal process. What this analysis of the failure of the Meiji opposition
  movements suggests is that the Meiji reforms destroyed traditional
  structures of collective action that, if they had remained in place,
  would have permitted far broader mobilization against the programs
  of the Meiji government.
  106 See Viastos, Peasant Protests.
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  CHAPTER 7
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Although Japan was never a "closed country" in the sense that
  sakoku literally implies, it did awaken from two hundred years of
  substantial "national isolation" in the last half of the nineteenth cen-
  tury to devote its full energy toward the realization of one goal - the
  establishment of a modern nation-state. This effort itself is better
  evidence of Japan's "turn to the West" than anything else, for the
  concept of a modern nation-state had yet to manifest itself in any
  non-Western country. In economic terms, a modern nation-state is a
  state that has experienced an industrial revolution; in social terms, it
  is a state with a centralized political system under which popular
  participation is structured through the parliamentary institutions of a
  constitutional order. By any measure, such characteristics of a state
  are thoroughly Western in nature and origin.
  These distinguishing characteristics were not to be found in the To-
  kugawa bakuhan state. Nineteenth-century Japanese society was pre-
  industrial, and its economy was based on forms of production that
  depended on animate rather than mechanical sources of power. A large
  bourgeoisie did exist to carry on commercial and financial enterprise,
  but it was excluded from participating in political decisions. The Toku-
  gawa political structure was composed of a bureaucracy, representing
  feudally privileged classes that operated within a system that reconciled
  theoretically incompatible elements of feudalism and absolute shogunal
  "monarchy." Despite Japan's high level of cultural homogenity - or
  perhaps because of it - the concept of a people as a "nation" that partici-
  pated actively in the affairs of a "state" was unknown.
  Confronted by an apparently superior "civilization" represented by
  the states of Europe, the Japanese confronted tasks of achieving
  modernity - making themselves into a "nation" and a "state" - fol-
  lowing the opening of their country (kaikoku). To that end they had
  to create a central government, train bureaucrats to run the state,
  institute an army and a navy based on universal conscription, orga-
  nize a legal system, foster capitalism, abolish feudal privilege, imple-
  432
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST 
  433
  ment the "equality of the four status groups," consolidate a system of
  education, and reform their customs.
  The individual who was perhaps most responsible for formulating
  these goals and was central to their execution in early Meiji years was
  Okubo Toshimichi (1830-78), a Satsuma leader who held real political
  power during the first decade of Meiji rule. Compared with his
  Choshu colleague Kido Takayoshi (Koin, 1833-77), Okubo was more
  conservative and less willing to sacrifice tradition in the quest for
  modernization. At the seashore near Osaka one day, Okubo gazed
  despondently at a clump of tree stumps - all that remained of a pine
  grove famous for its beauty - that had been leveled as a consequence
  of the policy of "foster industry and promote enterprise" (shokusan
  kogyo), of which he himself was the leading proponent. Feeling the
  need to admonish the prefectural governor responsible for this insensi-
  tive act, Okubo composed the following poem:
  The pines at Takashi beach
  in spite of their renown,
  could not escape the ravage of
  historic tidal waves.1
  Even for Okubo, however, the policy of "civilization and enlighten-
  ment" (bummei kaika) that Japan had adopted remained synonymous
  with Westernization. In an apparent belief that the Western powers
  were pure and simple embodiments of civilization, he wrote that "at
  present all the countries in the world are directing all their efforts
  toward propagating teachings of 'civilization and enlightenment,' and
  they lack for nothing. Hence we must imitate them in these respects."2
  A revealing anecdote about the process by which the Meiji constitu-
  tion was formulated points by extension to the larger question of
  preconditions within Japanese society that affected, assisted, and chan-
  neled the process of appropriating the Western example.
  In 1883, Ito Hirobumi, the chief architect of the future constitution,
  led a delegation to Europe to study its various national constitutions.
  Because the Meiji government had already more or less decided to
  model its new constitution on that of Prussia, ltd and his delegates
  first visited the jurist Rudolf von Gneist (1816-95) m Berlin to seek
  his advice. Gneist's advice was cool and discouraging. He told them
  that several years earlier Bulgaria, one of several newly independent
  1 Nihon shiseki kyokai, ed., Okubo Toshimichi monjo, vol. 9 {Nihon shiseki kyokai sosho, vol. 36)
  (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1969), p. 347.
  2 Okubo Toshimichi, "Seifu no teisai ni kansuru kengensho," in Okubo Toshimichi monjo, vol. 3,
  p. 11.
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  434 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  and semiindependent countries that developed in the Balkans after the
  Russo-Turkish War, had asked for assistance in framing a constitu-
  tion. Though all of Gneist's colleagues were hampered by a lack of
  knowledge about conditions in that country, one legal scholar had
  volunteered to go there to produce a constitution within six months'
  time, an offer that brought scornful amusement. True to his word,
  however, the man made good his boast. But upon his return to Berlin,
  he had provoked loud laughter among his colleagues with the quip,
  "After all, how long does it take to gloss over a bronze vessel with gold
  paint?"
  Gneist went on to advise his Japanese guests as follows:
  I am most grateful that you have chosen to come all the way to Germany on
  your mission. Unfortunately I know nothing of Japan, and have never studied
  it. Let me first ask you about Japan, about the relationship between ruler and
  ruled, its manners and customs, about the sentiments of its people, and about
  its history, etc. Clarify all these things for me first, and then I will think about
  them and provide you with an answer that might be of some assistance to
  you.3
  In short, Gneist began by bluntly admonishing Ito that only those
  nations possessing a minimum degree of latent potential, that is, a
  certain level of cultural advancement, were capable of creating a truly
  meaningful constitution. To undertake such a task before acquiring
  the requisite capacity would merely result in an elaborately embel-
  lished piece of paper. Gneist then insinuated that in Japan's case the
  drafting of a constitution might very well be meaningless.
  This brusque reply was thoroughly disheartening to Ito, the repre-
  sentative of a small, backward, East Asian country who stood face to
  face with a European civilization that was at the zenith of its power
  and glory and that was convinced of its own superiority as none other
  in recorded history had been. How could the words of a famous Berlin
  jurist fail to ring true in both East Asian and European ears?
  Yet if as Gneist asserted, a constitution, the framework of a modern
  nation-state, "is more a legal document," if indeed it is "the manifesta-
  tion of a people's spirit and the measure of a nation's capacities," then
  the fact that a modern nation-state did emerge in nineteenth-century
  Japan indicates that something in the "relationship between ruler and
  ruled," the "manners and customs," the "sentiments of its people,"
  and its "history, etc." facilitated the creation of a new form of state
  based on the Meiji constitution. To put it differently, this process, and
  3 Yoshida Masaharu, "Kempo happu made," in Oka Yoshitake, ed., Kindai Nihon seiji-shi
  (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 286-7.
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  BOOKS 
  435
  indeed the rapidity, of Japan's Westernization indicates that the gap
  between Japan and the West at that time was entirely bridgeable.
  Japan's "turn to the West" had to be carried out in two separate
  dimensions: (i) the importation and assimilation of modern ideas and
  institutions on a technical, formal level, such as Gneist's constitutional
  "legal document"; and (2) the adaptation of an indigenous, traditional
  culture and institutions to bring out their latent potential, in Gneist's
  terms, "the national spirit and capacities."
  THE MEDIUM OF BOOKS: FIRST AWARENESS OF MODERN
  WESTERN CIVILIZATION
  Dutch studies
  Tokugawa society was culturally creative and produced much that we
  now consider "traditionally Japanese," but Japan was not by any
  means intellectually self-sufficient during its period of national isola-
  tion. Intellectual activity during the Edo period can be broadly classi-
  fied into three categories: (1) Confucianism, which had a distinguished
  pedigree and possessed great prestige; (2) Japanese learning (koku-
  gaku), which arose in mid-Tokugawa times as a reaction to the
  sinocentrism that then prevailed in scholarly circles; and (3) Dutch
  studies (rangaku), whose emergence was signaled by the translation
  into Japanese of a Dutch translation of a work on anatomy by the
  German doctor Kulmus, referred to as Tafel Anatomia, which was
  completed in 1774 by Sugita Gempaku and his colleagues. Dutch
  studies sprang up as an adjunct to medicine and gradually spread to
  other areas, such as language study, astronomy, geography, physics,
  chemistry, and military science. Although they appeared on the aca-
  demic scene relatively late, Dutch studies had wide currency by late
  Tokugawa times, and the awareness of some Dutch studies specialists
  of the need to reconsider the system of national seclusion played an
  important role in bridging the intellectual gap between the West and
  Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.
  It is significant that two of these three principal fields of Tokugawa
  learning derived from China and the West and were alien in origin.
  Japan remained in contact with China and Holland, the cultural home-
  lands of Confucianism and Dutch studies, throughout the Edo period,
  although to be sure the degrees of contact differed greatly. Neverthe-
  less, conventional generalizations about the period of "national isola-
  tion" (sakoku) prepare one poorly for understanding the amount and
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  436 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  quality of information about the outside world that was accessible to
  Tokugawa thinkers. Chinese books, including Chinese translations of
  Western works, were imported every year from Ch'ing China. The
  Dutch East India Company maintained a Nagasaki outpost whose
  superintendent was required to submit reports on foreign affairs
  (Oranda fusetsugaki) to the bakufu via the Nagasaki magistrate when-
  ever Dutch ships made visits to that port. The same superintendent
  was obliged to travel to Edo at regular intervals for a formal shogunal
  audience, at first annually, then every other year, and finally every
  four years. On these trips he and his associates were able to convey
  information to doctors and astronomers there who were thirsting for
  knowledge about the West. There was thus direct, though limited,
  contact with representatives of European civilization. Just as Toku-
  gawa Confucians reaped the benefits of Ch'ing philological and histori-
  cal scholarship, Japanese students of Dutch studies profited from
  many of the modern scientific advances in contemporary Europe and
  America. Consequently, despite the restrictions imposed by national
  isolation, there was a considerable degree of openness and receptivity
  to East and West in the intellectual milieu of Tokugawa Japan.
  Even so, one cannot fail to be struck by the extraordinary speed
  with which Dutch studies spread. That speed reflects both the intense
  curiosity of those Japanese who pledged themselves to this new exotic
  discipline and the enthusiasm with which they pursued it. Moreover,
  the seemingly unsystematic activities of the Dutch studies specialists
  belie a certain underlying regularity. All these elements - speed of
  diffusion, curiosity, enthusiasm, and selective approach - anticipate
  Japan's more ambitious, post-Restoration attempts to assimilate mod-
  ern Western civilization.
  In 1815, the eighty-two-year-old Sugita Gempaku (1733-1817) pub-
  lished Rangaku kotohajime (The beginnings of Dutch studies) in which
  he recalled the circumstances under which he, Maeno Ryotaku, and
  their associates had begun the formidable task of translating a volume
  of anatomical tables, Tafel Anatomia (Ontleedkundige Tafelen), forty-
  three years earlier in 1771. It can be said that with that endeavor they
  initiated modern Japan's independent and eclectic assimilation of ad-
  vanced Western civilization through the medium of books. Sugita
  decribed the speed with which Dutch studies subsequently spread and
  the strength of will displayed by its early proponents:
  At present, Dutch studies are in great fashion throughout Japan. Those who
  have decided to pursue them do so avidly, although the ignorant among the
  populace praise and admire these studies in greatly exaggerated terms.
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  BOOKS 
  437
  Reflecting upon the beginnings of Dutch studies, I realize that in those days,
  two or three friends and I decided to take them up almost on the spur of the
  moment. Yet close to fifty years have since elapsed, and how strange it is!
  When we began, I never in my wildest dreams thought that Dutch studies
  would achieve the popularity they enjoy today.
  It was only natural for Chinese studies to develop and prosper gradually here
  in Japan. After all, in ancient times the government dispatched scholarly
  missions to China; later, learned clerics were also sent to the continent where
  they studied under Chinese masters. In either case, after their return to
  Japan, such persons were placed in positions to teach high and low, nobility
  and commoners, alike. But that was not the case with Dutch studies. . . .«
  Sugita, probably like other Japanese intellectuals with a similar
  historical consciousness, saw his own efforts at assimilating Western
  culture as sharply at variance with Japan's established methods of
  assimilating Chinese culture, which had been followed for over a mil-
  lennium. He posited three principal methods through which a foreign
  civilization could be assimilated: (i) experience, observation, and
  study abroad; (2) instruction by foreign or Japanese teachers; and (3)
  books. Between A.D. 607 and 894, the Japanese court had sponsored
  over a dozen scholarly missions to China for the direct observation of
  and instruction in Sui and T'ang culture. The contrast between these
  subsidized enterprises and Sugita's own humble efforts loomed large
  in his mind, for the sole medium of cultural assimilation accessible to
  him and his colleagues was books written in a language they could not
  read.
  But despite these handicaps - the lack of official support and awe-
  some linguistic difficulties - toward the end of his life Sugita re-
  marked that Dutch studies had developed like "a drop of oil, which,
  when cast upon a wide pond, disperses to cover its entire surface," a
  process that "brings me nothing but jubilation." The advances made
  by Dutch studies had now reached a point at which, as Sugita noted,
  "every year new translations appear." With historical hindsight we can
  add that the tide of translations from the Dutch in early-nineteenth-
  century Japan may have been roughly comparable to the amount of
  translation from Japanese into Western languages a century or so later.
  Sugita's jubilation was well founded, for unlike the days when Ja-
  pan had imported Chinese civilization, study in the West was out of
  the question, and devotees of Dutch studies could not even get instruc-
  tion from fellow Japanese, much less from foreign teachers, except for
  4 Odaka Toshio and Matsumura Akira, eds., Nihon kolen bungaku taikei, vol. 95: Taionki,
  Oritakushiba no ki, Ranto kotohajime (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964), p. 473.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  the bits and pieces of information they could cull from Japanese inter-
  preters who accompanied the Dutch East India Company representa-
  tives during their stays in Edo. Deprived of even the most elementary
  language training, Sugita and his associates had to begin their transla-
  tion of Tafel Anatomia by substituting Japanese equivalents of foreign
  names for parts of the body that appeared on anatomical diagrams.
  For example, we spent a long spring day puzzling over such simple lines as
  "An 'eyebrow' is hair growing above the eye." We sometimes stared at each
  other blankly from morning to dusk, unable to decipher a single line from a
  one- to two-inch passage of text.
  Nevertheless they gradually overcame these difficulties by application
  and enthusiasm:
  Yet we believed that "Man proposes, Heaven disposes" and persevered. We
  would meet six or seven times a month and devoted ourselves body and soul
  to the project. No one ever begged off on the scheduled meeting days; we all
  assembled without being prevailed upon to do so, and we would read and
  discuss the text together. "Perseverance will prevail," we would reassure
  ourselves and pressed on.
  After a year or so, our command of vocabulary gradually increased, and we
  naturally discovered a great deal about conditions in Holland. Later on, we
  became capable of reading as much as ten or more lines of text per day if the
  particular passage was not too difficult.'
  Sugita's satisfaction in recollecting these experiences lay in the fact
  that the cultural legacy of Dutch studies to subsequent generations of
  Japanese owed its existence to the determination and zeal displayed by
  this small group of pioneers.
  In the 1860s, Dutch studies and the Dutch language were aban-
  doned in favor of English, which soon became the primary Western
  language for Japanese intellectuals. This transition from Dutch stud-
  ies to Western learning was depicted by Fukuzawa Yukichi in his
  autobiography in which he described his experiences in the foreign
  sector of Yokohama after the ports had been opened in 1859. Fuku-
  zawa tried to speak Dutch with foreigners only to find to his dismay
  that communication was impossible. Undaunted, he made up his
  mind to "devote himself to English." Fukuzawa was a pioneer in the
  study of English and became an enlightenment thinker who explained
  the development of Japanese history in Western terms. By emphasiz-
  ing the importance of fundamental changes needed in Meiji Japan, he
  tended to slight Tokugawa achievements. Yet even Fukuzawa ex-
  5 Ibid., pp. 515,493, 495.
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  pressed his indebtedness to men like Sugita in the Dutch studies,
  tradition. Having obtained a copy of Sugita's Rangaku kotahajime,
  Fukuzawa and Mitsukuri Shuhei sat opposite each other and read and
  reread it. When they reached the portion that compared the way that
  those pioneers had set out on the translation of Tafel Anatomia to
  sailors "drifting about in a boat without rudder or oar, helpless and
  baffled on a vast expanse of ocean," he wrote that they "sobbed word-
  lessly until they came to the end." Fukuzawa wrote: "Each time we
  read this book we realize how great their toil must have been; we are
  amazed at their courage; we feel their sincerity and singleness of pur-
  pose; and we try to hold back the tears."6 Fukuzawa republished
  Sugita's book at his own expense in 1868, and in the foreword he
  related his feelings after having first read the work: "It was like en-
  countering an old friend, someone I thought was dead, reborn and
  well." He wrote that the source of energy propelling Meiji Japan
  toward modernization could be traced to forerunners like Sugita and
  argued that "the beginnings of knowledge of Western civilization ex-
  isted" a century before his time among scholars on this small island in
  East Asia, that "today's progress . . . is not a product of blind
  chance. "7
  The deciphering of Tafel Anatomia by Sugita and his associates illus-
  trates Japan's positive response toward Western civilization. There are
  two explanations of this enthusiastic response. First, it reveals the Japa-
  nese intellectuals' unusually strong curiosity toward the outside world,
  and it shows that the value system to which they were committed did
  not emphasize intellectual self-sufficiency to the exclusion of new ideas:
  To a large extent, alien doctrines and learning could be absorbed and
  accommodated. Second, the personal motivation that sustained the
  pioneers demonstrates both their intellectual curiosity and their pragma-
  tism. Maeno Ryotaku "desired to make Dutch studies his life's work, to
  learn all there is to know about that language and thus to find out all
  there is to know about conditions in the West and to read numerous
  books,"8 whereas Nakagawa Jun'an "had long been interested in what
  things were made of and wanted by this means to learn about Western
  products."9 On the one hand we discover an orientation of almost
  purely intellectual curiosity and, on the other, one of practicability,
  both driving people toward Dutch studies. In Sugita's own case, the
  6 Quoted in "Rangaku kotohajime saihan no jo," in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shot en, 1962), vol. 19, p. 770. 
  7 Ibid.
  8 Nikon kolen bungaku taikei, vol. 95, p. 499. 
  9 Ibid., pp. 491-2.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  motivation for translating Tafel Anatomia lay in his professional con-
  sciousness of being a physician. As he put it:
  First and foremost, I wanted to make manifest the fact that actual dissections
  performed on human bodies confirmed the accuracy of Dutch anatomical
  diagrams and disproved Chinese and Japanese theories. Then I wanted to
  apply the Dutch theories in clinical treatment and to make these available to
  other physicians in order to encourage the development of new techniques.
  Sugita's sense of mission had first been sparked by witnessing an
  autopsy performed at Kotsugahara in Edo in 1771. On the way home,
  he wrote, he discussed its results with Maeno and Nakagawa:
  What a revelation that day's demonstration had been! We were truly embar-
  rassed to discover our ignorance. Each of us, who was responsible for serving
  our lord as a physician, proved to be totally ignorant of the basic anatomical
  structure of man, which is fundamental to medical science. It was a disgrace
  that we had been carrying on our duties all along in this state of ignorance.
  Some writers have tended to associate Dutch studies with a critical
  attitude toward feudal authority, but here we find one of its most
  devoted proponents troubled by the sense of "disgrace" stemming
  from his unworthiness to "serve his lord" properly. Such an ethos,
  emphasizing as Sugita did the responsibilities of a physician's heredi-
  tary status, easily transforms itself into an occupational ethic. The
  intensity of this spirit - related also to bushido - and the ease with
  which it could be translated into an occupational ethic can be consid-
  ered two key factors that made Japan's "turn to the West" possible at
  an early stage in its contact with the West, thereby distinguishing the
  Japanese experience from that of other non-Western countries.
  The significance ofTokugawa lexicography
  In the initial phase of contact between Western and non-Western peo-
  ples, most lexicography was a product of the burgeoning, expansive
  West. This is seen, for instance, in the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapan
  containing over thirty thousand entries compiled by the Jesuit Joao
  Rodriguez Tcuzzu in 1603. Later, however, non-Western peoples who
  perceived Europe to be "advanced" and strove to "catch up" with
  Western civilization seized this lexicographic initiative. The Japanese
  provide a good example. The growth of Dutch studies in Japan was
  ensured after 1796, when Inamura Sampaku published a Dutch-
  Japanese dictionary, the Edo Halma. This was an adaptation of Fran-
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  gois Halma's eighty-thousand-word Dutch-French dictionary in which
  Inamura substituted Japanese translations for the French equivalents.
  In the era of early encounters with English-speaking peoples that fol-
  lowed, Dutch-English conversations books, English-Dutch dictionar-
  ies, and then English-language dictionaries were used. Webster's dictio-
  nary first reached Japan via the Perry squadron; and later, in i860,
  Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakahama Manjiro each brought back a copy
  from San Francisco. The first English-Japanese dictionary, the six-
  thousand-word Angeria gorin taisei, was compiled at the bakufu's direc-
  tion by the Nagasaki Dutch interpreter, Motoki Shozaemon, in 1814;
  but Hori Tatsunosuke's Ei-Wa taiyaku shuchin jisho,10 containing over
  thirty thousand entries and published in 1862, received far greater
  use. Hori used entries and sample phrases and sentences from the
  English-Dutch portion of H. Picard's A New Pocket Dictionary of the
  English-Dutch and Dutch-English Languages, eliminated the Dutch defi-
  nitions, and supplied Japanese equivalents from the Nagasaki Halma,
  a Nagasaki version of the Edo Halma that had more colloquial expres-
  sions. Thus the study of English developed from that of Dutch, and
  knowledge accumulated rapidly. Among the dictionaries compiled by
  Americans in Japan is the Wa-Ei gorin shusei, a work containing over
  twenty thousand words, published in 1867 by James Hepburn (1815—
  1911), Presbyterian medical missionary who came to Japan in 1859.
  But thereafter almost all the best dictionaries, whether English-Japa-
  nese, Japanese-English, German-Japanese, Japanese-German, French-
  Japanese, Japanese-French, or Russian-Japanese were compiled by
  Japanese."
  A nineteenth-century figure who perceived the significance of Toku-
  gawa lexicography was Sakuma Shdzan (1811-64), a scholar of both
  Confucian and Western learning. Sakuma planned to publish a revised
  and enlarged edition of the Edo Halma, and to cover the expenses he
  borrowed twelve hundred ryo from his domain by pledging his own
  stipend of one hundred koku rice as collateral. Although this plan
  10 Hori changed the "pocket" of Picard's pocket dictionary to a kimono sleeve; hence the
  character shu, as in sode.
  11 Professor N. I. Konrad's Japanese-Russian Dictionary, a possible exception, remains unsur-
  passed by Japanese efforts, a fact that probably indicates Japanese priorities in foreign-
  language study. What has been said about Western-language dictionaries applies equally to
  Chinese. Morohashi Tetsuji's reference dictionary of classical Chinese, Dai Kan-Wa jiten,
  published in i960 by a publishing house that had to set the work a second time after its plant
  was destroyed in 1945, is recognized as standard in all countries where Chinese characters
  serve as the written medium. Like the Western-language dictionaries, this work represents an
  attempt to assimilate a superior foreign culture by a less developed civilization, but it never-
  theless surpasses all similar lexicographical achievements in China itself.
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  442 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  came to naught because the bakufu refused to grant permission,
  Sakuma's petition shows his perception of the importance and mean-
  ing of the enterprise he proposed:
  If only you would see this project as a way of laying the foundation for access
  to and mastery of proficiency in die arts and sciences, as a step toward
  adopting die strong points of countries on every continent in order to create a
  Japan forever able to maintain its autonomy in the world, then whatever
  criticism it might draw would be as inconsequential as the flapping of a
  mosquito's wings.12
  The "science" referred to in Sakuma's famous slogan "Eastern moral-
  ity, Western science" is often taken to mean only "technology," but in
  fact, his term has broader implications, including the arts and sciences
  that form the basis of that technology. This can be seen in comments
  he made to a correspondent:
  At present die learning of China and Japan is not sufficient; it must be
  supplemented and made complete by inclusion of the learning of the entire
  world. Columbus discovered a new world by "investigating principle";
  Copernicus worked out the theory of heliocentricity; and Newton recognized
  die trudi of gravitational laws. Since diese three great discoveries were made,
  all arts and sciences have been based on them - each is true, not one is false. •'
  Sakuma believed that Confucianism was fully compatible with West-
  ern military technology and hence that Chinese and Western doctrines
  were ultimately identical. To him, dictionary compilation was an indis-
  pensable means to acquire this fundamentally identical knowledge. In
  the petition cited earlier, he also stated:
  Nothing is more important to die conduct of war, nor is diere anything more
  pressing in present-day coastal defense, dian Sun Tzu's adage "Know the
  enemy." Hence, I would like to see all persons in die realm thoroughly
  familiar widi die enemy's conditions, something diat can best be achieved by
  allowing them to read barbarian books as they read their own language. There
  is no better way to enable them to do this than publishing this dictionary.
  The compilation and publication of this dictionary thus symbolized
  Sakuma's desire to understand foreign civilization in a fundamental
  and comprehensive manner. He was also eager to disseminate such
  understanding among his countrymen. The assimilation of Western
  culture through such a process of enlightenment was pursued on a
  national scale by the Meiji government a few years later, but to
  12 "Haruma wo hangyo nite kaihan sen koto wo chinzu," in Shozan zenshu (Tokyo: Shobunkan,
  1913), vol. 1, p. 128.
  13 "Letter to Yanagawa Seigan," dated 3/6/Ansei 5 (1858), in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 845-6.
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  Sakuma, it still seemed as though the task hinged entirely on the
  bakufu's approval for publishing his laboriously brush-copied dictio-
  nary manuscript. Such was this Tokugawa intellectual's intensity on
  the eve of the Meiji Restoration.
  The cultural and intellectual milieu of Dutch studies
  Consideration of the setting within which Dutch studies was able to
  develop in Tokugawa times must include attention to general cultural
  traditions as well as an awareness of the specific trends of eighteenth-
  century intellectual hie.
  Tokugawa intellectuals began with an awareness of their ancestors'
  ability to adopt and adapt Chinese civilization; a millennium earlier,
  the Japanese had also thought of their land as existing on the outer
  fringes of a world cultural sphere. In a sense, nineteenth-century Japa-
  nese intellectuals needed only to transfer that center from China to the
  West. In this regard, the Japanese consciousness and problems dif-
  fered strikingly from those of China, and consequently Japanese think-
  ers were probably better equipped psychologically for assimilating
  Western culture than were their Chinese counterparts. Just as they
  had earlier studied Chinese civilization under the slogan "Japanese
  spirit, Chinese skills," now they spoke of "Japanese spirit, Western
  skills."
  The eighteenth-century pioneers in Dutch studies were fully aware
  of this parallel. Sugita Gempaku concluded his recollections of the
  growth of Dutch studies by asking: "Was it not because our minds had
  already been trained through Chinese learning that Dutch studies
  were able to develop this rapidly?"14 Moreover, the "training" he had
  in mind had linguistic as well as attitudinal aspects. Unlike other East
  Asian peoples on the fringe of the Chinese cultural sphere, the Japa-
  nese early developed a method for adapting texts in classical Chinese
  to the syntactical rules of their own language, instead of reading classi-
  cal Chinese as a foreign language. The result, known as kambun read-
  ing, was a complex and cumbersome procedure, but it involved rigor-
  ous intellectual training in translation that had as one consequence the
  nationalization of a foreign language.
  Partly because of this and partly because of its relative isolation,
  Japan was never overwhelmed by Chinese - or Western - learning
  but retained a substantial cultural autonomy from which assimilation
  14 "Ranto kotohajime," in Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 95, p. 505.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  could be managed. Just enough could be learned about the outside
  world to whet the curiosity of men seeking knowledge and instill in
  them admiration for the West without totally absorbing them into the
  "superior" culture. Given the physical isolation in which Tokugawa
  scholars of Dutch studies labored, there was never any possibility of
  their identifying themselves completely with the alien culture; their
  admiration for the West was fated to be pursued along purely intellec-
  tual lines. This geographical limitation contributed to the emphasis on
  retaining and strengthening the "Japanese spirit" while pursuing
  "Western skills." Hashimoto Sanai (1831-59) wrote that Japan should
  "adopt mechanical devices and techniques from the West but retain
  the benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and filial piety of Japan."'s
  Yokoi Shonan (1809-69) agreed and urged his countrymen to "make
  manifest the Way of Yao, Shun, and Confucius and to obtain a thor-
  ough knowledge of mechanical techniques from the West."16 Sakuma
  Shozan also spoke of "Eastern morality and Western techniques." The
  future Meiji government accepted these goals under the slogan "Adopt
  what is best in the culture of Europe to compensate for shortcomings
  in that of Japan."
  It is also useful to examine eighteenth-century intellectual trends
  that helped give rise to Dutch studies. For the most part, the era was
  characterized by empiricism, a development that arose also within
  Ch'eng-Chu Confucianism, the grand system of speculative philoso-
  phy that provided the principal current of orthodox learning during
  the Edo period. Those trends within Confucianism are treated else-
  where, and this discussion is limited to the development of empirical
  trends in relation to Tokugawa medicine, the womb from which
  Dutch studies emerged.
  Japan first encountered Western civilization in the late sixteenth
  century, before the national isolation of Tokugawa times. In that war-
  ring era, survival of the fittest was the rule, and political leaders were
  keenly aware of the need to appropriate any new device that would
  increase their chances of achieving victory. They were utterly indiffer-
  ent as to whether cultural accretions like firearms or surgery were of
  foreign or native origin. At that time the Japanese learned early
  Western-style surgery through direct observation of Iberian practice
  15 "Letter to Murata Ujihisa." dated 10/21/Ansei 4, in Nihon shiseki kyokai, ed., Hashimoto
  Keigaku zenshu, vol. 2 (Nihon shiseki kyokai sosho, vol. 47) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku
  shuppankai, 1977), pp. 471-2.
  16 "Letter to Nephews Studying in the West," in Nihon shiseki kyokai, ed., Yokoi Shonan
  kankei shiryo, vol. 2 (Zoku Nikon shiseki kyokai sosho, vol. 40) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku
  shuppankai, 1977), p. 726.
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  rather than through written accounts, and a distinct school of "south-
  ern barbarian" surgery developed. It was a physician (Kurisaki Doyu)
  trained in this school who treated the wounds sustained by the sho-
  gunal official Kira Yoshinaka in 1701 in the incident that led to the
  celebrated vendetta of the forty-seven rdnin. This school of surgery
  was dominant until it was superseded by techniques developed by
  students of Dutch studies, but it contributed almost nothing to the
  latter's emergence. The impetus behind Dutch studies lay elsewhere,
  in Tokugawa Confucianism.
  Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a number of private
  scholars challenged the Ch'eng-Chu Confucian school that then domi-
  nated the Tokugawa scholarly world. One of the foremost was ltd
  Jinsai (1627-1705) of Kyoto, who propounded the so-called Ancient
  Learning (also known as the School of Ancient Meanings) which re-
  jected medieval commentaries and sought the Way of the sages by
  going directly back to the Analects, the Mencius, and other Confucian
  classics. Thus Jinsai's school may be considered a form of antiquarian
  revivalism. Slightly later, Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728), also an advocate of
  ancient learning, had an even greater impact on the contemporary
  intellectual scene. The influence of these teachings was felt beyond the
  field of Confucian scholarship. For example, Japanese learning (Jkoku-
  gaku) held that the pristine "true Japanese heart" could be discovered
  only by rejecting the "spirit of China" that had come to muddy it in
  later ages and that this could best be done through studying the Kojiki,
  the Manyoshu, and other ancient Japanese classics.
  Until the middle of the Edo period, Tokugawa medical thought was
  dominated by the Li-Chu school of Chinese medicine that had devel-
  oped under Li Tung-yuan and Chu Tan-ch'i during the Chin and
  Yuan periods. It was a form of speculative philosophy that discussed
  human pathology in terms of yin-yang, the Five Elements, the Five
  Circulations, and the Six ch'i. But under the influence of mid-
  Tokugawa Ancient Learning, a movement arose among nongovern-
  ment scholar-physicians to reject such speculative ideas as latter-day
  inventions and to return to the "Way" that medicine had supposedly
  been practiced in ancient China, as depicted in works such as Shang-
  han lun.'? This movement was related to the School of Ancient Learn-
  ing in its emphasis on the empirical. Goto Konzan (1683-1755), who
  was an admirer of Ito Jinsai, sent one of his own disciples, Kagawa
  17 A medical text written by Chang Chung-ching of the later Han dynasty. The oldest extant
  edition was compiled by Wang Shu-ho of the Western Chin. Centuries later in the Sung, Lin
  I published a newly edited edition.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Shuan (1683-1755), to study at Jinsai's private academy. Under
  Kagawa there evolved a form of Confucian-medical thought that
  viewed Confucius' "Way of the sages" as being basically identical with
  a "Way of medicine." According to Kagawa, the sages and worthies of
  antiquity were staunch in their reverence for empirical fact, and latter-
  day speculative philosophers had obfuscated that emphasis. The
  School of Ancient Method, as it came to be known, repudiated such
  latter-day accretions in favor of a return to the direct study of ancient
  Chinese medical texts.
  The critical basis for this antiquarian revivalism was a positivism that
  insisted that hypotheses be verified. In time this emphasis made its
  proponents skeptical of the validity of ancient as well as medieval medi-
  cal texts. For example, one scholar, Nagatomi Dokushoan (1734-66),
  related the story of a T'ang palace painter, Han Kan, who, when or-
  dered by the emperor to paint a horse, was offered pictures done by
  former palace artists for reference. He replied, "I have no desire to look
  at such pictures, for the horses kept in Your Majesty's stables will
  provide far better reference." The physician too, Nagatomi concluded,
  must work in this manner. The mere reading of texts was insufficient;
  the physician had to be free of preconceived notions, tend a real patient,
  conduct a close and direct examination, and use his own ingenuity to
  devise a cure. This process was known as shinshijikken (personal exami-
  nation and actual experience). Yoshimasu Todo (1702-73), who
  stressed this method of shinshi jikken, devoted himself to what is now
  called the "symptomatic treatment" of diseases. In his book Medical
  Diagnoses he wrote that "principles" (It), or a priori speculative theories,
  are subjective, vary with the people who hold them, and lack estab-
  lished standards by which they can be confirmed or disproved. Dis-
  eases, on the other hand, have specific symptoms. In short, a doctor
  should not employ subjective theories without careful and accurate
  diagnoses of the diseases. Yamawaki Toyo (1705-62) was long skeptical
  of the traditional anatomical diagrams used by Tokugawa specialists of
  Chinese medicine. With encouragement from his teacher, Goto Kon-
  zan, he dissected an otter. Next, after obtaining official permission, he
  performed an autopsy on an executed criminal in 1754 and recorded his
  observations in a work entitled Account of an Autopsy. This work
  shocked the Tokugawa medical world. Yamawaki became the object of
  much censure and attack, but he steadfastly maintained his views. In
  his Account, he wrote: "Theories [It] may be overturned, but how can
  real material things deceive? When theories are esteemed over reality,
  even a man of great wisdom cannot fail to err. When material things are
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  investigated and theories are based on that, even a man of common
  intelligence can perform well."
  Yamawaki and his colleagues brought to the autopsy a Dutch trans-
  lation of a textbook on anatomy written by a professor at Padua Univer-
  sity. They were astonished to discover how closely the book's dia-
  grams matched the corpse's organs. Yamawaki had originally viewed
  Vesling's diagrams with some disbelief because of their great discrep-
  ancy with prevailing Chinese medical theories, but when he compared
  these Western diagrams with actual human anatomy and verified their
  accuracy, he realized how outlandish the Chinese versions were. As he
  put it: "He who treads the Way of fact reaches the same end though
  living ten thousand miles away. How can I suppress my admiration?"
  This reveals the idea that differences of nation or race are irrelevant to
  the quest for objective fact and the realization that the road to truth,
  which had been obscured in China since medieval times, paradoxically
  existed among those very Westerners normally considered barbarians.
  There was thus a clear relationship between the textual rigor of the
  School of Ancient Learning and the practical and empirical emphases of
  Dutch studies. The connection can also be traced in personal as well as
  intellectual terms. Kosugi Genteki, a student of Yamawaki Toyo who
  witnessed the autopsy, was a domain physician in Obama and thus a
  colleague of Sugita Gempaku. Another Yamawaki disciple, Kuriyama
  Koan, himself performed two autopsies in Hagi, the castle town of
  Choshu, and Sugita in 1771 managed to arrange and be present at an
  autopsy in Edo which he described as the starting point of his dedication
  to truth through experiment. The accuracy of the anatomical tables of
  the Kulmus volume he had with him that day so impressed him that he
  and his colleagues resolved to translate the entire work.
  Sugita's memoirs no doubt risk exaggerating the role of this event in
  a tradition already being transformed, but it should at the least be
  considered symbolic if not pivotal. There is a sense, moveover, in
  which Sugita and his contemporaries followed Ancient Learning to go
  a step beyond the promising beginning made earlier by Yamawaki.
  Despite the rhetoric of practicality and observation found in Yama-
  waki and his contemporaries, they tended in practice to restrict them-
  selves to the wisdom of antiquity and refrained from pushing their
  ideas to their logical conclusions.18 Sugita, however, in his Nocturnal
  18 For developments in medicine and thought on the eve of the rise of rangaku, see Fujikawa
  Hideo, "Kohoka to rangaku," in Fujikawa Hideo, Seito shitoa (Tokyo: Tamagawa daigaku
  shuppanbu, 1974), pp. 9-20. For a general treatment of rangaku and Western learning, see
  Sato Shosuke, Yogaku-shi kenkyujosetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1964).
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Dialogues with My Silhouette, described how his reading of Ogyu
  Sorai's treatise on military science, Kenroku gaisho, motivated him to
  try to formulate a systematic study of medicine based on empirical
  methods:
  Sorai writes that true warfare is very different from what so-called masters of
  the art of war teach us. Topography may be hilly or flat, and armies may be
  strong or weak. One cannot make identical cut-and-dried preparations that
  will be right for all times and all places; one cannot discourse on victory and
  defeat in unvarying, stereotyped fashion prior to the commencement of an
  engagement. . . . Victory or defeat are determined on a case-by-case basis by
  constant study of strategic principles and by the capacities of great generals."
  In this way, military strategy discussed by the leading proponent of
  Ancient Learning was transferred to the realm of medicine, combined
  with systematic observation (shinshi jikkeri), and applied to the appro-
  priation and utilization of Dutch medical and scientific lore by the
  pioneers of Dutch studies in late-eighteenth-century Japan. A half-
  century later the crisis in foreign relations found the emphasis shifting
  back to military concerns; ultimately it flowered in the Meiji govern-
  ment's policies of selective Westernization. These developments were
  thus of momentous significance for Japanese thought and Japan's as-
  similation of Western culture.
  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE: LATE TOKUGAWA AND
  EARLY MEIJI TRAVELERS
  Japan's longing to see the outside world
  One of the striking phenomena of mid-nineteenth-century Japan is the
  strong desire of educated Japanese to see the outside world. With an
  eighty-year history of Dutch studies behind them, many Japanese
  grew dissatisfied with relying solely on books to learn about the West.
  Presented with the evidence of Perry's "Black Ships" that Japan had
  fallen behind during its two-century absence from the stage of world
  history, many young men resolved to meet the challenge posed by
  technological superiority of Western civilization by investigating West-
  ern civilization at its source. Yamaji Aizan described the late Toku-
  gawa Zeitgeist as a "desire to speed to foreign shores and take up the
  great task of observing far-off lands."20 Miyake Setsurei, in his History
  19 Sugita Gempaku, "Keiei yawa," in Fujikawa Yu et al., eds., Kyorin sosho (Kyoto: Shibun-
  kaku reprint edition, 1971), vol. 1, p. 106. This passage is also quoted in Sato, Yogaku-shi
  kenkyujosetsu, p. 60.
  20 Yamaji Aizan, "Niijima Jo ron," in Yamaji Aizan, Kirisuiokyo kydron, Nihon jimminshi (To-
  kyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), p. 44.
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  449
  of Our Times, wrote: "Only the ignorant and indolent among the
  samurai were surprised upon learning of [Yoshida] Shoin's plan to
  visit America, for not a few like-minded men were making similar
  preparations. Ultimately his plan was implemented in the form of
  sending a bakufu warship to San Francisco in i860."21 Thus the steam
  engines of Perry's Black Ships, considered symbolic of the West's
  superior technology, convinced Japanese of their country's inferiority;
  their "consciousness of crisis" dictated that "there is no more pressing
  need in our defense against the barbarians at present than 'knowing
  the enemy'." This realistic, empirical outlook made it a prime task to
  "investigate enemy conditions," a goal mirrored in the title of Fuku-
  zawa Yukichi's best-seller, Conditions in the West.
  That this determination was shared by different sorts of men can be
  shown by comparing the cases of Yoshida Shoin and Niijima Jo. At
  first glance they seem an unlikely pair. Yoshida (1830-59) is known to
  history as a fiery nationalist and exponent of total, unquestioning
  loyalty to the emperor. His fury at the bakufu's agreement to sign the
  humiliating unequal treaties led him into teaching and plotting so
  extreme that he was executed in the Ansei purge carried out by Ii
  Naosuke. His unwavering espousal of the imperial cause as the highest
  duty made him a rallying point and martyr for later nationalism and
  nationalists. As early as 1867 the Choshu loyalist Takasugi Shinsaku,
  and as recently as 1970 the novelist Mishima Yukio, invoked his words
  in justifying ritual suicide in the national cause. Niijima (1843-90), on
  the other hand, is known to his countrymen as an ardent Christian and
  Westernizer, a runaway from feudal jurisdiction who found protec-
  tion, kindness, and Christianity in America, was educated at Amherst
  College and Andover Seminary, and returned to Japan to found its
  first Christian university (Doshisha) in Kyoto, the ancient capital and
  heartland of Japanese Buddhism. Nevertheless, Yoshida and Niijima
  shared a basic receptivity and curiosity regarding the West and a great
  desire to learn in the hope of preparing themselves and their country
  to accept the challenge posed by that West.
  The case of Yoshida Shoin
  Yoshida Shoin's encounter with the West came at the dawn of Japan's
  opening by the squadron of Commodore Perry's Black Ships. Perry
  arrived in 1853, left President Millard Fillmore's letter requesting
  21 Miyake Setsurei, Dojidaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 2-3.
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  450 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  formal diplomatic relations, and sailed away with a warning that he
  would return for a reply in the spring of 1854. In the interim Sakuma
  Shozan counseled his young student Shoin that it would be worth-
  while to try to leave Japan with the squadron when it returned in order
  to equip himself with direct knowledge of the West.
  While Perry's ships were inspecting the harbor of Shimoda in April
  I854, J. W. Spaulding, captain's clerk of the Mississippi, was ashore
  for a stroll one afternoon when two young men dressed as samurai
  approached him, ostensibly to examine his watch chain. Once within
  reach, one of them thrust a letter into the vest of the startled clerk.
  Flawlessly written in classical Chinese, which S. W. Williams, the
  American interpreter, could read, it stated: "We have . . . read in
  books, and learned a little by hearsay, what the customs and education
  in Europe and America are, and we have been for many years desirous
  of going over the 'five great continents'." The exaggerated metaphors
  of the kambun document reveal the intensity of Yoshida's desire to
  learn about the world outside Japan:
  When a lame man sees others walking, he wishes to walk too; but how shall
  the pedestrian gratify his desires when he sees another one riding? We have
  all our lives been going hither to you, unable to get more than thirty degrees
  east and west, or twenty-five degrees north and south; but now when we see
  how you sail on the tempests and cleave the huge billows, going lightning
  speed thousands and myriads of miles, scurrying along the five great conti-
  nents, can it not be likened to the lame finding a plan for walking, and the
  pedestrian seeking a mode by which he can ride?22
  The abortive effort of the two young men to secure passage on the
  Mississippi in the dead of night, before an answer could be given to this
  document, is well known. Perry felt it poor policy to help them break
  the laws of their government against travel overseas so soon after
  securing the treaty he had come to negotiate, and he reluctantly denied
  their request after discussing it with them through the interpreter on
  board. What should be noted, however, is the recklessness of the
  attempt and the intensity and, no doubt, naivete', of their behavior.
  This disregard for personal danger and single-mindedness of purpose
  earned the warmhearted understanding of S. Wells Williams, the inter-
  preter, which can be inferred from Yoshida's Account of a Spring
  Night, Spaulding's Japan Expedition, and F. L. Hawks's Narrative.
  22 Yamaguchi-ken kyoikukai, ed., Yoshida Shoin zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1936), vol.
  io, p. 876. Also in Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to
  the China Seas and Japan: Performed in the Years 1852,1853, and 1854, under the Command of
  Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, the Official Account (Washington, D.C.: Bever-
  ley Tucker, Senate Printer, 1856), p. 420.
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  45I
  Spaulding's account described the consequences for the two:
  A few days afterward, some of our officers in their strolls ashore ascertained
  that there were two Japanese confined in a cage at a little barrack back of the
  town, and on going there they were found to be the persons who had paid the
  midnight visit to our ships, and they also proved to be my unfortunate friends
  of the letter. They did not appear greatly down-cast by their situation, and
  one of them wrote in his native character on a piece of board, and passed [it]
  through the bars of his cage, to one of our surgeons present. . . .2J
  The officers of the American fleet discussed the possibility of inter-
  vening to save the men's lives, but the next time they went ashore,
  the two were nowhere to be seen. Rumor had it that they had been
  transferred to an Edo prison, and when an official they questioned
  gestured ominously with hand to throat, the Americans realized that
  the two had or would soon be executed. Spaulding, recalling that the
  writing on the letter that had been thrust into his vest appeared "neat
  and sharply defined," concluded that the writer was surely "a man of
  intelligence and taste," and Hawks's Narrative account of the initial
  encounter concurs that "the Japanese were observed to be men of
  position and rank, as each wore the two swords characteristic of
  distinction, and were dressed in the wide but short trousers of rich
  silk brocade. Their manners showed the usual courtly refinement of
  the better classes. . . .'>24 Clearly the Americans were impressed by
  the courageous sense of purpose shown by Shoin, convinced of his
  qualities, and sympathetic toward his fate. The affair no doubt
  served to convince them all the more strongly of the justness of their
  mission to open Japan.
  The message written on a small piece of wood that Yoshida was able
  to hand to the American naval surgeon who happened to pass by his
  cage was described by Hawks as a "remarkable sbecimen of philosophi-
  cal resignation under circumstances which would have tried the sto-
  icism of Cato." It read in part:
  When a hero fails in his purpose, his acts are then regarded as those of a
  villain and robber . . . while yet we have nothing wherewith to reproach
  ourselves, it must now be seen whether a hero will prove himself to be one
  indeed. Regarding the liberty of going through the sixty States [Japanese
  provinces] as not enough for our desires, we wished to make the circuit of the
  five great continents. This was our hearts' wish for a long time. Suddenly our
  plans are defeated. . . . Weeping, we seem as fools; laughing, as rogues. Alas!
  for us; silent we can only be.2'
  23 Hawks, Narrative, pp. 884-5. 
  24 Ibid.
  25 Yoshida Shodin zeruhu, pp. 874-5; and Hawks, Narrative, pp. 422-3.
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  452 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Yoshida lived another five years, during which he inspired a genera-
  tion of Choshu disciples in the academy that the domain authorities
  permitted him to direct during his confinement. As he explained to
  one such student, Shinagawa Yajiro:
  If one is loath to die at seventeen or eighteen, he will be equally reluctant at
  thirty, and will no doubt find a life of eight or ninety too short. Insects of the
  field and stream live but half a year, yet do not regard this as short. The pine
  and oak live hundreds of years, yet do not regard this as long. Compared to
  the eternity of Heaven and Earth, both are ephemeral insects. Man's life span
  is fifty years; to live seventy is a rarity. Unless one performs some deed that
  brings a sense of gratification before dying, his soul will never rest in peace.26
  This was not to be; further plotting brought Yoshida's extradition
  to Edo and his execution in 1859. Yoshida described himself as one
  "who fails in every enterprise undertaken, who bungles every chance
  for power and fortune." All the schemes he concocted, not only his
  trip to America, seemed to go awry. Yet his determination to know the
  West and his fervent loyalism lived on in his students and caught the
  eye of a sympathetic writer as early as 1882. Robert Louis Stevenson
  learned of Yoshida Shoin through a student of his Choshu school,
  Masaki Taizo, who was studying at Edinburgh, and the stories that
  Masaki told about his teacher became a chapter in Stevenson's Famil-
  iar Studies of Men and Books. Stevenson quoted Thoreau to the effect
  that "if you can 'make your failure tragical by courage, it will not
  differ from success' " and concluded that "this is as much the story of
  a heroic people as that of a heroic man." Stevenson's other heroes in
  this volume possessed characteristics similar to those with which Japa-
  nese admirers have associated Yoshida Shoin: bravery, self-reliance,
  tenacity of will, a high sense of honor, and fervent aspiration. They
  were qualities required by Japanese who resolved to travel to the West
  in late Tokugawa days, and they were suprisingly common.
  The case of Niijima Jo
  Yoshida Shoin and Niijima Jo were part of the same late Tokugawa
  phenomenon, an urge to experience the West directly. Yoshida's at-
  tempt was abortive partly because it was made too early, in 1854, and
  pardy because he chose the official channels of Perry's fleet on its
  initial diplomatic mission. By contrast, Niijima's attempt came a dec-
  ade later, in 1864, and through the private auspices of an American
  26 "Letter to Shinagawa Yajiro," dated circa 4/Ansei 6, in Shoin zenshu, vol. 6, p. 318.
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  453
  merchant ship. Moreover, during the ten intervening years there had
  been much exchange and travel. The Tokugawa warship Kanrin maru
  had sailed to the California coast to accompany the shogunal mission
  to Washington in i860, the first of a series of ever-larger and ever-
  more observant official missions to the West as treaty relations intensi-
  fied. In 1862 the shogunate had sent Nishi Amane, Enomoto Takeaki,
  and Tsuda Mamichi to Holland to study. In 1863, the domain of
  Choshu violated shogunal law by sending Ito Hirobumi and Inoue
  Kaoru, students of Yoshida's, to study in England; and the southern
  domain of Satsuma was preparing a large mission of fourteen students
  to go to to England in 1865. Knowledge of such travel usually spread
  to at least the families of those involved. When the Choshu samurai
  (and later foreign minister) Aoki Shuzo visited the castle town of
  Nakatsu in Kyushu while Fukuzawa Yukichi was abroad as inter-
  preter for one such official mission, Fukuzawa's mother was able to
  show him letters and photographs - the first Aoki had ever seen -
  from her distant son.
  Nevertheless, individual travel was still quite different, and very
  dangerous. Niijima later described his eagerness to travel in English
  still far from perfect: "Some day I went to the seaside of Yedo, hoping
  to see the view of the sea. I saw largest man-of-war of Dutch lying
  there, and it seemed to me a castle or a battery, and I thought too she
  would be strong to fight with enemy."27 The excitement felt by this
  late Tokugawa youth is apparent. Niijima was acutely aware of Japan's
  need to create a navy and of the important benefits to be had from
  seaborne trade.
  Niijima was chosen by his domain of Annaka to study Dutch, and he
  learned to read books on natural science. ("I read through the book of
  nature at home, taking a dictionary of Japan and Holland.") He had
  studied at the bakufu's Naval Training Institute for a time but found
  this inadequate and unsatisfying and decided that he must go overseas
  himself. Niijima was motivated by precisely the same simple-minded
  directness that Yoshida had shown, and as in Yoshida's case, Ameri-
  cans - the captain of the Berlin, who smuggled him out of Hakodate
  against instructions, and the captain of the Wild Rover, to which
  Niijima transferred in Shanghai and who accepted responsibility for
  him during the year-long voyage to Boston - found themselves drawn
  to him by the intensity of his passion. In Boston, the Alpheus Hardys,
  owners of the Wild Rover, after reading Niijima's poorly composed
  27 A. S. Hardy, Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892),
  p. 6.
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  454 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  English explanation for coming to America, generously paid his school
  fees and supported him through his undergraduate education at Am-
  herst College and his theological training at Andover Seminary.
  When Niijima discovered that the captain of the Berlin, who had
  taken him on board, had been dismissed for having helped him leave
  Hakodate, he made the following diary entry:
  Ah, I feel torn with guilt for having caused that good man such grief. But
  what is done is done, and cannot be undone. In the future, when my school-
  ing is finished, I will do all I can to repay each and every one of his kindnesses
  to me. Maybe then I can make up for a small part of my wrongdoing against
  him.28
  Westerners could no longer be considered "barbarians" by a man of
  such gratitude and conviction.
  Individual Westerners, of course, could still provoke strong reac-
  tions. Niijima served as the captain's valet, "cleaning his cabin, wait-
  ing on him, washing his cups and saucers, and caring for his dog" -
  duties that he could stoop to perform only because there were no other
  Japanese to watch him. Having been trained in etiquette in Annaka,
  Niijima was well equipped to minister to the captain's needs, and we
  may imagine that he did so splendidly; but his samurai pride was often
  gravely injured. On one occasion he was reprimanded for not obeying
  directions given in English by a passenger whose services he had
  requested as a language teacher. An expert swordsman, Niijima raced
  back to his cabin, took his sword, and prepared to cut down the
  passenger when he remembered his mission and stopped. No doubt
  such endurance and self-restraint were required more than once dur-
  ing the voyage.
  After transferring to the Wild Rover at Shanghai, Niijima asked its
  captain to cake him to America and presented him with the longer of his
  two samurai swords as a token of his gratitude. He also had the captain
  sell the shorter sword for $8.00 so that he might purchase a translation
  of the New Testament in classical Chinese. This captain, whom Niijima
  admired greatly, was unable to pronounce Japanese and so called
  Niijima "Joe." In 1876, Niijima formally adopted "Jo" as his first
  name. He later wrote his name "Joseph Hardy Neesima" in English,
  using "Hardy" to express his gratitude to the Boston shipowner couple
  who had cared for him and for whom he "felt a greater sense of gratitude
  than for his own parents." Niijima, an eldest son, justified his violation
  28 Diary entry, 9/13/Meiji 1, in Niijima Jo sensei skokan thu zokuhen (Kyoto: Doshisha koyukai,
  1960), p. 239.
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  455
  of filial piety and his illegal departure from Japan in terms of serving his
  "Father who art in Heaven." He became a Christian, found a new father
  and mother in the Hardys, and pursued his studies in America with
  total peace of mind.
  In time, official Japanese policy turned to support what had been
  the goals of Niijima's decisions for disobedience and flight. By the
  time of the Iwakura mission to the West in 1871-3, when Niijima was
  still studying in the United States, he was asked to serve as official
  interpreter for his country's highest officials, and upon his return to
  Japan in 1874 he was able to win the confidence and help of high
  officials like Kido Takayoshi (a member of the Iwakura mission) in
  gaining permission to found his Christian college in Kyoto. By then
  Japan's policy of "civilization and enlightenment" seemed virtually
  indistinguishable from Niijima's personal mission to convert his fellow
  Japanese to Christianity. At that time Niijima clearly had a linear view
  of progress, and he saw Westernization, civilization, and Christianity
  as a single goal to be sought. As he put it in an appeal for support for
  his college in 1884: "It is the spirit of liberty, the development of
  science, and the Christian morality that have given birth to European
  civilizations. . . . We cannot therefore believe that Japan can secure
  this civilization until education rests upon the same basis. With this
  foundation the State is built upon a rock. . . ."29
  Two points emerge from these two dramatically different careers.
  The first is that Yoshida Shoin, no less than Niijima Jo, began with a
  warm, trusting, and optimistic view of a West whose strengths he
  proposed to appropriate for his backward but beloved country. The
  second is that Niijima Jo, no less than Yoshida Shoin, though commit-
  ting himself to the West totally in terms of personal relations and
  spiritual beliefs, did so in the conviction that he was contributing to
  the "foundation of the state. "3°
  Learning missions to the West
  Yoshida Shoin and Niijima Jo were not the only Japanese longing to
  experience the West directly; high-ranking officials in the very bakufu
  29 "Meiji Semmon Gakko setsuritsu shishu," in Niijima sensei shokanshu (Kyoto: Doshisha
  koyukai, 1942), pp. 1158-9.
  30 I have discussed the attitudes toward America of Yoshida Shoin, Niijima Jo, and other mid-
  nineteenth-century travelers in Hirafcawa Sukehiro, Seiyo no shdgeki to Nihon (Tokyo:
  Kodansha, 1974), pp. 139-99-
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  that prohibited travel to foreign lands strongly desired to see the West
  with their own eyes and create a navy equal to those of Western
  nations. As early as February 6,1858, Japanese representatives negoti-
  ating the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States
  and Japan were reported by the American consul, Townsend Harris,
  to have
  proposed, if I [Harris] was willing, to send an ambassador in their steamer to
  Washington via California for that purpose! I told them nothing could possi-
  bly give me greater pleasure. That, as the United States was the first power
  that Japan ever made a treaty with, I should be much pleased that the first
  Japanese Ambassador should be sent to the United States.3'
  Japanese documents record this incident as follows: "Your nation has
  sent a total of three missions (including this one) to obtain this treaty.
  Now that it has been concluded, would it be possible for us to send a
  mission of our own to Washington for purposes of exchanging the
  documents?"*2
  Iwase Tadanari, who made this statement, probably did so in
  hopes of being sent himself, but two years of political upheaval,
  which included the Ansei purge, elapsed before the project was real-
  ized. Finally, in i860, Shimmi Masaoki was selected as chief ambassa-
  dor ("due to my father's achievements," as he put it); Muragaki
  Norimasa was deputy ambassador; and Oguri Tadamasa, superinten-
  dent and inspector (metsuke). Muragaki, a man of gentle disposition,
  left the detailed Kokai nikki (Voyage diary) in which he described his
  feelings when he was summoned to Edo Castle and informed of his
  appointment:
  Although we did dispatch "official envoys" to T'ang China in ancient times,
  that neighboring land was only a strip of water away; but America lies a
  myriad miles beyond our Divine Land, and when it is daytime there, it is
  nighttime here.
  I humored [my daughters, boasting,] "a man could achieve no greater honor
  than to assume this heavy, unprecedented responsibility and thereby attain
  renown throughout the five continents." But on second thought I realized, "a
  foolish man like myself accepting this first of all missions to a foreign land?
  Should I fail to execute the shogunal decree, our Divine Land will suffer
  humiliations untold." Just then, the moon was shining so clear and bright
  that I felt moved to a toast in solemn thanks for shogunal confidence:
  31 M. E. Cosenza, ed., The Complete Journal ofTownsend Harris (Rutland, Vt.:Tuttle, 1959), p.
  531-
  32 Dated 12/23/Ansei 4, in Dainihon komonjo: Bakumatsu gaikoku kankei monjo (Tokyo: Tokyo
  teikoku daigaku, 1925), vol. 18.
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  457
  Henceforth foreigners as well
  will gaze
  upon the moon
  of our Japan.»
  The tension in this poem contrasts with the following, which
  Muragaki composed upon his arrival in San Francisco:
  Foreign lands as well,
  lie beneath the same sky.
  Gaze upward and behold
  the mist-veiled spring moon.
  Clearly, the sense of self-importance enabling Muragaki to carry out
  his duties had weakened. Finally, the following poem expressed his
  sentiments when he parted with the captain and crew of the Powhatan
  in Panama:
  Though a glance reveals
  that they are foreigners,
  the sincerity of heart they display
  differs not from our own.**
  Thus Muragaki expressed his appreciation to the American crew. Af-
  ter traveling with them, he had discovered the universality of human
  nature.
  After "the Tycoon's envoys" ratified the Treaty of Amity and Com-
  merce between the two nations in Washington with Louis Cass, Presi-
  dent James Buchanan's secretary of state, they made their way to New
  York. In his diary Muragaki described in detail their welcome there on
  4/28/1860. Walt Whitman also described the festivities in his "A Broad-
  way Pageant." The poem describes not only Broadway, which on that
  day "was entirely given up to foot-passengers and foot-standers" but
  also the joy of seeing the union of East and West and the oneness of the
  universe.
  The welcome received by the members of the mission became
  known throughout Japan after their return home, and the mistaken
  image of Westerners as barbarians was modified, albeit gradually and
  among a limited number of intellectuals. In Yokoi Shonan's remote
  Kumamoto country school, lectures on the Analects were revised.
  Shonan's gloss on the first entry reads:
  33 Muragaki Awaji no Kami Norimasa, Kokai nikki (Tokyo: Jiji shinsho, 1959). This work was
  translated by Helen Uno as Kokai Nikki: The Diary of the First Japanese Embassy to the United
  Slates of America (Tokyo: Foreign Affairs Association of Japan, 1958). That translation has
  been modified here. 
  34 Uno, Kokai Nikki, pp. 38,51.
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  458 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  [Analects]: "Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?"
  [Shonan's gloss]: The phrase "have friends" means that when we appreciate
  learning and are eager to study, if we voluntarily approach, become intimate
  with, and speak to a man of virtuous repute whether he lives near or far away,
  that person will as a matter of course confide in us and become intimate with
  us in return. This is what is meant by the principle of "feeling and response"
  (kanno).
  The terra friends is not limited to scholar-friends. When we study to adopt the
  good points of any person, all men in the world are our friends."
  Then this scholar-statesman cited recent historical developments and
  advocated revising Japan's international relations on the basis of uni-
  versal brotherhood:
  Viewed from a wider perspective, this principle of "feeling and response"
  may be witnessed in the warm reception extended by the Americans to the
  recent bakufu embassy sent to their land. Their cordiality was deep indeed.
  By extending this meaning [of friends] to all people in the world, and not just
  to those in Japan, they are all our friends.
  Because sentiments for joi were intense in Kumamoto han in that era, a
  feigned champion of righteousness could have cut an imposing figure
  by dancing to this tune of the times. But in Shonan's lecture notes, we
  see a different figure, that of a Japanese thinker responding in kind to
  the hand of friendship offered by Whitman and other Americans. Until
  after the Russo-Japanese War, when American attitudes toward Japan
  began to change, the Japanese people felt a friendliness toward Ameri-
  cans that differed from their feelings toward other Western powers.
  Oguri Tadamasa, metsuke in the first bakufu embassy, refined his
  knowledge while in the United States. After returning to Japan he
  served as commissioner for foreign affairs and then naval commis-
  sioner (gaikoku, then kaigun bugyo), exercised his capabilities in fi-
  nance, sought assistance from France, and built the Yokohama and
  Yokosuka foundry and shipyard. After the bakufu's defeat at Toba-
  Fushimi in 1868, Oguri opposed concessions by the shogun, was cap-
  tured, and executed.
  However, the most famous member of this embassy traveled on an
  auxiliary vessel, the Kanrin maru, which was the first Japanese ship to
  cross the Pacific. Fukuzawa Yukichi, then a young student of Dutch,
  requested and received permission to escort Kimura Yoshitake on this
  trip to San Francisco. The chapter of his Autobiography entitled "I
  Join the First Mission to America" contains many interesting epi-
  35 Yokoi Tokio, ed., Shonan iko (Tokyo: Min'yusha, 1889), pp. 447-8.
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  459
  sodes, but perhaps the most surprising of these is that his reading of
  Dutch books and scientific training at the Ogata school in Osaka had
  given him enough of a background in natural science to facilitate his
  understanding of the explanations of the latest inventions made in
  America. By way of contrast, "things social, political, and economic
  proved most inexplicable." For example, when he asked "where the
  descendents of George Washington might be," an American replied,
  "I think there is a woman who is directly descended from Washington.
  I don't know where she is now." The answer was "so casual as to
  shock" this Japanese, who had more or less equated the social posi-
  tions of Tokugawa Ieyasu and George Washington, both of whom had
  founded the political systems then existing in Japan and the United
  States.*6
  Katsu Kaishu (1823-99), the captain of the Kanrin maru, was origi-
  nally a low-ranking Tokugawa official, but he rose to the highest
  positions of authority within the bakufu and ultimately became the
  person responsible for surrendering Edo Castle to the Restoration
  forces. Immediately after returning to Japan from this mission, Katsu
  earned the rancor of his colleagues by asserting that unlike the situa-
  tion in Japan, all men in positions of leadership in America possessed
  leadership capacity. In the late Tokugawa era, knowledge of the West
  gradually proved effective in criticizing the existing order for its inabil-
  ity to deal satisfactorily with the crises confronting Japan.
  After this first mission abroad, the bakufu sent large and small
  embassies abroad each year or every other year until its demise in
  1868. The second embassy, led by Takeuchi Yasunori in 1862,
  toured the states of Europe to seek approval for postponing the
  opening of four additional treaty ports. The third mission, to France,
  was led by Ikeda Naganobu in a futile effort to secure the closing of
  Yokohama as a port. Shibata Takenaka led the fourth mission, which
  went to France and England in 1865 to negotiate conditions for
  constructing the Yokosuka foundry and shipyard. The fifth toured
  Europe and headed for Russia in 1866 when its chief ambassador,
  Koide Hidezane, conducted negotiations to establish the boundary
  between Japan and Russia on Sakhalin (Karafuto). The sixth mis-
  sion, headed by the shogun Tokugawa Keiki's personal representa-
  tive, Tokugawa Akitake, attended the Paris World's Fair in 1867.
  This last embassy was entrusted with the secret mission of persuad-
  36 "Seiyo jijo," in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1959), vol. 7, p. 95. Also
  Eiichi Kiyooka, trans., The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press,
  1948), p. 125-
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  ing France to increase its aid to the bakufu, and it was still in Europe
  when the bakufu collapsed in 1868.37
  Although these "envoys of the Tycoon" had specific diplomatic
  assignments for dealing with the domestic situation or foreign rela-
  tions at the time of their appointment, intentionally or not, they also
  made important contributions to Japan's study and assimilation of
  Western civilization. In addition, when we consider the students sent
  to Europe by the bakufu and (illegally) by the domains of Choshu,
  Satsuma, or Hizen, we realize that the movement to study "in barbar-
  ian lands," launched by Yoshida Shoin in 1854, had expanded and
  developed to the bakufu or national level. If we include the crew of the
  Kanrin maru on the first bakufu mission abroad, over three hundred
  Japanese traveled to foreign shores before the Meiji period.
  Each of these missions investigated the institutions and civilization
  of the nations to which it was dispatched, but the second led by
  Takeuchi Yasunori was the most thorough and systematic, having
  been instructed "to pay particular attention to politics, school adminis-
  tration, and military systems." The activities of Fukuzawa Yukichi,
  Matsuki Koan (Terashima Munenori), Mitsukuri Shuhei, and other
  students of Western learning were noted in pamphlets bearing such
  titles as "An Investigation of England," "An Investigation of France,"
  and "An Investigation of Russia." On the Takeuchi mission, Fuku-
  zawa, who had already been to America two years earlier, did more
  than gaze at Europe with the bedazzled eyes of a tourist; he had
  discerned the inevitability of the sociopolitical transformation that
  would soon take place in Japan and began to see himself as an enthusi-
  astic "engineer of civilization." Thus the beginning of Fukuzawa's
  enlightenment activities in Meiji times can be gleaned from his travel
  in Tokugawa service.
  Fukuzawa's Account of My Voyage to the West and Notes on My
  Voyage to the West are full of memos scribbled in a hodgepodge of
  Japanese, Dutch, English, and French. A glance at these works shows
  Fukuzawa to be a virtual walking antenna, eager to absorb any and all
  information in these foreign lands. Whereas other Japanese became
  caught up in the small facets of Western civilization, Fukuzawa sought
  to integrate these facets and observe the overall organization that made
  this civilization function. For example, his colleagues might admire
  37 Haga Toru discusses these embassies in Taikun no shisetsu (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1968).
  The diplomacy in which they participated is the subject of Ishii Takashi, Meiji ishin no
  kokusai kanhyo, rev. ed. (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1966).
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  461
  the size of a locomotive, note how fast the train ran, or measure the
  width and height of its rails. But Fukuzawa went well past such con-
  cerns; his interests led him to investigate the composition of railroad
  companies, their banking activities, or the joint control enjoyed by
  England and France over Egypt's railways. In short, he tried to grasp
  not only the technology but also the social aspects of Western civiliza-
  tion. In his Autobiography he wrote:
  I did not care to study scientific or technical subjects while on this journey,
  because I could study them as well from books after I returned home. But I
  felt that I had to learn the more common matters of daily life directly from
  the people, because Europeans would not describe them in books as being
  too obvious. Yet to us those common matters were the most difficult to
  comprehend.
  So while in Europe, "whenever I met a person whom I thought to be
  of some consequence, I would ask him questions and would put down
  all he said in a notebook. . . ."s8 After returning home, Fukuzawa
  organized the notes he had taken during these question-and-answer
  sessions, checked them against information found in books that he had
  bought abroad, and published them from 1866 to 1869 under the title
  Conditions in the West (Seiyo jijo).
  Fukuzawa wrote the following account of one of these investigations
  in his Autobiography:
  A perplexing institution was representative government. When I asked a gentle-
  man what the "election law" was and what kind of a bureau the Parliament
  really was, he simply replied with a smile, meaning I suppose that no intelligent
  person was expected to ask such a question. But these were the things most
  difficult of all for me to understand. In this connection, I learned that there
  were bands of men called political parties - the Liberals and the Conserva-
  tives - who were always fighting against each other in the government.
  For some time it was beyond my comprehension to understand what they
  were fighting for, and what was meant, anyway, by "fighting" in peacetime.
  "This man and that man are enemies in the house," they would tell me. But
  these "enemies" were to be seen at the same table, eating and drinking with
  each other. I felt as if I could not make much out of this. It took me a long
  time, with some tedious thinking, before I could gather a general notion of
  these separate mysterious facts. In some of the more complicated matters, I
  might achieve an understanding five or ten days after they were explained to
  me. But all in all, I learned much from this initial tour of Europe.'«
  Conditions in the West, the fruit of such labors, was the first system-
  atic account of the structure of Western civilization written by a Japa-
  38 Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 7, p. 107; The Autobiography, pp. 142-3.
  39 Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 7, pp. 107—8; The Autobiography, p. 144.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  nese, and it was phrased in language that anyone could understand. In
  one sense it was designed to heighten Japan's appreciation of the
  West, but in another, it provided a vision of the future Meiji state as
  envisioned through Fukuzawa's reformism. Thus, the bakufu mis-
  sions abroad greatly contributed to the building of Meiji Japan by
  teaching numerous Japanese about the West and producing popular
  best-sellers such as Fukuzawa's Conditions in the West and Nakamura
  Masanao's translation of Samuel Smilcs'sSelf-Help. The Meiji Restora-
  tion altered Japan's political leadership totally and strengthened a
  resolve to learn from the West that was already forming by 1868. The
  greatest of all the official missions followed the Restoration. On De-
  cember 23, 1871, the new Meiji government dispatched Ambassador-
  Plenipotentiary Iwakura Tomomi to America and Europe as the head
  of a forty-eight-member delegation that took with it fifty-nine students
  of the ex-samurai class, five of whom were women.
  At this point we should mention the subsequent course of anti-
  foreign sentiment. On his way back to Japan in i860, Katsu Kaishu
  playfully displayed on board the Kanrin maru the Western umbrella he
  had bought overseas. When he asked, "What would happen if I tried
  to use this in Japan?" other members of the delegation cautioned him
  not to invite assassination. In 1862, when Fukuzawa returned from his
  second trip, sentiment for/01 had become more intense. As a student
  of Western learning Fukuzawa lived in constant fear of being cut
  down by xenophobic extremists, and for ten years he refused to go out
  after dark, choosing instead to concentrate on translations and his own
  writing. But by 1871 this sentiment had spent its force. The appear-
  ance among the members of the Iwakura mission of seven-year-old
  Tsuda Umeko, carrying a doll, symbolized the return of peace. The
  idea of a girl studying overseas would have been unimaginable before
  the Restoration, but after her long sojourn in America, Tsuda re-
  turned to Japan and founded what later became Tsudajuku University
  for Women, an institution that along with Fukuzawa's Keio Univer-
  sity and Niijima's Doshisha University, made important contributions
  to private higher education in modern Japan.
  We can only marvel at the new Meiji government's stability, which
  allowed it to send the Iwakura mission to America and Europe for
  such a long period of time, even allowing for the fact that civil war had
  ended and peace had been restored. Only four years after its inception,
  the new government abolished the old domains and provinces of Toku-
  gawa Japan and forced through the establishment of a modern pre-
  fectural system. Then only four months after that, leaders such as
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  463
  Iwakura Tomomi, Kido Takayoshi, Okubo Toshimichi, and Ito Hiro-
  bumi went abroad and, extending the originally planned length of
  their overseas stay by almost a full year, returned to Japan on Septem-
  ber 13, 1873, after a tour that had lasted 631 days. The Iwakura
  mission's ostensible objective was to revise the unequal treaties ratified
  and exchanged in Washington by the first Tokugawa mission to Amer-
  ica in i860, but its members' real intention was to discover conditions
  in the West and adapt these to Japan in order to create a new Meiji
  state. The Meiji leaders realized that to revise the unequal treaties,
  they would have to restructure Japan by putting it on a par with
  Western states and reforming domestic laws and institutions to bring
  them into line with those of the Western powers. Though the Iwakura
  mission was larger than those sent by the bakufu, its purpose and task
  were essentially the same: to study and learn from the West. One piece
  of evidence for this continuity of purpose can be found in the em-
  bassy's membership. Although its leaders were court nobles and
  prominent power holders from the domains that had emerged victori-
  ous in the Restoration wars, the secretarial staff supporting these lead-
  ers included many veteran diplomats, such as Tanabe Ta'ichi, who
  had served under the bakufu and were knowledgeable about or had
  actually traveled to the West.
  The mission looked at chambers of commerce, schools for the deaf
  and dumb, museums, shipyards, biscuit factories, girls' schools, pris-
  ons, telegraph offices, army maneuvers - all at a whirlwind pace.
  Kume Kunitake, a student of Chinese learning, went as scribe and
  published A True Account of the Observations of the Ambassadorial Mis-
  sion to America and Europe, which describes the embassy's brisk day-
  to-day routine:
  No sooner had our train arrived and we had unloaded our baggage at the hotel
  than our tour began. During the daytime we rushed about from place to
  place, viewing machines that peeled and locomotives that roared. We stood
  amidst the acrid smell of steel with smoke billowing around us and became
  covered with soot and dirt. Returning to our hotel at dusk, we barely had
  time to brush off our dirty clothes before the hour of our banquet ap-
  proached. At die banquet we had to maintain a dignified manner; if invited to
  the theater, we had to strain eyes and ears to follow what took place on stage,
  and all of this led to exhaustion. No sooner had we retired at night, than
  morning greeted us with an escort sent to guide us around a factory. In this
  way, strange sights and sounds filled our eyes and ears; our spirits sagged and
  our bodies were exhausted by all die invitations we received to this and that
  event. Though we might have wished to drink a cup of water or stretch out
  and nap with bent elbow for a pillow, we could not, for any personal slovenli-
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  ness on our part would constitute a lack of propriety in negotiations between
  Japan and foreign nations.*0
  The daily schedule of Okubo Toshimichi, who concentrated his
  investigations on industry and economic systems, no doubt resembled
  this. He questioned factory foremen, sought advice from legal schol-
  ars, exchanged speeches with city mayors, and discussed issues with
  the foreign ministers of various governments. In London he experi-
  enced a blackout caused by striking electrical workers seeking higher
  wages and thus discovered the serious effects that labor disputes might
  have. He toured the East End after sunset to see the misery and
  wretchedness lurking beneath the surface of modern Western "civiliza-
  tion." Okubo concluded that "the prosperity of English cities oc-
  curred after the invention of the steam engine," and Kume noted that
  "the contemporary phenomenon of wealth and population in Euro-
  pean states presented itself after 1800 and has become pronounced
  only in the last forty years." On the one hand, the members of the
  mission marveled at the cumulative nature of civilization in Europe,
  saying that "the light of civilization shines because knowledge has
  been accumulated through the ages," but at the same time, they
  braced themselves and stirred their often-flagging spirits by realizing
  that the gap between Japan and the West, which had just experienced
  the Industrial Revolution, could be bridged. Thus they resolved to
  overtake and surpass the West.
  Like Fukuzawa's Conditions in the West, Kume's True Account was
  organized according to individual countries. Japanese thinkers ranked
  Western nations according to their relative "superiority" or "inferior-
  ity." The scholars of Dutch learning had already discovered that Dutch
  medical texts were mostly translations from German and thus learned of
  Germany's superiority in this field. In similar fashion, the Japanese,
  through their study of books, through traveling abroad, and through
  advice obtained from foreign teachers, chose to assimilate the best that
  each particular Western nation had to offer. Fukuzawa challenged his
  countrymen to turn away from scholars of Chinese learning, arguing
  that they were so oblivious to world developments as to be "little more
  40 Kume Kunitake ed., Bei-0 kairanjikki (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977), vol. i, p. 12. For
  detailed information on the Iwakura mission, see Tanaka Akira, Iwakura shisetsu dan (Tokyo:
  Kddansha, 1977); and Haga Torn, Meiji ishin to Nihonjin (Tokyo: Kodansha gakujutsu
  bunko ed., 1980), pp. 219-43. I have relied heavily on Haga for this presentation. For the
  Iwakura mission in English, see Marlene Mayo, "The Western Education of Kume Kunitake
  1871-1876," Monumenta Nipponica 28 (1973). The daily experiences and observations of
  Kido Takayoshi can be followed in Sidney D. Brown and Akiro Hirota, trans., The Diary of
  Kido Takayoshi, vol. 2:1871-1874 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1985).
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  FROM BOOKS TO EXPERIENCE 
  465
  than rice-consuming dictionaries," and to adopt Western culture,
  which was based on practicality. By the same token he himself aban-
  doned Dutch for English in 1859 after acknowledging the superior
  material civilization of the Anglo-Saxon nations. The Japanese mod-
  eled themselves after England for industrial and naval development;
  Prussia, which defeated France in 1871, provided a model for military
  organization; France offered the model of its centralized police system
  and educational and legal patterns; and America stimulated agricul-
  tural development in the northernmost island of Hokkaido. The
  Iwakura mission found in Prussia a model of a late-developing modern-
  izer that seemed particularly appropriate to emulate. In regard to
  Prussia, which then was exporting agricultural products to obtain the
  capital necessary to develop its mining and industry, Kume wrote: "In
  establishing its national policies, Prussia has much that closely resem-
  bles conditions in Japan. We should find it more profitable to study
  Prussian politics and customs than those of England or France."*' It
  was only natural for the Meiji Japanese to turn to America and Europe
  rather than to Asian countries in formulating plans to modernize their
  nation rapidly, and they were wise to select the strong points of each
  Western nation to further this process. Their selectiveness, based on
  considerations of efficacy, seems totally different from the traditional
  Confucian view of a world order centered on China.
  Japan's knowledge of and experience with the West may seem to
  have progressed further during the Taisho and Showa eras than during
  the Meiji. But on closer examination we find that at least in regard to
  Japan's leaders, their knowledge of foreign countries did not improve
  qualitatively and quantitatively. The "elder statesmen of the Restora-
  tion," as they later were called, were on the one hand raised in accor-
  dance with traditional Tokugawa values, but at the same time they
  also knew a great deal about the West. The Restoration activists exer-
  cised a shrewd sensibility in their contact with foreigners. For the
  Meiji government leaders, the Iwakura mission provided firsthand
  contact with the Western world. For most of them it was their first
  trip, although Ito had gone to England as a young Choshu student.
  What mattered was that the experience shared by Iwakura, Okubo,
  Kido, and Ito produced a consensus on Japan's future course. These
  men were convinced of the need for domestic reforms first of all, and
  upon returning home in 1873, they canceled the plans for invading
  Korea that had been prepared by the "caretaker" government in their
  41 Kume, Bei-o kairan jikki, vol. 3, p. 298.
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  466 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  absence. This was the first case of a split in views on national policy
  engendered by the experience or lack of experience of the outside
  world and the knowledge or ignorance of foreign affairs.
  TEACHERS OF "ARTS AND SCIENCES": FOREIGNERS IN
  MEIJI GOVERNMENT EMPLOY
  Japan's use of foreign employees in late Tokugawa and early Meiji
  times presents an interesting and useful perspective on the larger
  "turn to the West," and it was also in some sense prophetic of the role
  of foreign advisers in the reconstruction of Japanese institutions after
  World War II. The relative success with which the Allied Occupation
  of Japan completed its work contrasts with the problem of American
  counselors in their efforts to channel reform in other developing coun-
  tries. But when considered in regard to Japan's use of foreign advisers
  in the nineteenth century, it suggests that much of that "success" was
  actually Japan's. The Meiji government and society, like those of
  developing states in the twentieth century, were intensely nationalis-
  tic, but the country's skill in using and then replacing outside foreign
  employees is too often forgotten.
  The rush with which Japan adopted foreign institutions and cus-
  toms following the Meiji Restoration sometimes gave Westerners (and
  not a few conservative Japanese) the impression that Japan was scrap-
  ping its entire traditional civilization to appropriate all the material
  and spiritual attributes of modern Western states. Of course, much of
  this program was tactical. Britain's defeat of China, followed by the
  extension of unequal treaties to Japan in the wake of Matthew Perry
  and Townsend Harris, filled Japan's leaders with apprehension. Japa-
  nese felt themselves exposed to a military threat and concluded that if
  they were to enter the arena known as the family of nations, they too
  must equip themselves with the weaponry possessed by the Western
  powers. But they also realized that the basis of Western power was not
  limited to weaponry; to the extent that such power was based on a civil
  society that had undergone the economic and social transformations of
  the Industrial Revolution, Japan's quest for power also entailed the
  building of political and social institutions based on the Western
  model.
  Although the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu was conducted
  under the slogan "revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians!" the
  Meiji regime that followed immediately implemented a policy of
  "open the country, establish friendly relations." After the "expulsion"
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  TEACHERS OF "ARTS AND SCIENCES" 
  467
  of the "barbarians" was rejected in the light of the recognition of the
  international situation, the same nationalism that produced the slogan
  was transformed into a quest for "civilization and enlightenment." So
  too for "reverence" for the sovereign: The overthrow of the bakufu
  resulted not in a restoration of direct imperial rule as it had existed in
  antiquity, but in a new form of monarchy.
  In pursuing its goals of following, achieving equality with, and even
  overtaking the West, the Meiji government created slogans for all
  aspects of its endeavors - "enrich the country, strengthen the army"
  (fukoku kyohei), "civilization and enlightenment" (bummei kaika), and
  "revise the (unequal) treaties" (jqyaku kaisei). The government ob-
  tained the assistance of foreign teachers and technicians to achieve
  these goals. In their assimilation of Western culture, the Japanese,
  who had progressed from book learning to direct experience of the
  West, now adopted a state policy of inviting large numbers of foreign
  teachers.
  Countries of origins and numbers
  Immediately after the opening of the country, the foreigners under
  whom the Japanese studied were mainly Dutch, although the first
  systematic instructor in Western arts and sciences was a German,
  P. F. von Siebold (1796-1866), who arrived in Nagasaki as a physi-
  cian with the Dutch trading post in 1823. While studying Japan's
  language, history, geography, animals, and plants, he practiced and
  taught medicine to Japanese students in a private academy set up for
  him, the Narutakijuku. In the Tokugawa years, Japanese curiosity
  began with Western medicine and astronomy, but by late Tokugawa
  times, their concerns had shifted to Western arms and military meth-
  ods, reflecting the gravity of the international situation. In 1855 the
  bakufu set up a naval training institute in Nagasaki to which it invited
  a team of Dutch instructors to provide training in navigation. Thus
  Japan's first "foreign employees" were Pels Rijcken and a group of
  twenty-two instructors, who arrived in 1855, and Huyssen van Katten-
  dycke and a team of thirty-seven, who came slightly later.
  In 1858, parallel treaties were concluded with the United States,
  Holland, England, France, and Russia. Once Holland was no longer
  the sole avenue for studying Western civilization, Dutch prestige suf-
  fered precipitously, and as the Japanese discovered that England,
  France, Germany, and America were the leading Western powers,
  they discarded the Dutch language and began studying English,
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  French, and German. Thereafter, students were dispatched to En-
  gland, America, France, and (in Meiji times) Germany to study.
  Initially, few foreigners were employed, and most of them were
  from France and Britain. In its final conflicts with Satsuma and
  Choshu, the bakufu sought closer relations with France, whereas
  Satsuma and Choshu looked to England. In 1862, the bakufu, with
  help from France, built a shipyard in Yokosuka and began a foundry
  in Yokohama as well as establishing a French-language school there.
  Oguri Tadamasa, a leading official in these final bakufu reforms, re-
  marked to a colleague: "The Tokugawa may have to transfer this old
  house [the bakufu] to someone else, but it will look a lot better with a
  new storehouse on the premises."*2 In fact, the Meiji government did
  take the decrepit bakufu structure off the hands of the Tokugawa a
  few years later and received the new Yokosuka arsenal "storehouse" as
  a bonus. Moreover, it is important to note that not only the plant itself
  but also the foreign employees operating it were taken over by the new
  regime. The Meiji government acquired new facilities as well as pre-
  cious human talent in the form of Japanese who had been sent abroad
  in the late Tokugawa period, but foreign employees were by no means
  the least valuable assets it inherited.
  In the Meiji period there was a rapid increase in the number of foreign
  employees serving in government and private capacities. The number
  of foreign government employees peaked in 1875 with approximately
  520 persons employed, but by 1894 and after, the annual totals were
  fewer than 100. In contrast, the number of foreigners in private employ
  was small at first but reached a high of approximately 760 in 1897. By
  occupation in government, engineers and educators in the ministries of
  Industry and Education were most numerous, and in the private sector,
  the number of educators increased as time went on. Classified by nation-
  ality, among government employees, the British were most numerous
  as educators and engineers, followed by the Germans; in the private
  sector, American educators predominated. In regard to the relative
  influence of the different nationalities, it is interesting to note the
  changes in numbers of foreigners employed in the various government
  bureaus. In 1872, out of a total of 213 government-employed foreigners,
  119 were from the United Kingdom, of whom 104 were engineers in the
  Ministry of Industry, and 49 were French, of whom 24 were shipbuild-
  ing technicians. By 1881, however, the statistics show 96 English, 32
  Germans, 12 Americans, and 10 French. Areas in which particular
  42 Fukuchi Gen'ichiro, Bakumatsu seijika (Tokyo: Min'yusha, 1900), p. 266.
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  TEACHERS OF "ARTS AND SCIENCES" 
  469
  nationalities were particularly influential included the English in the
  ministries of Industry, Navy, and Communications; and the Americans
  in the development of Hokkaido.«
  Budget figures are revealing: At some points, foreigners' salaries
  accounted for one-third of the Ministry of Industry's regular budget
  and one-third of the budget allocations for Tokyo Imperial University,
  the first modern university to be established in Japan. The foreigners'
  salaries clearly placed great strains on the budgets of all government
  ministries and bureaus, to say nothing of the costs of studying abroad.
  Yet perhaps it was precisely because of these great costs that the
  Japanese studied so assiduously under their expensive foreign teach-
  ers. These costs were heavy when the foreigners were conscientious
  and of good character, but when they assumed an attitude of superior-
  ity toward their Japanese employers, the costs must have seemed
  heavier still - all the more reason, no doubt, for the diligence with
  which the Japanese strove to master the new teachings.
  What the Japanese desired
  In November 1873 Ito Hirobumi, minister of industry, delivered a
  directive to mark the opening of the government's new Kogakuryd,
  which later evolved into the Department of Engineering of Tokyo
  Imperial University. Ito pointed out that the new enterprises that
  Japan was developing should be considered the foundation of future
  greatness. To create a "great civilization" meant educating "high and
  low alike," and it had to be done quickly so that "Japan could take its
  rightful place among the nations of the world" in wealth and power.
  Because only few Japanese had mastered the skills required up to that
  point, the country had "no choice but to employ many foreigners to
  assist us at the outset." But it was not enough to rely on the skills of
  others; to do so might bring temporary gains but not the "wealth and
  strength that will endure through myriads of generations." Conse-
  quently, Ito concluded:
  It is imperative that we seize this opportunity to train and educate ourselves
  fully. On this solemn occasion, I urge all ambitious youths to enroll in this
  school, to study assiduously, to perfect their talents, and to serve in their
  various posts with dedication. If this is done, then as a matter of course, we
  will be able to do without foreigners. We ourselves will fill die realm with
  43 Umetani Noboru, Oyatoi gaikokujin: Meiji Nikon no wakiyakuiachi (Tokyo: Nihon keizai
  shimbunsha, 1965), pp. 209-23. In English, see Hazel Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners
  in Meiji Japan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980).
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  470 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  railroads and other technological wonders that will form die basis for further
  developments to continue for a myriad generations. The glory of our Imperial
  Land will shine forth to radiate upon foreign shores, while at home, high and
  low will share in die benefits of a great civilization. Therefore, let all ambi-
  tious youths throughout die land proceed vigorously widi dieir studies.**
  It is clear that the Meiji leaders intended foreign employees to play
  only a subsidiary and temporary role in Japan's development and
  wanted Japanese nationals to be trained to replace them as soon as
  possible. The Japanese realized that in order to "lay the foundations
  for national wealth and strength that will last a myriad generations,"
  they would have to "train and educate" themselves and that they had
  no choice but to develop and increase their own capabilities. It was
  also Japan's good fortune that even in the West, scientific and techno-
  logical development had a history of only a few decades. And so
  although it was totally dependent on foreign teachers and technicians
  at the beginning, Japan succeeded in transplanting Western industrial
  techniques and in producing enough talented men to become surpris-
  ingly self-sufficient in the relatively short span of fifteen to twenty
  years. Tokyo Imperial University's engineering department had a total
  of 411 graduates between 1879 and 1885. This number of trained
  technological leaders was not far below the number of foreigners em-
  ployed by the Ministry of Industry since the beginning of the Meiji
  period.
  Tokugawa Japanese had gained a fair understanding of Western
  science, a fact that can be discerned in the observations made by
  Fukuzawa Yukichi during his i860 visit to America. He was not in the
  least surprised by the modern phenomena of the telegraph, metalwork-
  ing, or sugar refining. As is generally true for backward nations,
  however, Japan began its own development by availing itself of ad-
  vanced Western science and technology.
  The entry of Western modes of life
  The numerous foreigners employed by the Meiji government facilitated
  Japan's "turn to the West," not only by serving as teachers, but also in
  the broader sense of introducing new life-styles. For example, at one
  time during the first half of the 1870s, there were as many as twenty
  foreigners (most of them English) employed at the government mint,
  where it is reported that as early as 1870-1, Western clothing, the solar
  44 Umetani Noboru, Oyatoi gaikokujin (Tokyo: Kajima kenkyusho shuppan, 1968), p. 210.
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  TEACHERS OF "ARTS AND SCIENCES" 
  47I
  calendar, and Sunday holidays were adopted. Western clothing became
  compulsory for government officials in November 1872, when a direc-
  tive established Western clothing as the official ceremonial dress. In
  1876, frock coats were decreed standard business attire.45
  Calendar reform took place in November 1872, when the govern-
  ment decreed that the third day of the twelfth month of the lunar
  calendar would become January of the next year.*6 This was how the
  solar calendar was introduced to Japan.*7 The rationale behind calen-
  dar reform deserves a slight digression. The solar calendar was not
  unknown during the Tokugawa period, thanks to Dutch studies. As
  early as 1795, Otsuki Gentaku and his rangaku friends had celebrated
  the eleventh day of the eleventh lunar month as "Dutch New Year's
  Day." The actual use of the solar calendar after its adoption in 1872,
  however, was not particularly rapid or widespread. The traditional
  lunar-solar "Tempo calendar," intricately connected with the pulse of
  agricultural seasons, suited the Japanese life pattern well. For a time
  the new Meiji calendar was dubbed the "imperial court calendar," as
  opposed to the "Tokugawa calendar" to which the people were accus-
  tomed. Not until 1911 were the lunar listings of days removed from
  the calendars, and even today many Japanese feel a certain nostalgia
  for the old lunar calendar.
  One reason that the new regime pushed through calendar reform so
  early probably stemmed from budgetary considerations. Because there
  was one intercalary month to be added to the lunar calendar every
  three years, changing to the solar calendar meant saving the interca-
  lary month's expenditures. When the new government converted to
  the solar calendar in 1872 and "erased" two days, it withheld salaries
  for those days, not only for Japanese, but also for foreign employees
  whose salaries were drawn on a monthly rather than a yearly basis.
  The government mint, which took the lead in adopting Western dress
  and the solar calendar, also pioneered in Western accounting methods,
  reserve funds for work injuries, medical clinics, and other matters
  hitherto unknown in Japan. In addition, it quickly introduced gas
  lights and telegraph lines, which became symbols of "civilization and
  enlightenment" in Japan, even though none of these innovations was
  directly concerned with minting techniques.
  Individual foreign teachers often had astonishing influence through
  45 Tsuji Zennosuke, Nikon bunkashi (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1950), vol. 7, p. 18.
  46 Sato Masatsugu, Nikon rekigakushi (Tokyo: Surugadai shuppan, 1968), p. 479.
  47 The Julian method of intercalation was used at this time, but the Gregorian method was
  adopted in 1900.
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  472 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  the strength of their personal example and assumed almost oracular
  importance for young students who were only partly rooted in tradi-
  tional values and eager to learn the inner strength of "civilization." The
  artillery Captain L. L. Janes in Kumamoto and the agronomist William
  Clark in Hokkaido proved to be more successful religious teachers than
  were the numerous missionaries who were sent to Japan after the govern-
  ment rescinded the prohibitions against Christianity in 1873, and major
  groupings of the small but influential Protestant church derived from
  the "Kumamoto Band" and "Hokkaido Group."*8
  In addition, many of the customs inherent in "civilization and enlight-
  enment" or capitalist enterprise were introduced by foreign employees
  of the Meiji government. Christmas, for instance, which became a
  holiday in a non-Christian land, came with the foreign residents, as did
  many other aspects of contemporary life. Many aspects of Western life
  were taught by the foreigners through their daily life rather than
  through formal instruction. Along with the formal learning they dis-
  pensed, these foreigners thus provided the Japanese with opportunities
  to become acquainted with Western ways by observing foreign life-
  styles and daily activities. The result, as is mirrored in the woodblock
  prints of mid-Meiji, with the strong, aniline dyes that replaced the
  subtler hues of Tokugawa times, was as uniquely Japanese as were the
  mixed forms of dress and architecture pictured there.
  THE JAPANIZATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT AND
  INSTITUTIONS
  When Western value systems came into contact with Japanese values,
  there were three possible outcomes: The two could conflict; the values
  might be adopted totally; or they might be altered in the process of
  being accepted. Christianity provides one example of Japan's alter-
  ation and transformation of Western values. Another example can be
  found in Japan's civil code, which was drafted under the guidance of
  the French jurist G. E. Boissonade. By examining this draft, we may
  discover Japan's reaction to "teachers of arts and science" who at-
  tempted to introduce Western morality as well.
  Social order was well maintained in Tokugawa Japan, but not be-
  cause the Japanese of that era were bound by written laws. The un-
  48 John F. Howes, "Japanese Christians and American Missionaries," in Marius B. Jansen, ed.,
  Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1965), pp. 337-68. For Janes, see F. G. Notehelfer, American Samurai: Captain L. L.
  Janes and Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  JAPANIZATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT 
  473
  equal treaties concluded by the bakufu in 1858 posed a new problem
  and need in this regard. They were inequitable and humiliating; Japan
  was forced to relinquish tariff autonomy and concede extraterrito-
  riality to Westerners. To obtain equal status with the West, the early
  Meiji government would first have to prove that Japan was a "civi-
  lized" country, deserving equal status and treatment, and part of that
  process involved compiling legal codes similar to those possessed by
  the European states. Thus the adoption of a Western-style legal sys-
  tem was not simply a domestic matter; it was also essential to the
  resolution of an external problem that demanded an urgent solution.
  When the French legal system first came to the attention of the
  Japanese in late Tokugawa, they greeted it with enthusiasm. The
  Tokugawa official Kurimoto Joun, who traveled to France in 1867,
  noted in his memoirs:
  "Deciding a lawsuit with half a word" is something that requires the wisdom
  of Tzu-lu and is beyond the capability of men of only average abilities and
  intelligence. How much more impossible for a man without human feelings.
  The complete elimination of argumentation in court would have been impossi-
  ble even for the sage Confucius. That, at any rate, was what I thought until I
  learned of this Napoleonic code. . . . I was overwhelmed with admiration and
  envy.«
  The reason for Kurimoto's praise was that two Japanese merchants
  who had accompanied his party had been arraigned and brought to
  court, where he saw the French judge "base his decision and pro-
  nounce sentence in accordance with Article X, Provision Y of the
  Napoleonic code."
  In 1869, the Meiji government ordered Mitsukuri Rinsho to trans-
  late all five French law codes. At that time Eto Shimpei suggested that
  they "merely translate the French civil code verbatim, call it the 'Japa-
  nese Civil Code,' and promulgate it immediately."'0 His aim was to
  revise the unequal treaties: The laws need not be perfect, and it would
  be sufficient if they were part of a new judicial system. This would
  convince the West that Japan was indeed a "civilized" nation.
  A group under Eto's direction began compiling a civil code based
  on Mitsukuri's translation. In 1872, the French lawyer Georges Bous-
  quet was hired to assist them, and the next year Gustave Emile
  49 This opening phrase is a quotation from The Analects of Confucius. Kurimoto Joun, "Gydso
  tsuroku," in Nihon shiseki kyokai, ed., Hoan iko (Zoku Nikon shiseki wsko, vol. 4) (Tokyo:
  Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1975), p. 24.
  50 Eto Shimpei, "Furansu mimpd wo motte Nihonmimpo to nasan to su," in Hozumi
  Nobushige, ed.,Hdsoy<rwa (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1980), pp. 210-13.
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  474 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Boissonade de Fontarabie (1825-1910) followed;'1 the latter worked
  in Japan until 1895. In addition to their work of compilation, these
  men served as instructors in Western legal concepts at the Ministry
  of Justice. Before this, Inoue Kowashi (1854-95), who deserves
  much credit for his work to implement Western institutions, had
  been sent to France by the Ministry of Justice, where he had studied
  under Boissonade, who was then a professor of law at the Sorbonne.
  In Japan, Boissonade cooperated with Inoue on many projects. In
  public law, he strove to establish concepts like the principle of legal-
  ity and the principle of evidence and to abolish torture. He also drew
  up criminal and penal codes, which were Japan's first modern law
  codes. In private law, he worked on the civil code, drawing up
  sections on property, securities, and evidence. In addition he was
  influential in determining what was to go into the sections on per-
  sonal and family relations and property acquisitions. Boissonade's
  drafts passed final review in the Privy Council and were scheduled to
  go into effect in 1890. A noteworthy aspect of his draft was the ideal
  of equality between individuals in the inheritance of property. But
  these provisions drew sharp criticism from those who held that they
  would threaten the primacy of the house (ie), and as a result, imple-
  mentation of the code was held up just before it was to become law.
  Boissonade's provisions were rejected and replaced by requirements
  that the household head inherit all property. In sum, the Meiji gov-
  ernment placed more emphasis on maintaining the "house" (ie) as a
  structural unit than on respecting the individual's right to inheri-
  tance.'2 This "civil code issue" raged for several years.
  The controversy over the new code had many facets, but in general
  terms it can be viewed as a conflict between the universalistic, theoreti-
  cal legal thought espoused by French jurists of natural law and a more
  particularistic and empirical set of ideas advanced by proponents of
  historicist legal thought who drew their arguments from English and
  especially German traditions. The latter group argued that the concept
  of "house" (ie) and the sentiments it engendered were an intrinsic part
  of particularistic and traditional Japanese society and values. Hozumi
  Yatsuka, a spokesman for the latter group, became famous for his
  51 See Okubo Yasuo, Nihon kindaiho no chichi: Bowasonado (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977) for
  a discussion of this consultant.
  52 On the compilation of the civil code and the "civil code issue," in addition to Okubo, Nihon
  kindaiho no chichi; see Ishii Ryosuke, ed., Meiji bunkashi: Hosei-hen (Tokyo: Genyosha,
  '954)>P- 5!5- This work is vol. 2 of the Centennial Cultural Committee Series, Meiji bunkashi
  and was translated by William Chambliss as Japanese Legislation in the Meiji Era (Tokyo:
  Pan-Pacific Press, 1958).
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  JAPANIZATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT 
  475
  catchphrase "Loyalty and filial piety will perish with the enactment of
  the civil code." He wrote:
  With the spread of Christianity in Europe, a self-righteous "Father who art in
  Heaven" has come to monopolize the love and respect of all men. Perhaps for
  that reason, Westerners neglect the worship of ancestors and die Way of filial
  piety. With die spread of doctrines like equality and humanity, they slight the
  importance of ethnic customs and blood ties. Perhaps diat is why no "house"
  system exists among them anymore; instead they create a society of equal
  individuals and try to uphold it by means of laws centered on the individual.
  Japan has never forgotten the teaching of ancestor reverence because of die
  coming of foreign religions. However, die spirit in which diis civil code is
  drafted will bring repudiation of die national religion and destruction of our
  "house" system. The words house and household head do appear briefly, but
  die draft obscures die true principles of law, and dius, is worse dian if it were
  a dead letter.
  Alas, these men are trying to enact a civil code centered on extreme individual-
  ism, ignoring diree diousand years of indigenous beliefs!"
  Hozumi explained why the proposed civil code would lead to "the
  loss of Japan's individuality": (1) The section on property, by idealiz-
  ing unlimited freedom of contract for individuals, might raise society's
  productive capacities, but at cost of widening the gap between rich
  and poor, thereby producing conflicts between owners and workers,
  "contradictions inherent in capitalism"; and (2) the section on per-
  sonal and domestic relations, based as it was on an imitation of West-
  ern individualism, had been drafted with the idea that husbands and
  wives, and elder and younger brothers were separate individuals. Con-
  sequently there was danger that the code would break up Japanese
  society, which had always been upheld by teachings of reverence for
  ancestors, who continued to be central to the house.'* Instead,
  Hozumi advocated the enactment of a civil code that would emphasize
  "a spirit suited to the nation" and "the familial relations of the 'house
  system'."
  As a result of this civil code issue, the Diet (parliament) voted to
  postpone until 1896 the enactment of the civil code scheduled to go
  into effect the following year. It was still in limbo when Boissonade,
  who had poured heart and soul into the code during a residence of over
  twenty years in Japan, returned to France in 1895. Inoue Kowashi
  53 Hozumi Yatsuka, "Mimpo idete, chOko horobu," in Hogaku shimpd, vol. 5 (August 1891).
  54 On Hozumi's theory of state, see Richard Minear, Japanese Tradition and Western Law:
  Emperor, State, and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
  University Press, 1970).
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  476 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  composed a commemorative poem in classical Chinese for Boissonade
  from his sickbed and died soon after. New forces came into play.
  The code was in effect recompiled by a new commission headed by
  ltd Hirobumi and Saionji Kimmochi, and their new code was finally
  enacted in 1898. Their two guiding principles, which together defined
  the Meiji civil code, are of great interest to us: (1) Indigenous Japanese
  institutions and practices should be taken fully into account; and (2)
  the strong points of legislative theories from all Western nations
  should be adopted, and not just those of France and Italy, as had been
  the case previously.
  The section on property was left virtually unchanged. It incorpo-
  rated principles of legal equality between the sexes and the former
  social-status groups as well as the principles of individual choice, per-
  sonal ownership of property, and liability arising from negligence, all
  based on the spirit of individualism. It also contained a system of real
  and obligatory rights based on the idea of equal rights and duties.
  However, the section on social relationships was greatly revised to
  establish the power of the household head by means of special provi-
  sions for family heads, parents, and fathers. As a result, individuals
  were constrained by being placed within a status hierarchy of family
  relationships. According to Western historical concepts, Japan's civil
  code was thus based on a dual structure, whose two layers were logi-
  cally inconsistent: the return of the individual to a gemeinschaft-type
  of "house" unit in personal relationships versus the recognition of that
  person's status as an individual in capitalistic society. A modern soci-
  ety is presumably made up of individuals, but the Japanese people
  were continually forced to adjust themselves to a system burdened
  with a "house system" in which each individual was rooted.
  That the enactment of Japan's civil code went through these vicissi-
  tudes and that the end product came about by such contradictory
  compromises are hardly surprising. Quite the contrary: The civil code
  epitomizes the basic pattern taken by Japan's "turn to the West." Eto
  Shimpei, who, as mentioned earlier, once suggested that Japan enact a
  word-for-word translation of the French civil code, is said to have
  given the following instructions to Inoue Kowashi when the Ministry
  of Justice sent him to France:
  The most vital task for all of you who are being sent to Europe is to inspect
  various European countries and institutions and then adopt their strong
  points while discarding their weaknesses. You are not being sent to study
  about the conditions in each country and to import Western ways wholesale
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  SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 
  477
  into Japan. Hence, you should no longer think in terms of learning from
  Westerners, but instead, observe them in a spirit of critical inquiry. As Japan
  proceeds along the path of civilization, it is vital to adopt Western institutions
  and ways to improve our governmental processes. Nevertheless we must not
  become so infatuated with the West that we fail to discern its defects. If that is
  the case, the institutions and ways we adopt with so much toil and trouble will
  not be fit for our use.''
  In his memoirs Inoue stressed that the Meiji constitution and all
  other areas of reform in which he had had a hand in implementing
  show the spiritual characteristics of Japan. In contrast, Saionji Kim-
  mochi (1849-1940), who spent ten years of his youth in France and
  who placed his faith in the universality of civilization, criticized such
  particularism as follows: "Usually, what is termed 'particular to' a
  certain nation or race is a shortcoming or idiosyncracy. . . . Most
  traits that present-day educators in Japan babble about as being dis-
  tinctively Japanese would distress men of learning. . . ."56
  Hozumi Yatsuka, who overemphasized the importance of the
  "house system" and the "teaching of ancestor reverence," was de-
  rided by the intellectuals of his day. It must be noted here that when
  the sections on family relations and inheritance in Japan's civil code
  were drastically revised during the American Occupation in 1947, the
  concept of "house" was thoroughly repudiated. Many Japanese, how-
  ever, still opposed such "morality" imposed from abroad and feared
  that Western-style individualism would weaken family ties and create
  new problems in caring for the elderly, a problem that was of great
  concern by the 1980s. Thus opposition to aspects of Western "moral-
  ity" represented more than a conservative, emotional reaction, for it
  was reinforced by a desire to make Japan achieve "modernity" while
  avoiding the alienation and atomization of human relationships inher-
  ent in capitalistic society.
  THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM: FIRST TRANSLATIONS FROM
  WESTERN LITERATURE
  Robinson Crusoe
  The great number of translations from Western literature made dur-
  ing the Meiji period and after provides another striking indication of
  55 Matono Hansuke, Eld Nampaku (Tokyo: Hara shobo reprint, 1968), vol. 2, p. 107.
  56 Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, "Meiji kempo no seiritsu to sono kokusai seijiteki haikei," in
  Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, Nihon kenseishi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968), pp. 134-5.
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  478 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Japan's "turn to the West." During the early decades, however,
  translators were concerned more with causes than with literature.
  From the last days of Tokugawa rule through the first decades of
  Meiji, numerous translations were really practical tracts of agitation,
  often known as "political novels," that reflected the conditions of the
  time. More often than not, they were translated to suit the conve-
  nience of those who supported a cause or political position. Regard-
  less of their literary value or lack thereof, however, these translations
  are interesting for what they reveal about the way that Japanese in
  that era reacted to the foreign intercourse that followed the break-
  down of national isolation.
  Japanese intellectuals began reading accounts of castaways toward
  the end of the Edo period. Japanese castaways who returned to Japan
  were often interrogated by bakufu officials, who transcribed their
  accounts of conditions overseas. Against that background, two transla-
  tions of Robinson Crusoe appeared before the Meiji Restoration. The
  first was a partial translation from a Dutch version, entitled The Ac-
  count of a Castaway by Kuroda Kogen, a student of Dutch studies,
  which was completed before Perry's arrival. The following preface to
  the Dutch edition was also included in Kuroda's translation:
  Robinson Crusoe of England was a man with a desire to traverse the four
  quarters. He set out to sea and lost his ship in a tropical storm. He managed
  to stay alive but was cast adrift in a lifeboat, captured by pirates, and finally
  sold to a fisherman. Later, he escaped from that fishing boat and, while
  fleeing from pursuers, was unexpectedly rescued by a Portuguese merchant
  vessel. He grew sweet potatoes and became very wealthy, but his misfortunes
  at sea did not deter him from returning to it in a great vessel he constructed.
  He ran into many storms, was shipwrecked, and then marooned on a desert
  island. He used all his wits to survive on this island for twenty-eight years
  before an English ship chanced to come and take him home.
  Any reader of these accounts cannot help but be overwhelmed with admira-
  tion. When it was published in England, readers devoured it and rushed to
  buy it in droves; at one point its publication reached forty thousand copies.
  Its Dutch translation is being read more avidly than was the English original.
  Moreover, this book supplements gaps in our knowledge of geography. Al-
  though there are numerous other accounts of sea voyages, these merely de-
  scribe stormy seas or the contours of lands discovered; none reports anything
  like the miraculous nature of Crusoe's achievements. Readers who learn of his
  countless hardships and his resourcefulness in overcoming these cannot but
  develop their own mental faculties.
  I personally feel that although life is full of vicissitudes, no one has experi-
  enced as many as Crusoe. Each account of his experiences on that deserted
  island has great relevance to our own understanding of affairs in society. You
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  SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 
  479
  should never forget the sufferings Crusoe experienced and become conceited
  and self-indulgent.
  Moreover, Crusoe was adept solely in navigation, not in any other technical
  skills. Yet the mind of man is indeed a marvelous thing! Once he landed on
  the deserted island, he sewed his own clothes, gathered his own food, built
  his own house, constructed his own ship, made his own pottery, grew his own
  vegetables - succeeded in meeting all his personal needs by himself. . . . "
  This translator was apparently unaware that Robinson Crusoe was a
  fictional product of Daniel Defoe's pen and instead believed that it
  was a true account. Furthermore, Robinson Crusoe was not considered
  a children's story by the Japanese of that era but, rather, a true ac-
  count of a castaway, meant to be read by adults.
  Translations of this type suggest Japan's initial orientation toward
  the sea, as well as their yearning for information about foreign af-
  fairs. In the case of Niijima Jo, for example, his desire to find out
  about conditions abroad was accelerated by reading a translation of
  Robinson Crusoe lent to him by his teacher of Dutch studies. He then
  smuggled himself out of Japan. After spending well over a year at
  sea, he found himself in America in 1865, engaged in manual labor
  with no idea of what the future held in store for him: "Exhausted
  after each day's labor, I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the
  pillow. When I awoke each morning, my entire body ached so badly
  that I could hardly move."'8 This continued for weeks. Then he
  bought a copy of Robinson Crusoe in the original English. This book,
  along with a Dutch book about Christ and a Bible translated into
  classical Chinese, were what induced him to become a Christian.
  Niijima too believed that Crusoe was a real person and seems to have
  compared his own experiences with those of that solitary castaway.
  When he was stranded in Boston, he was insulted by burly sailors
  and found out about the grim living conditions caused by post-
  Civil War inflation. In that black hour, he is said to have gained the
  strength to carry on by repeating Crusoe's prayer.
  This is a most interesting account of the circumstances surrounding
  the conversion of one Japanese to Protestantism. Today we are used to
  reading editions of Robinson Crusoe rewritten for children and forget
  the emphasis on Divine Providence in Defoe's original. The author's
  intention, scholars tell us, was to edify readers and impress them with
  the importance of moral behavior. Robinson Crusoe was a parable of
  the role of Providence in human affairs, and accordingly, Niijima's
  57 Kokusho kankokai, ed., Bummei geroyu sosho (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1913), vol. 1,
  p. 136. 
  58 "Hakodate yori no ryakki," in Niijim sensei shokanshu, p. 1137.
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  480 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  interpretation was probably truer to the original than is that of most
  modern readers.
  Protestantism enlarged upon this idea of diligence and work based
  on the individualism of a God-fearing person, and for that reason it is
  often associated with the flowering of capitalism. What Defoe de-
  picted in Robinson Crusoe was an individual in relation to an absolute
  God, and that relationship made for an autonomous individual.
  Niijima perceived in Crusoe such a religious man, but he also saw the
  prototype of those who would later develop capitalism.
  After returning to Japan, Niijima established the Doshisha English
  School in Kyoto in 1875. His goal was to foster "talented men of
  conscience," a phrase that suggests Max Weber's "spirit of this-
  worldly asceticism." One might even suggest that with the abolition of
  feudal society, Niijima and his associates set out to reconstruct and
  transform the ethics of the samurai, who had been taught to "do
  everything humanly possibly and trust in Heaven's fate" in Meiji
  society through the medium of Protestantism.
  Except for a period in the 1880s when the number of converts to
  Protestantism seemed to be growing rapidly - a phenomenon not unre-
  lated to the exigencies of treaty reform - the young Meiji church
  probably did not enroll more than about thirty thousand converts.
  They were a strategic and able group of educated and usually ex-
  samurai youths. Prejudice in Kumamoto brought L. L. Janes's
  "Kumamoto Band" to Niijima's Doshisha, and the association of Prot-
  estantism with Western dynamism by adventurous and able youth
  made the influence of Protestantism much larger than the modest
  number of its adherents would suggest. Yet its significance can also be
  exaggerated, for adherents to the new faith as often came from a
  commitment to this-worldly values as they did to other-worldly, tran-
  scendent beliefs.
  Self-Help
  During the "civilization and enlightenment" of early Meiji, the first
  Western ideas to enter Japan were generally those associated with
  English and American thinkers like Mill, Bentham, Spencer, de
  Tocqueville, Guizot, and Buckle - utilitarianism, civil liberties, natu-
  ral rights, and rational positivism. Slightly later, French republican-
  ism associated with Rousseau arrived and spread. Together, these
  ideas destroyed the hierarchical status system of Tokugawa times and
  ushered in an ethos of "achieving success and rising in the world"
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  SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 
  481
  (risshin shusse). This ethos was powerfully stated in the phrases of
  Fukuzawa Yukichi's Gakumon no susume (An encouragement of learn-
  ing) in 1872: "People are not born exalted or base, rich or poor. It is
  simply that those who work hard at their studies and learn much
  become exalted and rich, while those who are ignorant become base
  and poor."59 This later became the Meiji government's ideology.
  Japan's traditional work ethic was instilled anew in early Meiji
  youths in the form of this demand for a modern education. As a result,
  an enthusiasm for "personal cultivation" spread. Under slogans such
  as "hard work and application" or "thrift, diligence, and effort," Meiji
  youths prepared to carry out their future duties and to acquire knowl-
  edge from the West in various capacities - as pupils in the newly
  created school system, as apprentices in traditional crafts, as live-in
  disciples in the homes of famous scholars, and as students studying in
  universities abroad.
  In 1883 a new translation of Robinson Crusoe by Inoue Tsutomu
  appeared as An Extraordinary Adventure: An Account of Robinson Cru-
  soe, the Castaway. In his preface, Inoue treated Crusoe as a fictional
  character, not as an actual person, but he also asserted that the novel
  was no mere adventure story and that it served to teach young English-
  men to overcome hardship. Inoue interpreted Robinson Crusoe in the
  following terms: "This book should not be thought of as trivial, for if
  men read it carefully they will see that it shows how an island can be
  developed by stubborn determination."60
  But it is the reception given to Self-Help that best shows the domi-
  nant hold maintained by the work ethic in Meiji Japan as it was
  applied to rendering service to society. After Fukuzawa Yukichi,
  Nakamura Masanao was the most influential exponent of "enlighten-
  ment" in the early Meiji era. Half of Nakamura's influence stemmed
  from his translation of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty; the other half,
  from Samuel Smiles's Self-Help. Nakamura was born in 1832 to a low-
  ranking samurai family but was admitted to the bakufu's Shoheiko
  academy on the basis of his scholarly promise. His education was
  fundamentally Confucian, but he was also drawn to Western studies
  and to Christianity, which he embraced in 1874. Just before the Resto-
  ration he was sent to England as the supervisor of a group of young
  59 "Gakumon no susume (shohen)," in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 3, p. 30 .This work has
  been translated into English by David Dilworth and Umeyo Hirano as An Encouragement to
  Learning (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1969).
  60 Inoue Tsutomu's translation was published in Tokyo by Hakubunsha in 1883. See also
  George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), p. 419.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  bakufu students. When he returned to Japan after a sojourn of a year
  and a half, he brought back copies of Self-Help (which was a gift from
  a friend) and On Liberty. At that time, the bakufu was collapsing, and
  Nakamura joined a group of loyal retainer-intellectuals who retreated
  to Shizuoka with the Tokugawa house.
  Nakamura now became an educator and translator. He completed a
  translation of Smiles's Self-Help in 1871 and published it as A Collec-
  tion of Stories about Success in the West and another of J. S. Mill's in
  1872 as The Principle of Liberty. Both books were immediately success-
  ful, as the Japanese of that era were thirsting for knowledge of the
  West. On Liberty became a fountainhead of liberalism during the Meiji
  enlightenment, and Self-Help was read by all Meiji youths. The latter
  work was a best-seller in England and America as well, selling 250,000
  copies by the end of the nineteenth century. But in Meiji Japan, where
  it appeared as an account of real Western men whose experiences were
  anchored in real social conditions, it is said to have sold 1 million
  copies. It certainly was a best-seller, being reprinted into the 1920s.
  In recent years Self-Help has been dismissed as part of the "success-
  story genre," but Nakamura's goals were moral as well as materialis-
  tic, and he stressed (by length and language) moral responsibility and
  the national interest. His translation was couched in classical language
  congenial to samurai readers, but he achieved a sonorous style that still
  strikes a respondent chord in many people, especially his opening
  rendition of Smiles's language:
  The proverb, "Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a truism, empiri-
  cally verifiable. In this adage lies the success or failure of everything in human
  affairs. "He who helps himself means the ability to be autonomous and
  independent, to refrain from relying on others. The spirit of self-help is the
  basis from which man derives intelligence. In broader terms, when the major-
  ity of a nation's people "help themselves," that state is filled with vigor and is
  strong in spirit.61
  When Nakamura, a model Confucian scholar who had studied in
  England, pointed to the path that Japan should follow, Meiji youths
  obeyed him implicitly. His puritan individualism and utilitarian moral-
  ity could be transplanted in Japanese soil without much opposition
  because they could be grafted onto traditional Japanese ideas almost
  naturally.62 This is indicated by the following episodes.
  In a book that Koda Rohan (1867-1947) wrote to instill the success
  61 For Nakamura's original text from which this was translated, see Ishikawa Ken, ed., Nihon
  kyokasho taikei: Kindai hen I (Tokyo: Kddansha, 1961), p. 25.
  62 Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J.:
  Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 67.
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  SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 
  483
  ethic in young people, the first book that its hero is said to have read is
  Ninomiya Sontoku's Account of Recompensing Virtue (Hotoku-ki). But
  when Smiles's book became popular, Rohan changed the title of his
  hero's inspiration to make it Nakamura's translation of Self-Help. Yet
  the hero's exclamations, "The fruits of your labors will derive from
  Heaven's boundless abundance" or "This book made me what I am,"
  fit either source of inspiration equally well.
  Kunikida Doppo, in An Uncommon Common Man, sympathetically
  portrays Katsura Shosaku, a youth fully imbued with the spirit of Self-
  Help. Katsura idealizes Watt, Edison, and Stevenson, saves his
  money, and goes to Tokyo to work his way through school. Though
  poor, he exhibits none of the heedlessness toward life's necessities that
  is usually depicted as a virtue (or a vice) in the traditional swashbuck-
  ling hero-gallant of East Asia. Instead, Katsura supports his brother
  while going on to become an electrical engineer who is earnestly "ab-
  sorbed in the work he is performing." He walks around and around
  some equipment, checking to discover the cause of its malfunction and
  then repairs it. Such an uncommon common man who has set his
  mind to do something fits Smiles's description of "a man devoted to
  his trade," one who is "able to endure long periods of tribulation and
  possesses true mettle." The reason that Japan could follow the exam-
  ple of Western peoples (whom Nakamura hailed in exclamations like
  "Ah, how happy Western peoples are today!") so quickly and could
  enjoy the benefits of electrical lighting in rural villages so early is that
  the majority of Japanese shared Doppo's sympathy with Katsura:
  There was a large reservoir of uncommon common men toiling dili-
  gently in the Meiji era.
  As might be expected in a nineteenth-century English work, Smiles
  lists many "creators of new inventions" among his heroes in Self-Help.
  He devotes several pages to an anecdote about Richard Arkwright's
  invention of the cotton reel. One admiring reader of this anecdote was
  Toyoda Sakichi, who himself succeeded in inventing an automatic
  loom in 1897. His descendents went on to make automobiles. The
  lessons preached by Smiles were quickly transplanted into Japanese
  soil and became the foundation for "overcoming adversity" and for
  "earnest application" in Meiji youths.
  The philosophy implied in these slogans - that possibilities were
  unlimited for the individual with ability and that everything depended
  on personal application - fit the realities of early Meiji society. This
  philosophy was also expressed in common parlance. However, one
  should also keep in mind the less glamorous reasons when explaining
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  484 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  why this transplantation took place so smoothly. One reason is that at
  least superficially, the lessons contained in Selp-Help are arbitrarily and
  conclusively stated. In both the original and the translation, the doc-
  trines are asserted with categorical authority. This arbitrary though
  edifying style, which is rather at odds with the work's purpose, was
  probably congenial to men born and raised in a feudal, authoritarian,
  moral value system. As George B. Sansom wrote, "It was unfortunate
  that, when at last the Japanese had time to consider the nobler efforts of
  the Western mind, it was the dreary ratiocinations of Herbert Spencer
  or the homiletic of men like Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Smiles
  which seemed best to stay their intellectual pangs."63 A Japanese raised
  within the Tokugawa Confucian tradition could accept the injunctions
  of Smiles and Franklin precisely because he was accustomed to their
  style of homily.
  In 1878 the Meiji empress translated Benjamin Franklin's "Twelve
  Virtues" into traditional Japanese poems. Regarding industry, Frank-
  lin had written in his Autobiography: "Industry: Lose no time; be
  always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
  The young empress, who had learned Franklin's "Virtues" from her
  Confucian imperial tutor Motoda Eifu as part of her education, tran-
  scribed this in traditional poetic form and "bestowed it upon the
  Tokyo Women's Normal School" whose students had previously ac-
  companied her procession at the school's opening ceremonies. The
  poem, adopted to music composed by Oku Yoshihisa, soon gained
  popularity and was sung in every part of the country:
  If unpolished, even the diamond
  loses its jeweled radiance.
  Without education, people too,
  will ne'er emit true virtue.
  If one begrudges the sunlight
  working throughout the day,
  As ceaselessly as the hands of a clock,
  all things can be accomplished.64
  The tendency to modernize from above is discernible in all late
  modernizing countries, but in the Meiji era, when the need to "foster
  industry and promote enterprise" was felt especially keenly, the royal
  poetess saw in Franklin's "Virtues" a new morality for civil society
  63 George B. Sansom, Japan, a Short Cultural History (London: Cresset, 1932), p. 504. See also
  Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salary
  Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).
  64 See Inoue Takeshi, ed.,Nihon shokashu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1958), pp. 48-9.
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  SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM 
  485
  and took the initiative of Japanizing and introducing it to the people
  through the medium of traditional poetry.
  Of course, the virtues of diligence and application were not new to
  the Japanese people in the Meiji period. The school song composed by
  the empress was, to be sure, Franklin's injunction in one sense, but in
  other respects, it was fully Japanese. In Tokugawa times there was a
  saying that "hardships polish one into a jewel." The thirteenth-
  century Zen monk Dogen wrote: "The jewel becomes a jewel through
  polishing. Man becomes benevolent through training. No jewel shines
  in its natural state. No novice is characterized by keenness of insight
  from the very beginning. They must be polished and trained."6* If we
  go back even farther, we will find virtually the same injunction in the
  Book of Rites: "Unless the jewel is polished, it does not become a
  jewel; unless men study, they do not learn the Way."66 Precisely
  because this idea of character building had a long tradition in Bud-
  dhism and Confucianism in East Asia, the Japanese were able to edu-
  cate themselves so diligently and in such a sustained fashion during
  the Meiji "civilization and enlightenment" period. Indeed, Ninomiya
  Sontoku's ascetism of self-restraint and moral cultivation was an ethos
  that dominated the rural villages until the end of World War II, and
  his Account of Recompensing Virtue (H6toku-ki) is far from neglected
  even today.
  Every age has its fashions. Today, for example, "becoming a success
  and rising in the world" sounds old-fashioned and pretentious, but
  when rephrased as "self-realization," the same aspiration becomes
  modern and chic. Similarly, in early Meiji times, when everything
  traditionally Japanese or Asian seemed anachronistic, young hearts
  were not inspired by quotations from Dogen or the Book of Rites.
  Masaoka Shiki, a great Meiji reformer of Japanese poetry, read
  Franklin's Autobiography when ill with tuberculosis and was deeply
  impressed by it. Shimazaki Toson, later a naturalist writer of great
  renown, used Franklin's Autobiography at a country school when he
  was a young teacher. These details illustrate what the Japanese were
  concerned about during the period of their nation's rise to statehood in
  the early Meiji era.
  Finally, we must consider that just as the activities of citizens in
  Western societies, many of them Protestants, later supported national-
  65 Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 81: Shobogenzo, Shobogenzo zuimonki (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1965), p. 397.
  66 This is from the chapter "Music" in The Book of Rites. See Kokuyaku kambun taisei, vol. 24:
  Raiki (Tokyo: Kokumin bunko kankokai, 1921), p. 351.
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  486 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  ism, the "diligence and application" of Meiji youths also became
  linked with nationalism in Japan. Self-cultivation did not stop at the
  personal level for Meiji youths but became associated with preserving
  Japan's independence in the face of Western encroachment. Morality
  and application came together in service to the larger community. As
  Fiikuzawa Yukichi put it, again in An Encouragement of Learning,
  "When we compare Oriental Confucianism with Western civilization,
  we discover that what is possessed by the latter and is lacking in the
  former is (i) mathematics in the realm of the tangible and (2) the spirit
  of independence in the realm of the intangible."6? Fukuzawa advo-
  cated cultivating the individual's spirit of independence. Based on
  Mill's view that "the independence of a nation grows out of the inde-
  pendent spirit of its people," Fukuzawa proposed that every Japanese
  "establish his own independence, and then Japan would be indepen-
  dent." This proposition is identical to one put forth by Smiles quoted
  earlier: "When the majority of a nation's people 'help themselves,'
  that state is filled with vigor and is strong in spirit." So it is interesting
  to note that the Confucian spirit repudiated by Fukuzawa functioned
  quite smoothly in this process, as Confucianism held that "personal
  cultivation and regulation of family affairs" was requisite to "ordering
  the realm and bringing peace to all under Heaven." Each citizen's
  "personal cultivation" in the form of "self-help" led directly to "order-
  ing the realm" in the sense of "national wealth and power" (or its
  synonym, "national independence"). Thus, it was fortunate for Japan
  that "overcoming hardship through diligence" and "becoming a suc-
  cess and rising in the world" in private life were in complete harmony
  with Japan's fortunes as a state. In this sense, self-help was by no
  means at odds with traditional Japanese values; quite the contrary, it
  was reinforced by them.68
  This simple unity between "hard work" and "rising in the world"
  dissolved in time, but only after Japan's "turn to the West" had ad-
  vanced to a further stage in which Japanese accepted Western litera-
  ture as literature and began writing modern novels themselves. The
  youthful characters in Futabatei Shimei's (1864-1909) Floating Clouds
  lived in the world of Meiji self-help, but the author no longer believed
  that "the success or failure of everything in human affairs" could be
  67 "Kyoiku no hoshin wa suri to dokuritsu," in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, vol. 3, p. 198. See
  also Kiyooka, tr., The Autobiography.
  68 On the influence that Franklin and Smiles had on Meiji Japan, see Hirakawa Sukehiro,
  "Furankurin to Meiji Kogo," in Hirakawa Sukehiro, Higashi no tachibana, nishi no orenji
  (Tokyo: Bungei shunjusha, 1981), pp. 53-88.
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  RETURN TO JAPAN 
  487
  related to the saying that "heaven helps those who help themselves."
  Instead of general exhortations, Futabatei focused on the life of an
  average youth agonizing over conflicting values in a real society in
  which new ranks had begun to form.
  THE RETURN TO JAPAN: A CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF IN
  MEIJI YOUTH
  The reaction against slavish Westernization
  During the first two decades of the Meiji era, it seemed as if the entire
  nation was determined to Westernize itself completely, but in the late
  1880s a reaction set in. Nevertheless, this "return to being Japanese"
  was not a reversion to the blind xenophobia of late Tokugawa times.
  In 1887, Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru was pursuing a policy of
  Westernization symbolized by balls and garden parties in the Rokumei-
  kan that were designed as an aid to procuring treaty revisions from the
  Western powers.69 Inoue spoke of the "recovery of judicial authority"
  for Japan, but in reality he was willing to accept the Westerners' treaty
  demands that foreign judges continue to preside in all cases involving
  foreign nationals. When an opposition faction headed by Inoue
  Kowashi learned of this, they leaked certain secret documents, thereby
  inciting fierce antigovernment agitation. Among those documents was a
  criticism by Boissonade of the government's frivolous Westernization
  policy. Boissonade pointed out that at that time in all areas - the armed
  services, administration, finance, education - in which foreigners
  served as employees or advisers, they were not permitted to obtain
  government posts or to wield actual government authority. Any system
  under which judicial authority was delegated to foreigners, he stressed,
  would be injurious to Japan's national interests and would open the
  door to foreign intervention in domestic affairs.70
  It is noteworthy that foreign employees like Boissonade were critical
  of Japan's craze for Westernization. Nevertheless, the "return to being
  Japanese" was not triggered solely by the advice of such well-in-
  tentioned foreigners. What is more important is that some Japanese
  began to criticize Westerners in terms of the universal principles of
  69 See Donald H. Shively, "The Japanization of Middle Meiji," in Donald H. Shively, ed.,
  Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
  I970.PP-77-H9.
  70 See "Bowasonaado gaiko iken," in Meiji bunka zenshu, vol. 6: Gaiko-hen (Tokyo: Nihon
  hydronsha, 1928), pp. 451-2.
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  "civilization" they had learned from the West. One example was the
  Normanton incident.
  In 1886, the Normanton, an English ship, sank off the Wakayama
  coast. Its English captain and foreign crew scrambled to safety in
  lifeboats, leaving all the Japanese passengers to drown. Despite wide-
  spread public indignation, a consular court in Kobe exonerated the
  captain and crew of charges of criminal negligence. The reaction was
  predictable: "The news spread like lightning throughout the four quar-
  ters, and all people, whether in or out of government, were over-
  whelmed with grief and righteous indignation. Newspapers were filled
  with editorials and articles treating the incident in a tragic or righ-
  teously indignant light."71 This sense of outrage played its part in
  bringing to a close the craze for Westernization symbolized by Inoue
  Kaoru's balls at the Rokumeikan.
  What provoked Japanese ire about the shipwreck and the court's
  verdict, in addition to the realization of racial prejudice, was the fact
  that the English captain and court had not lived up to the West's self-
  avowed standards. The Japanese originally were inspired by Smiles's
  Self-Help because of its many anecdotes of "benevolence even at the
  cost of death." For example, one story proclaims that when a British
  ship sank off the coast of Africa, the English army officers turned over
  the lifeboats to women and children. Nakamura's translation reads:
  "This group of heroes sank to the depths of that raging sea without a
  word of regret on their lips or a teardrop of lament on their cheeks."
  The hearts of Meiji readers were struck by "these gallant, yet quiet
  models of English manhood." The rule that "a captain goes down with
  his ship" was followed again and again until the end of World War II,
  not only in the Imperial navy, but also in Japan's merchant marine.
  Japanese youths had devoted themselves to creating a modern Japan
  based on Western models precisely because the injunctions and exem-
  plars contained in Self-Help seemed to conform to their own ethical
  ideals. When these overly idealized images were betrayed and exposed
  as false by the actual deeds of living Englishmen, the Japanese reaction
  was to explode with anger and indignation.
  To be sure, this incident itself should not be interpreted as ending
  Japan's "turn to the West." The "return to being Japanese" mani-
  fested by intellectuals was not a wholesale rejection of the West in
  71 For journalism on the Normanton Incident, see Shimbun shusei Meiji hennenshi, vol. 6 (To-
  kyo: Rinsensha, 1936), pp. 350, 356-7, 361, 365. See also Richard T. Chang, The Justice of
  the Western Consular Courts in Nineteenth Century Japan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
  1984)-
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  RETURN TO JAPAN 
  489
  favor of a total return to traditional foundations so much as a genuine
  appropriation of the best in Japanese tradition.
  A composite sketch ofMeiji nativism: Lafcadio Hearn's "A
  Conservative"
  In The Western World and Japan, George B. Sansom wrote as follows
  about the Japanese (in this case, Baba Tatsui) who reembraced their
  native land during the Meiji period:
  An interesting chapter of modern Japanese history could be written by trac-
  ing the careers of clever young men educated in liberal surroundings in
  England or America who returned to Japan flushed with domocratic enthusi-
  asms and in course of time lapsed into a bitter nationalism accompanied by a
  strong dislike of die West, which had nourished their youthful ardours. Not
  long ago an able and experienced member of this class observed to me that
  most of his contemporaries, products of Western education, had turned
  against die Western democracies feeling diat dieir liberalism was a sham.?2
  The phenomenon of the Westernized intellectual returning to native
  traditions is by no means restricted to Japan but is also found in
  thinkers and leaders in Russia and in other Asian countries. The trend
  toward a "return to Japan" was already evident in the 1890s, when
  Lafcadio Hearn wrote "A Conservative," a short story that he in-
  cluded in Kokoro. The piece is worth noting for the subsequent appeal
  it had to young Japanese. Its plot dealt with the intellectual develop-
  ment of a young man in changing historical conditions.
  Hearn's protagonist was a high-ranking samurai born and raised in
  the castle town of a 300,000-koku domain. Trained in the martial arts
  and schooled in Confucian and other traditional values, he was disci-
  plined to honor the spirits of his forebears and to scorn death. This
  warrior witnessed the coming of Perry's Black Ships; soon "barbari-
  ans" were employed as teachers within his castle town. After the Meiji
  Restoration, the protagonist left home to learn English in Yokohama
  under a foreign misssionary. At first he believed that love of country
  required him to learn about enemy conditions in a detached, cool
  manner, in keeping with the dictum "Know the enemy." But before
  long he was deeply impressed by the overwhelming superiority of
  Western civilization and decided that because the basis of its power lay
  in Christianity, he was duty bound as a Japanese patriot to accept this
  higher religion and encourage all his countrymen to convert. So in-
  72 Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 418.
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  49° 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  tense was his conviction that he became a Christian against his parents'
  opposition. To discard the faith of his ancestors was cause for more
  than a moment's distress: He was disowned by his family, scorned by
  his friends, deprived of all the benefits accompanying his noble status,
  and reduced to destitution. Still, the samurai discipline of his youth
  enabled him to persevere with fortitude despite all the hardships to
  which he fell victim. As a true patriot and seeker of the truth, he
  ascertained where his convictions lay and pursued these without fear
  or regrets.
  However, Hearn's protagonist was soon disturbed to discover that
  the knowledge derived from modern science, which had enabled his
  missionary-teachers to demonstrate the absurdity of Japan's ancient
  beliefs, could also be used to demonstrate absurdities in the Christian
  faith. The Western missionaries were often surprised and shocked to
  discover that the more intelligent their Japanese students were, the
  sooner they tended to leave the church. So it was with this youth,
  who became an agnostic in religious matters and a liberal in political
  affairs.
  Forced to leave Japan, he went to Korea and then to China, where
  he earned his living as a teacher for a time before making his way to
  Europe. There he lived for many years, observing and obtaining a
  knowledge of Western civilization matched by few Japanese. He
  lived in many European cities and engaged in various types of work.
  The West appeared to him a land of giants, far greater than he had
  ever imagined. On both the material and the intellectual fronts, West-
  ern civilization seemed far superior to his own. Yet its power of
  intellect was too often employed to destroy the weak. With this
  realization, Hearn's hero gained two articles of faith: (i) Japan was
  being forced by necessity, not by choice, to learn Western science
  and to adopt much from the material culture of its enemies; and (2)
  nevertheless there was no compelling reason to discard completely
  the concepts of duty and honor and ideas of right and wrong that had
  been inherited from the past. The prodigality inherent in Western
  life taught him to value the strength found in his country's honorable
  poverty. He would do his utmost to preserve and protect the best in
  Japan's traditions.
  What was of value and beauty in Japanese civilization - things that
  could be comprehended and appreciated only after coming into con-
  tact with foreign culture - now seemed clear to him. Thus, he had
  become a man longing to be allowed to go back home, and on the day
  that he set out for his return to Yokohama, he did so not as a blind
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  RETURN TO JAPAN 
  491
  xenophobe of bakumatsu times but as "a conservative" who was "re-
  turning to Japan."73
  Hearn's character portrait can perhaps be considered a composite of
  the samurai-intellectuals who came to grips with Western civilization
  in the early Meiji era. It was so with many of the early Doshisha
  student Christians, not a few of whom came as "band" members from
  Kumamoto where Hearn was teaching. Even Uchimura Kanzo, the
  leading member of the early Hokkaido Christian group, wrote of a
  moment in the United States when his homeland began to appear
  "supremely beautiful" to him. Another example can be found in the
  physician-writer Mori Ogai, who, like Hearn's conservative, received
  a samurai education in a castle town. As a child Ogai was often warned
  by his parents in no uncertain terms: "You are the son of a samurai, so
  you must have enough courage to cut open your belly." Others, like
  Nakamura Masanao or Uchimura Kanzo, studied under missionaries
  and accepted Christianity out of a sense of patriotic duty. Many con-
  verts, however, subsequently repudiated Christianity. In fact, al-
  though this is a little-studied area in modern Japanese thought, the
  great majority of Japanese thinkers seem to have "returned" to Japan
  in some sense. "China activists" like Miyazaki Toten and journalists
  such as Tokutomi Soho were both Christians at one time.™ Baba
  Tatsui was a liberal who took refuge abroad, and Shiga Shigetaka and
  the periodical Nihon qyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese), bring to
  mind the intellectual who returned to Japan bent on discovering its
  true "national essence."
  Hearn's piece, in that it foreshadows a floodtide of weltschmerz
  stemming from an observation of the darker aspects of Western civili-
  zation, has something in common with Natsume Soseki's later critique
  of modern Western civilization, and Hearn's short story contains
  many aspects of thought and action that matches those of later Japa-
  nese intellectuals. Stated conversely, later Japanese intellectuals, for
  all the surface brilliance and diversity of their variegated philosophical
  spectrum, have much in common with Hearn's hero on a deeper level
  73 "A Conservative," in Kokoro, vol. 7 of The Writings ofLafcadio Hearn (New York: Houghton
  Mifflin, 1922), pp. 393-422. For a detailed analysis of "A Conservative," see Hirakawa/
  Sukehiro, "Nihon kaiki no kiseki - uzumoreta shisoka, Amenomori Nobushige," Shincho
  (April I986):6-IO6.
  74 Miyazaki's autobiography was translated by Eto Shinkichi and Marius B. Jansen as My
  Thirty-three Years' Dream: The Autobiography of Miyazaki Toten (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1982). Tokutomi is treated by John D. Pierson, Tokutomi Soho, 7S63-7957:
  A Journalist for Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).
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  492 
  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  of feeling. In these respects, "A Conservative" is a composite sketch
  and a precursor of many modern Japanese intellectuals.
  Thejapanization of education
  Upon his arrival in Japan in the early Meiji period, Basil Hall Cham-
  berlain, who later became the dean of foreign Japanologists, lectured
  on "the life of Nelson" and similar topics in his post as instructor in
  the then fledgling Imperial Japanese Navy. About the young Japanese
  naval officers, successors of the Tokugawa samurai, whom he taught,
  he wrote that they were "fairly fluent in English, and dressed in a
  serviceable suit of dittos, might almost be a European, save for a
  certain obliqueness of the eyes and scantiness of beard."75 He noted
  that the Meiji naval officers were quite fluent in English. This held
  true beyond the students in Japan's naval academy, for the generation
  born around i860 produced an elite better able to communicate in
  foreign languages than could its successors. Men like Okakura Ten-
  shin (b. 1862), Uchimura Kanzo (b. 1861), and Nitobe Inazo (b. 1862)
  all wrote books in English; and Mori Ogai (b. 1862) probably did more
  than anyone else to introduce Western literature to Japan.
  Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), who was born a few years later, gradu-
  ated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1893, took over Lafcadio
  Hearn's chair as the first Japanese lecturer in English Literature in
  1903, and then in late Meiji left academic life to concentrate on his
  writing. His remarks about the capabilities of Japanese students in
  English over time provide a revealing insight into the "Japanization"
  of Meiji higher education. The students' command of English was
  declining, he noted, because of the proper and predictable progress
  achieved by Japanese education:
  In my generation, all instruction at regular schools was done in English. In all
  courses - geography, history, mathematics, botany and biology - we used
  foreign-language textbooks. Most students who came a little before us even
  wrote their answers in English; and by my generation, there were some
  Japanese instructors who taught in English.?6
  In that era, he went on, English was only one aspect of an excessive
  subordination to foreign culture: "Men would show off by dangling
  gold watches, wearing Western dress, growing beards, and interject-
  75 Basil Hall Chamberlin, Things Japanese (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1971), p. 1.
  76 "Gogaku yoseiho," in Soseki zenshu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, shinsho ed., 1957), vol. 34, pp.
  233-4-
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  493
  ing English phrases when speaking ordinary Japanese." Not only was
  English fashionable, but modern knowledge was as yet inaccessible in
  Japanese:
  Because we had so much English training outside regular English classes, our
  ability to read, write, and speak developed naturally. But we all are Japanese
  in mind, and considering our independence as a nation, such an educational
  system is, in a sense, a disgrace. It invokes in us the feeling that we are no
  different from India, that we are subjects of England. We all agree on the
  importance of Japan's nationality; it is not something to be exchanged for a
  mere knowledge of English. Hence, as the foundations for our state's survival
  are solidified, the aforementioned educational system ought naturally to fall
  into disuse; and in fact, this is precisely what is taking place.
  Not enough had been translated yet, and the use of many foreign
  textbooks was still unavoidable. But scholarship was universal, and
  once there were adequate materials and competent Japanese teachers,
  Japanese students were increasingly taught in their own language.
  From the standpoint of widely diffusing scholarship in society, it would be
  best to teach in Japanese, the language in which our students have been
  brought up and which they use naturally. . . . The declining use of English is
  natural and to be expected.
  But government policy also came into play and might even have
  proved more important than these cultural aspects. As Soseki saw it:
  The biggest cause for declining English abilities in Japan was man-made, in
  the form of a policy adopted, I believe, when the late Inoue Kowashi was
  minister of education [1892-6]. The decision was to teach all subjects except
  English in Japanese as much as possible. While emphasizing the importance
  of the Japanese language in teaching, Inoue sought to revive Japanese literary
  and classical Chinese studies as well. . . . This man-made decision to sup-
  press the use of foreign languages [in education] is an overwhelmingly impor-
  tant factor behind the present decline in language abilities.
  In early Meiji years, the "modernization" of institutions and ways
  was construed as "Westernization." However, in that the desire to
  modernize was generated by an external crisis that caused indepen-
  dence for the Japanese people and nation to be established as a categori-
  cal imperative, it was inevitable that Japanese students studying
  abroad would, upon their return home, appropriate the positions tem-
  porarily held by foreign employees in and out of government.
  Inoue Kowashi, too, advocated modernization with less West-
  ernization. Like many other Meiji leaders, his objective was not "the
  importation of things Western" but, rather, "Western-style produc-
  tion" in Japan. After the "political crisis of 1881," he submitted a
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  political program to the government in which he outlined the educa-
  tional policies that he thought the state should adopt. Two clauses in
  his program read:
  The Promotion of Chinese Studies:
  Since the Restoration, English and French studies have had high priority,
  and this has caused the sprouts of revolutionary thought to appear in our
  country for the first time. However, for teaching the Way of loyalty to ruler,
  love of country, and allegiance - values in danger of disappearing at present -
  nothing equals Chinese studies. We must revive these values and thereby
  maintain a balance."
  Encouraging the Study of German:
  Under our present educational system, the only students who study the
  German language are found in medicine. Students studying law and related
  subjects all learn English and French. It is only natural that those who study
  English admire English ways, and that those who study French envy French
  government. But of all nations in present-day Europe, only Prussia is similar
  to us with regard to the circumstances of its unification. . . . If we want to
  make men throughout the land more conservative minded, we should encour-
  age the study of German and thereby allow it, several years hence, to over-
  come the dominance now enjoyed by English and French.?8
  It was Inoue who, with Motoda Eifu, drafted the Imperial Rescript on
  Education which was promulgated in 1890. In the preceding passage
  we can see that as early as 1881 Inoue wanted to return to East Asian
  traditions and to uphold national unity by means of a philosophy
  stressing virtues such as loyalty to ruler, love of nation, and allegiance
  to superiors.
  However, we must not forget that among the generation that stud-
  ied directly under foreign teachers in Japan, there was a clarity of
  understanding regarding international affairs that proved lacking in
  later days. Naval officers are a case in point. Officers in the Russo-
  Japanese War for the most part fought on warships made in Britain.
  Unlike the officers in World War II, who fought on ships and flew in
  planes manufactured in Japan, they went to Britain or other foreign
  countries, observed how ships were built there, and delivered the
  finished products to Japan themselves. At times they might witness
  British laborers staging strikes, for example, and this broad range of
  experience made navy men international minded. After that genera-
  tion retired in the 1920s, the naval officers, like the ships they com-
  77 "Kangaku wo susumu," in Inoue Kowashi denki-hensan iinkai, ed., Inoue Kowashi-den,
  shiryo (Tokyo: Kokugakuin daigaku toshokan, 1966), vol. 1, p. 250.
  78 "Doitsugaku wo okosu," in Inoue Kowashi-den, shiryd, pp. 250-1.
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  RETURN TO JAPAN 
  495
  manded, were "made in Japan." This was true also for the leaders in
  all other areas of government. In the 1930s the entire nation was seized
  by a very narrow nationalism. That nationalism was partly due to
  conditions external to Japan, but it was able to gain ground in part
  because of the parochialism of Japanese education in that era.
  From the Charter Oath to the Imperial Rescript on Education
  The Charter Oath issued in 1868 and the Imperial Rescript on Educa-
  tion promulgated in 1890 may be considered official proclamations
  that mark the beginning and end of an era. In regard to the West, the
  Charter Oath states:
  Evil customs of the past shall be abandoned and everything shall be based
  upon the just laws of Nature.
  Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the
  foundations of Imperial rule.
  These two articles were declared by the victorious loyalists (sonno-ha)
  to be the cultural and political policies to be undertaken by a unified
  new Japan. It is interesting to note that once the antiforeign loyalists
  had toppled the bakufu and seized power themselves, they immedi-
  ately proclaimed a policy of peace and opened the country to foreign
  trade and diplomatic intercourse. This fact exposed the slogan "revere
  the emperor, expel the barbarians" for what it had really been - a
  catchphrase devoid of meaningful content that was used to unite and
  mobilize the energies of dissident samurai activists.
  Yet the new Meiji government's declaration that "knowledge shall
  be sought throughout the world" should not be interpreted as a simple
  by-product of its policy to establish peace and open the country.
  Yoshida Shoin, who defied bakufu law, had also "sought knowledge
  throughout the world," and his purpose too was "to strengthen the
  foundations of Imperial rule." The commitment to abandon "evil cus-
  toms of the past" was clearly indicative of the realization that Japan in
  1868 was as yet unequipped to be a modern nation-state and showed a
  singular desire to learn from the West.
  As opposed to the Charter Oath, which sought models to adopt in
  foreign nations perceived to possess cultural superiority, the Imperial
  Rescript on Education issued twenty-two years later in 1890 sought
  these models in a transcendent Japanese historical character. The
  rescript reads:
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  Be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands
  and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and
  moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate
  arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers;
  furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests; always
  respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer
  yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the pros-
  perity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. . . .7»
  These virtues appealed deeply to feelings traditionally held by the
  people. Moreover, the rescript asserts that "ever united," the Japanese
  people "have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty" of
  those virtues, thus pushing national unity and the source of national
  morality far back to the historical origins of the Japanese people.
  Conversely, such historicism posits the continued existence of national
  unity and morality throughout all periods of Japanese history, thereby
  giving birth to the concept of a historically transcendent "national
  essence" (kokutat).
  Not that the rescript was anti-Western in thrust. The exhortations
  to "pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual
  faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good
  and promote common interests; . . ." are almost identical to those put
  forth by Smiles in Self-Help. Thus, although it is often characterized
  as a simple piece of Confucian reaction, elements meeting the de-
  mands of a new age are to be found in this document. The rescript did
  not assert that Japanese traditions were universal principles; rather, it
  proclaimed that values then regarded as universal in nature really
  conformed to traditional Japanese ways.
  Yet it is also evident that foreign nations disappeared from view in
  the rescript. One distinguishing characteristic of post-bakumatsu his-
  tory is that unlike the period of national isolation, an inescapable
  influence was exerted on Japan by foreign, mainly Western, nations.
  In the Charter Oath, we find a declaration that for Japan, a latecomer
  to international society, to preserve national independence, the Japa-
  nese people must learn from foreign countries and progress along the
  road to civilization and enlightenment. By contrast, the only reference
  to Japan's relations with foreign countries mentioned in the Imperial
  79 Translated in R. Tsunoda and W. T. de Bary, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York:
  Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 646-7. For the genesis of the rescript, see also D. H.
  Shivery, "Motoda Eifu: Confucian Lecturer to the Meiji Emperor," in D. S. Nivison and A.
  F. Wright, eds., Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959),
  pp. 302-23.
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  497
  Rescript on Education is "should emergency arise, offer yourselves
  courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity
  of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth . . . ," which
  posits a hypothetical state of war.
  The Imperial Rescript on Education, which totally ignored the exis-
  tence of foreign countries and extolled the virtues of Japan's "national
  essence," was by no means indicative of recovered national self-
  confidence. The omission of foreign nations actually suggests a Japan
  filled with doubt and anxiety, a Japan unable to reject foreign influences
  completely and therefore driven to rely all the more on indigenous
  values. Such doubt and anxiety are revealed in the fact that as opposed
  to the Charter Oath, the rescript depicts foreign nations in a negative,
  almost menacing, light. The rescript's aim is to create internal solidarity
  among the people by maintaining a common national morality and a
  consciousness of that morality as stemming from shared origins in Ja-
  pan's past. This aim is manifested from the beginning: "Our Imperial
  Ancestors [stemming from the sun goddess, Amaterasu] have founded
  Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and
  firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial
  piety, . . ." to the end: "It is Our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence,
  in common with you, Our subjects, that we may all attain to the same
  virtue."
  Thus, the Imperial Rescript on Education clearly decreed the end of
  a fervent "turn to the West," whose start was symbolized by the
  Charter Oath. Whereas the Charter Oath posited "the just laws of
  Nature," a value assumed to be hitherto lacking in Japan, as a goal to
  be attained, the Rescript asserted that a "national essence," whose
  values were already manifested in Japan's feudal past, should be the
  foundation for future action.
  The Charter Oath can be compared to a small child just beginning
  to understand what is going on around him who seeks to absorb things
  from his environment; in short, it shows the desire to identify with the
  world. Conversely, toward the end of the 1880s, after deciding that its
  "turn to the West" had been too sudden and extreme, Japan sought an
  identity of its own, and part of this straining to confirm an identity can
  be seen in the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890.
  Japan, a non-Western nation, adopted from the West a tremendous
  amount of what was fundamental and essential to modernization during
  these twenty-two years. Without those ideas and institutions, the estab-
  lishment of a national identity would have been impossible, and the
  existence of an independent Japan within a society of nations dominated
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  JAPAN'S TURN TO THE WEST
  and ordered by the West could not have been maintained. But at the
  same time, because of this wholesale borrowing from the West, the
  basic establishment of a "self," which had to be attained and upheld by
  the Japanese themselves, became a process filled with anxiety and uncer-
  tainty. In short, the assimilation of Western culture was dictated by
  reasons of state, yet such efforts were fraught with an uneasiness that
  Japan's cultural self-identity might be violated. Because this psychologi-
  cal problem - a sense of pride easily injured - lay constantly at the
  bottom of Japan's modernization process, the Japanese displayed what
  might be called a strange fanaticism in every subsequent foreign crisis
  involving the West. The fact that the slogan "uphold the national es-
  sence" had such a powerful hold over Japanese hearts is undoubtedly
  also closely related to this psychological problem.
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  CHAPTER 8
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  Japan's nineteenth-century history is the crossroads for three overlap-
  ping, but normally distinct, perspectives on social change. Each per-
  spective constitutes a search, respectively, (i) for the origins of rapid
  modernization, (2) for the unraveling of the premodern social order,
  and (3) for the consequences of sweeping reforms. No one of these
  searches is yet near completion, but together they already offer convinc-
  ing evidence of far-reaching changes in social structure. When bol-
  stered by information from abundant materials such as local histories,
  which are rich in detail but eschew broad generalizations, the scholar-
  ship associated with these three perspectives provides an unusually
  strong historical foundation for attempts to summarize the main lines of
  social change in a nineteenth-century, still little modernized country.
  Exploration of the origins of rapid modernization derives from ques-
  tions about contemporary Japan. In search of the fundamental and
  distinctive qualities of Japan's "economic miracle," a number of social
  scientists have turned back to the organizational characteristics, the
  work attitudes, and the general social structure that immediately pre-
  ceded the modern era. Historically based catchphrases such as Chie
  Nakane's "vertical society" {tate shakai)1 and Hayami Akira's "indus-
  trious revolution" (kimben kakumei)2 are suggestive of the results of
  this retrospective inquiry, conveying the impression of a people pre-
  pared even before modern reforms were initiated for directed, con-
  certed, and diligent action. In like manner, others eager to discover
  the roots of Japan's unusual modern development continue to find
  evidence for extraordinary qualities already widely dispersed among
  the Japanese people in the nineteenth century.3
  1 Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
  1970).
  2 Hayami Akira, "Keizai shakai no seiritsu to sono tokushitsu," in Shakai keizaishi gakkai, ed.,
  AtarashiiEdojidaishizo0motomele(Toyokeizaish'imposha, 
  1977), p. 13.
  3 Evidence for Japan's distinctive premodern social conditions can be found in Cyril E. Black,
  Marius B. Jansen, Herbert S. Levine, Marion J. Levy, Jr., Henry Rosovsky, Gilbert Rozman,
  499
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  5OO 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  The second perspective evident in recent scholarship is a growing
  interest in nineteenth-century social change as an outcome of earlier
  currents and "contradictions." The more that historians of the Toku-
  gawa period recognize the dynamic qualities of Japan's so-called cen-
  tralized feudalism (shukenteki hdkensei), the more they will look ahead
  to the gradual unraveling of that carefully structured system during
  the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries. Often apply-
  ing concepts originally drawn from the Marxist historical lexicon but
  nevertheless broadly relevant, they amass evidence in support of a
  far-reaching transformation variously denoted by such labels as the
  "crisis of feudalism" or the "origins of capitalism."•» When well
  grounded in empirical research, this perspective helps see beyond the
  relatively stable facade of the bakuhan system into its internally evolv-
  ing social structure. The results of these studies are informative
  about many types of social change never before seen in Japan and
  only rarely and recently evident elsewhere in the world of the nine-
  teenth century.
  In the general histories, a third historical perspective overshadows
  either of these approaches to social change in nineteenth-century Ja-
  pan. It is less controversial, as it specifically focuses on the sweeping
  and well-documented policy changes of the Meiji Restoration and the
  years that immediately followed, rather than on the long-range and
  often gradual changes occurring largely independently of, or beneath
  the surface of, official decision making. The challenge remains of
  reinterpreting the policy changes of the 1860s and 1870s within the
  context of the other, long-term perspectives, that is, of showing how
  the transition from the Tokugawa to the Meiji period built on the
  preexisting foundation for modernization and on the internally gener-
  ated transformation of the Tokugawa social order, s
  Henry D. Smith II, and S. FTedtrickStasr,The Modernization of Japan and Rttsna: A Compara-
  tive Study (New York: Free Press, 1975). The authors single out as important to modernization
  such qualities as experience of a large, circulating service-oriented elite, the presence of social
  controls capable of balancing family loyalties, high levels of resource accumulation and of
  urbanization, and the spread of secularized education.
  4 For criticisms of excesses in applying Marxist categories without adequate attention to histori-
  cal detail, see Hayami Akira, Nihon keizaishi e no shikaku (Toyo keizai shimposha, 1968), chap.
  1; and Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindus-
  trial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 12-28. De-
  spite the validity of these criticisms, one should recognize the importance of information
  obtained from testing Marxist propositions regarding landownership, labor relations, village
  solidarity, and social classes.
  5 Beginnings toward this are made in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in
  Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
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  ASSUMPTIONS REEXAMINED 
  501
  ASSUMPTIONS REEXAMINED
  Explanations for the abrupt policy shifts associated with the Meiji
  Restoration invoke many of the prevalent interpretations of the
  sources of social change. Japan faced an international threat that
  forced a sharp turnabout in its foreign relations. Divisions within the
  leadership on how best to counter the foreign menace and to adjust to
  the altered international situation produced social unrest and widening
  conflict. From this environment emerged a new leadership prepared
  to make massive policy changes in areas touching numerous facets of
  the society. Although there is disagreement about the significance of
  the Meiji Restoration in terms of class motivation and about why
  Japan's social reforms came so quickly and penetrated so deeply, the
  scenario for change is reasonably clearly understood, and the causal
  arguments center on such standard factors as foreign demands and
  leadership changes. Political history appears to be more salient than
  social history, at least for explaining how change originated.
  The other two perspectives in nineteenth-century Japan pose more
  of a challenge to once-prevailing assumptions about the origins of
  social transformation and draw historians more immediately into socio-
  logical problems. Contrary to views about modern social change popu-
  larly accepted for other countries, which were not among the first to
  modernize, the roots of modern development in Japan appear to lie
  more in the thrust of past social change and organization and less in
  long-standing diffusion from the first countries to modernize, in the
  specific foreign relations occurring in the late nineteenth century, in
  the will of new leaders, or even in parallels to particular currents of
  social change popularly associated with the histories of west European
  states. Attention centers on the organization and development of Ja-
  pan's premodern social structure.
  Sources of change often credited with transformative powers in
  other premodern societies were notably minimal in Japan. So-called
  free cities or merchant self-governing organs associated with the dyna-
  mism of medieval Europe may have had clear counterparts among the
  ports and commercial centers of sixteenth-century Japan, but by the
  following century, such cities were fully incorporated into the directly
  administered territory of the shogun or into the various domains (han).
  Merchants on the rise in Tokugawa Japan did not follow the pre-
  scribed path by assuming control over the full range of urban govern-
  ment or by mounting any direct challenge to national representation
  and power.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  Popular assumptions about the role of international relations or of a
  "world economy" do not prove any more applicable than do the as-
  sumptions about free cities. As is well known, the self-imposed sakoku
  policies isolated Japan from the burgeoning foreign trade, the interna-
  tional division of labor, and the national competition seen by many as
  primary causes of domestic social changes elsewhere. Although the
  Japanese became aware of the expansion of the imperialist sea powers
  long before the country was forcibly opened to the world in 1853, one
  can also rule out the notion that earlier military threats or ambitions
  provoked any major reorganization of Tokugawa society as they had,
  for instance, in Russian society.
  There is also no basis in the historical record for claiming that a
  push for absolutist leadership by the shogun (and certainly not by the
  isolated emperor) could account for the record of Tokugawa social
  change. For close to two and one-half centuries, Japan was notably
  bereft of disruptive political struggle and absolutist ambitions as well
  as military destabilization and realignments. If political leadership
  propelled major changes, its stimulus in Japan occurred for different
  reasons and at different levels in the national hierarchy than are cus-
  tomarily assumed elsewhere. It is also easy to reject the notion that
  popular rebellions, either peasant uprisings or more broadly based
  revolutions, produced important social change. Although it has be-
  come popular to add up the scattered incidents of village protest or
  violence (ikki) and of urban unrest or violence (uchikowashi), the total
  impact of these actions did not amount to much until the very end of
  the Tokugawa period.
  Another set of explanations attributes massive behavioral and organi-
  zational changes to the development of new religious beliefs compara-
  ble to a "Protestant ethic" and to a rejection of previous other-worldly
  assumptions that had narrowed the horizons of the possible as far as
  this-worldly pursuits were concerned.6 One cannot doubt that popular
  consciousness was changing on many issues, but without a struggle
  among religious movements or a pattern of religious conversions or
  awakenings one is hard-pressed to find a stimulus for new entrepreneu-
  rial activity or other social change that in any meaningful way resem-
  bles what is presumed to have occurred in Europe's Reformation.
  6 On equivalents of the Protestant ethic, see Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values of
  Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1957); but modified, however, in Robert N.
  Bellah, "Baigan and Sorai: Continuities and Discontinuities in Eighteenth Century Japanese
  Thought," in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
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  ASSUMPTIONS REEXAMINED 
  503
  If the evidence does not support assumptions based on "free cities,"
  a "world economy," military pressures, absolutism, popular rebel-
  lions, and an equivalent of the "Protestant ethic," what did produce
  the social changes for the period before 1868 and that continued to
  form the background for Meiji policy initiatives and for early modern-
  ization late in the century? Scholarship on Japan has not arrived at any
  simple or straightforward answer to this question. Consistent with
  recent currents in historical social science writings, the approach here
  is to examine relatively detailed and exact evidence from, for example,
  demographic and urban history.7 This chapter will first introduce the
  findings drawn from quantitative social science evidence and then
  develop, in a necessarily hypothetical way, some linkages among them
  that may help explain the general pattern of social change. Because
  many of the European-based assumptions are obviously inapplicable,
  the reader will look in vain for a number of the themes stressed in
  treatments of premodern social change elsewhere.
  To reject the assumptions of historical causality associated with
  European history is not to deny common themes in social science
  history. Many of the directions of Japanese social change are antici-
  pated in studies of premodern societies elsewhere. The gradual transi-
  tion from samurai-dominated cities to merchant-dominated ones indi-
  cates the rise of the bourgeoisie, albeit not according to a scenario that
  calls for "free cities." The shift from commerce based on the lord's
  economy to that based on the peasant economy (nomin keizat) parallels
  the transformation of the peasantry away from self-sufficiency else-
  where. Increased specialization for national and regional markets al-
  ters the functions of cities and intensifies rural-urban interdependence
  as was occurring in western Europe. The individual household
  adapted to such changes by diversifying its income and its options for
  long-term advancement, in the process apparently coming to view
  children as resources whose numbers should be controlled, whose
  abilities should be cultivated through education, and whose labor from
  the teenage years should be used away from home where the wages
  were higher. These changes are in many ways reminiscent of changes
  observed in parts of Europe, which is noted in the brief comparisons
  in the concluding section.
  7 There may be no parallel to the mass of detailed, local studies of premodern social conditions
  now available for villages, cities, and local areas in Tokugawa Japan. Most studies are descrip-
  tive with little use of modern social science approaches; however, since the mid-1960s, research
  on historical demography and on wages and prices has led in the introduction of quantitative
  methods to local studies. A report on these trends is presented in Umemura Mataji, et al.,
  Nihon keizai no hauen: Kinsei kara kindai e (Nihon keizai shimbunsha, 1976), vol. 1.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  Assumptions regarding periodization are also evident in the labels
  used for Japanese society. There is near unanimity in Japan that the
  concept of "feudal" (hoken) society applies to the Kamakura, Muro-
  machi, Sengoku, and Tokugawa periods and that within this feudal
  rubric the Tokugawa period forms the bulk of the "early modern"
  (kinsei) era which follows the "medieval" (chusei) era. Furthermore,
  Western authors who define "feudal" more narrowly than do Marxists
  also apply the label to most or all of these same periods, although with
  some qualifications, such as John Hall's reference to "the declining
  feudal content of many political and social practices."8
  The "feudal" label implies a considerable degree of continuity in
  Japanese society before 1868 and a sharp discontinuity with the follow-
  ing period. There is ample reason for accepting these implications
  even if one is aware of notable examples of social change during the
  first two-thirds of the century as well as of salient continuities that
  lingered until the end of the century and beyond. The basic social class
  hierarchy remained intact until the 1860s. The privileged samurai
  were entrenched at the top of the social ladder without granting access
  or equality to the chonin (townspeople). Change in the peasant econ-
  omy did not result in substantial diminution in the high tax obligations
  that went largely for samurai stipends and expenses. The castle cities
  (jokamachi) continued to be the primary political and economic centers
  even when the flow of population was shifting to the smaller cities with
  less political importance. In almost all walks of life, the formal social
  structure and the legal system retained their early Tokugawa char-
  acter, and it is little wonder that the currents of change were long
  minimized or overlooked in an emphasis on continuity.
  In the absence of agreed-upon labels for further subdividing feudal or
  early modern, historians have applied the concepts of the rise and fall of
  a society. Accordingly, for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth cen-
  tury, Japanese "feudal" society is viewed as declining, and then it is
  seen as being replaced by a new type of "capitalist" (modernizing)
  society on the rise. Stated somewhat simplistically, (1) the Bunka and
  Bunsei (often abbreviated as Kasei) reign periods from the 1800s
  through 1820s are depicted as a time when the old social system, if not
  vibrant, was still capable of functioning, although the Kansei reforms of
  the late 1780s and early 1790s had not succeeded in setting back the
  clock to the social structure of a century earlier; (2) the Tempo crisis of
  8 John W. Hall, "Feudalism in Japan - A Reassessment," in John W. Hall and Marius B.
  Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modem Japan (Princeton, N. J.: Prince-
  ton University Press, 1968), p. 48.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
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  the 1830s and the abortive reforms in the 1840s are taken as evidence of
  the incapacity of the existing system and its "do nothing policies" to
  cope with continued social changes; (3) the bakumatsu period appears as
  a time when external and internal forces combined to destroy the old
  order; (4) the early Meiji period is characterized by massive reform and
  social engineering; and (5) the final decade of the century, the mid-
  Meiji period, witnessed the beginning of modern economic growth.
  Although this chapter is not organized chronologically, it is necessary to
  return from time to time to these five periods, each of which is associ-
  ated with a particular phase of social change in the nineteenth century.
  The labels "feudal," in both its broad and its narrow meaning, and
  "early modern" convey some information about social structure and
  have been reinterpreted to accommodate the growing awareness of
  social change in Japan. Nevertheless, they are originally based on
  assumptions drawn from European history and are not carefully
  worked out for comparative purposes. The use of these labels turns
  the focus primarily to the decline of a particular social order rather
  than to the foundation being built for a new order or the long-term
  processes of social change not easily encapsulated under the chosen
  label.
  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
  The three broad categories of any premodern population are the ruling
  class, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. Explanations of social
  change center on the competition for income, power, and prestige
  among the three social classes and on the relationships of groups
  within each of these broad categories, for example, the relationship
  within the peasantry between landlords and tenants. The division of
  Tokugawa society into samurai, nomin (peasants), and chonin (towns-
  people) is no exception. Although the idealized hierarchy of that time
  (borrowed from the Chinese social outlook) divided the chonin into
  artisans (shokuniri) and merchants (shdniri), most historical studies con-
  centrate on the general category of chonin and find other subdivisions,
  such as that between the upper and lower strata in wealth, which are
  more useful in interpreting social change than is the distinction be-
  tween artisan and merchant.
  From the late sixteenth century until 1868, Japanese acknowledged
  a fixed, formal status order referred to as mibunsei. It was premised on
  two principles that called for a complete and permanent separation of
  social classes: that between the samurai and peasants (heino) and that
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  between the merchants and peasants (shdnd). The lines separating the
  former groups were drawn sharply when the samurai were removed
  from the land and from part-time agricultural employment. Agricul-
  turalists, in turn, were denied all access to the symbols and training
  that characterized the samurai way of life. The lines were also drawn
  sharply between the agriculturalists and the merchants, and indeed
  townsmen in general. Each of the three social classes was to be residen-
  tially segregated and occupationally distinct, have a separate life-style,
  and recruit exclusively from its own ranks.9 Allowance for social mobil-
  ity by adoption was a concession that reaffirmed the general principle.
  The status order on which the Tokugawa social order rested was
  designed to freeze the character and relative position of each social
  class and to shield it from contamination, especially that which might
  emanate from the commercial activities.
  Separate and unequal did not necessarily mean subordinate in all
  walks of life. Hall has suggested the phrase "rule by status" for the
  exercise of authority in the Tokugawa era. In place of paternalistic
  relationships based on locally exercised private authority, authority
  was exercised impersonally over a population separated into self-
  regulating units under the direct control of the daimyo:
  As society became divided according to status levels and units of administra-
  tion, it segmented into a series of boxes or containers which confined the
  individual but also served to limit the arbitrary exercise of authority upon
  him. To the extent diat the administrative system became impersonalized,
  the individual gained a certain impartiality of treatment from the exercise of
  government. Rule by status assured an equality of treatment under law appro-
  priate to the status of each individual.10
  During the Tokugawa period, controls became less personal and
  arbitrary. The rigid class barriers set clear limits on what was permissi-
  ble without precluding opportunities for mobility and competition
  under relatively impartial regulations. Large numbers of chdnin and
  nomin seized the opportunities within the Tokugawa social order to
  advance their positions. In the process, they created a force for social
  change that gradually cast in doubt the very premises on which "rule
  by status" was based.
  Japanese authorities recognized that the chdnin represented the
  greatest threat to their objective of maintaining the status quo in class
  9 Honjo Eijiro, Honjo Eijiro chosaku shu 3: Nihon shakai keizaishi tsuron (Osaka: Scibundo
  shuppan kabushiki kaisha, 1972), pp. 232-305.
  10 John W. Hall, "Rule by Status in Tokugawa Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies 1 (Autumn
  1974): 45-
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
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  relations. Through commercial transactions and the accumulation of
  wealth, the chonin might in one way or another undermine the privi-
  leges and martial discipline of the samurai. On the other hand, they
  might entice the farming population away from purely agricultural
  pursuits or make them dissatisfied with their frugal way of life. Quar-
  antining the chonin, to the extent it could be achieved through policies
  affecting each of the three classes, meant controlling such things as the
  use of money, the production and distribution of various kinds of
  goods, migration, intermarriage, and the flow of ideas.11 Nevertheless,
  as developments in the late Tokugawa period demonstrate, the impact
  of the chonin could not be contained. And so it is to this group that one
  should look first in the search for the sources of social change.
  Chonin
  The narrow Tokugawa definition for this category is restricted to
  property-holding residents of officially designated urban areas {ma-
  chi), but the reality is a more diverse and scattered collection of people
  engaged in activities characteristic of townspeople. E. S. Crawcour
  formulated what is widely documented in Japanese sources of com-
  merce: Successive types and groups of merchants rose to the fore
  during the Tokugawa period.12 Initially, the goyo-shdnin (special pro-
  curement merchants or quartermasters) operated as close associates of
  the emerging daimyo. They served the needs of wartime and domain
  consolidation, enjoyed exemptions from services and taxes as well as
  grants of monopoly over various forms of domain commerce, and
  supervised the chonin community that was forming in the shadow of
  the daimyo's castle. Then, in the face of rapidly expanding in-
  terregional trade and urgent needs to convert local rice into cash for
  meeting expenses in Edo, the daimyo became deeply dependent on the
  central merchant financiers who were concentrated primarily in Osaka
  and Kyoto. By the early eighteenth century, as trade prospered and
  became more diversified between the castle cities across Japan and the
  three central cities, specialized wholesalers and shippers known as
  ton'ya gained control through their integrated commercial practices
  and broad marketing networks. Finally, from the late eighteenth cen-
  11 Controls on chonin are discussed by Takeo Yazaki, Social Change and the City in Japan
  (Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1968), pp. 156-61,199-223.
  12 E. S. Crawcour, "Changes in Japanese Commerce in the Tokugawa Period," in Hall and
  Jansen.eds., Studies in the Institutional History ofEarly Modern Japan, pp. 189-202.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  tury a new challenge appeared from the zaikata shonin, or rural and
  small-city merchants. In his study of the Osaka area, William Hauser
  has referred to the Kasei period from 1804 to 1830 as a time of "break-
  down in urban-centered marketing networks."13 In Edo too, the begin-
  ning of the breakdown of the ton'ya system is identified with this
  period.«4 The commercialization of agriculture, the low rate (or ab-
  sence) of taxation on expanded commercial production, and the in-
  creased availability of capital in local areas all contributed to the rise of
  local merchants.
  The succession of merchant groups, especially the serious competi-
  tion offered in the early nineteenth century by local merchants without
  official authorization, testifies to the dynamism of commercial rela-
  tions. No sooner had one group won recognition and a share in the
  privileges awarded by the local daimyo or the shogunate, than another
  group intensified its struggle to broaden the circle of authorization and
  privilege still further. Continuous competition and the growing pros-
  perity of large numbers of chonin marked the Tokugawa period. Social
  stratification among the merchant population became even more com-
  plex as each of the competing groups lingered on with its own sphere
  of operations.
  Studies of the chonin's impact convey an impression of governments
  on the defensive, reacting chiefly in the face of harsh economic reali-
  ties. Struggling to improve their debt-ridden finances, to extricate the
  samurai from a growing perception of impoverishment relative to the
  chonin, to stabilize prices and supplies, the bakufu and han authorities
  repeatedly shifted their terms of cooperation with the merchant
  groups. It was hoped that somehow readjustments in the relationships
  between lord and merchant and among various merchant groups could
  solve the pressing problems. In the long run, however, national re-
  form programs, including the Tempo reforms of 1841 to 1843, as well
  as occasional desperate acts of debt cancellation and arbitrary levies,
  failed to reassert national authority or to reverse the trends of decon-
  trol and prosperity.
  Most samurai commentators tended to see merchant gains as govern-
  ment, or even as samurai, losses, but this is certainly a distortion. The
  motif of class conflict, perceived by both contemporaries and histori-
  13 William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai
  Cotton Trade (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 51.
  14 Hayashi Reiko, "Edo dana no seikatsu," in Nishiyama Matsunosuke, ed., Edo chonin no
  kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1973), vol. 2, p. 106.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  509
  ans,1? must be balanced against that of mercantilist cooperation. In
  this latter view, tolerance and recognition of successive groups of
  merchants were seen as a means of raising domain prosperity. Seizing
  opportunities for improving their finances and pressed by the eco-
  nomic imperatives of bakufu government policies and of competition
  among the han, governments struggled to expand commerce and be-
  came even more reliant on the merchants.
  Excluded from political affairs, the merchants spearheaded social
  change through their struggles for business success. They redirected
  their energies from one set of customers to another, from one set of
  products to another, and from sources of capital in one type of commu-
  nity to those in other types of communities. More than any other
  group, the merchants were in the vanguard of social change in Toku-
  gawa Japan, all the more so under the relaxed controls in the first half
  of the nineteenth century.
  The transformation of the shokunin (artisans) occurred more slowly
  than that of the shonin. Both groups had been concentrated (through
  incentives as well as forcible migration) in the castle cities of the
  daimyo. Market forces increasingly operated rather than production
  for orders by powerful houses. The prized military craftsmen origi-
  nally resided in close proximity to their lord, often within the castle
  grounds. Then, as the plan of the castle city called for greater residen-
  tial segregation and specialization of land use, the artisans were moved
  to separate wards, or machi. More often than the merchant wards,
  those settled by artisans were named for the prevailing occupation and
  were organized as a community of households engaged in the same
  activity. Gradually, however, the forces of urbanization and imper-
  sonal markets overtook even the artisans. The lords could not justify
  or afford the small scale of production and duplication of services.
  Many artisans lost their earlier privileges. Some relocated in the cen-
  tral cities to which the daimyo were turning for mass-produced goods.
  Single-profession communities broke up as households moved to loca-
  tions dictated by market forces. Nonetheless, the shokunin were slower
  to disperse than were the shonin, and professions tied to han power
  were slower to disperse than were those oriented to domain consump-
  15 The simplified version of class conflict is presented in Charles David Sheldon, The Rise of the
  Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan: 1600-1868 (Locust Valley, N.Y.: Association for Asian
  Studies, 1958). For a critique of the widely expressed notion that economic distribution in
  Tokugawa Japan was a zero-sum game, see Hartley and Yamamura, Economic and Demo-
  graphic Change, pp. 12-27.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  tion.16 The castle city merchants easily outdistanced the artisans in
  establishing their independence both financially and symbolically and
  in their rate of population growth.17 As military expenditures de-
  clined, the merchants' dominance became even more apparent.
  In the nineteenth century, artisans in both the large central cities
  and the dispersed castle cities had to struggle with competition from
  the local (zaikata) producers. In some areas, such as the north Kantd
  region, the development of local textile production was so concen-
  trated and occurred on such a large scale that it has been cited as
  evidence of the rise of manufacturing.18 On a smaller scale, many
  forms of industrial production, especially the processing of agricul-
  tural goods such as sake and soy sauce, spread to the countryside.
  Across much of Japan, local crafts emerged as part of what Thomas
  Smith has described as the spread of side employments during the
  second half of the Tokugawa period.19
  Kozo Yamamura has offered two reasons for investments becoming
  concentrated in rural Japan and thus posing a challenge to the urban
  chonin:
  For the economy as a whole, this [roughly between 1760 and 1830] was a
  period of rapid increase in commercial and premodern manufacturing activi-
  ties. [The alternative of investment in large urban centers] was closed to the
  village entrepreneurs for two major reasons. One was that city guilds, though
  their power was weakening, were still able to rebuff the incursions of outsid-
  ers. The other was the absence of institutional arrangements to enable the
  transfer of capital from the villages to the cities.20
  Although the merchants and artisans could not readily shift their
  residences and shops (usually the two were joined in one building)
  from the city to the countryside or to the local marketing towns, the
  hired laborers (hokonin) were more mobile. This third category of
  chonin (the term hokonin includes, among others, servants and day
  laborers) was at the same time the heir to the hereditary servants who
  16 Nishikawa Koji, Nihon toshishi kenkyu (Tokyo: Nihon hoso shuppan kyokai, 1972), pp. 225-
  6,255-6.
  17 Nakamura Kichiji, ed., Nihon keizaishi (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 1967), p. 156.
  18 Japanese sources place considerable emphasis on the rise of rural manufacturing. See, for
  example, Kawaura Yasuji, Bakukan taisei kaitaiki no keizai kozo (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo,
  1965).
  19 Thomas C. Smith, "Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan," Journal of Eco-
  nomic History 29 (December 1969): 687-715.
  20 Kozo Yamamura, "Pre-Industrial Landholding Patterns in Japan and England," in Albert
  M. Craig, ed., Japan: A Comparative View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
  «979)>PP-295-6.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  511
  performed household and military service duties for the samurai and
  the precursors of the modern proletariat employed by capitalists as
  wage labor in manufacturing and transportation.
  Originally the hokonin of the samurai moved around with their mas-
  ters and were treated as long-term dependents. The legal freedom of
  these people became increasingly secure in the early seventeenth cen-
  tury as the bakufu repeatedly issued prohibitions on slavery, on selling
  servants, and even on long-term service. At the same time, a severe
  labor shortage in the burgeoning cities improved the labor market for
  the poor. Soon annual, seasonal, and increasingly more short-term,
  even daily, wages prevailed.
  Samurai on fixed incomes were finding that they often could not
  even afford labor in the face of rising wages offered by the chonin.21 As
  Kozo Yamamura makes clear, rising wage levels continued through
  the second half of the Tokugawa period.22 Even the city merchants
  and artisans could not offer high enough wages to attract as much
  labor as they could before. These circumstances altered both the
  length of the service obligations and the extent of status dependency.
  Even when the employer was a samurai and the employee a poor
  servant, the relationship between employer and employee became
  largely a function of the labor market.
  In the last century of Tokugawa rule, the urban lower strata, along
  with the merchants and artisans - all categories of chonin - were
  largely free of the personal bonds to lords and bosses that had once
  regulated their existence. If the Genroku era (1688-1704) marked the
  florescence of a well-to-do chonin society, then, according to Nishi-
  yama Matsunosuke, the Tanuma era three-quarters of a century later
  witnessed the establishment of a lower-class society in the city of
  Edo.a3 The lower-class presence was increasingly felt in various facets
  of city life. The poor inhabited the backstreets. They numbered
  among the renters who, as is clearly shown in a detailed study con-
  ducted in 1828,24 comprised as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chonin
  population within numerous districts of Edo.
  From time to time, the large numbers of hired labor, some temporar-
  ily unemployed, also posed a threat to urban order, as during the riots
  21 Nakabe Yoshiko, Kinsei toshi shakai keizaishi kenkyu (Tokyo: Koyo shobo, 1974), pp. 96-110.
  22 Yamamura, "Pre-Industrial Landholding Patterns," pp. 293,295-6,300.
  23 Nishiyama Matsunosuke, "Edo chonin no soron," in Nishiyama, ed., Edo chonin no kenkyu,
  vol. 1 (1972), pp. 28-33.
  24 Matsumoto Shiro, "Bakumatsu, ishinki ni okeru toshi no kozo," Mitsui bunko ronso 4 (1970):
  105-64.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  that gripped Edo in 1787. Whereas, on the one hand, the bakufu
  frequently reorganized privileged merchant associations in the hopes
  of solving commercial problems, it also repeatedly addressed the prob-
  lems of the urban lower strata in an effort to preserve order. It re-
  sponded to homelessness and unemployment through policies to re-
  turn migrants to their native villages, through welfare measures, and
  through tighter controls within the city, including a system of guaran-
  tors to be held responsible for recent migrants.25 The bakufu and han
  governments kept reacting to social change among the chonin, but
  their policies did not reverse the relatively autonomous growth of a
  diversified urban population, including the alarming development of a
  distinct lower-class society.
  It would be wrong to conclude that bonds of community and per-
  sonal loyalty among chonin became negligible during the Tokugawa
  period. Many themes of historical research refute such a view: The
  emphasis on self-government, albeit limited, and community coopera-
  . tion within each urban ward; the identification of close main and
  branch store (honke-bekke) connections and of apprentice (deshi) rela-
  tions, with prospects of gradual promotion through seniority and per-
  haps adoption; the emergence of powerful merchant houses that
  branched out from their home areas; and the presence of labor bosses
  (oyakatd) who acted as intermediaries in the labor market. These fea-
  tures, as well as the provisions for holding workers at times of labor
  shortage, and the presence of paternalistic forms of management are
  among the conditions that might be said to anticipate twentieth-
  century employment practices.
  Any discussion of the dynamism of chonin life would be incomplete
  without mentioning the widely accepted concept of chonin bunka (mer-
  chant culture). This concept, associated with the Genroku period but
  really a cumulative development continuing into the nineteenth cen-
  tury and reaching another peak in the Kasei period, refers to the
  emergence of a mass urban culture. It included, first, leisure-oriented
  interests in the arts and in the thriving nightlife that catered to urban
  males.26 Second, it incorporated, and indeed was based on, the sub-
  stantial advances in education, literacy, and knowledge that were
  made by large numbers in the urban population. Perhaps even more
  impressive than the qualitative advances in literacy were the advances
  25 Tokoro Rikio, "Edo no dekaseginin," in Nishiyama ed., Edo chonin no kenkyu, vol. 3 (1974),
  pp. 263-308; and Minami Kazuo, Edo no shakai kozo (Tokyo: Hanawa shobd, 1969), chap. 2.
  26 Nishiyama, "Edo chonin no soron," pp. 9-13.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  513
  in its distribution, for it eventually reached many of the urban poor
  and the rural population.2? Third, the term also conveys overtones of a
  distinctive approach to life that was conveyed in the codes of the great
  merchant houses and elsewhere. Bearing many similarities to the samu-
  rai codes of conduct, this approach stressed duty to the household to
  make one's business prosper, loyalty to superiors as expressed in de-
  voted service, and frugality and sacrifice in order to make one's way
  up through seniority.28 Hard work, respect for learning, a mass read-
  ing audience, and diversionary entertaining were among the signs of a
  new urban consciousness. Over time, the differences between samurai
  and chdnin culture diminished, especially as the mass culture of the
  chdnin became part of the samurai world view and as the chonin assimi-
  lated many of the samurai ideals depicted in literature and theater.
  Changes in the chdnin population appear no less dramatic when
  viewed quantitatively. Over the first half of the Tokugawa period, the
  number of chdnin may have tripled or quadrupled, resulting in an
  urban population of merchants, artisans, and hired laborers together
  with their household members well in excess of three million.2* Over
  the second half of the period, some decreases in the population of
  Osaka, Kyoto, and many of the castle cities were probably more than
  made up for by widespread increases in small cities, marketing cen-
  ters, and even villages. A period of dramatic growth was followed by a
  period of deconcentration, and the consequences of the latter must
  have been great for the impact of commercial activities on the lives of
  the Japanese people.
  In Edo, where approximately 600,000 chdnin resided,30 the second
  phase was not marked by decreasing population. In other respects,
  however, there was a demographic transformation that was echoed in
  many other urban centers. The sex ratio dropped from roughly 140
  males for every 100 females to little more than parity, and household
  size continued to fall.31 Although in the 1840s, as many as one-third of
  the city population still came from outside, the figure fell over the next
  27 Ronald Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
  nia Press, 1965).
  28 Johannes Hirschmeier and Tsunehiko Yui, The Development of Japanese Business 1600-1973
  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 43-66.
  29 Urban population figures are given in Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and
  Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 102. The break-
  down into social groups on pp. 81 and 88 must be supplemented by an estimate for hired
  laborers.
  30 Gilbert Rozman, "Edo's Importance in the Changing Tokugawa Society," Journal of Japa-
  nese Studies (Autumn 1974): 101-2.
  31 Nomura Kanetaro, Edo (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1966), p. 107.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  two decades to under one-quarter.*2 By the bakumatsu period, a more
  stable, family-centered chonin population largely residing in small
  household units predominated. Demographically as well as occupation-
  ally, changes in the composition of the chonin population proceeded at
  a rapid pace.
  Awareness of the various changes in the chonin class leads us to
  question two long-popular assumptions, that (i) the chonin did not
  challenge samurai power because of their weak economic position and
  great dependency on state power, and (2) Meiji entrepreneurs were
  largely samurai because the chonin were accustomed to following samu-
  rai and were unwilling to innovate. Kozo Yamamura cast doubt on the
  adequacy of the evidence cited in support of the dominance of samurai
  among Meiji entrepreneurs.33 What remains to be done is to establish
  more clearly the links between chonin dynamism during the Tokugawa
  period and their newly appreciated entrepreneurial vigor after 1868.
  The evidence suggests that the chdnin's entrepreneurial impact was a
  continuous and generally growing force in Tokugawa as well as Meiji
  Japan.
  For merchants and artisans, the reforms that ushered in the Meiji
  era were double-edged: They liberated the chonin from burdensome
  restrictions and at the same time threatened them by opening the gates
  to competition. In just a few years the new Meiji government estab-
  lished freedom of occupation for all, freedom of travel and residence,
  freedom of commercial transactions, and other rights that, at least in
  principle, had been absent before. Large numbers of chonin lost out
  with the elimination of the security of han monopolies, restricted do-
  main markets, guild restrictions, and a concentrated demand from
  samurai customers. They faced new competition from samurai who
  turned to commerce, favored with bonds in lieu of their earlier sti-
  pends and from local, often part-time, merchants already on the ascen-
  dancy in the late Tokugawa era. Conditions were in flux: New export
  markets opened; imports replaced certain handicrafts; taxes in kind
  gave way to cash payments; and government enterprises were founded
  and then sold off.
  Under these circumstances, the transformation undergone by chonin
  32 Takeuchi Makoto, "Kansei-Kaseiki Edo ni okeru shokaiso no doko," in Nishiyama, ed.,
  Edo no chonin kenkyu, vol. I (1972), pp. 387-90.
  33 Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurs/tip: Quantitative Analyses of
  Economic and Social Aspects of the Samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass.:
  Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 137-62.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  515
  in Tokugawa times may have greatly aided the capacity of a number of
  them to adapt. Johannes Hirschmeier and Yui Tsunehiko have referred
  to "the astonishing pace of adaptation of the House of Mitsui to the con-
  ditions of the Meiji economy," noting their familiarity with "advertis-
  ing techniques and customer service approaches which remind one very
  much of modern retailing.''^ Accustomed to a competitive environ-
  ment and flexible in their commitments, the Mitsui reflect the evolving
  commercial conditions of the late Tokugawa period. Many chonin
  proved adept at organizing to meet new circumstances, whether
  through the merchant houses with their elaborate rules and stringent de-
  mands of loyalty, the newly proliferating formal organizations modeled
  on Western examples, or the numerically predominant small-scale fam-
  ily enterprises. Modern organizational skills and their functional equiva-
  lents were widely dispersed across Japan. The acceptability of adoption
  and other employment mechanisms to ameliorate problems of nepotism
  in a family-oriented environment can be traced back to Tokugawa prac-
  tices for expanding business operations and operating branch stores.
  By the mid-Meiji period, Japan had a high proportion of women (well
  over half the total) among blue-collar workers. Unskilled, unmarried,
  short-term workers in light industry, these females were the heirs to the
  late-Tokugawa-era women who increasingly left home to take employ-
  ment and, in the process, sharply reduced the sex ratio in the cities.
  Hazama Hiroshi, following Okochi Kazuo, refers to these women as
  "dekasegi-type" (sojourning for work away from home) workers, as they
  were only temporarily in their jobs and maintained a close relationship
  with their farm families.35 The work conditions were grim; dormitory
  living was closely supervised; and contracts were made with the house-
  hold head, who accepted money as an advance against wages. But the
  rural households benefited, and the growth of a self-conscious urban
  proletariat was slowed, although by the late 1880s the poor districts
  were becoming crowded with hired laborers, peddlars, porters, and
  others who formed the nucleus of a proletariat.
  Early Meiji reforms that gave businessmen and workers legal rights
  comparable to those found in more modernized countries occurred
  with little pressure from below. They were granted by leaders who
  assigned high priority to economic growth. Intense competition re-
  34 Hirschmeier and Yui, The Development of Japanese Business, p. 66.
  35 Hazama Hiroshi, "Formation of an Industrial Work Force," in Hugh Patrick, ed., Japanese
  Industrialization and Its Social Consequences (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
  nia Press, 1976), p. 29.
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  5l6 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  suited. Three groups - the developing modern business community,
  the emerging industrial labor force, and the large number of mer-
  chants engaged in the still vital traditional sector - each became an
  amalgam of diverse social backgrounds. The ease with which entrepre-
  neurial talent of all sorts was used must be attributed to the heritage of
  social change in the Tokugawa era. In short, the surge of reforms of
  early Meiji recognized and brought to fruition currents already widely
  visible in the Kasei era at the start of the century's counterreforms in
  the Tempo era. By the mid-Meiji period the new momentum given to
  these currents of social change contributed to the beginning of rapid
  modernization.
  Nomin
  Change also permeated village life, transforming social conditions long
  before the Meiji Restoration and the land settlement that followed.
  Despite the goals of stability that the bakufu had for the rural areas,
  conditions were continuously transformed.
  The goals of the Tokugawa leaders for rural life were embodied in
  four concepts: the separation of samurai and peasants, the kokudaka
  system, the emergence of hombyakusho, and the suppression of nomin
  keizai (commercial activity by the peasants). The heino (samurai-
  peasant) split was one of the founding principles of Tokugawa society.
  It signified the separation of the military from the peasantry, both
  physically and in terms of rights over the use of land and labor.
  Peasants were barred from entering the samurai class, and, in princi-
  ple, from moving to the cities, from switching to nonagricultural pur-
  suits, and from selling or using their land as they might see fit. Samu-
  rai were increasingly cut off from their land base as multilayered or
  proprietary landownership was eliminated. The restrictions on samu-
  rai interference in village pursuits proved more effective and enduring
  than were the restrictions on peasant economic diversification. The
  simplification and impersonality of controls actually opened the way to
  rapid social change for the nomin, as it had for the chonin.
  On the basis of a national land survey and the establishment of a
  new landholding system in the 1580s, households, villages, tax admin-
  istered territories, domains, and even samurai stipends all were ex-
  pressed and set in kokudaka (estimated rice yield) levels. The system
  was founded on careful measurement and may have laid the founda-
  tion for a statistically oriented society. As a result of the kokudaka
  system, there was a high level of consciousness of relative standing
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  517
  (among nomin as well as among the daimyo and the samurai) and, in
  turn, of household efforts for improving one's status. The system
  demanded clear delineation of land rights under the principle of "one
  land, one ruler." Although the initial taxes were burdensome and
  probably drained all of the surplus away from the peasant, the system
  did offer predictability. With improvements in agronomy and in yield
  and in the absence of new surveys and taxes, there was also an incen-
  tive to raise production. Together with the separation of the social
  classes, the kokudaka system swept away many of the structural im-
  pediments to the peasants' self-betterment and initiative. What the
  leadership had not anticipated was that the fruits of nomin industrious-
  ness would increasingly escape the assessment process and the reach of
  the military elite. Throughout the 1860s this system continued to offer
  a secure and generally equitable foundation for household and commu-
  nity planning, while rural management and landholding patterns con-
  tinued to change.
  Taxes were assessed on the village and were allocated by village
  leaders drawn from owner-cultivators (hombyakusho). Through the
  listing of many marginal agricultural laborers as taxpayers, the hombya-
  kusho system gave the village a substantial measure of autonomy from
  the city-based samurai rulers. This system produced a subdivision of
  land, a more contractual and impersonal relationship between the
  original large landholders and their former dependent laborers, and
  incentives to increase total output. Despite lingering corvee and collec-
  tive obligations, the peasants were largely free to use their time as they
  saw fit, and even to engage in side employments to the extent that
  opportunities were available. Thomas Smith traced "the general weak-
  ening of the role of cooperation and obligation farming,"36 contrasting
  the dependent farming of the seventeenth-century village with the new
  market-type relationships that evolved. These included tenancy based
  on autonomous economic units. Smith referred to changes "of great
  importance for Japanese history, perhaps justifying comparison with
  the agricultural revolution in Europe . . . as a whole they fell mainly
  in the Tokugawa period, and their central feature was a shift from
  cooperative to individual farming."37 Small-scale management of agri-
  cultural resources advanced markedly as new methods and new farm-
  ers' handbooks became widely distributed.
  Whereas management became fixed at the household level, the scale
  of landownership increased to some extent. Kozo Yamamura has con-
  36 Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modem Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
  sity Press, 1959), p. 140. 
  37 Ibid., p. 9.
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  5l8 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  curred with Japanese scholars that landholding during the last 150
  years of the Tokugawa period became more concentrated and the
  village more differentiated. In explanation, he offered the increased
  demand for labor, the increase in the value of labor vis-a-vis that of
  land, and, after 1830, the impact of "rampant inflation and an in-
  creased competitiveness in commercial and manufacturing activities
  due to the decline of the guilds and the rise of the village entrepre-
  neurs. "38 Yamamura concludes that in both Japan and England "land-
  holding patterns and contractual arrangements were changed to make
  agriculture increasingly efficient. "39 During the final third of the nine-
  teenth century, when there was a big increase in the percentage of
  arable land controlled by landlords as their status rose under the new
  social system,*0 the hombyakusho system, which had provided a frame-
  work for expanded equality and homogeneity in the Japanese village,
  was disappearing.
  John Hall has observed that the ideal economic world envisaged by
  Tokugawa administrators "postulated a fundamentally agrarian econ-
  omy with minimum development of trade - a society in which the
  samurai governed, the peasants produced, and the merchants took
  care of distribution."'*1 Delivering their rice directly to local officials,
  the peasants were minimally affected by commercial transactions. Offi-
  cials initially suppressed twmin keizai based on the direct commercial
  activity of the peasants, for fear that it bore the seeds of undesired
  social change. Their fears were justified as rural commerce grew mark-
  edly, and han finances and the relative position of the samurai fell into
  decline. Japanese scholars often depict the peasant economy as surging
  past the lord's economy by the early eighteenth century and continu-
  ing to forge ahead.*2 Referring to the late Tokugawa period, Hall
  concludes, "At the village level it was as much as anything the spread
  of landlordism and commercial activity which led to the breakup of
  the traditional village economy and to many of the social dislocations
  which troubled the authorities."« William Hauser has cited as one of
  the factors behind a sharp decline in imports from the countryside to
  Osaka after 1830 "the increased participation of both the cultivators
  and rural processors and the rural merchants in the marketing pro-
  cess."4* Increased commercial agricultural production undermined
  38 Yamamura, "Pre-IndustriaJ Landholding Patterns," p. 300. 
  39 Ibid., p. 323.
  40 Ann Waswo, Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Rural Elite (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
  University of California Press, 1977), pp. 16-21.
  41 John W. Hall, Japan: From Prehistory to Modem Times (New York: Dell, 1970), p. 204.
  42 See, for example, Nakamura, Nihon keizaishi, pp. 98-104.
  43 Hall, Japan, p. 203. 
  44 Hauser, Economic Institutional Change, p. 51.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  519
  not only the mechanisms for controlling trade but also an entire sys-
  tem premised on a fixed division of labor among various social strata
  and various types of settlements.
  The Tokugawa period thus witnessed the fall of one type of land-
  lordism and the rise of another. The former type existed in a rela-
  tively nonmonetized economy in which powerful peasants formed the
  core of small bands of households who owed diffuse labor services
  and, in turn, received unspecified amounts of assistance in times of
  need. In mountainous villages and in regions remote from Japan's
  economic arteries, relations of this type continued into the nineteenth
  century, often involving households linked by kinship bonds such as
  honke-bunke (main and branch households set up through unequal
  inheritances) or the survival of dozoku (common lineage) bonds. In
  most areas diffuse and proprietary (so-called vertical) labor relations
  gave way earlier to more equal, "horizontal links" among households
  based on the subdivision of land, the transfer of risks to owner-
  cultivators, and the decline in mutual obligations for services and
  benefits.
  The new type of landlords operated in an increasingly commercial-
  ized economy. Known as gdno (wealthy peasants), they often diversi-
  fied their investments. Especially in the late eighteenth century and
  during the first half of the nineteenth century, these landholders cum
  entrepreneurs gained ascendancy in the rural areas.45 They acquired
  titles legally through investments in reclamation or by getting around
  laws against the alienation of land, for example, through mortgages.
  The gdno, including substantial landholders of the past and house-
  holds whose principal wealth derived from commercial enterprises,
  formed a new village leadership.
  The impact of the new landlords, without the hereditary privileges
  often observed in other societies, transformed village society in the
  final century of the Tokugawa period. First, their rural investments
  expanded the demand for labor, driving up the wages necessary to
  attract workers, and altering household decisions about labor alloca-
  tion, landownership, and migration. Second, their reliance on tenant
  farming or on wage labor made contracts the foundation for rural
  social relations, reducing the significance of the personal bonds that
  had earlier predominated in rural communities. Third, their flexibility
  in choosing among diverse and largely productive uses for their capital
  contributed to local economic growth in all sectors. Heavy invest-
  45 Yamamura, "Pre-Industrial Landholding Patterns," p. 296.
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  520 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  ments in irrigation systems and fertilizers helped make commercial
  agriculture more profitable, and transfers of funds into marketing
  centers contributed to the development of local commerce and indus-
  try. Fourth, their role as investors and managers fostered entrepreneu-
  rial skills in the rural sector. Fifth, the gono joined with the earlier
  village elite to form a group capable of emulating urban life. John Hall
  described this process of cultural diffusion as follows:
  Together they [the new and old wealth peasants] formed a village upper class,
  often well educated and in close contact with samurai officialdom, able to
  partake of the cultural products of the castle town or the great cities. Rural
  society eventually acquired something of a higher cultural life of its own and
  was able to produce substantial leadership in local administration and eco-
  nomic development.*6
  Despite their improved situation, Japanese landlords operated un-
  der various constraints until what Ronald Dore refers to as "stage I
  land reform" followed the Meiji Restoration.-*? The new government's
  policies dispossessed the daimyo and others who had enjoyed inherent
  ownership rights (however removed they might have been from the
  exercise of these rights apart from the collection of income that more
  closely resembled taxes than rents). In the late nineteenth century the
  landlord elite reached its peak. The full establishment of private prop-
  erty rights permitted this group to increase its holdings rapidly, and
  the end of rigid class barriers removed occupational and investment
  barriers and sumptuary laws.
  Ann Waswo has singled out the landlord elite as innovators and
  promoters of progress. Her analysis supports the conclusion that the
  actions of this rural elite were important to bringing about sustained
  advances to Japanese agriculture during the Meiji period and that the
  investments, managerial skills, and upwardly mobile sons of this elite
  contributed mightily to growth in other sectors. It was not until the
  late and post-Meiji years that increasing numbers of absentee land-
  lords diverted funds away from local investments. Waswo took excep-
  tion to the postwar Japanese scholarship that characterizes landlords
  as parasites and obstacles to progress:
  Most landlords lived comfortably, and a few, elegantly. But a large propor-
  tion of their wealth was used productively, not dissipated in conspicuous
  display. They were actively concerned with improving agriculture and village
  46 Hall, Japan, p. 204.
  47 Ronald Dore, "Land Reform and Japan's Economic Development," Developing Economies 3
  (December 1965): 487-9-
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  521
  life. Again in contrast to the stereotype, there is little evidence that they
  found trade and industry repugnant.*8
  There are many reasons to associate the transformation of landlords
  with the aforementioned social changes in the chdnin class. Large
  numbers of the local (zaikata) merchants on the rise in the late Toku-
  gawa period were none other than gono. The new landlords responded
  to opportunities for commercial agriculture, transferred capital back
  and forth between landholdings and commercial enterprises, emulated
  urban practices, and competed for labor after the demand for it had
  grown rapidly in the urban sector. In short, the continuing investiga-
  tion is turning up changes in commercial activities as explanations for
  each stage in the process that transformed a countryside dominated by
  patrimonial landlords to one characterized by deconcentrated, rela-
  tively egalitarian landholders, and finally to one with new concentra-
  tions held by entrepreneurial landlords, who, after 1868, were free to
  work toward larger holdings still.
  For every change in the landlord stratum, there was a correspond-
  ing change in the stratum of tenants and agricultural laborers. The
  polarization of landholdings (often referred to as the "disintegration"
  of the peasant class) through the nineteenth century greatly increased
  the number of landless and marginal agriculturalists. It has often been
  assumed that the emergence in the last century of Tokugawa rule of a
  rural "semiproletariat" attests primarily to the expropriation of the
  poor by the rich, to the greedy manipulation of the terms of trade or of
  credit, and to the catastrophic impact of the Temmei and Tempo
  famines that drove impoverished peasants to turn over their land.49
  Yet the statistics on prices, wages, rents, taxes, and standards of living
  give credence to a different explanation for the disposal of many small
  plots of land. The positive factors encouraging small owner-cultivators
  to reallocate their household labor and to reduce their landholdings
  may well have surpassed the negative factors pushing them off their
  own land.
  Clearly the situation of the rural lower strata changed markedly over
  the Tokugawa period. After they were legally released from personal-
  ized dependency relations with samurai and landlords alike, they
  gradually gained independence in other ways as well. They established
  separate households and residences. As labor services were discontin-
  48 Waswo, Japanese Landlords, p. 5. See also Richard J. Smethurst, Agricultural Development and
  Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
  49 Sasaki Junnosuke, Bakumatsu shakai ran (Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1073), p. 15.
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  522 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  ued, agricultural laborers and owner-cultivators could use their time
  more efficiently. Direct participation in local markets also improved
  their position and added to the incentives for increasing and diversify-
  ing production in order to earn a larger income. Increased opportuni-
  ties to move to the cities and to earn higher wages there also could not
  fail to influence the aspirations of potential migrants in the country-
  side and to put pressure on others who needed work to meet the
  standards of the competition. Indeed, by the nineteenth century, it
  appears that the term hokonin was as likely to refer to rural servants or
  hired labor as it was to their urban counterparts.5° The convergence of
  wage labor in the urban and rural sectors and the gradual shift in
  destination from the cities to the countryside form the background for
  the changes in observed landholdings.
  Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura have been virtually alone in
  bringing together the widely available evidence on the Japanese labor
  market in order to explain the situation of the rural lower strata. They
  have shown that in the final century of the Tokugawa period, the labor
  available for agriculture declined to such an extent that, unlike the
  seventeenth century when the population had grown rapidly, a shortage
  of labor developed. Because of large-scale migration to the cities and the
  expanding participation in side employments by peasants still in the
  village, there was inadequate labor left for agriculture. To summarize,
  what made possible a labor shortage was (i) the ease of movement to the
  cities and the high demand for labor there after the seventeenth century;
  (2) the existence of "labor markets, both in the agricultural and in the
  non-agricultural sectors, [that] were competitive by the beginning of
  the eighteenth century, if not before";*1 (3) increases in the number of
  "peasants engaged in commerce and manufacturing on a part- or full-
  time basis . . . [at the same time that] rural manufacturing and com-
  mercial establishments, growing larger and more efficient, could offer
  wages attractive enough to keep the labor for their needs";52 and (4)
  slowdown in population growth.
  The results of the labor shortage reverberated through rural and
  urban areas in similar ways. Many who enjoyed high status found that
  they could no longer afford hired labor - virtually the only form of
  extra household help still available. Others who were in a better posi-
  tion to readjust their use of scarce resources retained a declining num-
  50 Hayami Akira and Uchida Nobuko, "Kinsei nomin no kodo tsuiseki chosa," in Umemura et
  al., eds., Nihon keizai no flatten, pp. 67-98.
  51 Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, p. 86. 
  52 Ibid.,p. 98.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  523
  ber of workers with the likelihood that improved skills would be well
  rewarded. The laborers themselves were in a position to improve their
  career prospects and standards of living. In the villages, Hanley and
  Yamamura noted that the shortage of labor stimulated directly or
  indirectly (1) an improvement in agricultural methods and other more
  efficient uses of resources; (2) an increase in wage levels and in bene-
  fits such as the number of holidays for hired laborers; (3) an improve-
  ment in the terms of contract for tenant-cultivators; (4) in some less
  commercialized regions, a further decrease in the number of nago
  (landless peasants) who still cultivated small plots of land and pro-
  vided labor services in exchange for their plot; (5) an increase in
  peasant demand for diverse consumer products; (6) a reduction in the
  average duration of employment, as laborers found it advantageous to
  jump from job to job; and (7) a continued reallocation of landholdings,
  particularly as small and marginal peasants left the land in order to
  improve their living standards. Hanley and Yamamura summarized
  their findings on many of these points as follows:
  The movement of labor to nonagricultural activities resulted in a shortage of
  labor in agriculture, which had the consequences of raising the wages of
  agricultural laborers and servants and of improving the terms of contract for
  tenant farmers. Under these circumstances, some arable land remained un-
  worked, and the efforts of the ruling class to stabilize wages in defiance of the
  dictates of the labor market usually proved unsuccessful. The increasing
  returns to labor, imputed for tenants or paid to wage earners, necessitated the
  more efficient use of labor. In the manufacturing industries this often took
  the form of an increased scale of production. In agriculture, the result was for
  many to change the size of their unit to make it as close as possible to what
  would be optimum, given the prevailing level of wages, relative advantages in
  the types of crops that could be grown, climate and topographical conditions,
  and the market conditions (relative prices of crops and volume of demand) at
  the time.
  For holdings to approach optimum size, some owner-cultivators had to
  increase their holdings, while some of the largest landholders began to lease
  part of their land to tenant cultivators, even though it meant they had to offer
  tenants terms of contract promising them a return for their labor equivalent to
  what they could earn by migrating to towns, by engaging in rural commerce on
  a part- or full-time basis, or by becoming agricultural wage laborers."
  Thus what had been described as the pauperization of excess or
  overtaxed rural laborers now becomes characterized as an intense,
  competitive bidding for scarce labor. Incentives increased and re-
  53 Ibid., p. 323. See also the elaboration on some of these themes in Yamamura, "Pre-Industrial
  Landholding Patterns," pp. 292-302.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  sources were allocated more efficiently. Under these circumstances, it
  is understandable that the peasants became more industrious, that
  agricultural productivity rose, and that side employments became
  more competitive with urban production. Just as both the rural land-
  lords and the least well-to-do laborers benefited from the significant
  institutional changes launched from above in the late sixteenth and
  seventeenth centuries, both groups also benefited from the perhaps
  equally significant changes emerging from below over the eighteenth
  and much of the nineteenth century.
  Hayami Akira has introduced two expressions to refer to these
  changes in the lives of the rural masses: "economic society" (keizai
  shakai) and "industrious revolution."54 The increase in the peasants'
  dependence on the market, the independence of the small peasant
  household as a participant in the market, and the formation of a
  national network for marketing goods all are aspects of an "economic
  society." Hayami included as part of this concept the substantial move-
  ment of people for economic purposes and the development of mass
  education, mass entertainment, the mass media, and other forms of
  mass culture. The convergence of rural and urban labor markets,
  involving high rates of migration with flexible choice of destinations,
  facilitated the diffusion of many characteristics of urban popular cul-
  ture to the rural masses. Hayami's "economic society" is also a mobile
  and informed society; he regards it as a necessary but not sufficient
  condition for capitalism.55
  Noting that agricultural productivity increased several times over
  during the Tokugawa period, Hayami cites as a factor increased labor
  input per agricultural laborer. The small-family producing unit whose
  members increasingly enjoyed longer life expectancies and improved
  conditions of life responded to incentives to increase their labor input
  in order to raise their living standards. Hayami declares that this
  period witnessed the birth of an industriousness still present among
  Japanese peasants today.56 Gains in productivity through highly labor-
  intensive methods, with little population growth and with little, al-
  though increasing, inputs of capital, demanded that households maxi-
  mize the effectiveness of their labor inputs.
  However much the balance between landlord and tenant may have
  shifted after 1868 in the landlord's behalf (especially by denying ten-
  ants rights long sanctioned by local custom),5? the long-term impact of
  the tenants' improved position was not easily obliterated. A degree of
  54 Hayami, "Keizai shakai no seiritsu to sono tokushitsu," p. 318. 
  55 Ibid., p. 9.
  56 Ibid., p. 13. 
  57 Waswo, Japanese Landlords, pp. 17-23.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  525
  tenant independence is deeply rooted in the social changes of the
  Tokugawa period.
  One of the five articles in the Charter Oath issued by the new Meiji
  government in April 1868 asserted: "The common people, no less than
  the civil and military officials, shall each be allowed to pursue their
  own calling so that there may be no discontent." To that end, a series
  of decrees over the next five years raised the status of the majority of
  the people and established a broad category of commoners (heimin).
  Above all, two decrees of 1873, the land settlement and the conscrip-
  tion law, granted new opportunities while at the same time imposing
  new responsibilities. The former clarified landownership and regular-
  ized tax payments in cash, both resulting in a heightened orientation
  to the market and to land and labor as commodities. Freedom to
  move, to plant, and to sell formalized the free market in agriculture.
  Unlike land settlements aimed at eliminating the land-based aristoc-
  racy or at granting land to the previously landless, the Meiji settlement
  brought little redistribution. Several of its chief effects were to central-
  ize regulations in a country long divided, to give uniform legal backing
  to practices that had defied earlier official restrictions, and to confirm
  the primacy of impersonal market forces. Free rein was given to the
  household to pursue its prosperity. Small-scale holdings continued to
  prevail, although by the end of the century the amount of land rented
  to tenants had increased sharply, and a group of powerful landowners
  had emerged.
  The Meiji land settlement enhanced the authority of landlords in
  both tenancy relations and village life. It gave landowners clear title to
  the land, leaving tenants more vulnerable. In some cases the tenants
  protested the loss of common land or of customarily recognized perma-
  nent tenancy rights or high rent burdens, but they continued to accept
  the landlords as village leaders and referred to the relationship in
  kinship terms. *8 Over the final decades of the nineteenth century, they
  followed the example of the landlords in introducing new farming
  techniques, in sending their children to the newly established modern
  schools, and in joining new rural associations. Levels of agricultural
  productivity, rural literacy, and local organizational growth were extra-
  ordinary for a country just beginning modern economic development.
  The conclusion is inescapable that changes in Tokugawa village condi-
  tions left a rural population well endowed for modern development.
  58 Ibid., pp. 23-4.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  The conscription law was a principal step in abolishing the legal
  distinction between samurai and commoner. At age twenty-one, males
  were made liable for military service. Although there were exemptions
  and the possibility of commutation through payment, a considerable
  number of rural men were called up for service. Along with the educa-
  tional reforms designed to achieve compulsory schooling, conscription
  played a crucial role in widening the horizons of the village residents,
  imparting new skills and organizational experience, and inculcating the
  attitudes of a modern military force imbued with a samurai heritage and
  guided by a European model. By the mid-Meiji period, military prow-
  ess and success had confirmed the significance of the military career,
  while also demonstrating that the qualities (literacy, discipline, readi-
  ness to learn, and so on ) of Japan's rural recruits would not be easily
  matched elsewhere.
  Of course, both old and new inequalities limited homogeneity of
  Japanese society. The right to intermarry with samurai granted in
  1871 broke down artificial barriers without basis in wealth but did not
  result in much mingling of high and low. If most ndmin were unlikely
  to have the means to emerge from their day-to-day agrarian existence,
  the pariahs of the old society - eta and hinin - faced a still more insur-
  mountable barrier. They were legally freed in 1871 from severe restric-
  tions of occupation and residence, at the same time losing monopolies
  of occupation and nontaxed status. But despite legal equality, the
  adjustment was not easy, and more than a century later the stigma
  remained on their descendants (then called burakumin). Just as rigid,
  legal inequality did not prevent an easing of income differentials in the
  late Tokugawa period, reforms that provided for equality before the
  law did not prevent widening income inequalities during the Meiji era.
  Any discussion of social relations in rural Japan would be incom-
  plete without mentioning community relations. The Japanese village
  of this period had many elements of cohesiveness and solidarity, that
  is, kyodotai, gemeinschaft, or community spirit. This concept appears
  predominantly in the following contexts: (1) the communal use of
  resources, especially in the context of a rice-producing economy with
  shared water rights, that is, conditions of production that demanded a
  good deal of cooperation; (2) the unity that resulted from the govern-
  ment's levying a lump-sum tax on the village and the collective con-
  cern that the number of households not increase too greatly or that the
  land be redistributed so unequally that meeting fiscal obligations
  would prove difficult; (3) the group responsibility for discipline and
  order embodied in village self-regulation and codes that called for
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
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  ostracism or exclusion (mura hachibu) and other powerful controls in
  support of "governance by consensus";'9 (4) the existence of village
  assemblies and other leadership bodies that promoted collective en-
  deavors and represented a generally unified village to the outside; and
  (5) the religious and ceremonial unity (miyaza) centered on the village
  Shinto shrine. Citing some of these factors, Harumi Befu described
  the Tokugawa village as a corporation:
  The village was a corporate body, a legal entity which owned, bought and
  sold property; loaned and borrowed money; and sued, was sued by, and
  entered into agreements with other villages. The fact that the village had such
  corporate qualities is important. It indicates the degree of commitment by
  village members toward the village as a unit and the degree of solidarity they
  expressed. It is du's solidarity which enabled villagers to enforce their self-
  made laws and invoke sanctions against any members who transgressed
  them.60
  Japanese rural communities varied in their degree of kyodotai. By
  late Tokugawa times it seems to have been decreasing; in some cases
  it was an artifact of domination by an entrenched and hereditary
  elite, perhaps able to manipulate conditions to its own benefit. Many
  villages apparently had only nominal functions for the government-
  directed gonin gumi (five-household organizations, though they actu-
  ally varied in numbers) intended for mutual surveillance and responsi-
  bility. Evidence of conflict is not hard to find. Nineteenth-century
  redistributions of labor and land increased the potential for conflict,
  especially after the controls became lax in mid-century. Nevertheless,
  there was a high degree of cohesion, continuity, and community on
  the village level, based on the strong roots maintained by the house-
  holds (ie) identified as continuing for generation after generation, at
  the same time that there was great flux in the actual employment of
  each household's resources.
  In the late Tokugawa period, the ndmin may have been experiencing
  even greater effects from social change than the chonin were, for the
  locus of expanded migration and commercial vitality had shifted to
  local centers and villages. In comparison with the conditions that had
  prevailed a few centuries earlier, ordinary peasants were now more
  economically independent, market oriented, and industrious, and
  they were guided by diverse incentives and were educated and in-
  59 Dan Fenno Henderson, Village "Contracts" in Tokugawa Japan (Seattle: University of Wash-
  ington Press, 1975).
  60 Harumi Befu, "Village Autonomy and Articulation with the State," in Hall and Jansen, eds.,
  Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modem Japan, p. 308.
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  528 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  formed. Many of these social changes paralleled and came in the wake
  of similar changes among the chonin.
  Into the Meiji era - and beginning earlier in the growing port
  cities - the chonin again took the lead in social change, which was
  dubbed "civilization and enlightenment" (bummei kaika). The urban
  sector led the way in introducing the symbols of Westernization - new
  haircuts in place of the shaved head and topknot, Western-style dress,
  and much more - and organizations and technology as well. In com-
  parison with other latecomers to modernization, however, the Japa-
  nese rural sector does not appear to have lagged very far behind the
  urban sector, for example, in the spread of literacy. The earlier respon-
  siveness of the late Tokugawa ndmin to urban-initiated change sug-
  gests that similar mechanisms operated in two periods.
  Samurai
  Whereas the other two social classes experienced much social change,
  the samurai did not after the bakuhan system became firmly en-
  trenched in the mid-seventeenth century. From 1550 to 1650 the war-
  rior's style of life had been transformed and bureaucratized. Assem-
  bled in cities, deprived of former associations with particular villages
  and plots of land, denied interference in local taxation and administra-
  tion, and given some form of employment as members of governmen-
  tal bureaucracies, the samurai had largely become civil administrators.
  The accumulated weight of their administrative experience and ex-
  panded educational training no doubt continued to raise the level of
  their performance in various capacities, but on the whole they proba-
  bly had less incentive for superior achievement. After this formative
  period, there was little social mobility, either intergenerational or in-
  tragenerational. Eligibility for bureaucratic posts was generally limited
  to samurai of a specific rank. Duties continued very much as before,
  involving military, administrative, and ceremonial obligations. Espe-
  cially in the higher ranks, almost no change was possible in hereditary
  status, although there was continual movement in and out of the lower
  ranks, to which honor and reward were less important. Regulations
  minutely governed performance on the job and much conduct off the
  job as well. The possibilities of new appointments for younger sons
  were vanishing. Stipends, both in actual amounts and in real purchas-
  ing power, remained scarcely altered. Although there is reason to
  argue that the early Tokugawa regrouping of the elite into an orga-
  nized force for administration, based on ideals of dedicated service and
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  529
  high standards of performance, gave Japan a distinct advantage in the
  eventual formation of a modern bureaucracy, bureaucratic practices
  did not emphasize performance or responsiveness to changing social
  conditions. The kashindan (house retainer band) under each lord was
  too tradition bound and ascriptive - and too caught up in an intricate
  web of checks and balances defined in lord-vassal terms - to respond
  to gradual social changes. The rigidly structured existence of the
  samurai - their lack of flexibility in securing an income and in spend-
  ing stipends - allowed scant opportunity to respond to new economic
  forces.
  Nevertheless, the samurai perceived their position as changing. The
  origins of this perception can largely be traced to two conditions: the
  routinization and seeming irrelevance of many of their activities, and
  the awareness of improvements in the circumstances of the other social
  classes. Kozo Yamamura has discussed both of these conditions, de-
  scribing job assignments or the absence thereof that must have left
  many without adequate motivation or a sense of accomplishment. The
  picture that emerges is very different from the picture of peasant
  industriousness painted by Hayami Akira referred to earlier:
  The continued peace of the Tokugawa period gradually changed the shogun's
  retainers from the samurai of the battlefields into bureaucrats, underem-
  ployed soldiers, and unemployed idlers. . . . Life was no longer unpredict-
  able and dangerous, but full of monotonous routine for the former warriors
  who now spent hours working on the Tokugawa equivalent of interoffice
  memoranda, inspecting fire damage, and supervising the repair of river
  banks. . . . The working days of many bureaucrats decreased during the
  eighteenth century. Most worked two days with the third off in order to give
  employment to their fellow bannermen. A large number of supervisory ban-
  nermen and even some in other positions took turns on the job on a monthly
  basis. . . ."
  The roughly two million samurai, including five thousand to six
  thousand bannermen (hatamoto), along with their household mem-
  bers, that Yamamura studied, were too numerous to be employed
  productively or to be rewarded to their satisfaction. Especially the
  tozama daimyo found that they "had more [vassals] than they needed
  or could afford."62 Hard-pressed for funds, the daimyo repeatedly
  borrowed from their retainers, reducing their stipends at the very time
  that other social strata were making economic gains. Perhaps just as
  61 Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship, p. 70. The work is based on
  Yamamura's study of the bakufu bannermen {hatamoto).
  62 Harold Bolitho, Treasures Among Men: The Fudai Daimyo in Tokugawa Japan (New Haven,
  Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 71.
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  530 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  demoralizing was the absence of meaningful employment or opportu-
  nity to excel in their jobs.
  Daimyo could not, in general, fire samurai and, at the same time
  under conditions of peace, had little or no work for perhaps as many as
  half of them. They ensured loyalty in part through a system of lifetime
  employment - a forerunner of the modern reluctance in Japan to lay
  off workers.
  Problems of morale as well as of finances led to efforts to revitalize
  the bureaucracies. Herman Ooms has proposed the expression of
  "moral rearmament" to depict a prominent part of the two eighteenth-
  century reform programs intended to revitalize the bureaucracy-
  Yoshimune's response to routinization and Sadanobu's to corrup-
  tion. 63 Discipline, frugality, mutual loyalties and obligations, a return
  to martial vigor, a sense of social commitment, and other aspects of the
  samurai ethic were called upon on these occasions and in the Tempo
  reforms of the 1840s to alleviate the growing sense of crisis and to
  renew the performance of the society's elite. But the tide was never
  reversed. It proved difficult to reconcile (1) the Confucian view that
  the samurai were the meritorious, or at least the rightful, leaders of
  society with the increasing irrelevance of many of their duties; (2) "the
  old tradition of the bushi as a militant man of action and the new
  concept of the ruler as a gentleman"; and (3) "the status of enfeoffed
  vassal" and "that of salaried official."64 Bushido, the way of the war-
  rior, seemed increasingly irrelevant, as it expressed a formalism that
  offered little practical guidance for the changing times.
  Merchants and landlords each comprised about the same order of
  magnitude as the samurai in the Tokugawa population, perhaps 5 to 6
  percent. However, the ranks of these strata were adjusted by social
  mobility and prolonged competition. The samurai were immobilized
  from similar feats of adaptability and from "survival of the fittest" by
  their fixed residences, by official restrictions on (and disdain for) com-
  mercial involvement, and by the absence of occupational choice. But
  the impact of the forces generated by the chonin penetrated this group
  too; samurai sought improvements in their situation while remaining
  loyal to their lords.
  The major changes affecting the samurai in the eighteenth century
  and the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century were financial. First,
  they became increasingly reliant on loans, some of which were can-
  celed from time to time, after which credit would dry up. Second,
  63 Herman Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography ofMatsudaira Sadanobu, 1758-
  1829 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 
  64 Hall, Japan, pp. 197-8.
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  SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 
  531
  their stipends were cut in difficult times by hard-pressed daimyo.
  Third, the severe inflation of the final decades of Tokugawa rule drove
  up commodity prices faster than the rice price on which the samurai's
  income depended. Fourth and most important, over the centuries
  their aspirations grew while their income remained relatively constant.
  Yamamura has suggested that in the eighteenth century "the ban-
  nerman's increasing poverty was caused by increasing wants."6' Beset
  with heavy fixed expenses to maintain their positions, the samurai
  were also exposed every day to urban consumption practices that inten-
  sified their own demands. By late Tokugawa times the perception of
  impoverishment was probably reinforced by an actual decline in real
  income.
  Yamamura concluded that large numbers of samurai became scarcely
  distinguishable from the chonin, and in some cases the ndmin, in their
  life-styles and even in their real employment. So-called side employ-
  ments became "common for all but a limited number of high-ranking
  and well-off samurai."66 Many samurai were poor, performed odd jobs,
  and became a virtually indistinguishable part of a broad urban culture.
  Yamamura referred to "economic necessity . . . as a powerful equalizer
  of Tokugawa society" and wrote of class distinctions that became virtu-
  ally nonexistent.6?
  Many important questions about the samurai remain under consider-
  ation, even though they have long been high on the agenda of Japanese
  studies. How did a growing sense of relative deprivation influence the
  samurai's attitudes toward their leaders and the bakuhan system? Why
  did such a large and firmly entrenched elite tolerate a shift in the
  distribution of income in favor of others? What accounts for the rela-
  tive lack of resistance to the social policies that dethroned the samurai
  after the Meiji Restoration? What leadership roles did the samurai
  assume in the last decades of the century? Answers to these questions
  appear in other chapters. Only the last two questions require some
  comment here.
  The "declassing" of an entrenched elite occurred remarkably
  smoothly.68 In 1869 the daimyo accepted appointment as governors,
  ceding their hold on local power. In 1871, the complex classification of
  former samurai was simplified into two ranks, shizoku and sotsu, of
  which the latter was soon abandoned. Shortly thereafter, they were
  65 Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneunhip, p. 48.
  66 Ibid., p. 131. 
  67 Ibid., pp. 132,133.
  68 See Marius B. Jarisen, "The Ruling Class," in Jansen and Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition,
  pp. 68-90.
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  532 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  given the right to engage in all professions without loss of rank; the
  ' samurai's stipends were adjusted in steps and then, in 1876, were
  replaced by government bonds. There were instances of opposition -
  even armed resistance - but the transition from hereditary, privileged
  vassals to masterless individuals fending for themselves proceeded
  with astonishing speed. Why did the samurai so readily accede to the
  loss of their special status with corresponding changes in occupation,
  residence, and life-style? One part of the answer is the way that it was
  carried out, carefully in stages and with compensation. Another part
  of the answer is the nature of the samurai as a concentrated, disci-
  plined, service-oriented elite with an increasing educational level. Al-
  though some samurai no doubt clung to their privileges as the only
  hope for security in the emerging Meiji society, others had confidence
  in their knowledge and experience and may have welcomed the oppor-
  tunity to be freed of the virtually frozen status hierarchy of the
  kashindan. A third part of the answer must be the atmosphere of
  national peril and opportunity for service that inspired those who
  expected the Meiji leaders to honor their pledge to select talent on the
  basis of ability.
  That the lower samurai assumed many high leadership positions
  after they were freed from the rigid status distinctions of their class
  testifies to the positive, if belated, effects of social mobility for bring-
  ing talent to the fore. The succession of new types of leaders was now
  well along in all three classes. Each succession produced a shift from
  ascriptive rewards to achievement, from privilege conferred by the
  leaders to a position earned largely by initiative and talent. Each suc-
  cession involved a transition from urban to rural and from the big city
  to the small town; in the case of the samurai, many took up employ-
  ment in local areas as teachers, police, and local administrators, apply-
  ing skills learned in many generations of service to their lords. It is also
  likely that each succession of new social groups brought an increase in
  entrepreneurial skills and in the abilities necessary for exploiting com-
  mercial opportunities. Slow to engage directly in commercial enter-
  prises, the samurai nonetheless had other skills that helped many
  make a rapid adjustment. For all classes, the succession process did
  not result in a complete displacement of the earlier top group, but a
  widening of the top circle and a transitional period when some might
  make the adjustment to the new methods of operation.
  In each case, too, the initial sharp separation of classes helped deter-
  mine the course of succession. For example, the urban chonin, who
  were in many ways cut off from rural society, could not readily take
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  533
  command of the emerging rural commercial forces. Landlords, perma-
  nently separated from the samurai elite, could not rely on outside
  support to protect their claims on labor and land. The samurai faced
  the most barriers to shifting their resources out, but they also enjoyed
  the most protection in keeping their status intact. After 1868 the pent-
  up forces for rechanneling stifled energies operated as one of the major
  sources of social change. Thomas Smith identified this samurai re-
  sponse as the explosion of individual energies after the abolition of
  status distinctions.69 The samurai legacy became a potent model for
  the entire society at the very time that rigid status barriers were becom-
  ing merely a memory. The government consciously employed samurai
  ideals in the new legislation and organizations of the Meiji era.
  Above all, the samurai heritage (a mixture of military vassalage and
  Confucian hierarchical social relations embodied in a code known as
  bushidd) is reflected in the emphasis on loyalty and service to superi-
  ors. The cult of the emperor established a source of authority capable
  of keeping these values alive. As centralization continued and a reac-
  tion to unthinking Westernization set in, the educational system of the
  late 1880s incorporated a strong emphasis on ethics. Like the samurai
  before them, all Japanese were asked to submerge their individualism
  for the sake of larger causes. Modern nationalism and militarism
  found the samurai heritage fertile soil in which to grow. Meiji family
  law - its clear recognition of the authority of the household head, its
  favoritism for the eldest son, and its marked subordination of females
  to males - was also more fully rooted in the samurai tradition than in
  the practices of other social groups. The ability to keep alive and to
  diffuse samurai ideals was clearly one aspect of the anomalous combi-
  nations of traits observed in Japan since the earliest phases of its
  modernization: high degrees of social mobility combined with intense
  consciousness of social status; emphasis on achievement accompanied
  by a downgrading of individualism; and an entrepreneurial spirit com-
  bined with group orientation. In form, the samurai way prevailed, but
  in practice, the chdnin-led transformation continued its relentless
  course.
  URBAN TRANSFORMATION
  The level of urbanization in Japan remained fairly constant from the
  early eighteenth century until the 1880s, but there were many signs of
  69 Thomas C. Smith, "Japan's Aristocratic Revolution," Yale Review 50 (March 1961): 3.
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  534 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  significant changes. Three perspectives on the cities reveal substantial
  changes in the cities and in urban-rural relations: (i) the network
  perspective that centers on the distribution of settlements by size and
  function; (2) the ecological perspective that focuses on the internal city
  plan and how the various physical features and population groups are
  distributed; and (3) the organizational perspective that considers how
  particular urban environments, governments, or work arrangements
  affect the lives of the inhabitants. In the case of Japan, the first of
  these perspectives often leads to singling out at least three levels of
  cities: the three central cities at the top of the settlement hierarchy, the
  more than two hundred jokamachi or castle cities at an intermediate
  level, and various varieties of zaigomachi or local centers at the lowest
  level.
  The concentrated effort to freeze society in a newly created pattern
  is no less evident in Tokugawa urban policies than in stratification
  policies. A wave of new construction according to a highly structured
  plan - both for land use in the city itself and for the place of each city
  within its region - occurred in the early seventeenth century. The
  gradual breakdown of the original urban plans through the Tokugawa
  era parallels the transformation of social classes already discussed.
  Tokugawa Japanese leaders envisioned a society in which each settle-
  ment had a distinct function. Villages were to be exclusively agricul-
  tural centers, relinquishing military and administrative activities along
  with the samurai who performed them and transferring embryonic
  commercial and craft enterprises to other types of settlements. The
  main concentration of nonagricultural functions would be in the
  jokamachi, the centers of the domains into which four-fifths of the
  country were divided. Literally, "city below the castle," xhejdkamachi
  expressed the authority of the daimyo: his monopoly of military and
  administrative functions within the domain; his mobilization of the
  area's resources through taxation and marketing; and his planned relo-
  cation of temples, shrines, merchants, artisans, and samurai in succes-
  sively closer proximity to his castle headquarters.70 Unlike the Sen-
  goku pattern of multiple-branch castles grouped under a single lord,
  only a single castle city was permitted in each domain. To the extent
  possible, all urban functions were concentrated in this one administra-
  tive complex.
  On a nationwide scale, it was of course impossible to preserve the
  simplicity of this stark dichotomy between village and jokamachu The
  70 Nakabe Yoshiko, Jokamachi (Kyoto: Yanagihara sboten, 1978).
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  Tokugawa plan took this into account by recognizing several additional
  urban types, all originating in earlier periods of Japanese history. There
  were the central cities, especially in the Kinai region, on which local
  elites had long been dependent for specialized production and services.
  There were the shukubamachi, or post towns, required as transportation
  centers along the roadways that linked the jdkamachi to the central
  cities. Also indispensable in some areas were the shijomachi, or market
  towns, in the tenryd (lands directly under bakufu rule) and in the large
  domains where the jdkamachi could not absorb the marketing activities
  in all localities. Relatively cheap transport by sea also demanded a
  network of ports, not all of which could be sufficiently centrally located
  and meet historical expectations for local integration in order to serve
  simultaneously as jdkamachi. In addition, there remained monzenmachi,
  literally, towns in front of the gate (to a Buddhist temple or a Shinto
  shrine), and jinaimachi, or towns on the grounds of a religious establish-
  ment. Some of these centers managed to survive the transition from an
  era when powerful religious organizations had provided the necessary
  security and concentration of resources for urban development, usually
  by virtue of their capacity to perform other functions, as shijomachi or
  shukubamachi. Apart from the central cities, each of these other types
  could be expected to serve only a peripheral and residual role in supple-
  menting the primary urban functions centered in the jdkamachi. As far
  as possible, their functions were to be absorbed by the jdkamachi; in-
  deed, jdkamachi count prominently among the places listed as filling
  each of the other categories.
  Implicit in this precise division of labor among settlements was a
  corresponding division of labor among the regions. The regions of the
  central cities - the Kinai and Kanto regions - monopolized the nation-
  ally specialized activities. In fact, to a considerable extent, the three
  cities divided certain of these activities among themselves. On the one
  hand, Kyoto, the historical leader in crafts, and Osaka, the developing
  commercial leader, drew on the Kinai region's superior commercial-
  ized agriculture and numerous smaller urban places to dominate Ja-
  pan's interregional specialized production.71 On the other hand, Edo's
  role as an administrative and consumption city assumed far less com-
  mercialization in the Kanto region; rather, the city largely depended
  on a supply network stretching from scattered domains and, above all,
  from Osaka. The other regions, from Tohoku in the northeast to
  71 The literature on interregional marketing is rich in detailed local information. On Osaka's
  marketing significance, see Oishi Shinzaburo, Nihon kinsei shakai no shijokozo (Tokyo:
  Iwanami shoten, 1975), chap. 3.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  Kyushu in the southwest, were to be largely self-sufficient in meeting
  their own needs, despite some variations in their secondary products
  after rice. The trickle of specialty items and luxuries from the central
  cities to the jokamachi would only slightly offset the heavy flow of
  grain and other primary production to the center.
  By the early nineteenth century, it was clear that this carefully
  ordered urban and regional differentiation was in flux. The main
  source of dynamism came not from administrative, military, or reli-
  gious functions, but from commercial, craft, and transportation func-
  tions. Changes in the distribution of the urban population, beginning
  with the central cities, provide clear evidence of these developments.
  At each level, Japan's cities were changing remarkably.
  Central cities
  Two compelling central forces shaped Japan's national urban system
  during the seventeenth century and continued to operate throughout
  the Tokugawa period: the concentrated commercialization of the Kinai
  region, often referred to as the growth of a "national market," and the
  political centralization in Edo, in large part a consequence of the sankin
  kotai system of alternate residence. Operating in concert, the two forces
  made possible unprecedented urbanization and, at the same time, sti-
  fled the development of regional urban centers elsewhere.
  The Kinai region had enjoyed an extraordinary preeminence. Osaka,
  Kyoto, and other major cities such as Sakai, all under direct bakufu
  administration, gave this area an urban population in the early Toku-
  gawa decades that I estimate, based on the city statistics that I have
  gathered, as close to one-half of the urban total for Japan. In addition,
  the Kinai was divided into administrative units (small fragmented han
  and large amounts of tenryo under the bakufu) that did not raise any
  serious barriers to specialized production and regional integration.
  Bakufu policies acknowledged the fundamental fact of the commercial
  superiority of this region and capitalized on it by building up Osaka as
  the "kitchen" of Japan and by encouraging the development of rela-
  tively inexpensive sea transport centered on that city.
  A high level of urbanization in the Kinai region may have been
  indispensable to the transformation of Japan's system of cities, but the
  leadership in that transformation came primarily and increasingly
  from Edo.72 Its unparalleled population growth - from an inconspicu-
  72 Rozman, "Edo's Importance."
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  537
  ous branch castle before 1590 to the largest city in the world, with
  roughly 1.1 million inhabitants after 1720 - led Japan's nationwide
  urbanization. Moreover, the promotion of residence in Edo stimulated
  the continued mobilization of increasing quantities of materials and
  people into cities throughout Japan. Edo's significance stems, above
  all, from the demands of the sankin kotai system for the massive conver-
  sion of domain resources in order to meet the expenses of residence in
  the city. The daimyo maintained approximately one thousand residen-
  tial complexes in prescribed locations in the city. There were ten
  complexes of Tottori han alone, and Hikone han had four with over
  3,000 occupants.73 Some one-half to two-thirds of the roughly 250,000
  to 300,000 persons in these complexes consisted of those left perma-
  nently in Edo in connection with this system; the remainder were
  persons who accompanied the daimyo on their regular treks to and
  from the jokamachiJ* Far more than the numbers involved, the re-
  sources they commanded and felt pressure to expend attest to the
  significance of this regular migration. If one adds the irregular requisi-
  tions or assessments for projects such as castle construction or rebuild-
  ing after one of the many costly fires that swept across the city, then
  the demands placed on the daimyo directly or indirectly in support of
  Edo's development reach truly staggering proportions - perhaps one-
  third of all their expenses. Because of the importance of the Osaka
  market for converting domain rice into cash, rising expenses in Edo
  added also to Kinai prosperity. The huge Edo market relied on the
  Kinai cities for many of its supplies.
  Other samurai resided in Edo as direct vassals of the bakufu. All
  together these hatamoto, gokenin, and their household members and
  servants totaled over 200,000 and made substantial claims on the pro-
  duction of bakufu-controlled land {tenryo) for their stipends." Then-
  presence added to Edo's luster as a consumption center.
  Among the central cities, it was primarily Edo that gained from the
  narrowing of price differentials that had long favored the Kinai mar-
  ket, from the improving transportation network to outlying areas of
  the country, and on long-distance routes that made direct shipments
  feasible, and from the increased scale of exchange as a mass market
  expanded. The early magnate merchants in the Kinai region had prof-
  ited from their indispensability under undeveloped conditions; the la-
  ter, more differentiated commercial organizations were more broadly
  73 Nishikawa, Nihon toshishi kenkyu, p. 278.
  74 Fujioka Kenjiro, ed., Nihon rekishi chiri sosetsu: kinsei hen (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan,
  1977), PP- 248-9,260-1. 
  75 Ibid.
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  538 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  distributed, a reflection of Edo's increasing claims as a second national
  marketing center. At its peak, the population of the three central cities
  approached two million, of which over one-half lived in Edo. The
  proportion increasingly shifted to Edo's advantage, and by the mid-
  nineteenth century, Edo's chonin population alone outnumbered the
  declining totals of Osaka and Kyoto combined. Explanations for the
  discrepancy in development among these central cities are diverse: the
  challenge to the large Kinai cities from newly prosperous commercial
  centers and zaigomachi in southwest Japan; the continuation of the
  trend for commerce to bypass Osaka and proceed directly to Edo; the
  expanded production in the Kanto region to meet Edo's needs locally,
  often at the expense of earlier Kinai sources; and the greater stability
  of Edo's market due to the continued required residence of samurai,
  including those present by virtue of the sarikin kotai system. Over the
  last century of Tokugawa rule, Edo's impact across Japan became
  more direct and pronounced.
  Above all, the impact of Japan's central cities rests on the large
  volume of resources accumulated therein, the large number of indi-
  viduals (including the elite from all across Japan) who migrated there,
  and the great extent to which new patterns of consumption and styles
  of living filtered out to other cities and eventually to the countryside.
  The concentration of individuals with both the means and the motiva-
  tion to mobilize resources from across Japan created an irrepressible
  force for change and a powerful demonstration effect that can be
  observed especially in the jokamachi with which the central cities were
  directly connected. Few other premodern societies could boast as
  much as 6 percent of the total population in great cities; only much
  larger China exceeded Japan's record of three cities in excess of
  300,000 population, and it is likely that Japan alone until the early
  nineteenth century supported a city as populous as 1.1 million. It
  required a few decades of reorganization: Edo's population fell with
  the Ansei earthquake; there was an exodus following the end of the
  sankin kotai system in 1862; and after the abolition of samurai status,
  most cities recovered their earlier population levels and then began to
  expand rapidly at the end of the century. Until then, with little expan-
  sion in the percentage of its population in large cities, Japan already
  possessed an adequate urban base for launching modern economic
  growth. The percentage of Japan's population in cities of 100,000 or
  more was no higher (6 percent) in 1897 than it had been in the eigh-
  teenth century, and the number of cities at this level had only risen
  from five to six.
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
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  At the end of the nineteenth century, six cities dominated: Tokyo,
  Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Kobe, and Yokohama. Tokyo's continued
  predominance (1.3 million residents in 1897) reflected its position as
  the center of a centralized, national government as well as its impor-
  tance in modern finance and education. Osaka grew rapidly at the end
  of the century (750,000 in 1897), having reestablished itself as the
  center of large-scale manufacturing. Kobe and Yokohama, neither of
  which had been significant before the 1850s, were the leaders in urban
  growth (each nearing 200,000) because of their role in foreign trade.
  Nagoya, which along with Kanazawa had long ranked as one of the
  two largest castle cities, proved the most successful of any city of its
  type in converting to new functions (whereas Kanazawa declined be-
  low the 100,000 level, Nagoya doubled to 250,000 residents). Of the
  six largest cities, Kyoto grew the most slowly, but it still managed to
  accommodate itself fairly quickly (330,000 people in 1897) to the new
  industrial and commercial demands of the modern era. One city that
  was slow to pull out of the early Meiji decline was Nagasaki, which
  had lost its foreign trade monopoly to other ports; only the expansion
  of continental trade at the end of the century gave it new importance.
  The long period of intense, domestic competition before the 1858
  treaty that opened Japan to foreign trade helped prepare the popula-
  tion in the largest cities for organizational change under conditions of
  uncertainty. With the elimination in the late 1860s of trade monopo-
  lies and restrictions binding groups to particular occupations, the com-
  petition intensified. It centered in part on influencing government
  decisions about the location of offices and the establishment of modern
  enterprises. Much depended on the vigor of local leadership and its
  quest for prosperity under a centralized administration that granted
  the business community a heightened measure of autonomy. A major
  step toward urban self-government was the 1888 administrative re-
  form, which recognized as cities (shi) settlements of 25,000 or more
  people. New organizations (e.g., police, banking, and manufacturing)
  proliferated in cities throughout the country, demonstrating how
  quickly modern structures were adopted by urban residents.
  Jokamachi
  Close to two hundred cities with a total population of approximately 2
  million comprise a second level in the planned hierarchy of Tokugawa
  cities. The individual populations of these castle cities varied from
  under 1,000 to over 100,000. As a rule of thumb, John Hall has
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  54O 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  suggested that the jokamachi population equaled one-tenth the num-
  ber of koku (estimated rice yield) of the hanJ6 (The number of koku
  often approximates the number of people.) Japan's largest han, with
  hundreds of thousands of koku, boasted cities with tens of thousands
  of residents, whereas the numerous small han with 10,000 to 30,000
  koku produced small jokamachi generally below 3,000 in population.
  Fujimoto Toshiharu analyzed in some detail this relationship between
  city population and kokudaka, determining that in the northeast and
  along the Japan Sea, the jokamachi were generally larger than ex-
  pected, whereas in the southwest and along the Pacific and Inland Sea
  coasts the opposite pattern prevailed.77 He explained that the latter
  regions had a denser concentration of population in other cities apart
  from the jokamachi, that these regions tended to have larger han with
  greater commercialization. The han located in the Kinai and Kanto
  regions also generally produced relatively small cities because their
  domain land was not compact and was interspersed with tenryo directly
  under the bakufu and with the small holdings of distant daimyo
  granted to help them meet expenses in Edo and Osaka.
  In comparison with other premodern settings, the castle cities sup-
  ported surprisingly large proportions of their domain populations for
  many reasons: (1) the forced concentration of samurai and some chonin;
  (2) the widespread prohibition on commerce in other areas within and
  often throughout the domain; (3) the lure of incentives in the form of tax
  exemptions, monopolies, and the like, for chonin; and (4) the construc-
  tion of a transportation system centered on the castle city and discrimi-
  nating against other possible urban points within the domain.78 Within
  the domain, the castle city not only concentrated existing nonagricul-
  tural activities, but it also promoted their further development and
  generated new ones. Rising demand in the central cities and growing
  pressures on the daimyo to increase revenues available for use in Edo
  spurred castle city growth over roughly one century and also continued
  the transformation of functions. The jokamachi played an indispensable
  intermediate role in the national market, and in turn, much of its vital-
  ity depended on these intermediate links between the rest of the han and
  the central cities. Over this period of expansion, the jokamachi shifted
  its central focus from the military, to the administrative, and then to the
  economic. The cities became functionally more complex, and the
  daimyo's control over them declined.
  76 John W. Hall, "The Castle Town and Japan's Modern Urbanization," in Hall and Jansen,
  eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modem Japan, pp. 182-3.
  77 Fujimoto Toshiharu, Kinsei toshi no chiiki kozo: sono rekishichirigakuteki kenkyu (Tokyo: Kokin
  shoin, 1976), pp. 39-42. 
  78 Fujioka, ed., Nihon rekishi chiri sosetsu: kinsei hen, p. 185.
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  541
  The continued erosion of the domains' economic autarchy made the
  castle cities vulnerable to adjustments in the ties between local and
  national markets. The reorganization of national merchant groups in
  favor of more regularized, economically efficient ties was one such
  adjustment. A second was the entrance of the mass of rural producers
  directly into the marketing process. At both ends of the flow process,
  conditions became more competitive. The rapid-growth phase of the
  castle cities turned into a period of stagnant population and eventu-
  ally, for many cities, decline. Thomas Smith and Nakabe Yoshiko
  separately assembled data that show the castle cities declining an aver-
  age of 15 to 20 percent in chonin population over more than a cen-
  tury.™ Exceptions were largely in backward regions or inland. In
  contrast, the declining cities were disproportionately situated in the
  Kinki and Inland Sea areas of the southwest; many were ports, and
  mostly they defied provincial trends of population increase.
  The gradual loss of population in the jokamachi (some of the loss
  may be due to unrecorded suburbanization) in the late Tokugawa era
  can be largely attributed to their declining importance in four re-
  spects: transportation, commerce, industry, and consumption. In
  transportation, these cities along with many shukubamachi were in-
  creasingly bypassed by traffic seeking the cheapest possible routes.
  Official regulations on the old routes drove up prices and made them
  noncompetitive. At the same time, the castle city ports were not neces-
  sarily the most convenient for long-distance trade and for new han
  monopolies of specialized products. The more competitive flow of
  goods broke down the jokamachi transport monopolies. In commerce,
  the castle cities gradually lost some of their marketing functions within
  the domain. Merchant monopolies in the castle city kept prices high,
  and restrictions on periodic markets within the han could not be main-
  tained in the face of expanding rural economies. Nakajima Giichi
  determined that the small castle cities (especially those in han under
  20,000 koku) often lacked a critical mass to support periodic markets
  of their own or could not attract enough commerce to compete with
  the prosperous zaigomachi just outside the han borders.80 Regions
  varied in the prevalence of markets. Tohoku and much of the Chubu
  region had many markets that met each fifth day (or perhaps only each
  tenth day), whereas the Kinai region and certain parts of the south-
  79 Thomas C. Smith, "Pre-Modern Economic Growth: Japan and the West," Past and Present
  43 (1973): 127-60; and Nakabe, Jokamachi, pp. 306-9.
  go Nakajima Giichi, Shijo shuraku (Tokyo: Kokin shoin, 1964); and Nakajima Giichi, "Ichiman
  goku daimyo no joka," Shin Chiri 10 (September 1962): 1-15.
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  542 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  west had primarily daily commerce in more substantial urban cen-
  ters.81 Whether the competition came from periodic or daily markets,
  the jokamachi with their outmoded legacy of commercial exemptions
  and monopolies often fared badly.
  In industry, the outlying settlements also proved more inventive
  and more strategically located close to raw materials, water power,
  cheap labor, and local markets. Led by the Kinai and Kanto regions,
  industrial activities spread widely through the countryside.
  Finally, with respect to consumption, the deteriorating financial
  position of the hart and the resultant reductions in the samurai's sti-
  pends lowered expenditures in the jokamachi. To the extent that the
  sankin kotai system and life in Edo became more expensive, the fixed
  revenues of the daimyo forced cutbacks at home. In this and in other
  respects, the center of the daimyo's life shifted to Edo.
  On the whole, the jokamachi relied too much on han power to be
  competitive and proved inconveniently large for meeting new, local,
  developmental opportunities.82 Faced with pressing financial prob-
  lems, the daimyo let their chief cities slide into decline. Indeed, both
  the policies aimed at preserving embattled sources of revenue and
  those generating new revenue outside the castle city contributed to the
  local urban transformation.
  The interior transformation of the castle cities proceeded in step
  with the changes in their external role. The early-seventeenth-century
  castle city reflected the preeminence of military and administrative
  functions and the clear separation and regulation of diverse activities.
  By the mid-nineteenth century, as Yamori Kazuhiko has carefully
  analyzed, urban land use had changed in a number of ways.83 In the
  area of military functions alone, several changes can be noted. The
  castle continued to lose military significance, although it remained the
  center of samurai administration. The temples, shrines, and post sta-
  tions on the city outskirts were increasingly identified with recreation
  rather than with defense or control over movement. Some of the wind-
  ing roads inside the city designed to help thwart an invasionary force
  were straightened and widened in order to thwart a more imminent
  danger, that is, fire. And the lower samurai - many called ashigaru -
  located close to the periphery turned to home-industry side employ-
  ments that lessened their military interest and effectiveness. The mili-
  tary factor remained more pervasive in cities of the tozama daimyo, for
  81 Fujioka, ed., Nihon rekishi chiri sosetsu: kinsei hen, pp. 232,276-8,295.
  82 Nakabe, Jokamachi, pp. 310-23.
  83 Yamori Kazuhiko, Toshipwrannokenkyu(Tokyo: Omeido, 1970).
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  543
  example, in the Chubu region, but they too experienced a general
  demilitarization.*4 Taking into account a wide range of urban activi-
  ties, Nishikawa Koji concludes that from the Genroku to the late
  Tokugawa periods, the jdkamachi changed substantially, for instance,
  through the dispersal of professions and the reorientation toward
  chdnin consumption.8*
  The proportion of urban population who were samurai first de-
  creased and then later (when the chdnin population declined) in-
  creased, and the land area occupied by this group remained very large.
  Nakabe Yoshiko calculates the average number of samurai in a castle
  city as 70 to 80 percent of the number of chdnin; yet she noted that in
  backward regions, the samurai might be more numerous even to the
  extent of outnumbering chdnin by three to one.86 Fujioka Kenjiro
  clarifies the size of the samurai group (kashindan), pointing out that its
  totals were greatest relative to the size of the han in the far northeast
  and southwest in which military localism was powerful.8? Yamori
  Kazuhiko presents data on the percentage of urban land given over to
  samurai estates, showing in some cities as much as three-quarters of
  the city and, in large han in general, over 50 percent.88 The population
  density in the chdnin wards was far higher than in the samurai dis-
  tricts; the turnover rate was higher; and the neighborhoods were more
  fluid. Yet the differences were smaller away from the castle where the
  lower samurai lived. Urban sprawl along the roads leading out of the
  city tended to disperse the chdnin population. The growth of cities at
  their outskirts can be attributed to their growing orientation to rural
  needs. In backward regions, urban periodic markets met more fre-
  quently in order to serve rural needs. Elsewhere, daily commerce and
  crafts inside the city also showed a greater dependence on the rural
  market, and specialty products from other sections in the han contrib-
  uted to a reorientation toward the outskirts. Nishikawa Koji finds
  evidence of this shift in the decline of certain professions and the rise
  of others within Hikone City.89 The overall trend in the chdnin areas
  was from concentration to dispersal, from serving the centrally located
  samurai to meeting the internal urban demand of the more dispersed
  chdnin, to competing for the growing market of the scattered rural
  population. The initial commercial center near the castle, known as
  84 Fujioka, ed., Nihon rekishi chiri sosetsu: kinsei hen, p. 250.
  85 Nishikawa, Nihon toshishikenkyu, p. 326. 
  86 Nakabe, Jokamachi, pp. 304-5.
  87 Fujioka, ed., Nihon rekishi chiri sosetsu: kinsei hen, p. 199.
  88 Yamori, Toshipttran no kenkyu, pp. 292-306.
  89 Nishikawa, Nihon toshishi kenkyu, pp. 257-9.
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  544 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  honmachi, declined as multiple and secondary commercial centers
  formed.
  After 1868, military, administrative, and educational activities con-
  tributed to urban growth in new ways. Former castle cities continued
  to hold the bulk of Japan's urban population outside the national
  centers. Fujimoto Toshiharu examined the fate of these cities before
  1920.9° He found that cities in rather large han of 100,000 to 300,000
  koku remained relatively stagnant even when they were chosen as the
  administrative centers of the new ken (prefectures). Concentrated in
  the Tohoku, Hokuriku, and Sanyin regions, that is, along the Japan
  Sea, they were centers of agricultural surplus in areas of rice
  monoculture. With the removal of closed domain units of administra-
  tion, they lost central place functions. In these backward areas for
  modern industry, the city's handicraft base could not endure after han
  protectionist policies were ended with the Meiji Restoration. For these
  cities the administrative factor was crucial to survival.
  In contrast, former castle cities that began to grow rapidly in the late
  nineteenth century were in areas of greater commerce, more local
  cities, higher population density, and diversified agriculture. Other
  cities that had not been jokamachi and grew rapidly became new mili-
  tary and textile centers, many in the nearby hinterlands of central
  cities such as Tokyo. The fate of castle cities after 1868 can be pre-
  dicted not on the basis of their growth rates in the second half of the
  Tokugawa period but on the basis of their success in becoming di-
  verse, multifunctional cities competitive under commercial conditions
  and capable of forging new links with smaller, and with central, cities.
  This explains the paradox that the declining jokamachi of the late
  Tokugawa period emerged in the best position for growth in the Meiji
  period.
  Meiji leaders forged a centralized, nationwide urban system largely
  on the basis of more than two hundred castle cities that had func-
  tioned as independent centers of local domains. They accomplished
  this through administrative reforms after the old domain system was
  abolished in 1871. Controls on appointments, finances, and legisla-
  tion secured the central government's power. The swift transforma-
  tion from jokamachi to prefectural or district (gun) center had its
  roots in the evolution of a well-integrated and center-oriented ur-
  ban system during the Tokugawa period. Despite the continuation
  in many respects of autonomous domain markets and administra-
  90 Fujimoto, Kinsei toshi no chiiki kozo, pp. 345-81.
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  545
  tion, the underlying integrative forces had advanced far before Meiji
  centralization.
  The last third of the nineteenth century was a period of adjustment
  for cities formerly protected by domain insularity and national isola-
  tion. For growth reorientation was essential, especially to specialized
  industries that could meet demands in large cities and abroad. It
  helped to be located along newly built railroad lines and to have the
  capital and human resources of an energetic chonin community. Some
  places with excellent port facilities developed as naval centers. The
  opening up of Hokkaido also contributed to urban growth. Other
  cities, however, failed to readjust. Once-lavish samurai residential dis-
  tricts were left desolate, and farmers cultivated lots where shops had
  once stood.
  Zaigomachi
  The initial suppression of the zaigomachi was seen as a means of boost-
  ing the castle cities, that is, to simplify the settlement hierarchy much
  as the status hierarchy had been reduced to a small number of clearly
  denned classes. Many periodic markets and small craft centers (if they
  did not receive authorization as shukubamachi or in some other nar-
  rowly denned official capacity) were relegated to rural legal status, if,
  indeed, their nonagricultural functions survived at all. If they did
  survive, local rules allowed these centers to meet the peasants' supply
  needs with trade in agricultural tools, items of daily consumption,
  sake, and other goods that primarily supplemented the functions of
  the jokamachi. The expansion of commerce through the seventeenth
  and into the eighteenth century made more of these settlements indis-
  pensable for jokamachi prosperity. Conditions and timing varied from
  area to area, but the general pattern was for the central marketing
  activities of the castle city within the large han to gain by funneling
  resources through these local places.
  Over the last century of the Tokugawa era, many of these small
  centers posed a threat to jokamachi interests as they did to central city
  monopolies also. For instance, in 1787 the shonin in Matsuyama peti-
  tioned to stop local trade and to move local merchants to the castle
  city, and in 1823 a coordinated effort by 1,007 villages caused the
  bakufu to reconsider its protection of the cotton monopoly granted to
  Osaka merchants.'1 Neither the Kansei reforms nor the Tempo re-
  91 Matsumoto Shiro, "Kinsei koki no toshi to rainshu," in Ivxmami fwza Nikon rekishi, vol. 12
  (kinsei 4) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 99-100; and Hauser, Economic Institutional
  Change, p. 181.
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  546 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  forms a half-century later succeeded in protecting the jokamachi inter-
  ests. Small and scattered local centers were also important to new han
  commercial objectives and could not be simply abolished without dire
  financial consequences. Increasingly through direct ties to the national
  market and outside merchants, favorable locations for accumulating
  han specialty products (tokusanbutsu) and access to rural capital and
  labor, these centers met the competition of the castle cities. Especially
  in the commercialized Inland Sea area, they even managed to win a
  measure of independence. Through the reorganization of trade routes,
  small centers found markets outside their own han and at odds with
  han monopolies and restrictions.
  One of the major developments over the final century of Toku-
  gawa rule was the adjustment in rural-urban relations led by the
  growing zaigomachi. Drawing on the rural poor for labor and on their
  sales for capital, the zaigomachi created a bridge between urban and
  rural. The indicators of change are many: the population growth in
  these nonadministrative centers; the change in the destinations of
  migrants from urban jobs to zaigomachi labor that often allowed a
  return to the land at times of peak demand;'2 the increasing scale of
  production in these scattered towns; and the intense competition
  among the zaigomachi that caused some periodic markets unable to
  develop new specializations to lose their rural exchange functions as
  well. The long-run importance of local growth centers of a semiurban
  character is recognized by specialists on economic development and
  undoubtedly should be counted along with Japan's high premodern
  level of urbanization as an asset important to the modern transforma-
  tion undertaken in the Meiji period.
  The population of both the semiurban zaigomachi and other cities
  that were not jokamachi was rising, with the addition of both full-time
  and part-time merchants, artisans, and hired laborers. If one adds (i)
  the population of Nagasaki, Sakai, and other major cities (neither
  jokamachi nor among the three central cities); (2) the residents of the
  increasing number of intermediate ports in such areas as the Inland
  Sea; and (3) an estimate of the nonagricultural inhabitants of substan-
  tial local commercial and craft centers, then a total in excess of one
  million persons is indicated. This represents a major and growing
  component of the national urban total, which was in excess of five
  million.»
  The elimination of castle city restrictions had both positive and
  negative consequences for competing centers. Both castle city and
  92 Hayami and Uchida, "Kinsei nomin no kodo tsuiteki chosa," p. 84.
  93 Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan, p. 102.
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  URBAN TRANSFORMATION 
  547
  zaigomachi residents were freed from regulations affecting residence
  and business activities. The outcome varied greatly from area to area.
  Some towns maintained their late Tokugawa dynamism and overtook
  nearby castle cities as local centers, whereas others lost their competi-
  tive edge as the castle cities managed to rebound from the earlier
  population decline and an exodus of samurai in early Meiji.
  Between 1872 and 1900, Japan's gainfully employed population rose
  from 21.4 million to 24.4 million as the number in agriculture fell
  slowly from 17.3 million to 16.4 million.** Thus the percentage out-
  side agriculture grew from one-fifth to one-third. Most of the increase
  occurred after 1885 as the urban population growth accelerated. Un-
  der the impetus of initial, modern economic growth, the social compo-
  sition of Japan's cities changed considerably. Unlike the previous ma-
  jor transformation two decades earlier as samurai resettled, the cities
  became crowded when commerce and industry flourished.
  The dynamism of Japan's city system bears a number of resem-
  blances to that of its social-class hierarchy. On the surface, much
  remained the same over the second half of the Tokugawa period. The
  jokamachi were no more directly assailed than were the samurai who
  occupied their central areas. Despite some decline, both emerged in a
  strong position to take advantage of the new opportunities - admini-
  strative, military, educational, and industrial - after 1868. Change be-
  fore the 1860s came gradually through reorganization; merchants in
  the national centers pushed through commercial developments that
  left the jokamachi and the samurai more vulnerable; and merchants
  and landlords in the zaigomachi seized new opportunities that whittled
  away at the prerogatives and security of castle city life.
  In both the city system and the class system, one finds an initially
  highly rigid, planned arrangement persisting in important respects,
  whereas in other less obvious, but perhaps no less important, respects,
  it yielded to a highly competitive, fluid arrangement. Increasingly the
  forces of competition spread until even the countryside was engulfed.
  In the case of the urban system, there are comparative data that
  document Japan's extraordinary achievement. As of 1800, and for the
  previous century or so, Japan's approximately 17 percent urbanization
  (in cities of three thousand or more plus one-half the total in smaller
  but still substantial commercial and/or administrative centers) ap-
  proaches the highest levels in Europe and exceeds by a factor of two or
  three the levels reached after long histories of city building in Russia
  94 Robert E. Cole and Tominaga Ken'ichi, "Japan's Changing Occupational Structure and Its
  Significance," in Patrick, ed., Japanese Industrialization and Its Social Consequences, p. 58.
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  548 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  and China.'* The foundation of the late Tokugawa urban transforma-
  tion was a high level of urbanization. In 1800 Edo retained its century-
  long position as probably the largest city in the world, and the closely
  bunched Kinai cities combined to produce a comparable urban mar-
  ket. A second foundation for urban change was the force generated by
  these two great urban complexes - at the end primarily by Edo.
  Thomas Smith described the second half of the Tokugawa period as
  rural-centered development.s6 Although the urban base remained sub-
  stantially intact, the most visible changes spread through the country-
  side. A third foundation for change can be seen in Japan's powerful
  mechanisms for transmitting urban social currents into the country-
  side. All of these foundations continued to operate in the new circum-
  stances after 1868.
  Just as the dropping of social-class restrictions in early Meiji opened
  wide the gates of competition, the removal of settlement restrictions
  resulted first in a flurry of movement and, over several decades, an
  intense competition for urban growth and prosperity. The competi-
  tion for markets, transport improvements, administrative functions,
  and many other plums occurred in a period of slow economic growth
  and urbanization. Separate households and community organizations
  faced severe readjustments in the face of the relocations of samurai,
  the elimination of domains, and the entry of international competi-
  tion. Under these circumstances, it is noteworthy how little disruption
  there was in social control and economic activity. Massive urban reor-
  ganization proved a prelude to rapid urbanization, which was already
  under way in the mid-Meiji period.
  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS
  In many largely agricultural premodern settings in which survival,
  even in ordinary times, required hard work, there was frequently little
  scope for flexible decision making. Marriage was arranged at an early
  age; the stream of births counteracted the stream of deaths, especially
  among infants; residence and occupation did not change from genera-
  tion to generation or within a lifetime; and little thought was given to
  education or leisure. Although urban environments displayed some
  peculiarities in these matters, their impact on the countryside re-
  mained slight. On the contrary, those rural dwellers who managed to
  make their way into the cities brought with them the conventions of
  95 Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia, p. 245.
  96 Smith, "Pre-Modern Economic Growth," pp. 127-60.
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
  549
  country living, creating a sizable urban mass with scarcely more scope
  for flexibility than its rural counterpart had. One study after another
  over the past two decades has demonstrated that Tokugawa Japan
  moved away from this sort of fixed social order. Increasingly in the
  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the household unit faced alterna-
  tives and made choices unanticipated in the early Tokugawa decades.
  The cumulative effect of these changes is registered in a number of
  social indicators established for selected villages and, in some cases,
  estimated for the country as a whole.
  The reasons for these many changes are not necessarily obvious or
  easily demonstrated. Historians have long assumed that conditions
  such as a regionally stationary or declining population resulted from
  economic hardship and famine and that the peasants were pushed off
  the land into hired labor or migration. But recent empirical studies
  should lay to rest such assumptions. Other interpretations center on
  Japan's distinctive family system, on its community structure, and on
  the forces of commercialization and urbanization just discussed. At
  this early stage of research using quantitative data, it is still difficult to
  establish causal relationships with confidence. Nevertheless, in pre-
  senting the findings from various studies, the section that follows
  mentions some suggested explanations and relates them to the preced-
  ing sections on social stratification and urban transformation. Before
  proceeding, however, it is important to examine the basic structure of
  Japan's family system in order to establish the context in which house-
  hold decisions were made.
  The it
  The term for household, ie, refers to a corporate body expected to
  endure from one generation to the next. Its continuity rested on exter-
  nal and internal conditions. Viewed from the community, the ie was
  regarded as a legal unit under a head who had full authority over the
  family members and as a producing unit required to meet tax and
  other customary obligations. Official policies and local customs fa-
  vored the continuity and viability of this unit in order to protect social
  order and community solidarity and to ensure sufficient land or in-
  come to satisfy all financial obligations. The household itself owed a
  responsibility not only to the community but also to its ancestors, who
  were regularly venerated through tablets and rituals. Its members
  were expected to work hard and to act together in order to ensure
  continuity and to strive for improved status. Its streamlined organiza-
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  tion enhanced the chances for maintenance or improvement in status.
  Only one child, normally the eldest son of the head, inherited all
  property and authority. Adoption was readily accepted as a means to
  provide continuity or to bring a meritorious successor into an impor-
  tant post. Continuation of the blood line clearly was a lower priority
  than was perpetuation of the ie. Responsibilities to lineages and to
  other relatives outside the immediate household were slight. Robert
  Smith has noted that his study of members of small famines
  identified an extremely limited range of kin by specific terms and "cousin
  usages" [that] appear to have been [as] ambiguous in eighteenth-century
  Japan as they are in contemporary Britain and the United States. The Japa-
  nese were early possessed of what some writers have claimed is a kin terminol-
  ogy closely associated with modern urbanized industrial societies with highly
  developed commerce, attenuation of kin ties, high rates of mobility, and
  increasingly universalistic relationships.^
  A number of important features of family systems pertain to the
  formation of new households and the continuity of old ones. Among
  these are inheritance, adoption, and the dependence of the household
  on kinship or community organizations. That all of these features
  operated to stabilize the precise composition and number of house-
  holds appears highly likely from the data available on individual vil-
  lage and social groups. It comes as no surprise, of course, that samurai
  households both persisted and remained quite constant in number
  after the early seventeenth-century formative period.98 The size of the
  retainer band (kashindari) was basically fixed; younger sons had virtu-
  ally no chance of being appointed bannermen. In a lord-vassal rela-
  tionship preserved largely through primogeniture and by adoption if
  there was no male issue, stability in numbers is to be expected. What
  is more surprising is the pattern observed in village studies. In Susan
  Hanky's lists of the number of households in four villages, we find
  such narrow fluctuations, as between 109 and 112, over sixteen re-
  corded years for Fujito between 1794 and 1826, between 69 and 73
  over fourteen consecutive years for Nishikata, and between 68 and 70
  over nineteen recorded dates from 1822 to the end of the Tokugawa
  period in Numa." Hayami Akira's larger list of villages shows more
  97 Robert J. Smith, "Small Families, Small Households, and Residential Instability: Town and
  City in 'Pre-Modern' Japan," in Peter Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time
  (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 442.
  98 Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income andEntrepreneunhip, p. 10.
  99 Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, "Population Trends and Economic Growth in Pre-
  Industrial Japan," in D. V. Glass and Roger Revelle, eds., Population and Social Change
  (London: Arnold, 1972).
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
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  variability in numbers of households, especially before the mid-
  eighteenth century when the population growth remained consider-
  able.100 But Hanley's general point appears valid in comparative
  terms: Japanese communities registered a relatively stable number of
  households. Regulations against subdividing land among sons accom-
  panied by restrictions on the number of marriages to one in each
  generation preserved a fairly stable number of households. As some
  fell into extinction (zekke), some branch families (bunke) were permit-
  ted. Paradoxically, the denial of social change in this dimension en-
  couraged it in others.101
  The average household size declined markedly during the Toku-
  gawa period. Hay ami Akira and Uchida Nobuko explain the timing of
  that change:
  The most common explanation given today is that small families or house-
  holds consisting of one married couple and several children became common
  throughout the nation between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and
  took the place of the larger households of earlier periods, many or most of
  which had more than one married couple apiece. A persistent and uninter-
  rupted decline in average household size continued throughout the Tokugawa
  era, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the usual family size
  reached that common today, four or five members.102
  Their data for 22,274 households show a persistent decline from an
  overall MHS (mean household size): 7.04 for 1671 to 1700, 6.34 for
  1701 to 1750, 4.90 for 1751 to 1800, 4.42 for 1801 to 1850, and 4.25
  for 1851 to 1870. Over these two centuries, communities in Suwa
  county became increasingly similar in their average household size.
  Furthermore, for three of the four districts studied (the fourth being a
  remote mountainous area), the values of MHS had already leveled off
  in the late eighteenth century.
  Hanley cites additional evidence for the stability of average house-
  hold size after the late eighteenth century. She proposes that the size
  of each household tended to remain constant, despite any changes in
  the village economy, because of constant social pressure to maintain
  one's relative status. However, villages also took current economic
  conditions into account in timing events that would increase family
  100 Hayami Akira, Kinsei noson no rekishi jinkogakuteki kenkyu (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha,
  1973). PP- 68-72.
  101 Agreement on the need to control the number of households contributed to such changes as
  new controls on the size and composition of the household. The fullest statement of this
  argument is found in the writings of Susan B. Hanley, including Economic and Demographic
  Change, pp. 226-66.
  102 Hayami Akira and Uchida Nobuko, "Size of Household in a Japanese County Throughout
  the Tokugawa Era," in Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time, p. 473.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  size, in particular, marriage.I03 Hanley explains that a family con-
  sciously regulated tended to return to its usual number of members
  whenever the number rose or fell from that level.
  The question of how family size was regulated can be considered in
  the context of major life decisions. Before that, it is important to
  consider why household size declined and then why it remained
  remarkably constant. What social conditions contributed to this far-
  reaching transformation of Japanese households? Hayami Akira ad-
  dressed the question of decline in MHS, noting in his explanation:
  (i) the decline of dependent laborers living with their proprietors in
  large households, a process that occurred primarily during the seven-
  teenth-century transition in village relations; (2) the suitability of the
  resultant relatively small households for efficient agriculture produc-
  tion; and (3) proximity to the castle town: The closer the community
  was to the castle town and to convenient transportation on the plain,
  the earlier its household size would be stabilized at the new level,
  indicating the impact of the urban market on rural behavior.10'' Han-
  ley takes up the question of household stability, attributing it to (1)
  the overriding concern with the perpetuation and status of the ie,
  which, given its practice of single-son inheritance and easy accep-
  tance of adoption, would not be served by draining the family's
  resources on additional children who were not essential to the fam-
  ily's success; (2) the intense pressure to conform to community expec-
  tations, which were premised on the attitude that families should
  control their numbers in order to maintain their status and standard
  of living; (3) the general tendency for the family's economic base -
  and its need for farm labor - to remain constant or to change gradu-
  ally in rough parallel with that of others in the village, requiring that
  it maintain the same number of members in order to preserve its
  status in the village. I05 At the root of these explanations are impres-
  sions of an extraordinary family system that is both demanding in its
  concern for status and flexible in its acceptance of adoption and
  family limitation as means to these ends. Also required is an unusual
  degree of community solidarity capable of formulating villagewide
  objectives and eliciting conformity from households in reaching
  them. Finally, one can discern economic conditions such as a fluid
  labor market and predictable market opportunities that gave house-
  103 Susan B. Hanley, "Changing Life-Styles and Demographic Patterns in Tokugawa Japan,"
  in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4: Early Modem Japan, ed. John W. Hall (Cam-
  bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
  104 Hayami, Kinsei noson no rekishi, pp. 100-2. 
  105 Hanley, "Changing Life-Styles."
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
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  holds the confidence and the incentives to plan their size for the
  future generation.
  The stability of the community and the ie should not be confused
  with a static hierarchy of property and wealth. On the contrary, plots
  often changed hands. Thomas Smith has found that 50 percent of the
  holdings in the village that he studied increased or decreased by more
  than 20 percent from one tax register to the next, an average interval of
  twelve years. He further noted "the extraordinary difficulty that large
  holders had in keeping their place in the village [and that] small hold-
  ers had even more difficulty."106 Competing peasant families experi-
  enced frequent changes in household circumstances.
  Marriage
  One of the main reasons for the decline in household size is the change
  in marriage patterns that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth
  centuries. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period there is reason to
  believe that a sizable number of agricultural laborers dependent on and
  perhaps residing with patrimonial landlords did not marry. However, it
  was not long before the widespread establishment of independent house-
  holds increased the marriage rate. But the rate did not stay high for
  long, for there was another pattern that gained ascendancy. Various
  village studies have demonstrated a gradual and long-term decrease in
  the percentage of married women that accompanied the decline in
  household size. Analyzing one set of village data, Hayami Akira and
  Uchida Nobuko found that the variable most highly correlated with
  household size was the number of married couples per household.10?
  The small-household pattern, usually characterized by only one mar-
  ried couple, spread from one area to the next until by the early nine-
  teenth century it had blanketed the areas studied.
  Susan Hanley and Thomas Smith separately found evidence in
  other village data that marriage was largely restricted to the head of the
  household or his successor, limiting the number of childbearing cou-
  ples to one per household.108 Those who did not become family heads
  often did not marry, and heirs often married when they were in their
  late twenties in order to maximize the period of the family's peak
  106 Thomas C. Smith, Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-
  1830 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977), pp. 117-21.
  107 Hayami and Uchida, "Size of Household," pp. 493-7.
  108 Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, pp. 246-32; and Smith,
  Nakahara, p. 133.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  farming efficiency. The heir would still be young enough so that it was
  likely he could raise his children; yet postponed marriage prolonged
  the phase of high family-working capacity and delayed the release of
  noninheriting sons and daughters.
  Computations of the ages at first marriage for females also reveal a
  tendency to late marriages, although not nearly so late as in parts of
  western Europe in the same historical epoch. Controlling family size
  and composition by controlling the age of marriage signifies a power-
  ful means for promoting the welfare of the ie. Of course, short-term
  economic conditions were a factor in the calculations too; improved
  conditions led to a contraction in marriage ages, and in times of fam-
  ine, marriage was delayed. Income differences also had an impact on
  women. Women from poorer families, many of whom worked away
  from home for a considerable amount of time, married later. Control-
  ling for migration, income differences do not appear to have affected
  the age of marriage.109
  The consequences of marriage patterns for the birthrates were di-
  rect and considerable. Birthrates dropped along with nuptiality in the
  eighteenth century as increasing numbers of individuals failed to
  marry and as women married late and shortened their span of child-
  bearing. The new marriage patterns helped in these ways to reduce the
  ratio of dependents to producers and thus to improve the standard of
  living.
  Childbirth
  Along with controls on who married and at what age, birth control
  and/or infanticide within marriage made it possible to maintain a rela-
  tively constant household size. Analysis of household registration
  data, albeit for a small number of villages, strongly indicates that
  Japanese households deliberately limited the number of children they
  had and controlled the timing and sexual distribution of those that
  survived. Why did they do so? Famines caused some population limita-
  tion, but they were by no means responsible for the persistently slow
  or even negative rates of population growth. Even in times of relative
  prosperity and among households with sizable landholdings, the view-
  point appears to have prevailed that additional children represented a
  burden to be avoided if possible. Wealth must not be dispersed; status
  must be maintained. Hanley and Yamamura went so far as to hypothe-
  109 Smith, Nakahara, p. 95.
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
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  size that in the eighteenth century, villagers "began to choose to 'trade
  off5 additional children for goods and services or for the accumulation
  of wealth needed to improve or maintain their standard of living and
  their status within village society."110 For Thomas Smith, who empha-
  sizes the role of infanticide in family limitation, the objectives in the
  villages he studied were "an equilibrium of some sort between family
  size and farm size; and advantageous distribution of the sexes in chil-
  dren; possibly the spacing of children in a way convenient to the
  mother; and the avoidance of a particular sex in the next child."111 The
  results from various studies may not yet fully support these hypothe-
  ses or the exact means by which family limitation was carried out, but
  they do point to a pervasive planning mentality in this dimension of
  life, as in others.
  The evidence for the presence of family limitation within marriage
  derives from the analysis of the timing and sexual distribution of births.
  In comparison with those societies in which there was no birth control,
  eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan exhibited a short span of
  childbearing for women, a low average age of the women at the last
  birth, and long average interbirth intervals. Hanley and Yamamura
  reported that "the average woman bore children for only about a dozen
  years."112 In her mid-thirties a woman bore her last child. Thomas
  Smith found variation in the sex ratio by birth. After the second birth,
  "families tended to eliminate infants of the sex already predominant,
  and to eliminate girls somewhat more often than boys."11* Infanticide as
  a form of family limitation gave parents the choice of sex at the same
  time that it enabled them to control the size of the family.
  The demographic rates in the late Tokugawa villages were remark-
  able for a premodern society. After falling from seventeenth-century
  levels, the crude birth and crude death rates were in the twenty to
  thirty range rather than in the forty to fifty range often observed in the
  recent history of less developed countries before death rates plum-
  meted. Life expectancy at New Year's after birth (Japanese age two)
  reached into the forties. On the basis of these findings, Hanley and
  Yamamura conclude that "all evidence points to a remarkable similar-
  ity with pre- and early industrial population trends in Europe and no
  similarity at all between Tokugawa Japan and the other nations of Asia
  today."11*
  n o Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, p. 318.
  i n Smith,Nakahara, p. 83.
  112 Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, p. 318.
  113 Smith, Nakahara, p. 66.
  114 Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, p. 318.
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  Although infanticide (often in the form of drowning babies shortly
  after birth) apparently continued to be practiced, changes in sex ratios
  reveal a shifting pattern in its application.11? The changes do not seem
  to be a result of official disapproval of this much-condemned practice,
  but of a shift in the relative desirability of boys and girls. High sex
  ratios in the early eighteenth century indicate a strong preference for
  boys, but by the mid-nineteenth century the sex ratio was close to
  normal, and to the extent that infanticide was still practiced, it seems
  less a response to dire conditions than one means to achieve the de-
  sired family size and composition. The heightened value of female
  labor, as seen in the large number of female migrants and in their
  increasing age at marriage, may help explain the more equal treatment
  given to girl babies.
  Thomas Smith has studied the relationship between the sex ratio
  and the presence of trade, industry, and cities. Examining one set of
  data for Choshu in 1843, he found that "the higher the per capita
  income and the more commercial the economy, the lower the sex
  ratio."116 Using nationwide urban data for 1875 and regional sex ratios
  of 1846, he discovered almost the same correlation (—0.38) between
  the level of urbanization and the sex ratio. He concluded that "the
  development of nonagricultural employments seems to be associated
  with a declining sex ratio.""? Again the evidence points to the strong
  impact of the urban sector and of commercialization spreading from
  the cities on late Tokugawa village household decisions.
  Migration
  In order to explain changes in landholding patterns, in the distribution
  of cities, in the age of marriage, and in other aspects of social structure
  as well, it is necessary to consider migration. The ideal of the essen-
  tially closed community bound by custom, collective responsibility,
  and corporate relations endured. Yet the high rates of migration not
  only made the realization of this ideal impossible in the urban periph-
  ery; residential instability also characterized the inner chonin wards,
  many originally established for collective service in a given occupa-
  tion. Increasingly during the second half of the Tokugawa period,
  high rates of migration became evident also in the villages, much of it
  directed to other villages and to local towns other than the castle cities.
  A mobile rural population did not give up its strong roots in the ie and
  115 Hayami Akira, "Tokugawa koki jinko hendo no chiikiteki tokusei," Mita gakkai zasshi 64
  (August 1971): 77. 
  116 Smith, Nakahara, p. 154. 
  117 Ibid., p. 156.
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
  557
  thus in its home villages. Rather, the timing and purposes of the
  departures were carefully regulated to meet household objectives. Re-
  locations of labor proved generally responsive to changing employ-
  ment opportunities.
  The sankin kotai system brought a distinctive form of migration that
  remained highly stable until the early 1860s. It involved the daimyo
  and the samurai who accompanied them and promoted a major redistri-
  bution of wealth to Edo and the other central cities with corresponding
  pressures for mobilizing resources in the castle cities. This fully formal-
  ized movement of the elite between alternate residences had ramifica-
  tions for other forms of migration and for marketing, but itself did not
  represent an arena of social change.
  A second massive flow of population to the cities also developed
  during the early Tokugawa period. This flow,
  which in all essential respects should also include hokonin entering bushi
  service, differed from the first in bringing to the city persons mostly rural in
  origin, younger on the average, more predominantly male (although the mi-
  gration of samurai also involved an unspecified surplus of males over fe-
  males), and with rare exception poorer. Unlike samurai migrants, these
  would-be chdnin arrived in Edo without guaranteed incomes, jobs or places
  of residence, although not necessarily without contacts from their native areas
  which could ease the transition."8
  Over time, females became roughly as numerous as males in this rural-
  urban flow, although the numbers involved diminished. Because local
  wages had increased and employment opportunities were more plenti-
  ful, those who chose to go to the city were likely to be less impover-
  ished. This type of migration continued to replenish the ranks of those
  who rented lodgings in Japan's large urban sector.
  Robert Smith offered evidence for a high degree of turnover in
  urban residences. Using household registers for thirty-six years be-
  tween 1757 and 1858, he found "a social environment of constantly
  shifting composition. Although the continuity of the house-owners is
  more marked than that of the renters, even they move as households
  with great frequency. ""9 The presence of large numbers of mobile,
  small households and of single persons temporarily engaged in hired
  labor in the city anticipates modern conditions. A continuous flow of
  rural-urban and then urban-rural migration on a considerable scale
  had various impacts, some more difficult to measure than others.
  Much speculation could be presented on its effect on rural attitudes
  118 Rozman, "Edo's Importance," p. 101. 
  119 Smith, "Small Families," p. 440.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  and behavior, for example, on consumption and leisure tastes, but
  there is little hard evidence to demonstrate how urban practices were
  diffused. However, in one respect, the urban impact has been mea-
  sured through correlational analysis. Dividing Japan into fourteen
  regions, Hay ami Akira has examined the relationship between urban-
  ization and population growth. He discerned a significant inverse rela-
  tionship: Rural and overall population growth occurred largely in ar-
  eas with relatively low urbanization.120
  The repressive functions of the urban population resulted from
  several conditions: (i) In some cases as many as 50 percent of the
  migrants stayed in the city and did not return to the village; (2) the
  death rates in the city exceeded the birthrates, and the birthrates were
  below those in the village; and (3) the average age of marriage for
  returning migrants was higher than the average for other villagers. In
  short, the city swallowed migrants and depressed population growth
  in the surrounding region.
  The natural rate of population growth was negative in the cities;
  that is, the cities needed migration from the countryside in order to
  maintain their total populations. But in the villages, the natural
  growth rate was normally positive. Hayami depicted one village in
  which the crude birthrate exceeded the crude death rate by 8.4 per-
  cent, but migration kept the population quite constant.121 Then in the
  1840s, migration (as hokonin) declined to both cities and local destina-
  tions. Following this decline, village populations grew by roughly 1
  percent per year. The repressive effect of migration was eliminated.
  Migration out from the villages also stabilized the village class struc-
  ture. There was a continuous flow of downward mobility. Many
  lower-strata households died out, especially through migration. At the
  same time, the noninheriting sons of upper-strata households de-
  scended the social ladder through the establishment of branch house-
  holds (bunke) and adoption. A fairly constant number of households
  does not mean that there was no replacement process. Substantial
  levels of migration were vital to this circulation of households that
  opened outlets for social mobility.
  Across Japan, areas varied in their rates of migration. The highly
  urbanized hinterlands of Edo and Osaka-Kyoto and the south Kanto
  and the Kinki regions experienced substantial population losses, appar-
  ently through the effects of migration to the cities. Meanwhile, in
  southwest Japan, with a lower rate of urbanization, the population
  120 Hayami Akira, "Kinsei koki chiiki betsu jinko hendo to toshi jinko hiritsu no kanren,"
  Kenkyu kiyo (Tokugawa rinseishi kenkyujo, 1974), pp. 230-44. 
  121 Ibid., p. 232.
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
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  grew relatively rapidly during the second half of the Tokugawa period.
  Hayami also distinguished a different type of migration, more short
  term and mainly responsive to conditions pushing people out of the
  villages rather than to conditions pulling people into the cities.122 At
  times of famine, this type of migration prevailed in the severely hit
  areas of northeast Japan. In contrast, migrants normally were not
  acting out of desperation but were responding to labor opportunities,
  wage differentials, household needs, and property differences at home
  in order to maximize the long-term success of the ie.
  Hayami also related the population change to the declining sex ratio
  by region. I23 In areas of population decline, sex ratios had tended to be
  high in the early eighteenth century. The fact that they fell rapidly
  testifies to the even greater decrease in the male than in the female
  population. Especially in remote areas of Japan, the late Tokugawa
  period was marked by a rapid decline in the number of males as the
  small, independent household became nearly universal.
  Hartley and Yamamura have argued that occupational and geo-
  graphical mobility were factors in the rising living standards of Japa-
  nese peasants. From the eighteenth century onwards, income rose, as
  it became common for young men and young women to work away
  from home, often for several years before marriage. They summarized
  the studies on this topic as follows:
  Migration allowed the efficient allocation of labor, higher wages, the perma-
  nent or temporary adjusting of village population, and the regulation of
  numbers in individual households through marriage, adoption, and migration
  in or out for employment. It also undoubtedly had an effect on fertility, both
  by delaying marriage for some and preventing it for others (second sons) and
  by lowering marital fertility in families in which the husband worked away
  from home for years at a time.12*
  Clearly a remarkable impression is left if one takes into account the
  extraordinary urban-urban migration of the sankin kotai system, the
  high levels of rural-urban migration necessary to produce and to sus-
  tain the unprecedented Tokugawa urbanization, and the massive
  rural-rural and small-town migration that emerged in the second half
  of the Tokugawa period. These conditions of large-scale migration
  figured importantly in the transformation of social stratification and of
  the urban system as well as the decision making of households.
  122 Ibid., p. 236.
  123 Hayami Akira, "Kinsei Seino nomin no ido ni tsuite," Kenkyu kiyo (Tokugawa rinseishi
  kenkyujo, 1977), pp. 295-6.
  124 Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, p. 255.
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  Although a modern census was not taken until 1920, the old system
  of obligatory registration at Buddhist temples (for all but a few catego-
  ries of the population) and nationwide enumerations at six-year inter-
  vals from 1721 was replaced by a registration law in 1871. There are
  apparent deficiencies in the enumerations of the Meiji period, but they
  provide a general indication of population trends.
  In the bakumatsu period and following the Meiji Restoration, the
  population growth accelerated. Whereas over the first half of the nine-
  teenth century, growth was slight, over the second half, the total rose
  from roughly 30 million to 31 million to 44 million. The first phase of
  increased growth resulted in an annual rate of increase of about 0.5
  percent in the early 1870s. The second phase produced a rate of about
  1.0 percent in 1900. Birthrates appear to have risen somewhat at the end
  of the century, whereas death rates may have remained stable or fallen
  slightly. Whatever may be the explanation for increased growth, vital
  rates and the rate of natural increase remained relatively low in Japan -
  conditions generally considered favorable to economic growth.
  Education and knowledge
  With increasing standards of living and choice with regard to both
  work and consumption, Japanese gave more attention to bettering the
  prospects of their households. Fewer children and longer life expectan-
  cies permitted greater investments of time and resources in the educa-
  tion of each child. These opportunities were quickly seized. Ronald
  Dore has traced a chronology of change and wrote that by 1868 Japan
  was transformed into a literate society, "s By 1700 there was wide-
  spread literacy in the big cities; many commercial publishers catered
  to a mass market; and routinized administration produced a flood of
  documents that required even village headmen as well as virtually all
  samurai to be literate. By 1800, the education of commoners had
  emerged as a goal of some domains for purposes of moral upbringing
  and the restoration of old virtues and also for the dispersal of new
  administrative and production techniques and skills. Authorities did
  not fear the spread of education, and popular attitudes did not resist it.
  Popular acceptance of schooling hinged on its relevance to mobility
  aspirations. Secular and practical, popular education responded to the
  widespread desire for self-improvement and to opportunities to apply
  improved skills. There was a steady growth in the number educated
  125 Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan.
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  HOUSEHOLD DECISIONS 
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  and a gradual evolution to the content and purposes of education. Not
  only the actual knowledge imparted, but also rationalism, selflessness,
  sense of nation, training in being trained, and other attitudes involved
  in the educational process spread among the population. Dore esti-
  mated that by the 1860s as many as 40 to 45 percent of boys and 15
  percent of girls were receiving some formal schooling outside their
  home.126 In 1803 there had been but 550 terakoya (temple schools). At
  the time of the Restoration there were more than 11,000 that met the
  educational needs of a large part of the population."?
  With the spread of education, extrafamilial sources of respect, pres-
  tige, and instruction gained in most villages. Nineteenth-century gov-
  ernment directives thus could be understood, and impersonal means
  for the evaluation of achievement could be readily accepted. A good
  basis existed for the rapid achievement of universal schooling in the
  final decades of the century.
  The Meiji Restoration brought a more fluid society. The legacy of
  the earlier spread of education was vital to the new society in many
  ways: (1) the acceptance of the possibility of self-improvement and at
  the same time of national improvement; (2) the readiness of those who
  "in childhood had submitted to some process of disciplined and con-
  scious learning . . . to respond to further training, be it in a conscript
  army, in a factory, or at lectures arranged by his village agricultural
  association"; thus ensuring "that the generation which had passed
  childhood in 1870 did not have to be written off as lost";128 (3) the
  foundation for a competitive society in which talent could be encour-
  aged and applied; and (4) the acceptance of education for all not as a
  factor threatening the power of the samurai but as a means for a more
  just social order and a more skilled population. Neither did the ex-
  samurai fear mass education nor did the ordinary household reject it as
  irrelevant to personal needs. Largely through the spread of education,
  both before and after the ordinance of 1872, a diverse population once
  frozen into separate social classes became increasingly homogeneous.
  The Meiji Charter Oath proclaimed as one of its five articles "the
  seeking of knowledge throughout the world in order to strengthen the
  foundations of the Throne." In 1872 a national plan of education called
  for a nationwide, three-tier network of public schools for all. Modifica-
  126 Ronald Dore, "The Legacy of Tokugawa Education," in Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese
  Attitudes Toward Modernization, p. ioo.
  127 Richard Rubinger, Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
  versity Press, 1982), and "Education: From One Room to One System," in Jansen and
  Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition, pp. 195-230.
  128 X)OK, The Legacy of Tokugawa Education, pp. 101,104.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  tions occurred through the next decades as leaders recognized that their
  initial plans had been overly ambitious, and by the 1880s, the system
  became more centralized. Standardized textbooks, ethics courses, and
  uniforms prevailed. With the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890,
  the moralistic tone of education was set for the next half-century.
  Whatever the items chosen for inclusion, the picture would likely be
  the same: Japanese household behavior changed markedly over the
  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflecting increasing indepen-
  dence, long-term calculation, and scope for decision making. Social
  indicators such as mean household size, birthrates, death rates, life
  expectancy, sex ratios, migration, and literacy increasingly came to
  resemble those in modern societies. The explanations for these changes
  center, on the one hand, on urbanization, commercialization, improved
  standards of living, and a labor shortage near the major cities. But on the
  other hand, they also center on the nature and durability of the house-
  hold organization and on the solidarity and social pressure aroused by
  village organization. Regarding conditions a century later, observers
  were still noting the curious combination of some types of change accel-
  erated by urbanization or other conditions associated with the modern
  sector and other types accelerated by the distinctive organizational char-
  acteristics of Japanese society.
  CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS
  The social changes described for the final century or so of the Toku-
  gawa period can be instructively compared with the social changes
  during the first half of the Tokugawa period. Both periods witnessed
  considerable dynamism, but one can distinguish systematic differ-
  ences in the main forces, the main locations, and the main groups that
  produced the changes. For social stratification, both continuities and
  contrasts are apparent between the two periods. Whereas in the earlier
  period, urban-based, specialized merchants prospered from increas-
  ingly regular and large-scale interregional trade, in the latter period
  local and perhaps part-time merchants tapped new or underutilized
  rural resources, including labor diverted from agriculture into side
  employments. Already in the earlier period, hired labor was becoming
  predominantly contractual; in the latter period rising wage levels (un-
  til the rising inflation of late Tokugawa) and local employment oppor-
  tunities contributed to widespread participation in hired labor as a
  phase in the life cycle. The earlier primacy of the part-feudal, part-
  bureaucratic samurai ethic was yielding to the flowering of a mass
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  CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS 
  563
  urban culture emanating largely from the chonin yet spreading to the
  other classes as well. A period of dramatic growth in the number of
  chonin gave way to a period of deconcentration of their ranks and
  diffusion of their tastes and practices. The chonin, especially the mer-
  chants, continued to be in the vanguard of social change. Although
  tightly limited in certain respects, the rise of the bourgeoisie character-
  ized Japanese social development as it did the development of various
  other countries.
  For the peasants the shift from cooperative to individual farming and
  the division of large landholdings once under the control of patrimonial
  landlords were followed by a period of increased concentration of hold-
  ings under a new type of commercially oriented landlord. In both peri-
  ods the evidence indicates that peasant industriousness grew under the
  dual impetus of broadened incentives and concentrated social (commu-
  nity and household) pressures. On a larger scale than in the earlier
  period, landholders cum entrepreneurs accumulated resources, in-
  vested in diverse productive activities, and emulated urban consump-
  tion practices. Although village conditions in some areas spurred some
  outmigration, the intense competitive bidding for scarce labor created
  opportunities for ordinary peasants, thereby encouraging their eco-
  nomic independence, market orientation, and skill development.
  There was less and less justification for applying to Japan the stereo-
  types of parasitic landlords and impoverished peasants. Through
  mechanisms such as marketing, migration and formal education, the
  rural population broadened its horizons to an extent that perhaps few
  premodern societies could match.
  For the samurai, the first period brought a routinization of tasks and
  rewards, a reorientation from military to administrative duties, and an
  urbanization of living conditions. The later Tokugawa period did not
  produce such abrupt changes in actual circumstances, but the impact
  on perceptions was by no means negligible. The samurai more and more
  doubted their relevance and questioned their material position relative
  to others. With respect to types of employment as well as life-styles, the
  samurai (with the exception of the upper ranks) and the chonin were
  converging, as were the nomin and the chonin. In all three classes - but
  not so openly among the samurai until the 1870s - one finds a shift
  toward achievement criteria and an impersonal labor market and also a
  continued consciousness of status differences and group obligations. In
  comparison with other premodern elites, the samurai, by virtue of their
  skills and perceptions, were better prepared for coping with the loss of
  their elite status.
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  Japan's urban transformation during the last century or so of Toku-
  gawa rule clearly did not produce the tumultuous changes that had
  preceded it; nonetheless, the changes that did occur had important
  implications. There was no longer an explosive growth in the popula-
  tion of the three central cities; instead, there was a redistribution away
  from Osaka and Kyoto, and Edo gained a more direct hold at the head
  of the national urban system. Moreover, the once-burgeoning castle
  cities began gradually to lose population. These declining cities, pre-
  dominantly located in the Kinki and Inland Sea areas, could not meet
  the competition of the nonadministrative places, that is, the nearby
  ports, and of the small centers of crafts and commerce. That the
  largest and most numerous of the smallest cities prospered suggests
  the forging of a more direct link within the urban hierarchy, a redistri-
  bution conducive to commercialized agriculture and local specializa-
  tion and to centralized transport and services. Although temporarily in
  decline, many castle cities became restructured in a manner conducive
  to eventual growth in the Meiji era. The dispersal of professions and
  the reorientation toward chonin consumption continued from the ear-
  lier period, whereas commerce became more dependent on the rural
  market, and cities became more diverse and multifunctional in form-
  ing new links with the outside. A sharp contrast with the earlier period
  is particularly visible in the accelerated population growth and prosper-
  ity of the small towns. Their role in the dissemination of urban pat-
  terns to the countryside and in the accumulation of scattered rural
  resources became increasingly prominent in the nineteenth century.
  Household decisions also were altered sharply in the nineteenth
  century, in ways often unanticipated in the seventeenth century. Ef-
  forts to control the number of households in a village and to maintain
  or perhaps to elevate the status of one's household under new eco-
  nomic conditions were factors in the popularity of new decisions re-
  flected in the use of household resources. Household size declined
  sharply and then stabilized. Marriage rates declined as women married
  later or, in a small but growing number of cases, not at all. Family
  limitation was realized, in part through sex-selective infanticide aimed
  at males as well as females. Large numbers migrated, increasingly to
  other villages for wage labor. In particular, the high rates of migration
  to cities depressed village population growth. Improved standards-of
  living, life expectancies, and opportunities in the choice of work and
  residence encouraged families to concentrate more resources on the
  training of each child. In turn, levels of literacy rose sharply from
  those of the eighteenth century. Responding to unusual conditions of
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  CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS 
  565
  urbanization, commercialization, and labor demand as well as to social
  pressures on behalf of the long-term needs of household and village
  organizations, ordinary families changed their behavior markedly dur-
  ing the second half of the Tokugawa period. On these matters, there is
  little evidence of similar rural household changes during the prior
  period or of a comparable intensity of change in other premodern
  societies.
  Given this premodern history, it is no wonder that Meiji Japan was
  dynamic in many of the same respects. The new impetus came from
  legal changes, eliminating occupational and residential restrictions and
  freeing all groups to pursue their interests. The samurai heritage was
  transformed with the assistance of foreign advisers and Japanese mis-
  sions abroad into a rapidly growing, modern bureaucracy. The chonin
  legacy was invigorated through entrepreneurial talent from all back-
  grounds and was now virtually unfettered in its pursuit of profit. The
  nomin tradition advanced in a more market-oriented economy follow-
  ing the land settlement. By the end of the century, day-to-day adminis-
  tration was under the competent grasp of a new elite chosen for its
  educational performance. Financial and industrial growth was spurred
  by the emerging zaibatsu, who led in the reorganization of business
  activities. Land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of land-
  lords, who marketed a large part of agricultural production. The new
  groups were heirs to the old, both biologically and in terms of the
  skills and attitudes that had been transmitted.
  Meiji cities and household decisions also were infused by reforms
  that speeded trends already under way. Urban hierarchies and func-
  tions changed, particularly with the exodus of the samurai from their
  exclusive residential zones in the castle cities, as resources continued
  to flow efficiently into local and national centers. Population growth
  increased, but the factors that limited fertility continued to operate.
  Initially high levels of urbanization, along with close urban-rural link-
  ages and low levels of population growth based on early forms of
  family limitation, were of great importance in avoiding during the
  Meiji period the problems of cities without adequate jobs and ade-
  quate impact on the countryside and of excess population growth.
  Perhaps more clearly than in any other area, the continuities between
  Tokugawa and Meiji education show how far the premodern society
  had brought Japan along the path to modernization that it was follow-
  ing in the late nineteenth century.
  In at least four ways, the transition to modernization was facilitated
  by the premodern foundation: (1) Intense group solidarities offered a
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  566 
  SOCIAL CHANGE
  measure of control and coordination important to both preventing
  deviant behavior and pressuring conformity in the pursuit of new
  goals; (2) large numbers of households engaged in nonagricultural
  activities (including an elite exposed through required urban living
  and alternate residence for many in Edo, merchants in local areas able
  to challenge their big-city rivals, and landlords successful in entrepre-
  neurial undertakings) were prepared for new opportunities in the la-
  bor market; (3) high levels of urbanization, the presence of very large
  urban centers at the forefront of changes, and the proliferation of
  small, local growth centers formed a chain of communications and
  interaction capable of mobilizing resources and creating opportunities
  throughout the society; and (4) demographic and educational rates
  indicated a pattern of household decision making that promised to
  ease the task of controlling consumption and training a new generation
  for new tasks.
  Over the past three decades, nineteenth-century Japan's comparative
  standing as a premodern society has been subjected to a series of
  reappraisals. In the process, the old perceptions of a backward popula-
  tion with outmoded social-class relations, oppressive urban and rural
  organizations, and desperate household behavior have been largely
  discredited. Comparisons of class relations, including landholding pat-
  terns, urban literacy, and demographic rates, all show Japan as an
  unusual premodern society in the midst of internally generated, rapid
  change.
  In virtually every instance in which a quantitative indicator has
  been introduced, Japan's rate has turned out to be extraordinary for a
  premodern society. Repeatedly, the country chosen as most similar
  to Japan has been England, which elsewhere in the comparative
  literature normally appears as an exceptional case at the forefront of
  social development.
  Several types of organizations were instrumental in producing so-
  cial change. First administrative bodies, both regional and national,
  are singled out for their deep commitment to social planning, espe-
  cially in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but continuing
  throughout the Tokugawa period and greatly reactivated with the
  Meiji Restoration. Strong government direction emerges as a key
  element. Second, community organizations assumed a crucial role in
  leadership and coordination, for example, in controlling the number
  of households. The village community and other organizations pos-
  sessed a high degree of solidarity and a rare capacity to mobilize
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  CONCLUSIONS AND COMPARISONS 
  567
  social pressure. Third, household organizations engaged in the long-
  term planning of their resource needs and allocations. The distinctive
  qualities of the Japanese household came increasingly to the fore in
  the more competitive setting of the nineteenth century before and
  after 1868. All of these levels are distinguished by the considerable
  role of conscious planning, the high degree of group solidarity, and
  the substantial capacity for social control. In an environment of wide-
  spread opportunity and intense competition, these organizations com-
  bined tradition and leadership.
  The basic trend during the Tokugawa period was for more and
  more initiative to be seized from below. Rigid administrative controls,
  monopoly merchant practices, patrimonial landlords, collective com-
  munity obligations, concentrated castle city privileges, and other con-
  trol devices gave way to more decentralized or dispersed practices.
  The panoply of restrictive regulations was never fully abolished, but
  many were successfully challenged or allowed to persist in name only.
  By the mid-nineteenth century, the household had gained a wide mea-
  sure of autonomy. Unlike the previous period, during the second half
  of the Tokugawa era major social changes originated largely from
  below within the limitations imposed by the existing social system.
  Earlier scholarship emphasized those limitations, but recent scholar-
  ship offers a persuasive corrective with its stress on the social changes
  that were achieved. The speed and thoroughness of the early Meiji
  reforms as well as the rapid transition that followed should be seen
  against the backdrop of earlier dynamism.
  The preceding emphasis on continuities through the nineteenth cen-
  tury should not detract from the recognition of the sweeping changes
  that came one after another in a span of one to two decades in the
  bakumatsu-Mei)i transition. These changes constituted first a chal-
  lenge to the Tokugawa social and political order, then a repudiation of
  it, and finally a legal foundation for modern development. Without
  them it is inconceivable that late Tokugawa dynamism, however extra-
  ordinary its scope, would have given way to modernization.
  The transition brought changes with diverse significance for Japan's
  long-term transformation. Certain unprecedented events, such as the
  refusal of local merchants to ship their export goods through Edo and
  its guild channels, reveal how the actual social hierarchy was little
  more than a pale reflection of the officially supported social order.
  Resistance of this sort, rooted in earlier social change, gave impetus to
  the pressures for reform that won out in the late 1860s. Late Toku-
  gawa changes also helped speed up the reform process. Fissures and
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  SOCIAL CHANGE
  new outlooks among the samurai were even more important than those
  among the merchants to galvanizing the forces of reform. Restoration
  politics exacerbated already-strained samurai loyalties, bringing many
  to opt for new rather than old loyalty. At the same time, the legacy of
  the old order left its deep imprint on the nature of the response, and
  dangers of foreign origin led to a reemphasis on the samurai tradition,
  especially its military and service orientations. New steps taken during
  the 1860s also foreshadowed what was to come, as when the bakufu
  and its enemies turned to mixed samurai-peasant armed units to se-
  cure an effective fighting force reorganized in new-style formations
  and equipped with foreign weapons. In this way, expedient measures
  in a period of turmoil were a stepping-stone to reform programs.
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  CHAPTER 9
  ECONOMIC CHANGE IN THE
  NINETEENTH CENTURY
  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Japan was a preindustrial
  agricultural economy with technology and living standards not greatly
  different from those of other preindustrial areas of Asia. If a French-
  man of 1600 had been able to see the Japan of 1800, he would have
  been impressed by obvious differences in dress, manners, and architec-
  ture, but most features of economic life would have been readily under-
  standable to him. Had the same Frenchman visited Japan a century
  later, he would have been bewildered. By the end of the century, the
  nation's output of goods and services had increased fourfold, and the
  proportion contributed by industry had at least doubled, whereas the
  contribution of agriculture had declined to less than half the total
  output. Much of the infrastructure necessary for the development of
  an industrial economy, such as transport, communications, ports, and
  financial institutions, had been created, and a modest but crucial nu-
  cleus of modern factory industry was becoming a viable growth sector.
  This was a century of economic change, and the change was at an
  increasing rate.
  Explanations for this change represent both a variety of ideologies
  and a variety of views of the facts. Most Japanese historians have
  viewed it as a transition from a feudal to a capitalist society within the
  framework of the Marxian theory of stages of economic development.
  Even granted that a relative latecomer such as Japan might be able to
  take advantage of some shortcuts, it was not easy to see how such a
  change, which took centuries in Europe, could occur within a few
  decades in Japan. Japanese historians have been divided on how to
  explain this problem. The Rono (laborer and farmer) school, so called
  from its journal of the same name, made an adjustment at the begin-
  ning of the process and, while maintaining the idea that premodern
  Japan was basically feudal, stressed the emergence of capitalist ele-
  ments in the century before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which is
  usually taken to mark the beginning of Japan's modern period. Accord-
  ing to this school, therefore, the gap between the Japan of 1868 and
  569
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  the Japan of the early twentieth century was not as great as that
  between feudal and capitalist Europe. The Koza (lectures) school,
  which took its name from its major publication, Nihon shihonshugi
  hattatsu shi koza (Lectures on the development of Japanese capital-
  ism),1 made the adjustment at the latter end and stressed the premod-
  ern aspects of the Japanese economy throughout the Meiji period and
  beyond, as exemplified by the survival of noneconomic factors in the
  relations between landlords and tenants and between employers and
  employees, the immaturity of Japanese capitalism, and the absolutist
  nature of the Meiji state. Neither school seriously questioned the as-
  sumption that the process of economic change in Japan was essentially
  similar to the earlier European experience.
  Before the Pacific War, Western observers emphasized the impor-
  tance of state power in alliance with powerful business groups in
  exploiting Japanese workers and poor farmers in the interests of build-
  ing a strong nation as rapidly as possible. Their view may well have
  been colored by fears of what they saw as "unfair" competition in
  international trade supported by low wages in Japan. After the war,
  Western scholars devoted much attention to explaining Japan's eco-
  nomic development in terms of what were identified as preconditions
  for economic change. In essence, this was an attempt to see whether
  explanations of economic change in Europe based on such factors as
  the Protestant ethic and the agricultural revolution could be applied to
  the Japanese case by identifying analogues to these factors in the
  Japanese experience. The results were unsatisfactory for two reasons.
  First, the implied assumption that economic development could not
  take place in the absence of factors that were thought to be important
  to European development proved to be invalid. Moreover, when
  equivalents were found in Japan, such as a merchant ethic analogous
  to the Protestant ethic, similar conditions were found to exist in other
  countries, such as China, where modern economic growth did not
  occur. Second, these studies on the whole took insufficient account of
  the fact that economic changes in Japan occurred a century or more
  after the industrialization of western Europe and North America. Not
  only had the world changed in the meantime, but Japan was able to
  draw on the experience of the advanced industrial countries.
  Since then, explanations of Japan's economic development have
  mostly been in terms of the quantitative relationships among economic
  variables such as capital formation, the labor force, technology, the
  i 7 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1932-3).
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE 
  571
  structure of production and consumption, prices and other aggregates,
  and the ways in which they affect the rate of growth of national in-
  come. In comparison with prewar studies, these quantitative analyses
  are less explicitly concerned with the role of government arid the
  exercise of power as a means of influencing economic activity. Atten-
  tion so far has centered more on the behavior of the economic aggre-
  gates themselves than on the less quantifiable forces that modified the
  operation of free-market mechanisms.
  There are particular difficulties in applying these quantitative meth-
  ods to the study of the Japanese economy in the nineteenth century,
  for most of which quantitative data on a national scale are lacking.
  What follows in this chapter must therefore be largely descriptive.
  Because conditions varied widely from one part of Japan to another,
  descriptions of economic life in one village or region, of which there
  are many, cannot be taken as representative of the whole country.
  This chapter will nevertheless attempt to describe the economic sys-
  tem as a whole and the changes in the way that system operated.
  THE ECONOMY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH
  CENTURY
  Japan in 1800 was in most respects typical of a preindustrial Asian
  country. The population was about 30 million to 33 million, less than a
  quarter of the present population, and was growing slowly. Some 80 to
  85 percent of this population lived in rural villages. Of the remainder,
  nearly 2 million lived in the three very large cities - Edo (modern
  Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto - and upwards of a million and a half lived
  in the castle towns, the administrative centers of the domains, that
  varied in size from a few thousand to nearly 100,000 inhabitants. At
  least half a million lived in ports and communication centers. For
  administrative purposes, the bulk of the population was divided into
  four main classes - samurai, fanners, artisans, and merchants.
  With very few exceptions, such as Buddhist or Shinto priests, doc-
  tors, and professional teachers, who were outside the four main
  classes, those who lived in rural villages were officially classed as
  farmers. They produced all of the country's food including marine
  products, and industrial crops such as cotton, oilseeds, flax, tobacco,
  indigo, vegetable wax, and the raw materials for papermaking and
  sericulture, and they provided nearly all of the tax revenue. But they
  also produced a large and increasing part of the industrial output and
  conducted the local trade, commerce, transport, and construction. In
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  some regions, such as around Osaka Bay and along the Inland Sea,
  villagers officially classed as farmers spent on average as much as half
  their time in nonagricultural pursuits. In more remote regions where
  opportunities for industrial employment were fewer, as many as one-
  third to one-half of the villagers spent the slack agricultural season or
  periods of a year or more working away from their villages, and at least
  half of this work was nonagricultural. The importance of industrial
  and commercial activity was therefore much greater than the classifica-
  tion as farmers of 80 to 85 percent of the population would suggest.
  In Edo and the castle towns, about half of the population consisted
  of samurai and their dependents. As well as forming a standing mili-
  tary force whose function was mainly internal security, the samurai
  staffed the administrative and clerical levels of the government ser-
  vices. Samurai and their dependents made up some 6 to 7 percent of
  the country's population, but at any given time at least half of them
  had only nominal duties. The civilian population of these administra-
  tive centers consisted of artisans, wholesale and retail traders, and
  construction workers whose function was originally to supply the
  needs of the samurai establishment, but by the early nineteenth cen-
  tury much of the demand for their services came from the civilian
  population itself and from the growing role that these centers played as
  entrepots for the commerce of the surrounding districts. Osaka, with a
  much smaller samurai establishment, was Japan's commercial center
  par excellence. Tax rice and essential agricultural and manufactured
  products were channeled into it and, sometimes after further process-
  ing, were redistributed to Edo and other parts of the country. Osaka's
  highly developed commercial institutions were a key point in the gov-
  ernment's system of economic controls. Kyoto, the seat of the imperial
  court, was the traditional center of the industrial arts and also an
  important financial market. With the diffusion of such crafts as silk
  weaving and ceramics to other parts of Japan during the eighteenth
  century, Kyoto craftsmen specialized in products of high quality and
  artistic excellence for the court and senior samurai. Unlike the towns-
  men of Edo, few of whom had been in the city for more than a
  generation, many of the civilian inhabitants of Kyoto had been estab-
  lished there for two or three centuries before 1800 and were proud of
  their traditions.
  Because of Japan's mountainous geography and long coastline, most
  interregional traffic went by sea along a chain of ports that ran right
  around the main islands. Ports like Hakata, Niigata, Sakata, Tsuruga,
  Obama, Shimonoseki, Shimizu, and Choshi had populations often to
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  ECONOMY 
  573
  twenty thousand and provided services that were adequate for the
  needs of the Japanese shipping of the time. Nagasaki, the only official
  international port, was a city of fifty or sixty thousand, not including
  the Dutch and Chinese settlements. Sakai, the major port for in-
  terregional trade, especially with Hokkaido, was about the same size.
  The urban population tended to be a shifting one, and information
  on urban population is much less reliable than that on the rural popula-
  tion. In all, at least 10 percent of the population lived and worked in
  cities of ten thousand or more, and perhaps another five percent lived
  in towns of five thousand to ten thousand inhabitants.2
  Urbanization on this scale, while low by modern standards, implies
  a good deal of commercial activity. Although the theories of the politi-
  cal economy of Tokugawa Japan were predicated on subsistence farm-
  ing with all the surplus being drawn off in taxes, urban consumption
  centers had to be supplied with food, clothing, fuel, and other necessi-
  ties, and thus the system itself required commercial development and
  production for the market as well as the delivery of taxes in kind.
  Tokugawa economic policy was aimed at securing these supplies with-
  out putting cash into the hands of rural producers who might use it to
  express their own competing demands for the products of the market.
  For administrations whose incomes were in taxes in kind but whose
  expenditures were in the cash market, any growth of civilian demand
  represented unwelcome competition, and this situation became both a
  basic problem of economic policy and the source of economic change.
  Economic policy and its administration
  Under the bakuhan system, responsibility for economic policy and its
  administration was shared by the Tokugawa government (bakufu) and
  some 270 domain (hari) administrations. The bakufu held nearly a
  quarter of the country's land, by ratable value, as its own domain. In
  addition, it held all the cities of major economic importance containing
  nearly half the urban population. It also controlled all gold and silver
  production and had a monopoly of issuing coinage. The bakufu could
  also give guidance or even issue orders to the daimyo, the titular heads
  of the domains, who would comply more or less enthusiastically ac-
  cording to their own interests and their relationship with the bakufu;
  but because they were ultimately responsible to the bakufu for the
  good government of their domains, they tended to follow its lead. In
  2 Sekiyama Naotaro, Nihon no jinko (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1966), pp. 114—15.1 have added a figure
  for samurai and others not included in this source.
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  general, the economic aim of both the bakufu and the domains was to
  take in tax as much of the production of their people as they could
  while maintaining and, if possible, increasing the productive capacity
  of their territories. In the early years of the bakuhdn system, these aims
  of the bakufu and the domains did not seriously conflict with one
  another, but by 1800 production for the market had developed to a
  point where competition for the profit on the marketing of these prod-
  ucts led to chronic conflict between the policies of the domains and the
  bakufu and between merchant groups allied with one or the other or
  seeking independence from both.
  The principal aim of the bakufu's economic policy, as of its policy in
  general, was the maintenance of stability and the preservation of the
  agricultural economy which was its main source of income. Both the
  bakufu and the domains believed that the function of the agricultural
  population was to produce tax revenue, and this belief rather than any
  interest in the welfare of the villagers underlay their efforts to maintain
  the viability of the rural village and to increase the production of rice
  and other crops. Thus in the bakufu territories a village could be
  punished for failing to get the maximum amount of production from
  its land, planting commercial crops on land assessed as taxable rice
  land, or neglecting farming in favor of other occupations. Despite
  these efforts, the yield from taxes on agriculture had already reached
  its peak before 1800, and attempts to raise it increasingly encountered
  strong resistance.
  Fiscal policies of both the bakufu and the domains aimed to spend
  no more than was received as revenue, but this aim was seldom
  achieved. With their regular income fixed within narrow limits, gov-
  ernments tried to find other sources of income and to limit expendi-
  tures as far as possible. In these respects, the situation of the bakufu
  differed from that of the domains, and the possibilities available to the
  domains themselves also differed from one another.
  The bakufu had separate budgets for rice and cash. Records of these
  budgets are fragmentary and inconsistent, but all point to a deteriora-
  tion in the financial position of the bakufu. The regular rice tax in-
  come of the bakufu was actually falling at the opening of the nine-
  teenth century. Even in the famine decade of 1782-91 its rice tax
  receipts averaged 613,000 koku, net of collection costs and local admin-
  istrative expenses, leaving an average annual surplus of just 38,000
  koku. In the following two decades, receipts rose slightly, but so did
  expenditures. In the decade of 1812-21, however, rice tax receipts fell
  sharply to 566,000 koku per year, and the bakufu was forced to draw
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  ECONOMY 
  575
  on its stocks. These figures do not appear to include the revenues of
  the hatamoto, or bannermen. Regular cash revenue, including various
  license fees, also fell over the same period, whereas cash expenditures
  increased.3 From time to time the bakufu requested loan subscriptions
  from the virtually untaxed merchant communities of Edo, Osaka, and
  some other cities in its domains. Five requests between 1800 and 1813
  yielded a total of over half a million ryo, about half the amount re-
  quested. The cash deficit was financed largely by resort, not to the
  printing press, as the bakufu did not issue paper currency, but to
  debasement of the coinage which was subject to rather more practical
  restraints. Nevertheless, the results were similar, and because about a
  quarter of the total cash expenditures were financed in this way, infla-
  tionary results could be expected.4 That prices did not rise much until
  the 1830s and 1840s was due partly to the increasing demand for cash
  to finance a rising level of cash transactions, as people came to buy
  more and more things rather than produce them themselves or barter
  their produce for them, but it also depended largely on price control.
  Efforts to reduce expenditures took two forms. First, the bakufu,
  like the domains, tried to reduce the amount of goods and services
  bought by itself and its retainers. Official exhortations to frugality
  were included in its "Regulations for Samurai" and repeated with
  particular zeal in times of financial crisis, but they seem to have been
  singularly ineffective.5 The economic circumstances of the samurai
  depended on relative movements in the price of rice in which their
  incomes were denominated and in the prices of the goods and services
  on which they spent their incomes. As Yamamura has suggested, the
  real incomes of the bakufu's retainers seem to show no long-term
  falling trend in the last century of Tokugawa rule, but in the nine-
  teenth century they fell sharply as rice prices fell, whereas the general
  price level remained relatively stable.6 Using five-year averages to even
  out year-to-year fluctuations, the real value of the incomes of ban-
  nermen fell by 15 percent between 1791-5 and 1796-1800 and by a
  further 13 percent between 1796-1800 and 1801-5, and it was a long
  time before the levels of the last decade of the eighteenth century were
  3 Nihon zaisei keizai shiryo (Tokyo: Zaisei keisai gakkai, 1922-5), vol. 10, pp. 436-57.
  4 Sato Jizaemon, Kahei hiroku in Nihon keizai sosho (Tokyo: Nihon keizai sosho kankokai, 1914),
  vol. 32, pp. 327-8.
  5 Ishii Ryosuke, ed., Tokugawa kinrei ko (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1959), 1st ser., vol. I, pp. 61-75;
  and Takayanagi Shinzo and Ishii Ryosuke, eds., Ofwegaki Temmei shusei (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1958), pp. 481-92.
  6 Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
  vard University Press, 1974), p. 41.
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  576 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  regained. It was thus in the bakufu's interests to maintain and stabilize
  the price of rice, while making every effort to prevent rises in the cost
  of other commodities. These efforts consisted of regulating competing
  demands for goods from the rural population and attempting to con-
  trol prices in the cities.
  Regulation and control were indeed the cornerstones of economic as
  of other administration at all levels in Tokugawa Japan and particu-
  larly of the economic administration of the bakufu. Economic policies
  were directed at people rather than at economic variables such as the
  money supply, incomes, and employment. It was well known, for
  example, that
  rising prices are due to an overabundance of money. After all, the annual
  production of goods is fixed while there is no natural limit to the annual
  amount of increase in the money supply. The greater the increase the worse
  the effects. It is just like trying to relieve a famine by cutting the meat into
  smaller portions.'
  Faced with a deficit, however, the bakufu preferred to regard deficit
  financing as inevitable and to put the blame for rising prices on the
  people for spending the money that it thus put into their hands.
  The people, particularly the peasant farmers, were regarded as exist-
  ing and working for the support of the government. All that they pro-
  duced was, in principle, at its disposal, but because the government
  accepted responsibility for the peasants' livelihood, it allowed them to
  keep just so much as they needed to keep body and soul together. In
  principle, too, every aspect of the village's economic life was controlled,
  and farmers were required to devote all their efforts to producing food
  and other useful crops. Any other activity that interfered with this was
  forbidden. Even if work of any kind was available outside the village, it
  could not be accepted without permission, and the authorities had to be
  satisfied that the move would not reduce production from the land.
  Even an overnight absence from the village required an official exeat.
  Failure to work from dawn to dusk was described as "laziness" and was
  a punishable offense. A farmer who failed to cultivate his land so as to
  produce the maximum crops possible with the existing technology and
  weather conditions - even though his income might be higher if he
  devoted his time to other pursuits - not only incurred social penalties
  but was guilty of dereliction of duty and could be punished for the crime
  of neglecting his proper duties.
  Granted that these regulations were not always strictly enforced, it
  7 Sato, Kahei hiroku, p. 320.
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  ECONOMY 
  577
  is clear that the bakufu did not rely on the operation of market forces
  and indeed regarded them as working against its interests. Restriction
  of consumption by fiat, wage fixing, compulsory procurement of all
  essential products at regulated prices, and processing and marketing
  through organizations that acted in many ways like government agents
  were the time-honored ways of restricting rural demand, ensuring a
  steady supply of essential goods to the administrative centers, and
  keeping prices down. If despite all this, prices in Edo rose, the bakufu
  simply ordered wholesalers and retailers to reduce them. If the market
  price of rice fell following a bumper harvest, the bakufu ordered the
  rice dealers to increase their stocks, sometimes lending them funds to
  do so. Under such a closely regulated system, the free market oper-
  ated, as it were, on the fringes and was countenanced only when it was
  of a petty nature or when it could be made to work to the benefit of the
  authorities. The situation was in this respect not unlike that in a
  country such as the People's Republic of China. In terms of producing
  economic growth, the controlled economy was a failure, but then
  economic growth was not a principal aim of the policy. As we shall see,
  even in terms of the economic policy of the time, it failed to achieve
  the stability that the bakufu desired.
  As well as its monopoly of the coinage, control of national com-
  merce and agriculture, and consumption in its own domains, the
  bakufu controlled foreign trade and most mining and forestry. For-
  eign trade was officially limited to a small traffic with the Dutch and
  Chinese through Nagasaki, Japan's only authorized international port,
  but a considerable trade with the Ryukyus operated by Satsuma was
  tolerated and seems to have included as well as Okinawa sugar, some
  goods of Chinese, Southeast Asian, or even European origin.
  Despite such an array of powers, the financial position of the bakufu
  and its ability to control the economy declined as the century pro-
  gressed. The causes of this decline included, as we shall see, the
  growing fiscal demands of foreign relations and defense, the diminish-
  ing power to enforce collection of revenue, a slow but steady fall in the
  proportion of national product produced by agriculture, a number of
  poor harvests, and, not the least, the frustration of its system of com-
  mercial and financial controls by actions of the domains attempting to
  shore up their own finances.
  Because the domains were denied the right to issue coinage, their
  deficits represented an increase in their indebtedness, and with rising
  costs, especially of traveling to and from Edo and maintaining an
  establishment there, almost all the domains were accumulating a
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  578 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  mounting burden of debt despite a range of measures to increase
  revenue. These included raising the rate of agricultural tax, imposing
  new taxes, promoting land reclamation, "borrowing" or withholding
  part of the retainers' stipends, levying contributions from leading
  merchants of the domain, issuing paper money, encouraging produc-
  tion and processing of industrial crops, and sharing in the profit from
  their production and sale through monopoly marketing boards oper-
  ated by the domain itself or through its agents. The scope for increas-
  ing revenue by most of these measures was limited. Despite the
  encouragement of reclamation projects, the output of rice and other
  staple crops that provided the traditional tax base grew only slowly;
  and the higher the tax rate was, the more profitable it was for farm-
  ers to direct their energies to other kinds of production. Hence the
  steady flow of edicts forbidding neglect of staple agriculture for other
  occupations and hence, too, their general lack of effect. Growing and
  processing industrial crops was far more profitable than was growing
  rice to be taken in tax. If the taxes were too heavy, the farmers
  absconded and left the land to go to waste, thus reducing the do-
  main's income and offsetting schemes to increase acreage by expen-
  sive land reclamation projects. Even the Satsuma domain, which
  maintained tighter control than most over its farming population and
  where alternative occupational opportunities were relatively limited,
  had by 1820 accumulated debts to the tune of five million ryo, equal
  to about ten years' regular revenue.
  In a society that had come to expect that traditional practices would
  be maintained, imposition of new kinds of tax provoked discontent
  and sometimes actual rebellion. Levies on merchants and borrowing
  from retainers tended to alienate the very groups on which the domain
  authorities relied for support. Denied the right to issue coinage, the
  domains turned to issuing paper notes. The bakufu had placed strict
  controls on such issues in 1759, but with the growth of local industry
  and commerce in the early years of the nineteenth century, there was a
  demand for means of local payments, and so many domains issued
  notes backed by cash, rice, or goods. Those notes (hansatsu) were legal
  tender for certain purposes within the domain, and some enjoyed
  limited acceptance beyond its borders. By the 1860s such issues
  reached very large proportions, circulated at a heavy discount against
  cash, and contributed heavily to the inflationary pressures of the last
  decades of the Tokugawa period. Their direct inflationary effects
  were, however, largely confined to the domain that issued them, and
  their effect on national price levels was less than that of the massive
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  ECONOMY 
  579
  increase in bank advances associated with domain borrowing during
  these decades. At the start of the century, however, the harmful ef-
  fects of hansatsu were not intolerable, even though such issues already
  involved some conflict with the monetary policies of the bakufu.
  Whereas all these measures were to a greater or lesser extent nega-
  tive, in that they did not promote economic development but rather
  the opposite, attempts by domains to obtain a share of the profits from
  production other than staple agriculture had far-reaching conse-
  quences. The Tokugawa theory of political economy was rationalized
  in terms of Confucian maxims that the state could not prosper unless
  the people were prosperous, understood in the context of subsistence
  agriculture in which the state's primary function was to maintain law
  and order rather than to promote economic growth. Promotion of
  production for the general market, as opposed to encouragement of
  production for the lord's use, clearly ran counter to the theory. For a
  domain government to promote such production and trade for its own
  financial gain was not only ideologically unorthodox but in fact
  brought the domain into conflict with the bakufu. The reason was that
  in setting up marketing boards that acquired, either directly or
  through commercial agents, the more profitable products of the do-
  main at fixed prices and sold them not only locally but on the national
  market, they competed with the marketing system sponsored and
  controlled by the bakufu. Nevertheless, some domains had adopted
  these measures quite early - the Sendai domain's rice and salt monopo-
  lies and the Yamaguchi domain's paper monopoly, for example, had
  been in operation since the seventeenth century.
  By the early nineteenth century, many domains had abandoned the
  orthodoxy of the early Edo period and were actively encouraging new
  crops and industries, usually in collaboration with merchants from their
  castle town or from the more advanced Kinki region. From the late
  eighteenth century, the Tohoku domains of Aizu, Shinjd, and Yone-
  zawa actively encouraged industrial arts such as weaving and lacquer
  making, as did the Mito domain in northern Kan to. In the Chubu
  region from Kanazawa to Nagoya - with almost a quarter of Japan's
  arable land, population, and rice production - sericulture, silk and
  cotton weaving, paper, lacquer ware, and wood and bamboo products
  were important local industries by 1800. Silk-crepe weaving technology
  was introduced to Gifu as early as 1730 by a few refugees from a fire in
  Nishijin. By 1819 Gifu crepe broke the monopoly of the Kyoto industry
  by marketing its products through the official channels of the powerful
  Owari domain, to the advantage of the producers, local merchants, and
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  580 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  the domain itself. The introduction of striped-cotton weaving in Mino
  was thanks to another Kyoto fire in the 1780s. Here finance and market-
  ing were through merchants from Omi. Tokushima's indigo monopoly,
  Matsue's ginseng, Uwajima's and Yamaguchi's paper monopolies, and
  several domains' salt monopolies all brought considerable profits to the
  domains' treasuries. The operations of these monopoly marketing
  boards were linked with the issue of local paper currency, as local
  purchases were paid for in hansatsu and sales in the national market
  were for cash or credits convertible to cash.
  Promotion and sale of industrial crops and industrial products by
  the domains was central to the economic changes taking place in the
  first decades of the nineteenth century. Those changes were at least as
  much the results of and reactions to government controls as of sponta-
  neous activity by the population at large. The spread of industrial
  production in their domains, as commercial agents in the bakufu's
  cities sought cheaper sources of supply in the countryside, prompted
  the domain administrations to try to appropriate the profits from it in
  competition with the city merchants and to promote and control fur-
  ther growth to increase their own resources. Heavy taxes on main-
  stream agriculture and relatively light taxes on other occupations in-
  duced a move from rice culture to industrial crops and processing
  industries like textiles. This shift was supported from the demand side
  by a relatively elastic demand for industrial products and a relatively
  inelastic demand for rice.
  Apart from small-scale local peddling, which was countenanced as a
  form of unemployment relief, commercial activity was controlled at all
  levels, but control also provoked resistance at all levels. City mer-
  chants struggled to maintain the privileges granted to them by the
  bakufu and to prevent the domains' selling directly to urban consump-
  tion centers. Merchants in the castle towns, usually with the backing
  of their domain authorities, struggled to maintain their privileges
  against rural merchants. The producers struggled for freedom to sell
  their products wherever they could obtain the best price, but seldom
  with much success, as escape from control at one level was generally
  replaced by control at another. In the process, however, production
  grew and incomes rose correspondingly, but the increase in income
  was distributed unevenly. Much went to the city population and
  helped produce the flowering of city culture that characterized the
  first years of the century, but a good part went also to the rural traders
  and manufacturers who came to be characterized as "rich peasants"
  (gono).
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  ECONOMY 
  581
  The village economy
  The rural village, the basic unit of administration and taxation, which
  had once been almost completely self-sufficient, was changing rapidly
  around 1800, though the pace of change varied from region to region.
  Variation among regions and even among neighboring villages was so
  great that it is not possible to speak of a typical or representative
  village. A village might consist of six or seven households or two
  hundred or more. In some villages, landholdings were distributed
  fairly equally; in others the majority held no land at all, and the tax
  burdens varied from one domain to another and even among neighbor-
  ing villages. By 1800, regional specialization had produced different
  patterns of village economic activity from region to region.8
  Parts of northern Kanto, Tohoku, and Kyushu and isolated villages
  throughout the country had changed little in the century before 1800.
  An average "backward" village consisted of about forty to fifty house-
  holds, most of which held some land, though the distribution of land-
  holdings could be uneven. In general, however, the scale of farming
  was limited to what could be cultivated by household labor, generally
  around half a hectare. Few of the larger landholders were still able to
  call on the customary labor services of dependent households, and
  most leased what they could not cultivate to those who held little or no
  land of their own. Rice was grown to pay taxes in kind, and in an
  average season, little was left after the tax rice was delivered. For the
  rest, wheat, barley, soybeans, and coarse grains were grown for house-
  hold consumption, with the surpluses traded in small local markets or
  between households. In such areas the opportunities for commercial
  farming were limited, and industrial employment was also scarce.
  There was little incentive to use commercial fertilizers or to introduce
  new technology, and so agricultural productivity rose very slowly - if
  anything, backward areas were becoming relatively more backward.
  Taxation tended to be heavy relative to output, as the domains tried
  to maintain establishments and styles of living comparable to those of
  their peers from more prosperous areas. In a poor season some farmers,
  unable either to pay their taxes or to support themselves, simply walked
  off their farms and sought employment elsewhere. Because those who
  remained in the village were held responsible for cultivating and paying
  the taxes on land so abandoned, this could result in progressive agricul-
  8 Hone Eiichi, ed., Bakumatsu ishin no nogyo kozo (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1963).
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  582 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  tural decline and create serious problems for the domains as well as the
  farmers. Laws prohibiting farmers from leaving the land were re-
  inforced by prohibitions against neglecting agriculture for more profit-
  able occupations that might have enabled them to hold on. But rather
  than punish those who had left their land, the bakufu gave subsidies in
  the form of tools and rations to induce them to return to agriculture;
  some domains even paid child endowment to try to build up the farm
  population. Encouragement of agriculture, which was the source of
  government revenue, and suppression of industry and rural commerce
  was rationalized by the theory that agriculture was the backbone of the
  economy, whereas other occupations were unproductive.
  In the rice-growing areas of Mutsu and Dewa, improved techniques
  and some use of commercial fertilizers produced a surplus of rice for
  sale after taxes were paid. Those who held more land than they could
  cultivate with the labor of their own households employed labor either
  by the year or by the day. To operate a commercial farm successfully,
  however, required some capital, and those with very small holdings
  either became farm laborers or migrated in search of employment. By
  1800 the gap between rich and poor was already widening and was
  taking a different form, as control over people progressively gave way
  to control over other resources and the richer were combining commer-
  cial farming with trade. To the disgust of one official observer, rich
  farmers in the Sendai domain never soiled their hands with farm work
  but lived in luxury, amusing themselves with music, theater, poetry,
  and archery.9 Such a life-style must have been for a small if conspicu-
  ous minority. In the Kumamoto domain (southern Kyushu) in 1810, a
  farmer and his wife with just over half a hectare of paddy field and
  one-third of a hectare of dry field paid half of their crop of rice, barley,
  and miller in taxes and spent over half of the remainder on wages and
  food for hired labor. They owned a horse and bought processed foods,
  tools, equipment, seed, and fertilizer. As a solid owner-cultivator, die
  fanner's only luxuries were a trip to die temple during the slack season
  and a new straw hat. At that he would have broken even, had it not
  been for the horse's falling ill and needing a visit from the veterinar-
  ian.10 Success or failure for a commercial rice grower depended on the
  quality of his land, his labor costs, and his tax assessment. A substan-
  tial farmer with one hectare of good rice land and some dry field in
  9 Tamamushi Juzo, Jinsei hen, in Honjo Eijiro, ed., Kinsei shakai keizai sosho (Tokyo:
  Kaizosha, 1926), vol. 7.
  10 Kodama Kota, Kinsei nomin seikatsu shi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1958), pp. 276-84.
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  ECONOMY 
  583
  Mito was able to save six or seven ryo a year. Another with the same
  amount of less productive land could save less than two ryo.11 For
  those who could accumulate some capital, the region's export of rice,
  other grains, and dried fish, and its imports of manufactured goods,
  provided profitable trading opportunities.
  In northern Honshu and Kyushu, the inadequacy of subsistence
  agriculture and rice monoculture as a revenue base was apparent by
  the middle of the eighteenth century and was highlighted by the crop
  failures of the 1780s. Many domains encouraged and often financed
  cultivation and processing of industrial crops such as paper, mulberry,
  wax, lacquer, and silkworms. The domain monopolized the products
  and took the lion's share of the proceeds. Although farmers were in
  effect working for a government enterprise, such innovations also
  enhanced the viability of the village economy.
  In central Honshu, village life was more commercialized; industrial
  crops were widespread; and village industry was an important source
  of rural income. A sharp line cannot be drawn between this region and
  the rice-growing regions of the north. Although the Shonai domain
  exported little but rice, other parts of Dewa grew, processed, and
  exported benihana (a red dye), and the Yonezawa domain began to
  encourage industrial crops, especially sericulture, in the 1790s in an
  attempt to make up for falling revenues from agriculture. Echigo, just
  south of Dewa, exported substantial quantities of silk crepe as well as
  rice. Further south again, the huge Kaga domain produced and ex-
  ported silk, linen, and cotton cloth, marine products, umbrellas, live-
  stock, lacquer ware, salt, and paper, but rice still accounted for 40
  percent of all exports from the domain. The industrial exports them-
  selves were the result of domain development policies dating back to
  the mid-eighteenth century, and their production and marketing were
  largely a domain enterprise.
  It was in the southern provinces of central Japan from Owari to
  Harima, and particularly in the provinces of Izumi, Kawachi, and
  Settsu around Osaka Bay, that village life was most involved with the
  market. Here farmers worked for profit rather than for the domain
  administration; indeed with few powerful domains in the area, con-
  trols on production were few and ineffective. Many villages specialized
  in growing cotton and oilseeds to the extent that they imported rice
  from other areas. These crops required heavy applications of commer-
  cial fertilizers, such as oil cake, fish meal, and night soil, and farmers
  11 Ibid., p. 284.
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  584 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  carefully balanced their expenditures on fertilizers against the extra
  income that it could expect to return. An average village in this area
  consisted of about fifty landholding households and perhaps as many
  who held little or no land of their own. There was a strong demand for
  labor, and those with no land of their own found employment in
  cotton spinning and weaving or as agricultural laborers. Labor was
  scarce, not, as in the north, because depressed farmers were leaving
  the area, but because industries were growing rapidly. As a result,
  wages were relatively high, and those with more land than they could
  cultivate themselves found it more profitable to rent their surplus land
  to tenant farmers than to hire labor. Conditions were similar in west-
  ern Owari where cotton spinning was a major activity.
  In all these areas, the villagers spent more time in spinning, weav-
  ing, and trading than in farm work. A villager with land sufficient only
  for a house and garden would have been impoverished in the less
  commercialized areas of the north, but here he might make a living as
  a weaver or even be a prosperous trader. Taxes were relatively light,
  but controls on marketing depressed the prices paid to producers.
  The Kanto region, the hinterland of Edo, was developing rapidly in
  the 1800s as a direct supplier to the Edo market; silk weaving was
  established in Kiryu, Ashikaga, Hachioji, and Chichibu; cotton weav-
  ing was also widespread; Noda soy sauce was replacing shipments
  from Osaka; and Edo was supplied with fresh vegetables from its
  surrounding villages. About a quarter of the rural population was
  employed in handicrafts and commerce. According to one contempo-
  rary source,12 about half the population indulged in manufacturing,
  commerce, or sheer idleness, leaving the remaining half to do all the
  hard agricultural work. Many of these nonagricultural workers had
  migrated to Kanto from areas farther north where they had been
  unable to support themselves on their small farms.
  All over Japan, village trade was prohibited or discouraged on the
  grounds that it diverted fanners from their proper work of producing
  income for the domain and led to luxury and laziness. Some domains
  permitted peddling so long as it was done on the villagers' own time or
  when the villager had no other means of support. Where commercial
  crops were grown with the domain's encouragement or permission,
  one or more villagers - often village officials - were authorized to col-
  lect the produce at the village level and forward it to licensed mer-
  chants or domain agents. Retail shops, however, were in principle
  12 Buyo Inshi, Seji kemmonroku (1816), in Kinsei shakai keizai sosho, vol. t, pp. 55-6.
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  ECONOMY 
  585
  restricted to officially nominated towns (machikata). This was not easy
  to enforce, and in many parts of Japan there were villages with shops
  selling farm equipment, consumer goods of all kinds, and even, accord-
  ing to official reports, luxury goods inappropriate to farmers. The
  development of rural commerce was affecting the trade of established
  merchants in the cities and towns, who frequently appealed to the
  authorities to protect them by forbidding village trade.
  The urban economy
  Japanese cities were centers of adminstration, consumption, and com-
  merce. Although each domain's castle town or capital combined all
  three functions, the bakufu's administrative headquarters was in Edo,
  and its main commercial center, and that of the whole country, was in
  Osaka. Osaka was the entrepot to which the products of central and
  western Japan were sent and from which they were reexported to the
  great consumption center of Edo and to other parts of the country.
  This trade was handled by a sophisticated structure of wholesalers
  (ton'ya, toiya) organized in licensed associations (kabunakama) which
  were granted monopoly privileges in return for acting as the bakufu's
  agents for the control of the national commerce. Shipments from
  Osaka to Edo were the monopoly of twenty-four groups of authorized
  wholesalers who were required to consign their goods to ten similarly
  authorized groups in Edo. This system was under official supervision
  at every point and operated to keep city consumer prices stable and at
  the same time to restrict rises in rural incomes. In the century before
  1825, this system was effective, and the value of goods channeled
  through the system rose fourfold or fivefold (much more for some
  commodities), and prices remained relatively stable. The quantity of
  cash in circulation at least doubled over this period, with a correspond-
  ing profit on the coinage going to the bakufu. That such an increase in
  the money supply did not produce inflation was due largely to the
  increased need for money as the volume of transactions increased, but
  it also reflected the effectiveness of the controls.
  Osaka was also the main financial center. At the apex of the finan-
  cial system of Osaka and of most of the country was a small group of
  bankers known collectively as the Ten Exchange Houses (Junin
  rydgae) who performed some of the functions of a central bank, acting
  as a lender of last resort to correspondent banks, lending to domain
  governments, controlling the level of bank credits, and controlling the
  market between gold-denominated cash and silver-denominated bank
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  586 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  money. This last was of particular concern to the bakufu. Because
  wholesale transactions were in silver credit and retail sales in cash, a
  change in the ratio affected retail price levels. The gold-silver market
  also reflected the ratio of bank credit to the cash supply. Bank loans
  financed trade and industry through advances to wholesalers who in
  turn advanced funds to producers repayable on delivery of the goods.
  The banks also provided facilities for remittances between Osaka and
  Edo (and some other centers) by bills of exchange which set off pay-
  ments by Edo merchants for purchases from Osaka against transfers of
  official funds from Osaka to Edo. The Osaka banking system also
  made substantial loans to domains both to cover current deficits and to
  finance industrial and agricultural development projects.
  Industry had once been concentrated in cities, but as the demand
  for industrial products increased during the eighteenth century, indus-
  tries such as textiles, pottery, and lacquer ware spread to many parts
  of Japan. By the 1800s, urban manufacturing was declining, although
  Kyoto was still the center of high-quality silk weaving and the decora-
  tive arts, and Osaka was a major processing center. The construction
  trades flourished in all the major cities, and the demand for their
  services was maintained by frequent fires. Artisans in the construction
  industry were officially under the control of master craftsmen ap-
  pointed by the bakufu or the domain, a system dating from the time
  when their function was to build castles and other public buildings;
  sake brewers, wax refiners, oil pressers, and some master weavers were
  subject to the rules and regulations of their trade associations. The
  larger cities, especially Edo, contained large numbers of unauthorized
  immigrants from rural areas who led a hand-to-mouth existence as
  casual workers, day laborers, and peddlers. Precarious though their
  livelihood was, they resisted attempts to send them back to their
  villages, much as the inhabitants of shantytowns on the outskirts of
  some Third World cities do today.
  In each domain, the castle town acted as the commercial as well as
  the administrative center and performed at the domain level the func-
  tions analogous to those that Osaka and Edo performed at the national
  level. Licensed or "privileged" merchants acted as agents for the collec-
  tion, distribution, import, and export of goods from the domain, fi-
  nanced and often managed domain enterprises, and backed and man-
  aged domain note issues (hansatsu).
  This description of the Japanese economy at the beginning of the
  nineteenth century indicates tight economic as well as political con-
  trol. Staple agriculture was supervised by the local authority in the
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
  587
  interests of maintaining revenue. The growing, processing, and mar-
  keting of industrial crops were controlled by domain administrations,
  usually in association with commercial agents inside or outside the
  domain with whom they shared the profits, leaving small returns to
  the producers. The national commerce was controlled by the bakufu
  through licensed associations of merchants in the key cities to main-
  tain adequate supplies of essential goods to Edo and other large cities
  at stable prices while restricting the growth of incomes and purchasing
  power in the countryside.
  It was clearly in the interests of producers, local merchants, and the
  domains themselves to evade these controls, as they could usually sell
  at a higher price in the free market. How effective were the controls?
  Enforcement became more and more difficult through the first half of
  the nineteenth century wherever free-market demand was increasing.
  Faced with a relative decline in their agricultural tax base, moreover,
  more and more domains adapted to the growth of industry and com-
  merce relative to agriculture by encouraging and exploiting industry
  and trade as sources of revenue, and those that did not do so soon
  found increasing difficulty in enforcing controls designed to maintain
  an economic system that was becoming an anachronism over a grow-
  ing area of the country. The reforms of the Tempo era represented the
  last in a series of attempts by the Tokugawa bakufu to salvage its
  system of economic controls and adapt it to changing economic condi-
  tions. Efforts to control economic activity in the interests of the state
  did not, however, end with the Meiji Restoration, and their changing
  forms have been a central factor in Japan's economic development
  ever since.
  THE TEMPO REFORMS
  The transformation of the Japanese village from a community culti-
  vating its land for the benefit of its overlord to a collection of house-
  holds, each working for its own economic betterment, was well ad-
  vanced in some regions by the early nineteenth century, and the
  process accelerated through the century, drawing in more and more
  areas as it went.
  By the 1820s many of the new industrial crops and processing indus-
  tries introduced by the domains or the city merchants were well estab-
  lished, and output rose quickly, with most of the product marketed
  through official channels in Osaka or Edo under the control of the
  bakufu. At about this time, however, the domains, local merchants,
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  588 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  and producers themselves could see opportunities to get better prices
  for their products by selling outside these channels through their own
  agents in Osaka or Edo or directly to other parts of the country.
  Almost all the domains were heavily in debt - Satsuma owed thirty-
  three times its annual revenue in the 1830s, and Choshu owed twenty-
  three times its annual income by 1840. A condition of many of these
  loans was that the domain consigned its produce to its creditors in
  Osaka, but to do so meant that after the interest and repayments were
  deducted, little remained. The domains therefore tried to avoid Osaka
  and to market through other ports or directly to Edo. As a result,
  shipments to Osaka fell by as much as 30 percent between the 1820s
  and 1840. In the process, the domains' credit ratings in Osaka fell, and
  they were forced to seek the cooperation of merchants nearer home
  and increasingly to rely for revenue on a share of the profits from
  rapidly growing local industry and trade. Domain restrictions on rural
  industry and commerce were therefore progressively eased in return
  for license fees, inspection charges, and other levies or a share in the
  profits.
  Rural traders increased their business at the expense of merchants
  in the castle towns who had been granted privileges in return for the
  commercial and financial services they had provided in the eighteenth
  century or earlier when the rural trade network had not yet developed.
  These castle town merchants had been the commercial agents and
  financial backers of the domain monopolies in the late-eighteenth and
  early-nineteenth centuries, but by the 1830s, even though the total
  volume of commerce was increasing rapidly, their business was declin-
  ing as village trade expanded. In Echigo, Shinano, Kii, Tottori, and
  elsewhere, castle town merchants complained that they were being
  ruined by competition from traders in villages where trade was sup-
  posed to be forbidden. The response of many domains was to reorga-
  nize their marketing boards to include village traders as their grass-
  roots agents.1'
  By the 1830s a national market had developed for cotton, silk,
  indigo, wax, paper, sugar, tea, sake, pottery, matting, hardware, and
  lacquer ware apart from and in competition with the bakufu's procure-
  ment system, and with new market opportunities opening up, indus-
  try and trade became increasingly profitable as compared with agricul-
  ture. A survey of the Choshu domains at the southwestern end of
  Honshu in 1842 showed that the average gross nonagricultural income
  13 See Ando Seiichi, Kinsei zaikala shogyo no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1958).
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
  589
  was about as much as the net agricultural income.14 The main reason
  for this was that agricultural income was taxed at the rate of 39 percent
  of net output, whereas nonagricultural income was taxed at less than
  10 percent. Agricultural income after tax and production costs were
  deducted did not even cover reasonable living costs, but nonagricul-
  tural pursuits yielded a good profit. On the Inland Sea side of the
  domain, the proportion of nonagricultural net income was even
  higher. In northern Honshu about half of farm income came from
  sericulture, and in Kawachi almost three-quarters came from the cot-
  ton industry which by the 1830s produced two million lengths of cloth
  a year. In the cotton-processing areas of western Owari and Izumi,
  only 20 percent of output was from agriculture by 1840. Wherever
  industry developed, it provided cash income which in turn provided
  the basis for local commerce. In regions such as parts of Tohoku
  which enjoyed no comparative advantage in industry, cash income
  could be obtained only by seeking employment elsewhere, and despite
  official restrictions, many laborers migrated to the cities or to areas
  where industry was expanding. In one village in Fukushima, half of
  the registered landholding families had disappeared by 1841, and 20
  percent of the village land was left uncultivated. This was no isolated
  example - many villages in Tohoku and outer Kanto were in a similar
  situation. Often such migration was through personal connections,
  but in some areas there seem to have been regular labor recruitment
  agencies.
  It should not be imagined that these migrant workers went out in
  the expectation of making their fortunes. Although it was the exis-
  tence of employment opportunities elsewhere that made migration
  possible, it was poverty and hardship that drove people to leave their
  economically depressed villages, and their willingness to work for little
  more than subsistence wages tended to keep the general wage level
  low. Complaints of shortages of wage labor and rising labor costs came
  mainly from farmers on the outskirts of the major cities who were
  trying to maintain their relative economic position in areas where
  nonagricultural activity was expanding rapidly. Overall, however, mi-
  gration of labor from areas where nonagricultural activity was less
  14 Bocho fudo chushin an. See Akimoto Hiroya, "Bakumatsu-ki Bocho ryokoku no seisan to
  shohi," in Umemura Mataji, et al., eds., Swyo keizaishi ronshu, vol. 1: Nihon keizai no hatten
  (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shimbunsha, 1976), pp. 137-58. For a discussion of this document, see
  Shunsaku Nishikawa, "Grain Consumption: The Case of Choshu," in Marius B. Jansen and
  Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
  ton University Press, 1986), pp. 421-46.
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  59O 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  productive to areas where it was more productive tended to raise
  average productivity and incomes over the country as a whole.
  Cooperation among producers, local traders, and domain authori-
  ties could be very productive. In the early nineteenth century, the
  linen-thread producers of the Kaga domain operated on advances from
  Omi merchants to whom they were forced to sell their thread at low
  prices. Approaches to the domain to establish a system of finance and
  marketing that would bring better returns failed, and rather than sell
  the yarn for such a poor return, the producers, with the assistance of
  the domain, experimented with weaving their thread into linen crepe.
  By the 1820s the industry was well established, with finance and
  marketing facilities arranged by the domain authorities, who opened a
  marketing office in Edo in 1828. So successful was the venture that in
  the 1830s the villagers went into cotton weaving as a supplement to
  linen, for which demand was seasonal. The domain was asked to
  handle the new product but refused on the ground that the quality was
  still too uneven. A local merchant involved in the linen trade then
  offered to finance and market it himself if the domain would lend him
  the capital. The domain agreed, and by 1861 one district alone was
  producing a million lengths of cotton a year, and the domain had
  assumed direct responsibility for quality control and marketing.15
  Even though in such cases, the domain's main object was to secure a
  source of revenue, the prices to producers and middlemen rose. Pro-
  ducers were no longer prepared to work for the domain for little or no
  return, and attempts to force them to do so usually provoked vigorous
  protests. In Kinki and Shikoku where commercial production devel-
  oped early, such protests were common in the 1790s, and by the 1830s
  they occurred whenever the producers could get significantly better
  returns outside the domain monopoly system.
  In principle, producers and local merchants were not free to trade
  unless specifically permitted to do so, and when permission was
  granted there were usually conditions attached. Local merchants in
  Okayama gained freedom to export directly from the domain in the
  1830s but were required to surrender the hard currency they obtained
  thereby in return for hansatsu which could be used for purchases
  within the domain but could be converted to cash only at a discount.
  Although the apparent profits of the local merchants rose, the system
  operated to help meet the domain's expenses in Edo and Osaka rather
  15 Ando, Kinsei zaikala shogyo no kenkyu, pp. 165-70.
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
  591
  than to strengthen the value of its paper currency within the domain,
  and thus in effect it taxed local trade.
  Trading without permission was, however, widespread and difficult
  to suppress. The authorities were tolerant of peddling by villagers
  with no other means of support, but larger-scale trading, especially
  outside the domain or to the detriment of agriculture, was another
  matter. Nevertheless, there was unauthorized trade (nukeni) wherever
  commercial opportunities presented themselves and restrictions were
  easier to evade than to police. Having been forced by financial straits
  to license some village trading in return for license fees in 1825, the
  Tottori domain found that by 1846 there was so much of it that there
  was a shortage of cultivators. An attempt to correct the situation by
  putting the delinquent peasants to forced labor in land reclamation
  turned out to be a ludicrous anachronism. As the prices to producers
  rose, it became more and more profitable to leave agriculture for
  industry and trade, and as rural incomes thereby increased, so did the
  rural demand for manufactures of all kinds, thus adding fuel to the
  whole process. By the 1840s most villages in the more advanced re-
  gions of Kinki, Chugoku, and Shikoku were served by shops selling a
  full range of consumption goods, and villagers bought in cash most of
  their requirements other than staple grains.
  The gains of the domains and the rural producers meant a relative
  decline in the position of the shogunate. The traditional agricultural
  tax base was declining as a proportion of total output for domains and
  shogunate alike, but as possibilities for the domains to profit from the
  growth of industry and trade increased, the mechanisms by which the
  shogunate had been able to control national commerce to its advantage
  became less and less effective. This is indicated by a sharp decline in
  shipments to Osaka accompanied by rising prices, whose causes were
  diagnosed in a report prepared in 1841-2 under the direction of Osaka
  City Magistrate Abe T6t6mi-no-kami.16 Based on a survey of twenty-
  one commodities, the report found that although improper commer-
  cial practices were tending to raise prices, more importantly, the devel-
  opment of markets in the countryside was often diverting goods from
  Osaka and its control system. Attempts to strengthen and extend
  control to the hinterland of Osaka had failed when they encountered
  the massive resistance of the 1820s. In eight cases the report found
  that the operations of the domain monopolies were the major factor.
  Domains marketed their products elsewhere and forbade private ship-
  16 This comprehensive report on problems of price control is printed in full in Osaka-shi
  sanjikai, ed., Osaka-shishi (Osaka: Osaka shiyakusho, 1926), vol. 5, pp. 639-86.
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  592 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  ments to Osaka. If they found it convenient to market in Osaka, they
  used their monopoly power and the threat of going elsewhere to obtain
  higher prices. The report recommended abolition of domain monopo-
  lies and renewed efforts to enforce regulations requiring producers to
  ship their products to Osaka, an across-the-board price cut of 20
  percent (except for rice), and reorganization of the Osaka licensed
  trade associations. It appears that the report was never submitted to
  Edo but was overtaken by the progress of the Tempo reforms.
  The reforms
  Mizuno Echizen-no-kami Tadakuni, the prime mover of the Tempo
  reforms, had become governor of Osaka Castle (Osaka jodai) in 1825,
  soon after the more-or-less successful protests by thousands of Kinki
  villagers outraged at being forced to supply the Osaka market at pro-
  curement prices to compensate, as they thought, for the increasing
  evasion of the system elsewhere. Though Mizuno's two-year term in
  Osaka was relatively quiet, his first years as senior councilor were
  marked by harvest failures, rising prices, financial crisis, and wide-
  spread revolts against the system of government as a whole and espe-
  cially its economic administration.
  Following disastrous harvests, the price of rice in 1836 rose to about
  double the average of the previous decade and rose by a further 50
  percent the next year. But although the rice price subsided over the
  following three or four years, the prices of other commodities re-
  mained high, and in 1840-1 the ratio between the prices paid by the
  bakufu and its retainers for their purchases as against the price of rice,
  in which they received a good part of their income, was the highest
  since the 1770s. At the root of this inflation was the breakdown of
  trade and price controls in the face of the development of "free"
  markets, but the situation was aggravated by continuing budget defi-
  cits and large issues of currency. If we neglect silver bars (chogin,
  mameitagin) which had gone out of general use by this time, the
  amount of currency in circulation had increased by about 75 percent in
  the twenty years before 1838 and was still rising. From 1839 to 1841
  new issues of currency, mainly silver quarter-ryo pieces (ichibugin),
  totaled close to two million ryo, and the gold coinage had been debased
  to the extent that it was worth only half as much as the better-quality
  coins of the Keicho, Kyoho, and Bunsei eras. At the same time, with
  more and more people earning cash incomes by handicrafts and buy-
  ing more of their requirements for cash, there was a shortage of the
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
  593
  copper currency used for these transactions, and so between 1835 and
  1841 the bakufu issued new copper coins to the value of about 580,000
  ryo. The bakufu seems to have rather overestimated the demand for
  these coins, because by 1842 their value had fallen further than was
  thought desirable.
  With an increase of about 80 percent in the money supply between
  1816 and 1841, substantial inflation could be expected. Although
  prices rose steeply in famine years, the underlying rise in prices in Edo
  over the same period was of the order of 50 to 60 percent, or a rather
  modest 2 percent a year. It seems clear that as well as a growing
  transaction demand for cash, there was also a considerable rise in the
  output of goods over the period. That inflation in Edo was relatively
  modest suggests that most of the increase in currency flowed to the
  developing rural areas where it was most needed and also that the fall
  in the flow of goods to Edo through Osaka was largely compensated
  for by shipments direct from the producing districts in the Kanto
  hinterland and elsewhere. Nevertheless, deficit financing turned what
  had until about 1820 been a falling price trend into a rising one.
  Although the national output was growing, the bakufu's regular tax
  income was falling. It had, in fact, been on a declining trend since the
  mid-eighteenth century. Tax receipts in the famine year of 1836 were
  the lowest for 125 years, but even when harvests improved, attempts
  to increase tax revenue met with determined resistance.
  The bakufu's first reaction, like that of the domain governments
  faced with similar problems, was to reduce its own expenditures,
  suppress competing demands for goods, and try to get more resources
  back into basic agriculture which was its main source of tax income.
  The large Kaga domain had embarked on this traditional course as
  early as 1837 and had anticipated most of the measures taken by the
  bakufu in the early stages of the Tempo reforms. Faced with financial
  crisis, the Kaga domain "borrowed" from its samurai by withholding
  part of their salaries, declared a moratorium on its loans to samurai,
  introduced price control, imposed export taxes, sent farmers back to
  their villages, and exhorted villagers to frugality while trying to pre-
  vent them from leaving agriculture for other occupations. In an order
  of 1844 the domain noted that higher wages in weaving were produc-
  ing a shortage of farm laborers. Village officials should not lightly give
  permission to engage in industrial employment, and farmers must not
  pay more than officially determined wage rates - which were gradu-
  ated from 7,500 mm of copper cash (about 1.15 ryo) per year for a first-
  class male farmhand down to 2,000 mm for a third-class female
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  594 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  servant - and additional seasonal payments must not exceed the cus-
  tomary level.'7 Even though board and lodging were provided, they
  were at extremely low standards. Farm laboring was a hard life for
  little reward, and it is hardly surprising that few workers were dis-
  posed to accept it if other work were available at even slightly higher
  wages.
  Mizuno himself was trying to implement similar measures in his
  own domain of Hamamatsu, with very limited success. Nevertheless,
  such attempts at turning the clock back seem to have been de rigueur
  for any major reform.
  The bakufu announced its reforms in 1841 on the shogun's birth-
  day. A survey of the extent of nonagricultural activity in its villages
  confinned that there had been a substantial drift from agriculture, and
  an order was promptly issued forbidding villagers to engage in
  nonagricultural work or to seek such work outside the village. The ban
  was repeated the next year - and the year after and again in 1845 -
  but all attempts to keep the people down on the farm seem to have
  been ineffective.
  Both the bakufu and the domains attributed the problems of agri-
  culture to a decline in peasant morality leading to neglect of their
  proper, but unprofitable, work in the fields for more rewarding occu-
  pations. Peasants are not what they were, complained a bakufu or-
  der. Instead of wearing coarse clothing and tying their hair with
  straws, they were wearing cotton garments and using hair oil and
  fancy hair ties. And in wet weather, instead of straw capes they were
  using raincoats and umbrellas! Peasants would do almost anything to
  get out of farming, even to the extent of having themeselves disinher-
  ited and struck off the village register so that they would be free to
  leave for more profitable employment elsewhere.18 Such action could
  hardly have been taken lightly and indicates the desperation of some
  of the village population.
  Government expenditure, the lifeblood of the Edo merchant com-
  munity, was slashed; bans were placed on luxuries and amusements;
  and officials were appointed to police the bans throughout the city.
  Within a month Echigoya (modern Mitsukoshi Department Store)
  reported a drop in sales of 5,830 ryo from the previous month,
  Daimaru was down by 2,800 ryo, and Shirokiya (modern Tokyu De-
  partment Store) by 3,670 ryo. Although all three survived, and indeed
  survive to this day, this indicated a major business recession.
  17 Oda Kichinojo, ed.,Kaga hannoseishiko(Tokyo: Tokoshoin, 1929), pp. 578-9.
  18 Tokugaum kinreiko, 1st ser., vol. 5, p. 192.
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
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  Even so, prices did not fall far enough for the bakufu, and after a
  survey of the marketing system based on reports from the wholesale
  trade associations (ton'ya nakama), it became clear that these organiza-
  tions were no longer effective channels for bringing goods into Edo.
  Other channels had been developing for some time, bringing in goods
  from the rapidly growing production of Edo's own hinterland in the
  Kanto region. The bakufu itself favored this growth in the region in
  which it could best exercise direct control. By 1821, shipments of soy
  sauce from Osaka had been replaced by the products of Noda and other
  parts of the Kanto which were cheaper and whose stronger flavor ap-
  pealed to Edo tastes. The wholesalers' associations whose business was
  bound up with the Osaka trade invoked their monopoly privileges in an
  effort to obstruct the marketing of Kanto products in Edo. But by the
  1840s Kanto producers had captured 40 percent of the Edo market for
  cottonseed oil, and silk textiles from Ashikaga, Kiryu, and elsewhere in
  Kanto were selling in substantial quantities through Edo merchants
  who set up business in opposition to the chartered associations. Cotton
  cloth, tea, and other products of the Kanto region were entering the
  Edo market in increasing quantities. '9
  With supplies via the Osaka route dwindling, to give preference to
  Osaka goods in the Edo market meant restricting these growing sup-
  plies from Kanto and elsewhere. Moreover, the Kanto region was
  close to Edo, safe from blockade by sea, and because it was largely in
  the control of the bakufu either directly or through its retainers and
  branches, it was a potential base for a bakufu system of monopoly
  procurement along the lines of those so successfully operated by a
  number of domains. With such considerations in mind, the bakufu
  moved early in 1842 to withdraw its support from the Osaka route and
  to abolish the monopoly privileges of the chartered trade associations
  (kabunakama), beginning with those most closely involved in that
  trade. Anticipating, though not fully, the confusion likely to follow
  such a radical departure, the bakufu set up an office under one of the
  Edo city magistrates, but staffed by civilians, to observe and report on
  the operation of the new system and to control abuses.
  In the spring of 1842 the order to dissolve such trade associations
  was extended to the domains. By no means all domains complied, and
  those that did appear to have done so for their own reasons. The Owari
  (Nagoya) domain, for example, held by one of the senior branches of
  the Tokugawa family, complied on paper but maintained existing
  19 See Hayashi Reiko, "Bakumatsu ishin-ki ni okeru Kanto no shohin ryutsu," Chihoshi kenkyu
  20 (April 1971): 28-41.
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  controls on a number of trades. The monopoly privileges of its li-
  censed cotton cloth dealers who handled one of the domain's major
  exports were abolished but were replaced by a marketing board nomi-
  nally run by the domain itself but with former licensed dealers (ton'ya)
  involved in its operation. Some domains, like Aizu and Satsuma, ig-
  nored the order, and the Suwa domain actually licensed a new associa-
  tion of traders to control the marketing of its textiles.20
  The monopoly marketing boards by which the domains profited
  from the growth of industry and trade had irked the bakufu for some
  time, as they were the main mechanism by which the domains were
  increasing their financial strength relative to that of the bakufu, which
  was unable to benefit in the same way. At the end of 1842, therefore, it
  denied domain claims that their monopoly marketing boards were
  official business and insisted that their products be marketed freely.
  The response was scarcely encouraging. With agricultural tax income
  falling and expenses mounting, profits from the marketing boards
  were essential to keep the domains reasonably solvent. The Matsu-
  shiro domain in Shinano, forced for internal reasons to abandon its
  control of the silk cloth market at this time, found itself heavily in debt
  within eight years.21 Suspecting, with some reason, that the bakufu
  was considering establishing its own monopoly trading system or even
  moving toward some form of nationwide control of commerce, do-
  mains like Choshu and Satsuma strengthened their own systems rather
  than relinquishing them.
  By early 1843 the thrust of the reform was clearly toward shifting
  the balance of economic power in favor of the bakufu. At the begin-
  ning of the year the bakufu carried out a survey of issues of hansatsu
  (domain notes) but stopped short of banning them. Four months later
  it tried to restrict the domains' activities by forbidding auctions of
  goods in ports outside its own territory.
  Meanwhile, the bakufu was attempting to reduce both its own ex-
  penses and the domains' profits by ordering a general 20 percent price
  cut in Edo and Osaka, accompanied by cuts in wages and rents. In
  doing so, it anticipated that the reductions would be passed back to
  the suppliers, especially the domain marketing boards, which would
  in turn be forced to lower the prices paid to local suppliers and eventu-
  20 See Tsuda Hideo, Hoken shakai kaitai kalei kenkyujosetsu (Tokyo: Hanawa shobo, 1970), pp.
  222-3.
  21 Yoshinaga Akira, "Han sembai seido no kiban to kozo: Matsushirohan sembutsu kaisho
  shihd o megutte," in Furushima Toshio, ed., Nihon kdzaishi taikei (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku
  shuppankai, 1965), vol. 4, pp. 225-62.
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
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  ally to cut the rates paid to the producers themselves. This would have
  the added advantage of reducing the relative attractiveness, however
  small, of industry and trade over agriculture. Had there been no out-
  lets for goods other than the major bakufu cities, this would not have
  been an unreasonable expectation. In fact, however, a substantial de-
  mand had developed in many other parts of the country, and as long as
  sales could be made there, the domains and rural businessmen were
  not prepared to cut their margins. Payments to spinners, weavers, and
  other producers, however, had never been high, and their real in-
  comes had been reduced by inflation. To have reduced them further
  would certainly have provoked resistance and forced more destitute
  villagers to move to the cities in search of a livelihood. Thus the supply
  price of goods did not fall as expected, and Osaka's wholesale prices
  fluctuated around a level 36 percent above the average of the 1830s.
  The price controls were strictly policed under the direction of the
  Edo city magistrate and financial comptroller Torii Yozo, Mizuno's
  right-hand man and a remarkably capable and hardworking official who
  for those very reasons was generally detested. The result was a substan-
  tial diversion of goods from Edo to other markets almost certainly
  accompanied by some fall in production. Bakufu officials attributed
  shortages in Edo to the machinations of unscrupulous merchants, but
  given the extent to which Japan had by then become a commercialized
  society, they were a natural consequence of its price control policy.
  Like other governments, the bakufu seems to have been better at
  producing recessions than encouraging development. Within six
  months of the price control order, deteriorating conditions in the
  countryside were forcing more people out of the villages and exacer-
  bating the problem of destitute itinerants in Edo. At the end of 1842,
  numbers of these were rounded up and either sent back to their
  villages or put to work in labor camps. This was followed by a
  general order to all those in Edo without authorization to return to
  their villages and their proper agricultural occupations. At this time
  Ninomiya Sontoku and Ohara Yugaku were active in reconstructing
  Kanto villages on a model in some respects analogous to the modern
  agricultural cooperative, based on the concept that if farmers were no
  longer willing to work for their lord, they might still be persuaded
  that they should work for the good of the village community. This
  idea, considered novel at the time, achieved only modest success, but
  it became the prototype for an important element in the organization
  of modern Japanese society.
  By holding down interest rates in its territory, the bakufu had
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  598 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  hoped to lighten the burden of debt carried by its retainers. Its effect
  was, however, to dry up the sources of finance on which they had
  become dependent, making their financial situation more difficult
  than ever. In the spring of 1843, therefore, the bakufu took steps to
  improve their situation and to keep both its retainers and their credi-
  tors afloat.
  The bakufu itself had made substantial loans to its fief-holding
  retainers through its Bakuro-cho finance office. Seeing little chance of
  repayment, the bakufu wrote off half the amount outstanding, or some
  200,000 to 250,000 ryd, and declared the remainder repayable in easy
  installments free of interest. Retainers who received their salaries in
  rice were in the habit of borrowing from their financial agents
  (fudasashi). Some were in debt for large amounts accumulated over
  generations. To help them, the bakufu worked out an arrangement by
  which it would lend to its retainers on very favorable terms through
  the Saruya-cho finance office on condition that the funds be used to
  repay their debts to the fudasashi. The fudasashi for their part would
  follow the example of the bakufu and relieve the financial burdens of
  their smaller debtors by remitting or lowering interest and arranging
  for the repayment of capital in small installments. The bakufu pointed
  out that compared with previous repudiations, this was generous treat-
  ment. Before this arrangement was implemented, however, Mizuno
  was dismissed, and his successor seems to have insisted that all
  amounts owing to the fudasashi be repaid over twenty years free of
  interest, although the details are unclear. Coming only five years after
  the fudasashi had been ordered to contribute 100,000 ryd toward re-
  building part of Edo Castle, it was a serious blow, and a number
  temporarily closed their doors.22
  The Mizuno administration seems to have believed that it could
  finance these rescue operations and put its own finances on a sounder
  basis by a number of means. As a short-term measure, a forced loan
  (goyokiri) was imposed on the merchant communities of Osaka, Sakai,
  Hyogo, and Nishinomiya. Such loans had been raised from time to
  time, usually to finance rice price support operations. The leading
  merchants, mainly bankers, were required to lend to the government
  roughly in proportion to their standing in the business community, for
  periods of up to twenty years at low rates of interest, very much as
  Japan's banking system is required to take up government bonds
  today. The operation of 1843, however, was on a much larger scale
  than were any of its predecessors. The original target was to raise
  22 Koda Shigetomo, Nihon keizaishi kenkyu (Tokyo: Ookayama shoten, 1928) pp. 76-83.
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  TEMPO REFORMS 
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  about 2.25 million ryo at 2.5 percent repayable over twenty years.
  Given the lower risk factor, this rate of interest compared favorably
  with the return on loans to domains. The amount actually taken up
  was about 1.15 million ryo, but even at that it was about twice as much
  as had ever been raised before. Beyond the financing of the Bakuro-
  cho scheme, which was said to require not more than 250,000 ryo, no
  clear reason was given for raising so large a sum, but Mizuno seems to
  have had in mind some other operation that would require a large
  amount of capital.2*
  Mizuno was aware of the work of the scholar Sato Shin'en and is
  said to have commissioned one of his best-known works, Fukkoho
  gaigen.2* In this and other writings Sato recommended a state mo-
  nopoly trading system on a national scale, decisively transferring the
  control of production and the profits of marketing from the domains
  to the bakufu.
  Implementation of some such scheme within the bakufu's own terri-
  tory was certainly a possibility, and the Kanto region had developed to
  the point that it could provide a good base. Even before the Osaka loan
  was finalized, the bakufu announced that it proposed to consolidate its
  territories by resuming under its direct control all land within a radius
  of about twenty-five miles of Edo and within about twelve and a half
  miles of Osaka. Those whose territory was resumed would be compen-
  sated with comparable lands elsewhere. One reason for this proposal
  was the needs of national defense, but another was the need of the
  bakufu for a strong economic base from which it could compete with
  the domains and perhaps eventually extend its economic control
  throughout the country.
  Opposition to the plan was widespread among the domains and,
  combined with opposition from the hatamoto who would have been
  most affected, was sufficient to bring about Mizuno's dismissal. Plans
  for direct economic control at the national level were abandoned, and
  reclamation work in Kanto, which if successful would have added
  considerably to the bakufu's revenue, was stopped. Mizuno's succes-
  sor, Doi Oi-no-kami Toshitsura, professed himself unsure of the pur-
  pose of the large Osaka loan and suggested that in the circumstances,
  the money might be returned! Even when Mizuno returned to the
  government for a few months the following year, plans for, as it were,
  nationalizing the domains' trading monopolies were not revived.
  Nevertheless, the Tempo reforms brought about changes that were
  23 Ibid., pp. 437-8.
  24 Sato Nobuhiro (Shin'en), Fukkoho gaigen, in Takimoto Seiichi, ed., Nikon keizai taiten
  (Tokyo: Shishi shuppansha and Keimeisha, 1928), vol. 19.
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  6OO 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  irreversible. They made it clear that the process by which economic
  power was shifting away from the bakufu could not continue without
  sweeping changes. A realistic program of national defense required the
  mobilization of resources on a national scale, but the domains were
  clearly not prepared to surrender their economic powers to the
  bakufu. At the same time, in dismantling the outworn system of con-
  trol through the Osaka trade route, the bakufu cleared the way for
  further changes. These changes were beyond the bakufu's power, but
  its plans were taken over and largely implemented by the Restoration
  government some twenty-five years later.
  THE OPENING OF FOREIGN TRADE
  In the course of the Tempo reforms, the bakufu abandoned attempts
  to control the economy through the Osaka-Edo marketing system. In
  its place it had hoped to institute a new system that would give it
  control of production and commerce throughout the country, but it
  lacked the political and financial means to carry out its plans in the
  face of opposition from the domains. The plans were not, however,
  completely abandoned. Reestablishment of the wholesale traders' asso-
  ciations in 1851 did not represent a return to the pre-Tempo situation,
  but a move toward more widely based controls. The new associations
  were not intended to keep out outsiders but to bring them in. Thus
  they were granted no monopoly privileges, and membership was open
  to all bona fide traders. Instead of restricting rural traders, the bakufu
  encouraged them to join the new associations, and in 1852 member-
  ship was made compulsory. The jurisdiction of these associations did
  not extend to the domains' territories, but the new system was compre-
  hensive enough to include all traders through whom the domains sold
  their goods in the major cities, thus bringing them, nominally at least,
  under the bakufu's surveillance.
  It was into this somewhat uneasy situation that Commodore Mat-
  thew Perry arrived in 1853 with instructions to open Japan to foreign
  trade. The prospect of foreign trade and its actual opening in 1859
  dominated the economic as well as the political life of Japan until the
  Meiji Restoration and beyond. If Japan had been moving toward eco-
  nomic change in the 1840s, the opening of foreign trade ensured that
  change would be rapid and far-reaching. It produced severe inflation,
  changed production and relative prices, and focused the struggle be-
  tween the bakufu and the domains on the issue of control of foreign
  trade.
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  OPENING OF FOREIGN TRADE 
  6OI
  The effect of the deflationary measures of the Tempo era was rela-
  tively short-lived. By 1850, prices were again rising under the influ-
  ence of the bakufu's and the domains' deficits and a continuing rise in
  rural demand. It was the opening of foreign trade, however, that
  turned comparatively mild price rises into serious and accelerating
  inflation, and the question of the exchange rate was a major factor.
  In the negotiations leading up to the opening of trade, Townsend
  Harris, representing the United States, insisted that foreign currency -
  in practice Mexican silver dollars - should exchange for Japanese cur-
  rency on a weight-for-weight basis. This was the system used in trade
  with China and other parts of the East where currency, mainly silver,
  was valued by weight. Silver by weight (chdgin, mameitagin) did exist in
  Japan, and at the official rate of 60 momme to the gold ryd exchanged for
  gold at very close to the international ratio of 15.5 to 1, but by the 1850s
  it formed less than 3 percent of the Japanese currency and was no longer
  in general use.
  The Japanese currency of the 1850s consisted of gold one-ryo pieces
  and smaller-denomination gold coins and silver pieces representing
  fractions of a gold ryd. Most of these latter were silver quarter-ryo
  pieces (ichibugin), of which about 200 million had been minted since
  1837. As the Japanese negotiators pointed out to Harris, the weight
  and fineness of these subsidiary coins was immaterial, as they circu-
  lated as tokens for one-quarter of a gold ryd, irrespective of their
  intrinsic value, which was much less. If a foreigner were to be allowed
  to exchange Mexican silver dollars for Japanese token silver coinage by
  weight, a dollar would exchange for three ichibu coins, which in Japan
  respresented three-quarters of a gold ryd. Thus for 1.33 dollars the
  foreigner would be able to obtain a Japanese gold coin worth over
  three times that amount, or about 4.59 dollars. Harris's insistence on
  what he should have realized was a grossly unfair exchange not only
  complicated the negotiations but also forced the Japanese government
  to reform its currency in such a way as to make massive inflation
  inevitable.
  The first reaction of the Japanese was to remove the anomaly by
  reminting the subsidiary silver coinage. Just before the trade was due
  to start, the bakufu began minting large one-eighth ryd silver pieces,
  two of which weighed rather more than a Mexican silver dollar. At this
  rate a gold ryd would be equivalent to 4.48 Mexican dollars, very close
  to its value on the international market. Had the bakufu proceeded
  with its announced intention to remint all its subsidiary silver coinage
  in this way, it would have reduced the face value of currency in
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  6O2 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  circulation by some 14 million ryo, or about 26 percent, with deflation-
  ary results. As soon as the new coins appeared at the treaty ports,
  however, the foreign representatives protested that they were not genu-
  ine Japanese coinage in general circulation but a device to prevent
  foreign traders from making profits in the spirit of the treaties. Forced
  to withdraw the new coins, the bakufu did all it could to avoid ex-
  change at the anomalous rate specified in the treaties but, under con-
  tinuing pressure, was unable to prevent the export of up to 500,000 ryo
  of gold over the following six months. In January i860, however, the
  bakufu announced that the situation would be corrected by reminting
  the gold coinage and that in the meantime, silver ichibu would ex-
  change in Japan for gold ryo at the rate of 13.5 to 1. In April the new
  gold coins, slightly more than one-third the size of the old ones, were
  issued at the rate of three new coins for one old one. As a result, the
  total amount of currency in circulation increased almost 2.5-fold. The
  British government later apologized for the whole sorry episode, but
  the damage had been done.
  Whether the exchange anomaly introduced by the treaties was re-
  moved by reforming (regrading) the silver subsidiary coinage or by
  reforming (degrading) the gold coinage, the effect on the relationship
  between the two was the same. The effect on other price relationships,
  however, was vastly different. The former would have cut the dollar's
  purchasing power in Japan to one-third and reduced price levels in
  Japan, or at least would have prevented them from rising. The latter
  left the exchange value of the dollar intact but led to massive inflation
  and consequent changes in the distribution of wealth and income in
  Japan. Within a year the general price level had risen by over 30
  percent and by 1866 it was over four times the pretrade level.2*
  Once the exchange situation was resolved, trade grew rapidly. In
  i860, the first full year of trade, exports (in terms of Mexican dollars)
  were 4.7 million and imports 1.7 million. Exports rose to 10.6 million in
  1864 and 12.1 million in 1867; and imports, including ships, rose to 8.1
  million and 21.7 million, respectively. From the opening of trade until
  the Restoration, foreign trade resulted in an overall export surplus of
  just over 4 million. Raw silk was by far the biggest export, accounting
  for 50 to 80 percent of annual export value. The major imports were
  woolen and cotton textiles, with arms and vessels becoming important
  25 Shimbo Hiroshi, Kinsei no bukka to keizai halten: zenkogyoka shakai e no suryoleki sekkin
  (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha, 1978), p. 282.
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  OPENING OF FOREIGN TRADE 
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  (20 percent) as the Restoration approached. The prices of export prod-
  ucts rose much faster than those of items not affected by trade. The
  price of raw silk rose threefold in the first year of trade and doubled
  again over the following five years. Export demand eventually stimu-
  lated a large increase in output, but its initial effect on the Japanese silk-
  weaving industry was disastrous. In the silk-weaving center of Kiryu,
  the opening of trade produced an immediate rise in the price of first-
  grade raw silk, from 94 ryo per picul to 267 ryo per picul, and in Suwa
  the price per picul rose from 80 ryo to 200 ryo. With 30 to 50 percent of
  production being exported, the shortage of raw material for the Kyoto
  silk-weaving industry was so severe that the city magistrate anticipated
  riots and ordered a number of the richer merchants to set up soup
  kitchens for unemployed weavers.26
  Currency reform and inflation had the effect of redistributing
  wealth and income. Reform of the gold currency brought a windfall
  gain of 200 percent to those who held gold currency, mainly substan-
  tial merchants, bankers, and landowners. Inflation benefited traders,
  especially those engaged in the export trade, but brought hardship to
  those, such as laborers and lower-ranking samurai, whose incomes
  were relatively fixed. By 1865 the real wages of carpenters in Osaka
  were half of what they had been in the 1840s,27 and high prices and
  falling real incomes produced a wave of protests and riots in both rural
  and urban areas. Fuel was added to inflation by a large increase in
  bank credit. Loans by the banking system to the domain administra-
  tions between 1850 and 1867 amounted to about 21 million ryo, so
  large an amount that the value of bank credit instruments in terms of
  gold cash fell by half over the same period despite the threefold in-
  crease in the volume of gold currency.
  The effects of the opening of trade on production were far-
  reaching. Production of raw silk doubled between 1858 and 1863,
  and new silk-reeling technology spread rapidly. New devices such as
  the Wakao and zakuri reelers, some of them water powered, doubled
  output per worker and produced raw silk of better and more even
  quality. Comparable advances were made in the production and pro-
  cessing of tea. These and other industrial crops increasingly replaced
  rice and other staple food crops, despite official restrictions on con-
  verting rice land to other uses. The opening of foreign trade and the
  26 Ishii Takashi, Bakumatsu boekishi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1944), 312, 52-4,
  176-85,318.
  27 Shimbo, Kinsei no bukka to keizai flatten, p. 276. Although these particular wage data may not
  be representative, the general lag in wages was considerable.
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  expectations it generated provided an impetus for change throughout
  the country, notably in areas outside the economically advanced Kinki
  and Kanto regions, and greatly accelerated the changes in patterns of
  production and trade that had been proceeding since the beginning of
  the century.
  The opening of foreign trade precipitated a crisis in relations be-
  tween the bakufu and the domains. The bakufu's plans to impose
  national economic controls following the Tempo reforms were frus-
  trated by political and financial weakness and domain opposition. If,
  however, the bakufu could control foreign trade, it could greatly in-
  crease its revenue and acquire the resources to organize a nationwide
  system of trading under its control and thus shift the balance of power
  decisively in its favor. Because all the ports opened to foreign trade
  were in bakufu territory, this was by no means a far-fetched scenario.
  The bakufu made its first move early in i860 as foreign trade was
  beginning to get under way, by declaring that as an interim measure to
  avoid domestic shortages - such as were affecting the silk-weaving
  industry - grains, vegetable oil, vegetable wax, textiles, and raw silk
  were to be sold to bakufu-controlled bodies in Edo which would deter-
  mine quotas for export. There is clear evidence that the bakufu was
  planning a much more comprehensive control system that would have
  supplanted the domain trading corporations and in effect given it a
  monopoly of domestic as well as overseas trade.28 An indication of the
  potential gains involved can be found in an offer by the Kyoto raw silk
  dealers' association to pay 500,000 ryo a year for the right to control
  that trade. Had the bakufu succeeded in its plan, its revenue would
  have increased by up to 50 percent. Even the interim measure, how-
  ever, ran into immediate and stiff opposition from all sections of the
  raw silk export trade as well as from the domains, and when Harris
  warned that any form of control or restriction of exports would consti-
  tute a violation of the treaty, the bakufu was forced to withdraw once
  again and allow direct export sales subject to notification and an export
  permit. Permits seem to have been given freely until 1863, when the
  bakufu made another attempt to exercise control through export quo-
  tas. The result was a drastic fall in deliveries of raw silk and something
  approaching chaos in Yokohama, where Japanese silk traders whose
  quotas were restricted paid domain representatives as much as 18 ryo
  per packhorse load to include their consignments with domain silk
  against which it seems to have been more difficult to enforce the
  28 Ishii, Bakumatsu boekishi, pp. 448-67.
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  MEIJI RESTORATION 
  605
  quota system. Some resorted to hiring masterless samurai to terrorize
  the export authorities into issuing licenses. No export permits were
  processed for about four months, and by February 1864 trade was
  almost at a halt. Again the bakufu was deluged with complaints from
  traders, the foreign community, and particularly from domains against
  whose direct trade the move was ultimately directed. Faced with a
  warning from the foreign consuls that there was nothing in the treaties
  to prevent the domains opening their own ports if they wished, the
  bakufu resumed processing export permits but continued to explore
  means of enforcing a monopoly of the export trade until October, when
  the combined foreign flotilla, fresh from the bombardment of Shi-
  monoseki, entered Edo Bay with a show of strength that forced the
  bakufu to retreat once more.
  The bakufu nevertheless continued to explore the idea of a national
  marketing monopoly right up to its fall, and the question of control of
  trade was a key factor in forming the attitudes of both the bakufu and
  individual domains toward foreign relations and the movements lead-
  ing up to the Restoration.
  THE MEIJI RESTORATION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
  In the context of centuries of Japanese history, the changes following
  the Restoration appear to have been almost instantaneous and the
  restrictive apparatus of the old order to have been removed, as it were,
  at a stroke. But in fact these changes took at least ten turbulent years.
  The Restoration signaled far-reaching changes but had little immedi-
  ate impact on the economy other than to exacerbate the existing uncer-
  tainty and disruption. Nor did it solve any of the economic problems
  that had beset the bakufu in its last years. Although the new govern-
  ment appreciated the need for change, the situation was not promis-
  ing, and for a decade it moved, tentatively at first, from approaching
  the problems of the economy within the framework inherited from the
  old system toward entirely new solutions.
  One of its first problems was to resolve the struggle for economic
  control between the central government and the domains. The prob-
  lem was made more acute by the need to finance the considerable cost
  of the Restoration itself. Taking up the bakufu's abortive plans to
  establish a national system of economic control, the Meiji government
  within six months established an office (Shohoshi) for the purpose,
  operating branches (Shoho kaisho) in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hyogo.
  These were organized very much along the lines of the old domain
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  monopolies, with both commercial and financial operations entrusted
  to merchants of the major trading associations under government su-
  pervision. Just as the domains had financed their trading corporations
  by issuing paper currency, the Meiji government issued its own
  nonconvertible notes (Dajokansatsu) through these offices. The sys-
  tem failed and for reasons similar to those that had frustrated earlier
  attempts by the bakufu. Opposition from the foreign powers pre-
  vented control of foreign trade; the new paper currency was not well
  accepted; and the domains' trading organizations continued to com-
  pete with that of the central government.
  After only ten months of operation, the Shohoshi were abolished
  and replaced by the Tsuhoshi which operated through the trading
  companies {tsusho gaisha) and finance companies (kawase gaisha) estab-
  lished in eight major cities. Formed by substantial merchants and
  bankers such as the Mitsui and Ono groups under government con-
  trol, their objectives and functions were similar to those of their prede-
  cessors. Although they helped to restore some degree of order to
  Japanese commercial life, by 1872 changing circumstances had ren-
  dered them inappropriate. In preparing for reform of the currency
  from ryo to yen in 1871, the finance companies were ordered to main-
  tain a cash backing of 100 percent for their notes, a requirement that
  broke some of the participants, and when a new system of national
  banks was introduced in 1872, they either dissolved or were reorga-
  nized as national banks. Abolition of the domains as semiautonomous
  units in 1871 altered the position of the trading companies by opening
  the way to entirely new financial and economic policies that would
  supersede the idea of trade monopolies.29 After this rather unpromis-
  ing start, the first decade saw major institutional changes. In retro-
  spect these changes were essential for modern economic growth, but at
  the time they represented responses to financial necessities rather than
  a commitment to economic or social progress.
  The major preoccupation of the Meiji government was to create a
  sound fiscal base sufficient for its needs. Neither the bakufu nor a
  majority of the domains had achieved this, and the new government
  inherited not only their current fiscal deficits but also a mountain of
  accumulated debts and further debts that it had itself incurred during
  the Restoration campaigns. As we have seen, the Meiji government
  failed in its attempts to augment its income through monopoly corpora-
  tions, as some domains had done. The most pressing problem was to
  29 See Shimbo Hiroshi, Kobe keizaigaku idsho, vol. 7: Nihon kindai shin'yo seido seiritsushi ron
  (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1968).
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  MEIJI RESTORATION 
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  acquire a stable source of tax revenue, and both the predominance of
  agriculture in the economy and reluctance to arouse further opposition
  by imposing revolutionary new taxes ensured that this would take the
  form of a tax on agriculture. Experience both before and after the
  Restoration clearly indicated that however redistributed or stabilized,
  agricultural taxes could not be raised much above their existing level
  without provoking dangerous levels of resistance.
  At that rate the new government could expect at least as big a deficit
  as those of its predecessor unless it could drastically reduce some item
  of expenditure. Because some 30 percent of revenue went to pay the
  samurai's stipends, this was an obvious area for consideration. Other
  savings had been made. Roughly 20 percent of domain revenue had
  traditionally been taken by the costs of maintaining establishments in
  Edo under the system of "alternate attendance" (sankin kdtai), and this
  was no longer necessary. Thus if the yield of agricultural tax could be
  assured, irrespective of fluctuations in harvests and rice prices, and
  hereditary samurai stipends reduced or abolished, there seemed some
  hope of meeting the costs of government, even allowing for new com-
  mitments.
  Attempts to reduce the fiscal burden of samurai stipends began at
  the end of 1869 when their total was reduced from 13 million koku (1
  koku equals approximately 180 liters) to 9 million koku, and in 1871
  the total was further reduced to 4.9 million koku. With the reform of
  the land tax, any hope that samurai may have had of retaining rights to
  income from land was extinguished, and the Conscription Law of 1873
  removed their military raison d'etre. Those who had refused earlier
  inducements to surrender their entitlements were required to do so in
  return for a lump-sum payment, mainly in the form of government
  bonds redeemable by lot over thirty years beginning in the sixth year
  after issue. This was well below the samurai's expectations, and the
  Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was a forceful expression of their dissatisfac-
  tion. Over the next few years, inflation further reduced the real value
  of their compensation, and by the end of 1880 the market value of 7
  percent commutation bonds was only 60.7 percent of their face value.
  In this way the Meiji government greatly reduced its recurrent expen-
  diture for an outlay of ¥173 million in bonds and ¥730,000 in cash.
  Redemption of such a large bond issue was itself no easy matter, but
  without commutation of the samurai's stipends, the government's fi-
  nancial situation would have been hopeless. Those samurai who re-
  ceived comparatively large sums were encouraged to invest in the new
  national banks by a change in the regulations allowing the use of
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  commutation bonds as capital. Some invested in railway or other joint
  stock companies, but most were reduced to earning their own living or
  sinking into poverty.
  Reform of the agricultural tax system began in 1873 and took nearly
  six years to complete. The new tax was payable in cash on the assessed
  value of land, and the taxpayer was given title to his land. To assess
  the value of the land, the average crop was valued at the prices used to
  convert tax payments in kind into payment in cash, with some regard
  to local market conditions. From the gross value of the crop thus
  calculated were deducted allowances for seed, fertilizer, and national
  and local taxes to arrive at the value of the net product, which was
  capitalized at rates varying from 4 to 6 percent to give the assessed
  land value. The national land tax was set at 3 percent of this figure,
  and the local tax at one-third of the national tax.
  There has been some discussion as to whether the farmers' tax
  burden became heavier or lighter as a result of the change. The govern-
  ment's intention was that the total tax yield be as nearly as possible
  unchanged. Before the reform, however, many domains imposed a
  number of more-or-less minor taxes in addition to the seiso, or tax
  proper. Villages were also responsible for local works, such as the
  building and maintenance of roads and bridges, as well as for their
  own administrative expenses. Because the extent of these is unknown
  and in any case varied from village to village, a direct comparison is
  impossible, but it seems likely that the new tax as a proportion of
  output was no higher, and in most cases lighter, than the old. Because
  the incidence of the new tax was on the whole more equitable, how-
  ever, there may well have been cases of previously lightly taxed indi-
  viduals' having to pay more. Nevertheless there was a good deal of
  opposition to the new tax, and in 1877 the rate of national tax was
  reduced to 2.5 percent and the local tax to one-fifth of that rate. This
  lowered the tax burden considerably, but over the following four years
  on-farm prices of agricultural products almost doubled while the land
  tax remained the same. Although there is no indication that the vol-
  ume of agricultural production fell - it probably rose - the burden of
  the land tax as a proportion of farm output was by then well under half
  what it had been before the Restoration.
  Although the object of the land tax reform was to secure a stable
  source of revenue, its effects went far beyond that. Land became a
  capital asset that could be freely and legally sold, and with taxes fixed
  in money terms, landowners - and not overlords - received the bene-
  fits from agricultural improvements, specialization, falling transport
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  MEIJI RESTORATION 
  609
  costs, and price rises. These incentives could be expected to have
  resulted in some increase in the first half of the Meiji period, but it is
  difficult to measure. Because these benefits went to the landowners,
  rather than to the cultivating tenants, the more land that a farmer
  owned in these circumstances, the more he would benefit, and the
  result was a noticeable concentration of landholdings and an increase
  in tenancy over this period.
  Despite these drastic measures, the government was still heavily in
  deficit, and between the end of 1877 and the end of 1880 the govern-
  ment note issue rose from ¥105.8 million to ¥124.9 million, largely to
  cover the cost of suppressing the Satsuma Rebellion. Relaxation of the
  national bank regulations intended to facilitate the issue of commuta-
  tion bonds allowed an increase in bank notes over the same period
  from ¥13.4 million to ¥34.4 million. The paper currency in circula-
  tion thus rose by a third in three years, and by the beginning of 1881 it
  was circulating at a discount of 70 percent against coin.
  In the midst of its fiscal problems, the government somehow found
  the means to start building the infrastructure of communications essen-
  tial to further development. The government regarded this as a matter
  of urgency, partly for internal security reasons and partly to forestall
  foreign investors who had shown a keen interest in direct investment
  in this area. Beginning with the Tokyo-Yokohama railway financed
  by a foreign loan, 64 miles of government railways had been built by
  1877, and 2,827 miles of telegraph line had been installed by the same
  year. A semigovernment shipping company was formed in 1870 but
  failed after about a year of operation. This was followed by a mail
  steamer service using ships inherited from the bakufu and the do-
  mains, but this also failed. In 1875 the government handed over thirty
  ships free of charge to Iwasaki Yataro's Mitsubishi Company, along
  with an operating subsidy of over ¥200,000 a year. This measure too
  was prompted by internal security considerations and anxiety to elimi-
  nate foreign shipping companies, the American Pacific Mail Line and
  the British P & O Steamship Company which had captured the coastal
  trade between the treaty ports. Within a year the foreign shipping
  companies were convinced that their role was over, and further subsi-
  dies to Mitsubishi for services during the Satsuma Rebellion put it on
  the road to becoming one of Japan's largest enterprises and a key
  participant in the construction of modern industry and commerce.
  In land transport, the government-controlled system of packhorses
  based on post stations was abolished in 1871, and the business was
  opened to private enterprise. The old system of official couriers was
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  retained with little more than a change of name for the first few years,
  but a modern-style postal service between Tokyo and Osaka was inau-
  gurated in 1871. In 1872 there were still only 21 post offices, but the
  number rose to 3,224 by 1874, and in 1877 Japan joined the Universal
  Postal Union.
  In addition to providing these essential physical services, the govern-
  ment created the institutional framework for reorganizing the banking
  system which culminated in the establishment of a central bank, the
  Bank of Japan, in 1882. The old financial system, which had served
  Japan's needs well for many years, had been left in disarray by the
  events of the Restoration. The government also provided the legal
  basis for insurance and joint stock companies and encouraged their
  formation and took the initiative in founding chambers of commerce
  and trade associations. Until 1885, government activity in the field of
  infrastructure was at least as great a contribution to economic develop-
  ment as was direct government investment in and promotion of mod-
  ern industry.
  ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, 1868-1885
  National economic statistics before the 1890s are not available, and
  although estimates of national income aggregates and levels of produc-
  tion have been prepared back to 1878, the margins for error are
  great,30 and the estimating procedures involve assumptions about eco-
  nomic relationships for which little evidence exists. An attempt at
  quantitative economic analysis of this period would therefore give a
  spurious impression of accuracy.
  The best-documented and most conspicuous area of industrial devel-
  opment is the establishment of new industries based on imported
  technology. In terms of their proportion of Japan's industrial output at
  the time, their contribution was negligible, but as vehicles for introduc-
  ing new technology and modes of production, their long-run signifi-
  cance was immense.
  The Meiji government inherited a number of Western-style iron-
  works, munitions plants, and shipyards from the bakufu and some
  domains that had developed them for defense purposes.3' The Saga
  domain had built Japan's first successful reverberatory iron furnace in
  30 See Nakamura Takafusa, Nihon keizai: Sono seicho to kozo, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku
  shuppankai, 1980), pp. 12-13.
  31 See Thomas C. Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government
  Enterprise, 1868-1880 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955).
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  ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 
  6 l l
  1850 and cast iron guns in considerable numbers from 1853. Satsuma,
  Mito, and the bakufu itself followed suit. The bakufu's shipyard at
  Nagasaki built a steamer as early as 1857, and a comprehensive
  foundry, workshops, and shipyard were under construction at Yoko-
  suka at the time of the Restoration. Satsuma, Saga, and Mito had built
  steamships, and several other domains had built Western-style sailing
  vessels. Just before the Restoration, Satsuma had installed a modern
  integrated cotton-spinning and weaving plant, and Saga had modern-
  ized its Takashima coal mine with British technical assistance.
  Thus the new government found itself in possession of all Japan's
  munitions plants and shipyards. In addition it acquired about half of
  the country's forests and all the major mines, including the Sado gold
  mines, the Ikuno silver mines, the Miike and Takashima coal mines,
  the Ani and Innai copper mines, and the Kamaishi, Nakakosaka, and
  Kosaka iron mines.
  Between 1868 and 1881 the government continued to develop these
  facilities and to establish new ones. Its motives were primarily two-
  fold. First, it gave priority to developing defense industries to meet
  what it saw as a pressing foreign threat. It keenly appreciated the
  important role of military power in the negotiations connected with
  the opening and the conduct of foreign trade and was determined that
  future negotiations should be on the basis of equality. It was for such
  reasons that priority was given to munitions plants, although in retro-
  spect their contribution to the development of general engineering
  proved to be significant. Second, the foreign trade surpluses of the
  pre-Restoration period soon gave way to mounting deficits. From
  1868 to 1880 these deficits totaled ¥77 million, and the prospects for
  balanced trade were not bright. Foreign yarns and textiles, which in
  the 1870s made up half of the value of all imports, were much cheaper
  and of better quality than the Japanese products, and with the demand
  for them rising, there was an urgent need for import-replacement
  industries in Japan. Without adequate supporting infrastructure and
  services, technological background, and the means of mobilizing in-
  vestment funds on the comparatively large scale required, private Japa-
  nese investors could not be relied on to undertake such a task. Direct
  foreign involvement could not be expected in import-replacement in-
  dustries, and although it might well have been forthcoming in the
  production of bulky construction materials such as glass, bricks, and
  cement, Japanese were convinced that the superiority of foreign enter-
  prise would overwhelm local business and be difficult to control.
  It was for these reasons that the government, starting from the Sakai
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  cotton textile mill inherited from the Satsuma domain, bought two
  more two-thousand-spindle cotton spinning plants in 1878 and in-
  stalled them in Aichi and Hiroshima. The following year it bought ten
  more such plants for sale on very easy terms to private investors,
  mainly people already prominent in the traditional cotton textile indus-
  try, and financed the purchase of three more. The indifferent profit
  performance of these plants was attributed to their small scale, and so
  later spinning mills were larger. The Senju woolen mill was founded in
  1879 for the same import-replacement purposes.
  Third, the government hoped that its new nonmilitary industries
  would have a demonstration effect in familiarizing Japanese with
  factory production, training administrative and technical staff, and
  accumulating experience that could be made generally available.
  Whether or not these industries were expected to make profits is not
  clear, but in fact most ran at a heavy loss. The government was also
  active in the promotion and technical improvement of export indus-
  tries and agriculture. The Tomioka silk filature was established in
  1872 to improve technology in Japan's leading export industry, and a
  number of experimental stations and farms investigated the most
  modern overseas technology.
  It has been estimated that over ¥36.4 million was invested in gov-
  ernment enterprises between 1868 and I88I,32 and in the difficult
  fiscal circumstances of the time this was a substantial commitment. As
  we shall see, the nonmilitary enterprises were sold off in the 1880s,
  and their transfer to private hands was an important factor in the
  formation of "Meiji capitalism."
  The contribution of the new industries to production in the early
  Meiji period was, however, minimal, and agriculture and traditional
  industry continued along pre-Restoration lines. Estimation of agricul-
  tural production for this period is a serious problem, with important
  implications for our understanding of the growth process of the follow-
  ing decades. Ohkawa estimated the average annual value of agricul-
  tural production between 1878 and 1882 at ¥432 million in current
  prices.33 Nakamura, basing his arguments on a reexamination of crop
  yields and reported acreage, raised this estimate by as much as 80
  percent.34 Ohkawa later revised his estimate to give a value about
  32 Ibid., p. 69.
  33 Kazushi Ohkawa, The Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy Since 1878 (Tokyo: Kinokuniya,
  1957)-
  34 James I. Nakamura, Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan 1873-
  1922 (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1966).
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  ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 
  613
  50 percent higher in real terms than his earlier estimate. 35 The upward
  revisions were certainly in the right direction, but the question can
  hardly be said to have been settled.
  In 1874 *he government ordered a survey of physical production on
  lines similar to those carried out by the bakufu and the domains before
  the Restoration.36 It revealed that agricultural products formed 60
  percent of physical output, industrial products 30 percent, and the
  products of extractive industries (forestry, fishing, and mining) 9 per-
  cent. There is a good deal of double counting involved, as the value of
  silk textiles, for example, includes the value of the raw silk used in
  their production, which in turn includes the value of the cocoons from
  which it was reeled.
  Of the total value of crops produced, rice accounted for 63 percent,
  other food crops 23 percent, and industrial crops 12 percent. Most
  crops were cultivated to some extent in most parts of the country, but
  production was regionally specialized to the extent that for most crops,
  about one-ninth of the sixty-three prefectures produced between them
  one-third to a half of national output. Industrial output consisted
  mainly of sake and processed foods (42 percent) and yarn and textiles
  (28 percent). The value of sake produced was astonishingly large,
  more than the value of all silk and cotton textiles and three times the
  value of raw silk output. Commercial production in the economically
  advanced regions of Kinki, Shikoku, and Kanto was about three times
  as much per prefecture as in the relatively backward regions of
  Tohoku, Kyushu, and the Japan Sea coast.
  A survey of the occupational distribution of households in the same
  year listed 77 percent as "agricultural," with only 3.7 percent (mostly
  carpenters) as "industrial," 6.7 percent as "commercial," and 9 per-
  cent as "miscellaneous, servants, and employees." Clearly a large pro-
  portion of handicraft production and trade was the work of households
  listed as "agricultural."
  A survey of nongovernment "factories" in 1884 showed that of
  1,981 establishments, 1,237 were in rural villages. Over a third of all
  "factories" had no more than five workers, and only 176 of them
  employed more than fifty. Only 72 were steam powered; 47 percent
  were water powered; and the rest were operated entirely by hand. By
  industry, textiles accounted for 61 percent, ceramics for 12 percent,
  35 Okawa Kazushi, ed., Choki keizai tokei, vol. 1: Kokumin thotoku (Tokyo: Tdyo keizai
  shimposha, 1974).
  36 This and the following paragraph are based on Yamaguchi Kazuo, Meiji zenki keizai no
  btmseki (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1956), pp. 1-73.
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  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  food processing for 9 percent, and metalworking industries for 8
  percent. 37
  The outlines that emerge from these surveys are similar to our
  impressions of Japanese economic life in the 1850s and 1860s. Ad-
  vances in production of raw silk and tea in response to export de-
  mand, some diffusion of indigenous technology, greater specializa-
  tion, and recovery from the disruption surrounding the Restoration
  probably raised the real value of farm output above the levels of the
  early 1860s. Consumption of cotton textiles rose faster than imports,
  indicating both growth in the domestic industry and some rise in
  standards of living. Insufficient though the evidence is, however,
  there are no signs of drastic change or of a sudden spurt in Japanese
  economic activity.
  THE TRANSITION AND ITS NATURE
  By 1880 it was clear that inflation was not only a serious fiscal problem
  but was also hampering economic development. The adverse balance
  of payments had led to a lossyof ¥60 million to ¥70 million of specie,
  and because silver was depreciating abroad faster than in Japan, most
  of this was in the form of gold. Japan's reserves of specie had fallen so
  low that they provided only 4.5 percent backing for the note issue.
  When Matsukata Masayoshi became minister of finance in 1881, he
  took on the task, begun by Okuma, of reducing the volume of paper
  currency in circulation and restoring its parity with specie. Matsukata
  later recalled the situation as follows:
  At that time [1880] we fell into a condition which filled all classes of the
  country with anxiety. The real income of the government was reduced by
  nearly one-half. Among the people, those who lived on interest from govern-
  ment bonds, pensions, and other fixed incomes were suddenly reduced to
  dire straits. Bonds dropped sharply while commodity prices, especially the
  price of rice, rose to new heights. The land tax was in reality sharply
  reduced, while the value of land appreciated greatly. The farmers, who were
  the only class to profit from these circumstances, took on luxurious habits,
  causing a great increase in the consumption of luxury goods. . . . Conse-
  quently imports from foreign countries were increased and the nation's
  specie supply further depleted. Merchants, dazzled by the extreme fluctua-
  tions in prices, all aimed at making huge speculative profits and gave no
  heed to productive undertakings. As a result, interest rates were so high
  that no one could plan an industrial undertaking that required any consider-
  able capital. 38
  37 Ibid., Table 17 facing p. 104. 
  38 Quoted from Smith, Political Change, pp. 96-7.
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  TRANSITION AND ITS NATURE 
  615
  By drastic retrenchment, new taxes, and skillful financial manage-
  ment helped by what seems to have been a fortuitous cyclical down-
  turn in business conditions,39 Matsukata's measures reduced the note
  issue from ¥159.4 million in 1881 to ¥118.5 million by 1885, slightly
  below the 1877 level. Specie backing rose to 35.7 percent, and the
  value of paper currency returned very nearly to par. The process
  produced a severe recession that reversed many of the effects of the
  inflationary boom, transferring resources back to the government, the
  banking system, and stronger and more competitive businesses, espe-
  cially those with government connections who ultimately benefited
  from the sale of government enterprises forced by financial stringency.
  The growth of the traditional economy was checked as deflation
  helped turn resources toward the sectors where they would ultimately
  be most productively employed. Whether intentionally or not, the
  Matsukata deflation established the strategy of giving priority to the
  modern sector which eventually proved successful in its own terms,
  although inevitably at some cost to the average Japanese both at the
  time and for many decades later.
  But financial management, however skillful, cannot by itself in-
  crease the availability of real resources for development. Growth in
  production no doubt provided some, but what evidence we have sug-
  gests that this growth was not nearly as fast as was once thought. The
  economic transition of the Meiji period thus required some realloca-
  tion of existing resources, and the changes that occurred between the
  Restoration and the end of the Matsukata deflation in fact resulted in
  the redistribution of both income and wealth.
  The commutation of samurai stipends effected a substantial redistri-
  bution of income. Before the Restoration, samurai incomes in terms of
  rice had totaled about nine million koku. After allowing for the cost of
  providing the services that they had performed and of providing for
  their basic consumption needs, commutation converted income to capi-
  tal to the value of some three milhon koku a year, enough to cover over
  half of the total investment in the early Meiji period. Reform of the
  land tax and the subsequent sequence of inflation and deflation tended
  to concentrate income in the hands of those rural landowners and
  businessmen who were likely to invest it.
  The monetary changes of the Restoration, particularly the abolition
  of the silver credit unit, resulted in a large transfer of assets away from
  39 Teranishi Shigeo, "Matsukata defure no makuro keizaigakuteki bunseki," Gendai keizai 47
  (Spring 1982): 78-92.
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  6l6 
  ECONOMIC CHANGE
  those who held their assets in that form, mainly conservative bankers
  and wholesalers closely associated with the old economic order. In the
  post-Restoration settlement of the bakufu's and the domains' debts,
  their creditors were forced to write off an estimated ¥47 million, thus
  transferring assets from the traditional banking system to the govern-
  ment. In the process of redeeming domain paper currency (hansatsu),
  compensation was only about a third of their face value, inflicting
  heavy losses on the rural population who held them. Most of these
  changes tended to transfer income and wealth from consumers to
  potential investors.*0
  One of the most interesting questions that arises from a study of the
  Japanese economy in the nineteenth century is that of the relationship
  between the pre-Restoration economy and the transition to modern
  economic growth. A number of studies have tried to find features and
  trends in the pre-Restoration economy that might be considered "pre-
  conditions" of modern development. In fact these are not very evi-
  dent. Levels of income per head were on the high side for a preindus-
  trial economy, but they were far below the initial levels in any other
  country that achieved modern economic growth in the nineteenth
  century. Moreover, Nakamura's thesis that the Japanese growth rate
  at this time was not particularly high implies that Japan's success
  depended significantly and perhaps critically on the ability of the Meiji
  government and its supporters to restrict consumption in the interests
  of industrial and military investment. Indeed, consumption over the
  whole period up to 1945 appears so low and so weakly correlated with
  national income as to be difficult to reconcile with the usual experience
  in a free economy.
  There has been almost a surfeit of discussion and controversy
  among Japanese scholars about the nature of Japanese capitalism and
  the workings of the Japanese economic system, but it has not been
  widely reflected in Western scholarship, and possibly for good reason.
  To what extent, however, are we justified in analyzing Japan's early
  economic growth as though it had taken place in the context of a free-
  market economy? As we have seen, until the 1870s at least, it was very
  far from that. Byron Marshall argued that the ethical foundations of
  classical free-enterprise utilitarianism - faith in the "invisible hand"
  and the philosophy of laissez faire - were unacceptable in prewar Ja-
  40 E. S. Crawcour, "Nihon keizai iko no arikata: Kinsei kara kindai e," in Shimbo Hiroshi and
  Yasuba Yasukichi, eds., Kindai ikoki no Nihon keizai (Suryo keizaishi ronshu, Vol. 2; Tokyo:
  Nihon keizai shimbunsha, 1979), pp. 15-28.
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  TRANSITION AND ITS NATURE 
  617
  pan and that business activity was rationalized in terms of service to
  the community and the state.41
  Although traditional economic activity, and the small-business sec-
  tor that succeeded it, became increasingly free and competitive, Japa-
  nese governments have, in the areas that they considered most impor-
  tant, generally put more faith in manipulation than in free competition
  and the market mechanism. This chapter has suggested that the heri-
  tage of manipulation may have contributed as much to Japan's eco-
  nomic development as did the heritage of individual enterprise. As a
  comparative late developer, Japan was able to take advantage not only
  of advanced industrial technology but also of advanced techniques of
  manipulation. Whether the latter should be counted among the "ad-
  vantages of backwardness" is an interesting question and one that
  should exercise the minds of all who study the modern development of
  Japan.
  41 Byron K. Marshall, Capitalism and Nationalism in Pre-war Japan: The Ideology of the Business
  Elite, 1868-1941 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967).
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  CHAPTER 10
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  The overthrow of the Tokugawa in 1867-68 carried implications of
  important changes in the political institutions of Japan, as well as in the
  location of power. Yet when Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki) resigned as
  shogun in November 1867, this did not seem by any means inevitable.
  He might well have been succeeded, so contemporaries believed, by
  some kind of baronial council, in which he would still hold a preponder-
  ant place, thereby putting the authority of the shogun into the hands of
  a group of great lords, of whom he would be one. The palace coup d'6tat
  of January 3, 1868, engineered by Satsuma and Choshu, ended that
  prospect, at least in the sense of ensuring that the Tokugawa would be
  excluded from any successor regime to which those domains belonged.
  There followed some months of civil war, which confirmed and ex-
  tended Japan's political polarization, ensuring that all the lords and
  most of their retainers had to commit themselves to one side or the
  other. After this there was no going back. Because the Tokugawa had
  been defeated and there had emerged no single victorious feudal lord
  who could aspire to the office of shogun - Satsuma came closest - the
  country's new rulers had then to work out an alternative framework
  through which authority could be exercised. Japanese tradition and
  recent history ensured that it must focus on the emperor, but devising
  institutions appropriate to it was to take a whole generation, that is,
  until the promulgation of the constitution in 1889 and the associated
  regulations concerning central and local government.
  There are two contexts within which these events can be examined.
  One is that of modernization and the pursuit of national strength. The
  men who came to power in 1868, like the politics that brought them to
  it, had been deeply influenced by an awareness of Japan's weakness in
  the face of the Western threat. One important motive for the reforms
  they undertook was the desire to evolve ways of meeting that threat
  and averting the danger of a total Japanese submission to imperialism.
  Politically, this translated into a search for strong government and
  national unity. Both strength and unity involved the West, though not
  618
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS 
  619
  necessarily in the same way. Whereas unity depended in some degree
  on Japaneseness, that is, on the maintenance of certain traditional
  attitudes and the institutions embodying them, the strength of govern-
  ment required elements of Western technology, like modern weapons
  and communications. To some it seemed that it might be the more
  readily ensured by adopting Western institutional models as well.
  Military organization was a case in point. Laws and bureaucratic struc-
  ture were others. Moreover, Western models had a measure of propa-
  ganda and diplomatic value, insofar as their adoption might persuade
  foreigners of Japan's right to the label "civilized," and hence to their
  respect. There was here a question of direct political significance,
  because the tension - or the choice - between tradition and moder-
  nity aroused powerful emotions. Historians of Meiji political institu-
  tions must confront it when they consider, as they must, the nature
  and extent of foreign influences on Japanese life.
  It is also necessary to take a view on the subject of political typology.
  If one regards the Meiji Restoration as initiating a process by which
  state institutions were adjusted to underlying shifts in the distribution
  of wealth and social standing, it is possible to characterize what fol-
  lowed it in two different ways. The first is to identify the Western
  experience as the norm: to stipulate that it was one in which the
  development of capitalism was accompanied by an extension of politi-
  cal rights to a larger proportion of the population, usually through an
  elected parliament; then to measure Japan's subsequent achievements
  in terms of how fully and how quickly they approximated those of
  Western democratic societies. Many Meiji politicians tended to take
  this line, sometimes in criticism, sometimes in praise of what was
  done. So have some later historians, both Japanese and Western. Start-
  ing from quite different assumptions, as Japanese Marxists do, one
  can treat Meiji institutions as having been both objectionable and
  differently motivated. The argument, briefly stated, is that the emer-
  gence of capitalism in Japan - there is some disagreement about dat-
  ing the phenomenon - brought an inevitable movement toward a bour-
  geois revolution, such as had been manifested in Europe under similar
  circumstances, but that the Meiji Restoration provided a means by
  which the movement was halted, although powerful elements of feudal-
  ism still survived. This left Japan at a stage labeled Meiji "absolutism"
  (zettaishugi), defined as one in which political groups associated with
  the emperor and the military were able to achieve a balance between
  the feudal landowners and the bourgeoisie, playing off one against the
  other and thereby securing absolute power for themselves. This formu-
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  62O 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  lation is central to the Marxist critique of modern Japanese society, as
  well as to its explanation of the nature of Japanese imperialism and the
  origins of World War II.
  The two contexts, which can for convenience be described as those
  of modernization and democracy, are sometimes connected through
  the question of Japan's relationship with the West. One can illustrate
  this with reference to German influence on Meiji political institutions,
  especially on the constitution of 1889. This influence can be explained
  in two distinct ways. One can attribute it to a basic similarity in the
  social structure and political development of the two countries, which
  brought the Meiji leadership to recognize that German problems and
  German solutions - rather than British or American problems and
  solutions - were relevant to Japan. Alternatively, one can argue that
  the similarity is in the situation rather than in the societies: Japan, like
  Germany, as a "late developer" in the catching-up phase, found au-
  thoritarian government a more effective framework for modernization
  than democracy was. Put in this way, the problem clearly extends
  beyond the bounds of a discussion of political institutions, narrowly
  defined. Nor can an answer to it be wholly restricted to the Meiji
  period.
  INITIAL DECISIONS
  Japan's political tradition was not exclusively feudal. In the seventh
  and eighth centuries there had come into existence a form of govern-
  ment, modeled on that of China, that asserted a claim to rule the whole
  of Japan through a hierarchy of appointed officials. It is true that
  imperial power was always less than imperial pretensions; but when
  the emperor was eventually reduced to a merely ceremonial role, first
  by the reassertion of aristocratic privilege under the Fujiwara and then
  by the rise of de facto feudal rule under successive houses of shogun,
  he remained the nominal head of the governmental structure, largely
  because it was more convenient to use him than to find another source
  of legitimacy. Accordingly, Japan's political institutions remained no-
  tionally monarchical and autocratic, like those of medieval Europe;
  the shogun closely controlled the court but acted in the emperor's
  name. This tradition was reinforced during the Tokugawa period by
  two developments. The first was the spread of a knowledge of Confu-
  cian philosophy within the feudal class, tending to increase the bureau-
  cratic element in Japanese feudalism and to create a wider awareness
  of the differences between the Chinese and Japanese imperial systems.
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  INITIAL DECISIONS 
  621
  The second was a resurgence of Shinto ideas, carrying with it a new
  emphasis on the emperor's divine descent.
  Thus those who sought to replace feudal government (the bakufu)
  did not have to look outside Japan to find an instrument ready for
  their purpose. In all the disputes that followed the opening of the
  ports, men turned to the emperor for validation of their actions,
  thereby giving the court a new contemporary importance.1 It became
  clear that any regime succeeding the Tokugawa would have to act in
  the emperor's name, as the shogun had always done. Moreover, as
  criticism of the Tokugawa shaded into criticism of the system - on the
  grounds that it promoted disunity and deprived Japan of effective
  leadership against the West - the various alternatives that were pro-
  pounded all appealed in some way to the emperor's authority. Some,
  put forward by samurai activists of the early 1860s, envisaged an
  increase in the actual wealth and influence of the court within a con-
  tinuing feudalism, so as to afford opportunities for the advancement of
  those whose low feudal status - and illegal actions - denied it to them
  as things stood. Yet others cherished ambitions of a return to the
  prefeudal ideal, when the emperor's government had been the govern-
  ment of Japan.
  What gave a degree of realism to the last of these was evidence of a
  possible stalemate in the struggle among competing feudal alliances.
  In the closing months of 1867 it seemed by no means certain that the
  various opponents of the Tokugawa could be held together long
  enough to overthrow the bakufu. In fact, Iwakura Tomomi and
  Okubo Toshimichi, the one a court noble, the other a Satsuma samu-
  rai, who organized the final stages of the Restoration movement,
  found it necessary to bring into existence for that purpose a coalition
  of feudal lords, whose political objectives were in many respects di-
  verse. It was Iwakura who drew up a draft of a new political structure
  for Japan, the first that can be attributed to those who were to have a
  central part in the formation of the early Meiji government.2 It set out
  the ultimate desideratum as being "to make the sixty-odd provinces of
  the country into a single imperial stronghold and so ensure the peo-
  ple's unity." Iwakura recognized, however, that this would require an
  independent military force at the disposal of the central authority,
  which the court could not provide or command. He therefore compro-
  1 I have discussed these topics at some length in chaps. 12 and 13 of The Meiji Restoration
  (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972).
  2 The Japanese text, dated 1867, third month, is printed in Iwakura Tomomi kankei monjo, 8
  vols. (Tokyo: Nihon shiseki kyokai, 1927-35), vol. 1, pp. 288-300.
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  622 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  mised by putting the proposals in a feudal framework. The daimyo
  were to retain their lands but be subordinated to the court through a
  supervisory level of regional officials, "men of talent appointed from
  among the imperial princes, court nobles, and feudal lords."
  Because of its authorship, this document can be taken as an authori-
  tative statement of intent on the part of key political figures, though it
  was never put to or agreed by the members of the antibakufu coalition.
  Yet it was not the only influence that has to be taken into account in
  examining the background to early Meiji institutions. For several
  years the Japanese had been acquiring a knowledge of Western politi-
  cal ideas, both from Western residents in Japan and from Japanese
  students sent to Europe and America. Most of the advice based on
  them was channeled to the bakufu, which used it principally to devise
  a number of expedients that might serve to reconcile feudal opinion to
  a continuation in some form of the shogun's power. At the end of
  1867, for example, Nishi Amane, who had spent two and a half years
  studying at Leiden, produced at Edo's request an outline of a constitu-
  tion for Japan, under which the emperor's largely ceremonial func-
  tions would be specified and defined and the bakufu would retain
  executive authority. Legislation was to be entrusted to a bicameral
  assembly of daimyo and samurai, whose recommendations would be
  subject to imperial approval, obtained through the shogunJ
  For different reasons, the same kind of devices appealed to some of
  the bakufu's opponents. It was already evident by the autumn of 1867
  that Satsuma and Choshu would seek to dominate the coalition of
  antibakufu lords and push it into more extreme measures than many
  would wish. The probability was that success, if achieved by their
  efforts, would leave them in a position to control the new government.
  Their less powerful allies consequently sought means of forestalling
  this eventuality, occasionally using a Western-style constitutionalist
  argument for the purpose. Thus Tosa, urging Keiki to resign in Sep-
  tember 1867, put forward plans for a political structure, under which
  the right to govern Japan would revert to the imperial court, acting
  through a bicameral council of lords, samurai, and commoners.4 The
  advantage of this from Tosa's point of view was that it would eliminate
  3 Thomas Havens, Nishi Amane and Modem Japanese Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1970), pp. 62-3. The most detailed study of the influence of Western
  political thought before 1871 can be found in Asai Kiyoshi, Meiji ishin togunken shiso (Tokyo:
  Ganshodo, 1939).
  4 Marius B. Jarisen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1961), pp. 300-1, 316-17, gives a translation of the text of the proposal,
  together with the terms of the earlier agreement with Satsuma on which it was based.
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  INITIAL DECISIONS 
  623
  the bakufu, while preventing its replacement by an equally unwel-
  come hegemony on the part of Satsuma and Chdshu. In other words,
  constitutionalism, which the bakufu saw as a cloak for continued To-
  kugawa rule, Tosa saw as a restraint on dangerous rivals.
  Despite Tosa's efforts, events in the winter of 1867-8 gave the
  advantage increasingly to Satsuma and Choshu. They did not do so
  decisively enough, however, to make those domains independent of
  the other great lords who had cooperated in the final coup d'etat, with
  the result that in its early decisions, the Meiji government manifested
  a readiness to conciliate the widest possible spectrum of political
  views. This is apparent in the wording of the emperor's Charter Oath,
  issued on April 6, 1868. The document went through several drafts.
  The first, prepared by Yuri Kimimasa of Echizen in February, follow-
  ing court discussions about the government's need for financial and
  political support, gave some emphasis to the part to be played by
  commoners as well as samurai. Fukuoka Kotei of Tosa then revised it
  along the lines of the earlier Tosa proposals for an assembly, giving
  greater attention to provisions that would secure a closing of the ranks
  within the ruling groups in Kyoto. Finally, several weeks later, the
  wording was modified - becoming even less precise - by Satsuma and
  Choshu members of the government's inner circle. As issued, the text
  read as follows:
  (i) An assembly widely convoked shall be established and all matters of
  state shall be decided by public discussion.
  (ii) All classes high and low shall unite in vigorously promoting the econ-
  omy and welfare of the nation.
  (iii) All civil and military officials and the common people as well shall be
  allowed to fulfil their aspirations, so that there may be no discontent among
  them.
  (iv) Base customs of former times shall be abandoned and all actions shall
  conform to the principles of international justice.
  (v) Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world and thus shall be
  strengthened the foundation of the imperial polity.'
  Two points need to be made concerning this. One is that it is an
  appeal for unity, not a statement of immediate policy, despite the
  guarded references to a new kind of relationship with the West. Im-
  plicit in it is a rejection of the bakufu's overbearing habits and a
  promise to avoid them for the future, though without a specific indica-
  S This is the English version given in Ryosuke Ishii, Japanese Legislation in the Meiji Era (Tokyo:
  Toyd bunko, 1969), p. 145. The fullest discussion of the drafting of the document can be
  found in Inada Masatsugu, Meiji kempo seiritsu-shi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1960-2), vol. 2,
  pp. 1-22.
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  624 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  tion of how this would be done. The second point is that it is an
  "imperial" document, not merely because it refers to "the imperial
  polity," but still more so because it takes the form of an undertaking
  by the emperor personally, not through some katnpaku or shogun
  acting in his name. This signaled a change in Japanese constitutional
  practice, by which the emperor was to be much more closely associ-
  ated with the actions of the state than for several centuries past. By
  public appearances, like reviewing troops or naval forces; by granting
  audiences to foreign envoys; by giving his name to a growing list of
  decrees and rescripts outlining various aspects of policy; by making
  awards to deserving members of the population, especially officials -
  in all these ways, the emperor indicated that what was done was done
  by the emperor's will, making opposition to it a form of lese-majeste".
  For the Meiji leadership, especially as power fell more and more into
  the hands of relatively low-born samurai, some such prop was a prag-
  matic necessity, as Japanese society was one in which feudal loyalties
  remained strong and status still depended above all on birth. Neverthe-
  less, whether or not intentionally, the practice carried important insti-
  tutional implications, which the 1889 constitution eventually spelled
  out.6
  The break with constitutional custom is also seen in the arrange-
  ments concerning official apppointments early in 1868. During the
  Tokugawa period the bakufu had exercised its control over the court
  through a range of offices, headed by that of katnpaku, which had
  originated with the Fujiwara. These offices, like the Fujiwara families
  whose members inherited them, were therefore deemed to be part of
  the probakufu establishment. This made it desirable for the Restora-
  tion government to avoid using them. Fortunately it had a means of
  doing so that did not involve a prolonged search for new concepts and
  terminology. The slogan "restoration of imperial rule" (osei fukko),
  under which power had been seized, was soon taken to justify not only
  the working out of a new role for the emperor but also a reversion to a
  system of court administration dating from pre-Fujiwara days, that is,
  to the Chinese-style structure that had been introduced in the seventh
  and eighth centuries.
  The first step was the negative one of dismantling the old order. On
  6 On the emperor, see John W. Hall, "A Monarch for Modern Japan," in Robert Ward, ed.,
  Political Development in Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968),
  pp. 11-64; and Herschel Webb, "The Development of an Orthodox Attitude Toward the
  Imperial Institution in the Nineteenth Century," in Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese
  Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 167-
  91-
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  INITIAL DECISIONS 
  625
  January 3,1868, once the approaches to the palace had been secured, a
  hastily convened imperial council - excluding bakufu sympathizers -
  abolished all existing senior offices and substituted for them a three-
  tier hierarchy of officials and advisors. At the top was a chief executive
  (sosai), who was an imperial prince. Below him came a group of senior
  councilors (gijo), comprising a few high-ranking court nobles, together
  with the principal feudal lords of the anti-Tokugawa coalition. Below
  this again were the junior councilors (san'yo): lower-ranking court
  nobles, plus samurai from those domains whose lords were appointed
  as gijo. The functions to be performed by these men were not at first
  made clear, as the primary purpose of the appointments was to hold
  together the victorious coalition in the face of bakufu resistance. This
  is evident from the huge number of appointments made during the
  first five months. By June u , when there was a major reorganization
  following the surrender of Edo to the imperial forces, 30 men had held
  office as gijo: 5 imperial princes; 12 court nobles; and 13 daimyo (or
  their close relatives). The san'yo were even more numerous, totaling
  102: 43 court nobles, 6 court officials not of noble rank, and 53 samu-
  rai, the great majority being from the middle and upper levels of the
  samurai class.7
  It was not until the middle of February 1868, when the departments
  of state were established, that these officials were given something to
  administer. The departments had eighth-century names and modern-
  sounding functions - home, foreign, and military affairs, finance and
  justice - except for the department of Shinto religion, whose special
  standing served to underline the importance of the emperor's preroga-
  tives, deriving from divine descent. A general supervisory department
  (Sosaikyoku) was added later in the month. All department heads and
  their chief subordinates were senior or junior councilors. This in
  theory gave members of the council an executive role; but in practice,
  of course, despite the growing list of domains that had "submitted" to
  the emperor, virtually all Japan was still ruled by feudal lords, and so
  the principal task of imperial officials was to persuade the daimyo to
  cooperate in fighting a civil war. The formal submission of Tokugawa
  Keiki in May changed all this by putting the Tokugawa lands, or a
  7 I have analyzed these and other appointments in "Councillors of Samurai Origin in the Early
  Meiji Government, 1868-69," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 20 (1957):
  89-103. There are lists of officials in Robert A. Wilson, Genesis of the Meiji Government in
  Japan 1868-1871 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). The
  question of the origins of Meiji officialdom is also discussed at length in Bernard S. Silberman,
  Ministers of Modernization: Elite Mobility in the Meiji Restoration 1868-1873 (Tucson: Univer-
  sity of Arizona Press, 1964).
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  626 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  large part of them, at the court's disposal. In June, therefore, came a
  revision of the government structure. The number of departments was
  reduced to five - religion, military affairs, foreign affairs, justice,
  finance - and they were put under the control of the Executive Coun-
  cil (Gyoseikan), headed by two court nobles, Sanjo Sanetomi and
  Iwakura Tomomi, who had long had close political ties with Choshu
  and Satsuma, respectively. Senior administrative posts continued to
  be held by senior and junior councilors, but the numbers of these were
  substantially reduced. In the fourteen months until the next reorga-
  nization there were only twenty-one gijo and twenty-two san'yo (nine-
  teen of whom were representatives of key domains, mostly men with
  administrative experience).
  To compensate others for the loss of status implied by this streamlin-
  ing of the system, a legislature (Giseikan) was created, consisting of an
  upper chamber of gijo and san'yo and a lower chamber of nominees
  from the domains and from former Tokugawa territories now adminis-
  tered by the court. This body, renamed the Kogisho early in 1869,
  became a sounding board of feudal opinion, through which the Meiji
  leadership hoped to keep in touch with the ideas of the men to whom it
  still looked for political and military support. Significantly, however,
  such men came to Kyoto only in an advisory capacity. Insofar as Japan
  had a central government at all, it consisted of the group of court
  nobles, feudal lords, and samurai who held office as gijo and san'yo. It
  is convenient at this point to identify its most influential members.
  No other court nobles were as important as Sanjo and Iwakura, who
  continued to act as senior ministers for several more years. Among the
  daimyo, Matsudaira Keiei (Yoshinaga, Shungaku) of Echizen, Date
  Munenari of Uwajima, and Nabeshima Naomasa of Hizen, all "men of
  ability," remained in major posts until 1871. The rest, nearly all figure-
  heads in their own domains, soon gave way to men of lower rank,
  mostly samurai. Of these, the key figures were the men who had held
  together the antibakufu movement in the immediate pre-Restoration
  years: Okubo Toshimichi and Saigo Takamori of Satsuma, Kido
  Takayoshi (Koin) of Choshu, and Goto Shojiro of Tosa. They were
  joined by others from the same domains, some having special skills,
  like a knowledge of the West, and some being younger men, just
  emerging into prominence. The best known were Terashima
  Munenori, Matsukata Masayoshi, and Oyama Iwao from Satsuma;
  Inoue Kaoru, Ito Hirobumi, and Yamagata Aritomo from Choshu;
  and Fukuoka Kotei and Itagaki Taisuke from Tosa. The Hizen do-
  main had been "neutral" in the earlier struggles, but its connection
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  INITIAL DECISIONS 
  627
  with Nagasaki had given it a place of some importance in the introduc-
  tion of Western military technology. Recognition of this brought sev-
  eral Hizen samurai, as well as their lord, into the early Meiji govern-
  ment, notably Okuma Shigenobu and Soejima Taneomi. There were
  perhaps twelve or fifteen other samurai, largely from the same do-
  mains, who also held posts of some responsibility.
  The ministerial changes of the next few years continued the trend,
  established in 1868-9, °f dispensing with the men whose original
  apppointment had been designed, either as a gesture toward groups
  that had a "public image" role to play, like the court nobles, or as a
  recognition that the regime needed the support that the daimyo could
  marshal, even though the daimyo themselves were not always welcome
  as recruits to office. This marks a shift in emphasis from maintaining
  an anti-Tokugawa alliance - significantly, the next reorganization
  came in April of 1869, after the last military resistance of bakufu
  adherents in Hokkaido ended, just as the reorganization of June 1868
  had followed the surrender of Edo - to forming a government, even,
  as some historians have seen it, creating an oligarchy. The process
  raised problems. The most critical was that of the status of the new
  leaders and the standing of the regime to which they belonged. Their
  diverse social and geographical origins, which in traditional terms
  were bound to make it difficult for the imperial councilors to work
  together publicly, was to some extent overcome by previous political
  experience as members of an "illegal" form of opposition movement.
  Conspirators had no option but to deal with one another, however
  uneasy the relationships this implied. What caused more difficulty was
  that they had now to establish a relationship with other senior mem-
  bers of the body politic, including, for the samurai among them, their
  own feudal lords.
  There was a traditional solution to this kind of problem. An auto-
  crat, whether emperor or daimyo, could always raise the rank and
  income of the men in his personal entourage to a level commensurate
  with their importance to him. Some of the samurai had already en-
  joyed this kind of promotion. However, there were disadvantages to
  using the device any more extensively. Quite apart from the fact that
  in existing circumstances it might imply a transfer of loyalty from lord
  to emperor - which "loyalist" samurai were making in any case for a
  variety of reasons but which others would find objectionable - such
  elevation of the lowly would certainly offend the susceptibilities of
  many conservatives whose cooperation was still necessary in the task
  of manipulating the political structure as it stood. The Satsuma samu-
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  628 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  rai showed themselves especially conscious of this. As a result, the
  process of putting together a government in the emperor's name
  forced its members to confront another question, involving their per-
  sonal stake in it. Because there was no dominant personality who
  could make himself shogun or kampaku and demand obedience, what
  was to be the basis of the government's authority? Was its authority to
  be nominal, one that depended on persuasion and influence? Or was it
  to be real, giving the emperor's ministers, no matter what their origin,
  the power to command? In practice, this meant raising an issue that
  was central to any decision about the nature of Japan's political institu-
  tions, namely, that of feudal separatism, or the independence of the
  domains (han).
  THE ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS
  A variety of arguments in favor of abolishing the domains (liaihari) was
  being pressed on the Meiji government in 1868-9. Diplomats like Sir
  Harry Parkes, the British minister, had two reasons for recommend-
  ing it. One was that they associated the whole domain structure with
  the existence - and immunity from punishment - of samurai who had
  shown themselves eager to attack foreigners. The other was that feudal-
  ism belonged to Europe's past, something long since superseded by a
  commercial and industrial society. So if Japan were to be modern,
  manifesting a stability that was as important to foreign trade as it was
  to national strength, then it needed, in Parkes's view, to rid itself of an
  outmoded form of government.
  This second argument appealed strongly to some of Japan's new
  leaders, especially those who had visited Europe or America. ltd
  Hirobumi, for example, was one who urged an appeal to the lords to
  surrender their lands to the emperor. It could be made attractive to
  them, he wrote early in 1869, by an offer to make them members of a
  reconstituted aristocracy, give them substantial stipends, and open
  their way to office; whereas their followers could be conciliated by
  being incorporated into the national army and bureaucracy or enabled
  to return to the land. This was similar to the plan that was eventually
  followed.8
  Such reasoning was reinforced by traditionalist sentiment and by a
  widespread dissatisfaction with things as they were. Many samurai,
  8 This section is chiefly based on Beasley, Meiji Restoration, chap. 13; Wilson, Genesis, chap. 5;
  and Asai, Meiji ishin, pp. 105-300. See also Masakazu Iwata, Okubo Toshimichi: The Bismarck
  of Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), chap. 5.
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
  629
  who had been highly critical of the way in which feudal superiors,
  both shogun and daimyo, had reacted to the foreign threat, felt rather
  imprecisely that better things could be expected from an emperor who
  embodied all that was best in Japanese tradition. They were ready to
  see him made a real, not a nominal ruler, even at the cost of a major
  upheaval in the social order. From a different viewpoint, merchants
  and rich peasants, at least in some rural areas, had become resentful of
  their own low status in feudal society and felt little desire to perpetuate
  it. They had, indeed, often given material support to loyalist samurai
  in the turbulent years after the opening of the ports. Leaving aside the
  difficult question of how much weight one should attach to these
  factors, it is nevertheless clear that there existed at least some political
  basis for action to limit or destroy the independence of the domains,
  quite apart from the predilections of the emperor's own more "enlight-
  ened" councilors.
  Two things held the government back, however. One was the knowl-
  edge that many lords and upper samurai, including some on whose
  support the court continued to depend, would be resentful of such a
  move, perhaps to the point of open opposition. The other was an
  uncertainty about how to "manage" a situation to which familiar tech-
  niques would cease to apply. After all, the samurai members of the
  council had risen to power partly by learning to manipulate their
  feudal lords, rarely moving to the center of the stage themselves. It is
  not surprising that they felt some qualms about abolishing the system
  by which they had been able to climb.
  The test of the practicability of a measure in these circumstances
  was the extent to which Okubo and Iwakura could be brought to
  support it, for they were the politicians par excellence of the ruling
  group. Following discussions within Choshu, Kido took up Ito's ideas
  for getting the lords to surrender their lands and broached the matter
  to Okubo at the beginning of November 1868.9 Okubo was sympa-
  thetic, and they agreed that as a first step, opinion in the other key
  domains should be quietly sounded out. Their inquiries soon revealed
  that the plan, if put forward officially, was likely to meet a mixed
  reception. As an interim measure, a decree of December 11, 1868,
  imposed a decree of supervision and uniformity on the domains, re-
  quiring all daimyo to effect a clear separation between "public" and
  "house" business and to ensure that the selection of officials was deter-
  9 Kido can be followed from his diary in Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota, trans., The
  Diary of Kido Takayoshi, vol. 1: 1868-1871, vol. 2:1871-1874, and vol. 3:1874-1877 (Tokyo:
  Tokyo University Press, 1983,1985, and 1986).
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  mined by talent, not just by birth. The change substantially increased
  the government's ability to influence administrative policy in Japan as
  a whole, partly by ensuring that its views would get a ready hearing
  locally and partly by requiring each domain to appoint an official to
  represent it in the capital. To go beyond this and challenge the lord's
  title to his land seemed to some, as one of Matsudaira Keiei's followers
  put it, of no practical advantage and likely "to bring the country into
  confusion and disorder."
  Coming from such a source, comments like this were bound to induce
  caution. Early in 1869, therefore, the central government representa-
  tives of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen decided to put forward in
  the name of their lords a memorial that would enable them to test more
  widely the extent and intensity of the opposition to these proposals.
  This was submitted to the court on March 5. Briefly referring to the fact
  that the creation of the office of shogun in the distant past had led to the
  sequestration by the great military houses of what were properly "the
  emperor's lands," the document agreed that the overthrow of the Toku-
  gawa provided an opportunity to put this right and give Japan "one
  central body of government." It then went on to offer to surrender the
  land registers of the four domains to the emperor,
  asking that the court dispose of them at will, bestowing that which should be
  bestowed, taking away that which should be taken away; and we ask that the
  court issue such orders as it may deem necessary, disposing of the lands of the
  great domains and deciding changes in them, as well as regulating all things,
  from institutions, statutes, and military organization down to regulations
  concerning uniforms and equipment, so that state affairs, both great and
  small, may be in the hands of a single authority.10
  The wording of this memorial left open several options. The court -
  dominated by the men who had drafted the document - could take it
  at face value and impose similar action on all the domains in the name
  of national unity. Alternatively, if opposition seemed to make such a
  step politically unwise, the offer could simply be treated as an expres-
  sion of loyal sentiment, requiring no action on the part of the govern-
  ment, beyond a confirmation of existing territories, in the manner
  befitting a new feudal overlord.
  Reactions were in fact confused. Openly, most domains followed
  the lead given by Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen, forwarding
  similar memorials. But privately, many lords and upper samurai ex-
  10 Text in Iwakura Kojikki, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Iwakura K6 kyuseki hozonkai, 1927), vol. 2, pp.
  670-2. There is a translation (differing slightly from mine) in W. W. McLaren, ed., Japanese
  Government Documents, in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 42 (1914): pt. 1.
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
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  pressed misgivings. The Kogisho, where domain representatives dis-
  cussed the question in June and July, was sharply divided. A signifi-
  cant minority opted for the kind of arrangement that Ito had pro-
  posed, but a majority preferred to retain feudalism in one form or
  another, subject to confirming the emperor's preeminence. In effect,
  this meant that the government had to make a decision and implement
  it, taking such account of feudal opinion as seemed wise. Okubo
  concluded that the matter was one for "gradual action." Kido, though
  with reservations, concurred. Iwakura accordingly drafted a compro-
  mise plan, accepted by senior officials early in July, which was de-
  signed to ensure that the daimyo would surrender their hereditary
  rights in name but retain enough authority in practice to satisfy, or at
  least conciliate, the more conservative. As announced on July 25,
  1869, this meant apppointing them imperial governors (chiji) - not on
  an hereditary basis, thanks to Kido - of the lands they had formerly
  held in fief, allowing them to retain a generous one-tenth of their
  revenues as household expenses but requiring them to use the rest in
  ways specified by the central government. One corollary was to be a
  new peerage (kazoku), combining court nobles and feudal lords. An-
  other was a review of samurai stipends and a simplification of samurai
  ranks, implying that although the samurai would remain a privileged
  class, their status and perquisites would now be subject to central
  direction. These decisions were supplemented in October of the follow-
  ing year, by regulations requiring the new governors to spend at least
  three months in every three years attending meetings in the capital,
  and laying down various restrictions on the powers of local officials in
  such matters as finance, legal jurisdiction, and the raising of armed
  forces.
  Despite the considerable increase in central authority that these
  changes represented, there remained a number of anomalies. The
  lands taken over from the Tokugawa, which were extensive, had been
  made into prefectures (ken), in which all officials were appointed from
  the capital. Here government policy was carried out without question.
  Elsewhere, the extent of conformity depended a great deal on circum-
  stances. Even within the "loyal" territories of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa,
  and Hizen, there was a good deal of variation. Both Tosa and Hizen
  were in the hands of reforming samurai, who pressed on with mea-
  sures of the "modernizing" kind that found their chief spokesmen in
  Kido and Okuma, but in both Satsuma and Choshu there were power-
  ful conservative groups who would not always do the bidding of their
  colleagues in the capital. The same differences of emphasis existed in
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  other parts of the country, and so it became clear before long that the
  surrender of domain registers (hanseki-hokari) in the summer of 1869
  had by no means solved the problem of national unity.
  One reason was that some of the things that the government was
  trying to do were socially divisive. The handling of the samurai's
  stipends is an outstanding example. Finance was at this time a major
  difficulty, partly because the need to fight a civil war with inadequate
  resources had put the regime in debt from the start, giving fresh
  impetus to the inflationary trends inherited from the Tokugawa.
  Given that stipends had always been a heavy, regular burden on do-
  main finances, they were an obvious target for economies. However,
  the effect of another government policy, that of "promoting men of
  talent," was to make the incidence of these economies very uneven,
  because the method chosen was to cut most hereditary stipends, some-
  times savagely, while maintaining or increasing those that were paid
  for holding office. As a result, able bureaucrats did well, and other
  samurai did badly, often being forced to seek supplementary income
  from farming or commerce. This helped confirm the loyalty of offi-
  cials to the government, especially as it was accompanied by relaxation
  or abolition of the status requirements for appointment; but to the
  great majority, who did not benefit from this, it raised serious doubts
  about the government's virtues. There were a number of outbreaks of
  samurai unrest in 1870-1, including an important one in Choshu,
  attributable directly or indirectly to this cause.
  Senior administrators in some domains, especially small ones, or
  those with particularly intransigent economic problems, found these
  difficulties of finance and disaffection beyond their power to solve.
  Increasingly, they began to see advantages in making their territories
  into prefectures, thereby relieving themselves of worrying responsibili-
  ties. Several petitioned Tokyo to this effect and were incorporated
  voluntarily into the prefectural system. Members of the government
  for their part found in these developments additional reasons for tak-
  ing up again the question of abolishing the domains. As they saw it, it
  was not merely that some domains were becoming trouble spots. More
  generally, there was a rising level of popular disturbances, a continua-
  tion of the peasant revolts of the late Tokugawa period, damped down
  briefly during the immediate aftermath of Restoration but recurring
  once it became clear that the change of regime had done nothing to
  reduce grievances in the countryside. These had to be suppressed if
  Japan were to be made strong. If the domains, which in the past had
  always had the task of maintaining order, were no longer able to carry
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
  633
  it out, then it seemed that other means must be found. A national
  army, loyal to the emperor and not to a variety of feudal lords, was one
  obvious desideratum. Yet creating it would entail a further attack on
  samurai privilege, and financing it would require funds that at present
  were allocated to the domains. There was here another argument for a
  greater measure of centralization, which government ministers appear
  to have had in mind early in 1871.
  They were also aware that a divided council could never hope to
  impose on the country a policy so calculated to provoke resentment as
  abolition of the domains was likely to be. Hence, pushing through the
  1869 decisions to their logical conclusion, which had always seemed to
  Okubo and Iwakura a matter of timing not one of principle, came to
  depend on ensuring the unity of the ruling group. In the summer of
  1870 they took steps to limit the influence of Okuma, ltd, and their
  reforming friends (who were established in the ministries of Finance
  and Civil Affairs) with a view to making possible a rapprochement
  with those, especially in Satsuma and Choshu, who had objected to the
  policies followed with respect to samurai status and stipends. Then in
  the autumn Okubo made overtures to Saigo Takamori to persuade
  him to rejoin the government. Kido undertook similar discussions
  with men in Choshu. Finally, in February 1871 Iwakura proceeded as
  imperial messenger to both domains, providing a cover for Okubo and
  Kido to complete their arrangements. As a result, Shimazu Hisamitsu
  and Mori Yoshichika, representing the two daimyo houses, agreed to
  come to Tokyo and give the government countenance.
  At some point during these discussions the decision was taken to go
  ahead with abolishing the domains; and at the end of March, when all
  the men concerned were back in the capital, it was agreed to bring in
  reliable troops from Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa, in case the action
  was resisted. Saigo was to command them. In August - there was a
  delay because Mori had died and Shimazu had second thoughts - the
  government was reorganized in preparation for the final announce-
  ment: Saigo, Kido, Okuma, and Itagaki were made councilors (sangi),
  demonstrating the solidarity of the four leading domains; and Okubo
  became minister of finance, providing an additional guarantee that the
  reform party would be restrained. This done, the abolition of the
  domains was announced in an imperial edict dated August 29, 1871.
  Such daimyo as were in the city were summoned to the palace and
  brusquely informed that the prefectural system was to be extended to
  the whole of Japan. There was no pretense of consultation or debate.
  The edict, which was read to them, simply stated:
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  634 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  We deem it necessary that the government of the country be centred in a
  single authority, so as to effect a reformation in substance as well as in
  fact. . . . All this is for the purpose of doing away with superfluity, for
  issuing in simplicity, for removing the evils of empty forms and in order to
  avoid the grievance caused by the existence of many centres of government."
  It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of this step.
  Quite apart from the authoritarian manner in which it was carried out,
  the act itself had implications of fundamental importance for the fu-
  ture of Japanese political institutions. For most of Japan and the great
  majority of its people, the domains had for centuries provided the
  formal structure within which life was lived. Without them, the Meiji
  leaders had to devise a machinery for administering the large areas
  hitherto ruled by feudal lords, and recruit officials for running it; to
  organize a military and police force to do what the samurai had done as
  part of their feudal duty; to introduce courts and codes of law to
  replace those established by feudal custom; and to create a tax system
  that would provide a central revenue, making good the loss from
  feudal dues. In sum, this required that the Japanese government now
  be organized on entirely fresh principles. The availability of Western
  models for the most part determined what they should be. Indeed,
  there was little real choice, as China's institutions, to which Japan had
  always turned in the past, had been as much discredited by recent
  history as Japan's had been. China's military organization had shown
  itself incapable of putting down large-scale rebellions or of defending
  the country against quite small British, French, and Russian forces.
  China's tax arrangements, under which only a small proportion of the
  total revenue found its way to the central government, had failed to
  provide the resources required for military reform or effective govern-
  ment. They had also occasioned disputes with the powers, leading to
  the development of a customs administration almost entirely under
  foreign control. Similarly, the working of Chinese courts of law had
  long been a source of friction with the foreigners. Given the influence
  that Western diplomats could exercise in Japan, it was idle to suppose
  that the Chinese institutional alternative was any longer a realistic one.
  Even before the fall of the Tokugawa there had been a good deal of
  experiment with military reform in Japan, involving both the bakufu
  and the domains. Edo had invited a French military mission to Japan,
  11 Translated in Ishii, Japanese Legislation, p. 717; also in McLaren, Documents, pp. 32-3. See
  also Michio Umegaki, "From Domain to Prefecture," in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert
  Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1986), pp. 91-110.
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
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  officers from which had remained with bakufu troops during the civil
  war. Britain had produced a similar naval mission, arriving in October
  1867. Satsuma, Wakayama, and other domains had applied various
  forms of Western organization to their samurai forces. Choshu had
  devised irregular units in which commoners played an important part.
  Thus there was no lack of precedents for the new administration when
  it turned to the task of creating armed services of its own. Its principal
  military expert in the early period was Omura Masujiro of Choshu,
  who as vice-minister in the Department of Military Affairs, put for-
  ward proposals in July 1869 for a conscript army, whose members
  were to be recruited from the domains but would be required as one of
  their conditions of service to sever their domain connections. The
  samurai's hostility to this plan was one of the reasons for Omura's
  assassination at the end of the year. However, his work was later
  continued by his young protege^ Yamagata Aritomo, who was in Eu-
  rope at the time, studying the military organizations of Britain,
  France, and Germany.
  Yamagata returned to Japan in September 1870 and was appointed to
  a senior post in the military department. Almost at once he secured a
  decision in favor of standardizing Japanese military practice on French
  lines; orders to this effect were sent to the domains in October. In April
  1871, regulations were issued for a form of conscription broadly in
  accordance with Omura's ideas, but in practice nothing was done to
  implement them before the abolition of the domains, which changed
  the context in which reform would take place. Thereafter Yamagata
  became vice-minister in the department. Later in the year, jointly with
  his two Satsuma subordinates, one of whom was Saigo's younger
  brother, Tsugumichi, Yamagata put forward fresh plans for organizing
  a regular army which eventually became the basis of Japanese policy.
  These recommended that conscripts be "trained and drilled in Western
  tactics," and "organized into units regardless of whether they be samu-
  rai or commoners." After their period of service they would return to
  their own localities, forming a reserve that could be used to maintain
  civil order. Stability at home and defense against foreign attack, as
  Yamagata saw it, "were aspects of a single problem."12
  These proposals met with serious opposition from men who re-
  sented the adoption of any kind of military structure that did not give
  the samurai an entrenched position. Because this was a sensitive issue,
  12 Roger F. Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan: 1838-1922 (Cambridge,
  Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 61-2. For the conscription policy in general, see
  ibid., chap. 2; and Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 186-97.
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  progress toward a decision remained slow. In fact, it was not until the
  end of 1872 that the government was ready to proceed with the regula-
  tions drafted during the year by Yamagata and his colleagues (who
  included a Leiden-trained, former bakufu official, Nishi Amane). On
  December 28 an imperial rescript announced "a nationwide conscrip-
  tion law" designed to "lay the basic foundation of national security." A
  government statement accompanying this rescript condemned the
  samurai class in blunt language for "living a life of idleness for genera-
  tions"; claimed that what was now to be instituted would clear the way
  for "the unity of soldier and peasant"; and argued that hereafter no
  distinction would be made between samurai and commoner "in the
  service they render to their country."'*
  The conscription law itself was promulgated on January 10, 1873.
  Conscripts were to be called up at age twenty for three years' service
  with the colors, followed by four years with the reserve. Eventually
  there were to be six army districts, their combined strength totaling
  some 31,000 men, though in practice a start was made only in Tokyo
  during 1873, a nd it was some years before the whole force came into
  existence. There were a good many loopholes by which men could
  escape service altogether: by reasons of health or family status, as
  national or local government officials, as students in specified schools,
  or by paying for substitutes to replace them. Such loopholes seem to
  have been used widely. In addition, there continued to be objections
  to the system from both samurai and peasants, which were sometimes
  violently expressed. Nevertheless, Japan acquired by this step an in-
  strument that soon showed itself capable of imposing order at home.
  During the next ten years or so, peasant rebellion was gradually sup-
  pressed. Even the Satsuma samurai were successfully put down when
  they rebelled in 1877.
  Proposals for land tax reform were at least as contentious as were
  those for conscription.14 The subject had first been raised with refer-
  ence to the land taken over by the imperial government from the
  Tokugawa in 1868 - about one-quarter of Japan - which was suffi-
  ciently scattered and diverse to pose unaccustomed problems to samu-
  rai officials drawn from close-knit domains. Two arguments emerged
  13 Translations are in Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 723-4. For a comment on the social
  implications, see E. H. Norman, Soldier and Peasant in Japan: The Origins of Conscription
  (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1943).
  14 For a summary of the land tax discussions, see Beasley, Meiji Restoration, pp. 390-400. Of
  the many studies in Japanese, two are particularly useful: Fukushima Masao, Chiso kaisei no
  kenkyu (Tokyo: Yflhikaku, 1962); and Seki Junya, Meiji ishin to chiso kaisei (Kyoto: Minerva,
  1967).
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
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  among these officials as justifying some kind of reform. One empha-
  sized the question of law and order, pointing out that the considerable
  variations in the land tax among the localities had produced much
  popular unrest which the government so far lacked means to control.
  This line of reasoning led the prefectural governors, backed by the
  department of civil administration in the capital, to urge both a stan-
  dardization and a reduction of the taxes. By contrast, finance officials,
  especially in Tokyo, gave more attention to the rapid growth of state
  expenditure and the erosion of the value of the revenue by inflation.
  This, they said, meant that an upward revision of tax rates was vital to
  the financial needs and hence to the very existence of the imperial
  regime. One of them, Kanda Kohei (Takahira), a former bakufu ex-
  pert employed in the Finance Ministry, went so far as to propose in
  1869 and 1870 that the tax in kind should be replaced by a tax in cash,
  based on a valuation of landholdings. This, he claimed, would be
  easier to administer than would be feudal dues, would be payable in
  kind, and would provide a more stable revenue from year to year
  without in any way harming the farmers' interests.
  These differences of viewpoint prevented any substantial progress
  toward an agreement on policy before the summer of 1871. The aboli-
  tion of the domains then made urgent some kind of action. Many more
  areas, each with its own local customs and dues, had then to be incor-
  porated into a theoretically unified administration, greatly increasing
  the possibilities of discontent. Moreover, the Finance Ministry inher-
  ited heavy commitments to set against its additional revenue, as one
  condition of abolition had been that the government would permit the
  daimyo to retain a tenth of their former revenues as private income, as
  well as taking over responsibility for the payment of domain debts and
  samurai stipends. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the
  initiative in Tokyo passed to the finance officials. In the autumn of
  1871 Matsukata Masayoshi, deputy head of the tax section, submitted
  a memorial that argued for a new kind of land tax as part of a general
  agrarian reform, designed to stimulate production by abolishing re-
  strictions of every kind. This was taken up by his superiors, Okubo as
  finance minister and Inoue Kaoru as vice-minister, who put to the
  council proposals for a land tax payable in cash, representing a percent-
  age of a stipulated valuation of the land. Arriving at such a valuation,
  they noted, would require creating a market in land by raising the
  feudal ban on its sale or purchase.
  These points having been agreed in principle, it was left to the
  Finance Ministry to prepare the various regulations for putting them
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  638 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  into effect. This necessitated many drafts and much discussion, lasting
  nearly two years. In March 1872 the ban on sale of land was abolished,
  and regulations were announced covering the issue of landownership
  certificates. In August, the option of paying dues in cash, already
  standard in the former imperial prefectures, was extended to the
  whole of Japan. As a final stage, officials then turned to the problem of
  land valuation and tax rates. The first draft of regulations on this
  subject, apparently dating from the autumn of 1872, set out a complex
  system of calculating values, involving owners, village assemblies, and
  local officials, whose intention was to set the tax rate at 30 percent of
  the crop's net annual value. This was thought to have been the na-
  tional average under the Tokugawa, though basing it on an up-to-date
  valuation would undoubtedly have increased the current yield to the
  advantage of the government. At all events, it brought protests from
  many influential groups. Rich landlords, whose wealth frequently re-
  flected in part their success in paying lower real tax rates than did their
  fellow villagers, sought assurance that increases in the tax burden
  would, for an interim period, be limited to 40 percent in any individ-
  ual case. By contrast, samurai groups sought to ensure that their own
  notional land rights - stipends had nominally become payable in the
  remote past as a substitute for fiefs - would be recognized by requir-
  ing cultivators to buy out surviving feudal rights in their land, the
  funds so raised being used to finance samurai stipends and other
  public expenditures.
  The political importance of landlords and samurai ensured that
  opposition of this kind could not be ignored. In the spring of 1873, the
  whole range of issues, including that of stipends, was put to a confer-
  ence of local officials in Tokyo, whose meetings were presided over
  successively by Inoue Kaoru and Okuma Shigenobu. On stipends it
  was impossible to reach agreement, at least at this level, because the
  conflicting arguments about possible samurai unrest and government
  financial imperatives were not really negotiable. On tax rates there
  were some acrimonious exchanges between Finance Ministry represen-
  tatives and the rest, but in the end their differences were resolved.
  One decision was to add a further charge for local taxes, thereby
  raising the total annual levy from 3 percent to 4 percent of the land's
  capital value, the extra 1 percent being for local use. The other major
  cause of dispute, which was the method of valuation, involved assump-
  tions about dividing the product of the land among cultivator, land-
  lord, and tax collector. Here the interests of the landlord and the tax
  collector were more vigorously defended, with the result that the for-
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  ABOLITION OF THE DOMAINS 
  639
  mula as finally agreed on envisaged that 34 percent of the yield would
  be needed to pay for tax, whereas in the case of tenanted land, 34
  percent would go to the landlord and only 32 percent to the tenant.
  Given that the landlords were in a better position than the tenants
  were to protect themselves in the subsequent discussions about imple-
  menting the rules in the villages and prefectures - estimating values
  and making surveys was not completed until 1876 for arable land,
  1891 for forest and waste - one consequence of the tax changes was to
  make landlordism more profitable.
  Another was to give the government a stable and predictable reve-
  nue, which, because it was payable in cash, transferred the commer-
  cial risk of putting crops on the market to the private citizen. The
  imperial decree announcing the regulations, dated July 28, 1873, de-
  clared their purpose as being to ensure that the "tax be levied impar-
  tially in order that the burden may be shared equally among the
  people."1' This fairly reflected the concerns of many prefectural offi-
  cials, anxious to prevent further disorder. On balance, however, the
  rather different aims of the Finance Ministry seem to have been more
  successfully pursued.
  Much the same can be said about the commutation of samurai
  pensions.16 The crucial fact about them, as seen by Finance Ministry
  officials, was that in 1871 the department had to take over responsibil-
  ity for annual stipends that cost something like a third of the yield
  from land tax, which was itself overwhelmingly the greatest part of
  government revenue. Because the domains had several times reviewed
  the payments in recent years, cutting back hard on all the larger ones,
  there was little more that could be done by way of pruning the list.
  Consequently, if spending was not to be crippled by this charge, the
  government had either to find new sources of revenue or to accept the
  political risks inherent in shedding much of the burden in some fairly
  drastic way. To tax commerce, which was one alternative, would im-
  peril many of the plans for modernization. By contrast, to end entitle-
  ment to stipends would be a further step toward dismantling the
  privileges of those samurai who had little to contribute to the military
  and administrative machine. Thus logic argued for the conversion of
  stipends into capital sums; politics for caution in carrying out the
  decision.
  15 Translation in Ishii, Japanese Legislation, p. 722.
  16 See Beasley, Meiji Restoration, pp. 382-90. The most detailed Japanese study of the stipend
  question is by Fukaya Hakuji, Kashizoku chitsuroku shobun no kenkyu (Tokyo: Takayama
  shoin, 1941).
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  The first attempt to solve the problem was a proposal from the
  Finance Ministry early in 1872 that Japan should raise a foreign loan,
  part of which could be used to capitalize the stipends at four times
  their annual value, this amount to be paid to stipend holders in market-
  able bonds over a six-year period. Several members of the council,
  including Kido and Iwakura, thought this much too severe, hence
  politically dangerous. The idea was therefore dropped. It was not put
  forward again until November 1873, when Okubo and Okuma, de-
  spite objections from Kido and Ito, pushed through another Finance
  Ministry scheme, this time to tax stipends on a sliding scale - in ef-
  fect, reducing them - while offering to holders of the smaller ones the
  option of commuting them at a four-year valuation for life stipends
  and a six-year valuation for hereditary ones. This decision was an-
  nounced in December. It did little to overcome the financial difficul-
  ties, however, and it was soon clear that something else would have to
  be done to reduce expenditures under this head. In November 1874,
  the option of commutation was extended to all samurai, not just the
  poorer ones. Finally, in March 1876, Okuma proposed that commuta-
  tion be made compulsory. This was agreed, and in August, the terms
  for commutation were announced. The very smallest hereditary sti-
  pends were to be surrendered for government bonds at fourteen times
  their annual value, bearing interest at 7 percent; for the very largest
  the figures were to be five times the annual value and 5 percent; others
  would be at points between these two extremes. Life stipends were to
  be converted at half these rates.I7
  For the government, commutation reduced the charge on the bud-
  get by approximately 30 percent; ultimately, because of inflation,
  much more. For the more affluent samurai and their feudal lords, it
  provided useful capital sums in treasury bonds, which could be used
  to finance investment in land or some forms of modern enterprise. For
  the poorest, it completed the process of impoverishment that had been
  going on for generations, forcing them back to the land or into other
  kinds of productive employment. In all these ways it made a useful
  contribution to economic modernization, achieved at some human
  cost. Inevitably, it also brought unrest and discontent, which played a
  significant part in the origins of the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. More
  important in the long term, it signaled the end of the first stage in a
  transformation of the regime's political base. The daimyo and some
  upper samurai now joined the court nobles in a comfortable and digni-
  17 Translations of the relevant decrees (December 27, 1873, ant' August 5, 1876) are in
  McLaren, Documents, pp. 557-66.
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  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  64I
  fied way of life, marked by social prestige and political obscurity.
  Among their retainers, a minority found successful careers in the
  bureaucracy and armed forces, becoming the core of Japan's govern-
  mental elite. The rest sank back into relative anonymity, often re-
  spected but no longer privileged, either becoming, like the landlords
  and merchants, part of an emerging bourgeoisie, or descending into
  the ranks of peasants and laborers. It was this new class configuration
  that Meiji political institutions were to reflect in the next twenty years.
  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT
  The surrender of domain registers had been followed on August 15,
  1869, by a major restructuring of the central government, of which
  the chief characteristic was a further strengthening of the executive,
  now renamed the Dajokan.18 Power was to be restricted to a very
  small number of persons. The senior post was that of minister of the
  right (udaijin), held by the court noble Sanjo Sanetomi. Immediately
  below him came three great councilors, one of whom was Iwakura
  Tomomi, another the former daimyo of Hizen, Nabeshima Naomasa.
  Below this again came the councilors (sangi), whose numbers varied
  between two and seven during the next two years, all being samurai
  from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen. Collectively, these men
  were responsible for advising the emperor on matters of state. Execut-
  ing their decisions was entrusted to six ministries: Finance (Okura-
  sho), Civil Affairs (Mimbusho), Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho), War
  (Hyobusho), Justice (Kyobusho), and Imperial Household (Kunai-
  sho). These were headed by high-ranking court nobles or feudal
  lords, but in practice they were usually controlled by samurai vice-
  ministers. This meant that authority rested with a close-knit group of
  men who had a good deal of political experience. The figureheads of
  1868-9 had largely been discarded.
  Because this arrangement gave effective direction to the central
  government's activities, there seemed no need to make sweeping revi-
  sions after the abolition of the domains in 1871. Such changes as were
  made still further increased the degree of centralization within the
  executive, which was now divided into three chambers. The Central
  Chamber (Sei-in) - often equated with the Dajokan as a whole, be-
  18 For details of central government in this period, see Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 115-35;
  Wilson, Genesis, pp. 66-8; Albert M. Craig, "The Central Government," in Jansen and
  Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition, pp. 36-67; and Suzuki Yasuzd, Dajokansei to naikakusei
  (Tokyo: Showa hankokei, 1944).
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  642 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  cause it was so important - consisted of the chancellor {dajodaijin),
  ministers of the left and right (sadaijin, udaijin), and several councilors
  (sangi). This was the body that met in the emperor's presence and
  made recommendations to him. It was advised by a Right Chamber
  (U-in), consisting of ministers and vice-ministers of the executive de-
  partments, and a Left Chamber (Sa-in), nominally an appointed legis-
  lature but in fact never achieving a position of any great importance.
  The central group of officials remained much the same as before,
  though the number of its members shrank still more, and the samurai
  among them emerged more openly as men in authority. San jo was
  appointed chancellor in August 1871, remaining in that post until it
  was abolished in 1883. The office of minister of the left remained
  vacant. Four samurai were appointed councilors at the beginning -
  Saigo of Satsuma, Kido of Choshu, Itagaki of Tosa, and Okuma of
  Hizen - and there were only nineteen more in the fourteen years for
  which the office existed. All but one - Katsu Kaishu, a former bakufu
  official - came from the same four domains that were nominated in
  1871. Okubo Toshimichi was made minister of finance, not councilor,
  the first samurai to attain that kind of recognition, though before long
  such promotions became quite common. Moreover, a few samurai,
  like Yamagata Aritomo in the War Ministry, found themselves vice-
  ministers of departments in which there was no minister, a fact that
  made their influence more substantial.
  There were a few significant adjustments in the names and func-
  tions of ministries, mostly related in some way to the extension of the
  central government's power over the country or to plans for moderniza-
  tion. The Ministry of Justice was renamed Shihosho in August 1871
  and given responsibility for organizing a system of national and local
  courts. It inherited a criminal code based on Chinese and traditional
  Japanese precedents, which had been approved in February 1871; but
  a revision of this, completed in 1872 and issued in July 1873, was
  already beginning to show French influence.19 It was superseded in
  1882 by a new criminal code based entirely on French models. In 1875
  the Supreme Court (Daishin-in) was created to strengthen the judi-
  ciary and serve as a court of appeal. The Ministry of Education
  (Mombusho), established in September 1871, took over the supervi-
  sion of various institutions for the training of officials and specialists,
  previously administered by the bakufu, but gave most of its attention
  to devising a system of national primary education, which was an-
  19 See Paul Heng-chao Ch'en, The Formation of the Early Meiji Legal Order: The Japanese Code
  of I8JI and Its Chinese Foundation (New Vork: Oxford University Press, 1981).
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  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  643
  nounced in September 1872. In January 1873 it absorbed the func-
  tions concerned with propagating Shinto, which had formerly been
  performed by the Jingikan. That body, which had been reduced to the
  status of a ministry (Jingisho) in 1871, was abolished.
  The two principal innovations made at this time stemmed directly
  from the decisions to introduce conscription and abolish the do-
  mains. Introducing Western-style methods of organization and train-
  ing for the armed forces had important implications for the relevant
  bureaucratic structures, which themselves came to rely heavily on
  Western experience. In April 1872 this was reflected in the division
  of the Hyobusho into the Army Ministry (Rikugunsho) and the Navy
  Ministry (Kaigunsho). In 1878, following evidence of command and
  planning weaknesses during the campaign to suppress the Satsuma
  Rebellion, an army general staff was established on German lines,
  independent of the War Ministry and reporting directly to the em-
  peror as commander in chief. This was to have important long-term
  consequences for Japanese politics.
  Equally important were the decisions made about governing the
  lands and people relinquished to the emperor by the domains in the
  summer of 1871, amounting to approximately three-quarters of Japan.
  The Department of Civil Affairs, which had earlier borne the chief
  responsibility for matters concerning the imperial territories, was dis-
  continued in 1871, some of its functions being transferred to the Fi-
  nance Ministry, others to a new Ministry of Public Works (Kobusho),
  dating from December 1870. This proved to be an unsatisfactory
  arrangement, as there was then no single office to coordinate central
  policy toward the various local and regional units into which the coun-
  try was divided. Accordingly, in November 1873, when Okubo and
  Iwakura emerged as the dominant figures in the government, the
  Home Ministry (Naimusho) was established, and Okubo was made its
  head. Its powers and duties, as denned in February 1874, w e r e ex-
  tremely wide. It was to select local and prefectural officials; carry out
  surveys in connection with land tax assessment; administer the census;
  organize road building and coastal shipping; supervise the mails and
  local sanitary services; and so on. In short, it was to resume and
  expand on behalf of the central government a whole range of functions
  that had for centuries been performed by feudal lords. Moreover, it
  clearly proposed to do so by subjecting officialdom itself to tight con-
  trols, as it proceeded to issue regulations in November 1875 by which
  similar duties - plus provision of a police force, responsibility for
  schools, and care of shrines and temples - were imposed on the
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  prefectural governors (chiji) and their subordinates, whose appoint-
  ment, promotion, and dismissal were made subject to Home Ministry
  decisions, based on regular inspections and reports.20
  The local administrative entities to which these rules applied were
  also changed.21 When the domains were abolished, their territories were
  made into prefectures (ken), of which there were 302, varying enor-
  mously in size, in addition to the three urban areas (fu) of Tokyo,
  Kyoto, and Osaka. In January 1872 a process of consolidation reduced
  the number of ken to 72 (later to 43). For the purpose of preparing house
  registers as a preliminary to enforcing conscription, these units were
  subdivided into districts called ku, each under an appointed official,
  who in 1872 became the local representative of government, replacing
  the traditional headman. The final stage in this development came in a
  law of July 1878, when the ku, divided into wards (cho), were retained
  only as sections of the urban fu, and the prefectures were subdivided
  into districts (gun) and villages (mura or son). Headmen of ku and gun
  were appointed by the government and had official status; those of cho
  and son, being less important politically, were to be elected by residents.
  Thus the supervision exercised over prefectural administration by To-
  kyo was extended into the larger local communities.
  Staffing this expanding system, as it could no longer be done by
  calling on samurai to serve as part of their feudal duty, required the
  creation of a bureaucracy.22 Many of those whom the Meiji leaders
  appointed to subordinate positions were predictably men on whose
  loyalty they could rely because of past political associations, or "ex-
  perts" possessing useful skills, such as a knowledge of Western meth-
  ods and technology. Bernard Silberman, analyzing sixty-two officials
  who held major posts in government ministries between 1875 and
  1900, has shown that about half met both these tests, and nearly three-
  quarters met one or the other. Indeed, at this level the overwhelming
  majority were samurai from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen,
  whose domain affiliation was presumably some kind of evidence of
  20 For the translated text of the orders establishing the Home Ministry, see McLaren, Docu-
  ments, pp. 37-40; for the 1875 regulations, ibid., pp. 259-64.
  21 For local government in the early Meiji period, see Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 198-231;
  and Kurt Steiner, Local Government in Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
  I965). PP- 19-29-
  22 See, in particular, Silberman, Ministers, passim; Bernard S. Silberman, "Bureaucratic Devel-
  opment and the Structure of Decision-Making in Japan, 1868-1925," Journal of Asian Studies
  29 (1970): 347-362; and Sidney D. Brown, "Okubo Toshimichi and the First Home Ministry
  Bureaucracy 1873-1878," in Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Modern
  Japanese Leadership (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), pp. 195-232. In Japanese,
  the most useful work for the Meiji period is still by Tanaka Sogoro, Kindai Nikon kantyo shi
  (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimpd, 1941).
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  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  645
  reliability. Appointments to office of lower standing show less consis-
  tency. Sidney Brown, studying the Home Ministry, found that of the
  fifty-one officials serving Okubo between 1873 and 1878, only two
  came from Satsuma and three from Choshu, which was far fewer than
  in comparable positions in the ministries of Finance and War. By
  contrast, thirty-four out of seventy-three prefectural governors in this
  period came from the four leading domains. One can compare this
  with Silberman's figures. Taking a random sample of prefectural gov-
  ernors between 1875 and 1900, Silberman identified 86 percent as
  being samurai in origin; fewer than one in four as having had some
  Western education; and only one in seven as having worked his way
  up through the bureaucracy from the bottom ranks. The implication
  seems to be that the two types of qualification did not necessarily
  apply to the same kind of jobs. When expertise was required, feudal
  background could be overlooked - some experts had even served the
  bakufu - but in posts that were politically sensitive, loyalty, measured
  by a man's feudal "connections," was of preeminent importance. Cer-
  tainly in choosing senior prefectural officials - except in Satsuma,
  which was a special case because of its record of samurai turbulence -
  care was taken to avoid men who had previously belonged to a local
  domain.
  This brings us to a point where we can summarize the nature of the
  changes taking place in Japanese government during the first decade
  of Meiji rule. The main features are obvious enough: a concentration
  of power at the center in the hands of an oligarchy of court nobles and
  ex-samurai, and an authoritarian control, exercised by the bureaucrats
  of the capital over governmental organization in the provinces and
  extending the boundaries of administration far beyond the traditional
  ones of collecting taxes and maintaining order. Politically, this was a
  logical response to the "general crisis," occasioned by the threat of
  foreign attack and an apparent disintegration of domestic society. Insti-
  tutionally, it operated through a choice of models that were on the
  surface "Chinese," in that they derived from the earliest, China-
  dominated era of Japan's political culture. Nearly all the names of
  offices and departments were taken from eighth-century originals, as
  was much of the formal terminology of imperial pronouncements. Yet
  the reality they were required to serve had, by the middle of the 1870s,
  less and less to do with Japan's ancient past. "Wealth and strength,"
  though a classical slogan, was everywhere being interpreted in ways
  that owed more to Europe's example than to China's, looked more to
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  646 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  industry and Western military science than to agriculture and a feudal
  soldiery. Some consequences of this were already being manifested in
  government organization, as we have seen. The next decade was to see
  . this trend accelerate, so that over the whole range of political institu-
  tions, Japan moved decisively to Western models.
  Rapid progress was made in the development of a professional and
  politically reliable army. In 1881 the military police (kempeitat) was
  organized, primarily to ensure the loyalty of servicemen to the re-
  gime. An imperial "Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors," issued in Janu-
  ary 1882, admonished them: "Neither be led astray by current opin-
  ions, nor meddle in politics, but with single heart fulfil your essential
  duty of loyalty."2* In 1884 an army staff college began training offi-
  cers under the supervision of a German adviser, its work being sup-
  plemented in the next few years by specialist military schools for
  medicine, engineering, and artillery. The navy established an offi-
  cers' training college in 1888 and a separate gunnery school in 1893.
  It acquired its own general staff in 1891, though it was not until 1893
  that this became independent of the Navy Ministry. There were
  parallel developments in the organization of the civilian police, ori-
  ginally set up in 1872 under the Ministry of Justice and the pre-
  fectural governors. Yamagata Aritomo as home minister between
  1883 and 1890 brought them under firm Home Ministry control,
  provided them with a training school on the German model, and gave
  them substantially greater powers over press censorship and political
  offenses.
  The aim of much of this was to make a "strong" government more
  efficient by making it more Western, the decisions being taken against
  a background of rising criticism at home about the arbitrary behavior
  of the Meiji leadership and a series of clashes with China over Korea,
  which in 1884-5 brought the two countries close to war. The same
  concern with political stability and strength was evident in the creation
  of a Western-style peerage. An imperial decree of July 1884 an-
  nounced that the emperor wished to honor two groups: those who
  were "high-born descendants of illustrious ancestors" and those who
  had distinguished themselves "in the restoration of my rule."24 For
  this purpose, he established new ranks and titles, those of prince (or
  duke), marquis, count, viscount, and baron. The names of five hun-
  23 Translated in R. Tsunoda et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia
  University Press, 1958), pp. 705-7. See also James B. Crowley, "From Closed Door to
  Empire: The Formation of the Meiji Military Establishment," in Silberman and
  Harootunian, eds., Modem Japanese Leadership, pp. 261-87. 
  24 Translated in McLaren,
  Documents, pp. 88-90.
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  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  647
  dred men were put forward for initial appointment to them. Most of
  these were members of the old court and feudal nobility, who were to
  be accorded appropriate levels of prestige to ensure their continuing
  cooperation, notwithstanding their loss of many traditional privileges.
  They were to provide the basis for a reliably conservative House of
  Peers in the new constitution then under discussion. However, thirty
  of the names were those of government ministers, generals, and admi-
  rals, mostly ex-samurai, who were at last to be given a status commen-
  surate with their political importance. Significantly, the head of the
  Tokugawa house became a prince, and Okuma, Itagaki, and Goto,
  now in opposition, were omitted altogether. Evidently, the principle
  of selection was present usefulness, not past performance.
  There was as great a need to reconcile inherited status with contem-
  porary power within the government itself as there was in the wider
  circle of the privileged. The Dajokan system had not solved all the
  problems of welding men of disparate origin into a governing elite.
  Although the feudal lords had vanished from the political scene,
  there remained a tension between samurai "upstarts" and surviving
  court nobles, particularly as several of the latter had potentially pow-
  erful positions in the emperor's entourage. The death of Iwakura in
  1883 removed the man best able to mediate these differences. At the
  same time it weakened the influence of the nobility, creating an
  opportunity of institutional adjustment that Ito, aspiring to overall
  leadership in the government, was eager to take. There were also
  internal differences about coordinating government policy, which as-
  sumed an added importance in the atmosphere of foreign crisis dur-
  ing 1884-5. Coordination between the dominant Central Chamber of
  the Dajokan and the advisory body of senior executive officials, the
  Right Chamber, had been achieved by a variety of devices: by inter-
  locking appointments, ensuring that some councilors (sangi) were
  also departmental ministers; by the use of an informal Inner Council
  (Naikaku) to provide a forum in which key officials could discuss
  major issues; and by exploiting the personal links among former
  members of the antibakufu movement. Some of these devices pro-
  voked opposition from men who found themselves becoming "outsid-
  ers," like Okuma and Itagaki. Others were being weakened by time.
  Nearly all the first generation of Restoration leaders from Satsuma
  and Choshu were dead by 1883: Omura in 1869, Kido and Saigo in
  1877, Okubo in 1878. Without them the system worked clumsily,
  betraying its origins as a form of government designed to hold to-
  gether the heirs to the victorious coalition of 1868. In the conditions
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  648 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  of the 1880s there was much to be said for putting it on a better-
  defined and more coherent footing.
  In 1884, therefore, Ito took the initiative in proposing the replace-
  ment of the Dajokan by a Western-style cabinet (though using the
  term Naikaku).2* Discussions were delayed for some months by the
  crisis with China, which made it necessary for Ito to go to Tientsin,
  but on his return early in 1885 he overrode objections from Sanjo, who
  feared that the cabinet proposal might upset the delicate balance be-
  tween the Satsuma and Choshu factions, and entrusted the task of
  drafting suitable regulations to Inoue Kowashi, his principal assistant
  in constitutional matters. In some respects Inoue exceeded his brief,
  for he not only envisaged raising the status of samurai in government
  by making them eligible for the ministerial title of daijin, hitherto
  reserved for court nobles - a step parallel to that which had made
  them members of the peerage the year before - but also proposed to
  strengthen the government's public authority by providing for the
  emperor's personal participation in cabinet meetings (making the cabi-
  net in this respect a continuation of the Sei-in). Ito, following discus-
  sions with Sanjo, ordered a revision of this clause. Accordingly, when
  the new structure was announced in December 1885, prefaced by an
  imperial decree that identified the government's intentions as being to
  abolish "circuitous methods," economize expenditures, and "promote
  efficiency in the public service," the chief coordinating role was en-
  trusted to the minister president, or prime minister (sori daijin). All
  laws and ordinances issued by the government were to be signed
  jointly by him and the appropriate departmental minister. The prime
  minister was also to receive reports on the work of the various minis-
  tries and to be responsible for major matters of general policy. Thus,
  although the ministers continued to be in theory responsible directly
  to the emperor in departmental matters, they were in fact clearly
  subordinated to the prime minister in a manner similar to that laid
  down in the Prussian regulations of 1810, on which the Japanese ones
  were chiefly based.26 That this was a personal triumph for Ito, who
  became the first prime minister, is beyond doubt. Sanjo, hitherto the
  nominal head of the government as chancellor, withdrew to the lesser
  post of imperial household minister. The fact that this was not to carry
  25 For relevant texts and discussion, see McLaren, Documents, pp. 90-7; Ishii, Japanese Legisla-
  tion) PP- 37°-4> 389-93; and Inada, Meiji kempo, vol. I, pp. 732-58.
  26 The prime minister lost some of his powers of supervision and countersignature when the
  regulations were revised in 1889, but in the long term, this did not do as much to weaken his
  position as did other institutional developments.
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  CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
  649
  membership in the cabinet underlined the reality of the decision to
  remove the emperor from an active involvement in politics.
  Reinforcing the cabinet arrangements of 1885 were detailed regula-
  tions concerning the organization of the bureaucracy.27 In 1880 the
  government had issued rules for the conduct of official business,
  which set out at length the duties and authority of the minister and his
  subordinates in each department. A few days after the announcement
  about the cabinet in December 1885, a revised version calling for
  restriction of the number of officials, clear definition of functions, and
  careful enforcement of discipline was sent as an instruction from Ito to
  other ministers. It struck a very moral tone, emphasizing the need for
  attention to the officials' character, as well as avoidance of nepotism,
  undue present giving, or anything that might mar "the dignity and
  credit of the government." These instructions were incorporated into
  an imperial ordinance in February 1886, to which were added numer-
  ous rules regarding the handling of correspondence, the circulation of
  drafts, the keeping of archives and entry books, methods of making
  payments, and so on. Finally, another ordinance (July 1887) codified
  the requirements regarding personal behavior: a ban on bribery and
  accepting lavish entertainments, an injunction against "habits of dissi-
  pation or improvidence," and an official secrets clause prohibiting the
  passing of information on government matters to private persons or
  even courts of law.
  Under these various regulations, Japanese civil servants were classi-
  fied into three distinct grades: at the top, chokunin, appointed person-
  ally by the emperor, a group that included vice-ministers and prefec-
  tural governors; next, sonin, middle-grade officials appointed on the
  recommendation of ministers; and finally, hannin, men holding minor
  posts, appointed by a minister under delegated authority. Given that
  the choice of men at all levels had so far been mostly personal - and of
  a kind that gave credence to the criticism that power was too much
  monopolized by Satsuma and Choshu - there were clearly some argu-
  ments in favor of devising rules for appointment and promotion that
  would both disarm such opposition and make for smoother working of
  the kind of bureaucracy that was taking shape after 1885. Earlier
  proposals to use Chinese-style examinations for this purpose had come
  27 For texts of the regulations issued between 1880 and 1887, see McLaren, Documents, pp. 55-
  75, 99-127. On the development of an examination system, see Robert Spaulding, Imperial
  japan's Higher Civil Service Examinations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
  1967), chaps. 2,5-7.
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  65O 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  to nothing because of the leadership's preoccupation with the need for
  unity and strong central direction.
  In 1884, however, ltd raised the matter again. At his instigation a
  draft was prepared, envisaging examinations in law, economics, and
  political science, by which candidates would be admitted to posts at
  appropriate levels. The first step toward implementing it was taken
  with reference to judicial posts, because foreign criticism of the Japa-
  nese legal system was holding up progress on treaty revision; but in
  December 1885, Ito included a statement of intent about recruitment
  by examination in the instructions that he circulated to the ministers.
  During 1886 a scheme was worked out at his request by Kaneko
  Kentaro, which made examinations the main means of recruitment to
  sonin and hannin ranks and coupled the qualifications for entry to them
  with attainments in the state educational system. Despite continued
  opposition from those who thought the requirements were too strict,
  Ito put the scheme into effect in July 1887. There remained some
  exceptions. Those already holding office were exempt from the new
  tests. So were the chokunin posts, which were still to be filled at
  government discretion. Graduates of the new imperial university in
  Tokyo were to be admitted to sonin rank without examination after a
  period of training (a privilege they lost in 1893). All other recruits to
  government posts would have to pass the relevant examinations.
  This completed the move away from inherited status as the prime
  qualification for government office. Although it was still true that
  samurai descent and the family connections that went with it remained
  a considerable advantage in seeking an official career, ensuring both
  access to education and valuable patronage, Japan hereafter relied in
  recruiting its governmental elite on the selection of "men of talent"
  through education and examinations. It was a Confucian concept, as
  many of the discussions leading up to its adoption had emphasized.
  However, it was not in any other respect Chinese. The examinations in
  question were designed to test skills that were entirely Western in
  origin and methodology. In the long term they were to be an instru-
  ment of social mobility. Immediately, they aroused much opposition,
  both from conservatives, who saw in the change a turning away from
  Japanese values, and from men whose own inherited status had been
  their only guarantee of livelihood. At the same time, the groups who
  were eventually to benefit - the landlords and merchants, for whose
  sons education was to be the route to political influence - remained in
  the 1880s more conscious of the authoritarian character of the Meiji
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
  651
  government than of its career opportunities. There was, therefore, still
  something to be done by way of reconciling both kinds of critics to the
  new structure of power. A written constitution, combining a tradi-
  tional rationale of imperial sovereignty with what seemed to be a
  compatible form of Western political thought, was the chosen means
  for achieving it.
  THE MEIJI CONSTITUTION
  Japan's earliest moves toward limiting the power of the central author-
  ity derived, like Europe's, from ideas of feudal separatism. During the
  closing years of Tokugawa rule, several proposals had been put for-
  ward for a kind of baronial council, involving some of the great lords
  and even representatives of their retainers. From this came two devel-
  opments. One was a bakufu attempt to fend off complete disaster by
  making the shogun the president of such a council. This merged in the
  months after the Restoration into plans by Tosa and Echizen, in par-
  ticular, to check the ambitions of Satsuma and Choshu within the
  Meiji government. The other was the use of a similar device by the
  Meiji leadership as a means of conciliating those whose role in the
  political structure was assumed to be passive: the large numbers of
  court nobles, feudal lords, and samurai who had to be persuaded to
  accept the decisions taken by a minority on their behalf. In both
  contexts it was possible to appeal to Western models and precedents.
  In time it was recognized that there was good reason for doing so,
  namely, the desire to give Japan an international image of "enlighten-
  ment," which would reinforce its efforts to revise the unequal treaties
  of 1858. These motives - the wish by lesser members of the political
  elite to restrain the ministers' arbitrary authority, the value to govern-
  ment of marshaling the support of "public opinion," the need to im-
  press the treaty powers - all were to continue, though with varying
  degrees of importance, to influence Japanese discussions of representa-
  tive institutions throughout the events leading to the announcement of
  a written constitution in 1889.28
  The first step in that direction was the creation of the Kogisho in
  1869. This was a legislature, comprising nominees from the domains,
  28 On the late Tokugawa and early Meiji background to the constitutional movement, see
  Nobutake Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
  University Press, 1950), pp. 24-43; and Osatake Takeki, Ithin zengo ni okeru rikken shiso, rev.
  ed., 2 vols. (Tokyo: Hokodo, 1929).
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  which was formed to discuss matters put to it by the executive. It had
  a turbulent history and was quickly abolished, though its existence
  served to stimulate the emergence of similar assemblies in a number of
  domains. When the Dajokan was reorganized in 1871, the legislative
  function was entrusted to the Left Chamber (Sa-in). It seemed even
  less likely to weaken the essentially authoritarian character of the
  regime than its predecessor was.
  What changed this situation was the development of a split within
  the oligarchy. During 1872 and 1873, when leading members of the
  government took part in an exploratory mission to America and Eu-
  rope under Iwakura, the Satsuma and Choshu leaders, Okubo and
  Kido, began to diverge in their views concerning the course that
  Japan should take to secure international equality. Okubo, impressed
  by Britain's industry and Bismarck's authority, sought to make these
  his models. Kido began instead to dwell on the importance of con-
  sent as an ingredient in national unity and of a written constitution as
  providing a necessary framework for it. At his request Aoki Shuzo,
  then a student in Germany, drew up a draft of a constitution for
  Japan, which Kido submitted to his colleagues in November 1873,
  following their return from Europe. It provided for the emperor to
  have extensive powers, which the Dajokan would wield in his name:
  to superintend the administration, appointing and dismissing offi-
  cials; to conduct foreign policy; to command the armed forces; and to
  issue emergency ordinances having the force of law. A bicameral
  assembly would share the legislative authority with him. It would
  consist of an upper house (Genro-in), appointed from among officials
  of chokunin rank, and a lower house (Gi-in), ultimately to be elective
  but in the short term to be chosen from the nobility and prefectural
  governors. The emperor would have the right to veto legislation and
  dissolve the assembly, but an amendment of the constitution would
  require the consent of both houses, and the budget would have to be
  passed by the Gi-in. Ministers would be responsible to the emperor,
  not to the legislature.2'
  Okubo's response to this document was cool. He agreed that Japan
  needed a constitution to "establish harmony between the ruler and the
  people"; accepted that this implied the kind of monarchy under which
  29 Kido's memorial of November 1873, supporting these proposals, is in McLaren, Documents,
  pp. 567-77. The draft constitution is translated in George M. Beckmann, The Making of the
  Meiji Constitution: The Oligarchs and the Constitutional Development of Japan, 
  1868-1891
  (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1957), pp. 100-10.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
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  "state affairs are conducted according to the constitution," avoiding
  "monarchial absolutism . . . which had no fixed laws"; but he insisted
  that what was done must be "consistent with our conditions, customs,
  and tendencies." This he interpreted as requiring the retention of "the
  supreme power of the emperor."*0 In fact, Okubo was well enough
  satisfied with the Dajokan as it stood, that is, a strong executive, a
  legislature (Sa-in), consisting of members of the nobility and others
  "specially selected," and a clear separation of powers, which denied to
  the legislature any executive role. Because by this time he had emerged
  as the strong man of the Meiji government, taking over the newly
  formed Home Ministry, it seemed likely that his views would prevail.
  There was, however, a more serious disagreement that soon had to
  be taken into account. During the late summer and autumn of 1873
  there had been a bitter dispute among members of the government,
  focusing at first on Japan's policy toward Korea, but broadening into
  an assessment of national aims as a whole. As a result of it, several of
  the established leaders, including Saigo of Satsuma, Goto and Itagaki
  of Tosa, and Soejima of Hizen, had resigned. In January 1874 the last
  three, together with six other influential samurai, took up the argu-
  ments that Kido had put forward a few weeks earlier, but giving them
  a different thrust. Kido had called for a constitution, binding ruler
  and people together, as an element in Japanese defenses against for-
  eign attack, urging - much as Okubo did from his more authoritarian
  standpoint - the need to end feudal separatism for the sake of unity.
  "If a country is divided among a multitude of petty rulers, each one
  having full authority in his own district," he had written, " . . . the
  national strength is dissipated." Itagaki and his friends dwelt more on
  social cohesion, writing of "no taxation without representation," of
  terminating arbitrary rule, and of an assembly "chosen by the peopte"
  having substantial powers.31 Their memorial was thus a deliberate
  challenge to the men in office. They followed it up by organizing a
  public campaign to introduce representative government in Japan,
  seeking support especially among disaffected samurai. Given the wide-
  spread unrest that already existed, because of such measures as con-
  scription and the handling of samurai stipends, they had to be taken
  seriously.
  It was not only samurai discontents that were at issue. It is significant
  30 Okubo's memorial in reply to Kido, translated in Beckmann, Making, pp. 111-19.
  31 Memorial of January 17, 1874, in McLaren, Documents, pp. 426-32. For the quotation from
  Kido, p. 570.
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  that both Kido and Itagaki came from areas in which nonsamurai - the
  well-to-do of the countryside and towns, men often on the fringes of the
  samurai class - had played an active part in the events leading to the
  bakufu's overthrow. In another memorial, early in 1874, Itagaki com-
  mented that if an assembly were established, the franchise should ini-
  tially be limited to "the samurai and the richer farmers and merchants,
  for it is they who produced the leaders of the revolution of 1868."32 In
  this he was reflecting the political aspirations of men who had achieved a
  measure of wealth and local influence in the economic conditions of the
  late Tokugawa period but had so far been denied any share in running
  the affairs of the country. They were the kind of men whom it was
  important to conciliate. In many parts of Japan the mass of the villagers,
  oppressed by tax collectors, exploited by landlords, and bewildered by
  the commercialization of agriculture, were in a state of turbulence and
  occasional rebellion. Without the cooperation of rural elites, it was
  doubtful whether the army and police force could yet maintain order;
  and if they failed to do so, Japan might again face the combination of
  foreign and domestic dangers that had brought down the Tokugawa.
  Because of these circumstances, the Popular Rights movement
  (Jiyu minken undo) of the 1870s, marshaled by Itagaki and Goto
  through political party organizations like the Aikoku koto and the
  Risshisha," contributed to a shift in government policy away from a
  preoccupation with feudal opinion and toward the assimilation of new
  groups into the Japanese ruling class. It was not a sudden change. Nor
  was it something inexorably forced on the leadership by its political
  opponents. Rather, it reflected several converging influences: a steady
  improvement in the government's facilities for suppressing samurai
  and peasant unrest; a growing awareness of the need for a wider base
  of support within the population, if Japan were to be strong in any
  Western definition of the term; and a recognition that leaders were
  available who could organize an alternative regime, should those in
  power fail. Working out an institutional pattern appropriate to this
  situation took time. It also required that the remaining members of the
  governmental oligarchy come to an accommodation with one another,
  a process that took place largely behind closed doors.
  One step that could be taken with relatively little controversy was to
  32 Memorial of February 20,1874, in ibid., pp. 440-8.
  33 On the subject of the minken movement and its significance, see Ike, Beginnings, pp. 60-86;
  and George Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modem Japan: 1868—1900
  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 6-30.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
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  provide for wider participation in local government. Under an agree-
  ment between Okubo and Kido early in 1875, an assembly of
  prefectural governors (Chihokan kaigi) was established as a partial
  substitute for a national legislature. One of the proposals put to it in
  June of that year concerned the possibility of extending and regulariz-
  ing the local assemblies already established in some regions by the
  former domains, so as to ensure that there would be one in each urban
  area (fu) and prefecture (ken). Action was delayed by the outbreak of
  the Satsuma Rebellion and other manifestations of samurai unrest in
  1876-77, but the plan was brought forward again in 1878, approved
  by the Chihokan kaigi, and implemented in July. The regulations then
  issued stated that the electorate was to be limited to males over twenty-
  five, paying at least ¥5 in annual land tax; that assemblymen were to
  serve four years, with half retiring every two years; and that decisions
  were to be taken by simple majority vote. The main business to be
  conducted by the assemblies was raising and spending that part of the
  land tax designated for local use. They were entitled to discuss other
  matters put to them by the governor; but to make sure that they did so
  in a suitably responsible manner, any action they recommended was
  subject to veto by the governor and approval by the home minister.**
  In April 1880 these arrangements were supplemented by the creation
  of similar advisory assemblies for towns (cho) and villages (son), with the
  difference being that the heads of cho and son, who had no formal official
  authority, were to be elected, whereas those of larger areas were still to
  be appointed by government. The whole system was then codified
  under the influence of German advisers in the 1880s, when Yamagata
  was home minister. The chief change then made was the introduction of
  districts (gun) and cities (shi) as intermediate units within the prefec-
  tures, each having an elected assembly and an appointed head. Another
  consequence of the revised regulations - issued in 1888 for cities,
  towns, and villages; in 1890 for prefectures, urban areas, and districts -
  was that the members of the prefectural assemblies were thereafter
  elected indirectly by those of cities and districts. Paralleling these devel-
  opments but causing much more difficulty was a series of decisions
  taken within the oligarchy about the nature of a national parliament."
  The first stage was in February 1875, when Okubo, Kido, and Itagaki,
  34 Regulations of July 22, 1878 in McLaren, Documents, pp. 272-6. On local government
  assemblies and their powers in general, see Hackett, Yamagata, pp. 107-15; and Steiner,
  Local Government, pp. 25-54.
  35 The discussions within the oligarchy leading to these decisions are treated in some detail in
  Akita, Foundations, pp. 31-57; and Beckmann, Making, pp. 26-61. In Japanese, see Inada,
  Meijikempo, vol. 1, chaps. 6-11.
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  with the help of ltd as an intermediary, agreed to reorganize the
  Dajokan so as to replace the Left and Right Chambers by a bicameral
  legislature, comprising a senate (Genro-in) and the assembly of pre-
  fectural governors (Chihokan kaigi) already mentioned. This was an-
  nounced in April in an imperial rescript promising that constitutional
  government would be established "in gradual stages." The change did
  not in any way reduce the authority of the executive, acting through the
  Center Chamber (Sei-in), but it did set up a machinery for constitution
  making. In September 1876 the Genro-in was instructed to prepare
  constitutional proposals, a task entrusted to a small committee and
  completed in June 1878. The scheme it produced had some similarities
  to what Kido had put forward nearly five years earlier, as well as to the
  constitution that was eventually introduced in 1889. Nevertheless, in a
  number of respects it betrayed the influence of the kind of thinking that
  both Iwakura and Ito were inclined to describe as un-Japanese. Thus,
  although it referred to the imperial line as "unbroken for ages" and the
  emperor as "sacred and inviolable," possessing "the power of adminis-
  tration," it also described the legislative power as "divided between the
  Emperor and Parliament." Ministers were to be appointed and dis-
  missed by the emperor but were to take an oath of loyalty to the constitu-
  tion and could be impeached by the upper house (Genro-in). The lower
  house, which was to be elected under rules similar to those being intro-
  duced for the prefectural assemblies, was to have the sole right of
  approving the budget.?6
  Much of this was unacceptable to senior members of the Center
  Chamber. Ito and Iwakura promptly told the Genro-in to revise its
  draft to make it more in keeping with the "national polity," that is, to
  strengthen the imperial prerogative, but the version that was finally
  produced in December 1880 still did not satisfy them. For example, it
  did not provide for the emperor to have the right to issue ordinances
  having the force of law, or free the government from budgetary depen-
  dence on parliament, both of which were measures they deemed neces-
  sary. Consequently, the proposals were not accepted, and the drafting
  committee was abolished early in 1881. Meanwhile, ministers had
  been canvased for their views. All but one agreed that some kind of
  constitution was needed, that it must protect the imperial sovereignty,
  and that it must be approached gradually, after careful preparation.
  Yamagata envisaged a legislature consisting of appointed members for
  an interim period or indirectly elected by the prefectural assemblies,
  36 The draft is translated in Beckmann, Making, pp. 120-5.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
  657
  but in any case one that would not be able to challenge the executive.
  Ito proposed as a first step an enlargement of the Genro-in, in order to
  give more members of the nobility and the prefectural assemblies
  some experience of state affairs, as these were the men to whom Japan
  must look for sober political judgment. In general, he claimed, Japan's
  leadership must seek to disarm its critics, but not at the cost of ceding
  real power. We must "relax our hold over government but not yield
  it."37
  The one voice that broke the unison was that of Okuma Shigenobu
  of Hizen, who had been councilor since 1871 and minister of finance
  from 1873 to 1880. He had long been the government's outstanding
  modernizer. Now that Okubo was dead and Iwakura was getting old,
  the contest for overall leadership seemed to lie between Ito and
  Okuma, which gave the latter's views a particular importance. He did
  not submit them until March 1881. They then proved to be a great
  deal more radical than any of his colleagues had expected, not least in
  recommending that a parliament be established almost immediately,
  so that elections could be held in 1882 and the first session convoked
  in 1883. Not only was this very much faster action than any of the
  other ministers wanted, but it also was action of the wrong kind:
  Okuma envisaged a constitution on the British model, in which power
  would depend on rivalry among political parties and the highest office
  would go to the man who commanded a parliamentary majority. "Con-
  stitutional government is party government," he wrote, "and the strug-
  gles between parties are the struggles of principles."*8 Implicit in this
  was a challenge to the Satsuma and Choshu domination of the Meiji
  government. ltd at once took it up, threatening to resign if anything
  like Okuma's proposals were accepted. This enabled him to isolate
  Okuma and force him out of the council later in the year.
  In the interval, Ito consulted privately with Iwakura about the con-
  stitutional question, working out a set of ideas that on July 5 were put
  to the Dajokan in Iwakura's name as a statement of "general princi-
  ples." The memorial accompanying them rejected the proposition that
  Japan move "suddenly" to a British system, which made "the adminis-
  tration of the government responsible to the majority in parliament,"
  and expressed a preference for that of Prussia, in which parliament
  had only legislative power and "the organization of the chief officers of
  the administration" remained "the prerogative of the ruler." In Iwa-
  kura's words, the situation of Japan made it more appropriate to
  37 The memorials by Yamagata and Ito are translated in Beckmann, Making, pp. 126-35.
  38 The memorial is translated in ibid., pp. 136-42.
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  "advance gradually on the model of Prussia, thereby leaving room for
  future improvements."^ Specifically, he identified three points as cru-
  cial to the choice: that the emperor retain the right to appoint and
  dismiss ministers and senior officials; that the cabinet not be subject to
  "the intervention of parliament," the ministers being directly responsi-
  ble to the emperor in departmental matters; and that the government
  be freed from financial control by the parliament by providing for the
  budget of the previous year to be continued in force whenever the
  parliament rejected the current budget proposals. On October 11,
  1881, the Dajokan accepted Iwakura's statement as the basis for its
  future action. The next day an imperial decree promised that a consti-
  tution, designed to ensure "that our imperial heirs may be provided
  with a rule for their guidance," would be gradually worked out and
  brought into effect in 1890.4°
  Two themes ran through all these documents, except that of
  Okuma. One was that parliamentary government in Japan would be
  weak or even subversive government, destroying the firm central direc-
  tion on which the whole future of the country depended. The other
  was that Prussia, not Britain, was the relevant model for Japan, be-
  cause Prussia's problems and experiences were much more apposite to
  a country that had not yet attained the economic and social founda-
  tions needed for parliamentary rule. These considerations were to
  continue to dominate the discussions that led to the actual drafting of a
  constitution during the next eight years. They were manifested, first,
  in the muzzling of opposition through the enforcement of strict con-
  trols over press and public meetings, culminating in the Peace Preser-
  vation Law of 1887, through which the police were given the power to
  remove from the capital any person "who plots or incites disturbance,
  or who is judged to be scheming something detrimental to public
  tranquility"41; and, second, in the arrangement by which the drafts
  were prepared under the direction of ltd, working in seclusion with
  the help of German and German-influenced advisers.
  Insofar as the debates over a constitution were part of a struggle for
  power, it was one in which the position of the men in office grew
  steadily stronger. Following the imperial announcement of October
  1881, those who wished to push the government in the direction of a
  constitution that would give parliament genuine authority organized
  39 Iwakura's memorial is translated in ibid., pp. 143-8.
  40 Text translated in Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 720-1.
  41 Text of December 25, 1887, translated in McLaren, Documents, pp. 502-4. For the press
  laws of 1875 and 1887, pp. 539-50.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
  659
  themselves into political parties and conducted vigorous campaigns.42
  Okuma's Reform Party (Kaishinto), founded in March 1882 with the
  backing of some urban intellectuals and wealthy merchants, pressed
  hard for a parliament of the British type, but its broad acceptance of
  the main elements in Meiji modernizing held it back from taking any
  action that might be genuinely disruptive. The government had little
  to fear from gradualism of this kind, especially as the movement was
  without any solid commercial or industrial base. Itagaki's Liberal
  Party (Jiyuto) had no similar inhibitions. Initially controlled by dissi-
  dent ex-samurai, many of whom had been influenced by French politi-
  cal thought, it attracted widespread support in the early 1880s from
  landlords and farmers in the countryside. Under the pressures of a
  deflationary monetary policy, which reduced farm prices and caused
  considerable distress, some of these turned to demonstrations of force,
  more in the tradition of peasant rebellion than party politics. This had
  two effects. It provided the government with ample excuse for the use
  of army and police, on the grounds that the party was acting illegally,
  and it frightened the more moderate leaders into breaking with the
  radicals. The Jiyuto was dissolved in 1884, and the scattered out-
  breaks of violence with which it was associated were suppressed by the
  following year.43 Thereafter there was little really effective opposition
  of which the oligarchy needed to take account in its task of writing a
  constitution.
  One purpose of having a constitution was to consolidate this gain,
  that is, to ensure that men of substance would see enough advantages
  in the regime to make them want to cooperate with it, leaving the
  police to deal with the rest. In this sense one cannot divorce the formal
  written constitution from the decisions that were being taken during
  the 1880s regarding recruitment to the bureaucracy and the nature of
  local assemblies, though neither of these was to be the subject of
  specific provisions in the document of 1889. The latter also had an-
  other function, however: to persuade the world of Japan's enlighten-
  ment. To this, too, other decisions were relevant. Changes in the
  peerage and cabinet system, for example, were made not only for
  reasons of elite unity but also because they would present Japanese
  institutions to the West in a familiar and favorable form. Yet in pursu-
  42 The fullest account in English is by Ike, Beginnings, pp. 101-68.
  43 For discussions of rural disatisfaction as it related to the minken movement, see Roger Bowen,
  Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
  Press, 1980); and Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, ed. and trans. Marius B.
  Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  ing the path of Westernization, Japan's leadership faced a critical
  difficulty. The rationale on which its own power rested was that of
  imperial absolutism, deriving from the emperor's divine descent. Be-
  lief in divine descent was part of a complex of traditionalist sentiments
  that were spread widely through Japanese society. Westernizing was
  frequently offensive to those who held them. It was necessary, there-
  fore, to find a constitutional formula that would reconcile Western
  norms with the Japanese imperial tradition, if the maximum advan-
  tage was to be gained.
  Early in 1882 it was agreed that this task be entrusted to Ito, who
  would visit Europe to study Western models. He left Yokohama in
  March, proceeding directly to Berlin - a logical destination, in view of
  Iwakura's references to the Prussian constitution in the previous July
  and the German origin of Kido's original proposals of 1873. There he
  consulted constitutional experts like Rudolph Gneist and his pupil
  Albert Mosse. He then went to Austria to hear lectures from Lorenz
  von Stein. Thanks to those men, he wrote to Iwakura in August, "I
  have come to understand the essential features of the structure and
  operation of states. In the most crucial matter of fixing the foundations
  of our imperial system and of retaining the prerogatives belonging to
  it, I have already found sufficient substantiation. . . . "u
  By the time he returned to Japan in the summer of 1883, following
  brief visits to Paris and London, Ito was in a position to put flesh on
  the bones of Iwakura's "general principles." For various reasons the
  actual drafting did not begin until 1885. It was then protected from
  political pressures - within the establishment, as well as outside it -
  by being conducted, first, in Ito's residence in Tokyo and then in his
  summer villa on an island in Tokyo Bay. Five men, apart from Ito,
  were principally concerned with it. Two were German: Albert Mosse,
  invited specially from Germany for this work, and Hermann Roesler,
  who had been an adviser to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo since 1878.
  The others were Japanese: Inoue Kowashi, the most influential of
  them, who had been associated with both Okubo and Iwakura in
  constitutional discussions; Ito Miyoji, a former interpreter in English
  and secretary to the Dajokan, and Kaneko Kentaro, a graduate of
  Harvard and a secretary in the office of the Genro-in.
  The political ideas that most influenced their discussions were those
  44 Quoted in Akita, Foundations, p. 61. For accounts of Ito's work in drafting the constitution
  and of the subsequent discussions, pp. 58-75; Beckmann, Making, pp. 69-95; and Ishii,
  Japanese Legislation, pp. 366-408. Vol. 2 of Inada, Meiji kempo, is almost wholly devoted to
  this subject.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
  66l
  of "social freedom" and "social monarchy," current above all in Ger-
  many.-" The former implied freedom within the law, involving the
  regulation of social groups through legal institutions, in order that all
  might enjoy the benefits of security and stability. In the modern state,
  the argument ran, the main threat to this freedom arose from the
  struggle between capital and labor, which, if not regulated, could
  cause anarchy. It was the function of a constitution to impose a frame-
  work of law such as would moderate this struggle and harmonize
  competing interests. The role could not be performed by an elected
  parliament, because those who were elected to it would be representa-
  tives of the groups that were in conflict. Instead, it belonged to a
  monarch, standing above the struggle and embodying in himself the
  general interest. To perform it effectively, he must not be placed
  under the control of parliament. Nor must his ministers, who must be
  free to act under his direction in a manner contrary to the wishes of
  those who might at any given time possess a majority there. Yet this
  was not to be mere personal absolutism, subject to no limitations. It
  must operate within a framework of law, which it existed to uphold, a
  restraint symbolized by the requirement that the ruler's executive
  actions required the countersignature of a minister, just as his legisla-
  tive actions required the consent of parliament.
  In a memorandum of June 4, 1887, drawn up in response to ques-
  tions from Inoue Kowashi, Roesler set out this argument as it applied
  to Japan.*6 Japan was already entering the age of commerce and indus-
  try, he maintained. It followed that the bourgeoisie would emerge
  eventually as the most powerful class and that its demands for a politi-
  cal voice would have to be met. Satisfying it, however, would put in
  jeopardy the interests of the rural population, both landlords and
  propertyless. They would become the groups whom it would be the
  state's task to protect, and as the traditional defender of the weak it
  would be above all the emperor who must protect them.
  The kind of constitutional conclusions to which this argument led -
  ministerial responsibility to the emperor, a strong House of Peers, the
  denial of full budgetary rights to the Lower House, property qualifica-
  tions for the electorate, and a bureaucracy independent of parliamen-
  tary control - were clearly the sort of thing the Meiji leadership de-
  45 See especially Joseph Pittau, Political Thought in Early Meiji Japan: 1868-1889 (Cambridge,
  Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 131-95; and Johannes Siemes, Hermann Roesler
  and the Making of the Meiji Stale (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1966), pp. 3-35.
  46 Summarized in Siemes, Hermann Roesler, p. 32. The full Japanese text is given in Inada,
  Meiji kempo, vol. 2, pp. 142-8.
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  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  sired. Indeed, Roesler had played a part in drafting Iwakura's "general
  principles," from which the discussions had begun. Nevertheless,
  there was a key issue on which Roesler was out of step with his
  Japanese colleagues. One reason that the draft constitution produced
  by the Genro-in had been rejected in 1879 was, as Iwakura wrote to
  Sanjo at the time, "because there are parts which do not conform with
  the national polity."^ By this he meant that the treatment of the
  imperial institution was not in accordance with Japanese custom and
  tradition. Precisely the same objection was made by ltd Hirobumi and
  Inoue Kowashi to Roesler's drafts in the 1880s, even though they were
  in other respects in line with their aims and interests. Roesler's justifi-
  cation of the imperial prerogative, after all, was theoretical and Euro-
  pean in its derivation, owing nothing to Japanese circumstance beyond
  the general statement that the monarchy's historical survival demon-
  strated its appropriateness to Japanese conditions. There was no trace
  in it of the mystique of Japan's "national polity" (kokutai). Most Japa-
  nese understood kokutai to connote the existence of a uniquely Japa-
  nese emperor, ruling by right of divine descent and having a relation-
  ship with his people of a kind not paralleled in other societies. Unless
  the essence of this belief found expression in the constitution, many of
  them would regard it as no more "Japanese" than the cabinet system,
  or French criminal law, or an army recruited by conscription and
  dressed in foreign-style uniforms.
  Consequently, although the European concept of "freedom within
  the law" found its way into the final drafts of the constitution, that of
  "social monarchy" did not. In an article published twenty years later,
  Ito gave an account of the origins of the constitution that helps explain
  his thinking on this subject.48 Japan, he argued, faced in the Meiji
  period the necessity of securing the "recognized status of membership
  upon an equal footing in the family of the most powerful and civilized
  nations of the world." Because of the country's small size, success in
  this depended on cohesion and efficiency. Yet the heritage of feudal-
  ism meant not only that there were "centrifugal forces" to be over-
  come, but also that the people were "merely a numerical mass of
  governed units." For Japan to become strong, therefore, "it was a
  matter of prime necessity that these units . . . should combine and
  cooperate as a solid and compact organization for the attainment of the
  common weal," to which end the government had "to train the mass of
  47 Quoted in Akita, Foundations, p. n.
  48 "Some Reminiscences on the Grant of the New Constitution," in S. Okuma, ed., Fifty Years
  of New Japan, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elders, 1909), vol. 1, pp. 122-32.
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  MEIJI CONSTITUTION 
  663
  the people to modern ideas of public and political life." It did this,
  first, through prefectural and district assemblies, then by the introduc-
  tion of a national assembly. Indeed, Ito wrote,
  the problem to be solved and the object to be attained by the constitution in
  our country was not only the harmonising and conciliating of conflicting
  tendencies of different interests within die State, as is the case in die majority
  of constitutional monarchies, but also the imparting of a new vitality to the
  public life and citizens - a new and increased creative energy to the public
  functions of the State itself.
  In other words, "social monarchy" was not enough.
  The special significance of the imperial institution in this connec-
  tion was something that Ito emphasized in a statement to the Privy
  Council in June 1888, when that body was discussing the final draft of
  the constitution.49 In Europe, he said, history and religion had to-
  gether provided a basis for constitutionalism, about which there was
  "a fundamental consensus." Without some equivalent foundation in
  Japan, "politics will fall into the hands of the uncontrollable masses."
  Religion could not provide it: Shinto was too weak, and Buddhism
  was in decline. Only the imperial house could become "the corner-
  stone of our country." Hence "the first principle of our constitution is
  the respect for the sovereign rights of the emperor." The section of the
  final document that embodied this principle was the work of Ito him-
  self and Inoue Kowashi, not of their German colleagues; of the politi-
  cians, that is to say, not the jurists.
  The draft constitution, together with related documents - the Impe-
  rial Household Law, the Law of the Houses of the Diet, the Election
  Law, and so on - was ready by April 1888. At the end of that month
  the government created the Privy Council (Sumitsu-in), initially to
  scrutinize the drafts and subsequently to act as the highest authority
  on matters concerning constitutional interpretation and revision. Ito
  resigned as prime minister in order to become president of the council,
  though he continued to attend meetings of the cabinet by special
  imperial command. The discussions that followed took almost nine
  months and led to a few amendments of some importance - for exam-
  ple, giving the legislature (the Diet) the right to initiate laws, as well as
  to discuss and vote on them - but did not change the fundamental
  character of the proposals. They were announced publicly from the
  throne on February 11, 1889, that is, Kigensetsu, the supposed anni-
  versary of the accession of the first emperor, Jimmu.
  49 Quoted in Pittau, Political Thought, pp. 177-8.
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  664 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  The first chapter of the constitution concerned the emperor.*0 It
  described him as "sacred and inviolable" and as "the head of the
  Empire, combining in himself the rights of sovereignty." He was to
  exercise legislative authority "with the consent of the Imperial Diet,"
  which he could convoke, prorogue, and dissolve. He had the power to
  sanction laws; to issue ordinances having the force of law, subject to
  subsequent approval by the Diet; to exercise supreme command of the
  army and navy; and to declare war, make peace, and conclude treaties.
  In sum, as ltd put it:
  All the different legislative as well as executive powers of State, by means of
  which he reigns over the country and governs the people, are united in this
  most exalted personage, who thus holds in his hands, as it were, all the
  ramifying threads of the political life of the country.'1
  What is more, none of this depended on any kind of social contract or
  the performance of a particular function. The emperor ruled because he
  was descended from "a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal."
  The second chapter of the constitution dealt with the rights and
  duties of subjects. Their rights included those of appointment to civil
  or military office, regardless of inherited status; of trial according to
  the law; of property; of religious belief; and of liberty of speech,
  publication, and political association "within the limits of the law."
  Their duties involved military service and the payment of taxes. All
  rights were subject to the special ordinance powers of the emperor "in
  times of war or cases of national emergency." Ito took pains to empha-
  size this: "[I]t must be remembered that the ultimate aim of the State
  is to maintain its existence . . . [so] in times of danger the State will
  have to sacrifice, without hesitation, part of the law and of the rights of
  the subjects, in order to attain its ultimate end."'2
  Chapter HI established a bicameral Diet (Gikai), consisting of a
  House of Peers and an elected House of Representatives, whose compo-
  sition was set out in detail in separate laws. Neither house was given
  superiority over the other. All legislation required the consent of the
  Diet, both houses having the right to initiate proposals and make repre-
  50 The text of the constitution is available in English in a number of works, for example,
  Beckmann, Making, pp. 151-6; and Ishii, Japanese Legislation, pp. 725-33. The official
  commentary, published under the name of Ito Hirobumi, is Commentaries on the Constitution
  of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Igirisu horitsu gakko, 1889); it follows closely Roesler's
  commentary, except for the chapter on the emperor. There is a shorter commentary, also in
  Ito's name, "The Constitution of the Empire of Japan," in A. Stead, ed., Japan by the
  Japanese (London: Heinemann, 1904), pp. 32-63; this is arranged under the same headings
  as the English text of the constitution itself.
  51 Ito, "TheConstitution," p. 34. 
  52 Ibid., pp. 43-4.
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  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 1890 
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  sentations to the government. Sessions were to be for three months in
  every year; votes to be by simple majority; and deliberations to be
  public except when specifically ruled to be secret. Ministers were to
  have the right to attend and speak in either house. They were required
  (Chapter IV) to "give their advice to the Emperor, and be responsible
  for it," as well as to countersign relevant laws, ordinances, and
  rescripts. Ito's summary was that the Diet "takes part in legislation, but
  has no share in the sovereign power," whereas ministers served "as
  media, through which the imperial commands are conveyed. . . . "53
  In no sense were the ministers responsible to the Diet. Nor did they
  have a collective responsibility as members of the cabinet.
  Chapter VI spelled out the limitations on the Diet's budgetary pow-
  ers. The annual budget needed its consent, but there were a number of
  significant exclusions. The expenditures of the imperial household re-
  quired Diet approval only when they were to be increased. Fixed expen-
  ditures arising from "powers appertaining to the Emperor" under the
  constitution or from "the legal obligations of the government" - which
  covered most costs of regular administration, including pay for the
  armed forces - "shall be neither rejected nor reduced by the Imperial
  Diet, without the concurrence of the Government." Finally, when there
  was no Diet vote on the annual budget or the budget proposals had not
  been passed, "the Government shall carry out the budget of the preced-
  ing year." These provisions were to be the main focus of conflict be-
  tween the cabinet and the lower house in the following decades.
  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 1890
  The constitutional provisions concerning the imperial institution were
  to be a major source of weakness in Japanese political life. As we have
  seen, they were formulated in terms of a mystical absolutism, based
  not on the emperor's responsibilities in government, but on his legiti-
  mating role, which derived in turn from his place in an "eternal"
  lineage. Appropriately, this kind of emperor became steadily more
  aloof: his public appearances few and ceremonial and his rescripts
  hortatory and lofty in tone.54 From remoteness he sanctioned policy,
  making the decisions of his ministers those of the state. It is true that
  as an individual he was able to influence the decisions informally, as
  53 Ibid., pp. 34,50.
  54 See Marius B.. Jansen, "Monarchy and Modernization in Japan," Journal of Asian Studies 36
  (1977): 611-22; also David A. Titus, Palace and Politics in Prewar Japan (New York:
  Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 1-57.
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  666 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  could members of his household acting in his name, but there was no
  constitutional procedure by which he could do so formally. Roesler's
  proposal that the emperor should regularly preside at meetings of the
  cabinet had been rejected by ltd. As a result, the emperor became an
  autocrat whose powers, absolute in theory, were strictly limited in
  practice. The judicial power had to be exercised by the courts accord-
  ing to law; use of the legislative power required the consent of the
  Diet; executive action was the subject of advice by ministers, who had
  to countersign all decrees and similar documents. Thus it became the
  accepted interpretation of the constitution that ministers enjoyed a
  dictatorial authority, "since the cabinet's conduct was regarded in a
  legal sense as the exercise of an imperial prerogative legitimately based
  on the advice of imperial ministers."55
  There was nothing very new about this in Japanese history. Under
  the Fujiwara, the Minamoto, the Ashikaga, and the Tokugawa, for
  centuries the emperor's role had been much the same. In all these
  cases, however, there had existed, apart from the emperor, a continu-
  ing center of power, whether aristocratic or feudal, from which Japan
  was actually governed. In the Meiji period this condition no longer
  obtained. Following the restoration of imperial rule (oseifukko), Japan
  had on the surface reverted to an earlier, bureaucratic type of political
  organization. ltd and his colleagues had then shaped this into a pluralis-
  tic constitution, in which office depended on merit, not birth, and the
  emperor's prerogatives were separately institutionalized in such bodies
  as the cabinet, the Privy Council, the Diet, and the general staff. By
  doing so they severed old links without always substituting effective
  new ones. No one institution could challenge the legitimacy of an-
  other, provided that it acted within its "proper" sphere; the emperor
  himself was removed from everyday politics; the officials of his house-
  hold lacked the political weight to take over the coordinating role that
  was his in name; and there was no longer a feudal system that could
  operate independently of central direction.
  The bonds that held this structure together were provided, as was
  logical, by the men who devised it, the "oligarchs," though not with-
  out considerable difficulty. Their first attempt at constructing a policy-
  making organ, the Dajokan, had been abandoned as too clumsy and
  not "modern" enough. The cabinet replaced it, but the cabinet's co-
  hesion was imperiled by the desire to avoid a doctrine of collective
  responsibility, because it might carry connotations of British parlia-
  55 Ishii, Japanese Legislation, p. 387. See also Sakata Yoshio, Tenno shinsei (Kyoto: Shibunkaku,
  1984).
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  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 1890 
  667
  mentary rule. Ito had tried to fill the gap by arranging for the prime
  minister to have overriding powers; that is, in the words of his com-
  mentary of 1904, "to indicate, according to his pleasure, the general
  course of policy of the State," and to exercise control over "every
  branch of the administration."'6 Sanjo and Yamagata apparently be-
  lieved that this was a dangerous degree of individual authority. They
  accordingly introduced regulations in December 1889 by which the
  prime minister lost many of his supervisory functions. As a substitute
  they provided for the cabinet as a whole to discuss matters of general
  importance, but in a period when significant differences over both
  home and foreign affairs were emerging among the members of the
  central group, this proved ineffective.
  The solution that was eventually worked out was extraconstitutional,
  like so much else that matters in Japanese politics. It comprised the
  gradual evolution of a process of regular consultation on key questions,
  including the choice of a prime minister, among those who were recog-
  nized as having a preponderant influence in the regime.57 These men,
  the genro, or elder statesmen - Ito, Yamagata, Matsukata Masayoshi,
  Inoue Kaoru, Kuroda Kiyotaka, and one or two others - personified
  the power of Satsuma and Choshu. Because of their standing, they
  could make themselves coordinators of policy in their capacity as per-
  sonal advisers to the emperor. Because they acted outside the written
  constitution, they could do so flexibly and confidentially. Until death
  removed them, they were able to supply the piece that had been missing
  from the machinery of government. Thereafter the problem recurred,
  for they had no comparable successors. In the twentieth century the
  lack of an acceptable means of mediating among the different segments
  of government, which often prevented agreement on national priorities,
  played an important part in the events leading to World War II.
  By comparison, the development of the bureaucratic machine
  itself - at the levels where policy was implemented rather than -
  was comparatively smooth.'8 There was some revision of the examina-
  tion arrangements in 1893, chiefly to reduce the privileges of direct
  appointment enjoyed by graduates of Tokyo Imperial University and
  to separate out the candidates for the diplomatic service. But for the
  56 ltd, "The Constitution," p. 51. On the powers of the prime minister, see also Ishii, Japanese
  Legislation, pp. 384-94.
  57 See Roger F. Hackett, "Political Modernization and the Meiji Genro," in Robert W. Ward,
  ed., Political Development in Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
  1968), pp. 65-97.
  58 See Hackett, Yamagata, pp. 198-203; Spaulding, Higher Civil Service, pp. 88-120; and
  Stfberman, "Bureaucratic Development."
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  668 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  most part, the transition from a civil service recruited among samurai,
  usually through personal connections, to one recruited through the
  national education system, went ahead with remarkably little friction.
  The one important source of disagreement was the method of appoint-
  ment to the highest (chokunin) ranks, which included vice-ministers
  and prefectural governors. Because these were filled by nomination of
  the government - technically, appointed by the emperor in person -
  they fell outside the examination system. And as the strength of politi-
  cal parties grew, Yamagata, in particular, began to fear that senior
  posts in local and central government might become part of a system
  of "spoils." He took several steps to prevent this while prime minister
  between 1889 and 1900. First, he changed the regulations concerning
  chokunin appointments, so as to give an advantage to those who had
  already served as sonin, that is, had entered by examination, and to
  those who had had other kinds of administrative experience, which"
  made it unlikely that they would be mere political nominees. Second,
  he extended the powers of the Privy Council, including in them the
  review of legislation concerning education and the bureaucracy,
  thereby making it difficult for any future party government to change
  the rules. Finally, he gave formal recognition to an existing practice
  whereby the posts of army and navy minister were limited to generals
  and admirals on active duty. All this helped protect the bureaucracy,
  both civil and military, from political meddling. What it did not do, as
  the twentieth century was to demonstrate, was to prevent the bureau-
  cracy from meddling in politics.
  Because the privileges of both oligarchs and bureaucrats had been
  firmly entrenched, there was from the outset a predictable clash be-
  tween those who already wielded power and those, the political par-
  ties, who sought to acquire it through votes in the House of Represen-
  tatives. The oligarchy's view of the cabinet's relationship with the Diet
  was that it must be "transcendental." Ito stated it as follows in a
  speech to the presidents of the prefectural assemblies in February
  1889: "The emperor stands above the people and apart from every
  party. Consequently, the government cannot favor one party above
  the other. It must be fair and impartial. And the prime minister . . .
  who assists the emperor, must not allow the government to be manipu-
  lated by the parties."*?
  59 Quoted in Akita, Foundations, p. 70. For an account of parliamentary politics between 1890
  and 1900, see especially Akita, Foundations, chaps. 6-10; W. W. McLaren, A Political
  History of Japan During the Meiji Era: 1867-1912 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), pp. 208-
  26, 242-73; and Robert Scalapino, Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan
  (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953), chap. 5.
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  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 189O 
  669
  Yamagata made a similar observation in an address to the prefectu-
  ral governors in the following year: "Because administrative rights are
  the sovereign prerogatives of the emperor, those who are given the
  responsibility of their exercise shall stand outside the various political
  parties."60 Nevertheless, there was, as we have seen with reference to
  bureaucratic institutions, a certain lack of articulation in the constitu-
  tion, and this was manifested also in those sections that specified the
  respective powers of the government and the lower house. The result
  was to leave openings that the parties were able to exploit. In particu-
  lar, the Diet's ability to block any increases in the budget proved to be
  a much more potent weapon than Ito had expected, given that the first
  parliamentary decade was to be that of Japan's first modern war and
  the beginnings of its overseas expansion.
  In July 1890 the first elections gave a majority in the lower house
  (160 votes out of a total of 300) jointly to the three parties led by
  Goto Shojiro, Itagaki Taisuke, and Okuma Shigenobu, all former
  members of the Dajokan, who were now openly at odds with the
  men still in office. Through several turbulent sessions - and interven-
  ing elections - they concentrated their attacks on the budget, forcing
  ministers to adopt a variety of illegal or suspect devices in order to
  get their proposals through. Matsukata, for example, tried to manipu-
  late the 1892 elections by an extensive use of bribery and the special
  powers of the police. The outcome was twenty-five people killed, but
  only ninety-three representatives supporting the government re-
  turned to the Diet. In the next session, Ito had recourse to a personal
  message from the emperor as a means of getting a favorable budget
  vote. Despite a political truce during 1894-5, because of the Sino-
  Japanese War, such deadlocks recurred, and it began to seem that if
  the parties could not rule Japan, they could make it almost impossi-
  ble for anyone else to do so constitutionally.
  Neither Ito nor Yamagata wanted the constitution to break down, as
  this would seriously damage the country's international reputation.
  Ito, however, was willing to go much further than Yamagata in trying
  to make it work, even to the point of admitting the parties to a share of
  office. In 1893 he had begun a limited cooperation with Itagaki's
  Liberal Party, only to find in the end that the opposition of other
  genro, notably Yamagata, prevented him from paying Itagaki's price,
  which was a post in the cabinet. In 1896 he was willing to pay that
  price, and in 1898 he gave his support to the formation of a joint
  60 Quoted in Scalapino, Democracy, p. 153, n. 8.
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  67O 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  Okuma-Itagaki government, but this collapsed in a matter of weeks
  because of its own internal divisions. As a last resort, therefore, Ito
  turned to forming a party of his own, one whose members would back
  "government" policies in return for some access to cabinet appoint-
  ments for themselves, that is, a party that would be satisfied with
  influence, not power. Taking over the surviving membership and
  organization of the Liberal Party, he founded the Rikken Seiyukai
  (Association of Friends of Constitutional Government) in September
  1900. This marked a parting of the ways between Ito and Yamagata,
  the former relying thereafter on manipulating the Diet and the genro,
  the latter on exploiting his base of support within the army and the
  Home Ministry bureaucracy. It also opened the way for a gradual
  infiltration of "outsiders" into the corridors of power, men like Hara
  Takashi (Kei), who countered Yamagata's moves by establishing ties
  between the parties and senior bureaucrats. Ito, optimistically, saw
  the resulting changes as evidence of a recognition by both sides that
  "the spirit of tolerance and conciliation, together with the tacit and
  mutual consent to place the welfare of the nation high above party
  politics or party passions, were necessary for the vitality and harmo-
  nious working of any constitutional government."61 Later commenta-
  tors have been less generous. Be that as it may, events in the 1890s had
  certainly demonstrated that the exclusion of elected representatives
  from positions of authority need not be as complete or as permanent as
  a first reading of the constitution would suggest.
  There had also during the same period been a broadening of the
  electorate, which was equally indicative of things to come.62 In 1890
  the vote was confined to males over twenty-five, who had lived for a
  year in the electoral district and paid annually at least ¥15 in national
  taxes. This meant that the total electorate was less than half a million,
  approximately 1.5 percent of the population. Electoral districts were
  small and were based on the census figures, not the distribution of
  qualified voters, and so the number of votes required to secure elec-
  tion varied, according to area, from under one hundred to over four
  thousand. Because the voters qualified chiefly by paying land tax -
  other tax rates were low - there was a substantial overrepresentation
  of rural interests, chiefly those of the landlords, and an underrepresen-
  61 Ito, "Some Reminiscences," p. 131.
  62 There is a good summary of the electoral system between 1890 and 1900 in George E.
  Uyehara, The Political Development of Japan: 1867-1909 (London: Constable, 1910), pp.
  168-79. F° r a detailed study of the system in action, see R. H. P. Mason, Japan's First
  General Election, 1890 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), esp. pp.
  27-58.
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  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 189O 
  67I
  tation of urban ones. This did not entirely accord with the oligarchy's
  assessment of the desirable course of national development, especially
  after Japan's victory over China. Hence Ito and Yamagata both tried
  to secure electoral reform, starting in 1895. Early bills for this purpose
  failed to get past the landlord vote in the lower house, but Yamagata
  finally succeeded in getting one approved in 1900. It created larger,
  multimember electoral districts, using the single, transferable vote;
  reduced the tax qualification for voting to ¥10 and made it less depen-
  dent on land tax, thereby increasing the electorate to about 1.7 mil-
  lion; and established separate electoral districts for all municipalities
  with a population of more than thirty thousand. Thus it ensured that
  the twentieth-century Diet would be more representative of Japan's
  growing commercial and industrial class.
  In conclusion, let us return to the question, raised at the beginning of
  this chapter, of how Meiji political institutions can be characterized as
  a whole. One negative statement can be made at once. The liberal
  democracy, which Western Europe and America developed during the
  nineteenth century - and sought eagerly to export - found its princi-
  pal advocates in Japan among those who criticized the regime, not
  those who created it. Nor was this phenomenon in isolation. Japan
  before 1900 was not yet fully industrial or even capitalist, whether
  viewed in a political, economic, or social context. Its government did
  not pursue liberal economic policies, any more than it pursued liberal
  democratic ones, and the bourgeoisie remained less powerful than the
  ex-samurai or landlords. It is easy to be misled by the enthusiasm with
  which Japanese translated Samuel Smiles or Herbert Spencer into
  believing that the liberal tendency in Japan was stronger than it really
  was.
  Contemporary opponents of the Meiji government, mostly liberals
  themselves, saw it as feudal and autocratic: an alliance of factions
  (hambatsu) institutionalizing the power of men from a small number of
  domains (Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen) who had come together
  to overthrow the bakufu in 1867-8. As a description of the origins of the
  leadership and of the bonds that held it together for the first twenty
  years, this emphasis on the feudal has much to commend it. Moreover,
  it was a feudal society that had to be transformed. Samurai origins and
  connections, especially for families belonging formerly to those four
  powerful domains, have continued to be politically important in the
  twentieth century. In social and economic institutions, too, feudal atti-
  tudes and values have often proved remarkably enduring. Neverthe-
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  672 
  MEIJI POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
  less, as a means of identifying a stage of political development, the
  hambatsu label is inadequate. It does not sufficiently differentiate be-
  tween the importance of being a samurai and the importance of belong-
  ing to a particular domain. More serious, it does not give enough weight
  to the nature of the common policies that the members of the Meiji
  government pursued. These had modernizing and centralizing dimen-
  sions that make an explanation in terms of the geographical and status
  origins of the leadership too narrow and possibly misleading.
  There are two later interpretations that have wide currency. One is
  that of "social monarchy," which emphasizes the German theme in
  Meiji political institutions and identifies points of similarity between
  the two countries in social structure (Junkers and samurai) and stages
  of growth (late developers). This view, which is essentially concerned
  with theories of modernization, has a good deal of substance. It serves
  to underline the element of choice exercised in Japan's approach to the
  West. The German constitution was selected for study by Iwakura and
  Ito because of its apparent relevance; it was not just "copied" because
  it was there. It also identifies correctly the kind of Western ideas that
  were most influential within the Meiji government, where there was a
  clear recognition that the example of "advanced" countries, like Brit-
  ain, was one that Japan was not yet ready to follow, notwithstanding
  the appeal of Britain as an example of what modernization might
  achieve. Finally, it introduced an element of lasting importance into
  Japanese political thought, notably the kind of university training
  given to aspiring civil servants. One could even argue that the concept
  of "social monarchy," as a justification of conservative reform on bu-
  reaucratic initiative, was more influential in Japan in the twentieth
  century than in the nineteenth.
  Yet this label, which implies a Western frame of reference for an
  analysis of Japanese political development, may be a source of misun-
  derstanding. This is not least because it purports to apply specifically
  to the monarchy. As we have seen, it was precisely in this context that
  Ito and Inoue Kowashi moved away from the recommendations of
  their German advisers. In their eyes, even within a Western-style
  constitution the emperor had to remain a traditionally Japanese sym-
  bol and legitimating authority. There were sound reasons for this,
  related to Japanese nationalism and the advance of national unity, but
  the result of accepting them was the creation of institutional anomahes
  that were a continuing source of difficulty in Japanese politics. They
  were resolved only in 1946 by abandoning the whole Japanese ratio-
  nale on which the monarch's constitutional role had rested.
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  POLITICAL SOCIETY AFTER 189O 
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  The alternative "absolutism" theory is as much sociological as his-
  torical. In a narrow sense, in which it may be said to identify the Meiji
  leaders as samurai who were able, by using the imperial institution, to
  detach themselves from their feudal origins and seize power without
  becoming dependent on the support of any single social class, it is an
  extension of the hambatsu approach. In addition, by asserting that
  absolutism of this kind was possible in the later decades of the nine-
  teenth century only because there was an approximate balance of
  forces among a declining feudalism, a rebellious peasantry, and a
  rising bourgeoisie, it provides a satisfying formulation of the relation-
  ship between political events and socioeconomic change (though like
  most such statements it cannot be proved). There are two possible
  explanations of the origins of Meiji absolutism. One is E. H. Nor-
  man's argument that it was "only through an absolutist state that the
  tremendous task of modernization could be accomplished,"63 which
  tends to emphasize the Tokugawa heritage and the foreign threat. The
  other is the argument that peasant unrest in Japan was an independent
  factor working in the same direction, that is, stimulating the ruling
  class's fear of populist revolution and thereby making absolutism an
  acceptable alternative.64 Similarly, there are different ways of extend-
  ing the theory into the twentieth century: to claim that Meiji absolut-
  ism succeeded in checking an incipient bourgeois revolution, thereby
  "distorting" Japanese historical development, or to see it as a stage in
  the transition to a distinct type of bourgeois society, characterized by a
  symbiosis between absolutist bureaucrats and entrepreneurs. Such in-
  terpretations are far too wide in their implications to be examined in a
  chapter of this scope. The point of this paragraph is simply to remind
  the reader that they exist and that they are controversial. They also
  make it unlikely that any scholarly consensus about the nature of Meiji
  political institutions will last very long.
  63 E. H. Norman, Japan's Emergence As a Modem State (New York: Institute of Pacific Rela-
  tions, 1940), p. 102.
  64 See, for example, the discussion of this subject by Tanaka Akira, "Ishin seiken-ron," in Koza
  Nihonshi, vol. 5: Meiji ishin (Tokyo: Rekishigaku kenkyukai, 1970), pp. 147-75.
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  CHAPTER 11
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  The Meiji period bequeathed to modern Japan a powerful conserva-
  tive tradition that dominated government and society in the twentieth
  century. Meiji conservatism took shape at the end of the nineteenth
  century in reaction to the sweeping reforms and Western influence
  that had held sway in the first two decades of Meiji. Those reforms,
  which brought to fruition the demands for change that had grown
  during the late Tokugawa, drew their inspiration from Western ideas
  and institutions that were the products of the Enlightenment and of
  the liberal philosophies that accompanied the emergence of commer-
  cial capitalism and a bourgeois class dissatisfied with traditional forms
  of government in Europe. The Meiji ruling group, after initially adopt-
  ing many of the ideas and institutions of the Enlightenment, subse-
  quently promoted a powerful conservative program in order to sustain
  its power and the social order on which it rested.
  Conservatism, in the sense used here, is not simply a tendency to
  maintain the status quo. Rather, it is a distinctly modern phenomenon
  that first developed in the West in the late eighteenth and early nine-
  teenth centuries in reaction to the dominant themes of the Enlighten-
  ment and to the implications of the French Revolution. Although
  conservatism had distinctive features in different European countries,
  owing to their divergent histories and social structures, certain com-
  mon features became apparent wherever it arose in the West. It is
  worthwhile to examine our topic in the context of European conserva-
  tism, in part because the Japanese conservatives drew inspiration from
  their European counterparts and in part because comparisons will
  prove meaningful in understanding the nature of Meiji conservatism.
  The origins of conservatism have generally been associated with
  Edmund Burke and the reaction to the consequences of the French
  Revolution. However, students of this style of thought, like Karl
  Mannheim and Klaus Epstein, trace its origins more precisely to a
  reaction to the ideas of the Enlightenment. They show that conserva-
  tive doctrines were already formed before 1789. To be sure, the polari-
  674
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  ties among categories of liberal, radical, and conservative were more
  sharply denned after the French Revolution, but it was the implica-
  tions of the European Enlightenment that first called forth a coherent
  philosophy of conservatism.
  The dominant themes of the Enlightenment in Europe included an
  optimistic faith in the ability of humans to mold their environment
  according to their own designs. This faith was rooted in the achieve-
  ments of natural science and the belief that it was possible through the
  application of reason to construct a social order in accord with nature.
  In the same way that rational science had made progress possible in
  the mastery of the physical world, human affairs, too, could be im-
  proved because they were believed to be governed by natural laws
  whose workings, once discerned, could be used to bring ever-greater
  improvement in society. Accordingly, traditional values and beliefs
  associated with organized religious practice were dismissed in favor of
  a new view of humanity and its place in the world. By disseminating
  the new scientific knowledge and liberating humanity from the obscu-
  rantism and religious parochialism of the past, a new era would dawn.
  Government must become enlightened by recognizing the "rights of
  man" and by sweeping away the old class restrictions and establishing
  a new social equality through a wide array of reforms. It was necessary
  to eliminate all artificial restrictions, especially state regulations, that
  inhibited the natural workings of the economy. Because all human
  beings were subject to universal laws, all peoples and races were seen
  as progressing toward a uniform civilization. The Enlightenment, ac-
  cordingly, embodied a negative view of the particularistic culture and
  traditions of all societies.
  Those who opposed this new world view, who became known as
  conservatives, rejected the notion that society could successfully be
  remade simply through the application of the rational will. They
  stressed the idea of the historic growth of societies and the "collective
  wisdom" that existing customs and traditions embodied. Institutions
  would be more useful if they were the product of gradual growth
  than if they were constructed anew by individuals. Conservatives did
  not oppose change but said that it should be evolutionary. Society
  was like an organism; it had grown as a whole, as a system with its
  parts interrelated and fitting one another. Such a holistic conception
  of society required that a change of institutions be made by gradual
  adaptation. Because nations were the products of organic growth,
  institutions could not be transferred arbitrarily from one nation to
  another. Conservatism and nationalism found a natural affinity in
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  their glorification of the particular traditions and institutions of a
  people. The universalist themes of the Enlightenment, its affirmation
  of the potential similarity of all human beings and of the progress of
  all peoples and races toward a uniform civilization, were countered
  with the particular claims of distinctive national patterns of historical
  development.
  THE CHALLENGE OF THE JAPANESE ENLIGHTENMENT
  Modern Japanese conservatism had its origin in response to dominant
  themes of influence exercised by Western culture during the period of
  "civilization and enlightenment" (bummei kaika) that held sway in the
  first two decades of the Meiji period. The full sweep of European
  Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberal thought was introduced
  into Japan in a very short space of time. Positivism, materialism,
  utilitarianism - there was little opportunity to sort out and pursue the
  logical development of ideas. They were introduced in no particular
  order. For example, Nakamura Masanao published a translation of
  John Stuart Mill's On Liberty in 1871, but it was eleven years before
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract was translated by Nakae
  Chomin.
  The bummei kaika brought a wholesale delivery of the entire West-
  ern liberal tradition. The Enlightenment writers associated with the
  society known as the Meirokusha - Fukuzawa, Nishi, Tsuda, Mori,
  Kanda, Kato, and others - were among the most self-conscious initial
  advocates of the cultural revolution that swept over Japanese society in
  early Meiji. Subsequently, the ideologues of the People's Rights move-
  ment, like Ueki Emori and Nakae, further elaborated the political
  implications of the Western liberal tradition; and in the 1880s a new
  generation of writers, of whom Tokutomi Soho was the most represen-
  tative, sought to press the bummei kaika ideals to their ultimate conclu-
  sion by demanding the Westernization of every aspect of Japanese
  society. Western liberal civilization challenged Japan's traditional be-
  liefs, its traditional social organization, and its traditional system of
  government with such ceaseless, persistence as to throw nearly every
  area of life into a state of turmoil. The details of the bummei kaika are
  described in this volume. Here we shall try only to summarize the
  main themes that subsequently evoked the conservative response.
  First, bummei kaika thought was dominated by a negative view of
  Japan's traditional institutions and the learning that underlay them.
  Fukuzawa Yukichi summed up this sweeping rejection of his heritage:
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  If we compare the knowledge of the Japanese and Westerners, in letters, in
  techniques, in commerce, or in industry, from the smallest to the largest
  matter . . . there is not one thing in which we excel. . . . Outside of the most
  stupid person in the world, no one would say that our learning or business is
  on a par with those of the Western countries. Who would compare our carts
  with their locomotives, or our swords with their pistols? We speak of the yin
  and yang and the five elements; they have discovered sixty elements. . . . We
  think we dwell on an immovable plain; they know that the earth is round and
  moves. We think that our country is the most sacred, divine land; they travel
  about the world, opening lands and establishing countries. . . . In Japan's
  present condition there is nothing in which we may take pride vis-a-vis the
  West. All that Japan has to be proud of . . . is its scenery.1
  Despite this thorough rejection of Japanese civilization, the bummei
  kaika writers held almost limitless hope for the future. As with the
  Enlightenment in Europe, there was an optimistic belief that human
  effort could master the sociopolitical environment, just as science had
  made it possible to master the physical environment. A second domi-
  nant theme of the Japanese enlightenment stressed the cultural exam-
  ple of the West. Because universal laws of nature governed human
  behavior, if Japan developed in accord with these laws, it could prog-
  ress in the same way that the Western nations had. Progress, in other
  words, was unilinear; it was determined by universal forces of histori-
  cal development rather than by the particular trends of national his-
  tory. Civilization in the West had progressed further along this univer-
  sal path of development, and therefore, it could be looked to as an
  example. The liberal economist Taguchi Ukichi explained that the
  object of bummei kaika was not simply to "Westernize" Japanese soci-
  ety but, rather, to follow the path of universal progress that the West
  represented:
  We study physics, psychology, economics, and the other sciences, not be-
  cause the West discovered them, but because they are the universal truth. We
  seek to establish constitutional government in our country, not because it is a
  Western form of government, but because it conforms with man's own na-
  ture. We pursue the use of railways, steamships, and all other conveniences,
  not because they are used in the West, but because they are useful to all
  people.'
  Taguchi was bold and consistent in his pursuit of the bummei kaika
  themes. Civilized development meant not only that people would use
  1 Albert M. Craig, "Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations of Meiji Nationalism,"
  in Robert E. Ward, ed., Political Development in Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
  University Press, 1968), pp. 120-1.
  2 Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885-1895
  (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 90.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  similar machines; they would also think and behave in similar ways,
  eat the same kinds of food, wear the same kinds of clothing, live in
  houses of similar architecture, and enjoy the same kinds of art. In
  short, it was the implication of his Nihon kaika shoshi (A short history
  of civilization in Japan) that civilized people would become more and
  more aware of their common humanity and that no nation would have
  a peculiar message.
  A third dominant theme of the bummei kaika was a wholehearted
  commitment to science, technology, and utilitarian knowledge. The
  classical curriculum in the schools must be replaced by practical learn-
  ing that was useful for day-to-day life. Fukuzawa's well-known condem-
  nation of Tokugawa scholars as "rice-consuming dictionaries" con-
  cluded that "managing your household is learning, business is learning,
  seeing the trend of the times is learning."3 The principles governing the
  physical universe could no longer be seen as identical with Confucian
  ethical principles. "First there are things and only afterward ethical
  principles"; Fukuzawa wrote in his Bummeiron no gairyaku (Outline of
  civilization), "it is not that principles come first and that things emerge
  afterward. "4
  As a fourth dominant theme, the bummei kaika writers promulgated
  a new view of humanity with revolutionary implications for society
  and the state. Fukuzawa's ringing words that opened Gakumon no
  susume (The progress of learning), "Heaven did not create men above
  men, nor set men below men," succinctly summarized a rejection of
  inflexible hereditary status. Signifying a new, open, and mobile soci-
  ety, he went on to explain that a young man's position in society
  should be determined by his grasp of practical knowledge. In Bummei-
  ron no gairyaku he wrote that the fundamental flaw of Japanese culture
  was its most basic institution - the Japanese family system. The
  bummei kaika writers blamed the family for destroying the spirit of
  individual initiative and independence on which, they believed, mod-
  ern scientific civilization depended. They said that the family system
  inculcated values of absolute power on the one hand and unquestion-
  ing deference on the other and, therefore, that it provided the founda-
  tion for authoritarian government. What was necessary was the foster-
  ing of a new set of values on which democratic, constitutional, and
  3 Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi
  (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 52.
  4 Craig, "Fukuzawa," in Ward, ed., Political Development, p. 122. For the entire work, An
  Outline of a Theory of Civilization, trans. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo:
  Sophia University Press, 1973).
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  EARLY MEIJI CONSERVATIVES 
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  enlightened government could be founded. The bummei kaika was by
  no means democratic in the twentieth-century sense of advocating
  universal suffrage or economic equality, but it did oppose old forms of
  social stratification and government by a closed elite. It favored an
  open and mobile society in which economic rewards would be com-
  mensurate with individual talent and effort. It stood for a new social
  ethic that would free the individual from group control - an ethic that
  would cultivate self-support, self-expression, and self-responsibility.
  The bummei kaika advocates frequently expressed hope of replacing
  the extended hierarchical family groups with independent nuclear
  households consisting of only parents and children and marked by the
  elevation of women to anew status. These writers generally argued for
  a parliamentary government that would function through rational de-
  liberation and enlightened legislation, with responsible ministries and
  an impartial law-abiding administration. They espoused Manchester
  free-trade ideals and put their faith in an emerging internationalism.
  Fukuzawa, in a section entitled "Countries Are Equal" of Gakumon no
  susume, saw little future for a narrow nationalism: "A country is a
  gathering of people. Japan is a gathering of Japanese and England is a
  gathering of Englishmen. Japanese and English alike are members of a
  common humanity; they must respect each others' rights."5 Taguchi
  Ukichi was typically even more bold and provocative in arguing an
  emerging internationalism. In an article in the first issue of the journal
  Kokumin no tomo in 1887, he described nationalism as a foolish and
  outmoded conception that had caused needless disputes. Nationality
  ought to be ignored, so that an Englishman living in Tokyo was "a
  Tokyoite" just as much as was a Kagoshima man living in Tokyo.
  Kokumin no tomo, the journal of Tokutomi Soho that evoked enthusias-
  tic response from educated youth, represented the carryforward of
  bummei kaika themes and ideals to a new generation of Japanese.
  Heiminshugi, as Tokutomi called his ideas, proclaimed the emergence
  of "a new Japan," making a clean break with its past and becoming a
  wholly Western, liberal, democratic, industrial society. There was no
  room here for a Japanese cultural identity.
  EARLY MEIJI CONSERVATIVES: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE
  It was in confronting individual elements and themes of the bummei
  kaika that a conservative philosophy began to take shape. From the
  S Ibid., p. 118.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  very outset of the Meiji period, of course, there was reactionary opposi-
  tion to the reforms that were introduced. This opposition drew its
  greatest strength from the activities of those who were politically alien-
  ated from the new regime. Saigo, for example, left the government,
  returned to Satsuma, and led an uprising, already described in this
  volume, that sought to turn back the clock on many of the Meiji
  reforms. There were other reactionary efforts such as the Shimpuren
  in Kumamoto, which were prepared to use violence against the agents
  of Western-inspired reform.
  In contrast with such reaction and a wish to return to the past, the
  beginnings of a coherent conservative philosophy depended on a rea-
  soned response to the premises of the bummei kaika. Above all, it was
  the challenge that the Enlightenment offered to fundamental Japanese
  social institutions and values that evoked the beginnings of Meiji con-
  servatism. Except for the imperial institution, the bummei kaika advo-
  cates could not have attacked any part of traditional society to which
  the Japanese felt a deeper emotional attachment than they did to the
  values that underlay family life.
  Even the advocates of reforming these values found it difficult to
  practice their proposals within their own families. Fukuzawa, for ex-
  ample, had advocated a modern education and individual rights for
  women but brought up his own daughters in the strictest orthodoxy.
  Mori Arinori had published a reformist "Essay on Wives" in the peri-
  odical Meiroku zasshi but found trouble in being consistent. For his
  first marriage, he insisted that it be in the form of a contract -
  Fukuzawa was a witness! - to demonstrate the equality of the partner-
  ship. Subsequently, however, he dissolved the marriage, explaining
  that his wife had become "peculiar and flighty" as a result of the new
  relationship and that "to attempt a marriage like that with an unedu-
  cated Japanese woman was my mistake."6
  The early Meiji education system was the prime target of conserva-
  tive wrath because it replaced traditional Confucian moral teachings
  with a utilitarian spirit stressing a view of learning as an investment in
  worldly success. The preamble of the Education Ordinance of 1872
  stated that the purpose of education was to enable a student to "make
  his way in the world, employ his wealth wisely, make his business
  prosper, and thus attain the goal of life." Some of the values that were
  6 Michio Nagai, "Mori Arinori," Japan Quarterly n (1964): pp. 98-105. For Mori's "Essay,"
  see Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, trans. William R. Braisted (Cam-
  bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). For Fukuzawa's raising of his daughters, see
  Blacker, Japanese Enlightenment, pp. 157-8, note.
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  EARLY MEIJI CONSERVATIVES 
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  introduced in the new school system may have had a basis in Japanese
  experience and in the background of the Meiji Restoration. Those
  values that emphasized ambition, hard work, the value of education,
  and the utility of science clearly had the force of history behind them.
  Other values, however, which were drawn from the Western liberal
  tradition and emphasized the natural rights of humans, the freedom of
  the individual, the rights of women, and so on, had little basis in
  Japanese experience and relatively little social support.
  In fact, traditional ideals of loyalty and obligation, solidarity, and
  duty to superiors, which had deep roots in the family ethics and the
  feudal experience of Japanese, retained vast social support in Meiji
  and well into the twentieth century. This was partly owing to the
  "limited" nature of the Meiji Restoration which had not brought to
  power a wholly new class espousing a revolutionary set of values.
  Above all, there was no revolutionary change in the basic nature of the
  farming classes. Extraordinary continuities in the mode of Japanese
  farming all the way up to World War II helped perpetuate old values
  in the countryside. Accordingly, it was no surprise that the clean
  sweep of traditional values wrought by the bummei kaika in the educa-
  tional system should soon come under attack. Conservatives had a vast
  social basis for the reassertion of old values.
  The beginnings of a coherent, conservative defense of traditional
  Japanese values can best be found in the thought of several Confucian-
  oriented writers who supported some of the Meiji reforms but who
  regarded the disappearance of a clear, accepted moral code as a failing
  of the new period. They concentrated their criticism particularly on
  the new educational system, advocating instead a return to prescribed,
  Confucian-based values. Their ideas had something in common with
  the views of intellectuals in the late Tokugawa years who advocated a
  combination of Tqyo dotoku (Eastern ethics) with Seiyo geijutsu (West-
  ern techniques).
  The two most prominent advocates of this position were Motoda
  Eifu and Nishimura Shigeki, both of whom were Confucian in their
  fundamental views. Motoda, who served as tutor and personal adviser
  to the Meiji emperor for twenty years beginning in 1871, was the more
  conservative of the two because he still held in significant ways to the
  universal applicability of Confucian values. 7 Though accepting the
  7 Three essays by Donald H. Shively are useful in understanding the early stages of this
  Confucian-oriented protest: "Motoda Eifu: Confucian Lecturer to the Meiji emperor," in
  David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, eds., Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
  ford University Press, 1959), pp. 302-33; "Nishimura Shigeki: A Confucian View of Modern-
  ization" in Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese attitudes Toward Modernization
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  irreversibility of the Western technological adoptions, he maintained
  that Confucian ethics must remain the core of education. Virtue and
  knowledge could not be separated:
  The advocates of enlightenment completely mistake the basic meaning of
  virtue when they contend that whereas the province of wisdom is broad and
  boundless, the sphere of virtue is narrow and limited. Originally, virtue was a
  name which embraced myriad excellences, while wisdom was one part of
  virtue with no province outside it.8
  Motoda began a crusade to restore traditional Confucian ethical train-
  ing shortly after the Ministry of Education decided in 1872 to replace
  Confucian ethics in the courses in moral training (shushiri) with transla-
  tions of American and French moral texts. As lecturer to the emperor
  he was able to press his views within the government, often through
  documents drafted for the Meiji emperor to promulgate.
  In 1879 he wrote a document describing the emperor's dismay at
  what he observed in schools on an imperial tour of inspection to the
  Tohoku region. The damage that Western-style ethics texts was inflict-
  ing could be overcome if instruction were "founded upon the Imperial
  ancestral precepts, benevolence, duty, loyalty, and filial piety, and
  Confucius were made the cornerstone of our teaching of ethics."9
  Issued as an imperial rescript, the Kyogaku taishi (The great princi-
  ples of education) put the emperor's prestige behind the preservation
  of Japan's "customary ways" as part of every Japanese child's school-
  ing. The rescript of 1879 regretted that "in recent days, people have
  been going to extremes. They take unto themselves a foreign civiliza-
  tion whose only values are fact-gathering and technique, thus violating
  the rules of good manners and bringing harm to our customary
  ways."10 To reverse the decline in the moral climate required restora-
  tion of the "ancestral teachings" and, particularly, the "study of Confu-
  cius" to priority among the objectives of instruction.11
  The rescript of 1879 spelled the beginning of the end of the bummei
  kaika era in education. A new minister of education decreed a greater
  (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 193-241; and "The Japanization of
  the Middle Meiji," in Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese
  Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 77-119. An essay more
  sharply focused on our interests here is by Matsumoto Sannosuke, "Meiji zenpanki
  hoshushugi shiso no ichi danmen," Sakata Yoshio, ed., Meiji zenpanki no nashonarizumu
  (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1958), pp. 129-64.
  8 Shively, "Motoda," in Nivison and Wright, eds., Confucianism in Action, p. 315.
  9 Ibid., p. 327.
  10 Herbert Passin, Society and Education in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press,
  1965), p. 227.
  11 Ivan Parker Hall, MoriArinori (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 347.
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  EARLY MEIJI CONSERVATIVES 
  683
  centralization of education and stipulated that moral instruction in
  loyalty and filial piety be the chief end of education.12 What was more,
  at the urging of ltd Hirobumi, the government issued the Public
  Assembly Ordinance in 1880 which denied to both pupils and teachers
  the right "to attend or to join as members in assemblies organized for
  the purpose of political lectures and debates."^ Ito's primary intent
  was to undercut the influence of the People's Rights movement in the
  schools, but the ordinance also had the effect of adding to the conserva-
  tive tide in education.
  Nonetheless, although the liberal ideals that had guided education
  in the 1870s were mortally wounded by the initiatives of Motoda and
  other conservatives with the personal backing of the Meiji emperor,
  there were sharp disagreements among the conservatives. ltd, Inoue
  Kowashi, Mori Arinori, and others in the bureaucracy opposed the
  reintroduction of Confucian moral doctrine and the establishment of a
  "national doctrine" (kokkyo) through the educational system. '« They
  favored a secular, statist approach in contrast with what they regarded
  as Motoda's reactionary and crude attempts at Confucian ideological
  orthodoxy. Ito already envisioned a modern though limited constitu-
  tional monarchy, whereas Motoda sought imperial rule and the unity
  of court and government.
  Despite these disagreements, the conservative trend gained momen-
  tum. Influential officials, particularly those around the emperor, be-
  gan to compile new moral textbooks. Among them was Nishimura
  Shigeki, who had been a founding member of the Meirokusha and was
  one of the early advocates of Western institutions but whose bumtnei
  kaika enthusiasm faded after his appointment as a lecturer to the
  emperor in 1876. Outside the court, Nishimura's views often had
  greater influence than Motoda's did, as he was not so uncritical of
  Confucian values as Motoda was. Nishimura found fault with Confu-
  cianism as a comprehensive and universal doctrine and for its lack of
  progressive spirit, but he believed that it formed the basis for a code of
  moral values that could serve modern Japan. While pointing out the
  shortcomings of Confucianism, he proposed to adopt selectively from
  both Confucianism and Western philosophy in order to build a new
  morality for modern Japan. In practice, the result was a watered-down
  Confucianism:
  12 Passin, Society and Education, p. 84.
  13 Hall, Moh Arinori, p. 346.
  14 See Helen Hardacre, "Creating State Shinto: The Great Promulgation Campaign and the
  New Religions," Journal of Japanese Studies 12 (Winter 1986): 29-63.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  The Confucian way which has formed the morality of the Japanese people
  since the times of our ancestors, cannot be discarded even if we were to try to
  discard it. Especially the Four Books - the Analects, Mencius, Great Learning,
  and the Mean - in my opinion, can be said to be so far the best teachings in
  the world. Therefore, it is most proper to establish the foundation of moral
  education in Confucian books today. . . . When the Confucian Way is used,
  its spirit alone should be taken, and I hope the name Confucianism will not be
  used. The name Confucianism has for some time been disliked by the people,
  so that there are many who would not believe in the substance because of the
  name.'5
  In 1886, Nishimura published a treatise, Nihon dotoku ron (Discourse
  on Japanese morality), in which he summarized his views. The faults
  with Confucianism, he wrote, were its lack of progressive spirit, its
  idealization of the past, and its rigid hierarchical views of the social
  order. Western philosophy alone, however, was inadequate because it
  did not give sufficient attention to personal conduct and was too conten-
  tious to provide a basis for a strong moral system. Japan would selec-
  tively have to build its own system, retrieving the basic Confucian spirit
  and updating it with appropriate maxims from Western philosophy.
  Nishimura and Motoda also pressed during the 1880s for a "sacred
  rescript" to establish the basis of a moral orthodoxy for education. But
  Ito, who became prime minister in 1885, and Mori, whom he ap-
  pointed education minister, opposed the idea of creating a rigid na-
  tional orthodoxy. It was not until after Mori's assassination in 1889
  that Nishimura and Motoda succeeded. In 1890, Premier Yamagata
  Aritomo and Minister of Education Yoshikawa Akimasa gave their
  support to the idea of an imperial edict because they thought it would
  contribute to the stability of the new constitutional era. The final
  document, issued shortly before the opening of the Diet (parliament)
  on October 30,1890, was the product of drafts by many in the govern-
  ment, including Motoda. Until 1945, it remained the fundamental
  statement of ethical principles to govern the behavior of teachers and
  students and, in fact, the entire nation.
  The Imperial Rescript on Education read as follows:
  Our Imperial Ancestors have founded the Empire on a basis broad and
  everlasting. . . . Our Subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from
  generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the
  fundamental character of Our Empire, and herein lies the source of Our
  Education. Ye, Our Subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your
  brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious; as friends
  true. . . . Pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual
  15 Shively, "Nishimura," in Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes, p. 238.
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  faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good and
  promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the
  laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and
  thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with
  heaven and earth.
  Conservatives faced a dilemma to which Nishimura alluded when he
  wrote that the name Confucianism should not be used in the document
  because "there are many who would not believe in the substance
  because of the name." In the new age, Confucian values lacked the
  automatic sanctions to command belief that they had once had when
  the entire Confucian world view was accepted. The dilemma is no-
  where better illustrated than in the work of Inoue Tetsujiro, a conser-
  vative professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University who was
  asked by the Ministry of Education to prepare a commentary on the
  education rescript. In his Chokugo engi, Inoue set out to justify tradi-
  tional values to a new generation raised on scientific and utilitarian
  thought. His purpose, he said, was to explain a rational basis for
  loyalty and filial piety. He wrote that traditional values must be justi-
  fied inductively if they were to command belief. Accordingly, he gave
  the values of the rescript a utilitarian explanation. Filial piety, for
  example, was justified by self-interest, for "inevitably everyone grows
  old and weak. . . . Therefore, if you want your children to feel filial
  tenderness for you in the future, you must set the example. . . . If you
  do not, you cannot expect anyone to take care of you."16
  It was typical of this formative period of conservative thought that
  such clumsy attempts at rescuing traditional values should be made.
  Inoue's blatant utilitarianism was indicative of the conservatives' des-
  perate attempt to justify the traditional values, to which they were still
  attracted, in terms of the new rationalist thought that was intellectu-
  ally satisfying to them.
  Other young conservatives found distasteful such a defense of tradi-
  tional moral values. The brightest and most influential of a new conser-
  vative group that came to the forefront in the late 1880s was the young
  editor of the newspaper Nihon, Kuga Katsunan. Well read in Euro-
  pean conservative thought, he understood the kind of premises on
  16 Pyle, The New Generation, pp. 127-8. See also Minamoto Ryoen, "Kyoiku Cbokugo no
  kokkashugiteki kaishaku," in Sakata Yoshio, ed., Meiji zenpanki no nashonarizumu (Tokyo:
  Miraisha, 1958), pp. 165-212. The standard reference on the framing of the rescript is Kaigo
  Tokiomi, Kyoiku Chokugo seirilsushi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1965).
  For the development of nonofficial interpretations of that document, Carol Gluck, Japan's
  Modem Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press,
  1985).
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  which a viable conservative philosophy must be built. The fundamen-
  tal claim of the bummei kaika that Japan must follow the historical
  development of the West must be combated. The bummei kaika writ-
  ers contended that this process was a fixed, universal pattern of devel-
  opment to which all progressing nations must conform. Accordingly,
  they held that the values of bummei kaika were of universal validity.
  On both theoretical and practical grounds, Kuga attacked these prem-
  ises. His editorials, which had a wide and influential audience, argued
  that the liberals failed to understand the meaning of history and of the
  nation-state that established the framework within which Japanese
  reform must take place if it were to be effective and enduring. He was
  fond of asserting that the bummei kaika theorists "failed to grasp the
  historic, that is to say, organic, relationship between the nation and
  the individual."'7 A Japanese acted not as a member of a bloodless
  humanity governed by universal values; he acted rather as a member
  of his own vibrant people, inspired by Japan's own national spirit.
  Kuga did not embrace traditional values, as Motoda and Nishimura
  had, from confidence in their universal validity. Nor did he try to
  legitimize them, as Inoue Tetsujiro attempted, in terms of the new
  rationalist thought. Instead, he gave them a nationalist justification.
  Referring to the rescript's provisions, he stated: "Filial piety, broth-
  erly affection, marital harmony, and the loyalty of all to the Imperial
  Throne are Japan's distinctive national ethics. They are the historic
  customs of the Japanese people, the basic elements that support her
  society." He concluded pointedly that these values "cannot be de-
  duced by academic reason (gakuri), but (only) by the emotions
  (kanjo)" of Japanese.'8
  Further, on practical grounds Kuga added that the preservation of
  traditional morals and customs was psychologically necessary to the
  nation because they provided the binding, integrative basis on which
  Japan's cultural identity and nationalism could be built. Kuga feared
  the social disruption that the values of the bummei kaika would cause,
  which in the heyday of Western imperialism could lead to national
  destruction:
  If a nation wishes to stand among the great powers and preserve its national
  independence, it must strive always to foster nationalism (kokuminshugi). . . .
  If the culture of one country is so influenced by another that it completely
  loses its own unique character, that country will surely lose its independent
  footing."
  17 Pyle, The New Generation, p. 97. 
  18 Ibid., p. 127. 
  19 Ibid., p. 75.
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  This argument became the most powerful in the conservative arsenal:
  that nations could not be subdued by force alone, that cultural acquies-
  cence could prove to be self-defeating.
  Promulgation of the Imperial Rescript on Education was accompa-
  nied by much pomp and circumstance. Copies of the imperial portrait
  and the rescript were sent to all the schools as sacred symbols to be
  used for regular ceremonies. When Uchimura Kanzd, a Christian re-
  cently returned from a period of extended study in the United States
  and now teaching at the First Higher School, abstained from ceremo-
  nial obeisance to the portrait on the occasion of a reading of the
  rescript at the school, it set off a controversy as to whether Christianity
  was compatible with Japanese nationalism. Inoue Tetsujiro wrote an
  essay denouncing Uchimura's behavior that became the center of the
  controversy. His essay, entitled "The Clash Between Religion and
  Education," held that Christian beliefs in individualism, universal
  brotherhood, and denial of the emperor's divinity could not be recon-
  ciled with the spirit of the rescript.
  Kuga, much more astute than Inoue, saw the controversy in a some-
  what different light. If Christianity could be stripped of its foreign
  customs and ties and assimilated to Japanese circumstances, as Bud-
  dhism had been, then Christianity need not be regarded as inevitably
  in conflict with Japanese moral education. In a period of intense com-
  petition among nations, as a matter of national survival, moral educa-
  tion was necessary to foster the "common sentiments" of the Japanese
  people to enable them to work together to deal effectively with their
  domestic and international problems. Uchimura, in fact, later at-
  tempted to foster a Japanese-style Christianity shorn of its foreign
  customs and ties. It was not his goal to turn Japanese into "universal
  Christians" who, he said, "turn out to be no more than denationalized
  Japanese."20 He founded the "nonchurch" movement (mukyokai)
  which deliberately divorced itself from outside influences. But Chris-
  tianity in Japan after the rescript and the rise of conservative ideologi-
  cal movements in the 1890s was on the defensive. Traditional values
  of Japanese society became inextricably intertwined with partriotism
  and loyalty to the Japanese nation. In the heyday of imperialism, to
  adhere to beliefs introduced by missionaries coming from the Western
  20 Marius B. Jansen, Japan and China: From War to Peace, 1894-1972 (Chicago: Rand Mc-
  Nally, 1975), p. 99. For a study of Uchimura, see John F. Howes, "Uchimura Kanzd:
  Japanese Prophet" in Dankwart A. Rustow, ed., Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership
  (New York: Braziller, 1970), pp. 180-207.
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  imperial nations was to leave oneself open to suspicion of disloyalty
  and subservience.
  CONSERVATIVES AND THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN
  RELATIONS
  The struggle over the nature of moral instruction in education was the
  first issue around which conservative opinion began to crystallize.
  Another issue that early attracted the conservatives' attention was the
  problem of Japan's relations with the treaty powers. Until 1894, revi-
  sion of the unequal treaties was one of the prime political issues whose
  influence was felt in both domestic and foreign affairs. More than any
  other issue at the time, it forced the conservatives to define their views
  of the Japanese nation.
  The bummei kaika had posited a rather benign view of the treaty
  powers. Its advocates were disposed to overlook, at least for the time
  being, the violations of Japanese sovereignty imposed by the system of
  extraterritoriality that the powers maintained. Such infringements
  were attributed to Japan's backward nature; but as it adopted civilized
  values and institutions, these infringements, they believed, would dis-
  appear. Nations as they progressed would become more alike, and
  with the advancement of civilization, conflicts among them would
  recede. The nation-state, in fact, would become less important.
  Tokutomi Soho, whose views as a young writer in the 1880s can be
  seen as the culmination of bummei kaika themes, saw the militant
  phase of civilization being replaced by an industrial phase. Under the
  influence of Herbert Spencer, Tokutomi foresaw the decline of war-
  fare and emergent internationalism. The rise of industrial civilization
  was accompanied, he wrote, by free-trade policies and economic inter-
  dependence that would overcome divisions among nations. Economic,
  rather than military, strength would determine the survival of soci-
  eties. Accordingly, the most important measures that Japan could
  undertake were the adoption of the modern technology, civilized insti-
  tutions, and liberal values that were common to the advanced indus-
  trial societies. Reaction to such a sanguine world view became a major
  issue, evoking a conservative response to the bummei kaika.
  The treaties to which the bakufu had submitted represented an
  infringement of Japanese sovereignty. They permitted foreign resi-
  dents and trade in certain leased territories and ports, and under the
  system of extraterritoriality, foreign residents were subject to the juris-
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  FOREIGN RELATIONS 
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  diction of their consular courts. Japanese tariffs were under interna-
  tional control. For a quarter of a century after the Restoration, it was a
  primary goal of Japanese foreign policy to revise the treaties and join
  the international system on an equal footing with the Western powers.
  To achieve this goal, the Meiji leaders pursued a pragmatic course of
  adopting the legal institutions that were deemed necessary for accep-
  tance into the company of civilized nations who controlled the interna-
  tional system of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. Foreign Minis-
  ter Inoue Kaoru put it succinctly in 1887 when he told his colleagues,
  "It is my opinion that what we must do is to transform our empire and
  our people, make the empire like the countries of Europe and our
  people like the peoples of Europe. To put it differently, we have to
  establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia."21
  The Meiji leaders went to great lengths to accommodate to the rules
  and mores of the international system. They pressed for adoption of
  Westernized legal codes in order to impress on the powers the civilized
  progress of Japan and so to hasten treaty revision. Many of the other
  Meiji reforms, including constitution making, had treaty revision as
  one of their motives. The lengths to which the oligarchs were willing
  to go to accommodate their Western visitors were dramatized by the
  opening in Tokyo in 1883 of the Rokumeikan, a gaudy Victorian hall
  where foreign residents were entertained with Western music, cards,
  billiards, masked balls, and other social functions. A dancing master
  was hired from abroad to instruct the oligarchs and their wives in the
  "civilized" social graces.
  Conservatives were outraged and made the Rokumeikan a symbol of
  cultural subservience to the Westerners, but it was Inoue Kaoru's
  efforts at treaty revision that elicited a clearer focus of conservative
  views of the importance of cultural autonomy. Inoue convened repre-
  sentatives of the treaty powers in Tokyo in 1886 and proposed a
  number of concessions in return for the abolition of consular jurisdic-
  tion. He offered to establish "mixed residence," which would allow
  foreigners to travel and engage in commerce in the interior, and prom-
  ised determination of all Japan's legal codes "according to Western
  principles."
  The intense conservative opposition to these proposals was led by
  Tani Kanjo, minister of commerce and agriculture. Tani was a former
  army general who, along with other military figures, had opposed
  some of the liberal trends of the 1870s and had organized a party to
  21 Marius B. Jansen, "Modernization and Foreign Policy in Meiji Japan," in Ward, ed., Politi-
  cal Development in Modem Japan, p. 175.
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  urge a conservative version of the constitution. The oligarchs had
  given him a cabinet position that took him on a tour of Europe where
  he was impressed by the spirit of nationality that was preserved from
  country to country. He returned from the trip at the time that Inoue
  was pressing his proposals. Tani expressed sharp opposition to them
  on the grounds that the promise to transform Japan's legal codes after
  the pattern of Western ones was humiliating and destructive of the
  Japanese spirit of nationality. Tani issued a dramatic resignation from
  the cabinet and led a vociferous opposition, both in the bureaucracy
  and outside the government, forcing Inoue to resign and ending his
  effort to revise the treaties.
  Nonetheless, the government followed it with another effort at revi-
  sion. This time the attempt was by the new foreign minister, Okuma
  Shigenobu, appointed in 1888. In his negotiations with the powers,
  Okuma extracted more concessions than Inoue had, but he did not gain
  an unconditional end to extraterritoriality. Moreover, the commitment
  to adopt Western legal principles remained a part of the agreement.
  When the details were revealed, controversy once again erupted;
  Okuma was driven from office; and negotiations were suspended.
  The treaty revision controversy galvanized conservative opposition
  to bummei kaika views. It brought into focus the relationship between
  cultural borrowing from the West and the establishment of national
  self-esteem and pride. This issue was the prime concern of a new
  generation of intellectual conservatives. A group of young journalists
  and publicists emerged who expressed a more moderate conservatism
  than Motoda or Nishimura had. Educated after the Restoration in the
  new schools, they had been imbued with Western values from the
  early days of their education. They were not backward looking; they
  favored change and reform; but they believed it must be consistent
  with the Japanese character. Such concerns, they believed, were essen-
  tial to national survival in an age of keen competition among nation-
  states and, particularly, in the heyday of Western imperialism. We
  have already considered Kuga Katsunan, the most articulate of them,
  the one most impressive for the clarity of his reasoning. He and others
  of this group formulated arguments against the bummei kaika notion of
  a universal civilization toward which all nations were progressing and
  against the belief that cultural distinctions from the West would ebb as
  Japan advanced. He held that the concept of "civilization" was rela-
  tive, that social progress was not governed by universal laws. Not only
  was progress compatible with a diversity of cultures, but in fact,
  "world civilization progresses through the competition of different
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  FOREIGN RELATIONS 
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  cultures." He sought to distinguish his own views from the more
  traditionalist reaction by arguing for careful, selective borrowing:
  We recognize the excellence of Western civilization. We value the Western
  theories of rights, liberty, and equality; and we respect Western philosophy
  and morals. We have affection for some Western customs. Above all, we
  esteem Western science, economics, and industry. These, however, are not to
  be adopted simply because diey are Western; diey ought to be adopted only if
  they can contribute to Japan's welfare. Thus we seek not to revive a narrow
  xenophobia, but rather to promote the national spirit in an atmosphere of
  brotherhood.22
  When he argued for selective borrowing from the West, his liberal
  critics charged that this would make a "patchwork" of society, because
  there was a certain spirit and set of values that underlay and motivated
  institutions in Western society. Kuga argued, however, against a
  monolithic conception of Western societies, pointing to cultural differ-
  ences among the European countries and their fierce preservation of
  their own separate nationalities. The artist and writer, Okakura
  Tenshin, who was joining at this time with an American, Ernest Fenol-
  losa, in a movement to preserve the distinctive Japanese traditions of
  aesthetics, made a similar point:
  Where is the essence of the West in the countries of Europe and America? All
  these countries have different systems; what is right in one country is wrong
  in the rest; religion, customs, morals - there is no common agreement on any
  of these. Europe is discussed in a general way, and this sounds splendid; the
  question remains, where in reality does what is called "Europe" exist?2*
  Kuga adopted the historicist and holist arguments characteristic of
  conservative theorists in any country, to counter the bummei kaika
  themes of universalism and individualism. There was rarely apparent
  in his thought nostalgia for the past. Certainly there was no longing for
  an archaic Utopia, for example, antedating Western or even Chinese
  influence on Japan. Rather, Kuga argued for the idea of the historic
  growth of society over time. This was, in short, moderate conserva-
  tism that sought piecemeal change - selective borrowing, for exam-
  ple - to improve society. Japan's development must be organic and
  22 Pyle, The New Generation, pp. 94-7. A treatment of Tani Kanjo and other conservatives of
  his group is found in Barbara Joan Teters, "The Conservative Opposition in Japanese Poli-
  tics, 1877-1894," Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1955. See also Barbara Joan
  Teters, "The Genro-In and the National Essence Movement," Pacific Historical Review 31
  (1962): 359-78; and Barbara Joan Teters, "A Liberal Nationalist and the Meiji Constitu-
  tion," in Robert K. Sak3i,ed., Studies on Asia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965),
  vol. 6, pp. 105-23.
  23 Pyle, The New Generation, p. 74 note. For Fenollosa, see Lawrence W. Chisholm, Fenollosa:
  The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963).
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  holistic; it must grow gradually so that all the parts interrelated and
  worked together.
  A group of young intellectuals and writers, with whom Kuga was
  closely associated, known as the Seikyosha and led by Miyake Set-
  surei, founded a journal Nihonjin (The Japanese) in 1888 whose ex-
  press purpose was the "preservation of the national essence" (kokusui
  hozori). The phrase became popular among writers of the day, and
  there was much debate over the nature of the national essence that
  should be preserved. The difficulty they had in this regard was indica-
  tive of a conservative dilemma. These young writers had a Western
  education and were perturbed by reactionaries who used their argu-
  ments to make a sweeping defense of traditional civilization. They
  sought a middle way between such traditionalism and the Westernism
  of the bummei kaika. In a word, they sought to be both modern and
  Japanese.
  The fundamental issue in the deliberations of these young conserva-
  tive writers is one not fully resolved today, namely: What is the nature
  of social progress? They, of course, fully accepted the notion of prog-
  ress, but was it compatible with diverse social structures? Or did the
  functional necessities of industrial society inevitably overcome the di-
  versity of social and cultural forms? Today, in the late twentieth cen-
  tury, there is plenty of evidence to show that industrial societies retain
  aspects of their traditional social structure, but for the Japanese in the
  late nineteenth century, as the first non-Western people to pass
  through the Industrial Revolution, the issue was particularly perplex-
  ing. Young liberals, like Tokutomi Soho, who had a broad following
  in the 1880s and 1890s believed that industrial development required
  passage through universal, evolutionary stages. As it advanced, Japan
  would inevitably come to resemble the more advanced Western na-
  tions; Japan's progress, in fact, could be measured by its success in
  acquiring similarities to Western societies.
  Such views made Japanese self-esteem vulnerable. For example,
  when the first session of the Diet failed to operate smoothly, many
  liberals were depressed because the experience reawakened doubts
  about Japan's ability to establish successful parliamentary institutions
  that were regarded as the essence of the bummei kaika.
  Miyake Setsurei's most successful contribution to formulating a
  conservative argument was an essay, Shin-zen-bi Nihonjin (The Japa-
  nese: truth, goodness, and beauty), written in 1891 amidst disappoint-
  ment over the outcome of the first Diet. This essay set forth a concept
  of world civilization progressing through competition among nations
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  FOREIGN RELATIONS 
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  having diverse talents that resulted from different experiences and
  environments. The culture of Western nations might be the highest
  stage that civilization had so far attained, but progress would require
  other cultural forms and values if civilization were to move on to a
  higher state. In other words, cultural nationalism was not only a mat-
  ter of self-defense, as Kuga argued, it was also a contribution to the
  progress of man. In his preface, Miyake wrote: "To exert oneself on
  behalf of one's country is to work on behalf of the world. Promoting
  the special nature of a people contributes to the evolution of mankind.
  Defense of the homeland and love of mankind are not at all contradic-
  tory."24 It was a billiant argument designed to appeal to the young by
  persuading them that preserving Japanese cultural values was not a
  reactionary stand against progress but was, rather, a contribution to
  the development of civilization in the world.
  Miyake described the ways in which his concept of world civiliza-
  tion, with its corollary of national mission, could be pursued by the
  Japanese and thus contribute to the realization of the ideals of truth,
  goodness, and beauty, which he defined as the ultimate goal of world
  civilization. Japanese, because they were familiar with both Asia and
  Europe, could make a unique contribution to truth by correcting the
  Western-centric view of scholarship. Spencerian sociology, for exam-
  ple, did not deal adequately with Asia, and the Japanese could offer
  new scholarly theories based on broader knowledge than Western
  scholarship possessed. Similarly, Japanese had a mission to contribute
  to goodness by building their military strength, protecting Asian na-
  tions from Western imperialism, and thus promoting justice. Finally,
  the Japanese had a mission to conserve their unique conception of
  beauty, with its emphasis on the delicate and exquisite, rather than
  simply adopting the grand styles characteristic of Western art and
  architecture.
  These young conservatives had many able spokesmen, and we can-
  not doubt their wide influence in appealing to the nationalist predilec-
  tions of the first generation to go through the Western-oriented Meiji
  schools. They were instrumental in forestalling the treaty revision
  effort of Inoue and Okuma. They also lent support to the opponents of
  the new legal codes that had been drafted and that would have intro-
  duced many significant Western legal concepts. For a generation,
  Japanese bureaucrats and scholars had been working with foreign
  advisers to develop new codes to cover the law of the family and
  24 Pyle, The Mew Generation, p. 151.
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  694 
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  private transactions as well as the law of civil procedure. Tokugawa
  customary law, in unrecorded form and highly diverse from place to
  place, was incapable of dealing with the social relations and commerce
  of the Meiji state. Adherents of French or German or other Western
  legal traditions argued for the adoption of their favored patterns of
  legal codes. The complex controversies were important, to say the
  least, because of the effects that the codes were bound to have on the
  future social order. The growing influence of conservatism in the
  1890s induced much greater caution. The Code of Civil Procedure
  went into effect in 1891, but the civil code was postponed and debated
  further until 1898, and the commercial code was delayed until 1899.
  Similar controversies between the universalism of the bummei kaika
  and the growing influence of cultural nationalism and conservatism
  took place in many fields of human endeavor. Literature and the arts
  were directly affected. Okakura and Fenollosa led a movement against
  the prevailing adulation of Western styles in the arts. The bummei
  kaika had brought to adherents of Westernism control of the govern-
  ment apparatus of art training and patronage, but the traditional arts
  and crafts languished in neglect and disrepute. Okakura, a contributor
  to Nihonjin, and Fenollosa tried to chart a middle position between the
  liberal, utilitarian, and pro-Western circles, on the one hand, and the
  traditionalists and xenophobes on the other. They tried "to create a
  new basis for Japanese art in an amalgam of East and West, old and
  new, subjective and objective."2* Similarly, literati struggled over new
  forms of prose. Tsubouchi Shoyo's Essence of the Novel in 1885
  pointed the way toward a new realistic literature that Futabatei
  Shimei's novel Ukigumo, published two years later, in prose close to
  the colloquial, sought to attain.26
  The 1890s was, in short, a kind of watershed in the public discus-
  sion of cultural issues raised by the Meiji reforms. Japanese conserva-
  tism in its formative phase became deeply imbued with cultural nation-
  alism. The younger generation had clearly succeeded in articulating a
  more thoughtful and balanced conservatism than Motoda, Nishimura,
  and others had in the early 1880s. The perceptive journalist, Yamaji
  Aizan, distinguished between the two styles of thought:
  Whereas the conservatism that appeared in 1881 and 1882 was nothing more
  than a rebirth of Chinese learning, the conservatism of the late 1880s repre-
  25 John M. Rosenfield, "Western-style Painting in the Early Meiji Period and Its Critics," in
  Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, p. 204.
  26 Translated by Marleigh G. Ryan as Japan's First Modem Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei
  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
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  sented the development of national consciousness. Of course, in the latter
  case, many backwoods priests and Confucianists were delighted to plunge
  into the movement but . . . the leaders of the group had an understanding of
  Western culture. They absorbed the spirit of European nationalist move-
  ments, and regarded the attempt to make Japan over into a Western state as a
  most dangerous tendency. They observed diat Western powers, through their
  language, literature, and customs, strove to preserve their nationality. Ulti-
  mately, diey reversed the intellectual trend, and national spirit (which those
  who did not sympathize called conservative spirit) finally prevailed.2'
  The successive public controversies over the unequal treaties with
  the powers diminished the appeal of the bumtnei kaika's benign view of
  international relations and helped make the conservatives' case for
  preserving cultural autonomy a basis for maintaining the strength of
  the Japanese state. Tokutomi saw his Westernism declining in influ-
  ence before the growing strength of "the new conservative group." In
  an eloquent appeal he admonished his countrymen:
  If you hate damage to national pride and therefore entrance into the civilized
  world . . . then feeling for Japan will grow and feeling for the world will
  wane, then the ideal of die state will flourish and die ideal of die people will
  wither, then die spirit of conservatism will appear and the spirit of progress
  will die, and our country will have lost its vital energy. . . . Stop treaty
  revision, but don't halt the progress of nineteendi century Japan!28
  More than any other event, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War
  in 1894 and its extraordinary release of patriotic emotion gave sway to
  the conservative cause and overrode the universalism and liberal ideas
  of the bummei kaika. Not until 1945 was public opinion again so
  receptive to the appeals of reform as it had been in the early Meiji.
  For a generation an effective foreign policy had implied a successful
  reform movement. But by 1890 the mood was changing. The new
  order was largely in place, and the international environment was
  changing. East Asia became the locus of fierce competition among the
  powers. Yamagata and the heads of the military services concluded
  that the security of the Japanese islands could be imperiled by the way
  in which the vacuum of power on the continent was filled. The West-
  ern powers became primarily adversaries rather than models of re-
  form.
  Treaty revision was achieved, and national pride, so long submerged
  by the tasks of the bummei kaika, welled up with the great military
  27 Pyle, The New Generation, p. 108.
  28 Ibid., p. 106. For a comprehensive treatment of Tokutomi, see John D. Pierson, Tokutomi
  Sohd, 1863-1957-' A Journalist for Modem Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1980).
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  victories of 1894-5. Abandoning his liberal views in a volte-face that
  attracted immense symbolic interest, Tokutomi Soho exulted:
  Now we are no longer ashamed to stand before the world as Japanese. . . .
  Before, we did not know ourselves, and the world did not yet know us. But
  now that we have tested our strength, we know ourselves and we are known
  by the world. Moreover, we know we are known by the world!2'
  Fukuzawa, the leading symbol of an era now past, could scarcely
  contain his joy:
  One can scarcely enumerate all of our civilized undertakings since the
  Restoration - the abolition of feudalism, the lowering of class barriers, revi-
  sion of our laws, promotion of education, railroads, electricity, postal service,
  printing, and on and on. Yet among all these enterprises, the one thing none
  of us Western scholars ever expected, thirty or forty years ago, was the
  establishment of Japan's imperial prestige in a great war. . . . When I think
  of our marvelous fortune, I feel as though in a dream and can only weep tears
  of joy.3°
  THE EMERGENCE OF BUREAUCRATIC CONSERVATISM
  The Meiji leaders looked at the problems of cultural nationalism and
  the lack of moral standards in a somewhat different light than did the
  journalists and intellectual leaders. The oligarchs were less concerned
  with the issues of cultural pride than with the practical problems of
  stabilizing the new order and, at the same time, mobilizing mass
  support for the national goals of economic and military power.
  European conservative thought became increasingly relevant to the
  Meiji leaders in the early 1880s. They had already implemented
  many of the revolutionary ideas that they had held when they came
  to power, including the abolition of the rigid Tokugawa social order,
  the establishment of a national conscript army, the introduction of
  universal education and a new curriculum, and the promotion of an
  ambitious industrial policy. Other reforms still awaited completion,
  including the constitution, the local government system, parliamen-
  tary institutions, and the codification of law. But in the implementa-
  tion of these programs in the 1880s, an increasingly conservative tone
  was evident. After the crisis of 1881, Meiji leaders, purged of liberal
  elements and determined to reestablish order and unity in political
  29 Pyle, The New Generation, p. 175.
  30 Kenneth B. Pyle, trans., "The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Case," Journal of Japanese
  Studies 1 (Spring 1975): 347. From Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshu, 21 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami
  shoten, 1958-64), vol. 15, pp. 333-7.
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  BUREAUCRATIC CONSERVATISM 
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  life, were less inclined to hold up their revolutionary example to the
  younger generation. ltd Hirobumi, for example, described the early
  1880s as "an age of transition":
  The opinions prevailing in the country were extremely heterogenous and
  often diametrically opposed to one another. We had survivors from former
  generations who were still full of theocratic ideas and who believed that any
  attempt to restrict an imperial prerogative amounted to something like high
  treason. On the other hand, there was a large and powerful body of the
  younger generation educated at a time when the Manchester theory was in
  vogue, and who, in consequence, were ultraradical in their ideas of free-
  dom. . . . A work entitled History of Civilization, by Buckle, which de-
  nounced every form of government as an unnecessary evil, became the great
  favorite of students of all the higher schools, including the Imperial Univer-
  sity. . . . At that time we had not arrived at the stage of distinguishing clearly
  between political opposition on the one hand and treason to the established
  order on the other.3•
  In order to realize the immense task of building an industrial society
  in the course of their generation, the Meiji leaders had to find some
  means to spur the populace to prodigies of self-sacrifice and effort and,
  at the same time, to maintain social stability. This, of course, is a
  fundamental problem of nation building, for modern development
  entails the awakening of increasing numbers of people to the national
  political community, and it engenders new divisions of the population.
  The challenge that Meiji leaders faced, therefore, was to balance eco-
  nomic development with political integration. What is particularly
  impressive about the statecraft of the Japanese leaders is the clarity
  with which they understood the historical process through which they
  were leading the nation. This owed much to their sensitivity to the
  experience of the more advanced industrial societies of the West. As
  I to wrote in 1880 of the People's Rights movement and the demands
  for democratic government to which the bummei kaika had given rise.
  The present political disturbance is symptomatic of a general trend sweeping
  the whole world and is not limited to a single nation or province. About a
  hundred years ago, the revolutions in Europe started in France and spread
  gradually to other European nations. The momentum of those revolutions
  gained strength and has come to constitute a tremendous force. Sooner or
  later practically all nations . . . will feel the impact of this force and change
  their form of government. The change from old to new was accompanied by
  violent disturbances. The disturbances have lasted to this very day. An en-
  lightened ruler and his wise ministers would control and divert the force
  towards a solidifying of the government. To achieve this, all despotic conduct
  31 George M. Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York: Knopf, 1950), pp. 347-8.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  must be abandoned, and there can be no avoiding a sharing of the govern-
  ment's power with die people.
  ltd was confident that Japan could avoid the revolutionary violence
  that had accompanied the historical process elsewhere: "Even as we
  control the trends, there will be no violence, and even when ideas are
  given free reign, they will not lead the people astray. Progress will be
  orderly and we will set the pace of progress, and the passage of time
  will bring about the normalization of trends."32 I to believed that the
  trend toward popular participation in government was irreversible but
  that it could be controlled.
  The oligarchs needed to find ways to avoid the severe antagonism in
  society that would undermine the effort to achieve their national goals.
  They found their answer to this need in the conservative reform tradi-
  tion of German political-economic theories. Influenced by this tradi-
  tion, the oligarchs foresaw the necessity of accommodating new
  groups into the political order so as to maintain the social consensus
  necessary to control the development of society. The concept of social
  monarchy was influential - up to a point - in the development of the
  oligarchs' attitudes toward the institutional framework. The thinking
  of Lorenz von Stein and Rudolf von Gneist was particularly influential
  in forming the oligarchs' conservative reformism. Stein saw the devel-
  opment of industrial capitalism as creating acquisitive instincts that if
  unchecked, would lead to the dominance of the bourgeoisie at the
  expense of the other social classes. The result was likely to be social
  upheaval. Therefore, it was the necessary role of the socially conscious
  monarch and his bureaucracy to stand neutral above class interests and
  to act in the interest of the whole. In order to build a strong nation-
  state, the government would intervene in the economy to prevent class
  conflict and to maintain a harmonious social balance, integrating the
  lower classes into the national community "by means of social legisla-
  tion and an active administrative policy that works for the physical and
  spiritual welfare of the lower classes."33
  It was not only the Germans who gave conservative advice. There was
  plenty of it from other Western countries, much of it originating from
  evolutionist thought. Ivan Hall called it "overcompensating conserva-
  tism on the part of Westerners, a tendency to lean over backward away
  from their own liberalism in order not to push Japan too rapidly down
  32 George M. Beckmann, The Making of the Meiji Constitution: The Oligarch and the Constitu-
  tional Development of Japan, 1868-1891 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1957), app. .
  5-
  33 Johannes Siemes, Hermann Roesler and the Making of the Meiji State (Tokyo: Sophia Univer-
  sity Press, 1966), p. 32.
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  BUREAUCRATIC CONSERVATISM 
  699
  the road of progress."*» Herbert Spencer, for example, advised Mori
  that constitutionalism not be introduced too rapidly, that institutional
  growth follow an evolutionary or organic pattern: "I explained how
  botany teaches that vegetation transplanted from a foreign land will not
  produce the same flowers and fruits as in its native soil; that constitu-
  tions follow a principle identical with this botanical law. . . ."35
  The Meiji leaders were committed to finding ways to accommodate
  and, thus, to control the increasing politicization of the lower orders.
  Yamagata, more conservative than many of his colleagues, wrote in his
  1879 "Opinion on Constitutional Government" that although political
  parties and other forms of opposition to the government were wrong
  and immoral, the governed should be given an opportunity to partici-
  pate in order to overcome divisions within society, popular estrange-
  ment from the government, and economic discontent: "If we gradually
  establish a popular assembly and firmly establish a constitution, the
  things I have enumerated above - popular enmity toward the govern-
  ment, failure to follow government orders, and suspicion of the govern-
  ment, these three evils - will be cured in the future."*6 It became an idee
  fixe of bureaucratic conservatism that the people should be brought into
  the governing process, not as a natural innate right, but, rather, to
  achieve national unity. Thus, conservatives in Japan favored - in fact,
  conservatives generally took the initiative in bringing about - popular
  participation in local government, a national assembly, and, later, uni-
  versal suffrage.
  After Okuma, whose constitutional views were an extension of
  bummei kaika thought, was expelled in 1881, I to went to Europe to
  prepare for the development of a conservative constitutional order
  and, in particular, to study Prussian experience firsthand. "By study-
  ing under two famous German teachers, Gneist and Stein," he wrote
  to a fellow oligarch,
  I have been able to get a general understanding of the structure of the state.
  Later I shall discuss with you how we can achieve the great objective of
  establishing Imperial authority. Indeed, the tendency in our country today is
  to erroneously believe in the works of British, French, and American liberals
  and radicals as if they were Golden Rules and, thereby, lead virtually to the
  overthrow of the state. In having found principles and means of combatting
  this trend, I believe I have rendered an important service to my country, and
  I feel inwardly that I can die a happy man.37
  34 Hall, MoriArinori, p. 321. 
  35 Ibid., p. 138.
  36 Beckmann, The Making ofthe Meiji Constitution, p. 130.
  37 Nobutaka Ike, The Beginnings of Political Democracy in Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
  University Press, 1950), pp. 175-6.
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  7OO 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  Ito found in German constitutional thought the elements needed to
  legitimate the new order in terms other than natural rights philosophy.
  Popular participation in government would be permitted under condi-
  tions that channeled it in nationalist directions. As was pointed out in
  Chapter 10 of this volume, Herman Roesler was retained as an adviser,
  but his ideas were filtered through the oligarchs' own determination to
  make the emperor into an unchallengeable and invulnerable center-
  piece of the government, giving the Japanese people the sense of
  identity that conservative intellectuals had seen as so necessary to the
  new era. As Ito wrote:
  What is the cornerstone of our country? This is the problem we have to solve.
  If there is no cornerstone, politics will fall into the hands of the uncontrollable
  masses; and then the government will become powerless. . . . In Japan [un-
  like Europe] religion does not play such an important role and cannot become
  the foundation of constitutional government. Though Buddhism once flour-
  ished and was the bond of union between all classes, high and low, today its
  influence has declined. Though Shintoism is based on the traditions of our
  ancestors, as a religion it is not powerful enough to become the center of the
  country. Thus, in our country the one institution which can become the
  cornerstone of our constitution is the Imperial House.38
  The imperial myth became the ideological glue that held together the
  new political structure. As we have seen, it was enunciated again in the
  Imperial Rescript on Education, laying the foundation for the more
  fullblown ideology of the family state. The new order was, therefore,
  at its core given a Japanese cast that departed sharply from the vision
  that the bumtnei kaika had held out for a new Japanese nation. Though
  embodying some limited aspects of liberal political principles, it was
  fundamentally based on a conception of a unique Japanese polity - the
  Japanese kokutai - which was rooted in the history and traditional
  cultural values of the people. Conservatives interpreted this kokutai in
  different ways. Ito held to a rational, secular view of the kokutai which
  treated it as the product of a long evolutionary process and certainly
  capable of change and development in the future.
  But there was another interpretation that had more in common with
  the views of conservatives like Motoda. In this interpretation the
  kokutai was a moral, religious, almost mystical entity. The rescript on
  education described the imperial house as "coeval with Heaven and
  Earth," almost a personification of the Confucian cosmological order.
  Conservative legal scholars like Hozumi Yatsuka, dean of the law
  38 Joseph Pittau, Political Thought in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
  Press, 1967), pp. 177-8.
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  BUREAUCRATIC CONSERVATISM 
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  faculty at Tokyo Imperial University and one of the most influential
  interpreters of the constitution at the turn of the century, elaborated
  this religious conception of the kokutai by stressing the themes of the
  family state and of ancestor worship. His was a blend of Confucian,
  Shinto, and German statist thought. Japanese society, according to
  Hozumi, was founded not on a social contract but, rather, on racial
  unity that was preserved through ancestor worship. All Japanese were
  ultimately descended from a common imperial ancestor:
  The ancestor of my ancestors is the Sun Goddess. The Sun Goddess is the
  founder of our race, and the throne is the sacred house of our race. If father
  and mother are to be revered, how much more so the ancestors of the house;
  and if the ancestors of the house are to be revered, how much more so the
  founder of the country.?'
  Hozumi was the chief opponent of the French-influenced draft of a
  civil code that was debated from 1892 to 1898. The draft, based on
  natural rights theory, would have greatly curtailed the power of the
  family head. But Hozumi and other opponents argued that the Japa-
  nese kokutai was based on the authority of the househead, in both the
  family and the state. "Our family state," he wrote, "is a racial group.
  Our race consists of blood relatives from the same womb. The family
  is a small state; the state is a large family"*0 The section on family law
  in the revised civil code issued in 1898 represented a victory for
  Hozumi's views. The notion of the family state was, likewise, increas-
  ingly evident in the school texts for moral education. Hozumi, him-
  self, headed the Ministry of Education Commission that recom-
  mended revision of the textbooks in 1908.
  The conservative interpretations of the new order were soon dissemi-
  nated through the educational system. As we have seen, the tide had
  already turned in a conservative direction by the early 1880s, when the
  liberal morals texts were removed, and a reassertion of traditional
  values began. When Mori Arinori was appointed minister of education
  in 1885, the momentum picked up.
  Mori, an apostle of the bummei kaika in the 1870s, helped push
  39 Richard H. Minear, Japanese Tradition and Western Law: Emperor, State, and Law in the
  Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 73. For
  a splendid treatment in Japanese, see Matsumoto Sannosuke, Tennosei kokka to seiji shiso
  (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1969).
  40 Minear, Japanese Tradition, p. 74. For treatment of the civil code controversy, see Toyama
  Shigeki, "Mimpoten ronso no seijishi kosatsu," in Meiji shiryo kenkyu renrakukai, ed.,
  Minkenron kara nashonarizumu e (Meijishi kenkyu sosho, IV) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobo,
  '957)- In English, see Dan Fenno Henderson, "Law and Political Modernization in Japan,"
  in Ward, ed., Political Development, pp. 387-456.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  education in a conservative direction during the succeeding decade.
  He and Ito had conferred at great length regarding the role of educa-
  tion while they were in Europe in 1882. Both agreed that "the founda-
  tions of education should be established with a view to the future
  stability of the nation." Education should not be confused with the
  "aimless promotion of intellectual prowess" or with "the struggle to
  get ahead." Rather, its purpose was "to elevate the spirit of the entire
  nation."41 Under Mori's leadership the educational system was recast
  to place it at the service of the state rather than the individual. It was
  to create an elite of talent so as to promote "the economic growth and
  viability of the Japanese state."42 Mori told local officials in 1887:
  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are not our major concern in the education
  and instruction of the young. Education is entirely a matter of bringing up
  men of character. And who are these men of character? - they are the good
  subjects required by our Empire. And who are these good subjects? - diey
  are those persons who live up fully to their responsibilities as Imperial Sub-
  jects.43
  Mori's was a secular vision of the state that contrasted with the views
  of Motoda and later theorists like Hozumi whose views approached a
  mystical conception of the Japanese state. Mori was, in fact, assassi-
  nated in 1889 for his purported slights in ritual during a visit to the Ise
  Shrine. At the time, Kuga reminded the readers of Nihon that the
  ceremonies conducted at Ise were not religious services to worship
  Shinto deities, but rather they were national political ceremonies to
  reverence the imperial household, because Ise had been built to honor
  the emperor's ancestors. The distinction was an important one for
  Kuga and for most conservatives: the imperial household was the most
  important symbol of Japan's historical continuity and its unique cul-
  tural traditions.
  The growing popular reverence for the imperial institution was ap-
  parent after 1890. We have already seen the reaction to Uchimura
  Kanzo's reluctance to bow before the imperial portrait in 1891. The
  same year, a Tokyo Imperial University professor, Kume Kunitake,
  published an article describing Shinto as the "survival of a primitive
  form of worship." Writing in objective, historical fashion, he traced
  the origins of court ceremonies, of the imperial regalia, and of the Ise
  Shrine to forms of primitive worship in the Orient that had existed in
  prehistoric Japan. Shintoists attacked the article as sacrilegious and
  forced Kume out of his university position. Moderate conservatives
  41 Hall, Mori Arinori, pp. 362-3. 
  42 Ibid., p. 458. 
  43 Ibid., p. 398.
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  BUREAUCRATIC CONSERVATISM 
  703
  like Kuga made no attempt to defend a literal belief in Shinto myths,
  but they abhorred detached objective criticism of the imperial court,
  which they regarded as an historic symbol of national unity, essential
  to national cohesion. Kuga wrote:
  It is our moral obligation to refrain from making a public issue of anything
  that relates to the Imperial household, lest . . . what began as an academic
  dispute result in jeopardy to the security of the nation. People like Mr. Kume
  are aware of their status as scholars, but they tend to forget their obligation as
  subjects.**
  The bummei kaika had never had a deep social basis for many of its
  ideas. There was a ready audience for conservative views, and the
  public mood of Japan changed dramatically. The pressures to con-
  form, as Marius Jansen has pointed out, came not so much from the
  government as from "forces within Japanese society. Colleagues,
  neighbors, publicists, relatives - these were the people who hounded
  the Kumes, the reformers, and the liberals."**
  The new ethics texts adopted the conservative ideology to explain
  the basis of the new political order. In the early 1890s, over eighty
  texts were privately produced. They stressed the sacred authority of
  the emperor, the family state, and ancestor worship. To maintain
  control of the new developing orthodoxy, the Education Ministry be-
  gan, in 1903, to compile an official set of ethics textbooks. There is
  some indication that the bureaucracy felt that the conservative trend
  was going too far, for the 1903 edition is regarded by many as repre-
  senting a somewhat liberalizing trend. Nevertheless, they contained
  the basic teachings of the family-state ideology on which the subse-
  quent edition of 1910 was built.*6 The new imperial ideology drew on
  the traditional language of loyalty and obligation and on a mythical
  past to imbue the new order with the aura of sanctity and legitimacy
  that would inhibit political opposition and dissent. As one scholar has
  put it, "The emperor became a substitute for the charismatic leader so
  prominent in the modernization of most non-Western societies of a
  later period, a substitute that was more permanent, more deeply
  rooted in the culture, and more invulnerable to attack."*7
  44 Pyle, The New Generation, pp. 124-5.
  45 Jansen, Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization, pp. 80-1.
  46 Wilbur M. Fridell, "Government Ethics Textbooks in Late Meiji Japan," Journal of Asian
  Studies 29 (1970): 823-34. The standard authority is Karasawa Tomitard, Kyokasho no rekishi
  (Tokyo: Sobunsha, i960).
  47 Robert A. Scalapino, "Ideology and Modernization: The Japanese Case," in David E. Apter,
  ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 103.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  THE CONSERVATIVE APPROACH TO INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
  The Meiji leaders in their drive to promote industry had always advo-
  cated one of the main enlightenment themes, namely, the advance-
  ment of science, technology, and utilitarian knowledge. In that sense
  they might not be considered conservatives. As Benjamin Schwartz
  observed in his essay on conservatism in modern China, moderniza-
  tion of industrialization would seem to be "the very antithesis ^ef con-
  servatism" because it involves "the systematic universal application of
  technological rationalism both to nature and society," which was one
  of the main premises of enlightenment thinking that the conservatives
  were said to oppose. Modernization, Schwartz continued,
  thus seems to be the very paradigm of the deliberate effort to shape the social
  order according to conscious ideas in people's heads. Yet the fact is that as
  modernization has proceeded, it too has come to be viewed more and more as
  a sociohistoric process independent of human wills. It has thus also come to
  be viewed as a kind of organic societal growth which has already achieved a
  mature state of development. While there no doubt have been forms of
  aristocratic conservatism in Europe which resisted industrialization, the fact
  is that conservatism of the Bismarckian variety wholeheartedly based itself on
  bureaucratic and industrial nationalization and clearly perceived the link
  between industrialization and national power."8
  The Bismarckian variety of conservatism formulated under the im-
  pact of Germany's maturing industrialism, fear of social revolution,
  and the ideals of German unification was uniquely relevant to Japanese
  circumstances and, in fact, exercised great influence on the Meiji
  bureaucratic leaders. German thought helped them anticipate the so-
  cial and economic effects of industrialization and plan ways in which
  political initiatives could be taken to maintain conservative control of
  industrial society.
  The German historical school of economics was particularly influen-
  tial. It had risen in the nineteenth century to challenge the laissez-faire
  liberalism of Adam Smith. The historical school rejected the notion
  that the same body of theory was valid for all times and places. It
  rejected the materialism and universalism of both the Manchester
  school and the socialists. Instead, it saw economic issues as inseparable
  from the society, culture, and history in which they arose. Economic
  48 Benjamin I. Schwartz, "Notes on Conservatism in General and on China in Particular," in
  Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican
  China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 14.
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  INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 
  705
  issues, moreover, could not be left free to work themselves out as the
  Manchester liberals had contended. Economics should be studied from
  an ethical point of view, with the purpose of advancing the good of the
  whole society. German historical economics, therefore, favored the in-
  tervention of the state to maintain social welfare. Otherwise, pursuit of
  individual self-interest would lead to class cleavages and to social revolu-
  tion. The socially conscious monarch and his bureaucracy were the only
  neutral force in the conflict of social classes. In order to build national
  greatness and to prevent the alienation of the lower classes, it was
  necessary to protect them from exploitation and to integrate them into
  the political community. Under the influence of these economists, Bis-
  marck's government proposed factory inspection laws, social insurance
  plans, state encouragement of consumers' and producers' cooperatives,
  state ownership of railroads, and minimum wage laws.
  Conservatism in the modern world since the French Revolution
  came to have a direct relationship to social revolution. As one observer
  puts it, "The historic mission of political conservatism in the West has
  been not to defeat but to forestall revolutions, not to crush but antici-
  pate them."49 In Japan, bureaucratic conservatism had as a principal
  motivation the forestalling of social revolution.
  German historical economics came to have very great influence in
  shaping bureaucratic conservatism in Japan. Its introduction was pri-
  marily the work of Kanai Noburu (1865-1933) who was the first major
  academic economist in Japan, the one most responsible for introducing
  the new industrial economics, and the teacher of many of Japan's subse-
  quent academic and bureaucratic leaders.5° The writings of his school
  greatly expanded the understanding of incipient social problems inher-
  ent in the process of industrialization that Roesler had touched on in his
  advice to the oligarchs.
  In 1890, after four years of study in Europe, principally in Germany
  where he had immersed himself in studying the historical school and
  in observing Bismarck's conservative policies, Kanai was appointed
  professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Kanai's early writings criti-
  cized the bummei kaika writers, attacking their universalism and argu-
  ing that economic theory must be based on the particular history and
  cultural heritage of a nation. They had followed Manchester views.
  Fukuzawa, for example, wrote in Seiyojijo that economics, like chem-
  49 Clinton Rossiter, "Conservatism," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New
  York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), vol. 3, p. 292.
  50 Kanai is described in Sumiya Etsuji, Nihon keizaigaku-shi (Kyoto: Mineruva shobo, 1958).
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  7O6 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  istry and physics, was governed by fixed laws. Similarly, Taguchi
  Ukichi, one of the most bold and consistent of the enlightenment
  writers, wrote in his Keizairon no rompo (1884): "Economic truth does
  not change according to the times or the national conditions. The law
  that is useful in one country is useful in every country. . . . One plus
  two is always three."'1 Kanai rejected the free-trade notions and the
  faith in individual pursuit of self-interest that the bummei kaika had
  introduced. He held that liberalism had failed in Europe because it
  permitted conditions in the new industrial societies to deteriorate until
  revolution became a serious possibility. Kanai was instrumental in
  introducing discussion of the social problems (shakai mondai) created
  by industrialization and the positive role required of the state to pre-
  vent such problems. He wrote in 1891:
  If workers are treated like animals, then after several decades unions and
  socialism will appear. If now we concentrate on protection we can prevent
  unions and the spread of socialism. This is the policy of prevention. An
  illustration of the failure to act is not far to seek; it is in every country of the
  West.'*
  Kanai's theme of preventive action became an important element in
  Meiji conservative thought. The timing of Japan's industrialization
  gave it an opportunity to learn from the experience of the more ad-
  vanced Western societies, to act early to forestall social problems. A
  second theme in Kanai's writing was his emphasis on thought guid-
  ance (shiso zendo) as an important preventive for social unrest. He held
  that social problems originated as much in the awakened conscious-
  ness of the lower classes as they did in objective living conditions.
  Accordingly, it was necessary for the state to lead the lower classes
  toward a positive and harmonious social attitude. Another important
  theme of Kanai's that was also essential to the conservative view was
  his emphasis on social solidarity as necessary to success in foreign
  affairs. He wrote:
  Ultimately the highest object of social policy in modern times is to bring back
  together again die various social classes which are daily becoming more and
  more separated; and it must establish a socially cooperative life based on
  intimate relations of mutual help and interdependence. . . . That is to say,
  social policy, which is the greatest need in domestic politics, is not just a
  51 Kawai Eijiro, Meiji shisoshi no ichi danmen: Kanai Noburu o chushin to shite, reprinted in
  Kawai Eijiro zenshu (Tokyo: Shakai shisosha, 1969), vol. 8, p. 195. This account of economic
  thought in Meiji, centering on Kanai and written by his son-in-law, himself a well-known
  political economist, is a valuable source.
  52 Kenneth B. Pyle, "Advantages of Followership: German Economics and Japanese Bureau-
  crats, 1890-1925," Journal of Japanese Studies I (1974): p. 143.
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  INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 
  7O7
  noble human ethic, it is an effective method to achieve success in foreign
  policy."
  Social policies of the government would introduce reforms, not as a
  matter of justice or right, but because they would strengthen national
  cohesion. Max Weber, in his 1895 Freiburg inaugural lecture, ex-
  plained the motivation of German economists: "It is not the purpose of
  our work in social policy to make the world happy, but to unite
  socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the
  hard struggles of the future." And he added, "Not peace and human
  happiness we have to pass on to our descendants, but the maintenance
  and up-breeding of our national kind." Japan was not yet "a nation
  split apart by modern economic development."» Japanese conserva-
  tives were determined to prevent that.
  In 1896, Kanai's disciples established the Shakai seisaku gakkai
  (Organization for the study of social policy), a group modeled on the
  Verein fur Sozialpolitik, which had been formed by the German his-
  torical economists in 1872 to advocate state intervention in the econ-
  omy in order to ease class conflicts through social welfare legislation.
  The Gakkai became the principal professional organization for Japa-
  nese economists, including nearly everyone teaching economics in uni-
  versities as well as those in the bureaucracy and in business who were
  considered economists.
  Increasingly, after the Sino-Japanese War, the Meiji conservatives
  found themselves as much concerned about the socialists and other
  radicals as they were about the liberals. The declaration of principles
  issued by the Shakai seisaku gakkai defined a middle course between
  the liberals and the socialists. It professed to discern already in Japan
  the beginning of a clash between labor and capital:
  We oppose laissez-faire because it creates extreme profit consciousness and
  unbridled competition, and aggravates the differences between rich and poor.
  We also oppose socialism because it would destroy the present economic
  organization, obliterate capitalists, and therefore impede national programs.
  We support the principles of the present private enterprise system. Within
  this framework we seek to prevent friction between classes through the power
  of government and through individual exertions and thereby preserve social
  harmony. 55
  Kuwata Kumazo, who was a prime mover in the founding of the
  Shakai seisaku gakkai, wrote in an 1896 essay, entitled "The State and
  53 Ibid., p. 144.
  54 Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1967),
  p. 41. 
  55 Pyle, "Advantages of Followership," pp. 145-6.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  the Social Problem," that although the nineteenth century had been one
  of political revolutions, the new century promised to be one of economic
  revolutions. Whereas the Western countries were accomplishing the
  economic revolution in the same way as they had accomplished the
  political revolution - at the cost of great strife and bloodshed - Japan
  could avoid this, as it had already proved: "The fact that the Japanese
  people established a constitutional system without shedding a drop of
  blood is a matter of great distinction in modern history. In the coming
  economic revolution, too, why should it be impossible to solve this great
  problem peacefully?" He argued that German social policy was appro-
  priate to the Japanese experience because of Confucian injunctions to a
  ruler to take a benevolent interest in the well-being of his people and to
  instruct them in moral principles. Kuwata, who lectured on industrial
  policy at the Imperial University of Tokyo and served on many govern-
  mental commissions, recommended specific measures that the govern-
  ment should enact:
  1. Factory legislation to regulate working hours, conditions, and
  female and child labor.
  2. Regulations to protect the interests of tenants.
  3. Poor relief laws.
  4. Compulsory workers' insurance.
  5. Credit cooperatives to protect and aid small fanners.
  6. Progressive tax policies to ease the burden of low-income groups.
  After the Sino-Japanese War, with the political order established
  and underwritten by a powerful ideology and with the goal of treaty
  revision accomplished, the Meiji leaders had to turn their attention to
  the problems of the industrial revolution. It was a new era. The term
  shakai mondai (social problem) became a frequent theme of public
  discussion. The naive optimism about the future that had character-
  ized the bummei kaika was fading and was replaced by a more balanced
  assessment of what was entailed by modern economic development.
  The term bummei byd (civilization sickness) became a common phrase
  to indicate the problems that afflicted Western industrial societies -
  class hostilities, labor strife, destruction of the peasant village, deca-
  dence, materialism, radical ideologies, the decline of cooperation, and
  its supporting values. Would Japan be inevitably afflicted by the same
  problems as it passed through its industrial revolution? Many Japa-
  nese feared so. There were already harbingers. Socialist writings ap-
  peared in the 1890s, and the first socialist groups, small as they were,
  were accorded much attention. The first socialist party did not have a
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  INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 
  709
  long history - it was closed down by the Home Ministry several hours
  after it had announced its formation in 1900.
  The Ashio Copper Mine problem was seen as an early symptom of
  bummei byd. The mine, situated at the headwaters of the Watarase
  River, near Nikko, represented one of Japan's important industries.
  Through the application of modern technology, the mining complex
  had undergone impressive expansion, but in the process, through
  deforestation, the river's watershed was destroyed. Floods brought
  appallingly polluted waters downstream, inundating villages and con-
  taminating fields in the northern Kanto plain. In 1896, thirteen thou-
  sand households were flooded, and a national protest movement be-
  gan. Ashio became a symbol of the sacrifice of agriculture to industry
  and of community values to economic growth.56
  Ashio was only one of the more dramatic indications to the Japanese
  of what was likely to come as the industrial revolution proceeded. By
  the turn of the century, there was a rising awareness of the need to
  take preventive measures and a sense that Japan had a special advan-
  tage as a "follower country" to profit from the Western experience.
  The young economist (later to be a socialist), Kawakami Hajime wrote
  in 1905:
  We have the history of England's failure and there is no need to repeat that
  history. Are there not opportunities for countries that lag behind in their
  culture? . . . The history of the failures of the advanced countries (zenshin-
  koku) is the best textbook for the follower countries (koshin-koku). I hope that
  our statesmen and intellectuals learn something from this textbook.'7
  As the comments of one official, Kaneko Kentaro, indicated, the
  Japanese bureaucrats were sensitive to the lessons of history. We
  should learn from the "sad and pitiful" history of British industrializa-
  tion, because, Kaneko added, "it is the advantage of the backward
  country that it can reflect on the history of the advanced countries and
  avoid their mistakes."*8 This style of thought soon infused the think-
  ing of officialdom, even at the highest levels. Okuma Shigenobu wrote
  in 1910 that Japan was in an advantageous position to secure the
  cooperation of labor and capital: "By studying the mistaken system
  that has brought Europe such bitter experience in the past several
  decades, businessmen, politicians, and officials in Japan can diminish
  these abuses." Relying on the force of laws and family customs, they
  56 See "Symposium: The Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident," Journal of Japanese Studies I
  (I975)- 
  57 Pyle, "Advantages of FoUowership," pp. 129-30.
  58 Ronald P. Dore, "The Modernizer As a Special Case: Japanese Factory Legislation, 1882-
  1911," Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969): 439.
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  710 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  could "prevent a fearful clash" and plan the conciliation of capitalists
  and laborers. Similarly, Prime Minister Katsura wrote in 1908:
  We are now in an age of economic transition. The development of machine
  industry and the intensification of competition widens the gap between rich
  and poor and creates anatagonisms that endanger social order. Judging by
  Western history, this is an inevitable pattern. Socialism is today no more than
  a wisp of smoke, but if it is ignored, it will some day have the force of a wild
  fire, and there will be nothing to stop it. Therefore, it goes without saying
  that we must rely on education to nurture the people's values; and we must
  devise a social policy that will assist their industry, provide them work, help
  the aged and infirm and, thereby, prevent catastrophe.'9
  Thus, by the turn of the century, a conservative approach to indus-
  trial society had taken root in the bureaucracy. It was heavily influ-
  enced by Bismarckian social policy and German economic thought. It
  was influenced, as well, by the conservative belief that Japanese soci-
  ety was indeed different and should be unique, that by preserving its
  own values of social harmony it could avert the social consequences of
  industrialism evident in many Western societies. Finally, and perhaps
  most important, it was motivated by the urgency of the time. Success
  in foreign affairs depended on a united nation and rapid economic
  growth.
  THE SOCIAL PROGRAM OF THE CONSERVATIVES
  The most clearly denned initial objective of the bureaucratic conserva-
  tives in addressing industrial society was the passage of a factory law to
  regulate the working conditions of industrial labor. Actually, far in
  advance of an organized labor movement demanding it of the govern-
  ment, the bureaucracy took the initiative in drafting it and in organiz-
  ing support for its passage. In fact, the bureaucracy's efforts were so
  early, Dore points out, that when the Ministry of Agriculture and
  Commerce began to study foreign factory laws in 1882, there were
  fewer than fifty factories using steam power in all of Japan!60
  In the 1890s, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce circulated
  to various chambers of commerce the draft of a law that would estab-
  lish minimum health and safety standards and limit the working hours
  of women and children employed in factories.61 After the Sino-
  Japanese War, the government pressed factory legislation with greater
  59 Horio Teruhisa, "Taisei sai-togo no kokororai to teikoku ideorogii no keisei," Nihon seiji
  gakkai nempo (1968): 164. See also Pyle, "Followership," pp. 130,159.
  60 Dore, "The Modernizer As a Special Case," p. 437. 
  61 Ibid., pp. 437-8.
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  SOCIAL PROGRAM 
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  urgency. Beginning in 1896, the government convened a series of
  national conferences to discuss the state of the economy. Bureaucrats
  brushed aside the contention of businessmen that working conditions
  in Japan were good, with the argument that it was necessary "to create
  the laws necessary to maintain in the future the balance between capi-
  tal and labor, and harmonious relations between employers and em-
  ployees, thereby protecting in advance against any disorders."62 At the
  same time, steps were taken to prevent the growth of union powers.
  The Peace Police Law of 1900 virtually denied the unions the primary
  function of organizing.
  A factory law was eventually passed in 1911, and in the meantime,
  there were other steps taken in the cities to prepare for industrial
  society. On the whole, however, before World War I, the bureaucracy
  depended primarily on its police power to maintain control in the
  urban sector and, for a number of reasons, showed far more concern
  for the countryside. First, that was where 80 percent of the population
  still lived at the turn of the century. If the new order were to have a
  powerful counterrevolutionary bulwark, it would most effectively be
  in the towns and villages. Second, industrialization in Japan fre-
  quently had a rural setting and was dependent on village labor and
  farm side employments. The commercial spirit had already begun to
  invade the countryside and to affect the solidarity of the village com-
  munity. Third, ever since the bummei kaika had made its effect felt on
  the cities, the towns and villages had come to symbolize the essence of
  what was historically Japanese. Finally, there was traditional sanction
  for such a view. Tokugawa political thought had regarded agriculture
  as the basis of society. Ogyu Sorai put it this way: "To take care of the
  roots and to keep the branches under control, this is the principle
  taught by the sages of old. The root is agriculture; the branches,
  industry and commerce."63
  The Shakai seisaku gakkai devoted much attention to studies of the
  way in which industrialization in Western countries had led to the
  disintegration of the peasant village. Already, this society's members
  saw dangers in the countryside. Rising government expenditures for
  industrial capital formation and military enterprises were creating a
  growing tax burden for the citizenry. Central government expendi-
  62 Byron K. Marshall, Capitalism and Nationalism in Prewar Japan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
  University Press, 1967), p. 54. Discussion of bureaucratic efforts to develop factory and labor
  legislation can be found in Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modem Japan (Berkeley
  and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
  63 Ronald P. Dote, Land Reform in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 57.
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  712 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  tures tripled in the decade before the Russo-Japanese War, and respon-
  sibilities for public works and education were increasingly delegated to
  local government. Local taxes rose sharply, and the town and village
  assemblies, which were dominated by wealthy families, enacted a vari-
  ety of regressive taxes. This growing tax burden, the increasing con-
  centration of land ownership, and the attractiveness of the city to
  ambitious peasant youth portended social problems in the countryside
  that the government could ill afford. As Tani Kanjo wrote in 1898, a
  secure yeomanry was critical to Japan because it would serve as a
  barrier to radical ideologies, provide a reliable source of able-bodied
  soldiers, and ensure self-sufficiency of food in time of war. To prevent
  destruction of the cohesiveness and harmony of the village, the Gakkai
  proposed a tenancy law to regulate landlord-tenant relations, and the
  establishment of credit facilities and industrial cooperatives.
  The bureaucracy thus came to the conclusion that if the cohesion of
  the countryside could be preserved, then the tensions that industrial-
  ism was certain to create could somehow be managed. The oligarchs,
  particularly Yamagata, had always regarded local administration as
  critical to the future stability of their rule. For that reason, Yamagata
  had taken an intense, firsthand interest in the establishment of the
  new system of local government, which culminated in the Town and
  Village Code of 1888.
  To infuse this system with the new national ideology and to estab-
  lish a stable conservative social base for the difficult transition to an
  industrial economy, the government embarked on an ambitious and
  comprehensive program of conservative reforms in the countryside.
  The Rural Improvement movement (Chiho kairyo undo), which the
  Home Ministry launched at the turn of the century, was the archetype
  of the bureaucratic approach to modern Japanese social problems. It
  demonstrates the pragmatic effort of Japanese conservatives to make
  limited reforms within a nationalist framework as a means of cushion-
  ing society from the traumatic effects of the industrial revolution. The
  objectives of the movement were to promote both economic develop-
  ment and social harmony. It thus sought to strengthen the financial
  resources of the new administrative towns and villages and to build
  national loyalties among all classes at the local level.
  One of the most impressive manifestations of social policy thought in
  the bureaucracy's approach to rural society was its promotion of agricul-
  tural cooperatives. Through the efforts of a leading bureaucrat, Hirata
  Tosuke, who was a close associate of Yamagata and who had studied
  social policy in Germany, the Diet passed in 1899 the Industrial Co-
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  SOCIAL PROGRAM 
  713
  operatives Law which encouraged the establishment of credit, con-
  sumer marketing, and producers' cooperatives. Just as the factory law
  had not depended on the demands of discontented laborers for its pro-
  motion and passage, so the Industrial Cooperatives Law was not the
  result of demands from farmers or farm pressure groups. Rather, the
  bureaucracy took the initiative in drafting it in order to prevent the kind
  of agrarian impoverishment and disruption that had occurred in the
  West. Hirata's justification of the measure is noteworthy for us here. He
  regarded cooperatives as a form of "social education" that would estab-
  lish a strong collectivism at the local level. They would become "commu-
  nities working in behalf of the nation" (kokka no tame no kyodotai).
  Hirata reasoned that if "we come to have the great class divisions that
  exist in every Western country, it will be cause for immense concern
  and regret. Therefore before this calamity occurs we should let the
  lower class people share in the blessings of civilization along with the
  great capitalists." Cooperatives would "protect the security of society"
  and promote economic development by helping the small producer who
  was "the center of the industry."6* Following the enactment of the
  Industrial Cooperatives Law, the government mounted a vigorous prop-
  aganda campaign throughout the countryside. It relied on the teachings
  of the Tokugawa peasant-scholar, Ninomiya Sontoku, which stressed
  mutual aid and cooperation in the village, conciliation and cooperation
  between landlord and tenant, careful long-term planning and budget-
  ing, the dignity of manual labor, thrift, and the payment of taxes as a
  moral obligation. Ninomiya's followers had, in fact, formed societies
  known as hotokusha which had functioned as crude credit associations.
  By 1921, over 13,700 cooperatives had been organized in conformance
  with the new law, and nearly one-half the farm families were members
  of a cooperative.
  The Rural Improvement movement took a number of steps to
  strengthen the new administrative towns and villages that, following
  the Town and Village Act of 1888, had been formed by joining many
  of the old hamlets. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War, over
  76,000 natural villages or hamlets (Jburaku) that had existed in the
  Tokugawa period had, through mergers, been reduced to some 12,000
  administrative towns and villages. The intention was to transfer re-
  64 Kenneth B. Pyle, "The Technology of Japanese Nationalism: The Local Improvement Move-
  ment, I9oo-I9i8,"7o«ma/ of Asian Studies 33 (1973): 51-65. The best description of the
  Local Improvement movement in Japanese is by Miyachi Masato, Nichi-Ro sengo seijishi no
  kenkyu (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1973). Another major work is by Kano
  Masanao, Shihonshugi keisei-ki no chitsujo ishiki (Tokyo: Chikuma shobd, 1969).
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  714 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  sources, including all communal lands and property, from the hamlets
  to the new administrative units.
  As part of the same effort, the Home Ministry announced in 1906 its
  determination to enforce a sweeping merger of Shinto shrines at the
  local level so that hamlet shrines would be replaced by a single central
  shrine in each administrative village. Worship at the hamlet shrines
  had centered on the daily concerns of local inhabitants - such matters
  as clement weather, good harvests, and healthy offspring. Under the
  new program, worship was to focus chiefly on the imperial family and
  national festivals.65 Priests were placed under the disciplinary regula-
  tions of regular civil government officials.
  Inspiration for this program, as Hashikawa Bunso and others noted,
  came from the visits that bureaucrats made to the West where they
  were impressed with the cohesive power of religion and the dominance
  of churches in local society. The instrumental use of religious rites to
  support the state, of course, can be traced back in Japanese history to
  the ideas of Ogyu Sorai and beyond. In this way, what I to had envi-
  sioned as the cornerstone of the nation - the imperial ideology or what
  was later called state Shinto - was established at the local level. This
  was not something that welled up spontaneously from the people and
  their folklore and traditions. To the contrary, there was much resis-
  tance at the local level to the attempt to merge shrines and override the
  simple local devotions of the past.
  The bureaucracy, however, persisted in other methods to create
  national loyalties and inculcate the national ideology at the grass-roots
  level - most effectively through organizations that Professor Ishida
  Takeshi has called half-bureaucratic/half-popular organizations - be-
  cause they were organizations that had their origins at the local level
  and that were used by the bureaucracy as effective vehicles of the new
  nationalism and were encouraged to develop much more elaborate
  structures. The most important of these organizations were the youth
  groups (seinenkai) and the military associations (zaigo gunjinkai).66
  The modern youth group movement was begun in the 1890s by a
  Hiroshima Prefecture schoolteacher, Yamamoto Takinosuke, who
  65 Wilbur M. FrideU, Japanese Shrine Mergers, 1906-1912 (Tokyo: Sophia University Press,
  1973)- See also Hashikawa Bunso's excellent essay on the bureaucracy's efforts to extend its
  power to the local level: Kindai Nihon seiji shiso no shosd (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1968), pp. 35-73.
  66 Ishida Takeshi, Meiji seiji shisoshi kenkyu (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1954) and Ishida Takeshi, Kindai
  Nihon seiji kozb no kenkyu (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1956) are the standard sources. Also essential is
  Fujita Shozo, Tennosei kokka no shihai genri (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1966). In English, see Richard
  J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
  University of California Press, 1974).
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  SOCIAL PROGRAM 
  715
  published in 1896 a tract entitled Inaka seinen (Rural youth). In this
  and subsequent writings, he exhorted and praised rural youth as the
  backbone of the nation: They exemplified virtues of hard work, thrift,
  filial piety, and national spirit. They were uninfected by the "civiliza-
  tion sickness" (bummei byo) that afflicted city youth. The Home Minis-
  try, seeing the value that such grass-roots organizations could have in
  mobilizing support at the local level, set out to organize village youth
  groups in a national hierarchy under its guidance. By the end of the
  Meiji period, youth groups were said to number 29,320, with a mem-
  bership of 3 million.
  The local military associations (zaigo gunjinkai) had similar grass-
  roots origins. Established after the Satsuma Rebellion as fraternal
  organizations for former members of the military, they took leadership
  of youth activities, community service projects, and patriotic ceremo-
  nies. The government organized them into a national hierarchy, and
  by the end of the Meiji period, virtually every community in the
  nation had a branch. The youth groups and military associations be-
  came mass organizations (along with the credit associations) at the
  grass-roots levels and were increasingly effective in the twentieth cen-
  tury as instruments for mobilizing nationalist support of the great
  effort required to achieve military and industrial success.
  The keynote of the Rural Improvement movement was sounded by
  the issuance of the Imperial Rescript of 1908, known as the Boshin
  shosho. As Professor Sumiya Mikio observed, this rescript symbolized
  the government's intention to press a campaign of national mobiliza-
  tion, exhorting all Japanese to unite in hard work, thrift, and coopera-
  tion so that the nation could achieve its destiny as one of the world's
  great military and industrial powers.67 In part it read:
  In order to keep pace with the constant progress of the world, and to partici-
  pate in the blessings of its civilization, the development of the national re-
  sources is manifestly a requisite of prime importance. . . . We desire all
  classes of Our people to act in unison, to be faithful to their callings, frugal in
  the management of their households, submissive to the dictates of conscience
  and calls of duty, frank and sincere in their manners, to abide by simplicity
  and avoid ostentation, and to inure themselves to arduous toil without yield-
  ing to any degree of indulgence. The teachings of Our revered Ancestors and
  the record of our glorious history are clear beyond all misapprehension. By
  scrupulous observance of the precepts thus established, the growing prosper-
  ity of our Empire is assured.
  67 Sumiya Mikio, Nihon no shakai shiso (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1968), pp. 65-6.
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  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  The ease and speed with which mass mobilization was achieved under
  bureaucratic initiative is sometimes exaggerated and is still the subject
  of controversy. What was clearly accomplished by the late Meiji pe-
  riod was mobilization for nationalist purposes of the "local notables" -
  village headmen, school principals, prominent landlords, and Shinto
  priests. It was this stratum of grass-roots leadership that Yamagata
  had referred to as the "strong middle men" (chuken jimbutsu) who
  could mediate between the new national administrative system and
  local society. Charged with responsibility for achieving the national
  destiny, they attained enhanced respectability by exercising patriar-
  chal leadership of the youth groups, the industrial cooperatives, and
  the military associations.68
  THE LEGACY OF MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  By the turn of the century, the public mood of Japan had been trans-
  formed, and a powerful conservative orthodoxy held sway. The millen-
  nial vision of the butnmei kaika had faded, and liberals and reformers
  were in disarray. Their optimism had given way to ambivalence. Many
  of them now had a more balanced perspective on the impact of the
  science and industry in which the bummei kaika advocates had put
  their faith. The new technology was creative but also destructive. It
  offered new hope and opportunities, but at a high cost in human
  disruption and hardship. The reformer, Tanaka Shozo, expressing
  moral revulsion toward the commercialization of values and the de-
  cline in cooperation, said in the Diet in 191 o that modern civilization
  was destroying "moral structures that have taken five hundred or a
  thousand years to build." Reflecting on the Ashio pollution case, he
  wrote in his diary that "progress of material, artificial civilization casts
  society into darkness. Electricity is discovered and the world is dark-
  ened."69 Some of the liberals like Tokutomi Soho, the leader of the
  reform cause, had abandoned the faith and thrown in their lot with the
  conservatives. The journalist and reformer Kinoshita Naoe wrote of
  his disillusion with the Spencerian vision of the future that Tokutomi
  had offered in the 1880s: "Weren't we fools! We were afire with hope
  when we first heard Spencer's prophecy that society was evolving from
  68 A recent assessment of the success of bureaucratic efforts at the local level is by Ariizumi
  Sadao, "Meiji kokka to minshu togo," in Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 17 (kindai 4)
  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 221-62.
  69 Alan Stone, "The Japanese Muckrakers," Journal of Japanese Studies 1 (1975): 402.
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  LEGACY 
  717
  the militant to the industrial stage, that wars would cease, that loyalty
  and patriotism would disappear, and that there would be a golden age
  of peace and freedom!" Instead, material civilization had brought "de-
  pravity, ruin, and normlessness."70
  Liberal despair over the course of industrial civilization was com-
  pounded by the oppressive orthodoxy that pervaded public discourse.
  Most young Japanese had little of their predecessors' optimism about
  reforming society. They felt powerless to change the social and politi-
  cal order. "The atmosphere that surrounds us youth," the poet
  Ishikawa Takuboku wrote, "is suffocating. The influence of authority
  pervades the entire country. The existing social organization reaches
  into every nook and cranny." It was this kind of despair that radical-
  ized socialists like Kotoku Shusui and impelled them to extremes.71
  Even moderate conservatives were dismayed at the extent to which
  the conservative reaction had gone. Those like Miyake Setsurei and
  Kuga Katsunan had attacked some of the main themes of the Japanese
  enlightenment, including its dismissal of Japanese history, its naive
  internationalism, and its adulation of Western society and politics. But
  by the turn of the century, they were appalled at the distortion of their
  ideas. The term they had originated, "preservation of the national
  essence" (kokusui hozon), had become a pretext for opposing needed
  reforms. Moderate conservatives had argued for cultural autonomy,
  for a modern industrial society that was in keeping with historical
  traditions, but they lamented the narrow views that now stigmatized
  change as inconsistent with the national character.
  This dramatic reversal of the liberal cause came about because many
  of the main themes of the bummei kaika had lacked a strong social
  constituency to defend them. When they were challenged, particularly
  from within the government and the imperial court, as in the case of
  the liberal education reforms, they were easily displaced. The extreme
  adulation of the Western cultural model could not sustain itself once
  the vogue had passed and, particularly, once the motivation of treaty
  revision had disappeared. Free trade and internationalism never had
  many self-interested supporters and, in the age of imperialism that
  dawned in the 1890s, could scarcely be sustained. Many of the new
  social values introduced during the bummei kaika ran counter to the
  mores of the Japanese but, above all, were incompatible with the
  institutions of the countryside where the great majority of the popu-
  70 Ibid., p. 404.
  71 Pyle, The New Generation, p. 200. On Kotoku, see F. G. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shusui: Portrait
  of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
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  7l8 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  lace had its roots. Finally, by the turn of the century, there was an
  emerging awareness that industrial society in the Western countries
  was subject to disruptions and strife that made it much less worthy of
  emulation. For these reasons, the public mood changed rapidly in the
  1890s.
  The oligarchs led this change in mood, placing the full weight of
  their power behind the new conservative tide. Historiographical con-
  troversy regarding Meiji conservatism has tended to center on assess-
  ment of its motivations and its legacy. E. H. Norman's classic work,
  Japan's Emergence As a Modern State (1940), locates the motivation of
  the Meiji leadership in the desperate exigencies of the time:
  Time was short, resources scanty, and it is a cause for amazement that Japan's
  leaders accomplished so much rather than a cause for blame because they had
  to leave so much undone in the way of democratic and liberal reform. . . .
  Speed was a determining element in the form which modern Japanese govern-
  ment and society assumed. The speed with which Japan had simultaneously to
  establish a modern state, to build an up-to-date defense force in order to ward
  off the dangers of invasion . . . , to create an industry on which to base diis
  armed force, to fashion an educational system suitable to an industrial, mod-
  ernized nation, dictated that these important changes be accomplished by a
  group of autocratic bureaucrats rather than by die mass of the people working
  through democratic organs of representation. These military bureaucrats
  were so far in advance of the rest of their countrymen that they had to drag a
  complaining, half-awakened nation of merchants and peasants after them.'2
  In a later work, written in 1943 during the height of the Pacific
  War, Norman was more negative and harsh in his assessment. Repres-
  sion and counterrevolution were the driving motives of the oligarchs.
  In Soldier and Peasant in Japan he wrote that
  any possibility of a steadily rising standard of living, a broadening out of
  popular liberties (all of which would have directed Japanese energies into
  channels odier than . . . expansion, aggression, and wars) was resolutely
  blocked by the calculating Japanese Metternichs. . . . As soon as the people
  of Japan could stand upright and breathe the intoxicating air of freedom
  following die overdirow of the Bakufu, they were burdened widi fresh exac-
  tions and taxes; their relative advance in terms of social and political freedom
  was soon drastically checked."
  This judgment has been widely shared by postwar Japanese histori-
  ans who have elaborated themes of a nascent democratic-populist
  movement that supported the People's Rights movement and subse-
  quently resisted bureaucratic institutions of control in the. 1890s and
  72 John W. Dower, ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings ofE. H. Norman
  (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 154. 
  73 Ibid., p. 23.
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  LEGACY 
  719
  later. Recent historiography in the West, which has tended to empha-
  size the success of Japanese modernization, has accorded a more favor-
  able assessment. Most striking in this regard is Professor George
  Akita's judgment that the Meiji leaders were enlightened heroes deter-
  mined to share their power with their countrymen by "force-feeding
  'liberalization' to a citizenry reluctant to accept the rights and duties of
  participation in government affairs. When the results were not what
  had been expected and were threatening the socio-political structure,
  the Meiji leaders continued to take further steps calculated to relax
  their own hold."74
  It is important for us to remember that there were different shades
  of conservatism within the bureaucracy. Some bureaucrats were
  moved by a primary reliance on the imperial myth to circumscribe
  narrowly the limits on institutional innovation; others were more prag-
  matic and tolerant of change. There was, in fact, a strong strain of
  conservative reformism in the bureaucracy that was motivated by na-
  tionalist concerns. These reform-minded bureaucrats came to the con-
  clusion, principally from their sensitivity to the experience of the
  Western industrial societies, that to prevent social disruption and
  maintain a strong nation-state, it was necessary for a government to
  adopt an early social policy and intervene in the economy to accommo-
  date the lower classes into the political order. Their strategy for build-
  ing this national solidarity was twofold. On the one hand, they pressed
  for social reforms like factory legislation and agricultural cooperatives.
  On the other hand, they relied on schools, youth groups, military
  associations, and the shrines to propagate the collectivist ethic.
  This dual strategy characterized the government's approach to the
  problems of industrialism in the post-World War I years. Reform-
  minded bureaucrats worked for institutional changes that would con-
  ciliate tenant-landlord and labor-management problems. Similarly,
  they pressed for extension of the suffrage. Along with their social
  policy, they promoted the national ideology as a means of mass mobili-
  zation. The Local Improvement movement, which served as a model
  of this dual strategy, was followed by a succession of bureaucratically
  sponsored movements in the 1920s and 1930s, each one designed to
  maintain social cohesion and to prod the populace to the greater efforts
  required by the forced march to industry and empire.
  This conservative strategy of early establishing institutions and an
  ideology to cope with social problems helped Japan avoid some of the
  74 George Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modem Japan, 1868-1890 (Cam-
  bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 174.
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  720 
  MEIJI CONSERVATISM
  horrors to which the industrial revolution gave rise in England - but it
  had its price. Ralf Dahrendorf, reflecting on the German experience,
  wrote that an "early social policy serves to prevent rather than to
  promote the reality of the citizen role" and that "social policy always
  went too far in holding citizens in tutelage."" In Japan, too, the
  bureaucratic strategy weakened support for parliamentary politics and
  for open confrontation of competing ideas and interests. A premium
  was placed on national unity. Reforms did not keep pace with the
  growing social problems. As problems of the economy worsened,
  threatening Japan's precarious international position, the rhetoric of
  national strength and exclusiveness was continuously strengthened.
  Meiji conservatism had set a pattern for handling the problems of
  industrial society that tended under these circumstances to lead to
  more and more extreme measures.
  75 Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, pp. 70— 1.
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  CHAPTER 12
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER
  STATUS
  THE FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE
  Nothing is more striking, in tracing Meiji Japan's foreign affairs, than
  the fact that the Meiji period coincided with the emergence of several
  "modern states." The half-century before the outbreak of World War
  I in 1914 witnessed political, economic, social, and intellectual devel-
  opments in the West that coalesced into the development of national
  entities, outlines of which have remained to this day. England,
  France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries, as well as the
  United States, evolved as centralized and integrated mass societies
  that, for want of a better term, have been called modern states. Al-
  though no two modern states were exactly alike, they were generally
  characterized by centralization of state authority, on the one hand, and
  mass incorporation into the economy and polity, on the other. These
  developments had, of course, been preceded by the democratic and
  the industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and the early nine-
  teenth century, but it was in most instances only after the 1860s that
  these earlier, and ongoing, revolutions conspired with other trends to
  create conditions for unified state systems.
  The twin phenomenon of centralization and mass incorporation
  may be illustrated by the United States, the country that held the
  greatest fascination for the Japanese during the two decades after
  Perry. The America of Perry's days was not yet a full-fledged modern
  state. It was a country with serious cleavages between regions and
  economic interests. Although shared mythologies of the American
  Revolution generated a sense of common heritage, what a later genera-
  tion would call a "civil religion," and although a sense of nationhood
  was buttressed by economic opportunity (a theme that Alexis de
  Tocqueville stressed in the 1830s), there also grew an apparently in-
  soluble dispute about the nature of the American state. Those follow-
  ing Andrew Jackson, who believed in the integrity of national unity as
  expressed by the government in Washington, were increasingly on the
  721
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  722 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  defensive in the face of "nullifiers" like John C. Calhoun, who argued
  that the very essence of the nation lay in a compact among units to
  form a larger entity so that any of them retained the freedom to secede
  from the entity when the latter seemed to infringe on its rights. When
  the first Japanese embassy, led by Shimmi Masaoki, visited the United
  States in i860, they were being unwitting witnesses to a drama that
  preceded the dissolution of the union.
  The situation was vastly different when the second embassy, this
  time dispatched by the fledgling Meiji state and headed by Iwakura
  Tomomi, reached the United States in 1871. The four-year-long Civil
  War had settled the question about the inviolability of national unity.
  The country was to be governed as one political unit under a federal
  government with powers to emancipate and enfranchise slaves, regu-
  late internal commerce, and use troops for maintaining domestic or-
  der. "Rebel states" in the South would never again attempt to create
  their separate sovereignty; instead they would try to promote their
  welfare within the larger national framework. The national govern-
  ment was now more centralized than before the Civil War, with civil
  reforms recruiting bureaucrats whose loyalty was to the new order.
  The armed forces, too, were increasingly bureaucratized. Although in
  the immediate postbellum years both the army and the navy dwindled
  in size, the nucleus of modern armed power remained, and its leaders
  were committed to the rationalization of organization, ordnance, and
  command.
  The centralization of political authority reflected and confirmed
  economic integration. The United States grew as a huge national mar-
  ket, its agricultural sector producing all that its citizens needed, and
  much more. Railroads crisscrossed every region, and the newly devel-
  oped technology of refrigeration and canning enabled farm and dairy
  products to travel thousands of miles to reach the consumer. Inevita-
  bly, problems arose in arbitrary railway tariff charges, unsanitary con-
  ditions of meats, or falling prices of wheat due to overproduction, and
  in every instance the federal government was viewed as an arbiter and
  regulator of conflicting interests. The government's most crucial con-
  tribution to the national economy, however, lay in its tariff policy.
  Protectionism provided a setting in which industrialization could grow
  apace. Capital for industrialization came from largely European, par-
  ticularly British, sources, rather than from domestic savings, but the
  late nineteenth century also created a class of fabulously rich American
  capitalists who, by controlling the railways and expanding factories,
  were so influential in linking segments of the national economy that
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  FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE 
  723
  the government felt obliged, in 1890, to enact the first antitrust mea-
  sures. But they did little to stem the trend toward the creation of a
  national economic order.
  Mass incorporation into the national economy and polity was an
  integral part of this phenomenon. In the United States, it is true, the
  people had enjoyed greater freedom and opportunity than in most other
  countries since the late eighteenth century. Still, the situation after the
  Civil War was unique in that on the one hand, the federal government as
  well as the political parties were committed to the idea of national
  economic development through industrial, transportation, and finan-
  cial development, whereas on the other hand, rapid economic change
  created significant social dislocations severely affecting the lower strata
  of society who often had recourse to organized political action. Both
  phenomena tended to deepen the government's involvement in the
  people's economic and social affairs - what Morton Keller has termed
  "the affairs of state" - while at the same time developing a pervasive
  sense of the people's common identity as workers, consumers, and often
  victims of forces beyond their control. In all this process a mass society
  was being created, a society that was at once more heterogeneous ra-
  cially and socially, and more integrated politically, than earlier.
  Whether this was a desirable phenomenon for the health and growth of
  America was a question hotly debated by its leaders. Some urged a
  return to a less complicated era characterized by homogeneous local
  communities, and others sought to forge a new unity on the basis of
  cooperation among different interest groups under the benevolent lead-
  ership of the state. Still others advocated a class struggle as the only way
  to improve the living conditions of the masses. These alternatives
  pointed to a central question of the modern state: how to preserve order
  amid change. Given the rapid technological development and economic
  change, the state authority had to devise means for preventing unman-
  ageable upheavals, but a politically conscious populace would not be
  satisfied with a stale stability that gave them no feeling of participation
  in public affairs and opportunities.
  Thus both the state authority and the masses were gaining power.
  Whether one would grow at the expense of the other was never satisfac-
  torily resolved, but on the whole it may be said that various mecha-
  nisms were devised to prevent either development and to maintain a
  balance between state and society. One such mechanism was party
  politics, and another was organized interest groups. These institutions
  mediated between governmental leadership and bureaucracy, on the
  one hand, and mass interests and aspirations, on the other. Also impor-
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  tant were the intellectuals, professionals, social workers, and educa-
  tors who served as intermediaries among the different groups, and
  between them and the government. They were the experts capable of
  understanding - so it was thought - the forces of modern transforma-
  tion. They would work to make the process of modernization more
  beneficial and less painful to the society at large; they would provide
  technical expertise for public administrators to cope with complex
  issues of the industrial age; and they would put brakes on both govern-
  mental power and popular power lest they should get out of hand and
  undermine social unity. Usually called reformers or liberals, these
  were the individuals who were the country's leaders without being
  part of the state, and who spoke for the masses without being totally
  identified with them. Thus functionally they were against state dicta-
  torships, mass revolutions, and class struggles. Rather, they were re-
  formists trying to accommodate forces of change within manageable
  frameworks. Their task was not an easy one, for they had to chart a
  middle course between revolution and reaction and between authori-
  tarianism and anarchy.
  Such, in rough outline, were the forces that were shaping American
  society after the Civil War. Although the existence and abolition of
  slavery made the country unique, in most other instances the experi-
  ence was similar to those elsewhere in the West. The European coun-
  tries, too, had their domestic strife and civil wars before they emerged
  as centralized states with civilian and armed bureaucracies, national
  markets, and mass politics and culture. When the Japanese awoke to
  the importance of turning to the West, then, they were presented with
  precisely those features that made them modern states. Of course,
  they may not have been aware that this was a rather recent develop-
  ment, a stage in Western history. But they were naturally more inter-
  ested in the present than in the past, and they could not have chosen a
  more suitable moment for transforming their own country. They had
  models everywhere they looked, and it required no unusual imagina-
  tion for them to pattern their national development after these models.
  They did not pick just one model, but several, and so they borrowed
  certain institutions from Britain, some from Germany and France, and
  still others from the United States. Such selectivity is not surprising in
  view of the fact that Western nations, too, were avidly copying one
  another with a view to transforming themselves into powerful modern
  entities.
  The emergence of modern states inevitably had serious repercus-
  sions on international affairs. First, a modern state by definition had
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  FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE 
  725
  greater military resources at its command. Its armed forces were better
  organized and more effectively mobilized than earlier because of the
  state's centralized system of bureaucracy and taxation. The armed
  forces represented the state, both internally to maintain law and order
  (against "public enemies" such as dissidents, subversives, and some-
  times even strikers) and to demonstrate national power abroad. Mili-
  tary organization, ordnance, and intelligence were improved, and vast
  strides were made in building faster ships, better fortifications, and
  more efficient systems of communication. Because these develop-
  ments were taking place simultaneously in most countries, it was not
  surprising that they should have intensified, rather than contributed
  to diminishing, a sense of insecurity in each country, which would
  now be confronted with potential adversaries with larger ships and
  better-equipped soldiers. Under the circumstances, the idea of na-
  tional defense expanded. Basic to the new definition was a global
  perspective. All regions of the world were perceived to be interlinked
  because of technological improvements and increased armament, and
  for a nation to maintain secure defenses it was considered imperative
  to adopt a global strategy. As Alfred Thayer Mahan noted in the
  1890s, "Defense means not merely defense of our territory, but de-
  fense of our just national interests, whatever they be and wherever
  they are." Echoing such a view, an American army officer wrote in
  1892, "Now we have interests abroad which are endangered by threats
  of aggression far from our own borders."1 The broadened concept of
  defense was a characteristic feature of the late nineteenth century and
  reflected the emergence of centralized states. It compelled strategic
  reformulation and produced certain ideas that remained influential
  through World War I. They included the quantitative enlargement
  and qualitative improvement of armed forces, the acquisition of bases
  and coaling stations, and the development of a geopolitical outlook
  that might call for a combination of "land powers" against "sea pow-
  ers," as Mahan advocated, or for the establishment of an economically
  viable regional bloc such as "Mitteleuropa," an idea developed by
  some German economists and military thinkers.2
  Equally important were military alliances. As ultimately exempli-
  fied by Britain's decision to terminate its "splendid isolation," the
  capitals of Europe became aware at this time that no one country
  1 Graham Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War
  (Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 1971), pp. 35-7.
  2 David E. Kaiser, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War (Princeton,
  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5.
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  726 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  would be able to maintain its security in a world of expanding arma-
  ment and improving technology. It would be necessary to form alli-
  ances and ententes to pool several countries' resources and labor
  power against contingencies. At the outset, when an alliance was con-
  cluded between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879, few could
  have foreseen that this presaged a rigid structure of alliances that led
  ultimately to war. At that time, this and other similar undertakings
  appeared to be temporary expediencies designed to provide their signa-
  tories with a sense of security; they would be replaced by other alli-
  ances as conditions changed. However, within less than thirty years
  after 1879, there had emerged two groups of powers into which the
  major European countries had become divided: the Triple Alliance of
  Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, on the one hand, and the Tri-
  ple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, on the other. They vied
  with one another for more efficient armed forces, and within each
  group its member states exchanged strategic and mobilization plans.
  Peace was maintained precariously in the form of a balance of power
  between the two camps. But it could give way to conflict, and when it
  did, it was likely to involve all these countries and even more.
  Strategic implications, however, were not the only by-product of
  the emergence of modern states. Also crucial was the fact that each
  state was committed to rapid economic development, particularly over-
  seas trade and domestic industrialization. Sometimes called neomercan-
  tilism, this commitment was different from seventeenth-century mer-
  cantilism in that it stressed the growth of national economic units as
  producers and as markets in the global economic system. The state
  encouraged the expansion of worldwide trade and investment activi-
  ties, while at the same time facilitating the growth of domestic indus-
  try. Western nations were economically linked to one another by a
  gold standard that made national currencies convertible into gold and
  other currencies. But the states remained economic units, and govern-
  ments fostered the creation of national marketplaces by establishing
  transportation networks, encouraging cooperation between capital and
  labor, and protecting domestic industry and agriculture against for-
  eign competition. All these activities could be carried out more effi-
  ciently than formerly now that each government had built up a system
  of administration by career bureaucrats. Their task was to ensure the
  stability of the gold standard and the success of industrialization.
  These were linked to foreign affairs in that they sustained the new
  modern states, providing them with revenue for further armament
  expenditures. Increased armaments, in turn, were seen as a means of
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  FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE 
  727
  protecting the country's trade routes and overseas possessions that
  were linked to the domestic economy.
  This last phenomenon, that is, the incorporation of overseas posses-
  sions and spheres of influence into the domestic economic and strate-
  gic system, was then and has since been termed imperialism. Although
  the term has been so broadened as to include almost any type of
  domination by one country over another - even by a noncapitalist or
  underdeveloped state over another - it also connoted something spe-
  cific, a development that coincided with the emergence of centralized
  industrial states. 3 Although not all such states undertook imperialist
  policies, the nations that did were invariably "powers" that were going
  through the process of political centralization and economic modern-
  ization. This was because they had enough economic, military, and
  administrative resources to dominate the less powerful and less devel-
  oped areas of the world. Their bankers, industrialists, and merchants
  sought to maximize their profits through finding and enlarging over-
  seas markets and through obtaining cheap raw materials and food-
  stuffs in the tropical regions for consumption at home by the laboring
  population. Although these activities had been going on since the
  inception of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, at the
  end of the nineteenth century their endeavors were more readily sup-
  ported, and often encouraged, by the state. Its bureaucratic and mili-
  tary apparatus could be used to seek overseas markets as well as bases;
  they provided the labor power necessary to protect rights and preroga-
  tives obtained; and both economic and military activities enhanced the
  state's prestige and power. Somehow it was believed that all successful
  modern powers must expand overseas. Much of this expansion, of
  course, deviated little from more traditional forms of expansion such
  as emigration to the American continent or trade with other advanced
  countries. However, there was also great concern with incorporating
  less developed parts of the globe into modern state systems. These
  "peripheral" areas would constitute the fringes of the modern states
  geographically and politically; they would never be fully integrated
  into the polity. But they would serve as dependable markets, as raisons
  d'etre for large armed establishments and bureaucracies and as symbols
  of status and power in international affairs.
  This last was very important, particularly with regard to the masses
  in the metropolises whose tax contributions as well as votes were neces-
  sary for an imperialist program. Their support could be obtained by
  3 Various interpretations of imperialism are aptly summed up by Wolfgang Mommsen, Theories
  of Imperialism, Engl. ed. (New York: Random House, 1980).
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  painting a picture of an expanding empire as an invigorating and noble
  enterprise in the service not only of the state but also of civilization and
  humanity. Because the empire now contained tropical regions and popu-
  lations, it could be presented as a duty - even a "burden" in Rudyard
  Kipling's famous construction - incumbent upon more advanced and
  civilized peoples to provide the former with order and purpose. If
  metropolitan voters and taxpayers were not in a missionary mood, then
  they could be told that the new possessions gave them added opportuni-
  ties to better themselves. If they did not fare well at home, they could
  always go to these areas where they would be treated as superior beings
  and would be guaranteed protection by their government. Their nation-
  alism, which was daily being cultivated through news of international
  rivalries as well as promoted by domestic policies of centralization,
  could be counted on to support acts that resulted in additions of more
  territory under the country's control. Some political parties took advan-
  tage of this expansionist sentiment by identifying themselves with impe-
  rialism in order to obtain a mass following. In a sense they mediated
  between government and people. By channeling mass emotions away
  from domestic issues, which, as George Bernard Shaw noted, could lead
  to revolution, and deflecting them to the support of imperialism, the
  parties ensured domestic order at the expense of international stability.4
  But this phenomenon - sometimes referred to as social imperialism -
  could go much beyond obtaining mass satisfaction with the polity. An
  emotionally aroused public opinion could be transformed into irrespon-
  sible jingoisms not easily controllable even by the government. If that
  should happen, foreign policy issues would seriously undermine domes-
  tic order. The modern state, in this way, was built on a precarious
  balance between obtaining mass support for military strengthening and
  overseas expansion and avoiding mass extremism that could unleash far
  more emotional and irrational forces than could be accommodated in
  the political apparatus.
  THE MEIJI POLITY AND SOCIETY
  This brief sketch helps put Meiji Japanese foreign affairs in context
  and perspective. It is important to recall that Japan, too, was trans-
  forming itself as a modern state. Its foreign relations were an aspect as
  well as a product of that process. Other chapters in this volume treat
  the domestic developments at greater length, so it should be sufficient
  4 On social imperialism, see Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social
  Imperial Thought, 189S-1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, i960).
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  POLITY AND SOCIETY 
  729
  here to note that between 1868 and 1912 - the forty-five years of the
  Meiji emperor's rule - Japan came to acquire almost all of the ingredi-
  ents of a modern state that other countries were also in the process of
  obtaining. First, internal administrative unity replaced the cumber-
  some Tokugawa system. The new Tokyo government quickly estab-
  lished a bureaucratic apparatus so that within a few years after 1868 it
  boasted of a multitude of ministries of Finance, Home Affairs, For-
  eign Affairs, and others for which "enlightened" elites were recruited.
  These elites were mostly former samurai who had been active in
  bakufu and han affairs in the years before the Restoration, and many
  of them had spent several years studying in the West. They were
  technical experts whose loyalty was to the new regime under the nomi-
  nal head of the emperor. The latter symbolized the fact that the coun-
  try was now administratively and politically centralized, a system in
  which professional bureaucrats would play a pivotal role. Their work
  was sustained and protected by the newly created armed forces that,
  too, represented central authority against latent localism. The suppres-
  sion of the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 marked a successful alliance of
  Japan's new bureaucrats and armed forces, some recruited from peas-
  ant families, against the remnants of the old order.
  Administrative centralization was accompanied by the development
  of a national economy. Even before 1868, of course, the country had
  been unified as a national market through commerce, uniform curren-
  cies, and domestic travel. But the Meiji government was intent on
  providing national leadership for economic development so that the
  country as a whole would "increase production and create industry,"
  as one of the slogans put it. This was essentially an administrative
  task, involving tax reforms so as to obtain revenue from the agricul-
  tural sector and to turn it over for industrialization. The government
  took steps to identify and protect merchants and industrialists, to
  establish model factories and quality inspection stations, and to instill
  in the people the idea that "enriching the country" was just as impor-
  tant a goal as was "strengthening its defense."
  Mass incorporation into the new polity, in the meanwhile, grew
  quickly. This took various forms, ranging from a comprehensive sys-
  tem of population registers to universal military conscription. The
  idea was to create an administratively effective system so that the
  government would be able to reach out to the entire population as
  citizens of the state. Their services were needed not only as potential
  soldiers and loyal subjects but ultimately as the backbone of the mod-
  ern Japanese nation. An educated, enlightened citizenry was consid-
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  ered an essential part of the entity. Hence there was an early emphasis
  on education, both at the schools and in various political and profes-
  sional activities. The people had to be politically conscious and eco-
  nomically developed if they were to support the new arrangements as
  citizens, producers, and taxpayers. This process of mass incorpora-
  tion, of course, was destined to give rise to social movements that were
  not all supportive of the state. Although the awakening of political
  consciousness was a vital part of the formation of the modern state, it
  could develop into a force of protest against specific governmental
  decisions, general thrusts of national policy, or even the Meiji state
  itself. These forces, broadly termed the "Freedom and People's
  Rights" movement, made their appearance during the 1870s, evidence
  that Japan was already acquiring yet another characteristic of a mod-
  ern state. For mass movements were a necessary component of a
  society that was undergoing political and economic centralization. Al-
  though such movements could, and often did, present obstacles in the
  way of centralization, functionally there could be no centralized mod-
  ern society without politically conscious citizens.
  The two could be related in a number of ways. The twentieth
  century has produced such extreme examples as the totalitarian mass
  societies in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, or the "mass-line"
  politics in Maoist China. They all linked the masses with the state
  through centralized indoctrination, party dictatorship, and mass meet-
  ings. Few institutions stood between the state and the people. In the
  late nineteenth century, however, almost all modernizing states re-
  tained family, church, business, community, and other institutions
  that mediated between them. They functioned as checks on state
  power, on the one hand, and as agents of modernization, on the other,
  in the sense that through them the people would be socialized, edu-
  cated, and developed into citizenry. Most important, there were politi-
  cal parties that spoke for both the state and the people. They provided
  personnel for the government and also represented the diverse inter-
  ests and viewpoints of the people.
  Meiji Japan fitted into this pattern. Already by the 1870s numerous
  political parties, study groups, and community organizations had
  come into being, superimposed on traditional family and religious
  institutions. Their growth was ensured by the government's policy of
  encouraging education, social mobility, economic development, and
  political consciousness. Both those who benefited from such develop-
  ments and those who felt left out found it easy to organize. Early
  political parties were an amalgam of divergent interests and view-
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  POLITY AND SOCIETY 
  731
  points, some urging the state to do more for modernization and others
  opposing the process as too swift and confusing. Even the latter,
  however, lent their hands to the modernization process in that they
  contributed to political organizing efforts and to arousing mass inter-
  est in national affairs. After all, they had no recourse for seeking
  amends other than through organizing themselves and demonstrating
  their causes in accordance with the various grievance procedures that
  were being set up. In the end, the bulk of the "premodern" dissidents
  found themselves joining existing political parties or being co-opted
  into working for the state.
  It does not mean, of course, that Japan as a modern state did noi
  have special characteristics of its own. All nations are unique. Bui
  uniqueness generally lies in historical diversity. Although Japanese
  history made the country different, the same was true of other coun-
  tries. Moreover, some peculiar features of Meiji Japan should proba-
  bly be considered within the framework of its development as a mod-
  ern state, that is, as minor variations on a common theme. Among
  such variations two stood out in the Meiji era: the emperor system and
  the military's "right of supreme command." Although most modern
  states at that time were monarchies, the Japanese case was unique in
  that the imperial institution was consciously used to create a central-
  ized bureaucratic system. By identifying the new arrangements as rule
  by the sacred emperor, an aura of sanctity was accorded to them.
  Japan's armed forces and bureaucrats would be "the emperor's sol-
  diers and officials," making them perhaps less vulnerable to partisan
  attacks than might have been the case in other societies with shorter
  periods of dynastic history. By combining a newly created bureau-
  cracy, civilian and military, with the prestige of a fifteen-hundred-
  year-old institution, the Meiji leaders succeeded in giving moderniza-
  tion almost instant legitimacy. Second, they early perceived the need
  to separate military administration from strategic affairs, and in 1878
  they established a general staff independent of the Ministry of War.
  The former would control strategic planning, tactical decisions, and
  military intelligence. These, comprising matters pertinent to "the
  right of supreme command," would enable the general staff to report
  directly to the emperor, thus sustaining its separate status from civil-
  ian bureaucracies. The system was learned from Prussia, but it grew
  into an extremely important aspect of the Japanese state, because the
  "independence" of the supreme command was combined with the
  imperial institution. Already by 1879, army leaders such as Saigo
  Tsugumichi and Oyama Iwao were arguing that as the civilian and
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  constitutional government was expected to expand, it would be desir-
  able to maintain the separate existence of the military. 5
  It is these characteristics that have led some historians to define the
  Meiji state as "emperor absolutism." Presumably such a definition
  makes sense in stressing the pivotal roles played by the emperor and
  the military. Evidently the two were under much less restraint than in
  other modern states, perhaps with the exception of czarist Russia.
  These features, however, do not alter the fact that Japan was emerging
  as a modern state in the late nineteenth century. The imperial institu-
  tion and the military right of supreme command represented the cen-
  tralizing forces, the first prerequisite for such a state. Whether these
  institutions made Japan an "absolutist" state cannot be discussed in
  the abstract. To the extent that their appearance coincided with that of
  the civilian bureaucracy and popular movements, it may be said that
  all were aspects of modern transformation. To the degree that these
  latter weakened relative to the power of the emperor and the military,
  Japan became less "democratic" and more totalitarian. The key ques-
  tion was whether there developed a mutually reinforcing relationship
  between state and society so that both the central government and the
  people benefited from the new arrangements.
  Japanese foreign relations become significant in such a context.
  How Japan's emergence as a modern state determined its foreign rela-
  tions; how the latter in turn affected the nature of the modern Japa-
  nese state and how Japanese society's unique features resulted in pecu-
  liar foreign policy decisions are among the most interesting questions
  that arise. Unfortunately, there are few systematic treatments of the
  subject, although the Foreign Ministry has been scrupulous about
  publishing its documentary compilations.6 Most writings are little
  more than conventional narratives of diplomatic relations, as illus-
  trated by the multivolume Nihon gaiko shi (History of Japanese diplo-
  macy) by Kajima Morinosuke.? These volumes, some of which have
  been translated into English, are simplistic compendia of official docu-
  ments, with little analysis. Where interpretation is attempted, it is
  almost invariably in the framework of justifying Japan's actions. Less
  parochial but similarly oriented to chronological treatment are the few
  other general histories of Meiji foreign relations that have been pub-
  5 Yamanaka Einosuke, Nihon kindai kokka no keisei to kanryosei (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1974), pp.
  64-8,70.
  6 Gaimusho, Nihon gaiko bunsho. Over 151 volumes, reaching the year 1926 in 1986.
  7 Morinosuke Kajima, The Diplomacy of Japan, 1894-1922, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Kajima Institute of
  International Peace, 1976-80); in Japanese, Kajima heiwa kenkyujo, Nihon gaiko shi, 34 vols.
  (Tokyo: Kajima kenkyujo shuppankai, 1970-73 and Nihon gaiko shi, bekkan, 4 vols. (1971-4).
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  POLITY AND SOCIETY 
  733
  lished, such as Hanabusa Nagamichi's Meiji gaiko shi (History of Meiji
  diplomacy) and Shinobu Seizaburo's Nihon gaiko shi (History of Japa-
  nese diplomacy).8 This last contains systematic essays by Marxist-
  oriented historians and provides the best survey to date of Meiji for-
  eign affairs. There are also numerous monographs that describe in
  laborious detail various diplomatic incidents and negotiations of the
  Meiji era, most of which, however, are conventional diplomatic his-
  tory in that they document intergovernmental relations, with little
  attention paid to the interplay between them and domestic develop-
  ments. Many of them focus on a few individuals so that the foreign
  affairs as presented are little more than a sum total of what they said
  and did.
  One looks in vain for studies that transcend a parochial, nationalis-
  tic treatment, or antiquarian diplomatic history. At this stage of schol-
  arship, the most plausible approach would seem to be a comparative
  one in which Japanese foreign affairs are comprehended in comparison
  with those of other modern states. Such a study would be useful not
  only to students of Japanese history but also to modern international
  history. Unfortunately, these latter have all but ignored Japan or mani-
  fested only the most superficial knowledge of its history and politics.
  Note, for instance, that virtually all historians who, for the past thirty
  years, have been engaged in fierce and productive debate on the nature
  of modern imperialism have had little to say about Japanese imperial-
  ism. Wolfgang Mommsen's Theories of Imperialism (English edition,
  1980), though a splendid synthesis of the key interpretations that have
  been offered by students of modern imperialism, does not once men-
  tion Japan. There is thus a regrettable gap between these two groups
  of specialists. It is in part to fill this gap that the following sections
  have been written.9
  CONSOLIDATION OF DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
  I868-I88O
  The awareness that domestic and external affairs were intimately
  linked was, of course, always present during the Tokugawa era. After
  all, the Edo regime built its administrative and legal system on the
  basis of curtailing and controlling all foreign contact. The assumption,
  from the time of Tokugawa Ieyasu, had been that such contact would
  8 Hanabusa Nagamichi, Meiji gaiko shi (Tokyo: Shibundo, i960), and Shinobu Seizaburo, ed.,
  Nihon gaiko shi: 1853-1972, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Mainichi shimbunsha, 1974).
  9 This gap will be more difficult to justify since the appearance of Ramon H. Myers and Mark R.
  Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
  Press, 1984).
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  734 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  be detrimental to domestic order. This was ultimately because interna-
  tional affairs were seen as disorderly, confusing, and constantly shift-
  ing, in which countries vied with one another for power and material
  gains. Obviously, international disorder could not be allowed to in-
  trude on domestic order. Toward the end of the eighteenth century,
  the shogunate allowed a few individuals to have access to the Western-
  ers in Nagasaki, but the intention was to use this contact to strengthen
  the regime. The policy eventually backfired, as various domains, too,
  came to appreciate the value of Western arms, artifacts, and ideas as a
  means for their own strengthening and for bringing about a change in
  the country's political system.
  Given this background, it is not surprising that from the beginning
  the Meiji regime should have sought to establish control over foreign
  affairs as an essential prerequisite for consolidating its power at
  home. In March 1868, the imperial government in Kyoto (eleven
  months before it moved to Tokyo as the new capital) issued a procla-
  mation calling on the people to cooperate with its foreign policy.
  "Domestic conditions are unstable," it said, but "external dealings
  are extremely important." In such a situation, the new regime's sta-
  bility appeared to depend on the willingness of various factions to
  deal with foreigners only through the government, and on the readi-
  ness of the foreigners to cooperate in this process. Such were, the
  proclamation said, the "trends of the times" (jisei).10 This was a
  delicate process, but on the whole the new leaders succeeded in
  preventing foreign affairs from exacerbating domestic tensions and in
  using external issues to stabilize internal order. In this sense, the
  story of Japan during the 1860s and 1870s is comparable to that of
  Prussia in the same period, in which external and internal affairs
  likewise developed in a symbiotic fashion: The situation was differ-
  ent in the neighboring country of China, in which a brief period of
  "restoration" after the turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion - a restora-
  tion that was supported by the Western powers - was followed by a
  sustained period of antiforeign attacks, decentralization of political
  authority, and mass disaffection, a situation that proved to be fertile
  ground for further foreign encroachment.
  Japan's relative success in the years after 1868 was due fundamen-
  tally to the recognition of the intimate link between domestic and
  foreign affairs that the new leaders shared. They thus took foreign
  relations with the utmost seriousness lest they render ineffective their
  10 Shinobu Seizaburo, ed., Nihon gaiko shi (Tokyo: Mainichi shimbunsha, 1974), vol. 1, p. 74;
  Inau Dentaro, Nihon gaiko shiso shi ronko (Tokyo: Komine shoten, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 42-3.
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  DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
  735
  effort to establish a new domestic order. A few examples will illustrate
  how this was done.
  First, antiforeign attacks were banned and, when they did take place,
  were severely dealt with. The new regime knew all too well how indis-
  criminate assaults on foreigners could undermine its claim as the govern-
  ment of the country; similar attacks had fatally wounded the Tokugawa
  shogunate's standing in the international sphere. Foreign complica-
  tions would serve only to keep the country in turmoil, which in turn
  would invite further diplomatic incidents. To deal with these dangers,
  the government had to improve its system of law enforcement and legal
  procedure. It also engaged in an extensive propaganda campaign to
  inform the populace that antiforeign attacks were against "the laws of
  the world." The country was now going to develop in accordance with
  these laws, and therefore its people should not act on the basis of "old,
  stained habits." By accepting the laws of the universe, Japan would be
  able to "assert its prestige throughout the world."11 The people were
  exhorted to join this task. It was a brilliant strategy, combining the
  prohibition of antiforeignism with the vision of a glorious future, both
  calculated to consolidate the government's authority and prestige. Ap-
  parently, within a few years after 1868 virtually all segments of the
  population and all factions among the former samurai accepted the new
  orientation, so that antiforeign incidents visibly abated.
  The issue of antiforeign assaults was closely connected to that of
  legal reforms in the country, looking eventually to the abolition of
  extraterritoriality. To the extent that the Meiji government success-
  fully stamped out antiforeign outbursts, the country would be safe for
  foreign residents. Foreigners would no longer have to be confined to
  restricted areas to protect them from violence. They would be free to
  travel and live in the interior. All this would assume that the Japanese
  people would treat overseas visitors with deference. At the same time,
  such a situation would make obsolete the special system of legal protec-
  tion that had been granted to foreigners in the form of consular juris-
  diction. There would no longer be much justification for its existence,
  and foreigners would have to be asked to obey Japanese laws like
  anybody else. If extraterritoriality were abolished, it would be a sign
  that foreigners were perfectly safe in Japan and that the country had a
  system of laws that they could accept. In both cases, the government
  would be credited with having transformed Japan into a modern legal
  state. Its prestige, both internally and externally, would be enhanced.
  II Shinobu, Nihon gaiko shi, vol. I, p. 74; Inau, Nihon gaiko shiso shi, vol. I, pp. 64-5.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  Already in April 1869 Iwakura Tomomi noted the need for treaty
  revision, as the presence of foreign troops in the country and the
  foreigners' extraterritorial rights were a violation of Japanese indepen-
  dence.12 Few would have disputed the view, and in 1871, when
  Iwakura led a large mission to the United States and Europe, the
  emissaries were entrusted with the task of initiating preliminary dis-
  cussions of treaty revision. They were not to undertake formal nego-
  tiation, for the Meiji leaders felt that the country's internal reforms
  had not yet progressed to the point that it could boast a completely
  modernized system of laws. As the government's instruction to the
  ambassadors pointed out, "nations must possess equal rights" in their
  treaty relationships, but Japan had been deprived of such rights
  because of "the defects of its traditional custom and Oriental political
  institutions." These deficiencies, however, were now being over-
  come, and a new legal system was being established. It would take a
  few more years to complete the task by drastically revising civil,
  criminal, tax, trade, and other laws. The mission was in part in-
  tended for an extensive observation of Western legal institutions and
  political systems so that the "political institutions of the most enlight-
  ened and powerful nations" could be introduced to the Japanese
  people.13 In Kume Kunitake's Bei-O kairan jikki {True Account of
  Observations of America and Europe), one sees a massive documenta-
  tion of the embassy's observations, ranging from scenery and architec-
  ture to the politics, economy, and history of the Western countries.14
  It is not surprising that one of the things that struck the visitors most
  was the way in which governments and people appeared to be strug-
  gling for common goals such as national strengthening and well-
  being. They carried away the strong impression that a modern nation
  must have not only a strong central government but also an enlight-
  ened and motivated populace. Because this was the very theme of the
  emerging states in the West, the trip could not have taken place at a
  more opportune moment. Particularly pertinent was the German ex-
  ample, as the Japanese visit coincided with the establishment of the
  newly unified nation and Prince Otto Bismarck frankly explained to
  the Japanese the need for realism and hard work if they hoped to
  succeed in their own task of nation building.
  After the embassy's return, legal reforms proceeded apace, and in
  1880 the government promulgated new criminal laws. But treaty revi-
  12 Shinobu, Nihongaikdshi, vol. i,p. 78. 
  13 Ibid., p. 85.
  14 Marlene Mayo, "The Western Education of Kume Kunitake 1871-76," Monumenta Nip-
  ponica 28 (1973): 3-67.
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  DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
  737
  sion could not be easily achieved. On the one hand, foreigners sought
  to hold onto their privileges and reminded the Japanese that their
  modern reforms were still not complete; they would need to revise
  further their civil, tax, and commercial laws. Domestic travail, as
  evidenced by Saigo Takamori's resignation from the government in
  1873 and his open rebellion four years later, was not calculated to give
  confidence to foreigners regarding Japan's political stability. Although
  negotiation for revision was not interrupted by the rebellion of 1877,
  the foreign governments were unwilling to concede that their nationals
  could subject themselves to Japanese jurisdiction. Tokyo's leaders
  sought to mollify them by offering to appoint foreign judges in Japa-
  nese courts in cases involving foreign residents, but even such conces-
  sions produced no immediate response by the powers. !s
  Equally important, the government's seeming lack of success and
  willingness to consider concessions such as the appointment of foreign
  judges aroused the resentment of the politically active segments of the
  population that strengthened in proportion to the delay in the treaty
  revision negotiations. To the extent that one may speak of "public
  opinion" or "mass politics" in Japan during the 1870s, the treaty
  question played a major part in their development. A vocal minority
  from the beginning was opposed to "mixed residence," that is, the
  opening of the interior for foreign residence, business, and property
  ownership. Although opinion was divided on this and other specific
  issues, newspapers and nascent political organizations - Aikoku koto
  (Public Party of Patriots) was organized in 1874 - were adept in taking
  advantage of the treaty question to demand more "freedom and peo-
  ple's rights." They insisted that the best way to put an end to the
  foreigners' extraterritorial privileges was to mobilize and organize
  popular opinion by convening a national assembly. The establishment
  of such an assembly, which was an institution in almost all Western
  states, would not only demonstrate that Japan was now as modern a
  country as theirs but would also be effective in presenting a massive
  national sentiment in favor of treaty revision. Foreigners would thus
  be persuaded to relinquish their special privileges and accord to Japan
  the status of an equal, sovereign nation.
  Thus ironically, mass integration into the polity was being achieved
  because of the government's alleged failure to have the powers recog-
  nize the country as an independent, modern state. The only solution
  to the dilemma, according to government leaders, was to push for
  15 The best concise summary of treaty revision negotiations remains Inoue Kiyoshi, Jayaku
  kaisei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1955).
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  738 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  further legal and political reforms, so that foreigners would have no
  excuse for treating the country as semicivilized, while at the same time
  making certain that during the 1870s movements for popular rights
  and for treaty revision were aspects of the same drive for the national-
  ization of the Japanese polity.16
  In the meantime, the government became interested in regaining
  tariff autonomy. All existing treaties stipulated that duties imposed on
  foreign imports were to be determined by agreement between Japan
  and other governments. This "treaty tariff system was viewed by the
  Japanese government and public as an infringement on sovereignty,
  just as consular jurisdiction was. It deprived the country of much
  needed revenue as it undertook economic modernization. Public fi-
  nance was in a chronically critical situation, in which taxes had to be
  raised. The people, too, were quick to establish a connection between
  their heavy tax burden and the absence of tariff autonomy. As Foreign
  Minister Terashima Munenori pointed out in 1876, such a sentiment
  could revive antiforeign hysteria. In order to "satisfy public senti-
  ment, maintain law and order, and expand foreign trade," it was
  imperative to "regain our national rights" by seeking the restoration of
  tariff autonomy.1? Between 1876 and 1879 Terashima concentrated on
  this issue, rather than extraterritoriality, as the first priority in treaty
  revision negotiation. He achieved modest successes when the United
  States, Russia, Italy, and several others indicated their willingness to
  restore tariff autonomy to Japan, but Britain, France, and Germany
  stood adamant, and the efforts bore no immediate result. Although the
  Western countries' trade with Japan was minuscule at this time,
  amounting in most instances to less than 1 percent of their total vol-
  ume of trade, they all viewed export trade as an important ingredient
  of national economic growth. Treaty tariffs provided an effective
  means for maintaining their "informal empires" overseas. Some pow-
  ers, notably the United States, took the position that trade would
  expand even after Japan regained tariff autonomy; in fact, the friendly
  relationship that would result from it could be calculated to tie the two
  countries closer together economically. Moreover, the United States
  under the Republican administrations was practicing a highly protec-
  tionist trade policy, causing Japanese officials like Ito Hirobumi to call
  for a protectionist policy of their own as beneficial to the country.18
  16 Shinobu, Nihon gaiko shi, vol. I, p. 112; Sakeda Masatoshi, Kindai Nihon ni okeru laigaikd
  undo no kenkyu (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1978), p. 7.
  17 Shinobu, Nihon gaiko shi, vol. 1, p. 108.
  18 Shimomura Fujio, Meiji shorten joyaku kaisei shi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan,
  1962), p. 80.
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  DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
  739
  Although protectionism was practiced by few other countries at that
  time, all believed that industrialization and extensive trade went hand
  in hand. Ultimately, then, the question of tariff autonomy hinged on
  the readiness of the Western nations to permit an economically mod-
  ernizing Japan to enter their system of international relations. As of
  the 1870s, few of them were.
  Treaty revision graphically illustrated the close links between do-
  mestic political developments and foreign affairs. No less important in
  this context were the territorial questions. Modern history has shown
  that few issues arouse as intense a popular passion as territorial issues
  do, and few are regarded as a more telling index of a state's ability to
  govern or of a government's claim to legitimacy. A modern state is
  defined as a territorial entity in which center and periphery are united
  in a conception of national unity and defense. It is no accident that
  during the second half of the nineteenth century the geographical
  boundaries of such countries as the United States, Italy, Germany,
  and the Low Countries became more clearly denned and that where
  there were ambiguities, as was the case in Alsace and Lorraine and
  most notably in the Balkans, in which Russia, Austria-Hungary, and
  Turkey had conflicting claims, there was always a strong likelihood of
  armed hostilities. Nationalistic sentiment could easily be mobilized
  through government propaganda and the press whenever it was felt
  that a country's justifiable territorial claim was being violated; on the
  other hand, the government would be held accountable for ensuring
  territorial integrity and security so that its authority would be seri-
  ously undermined when it gave the impression of succumbing to exter-
  nal pressures on a territorial question.
  Meiji Japan was no exception. The new leaders assumed as a matter
  of course that one of their first tasks would be to establish clearly
  definable national boundaries. This could have been a relatively easy
  undertaking, compared with the complex situation in Europe where
  historical, ethnic, and religious diversities never quite corresponded to
  distinct geographical boundaries. Japan was characterized by no such
  complexity, and during the Tokugawa period its domain had been
  confined to the four major islands. Beyond them, however, were re-
  gions of ambiguous definition that had not been incorporated into
  another power's domain. For this reason, the Japanese were eager to
  establish clear demarcations for these areas. Such incorporation would
  not only define the limits of the new Japanese state to come under the
  jurisdiction of the central government; it would also enable the latter
  to plan for national defense and development. The populace, in the
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  meantime, would have a new conception of the nation so that they
  would be under the protection of the new government anywhere
  within the new boundaries.
  Reflecting such perceptions, the Meiji government early showed an
  interest in establishing a clear boundary to the north of Hokkaido.
  There lay the large island of Sakhalin and the chain of smaller islands,
  the Kurils, that arched the northwestern Pacific from Hokkaido to
  Kamchatka. In the mid-nineteenth century both these territories were
  sparsely populated by Russians and Japanese. The latter were a minor-
  ity, mostly fishermen, but they would have to be protected if indeed
  they were living in Japanese territory. The perpetuation of mixed
  residence, in which the two nationals lived together in ambiguous
  status, appeared undesirable. Japan could have drawn a line close to
  Hokkaido so that Japanese living in Sakhalin and the Kurils would be
  considered beyond the protection of the government, or else they
  would be told to return to Japan proper. (This has been the situation
  since 1945.) But this was an option that the Tokyo government found
  hard to accept. It would imply a retreat and damage the new regime's
  domestic and external prestige. It would bring Russia that much closer
  to Japan proper. Russian ships had temporarily seized the island of
  Tsushima (lying between Kyushu and Korea) in 1861, causing a near
  panic among Japanese in that part of the country. Similar incidents
  could recur if Russia gained Sakhalin and the Kurils. On the other
  hand, there was little compelling reason that those territories should
  belong to Japan. Territorial enlargement would complicate the ques-
  tion of administration and defense; it could give rise to further prob-
  lems with Russia, as it would bring Japan closer to Russia's territory in
  Siberia and the Maritime Provinces; and it was not at all clear whether
  the government and the people of Japan were prepared to divert their
  resources to the economic development of Sakhalin and the Kurils
  when they had just begun a project for settling and developing
  Hokkaido.
  In the end, Tokyo's response showed the government's receptivity
  to domestic pressures. In 1874 it decided to evacuate Japanese resi-
  dents from Sakhalin, intimating a decision to concede the whole island
  to the Russians. At the same time, Japan insisted on its claim to the
  whole of the Kuril island chain. This was for reasons of prestige; it
  would placate domestic opposition unhappy about the Sakhalin retreat
  and also demonstrate to the other powers that Japan would make
  concessions only on a quid pro quo basis. All this would add to the
  sense of national unity and clarify the limits of state administration. It
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  was symbolic of the concern with national unity that the government
  should have turned to Enomoto Takeaki, one of the staunchest sup-
  porters of the late shogunate against the new regime, who had estab-
  lished an ill-fated republic in Hokkaido before being captured and
  imprisoned and who had been released from prison only in 1872, to go
  to St. Petersburg to negotiate a settlement of the territorial question.
  In 1875 Enomoto successfully concluded a treaty along the lines of his
  instructions, resulting in an "exchange" of Sakhalin for the Kurils.
  Henceforth Russia was to control the entire island of Sakhalin but was
  to cede all of the Kurils to Japan. The treaty was popular, as it was the
  first significant settlement with a Western power in which Japan had
  been treated like an equal and had not been forced to make humiliat-
  ing concessions.19
  Somewhat more clear-cut was the disposition of the Ryukyu king-
  dom, consisting of the island of Okinawa and its vicinity. Standing
  almost equidistant from Kyushu, Korea, and Taiwan, the islands had
  been governed as part of Satsuma han, but their rulers had also sent
  tributary missions to the Chinese court under the Ch'ing dynasty. Ethni-
  cally and culturally, the people of Ryukyu were distinct from, though
  related to, both the Chinese and the Japanese, although their language
  was closer to Japanese. The question that the Meiji government faced
  was whether the island population should now be incorporated into the
  Japanese state, extending to them the jurisdiction and protection of the
  central authority. From the beginning there was little hestitation to
  answer the question in the affirmative, the national government placing
  the kingdom of Ryukyu under the jurisdiction of Kagoshima Prefecture
  (formerly Satsuma han) in 1871. It was resolved that because the Toku-
  gawa regime had, indirectly through Satsuma, ruled over the kingdom,
  the Tokyo government should do likewise but also go a step further and
  turn it into an administrative district of the country. This entailed
  extending the national government's protection to the Ryukyu popula-
  tion, a matter that suddenly surfaced as a grave national issue when in
  1871 some fifty-odd island fishermen who had been shipwrecked and
  drifted to Taiwan were massacred by aborigines.
  The incident was a test of the Meiji regime's ability to affirm its
  leadership of a modern state. If those fishermen, Ryukyu subjects,
  were to be considered Japanese citizens, it would be incumbent upon
  the government to seek satisfaction for their tragedy from the Chinese
  government, which had control over Taiwan, a province of China. If
  19 On the Sakhalin-Kurils "exchange" treaty, see John J. Stephan, The Kuril Islands: The
  Russo-Japanese Frontier in the Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
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  742 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  they were not viewed as Japanese citizens, Japan's claim to the
  Ryukyus would, of course, be destroyed. This was something the
  leaders could not concede, especially in view of an aroused domestic
  opinion. Both within and without the government, voices called for
  strong action to avenge the damages done to Japanese citizens and to
  "punish" the "uncivilized" people of Taiwan who had dared to assault
  Japanese subjects. The vocabulary was similar to what Westerners had
  used in retaliating against Japanese attacks on their nationals. (Commo-
  dore Perry, in fact, had dealt severely with Okinawan authorities when
  one of his sailors was killed by local residents.) Inaction in the face of
  such an assault would be taken as a sign of weakness, as evidence that
  Japan was not yet as strong a state as America and the European
  countries.
  Presumably, satisfaction could have been obtained from the Ch'ing
  government, but the latter was unwilling to discuss the issue on the
  grounds that the massacre had been caused by "uncivilized people,"
  beyond the reach of Chinese "politics and religion."20 Such an argu-
  ment, of course, revealed the Chinese authorities' lack of understand-
  ing of the responsibilities of a modern state - which is not surprising
  in that they were similarly irresolute and insensitive when a far more
  serious incident arose closer to home, the massacre of French mission-
  aries in Tientsin, in the same year, 1871. (Several years afterwards,
  Chinese officials resorted to Japanese and Western language in their
  efforts to hold the United States government responsible for the kill-
  ing of Chinese immigrants in western states.) For two years after 1872,
  when the incident became known, Japanese and Chinese officials en-
  gaged in inconclusive talks over the incident, but in the end the former
  decided to act unilaterally by sending a punitive expedition to Taiwan.
  This was fundamentally in response to domestic pressures. These
  years saw a series of critical clashes and confrontations among the
  country's political leaders, the most dramatic of which was the 1873
  dispute on the Korean question, resulting in the resignation from the
  government of several influential men. In such a situation, those who
  remained in power - Okubo Toshimichi, Okuma Shigenobu, and
  others - felt they needed an issue that would dissipate some of the
  dissidents' unhappiness, coalesce national opinion, and reaffirm the
  regime's prestige. An expedition to Taiwan was chosen as a viable
  solution. It was officially approved at a cabinet meeting of February 6,
  1874, and an expeditionary force of 3,000 was organized under Saigo
  20 Shinobu, Nihon gaiko shi, vol. I, p. 90.
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  DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
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  Tsugumichi. They landed in Taiwan on May 22, and after incurring
  some 573 casualties, all but 12 of which were due to tropical diseases,
  they established control over the areas inhabited by the aborigines.
  The fact that the Taiwan expedition came more than two years after
  the massacre took place indicates that it was less a reactive move than a
  deli berate response to domestic needs. This explains why the Japanese
  government informed foreign governments of the impending expedi-
  tion at the very last moment and did not even bother to tell China
  about it until after the expedition had taken place.21 From the Japa-
  nese point of view, the important thing was to carry out the expedition
  to placate domestic opposition and, by having the Chinese recognize
  its legitimacy, to assert control over the people of Ryukyu as Japanese
  citizens. After some protracted postexpedition negotiations in Peking,
  in which Okubo himself took part, the Ch'ing court acquiesced in
  recognizing the "justice" of the expedition, in return for Japan's evac-
  uation of Taiwan. Because the seizure of that island was never an
  original Japanese aim, this was accomplished without arousing domes-
  tic resentment. It was enough that the Japanese had acted like the
  other powers in protecting its nationals by a show of force.
  The Chinese-Japanese agreement on the settlement of the Ryukyu
  massacre was a blow to China's prestige, especially in view of the 1871
  treaty between the two countries that had established normal diplo-
  matic relations between them and granted mutual extraterritoriality.
  The treaty also included a provision for mutual assistance and media-
  tion in case one of the signatories entered a dispute with a third power.
  But the Taiwan expedition threatened to undermine the framework of
  friendly relations that such provisions implied. The Japanese were
  aware that their policy of incorporating the Ryukyus into their na-
  tional boundaries - which was to be effected in 1879 - would create
  tensions with China. But they reasoned that as a modern state, Japan
  could no longer acquiesce in an anomalous situation in which the
  island people were not fully integrated into the nation. Moreover, if
  these people were to be considered Japanese subjects and protected by
  Japanese arms, it would become necessary to assume responsibility for
  the defense of the islands. Japan might have to build a naval base there
  to station a fleet and also to cope with a potential internal turmoil -
  the Okinawan king did not conceal his displeasure at the abolition of
  his own kingdom - through military means. All these measures would
  be tantamount to extending Japanese control into a region close to
  21 Ibid., p. 94.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. It is not surprising, under the
  circumstances, that Chinese officials should have become increasingly
  alarmed over the situation and that during the second half of the 1870s
  a sense of acute crisis should have developed between the two coun-
  tries. That in turn would confront the Japanese with the need for
  strengthening their military and for defining their strategic priorities.
  Though little was done in those areas at this time, it should be noted
  that Japan was following the pattern of other states in that the delimita-
  tion of territorial boundaries went hand in hand with a redefinition of
  security needs, resulting in calls for increased armament and long-
  range war plans. The transformation of China in Japanese perception
  in the 1870s, from a friendly neighbor of equal status to a potential
  adversary, is a good illustration of the way in which a modern state
  stressed power considerations in its external affairs.
  Power in a modern state, however, meant more than armament and
  war plans. It also developed in combination with economic and social
  forces at home. For the state to have an effective foreign policy, it was
  vital to mobilize domestic resources to the full. We have seen this in
  connection with treaty revision. Equally significant for the 1870s was
  the developing crisis with Korea. Nowhere were the links between
  domestic and foreign affairs more graphically demonstrated, and no-
  where were the promise as well as the frustrations of modernization
  more tellingly revealed, than in the tangle of events and decisions that
  dotted Japanese-Korean relations after the Meiji Restoration. Meiji
  leaders early recognized the clear links between the Korean question
  and the establishment of domestic order. As Kido Takayoshi wrote in
  1869, a vigorous assertion of policy toward Korea "would instantly
  change Japan's outmoded customs, set its objectives abroad, promote
  its industry and technology, and eliminate jealousy and recrimination
  among its people."22 Behind such bombast lay historical factors that
  had defined a tortuous pattern of relationship between the two coun-
  tries. The Japanese liked to talk of "restoring" an ancient relationship
  between the two countries now that they had effected their own inter-
  nal "restoration." The Tokugawa regime had dealt with the Korean
  kingdom through the lord of Tsushima, and the Koreans had viewed
  such connections as distinctly inferior to their tributary relationship
  with China. Perpetuation of the existing arrangements would imply
  22 Key-Hiuk Kim, The Last Phase of the East Asian World Order: Korea, Japan, and the Chinese
  Empire, 1860-1882 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 125.
  Kido reversed his position after taking part in the Iwakura mission to the West and also
  opposed the Taiwan expedition.
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  DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
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  that Japanese-Korean relations were still comprehended within the
  traditional world order denned by China. If Japan were to "restore"
  domestic arrangements to eradicate feudalism and if part of that under-
  taking involved the establishment of a new framework of foreign af-
  fairs, then it followed that Japanese-Korean relations, too, must be
  placed on a new footing. The matter was complicated, however, be-
  cause it was never clear how that footing was to be denned and because
  division on this question threatened the very domestic stability in
  Japan that was the basic objective of the Meiji leaders.
  Kido's assertion just cited revealed a widely shared view that a
  strong stand toward Korea would be a good way to unify domestic
  opinion and consolidate the base of the new leadership in Japan. But
  ironically, the Korean issue almost destroyed the nascent Meiji govern-
  ment. There is not enough space here to chronicle the fascinating story
  of internal strife in Japan during the 1870s which brought about the
  defeat of sei-Kan ran (the movement for a Korean expedition). As one
  Japanese historian has pointed out, even Saigo Takamori, usually iden-
  tified with that movement, was initially opposed to the use of force.23
  He wanted to use diplomacy, such as the dispatch of a high-level
  embassy to Seoul headed by himself, to solve the impasse in Korea, in
  which the Yi dynasty refused to accede to Japanese demands for a new
  diplomatic relationship. But his political opponents, such as Kido,
  Iwakura, and Okubo, feared that a successful consummation of the
  project could enhance Saigo's prestige, thus undermining their own
  power. Because they were dedicated to consolidating the Meiji state,
  they had to oppose Saigo's plans. Frustrated, he in turn came to call
  for a more militant policy in Korea so as to embarrass the Kido-
  Iwakura faction. The conflict ultimately led to the Satsuma uprising of
  1877. In all these developments, Korea was but a context in which
  domestic rivalries were played out.
  It was obvious that the government had to achieve some diplomatic
  success quickly. Its passivity would be contrasted not only with the
  growing tide of sei-Kan ran but also with Saigo's advocacy of a diplo-
  matic solution. What the Kido-Iwakura leadership carried out was
  close to what Saigo had advocated: the dispatch of a high-level mission
  to Korea to seek to establish diplomatic relations between the two
  countries. The government also hoped to silence advocates of forceful
  measures by dispatching three gunboats to Korean waters in 1875.
  23 Shinobu, Nihon gaiko shi, vol. I, p. 92.
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  746 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  When one of them was fired on at Kanghwa Bay, it retaliated by
  bombarding some coastal batteries. Thus provided with a pretext for
  sending an emissary, Tokyo dispatched an embassy headed by Kuroda
  Kiyotaka in January 1876. Fully conscious of the parallel between his
  own and the Perry expedition, Kuroda was accompanied by three
  warships and succeeded in concluding a treaty with the Korean king-
  dom roughly similar to the treaties that Japan had been forced to
  negotiate during the 1850s. The Korean treaty stipulated that the
  kingdom was "an independent nation," thereby putting an end to its
  tributary relationship with the Chinese empire. The opening of three
  ports for Japanese trade was provided for, as was Japanese consular
  jurisdiction in Korea. Compared with the Japanese-Chinese treaty of
  1871, this was clearly one that established an unequal relationship
  between Japan and another country.
  It would be wrong to conclude, however, that the 1876 treaty with
  Korea was the product of a premeditated plan for expansion and that it
  was the first step for Japan's continental imperialism. It was more a
  case of the Japanese leaders' eagerness for a diplomatic success in
  order to consolidate their power at home. In this they achieved their
  goal. The treaty was hailed as a sign that Japan was now in a position
  to enjoy some of the same rights in another country that Westerners
  had gained in Japan. It was the first nation to have opened up Korea to
  foreign intercourse. The resulting prestige enhanced the power of the
  Meiji leadership, although this very success led dissidents under Saigo
  to stage the unsuccessful Satsuma Rebellion of 1877.
  The story of Japanese foreign affairs between 1868 and 1880, then,
  should primarily be seen as subsidiary to domestic developments. The
  consolidation of centralized power at home and the incorporation of
  larger segments of the population into the new polity had first to be
  achieved, and external issues had to be put in that context. This is
  hardly different from other countries, in particular Germany and the
  United States, which, too, were just then emerging as modern states.
  Of course, compared with theirs, the Japanese economy was far less
  industrialized, and its trade was still largely controlled by foreign
  merchants enjoying treaty privileges. It was hardly surprising that a
  key goal of the Japanese state should have been to seek revision of the
  treaties. At the same time, the Meiji leaders shared the views of their
  Western counterparts that national power must be defined broadly, in
  terms of the people's productivity, education, and discipline, as well
  as an efficient system of administration. They understood that a mod-
  ern state must have clearly defined geographical boundaries as well as
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  POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION 
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  a sense of nationhood on the part of the people living within them.
  Although threatened with periodic internal turmoil, the Japanese state
  was on a firmer footing at the end than at the beginning of the 1870s,
  in many ways the crucial decade in modern international history. The
  result was that after 1880, when the tides of change in the world
  moved faster, Japan was in a position to understand, identify with,
  and use them for its further strengthening.
  DOMESTIC POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION,
  188O-1895
  After the 1880s European international relations entered a phase of
  colonial expansion and imperialist rivalries. Although neither colonial-
  ism nor power politics was a new phenomenon and although during
  the preceding decade Britain and Russia had signaled the opening of
  the Near Eastern question by clashing in Afghanistan and Turkey, it
  was in the 1880s that the tempo quickened, with France, Britain,
  Germany, and other states avidly extending their power to areas hith-
  erto either loosely tied to European powers or lying beyond their
  control. In 1881 France established a protectorate over Tunis; in 1882
  Britain occupied Egypt; in 1883 Germany began its colonial activities
  in Southwest Africa; during 1884-5 France and Britain extended their
  respective sways to Indochina and Burma; and in 1889 Germany,
  Britain, and the United States divided up the Samoan kingdom into
  three segments for their tripartite condominium. By the mid-1890s
  most of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific had fallen under
  the domination of one or another of the Western powers. China, Ja-
  pan, and Korea were among the few noncolonized states in 1880, but
  by 1895 China and Korea had lost part of their sovereignty, thanks
  largely to Japanese expansionism.
  Such a brief listing makes the conclusion inescapable that Japan
  joined the ranks of imperialist states and began behaving like them
  overseas. No amount of apologetic writing alters the fact that between
  1880 and 1895 Japan did establish colonial enclaves and spheres of
  dominance over Korea, Taiwan, and parts of China. It is surprising,
  however, how little effort writers have made to fit Japanese expan-
  sionism into the general history of late-nineteenth-century imperialism
  and to fit the Japanese case into theories of imperialism. Most Euro-
  pean writings on imperialism concentrate on Britain, France, and
  Germany. American historians, on their part, have written volumes
  about the emergence of the United States as an imperialist in the late
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  748 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  I 890s but have on the whole tended to treat the phenomenon in isola-
  tion, separate from European and Japanese imperialism. Russian schol-
  ars, quite predictably, do write a great deal about czarist imperialism.
  They have also published far more about Japanese imperialism than
  have historians of other European countries; perhaps this reflects the
  fact that the rivalry between Russia and Japan was a key feature of the
  age of imperialism in East Asia. However, virtually all Soviet writings
  on the subject are presented in Marxist-Leninist formulations, and
  they are as susceptible to criticism as are similar accounts of British,
  French, or German imperialism. If anything, Leninist concepts are
  much more difficult to apply to less developed economies such as
  Russia and Japan at the turn of the century than to Britain and other
  countries. Despite this, Japanese writings on imperialism have also
  tended to be largely couched in Marxist-Leninist terms. The result is
  that when Japanese imperialism is fitted into the general history of
  modern imperialism, it is usually little more than a mechanistic exer-
  cise in applying rigid theories to the country. This has taken the form
  of locating the emergence of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, monopoly
  interests, and the like, as they are credited with having brought about
  late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century imperialism. As
  with Marxist interpretations of European imperialism, however, it has
  been difficult to establish a correspondence between economic develop-
  ments and specific instances of overseas expansion.
  Neo-Marxists such as Andre G. Frank and Harry Magdoff have
  presented less rigid and more usable generalizations, although few of
  them have worked specifically on Japan.2<» It is their contention that
  regardless of the different rates of capital accumulation or levels of
  industrialization, the Western nations had, by the late nineteenth cen-
  tury, linked themselves to other parts of the world, turning the latter
  into their "satellites." These "satellites" provided raw materials, mar-
  kets, and infrastructures, thereby making themselves dependent on
  the metropolitan economies. The result, according to this argument,
  was the perpetual underdevelopment of non-Western countries, which
  was in a symbiotic relationship with the development of the West.
  These writers term this total structure of dependency imperialism.
  Japan, obviously, is one exception to this pattern of Western domina-
  tion, a fact that Frank has explained rather tautologically, saying that
  it escaped the dependency status by not becoming a satellite of the
  24 A. G. Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Review
  Press, 1970); Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy
  (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
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  POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION 
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  West. At least such a framework is useful, as it takes into account that
  despite its relative underdevelopment, Japan in the 1880s was not
  incorporated into a global economic system as a satellite of an ad-
  vanced capitalist nation. On the contrary, as this chapter has empha-
  sized, the country was on its way to becoming a centralized mass
  society, that is, a modern state. The country's basic political and
  bureaucratic framework had been established; the leadership had just
  survived a serious challenge to its authority; and the ground was being
  laid for the promulgation of a constitution and the convening of a
  national assembly, the Imperial Diet. More important than such insti-
  tutional provisions was the fact that the populace had been educated
  and politicized. Often they had grown more politicized than the lead-
  ers had bargained for; die movement for "freedom and people's
  rights" throughout the 1870s had indicated that segments of the popu-
  lation were well educated, versed in political theory, and intent on
  resisting the growth of state authority. But those who held power
  recognized the importance of a politically alert opinion, and they had
  tried to channel it in the direction of national cohesiveness. The result,
  at the beginning of the 1880s, was that the politically essential precon-
  ditions for turning Japan into a modern state had been sufficiently
  fulfilled.
  These basic achievements meant that in the 1880s, when the Euro-
  pean powers stepped up their tempo of imperialist domination, the
  Japanese state, with a centralized bureaucracy and aroused public
  opinion, was in a far better position to understand and respond to
  these developments than were the other countries of Asia, the Middle
  East, or Africa. Japan's own imperialism must be understood in that
  context. In other words, its foreign dealings were now backed up by a
  stronger, more centralized government and were affected by domestic
  opinion and interest groups with greater self-assertiveness than before.
  Power, summing up armed forces, public opinion, and economic re-
  sources, could be better mobilized, just as it was being mobilized by
  other advanced countries. To the extent that the disparity between
  stronger and weaker power areas throughout the globe provided the
  setting for imperialist pressures, as David Landes has noted, it fol-
  lowed that Japan would represent the former and hence develop as an
  imperialist.25
  In some such fashion, the Japanese began their story of overseas
  expansion, which culminated in the establishment of control over vast
  25 David Landes, "Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism," Journal of Eco-
  nomic History 21 (1961): 496-512.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  areas of Asia within thirty years. It should be pointed out, however,
  that expansion was always considered in the context of the growth of
  the modern Japanese nation and that as such it took many forms, not
  just formal colonial domination. The latter was not an end in itself, a
  premeditated goal for its own sake, but an aspect of Japan's develop-
  ment in a world environment defined by the major powers.
  Basic to such a conception was a view of international affairs that the
  Japanese had begun to develop through their contact with Western
  countries and peoples during the 1870s and that was confirmed by the
  latters' overseas expansionism in the new decade. That view was ex-
  pressed in such phrases as "war without warfare," "economic warfare,"
  or "the struggle for survival," all expressions common in Japanese
  utterances at this time. That the international arena was controlled by
  the powerful, industrializing nations of the West was already clearly
  recognized. Added to this was the idea that those powers were con-
  stantly struggling with one another for greater national strength, not
  necessarily through war but through other means as well. There were,
  in fact, few, if any, armed hostilities among Western powers at that
  time. But this did not mean that they were not preparing for such
  conflict or that they were not constantly trying to augment their power.
  Even more important, not simply armies and navies but the total re-
  sources of a given country seemed to be committed to these goals. The
  people in these countries, the Japanese found, were energetic, vigorous,
  and aggressive, sharing with their leaders a sense of devotion to power,
  prestige, and wealth. They were, in short, engaged in a "war without
  warfare" or, as it came to be called in the 1890s, a "peacetime war."
  That the Japanese should do likewise was taken for granted by virtually
  all who spoke or wrote on the matter, although, as elsewhere, they
  differed among themselves as to the means for achieving the same ends.
  They were unanimous in believing that vigorous foreign policies and
  enterprises were a sign of internal health and power. Conversely, over-
  seas activities by Japanese would rebound to the benefit of the home
  country. This was the theme of "expansion" broadly denned, a theme
  that came to be repeated with almost monotonous regularity in the
  1880s and the subsequent decades. This was also imperialism, but it
  would be best to reserve that term for expansion into less powerful and
  less developed areas, such as Korea and China. There the Japanese
  came into contact with other imperialists and engaged in imperialist
  rivalries. But it should not be forgotten that there were other kinds of
  activities, such as emigration to Hawaii and trade with the West, that
  were equally important.
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  Japanese-Korean relations during the 1880s reflected a sense of
  power and urgency not visible earlier. As befitting a leadership that
  had survived a serious domestic challenge to its authority, the Meiji
  government in the late 1870s and early 1880s launched a program for
  extending its political and economic control over the peninsular king-
  dom. Export trade to Korea expanded phenomenally, not only bring-
  ing Japanese goods (matches, copper, and so on) there, but also ship-
  ping Western commodities from Japan to Korea (only 11.5 percent of
  total Japanese exports to Korea in 1882 consisted of goods made in
  Japan). Korea's rice and soybeans were imported into Japan in grow-
  ing volume, Japan almost always purchasing 90 percent of all Korean
  exports. In 1881 a military advisory group was dispatched from Japan
  to start working on a modernized army for Korea.26 These moves were
  obviously connected with the perceived needs of the Japanese state.
  Economic control over Korea was considered both desirable and feasi-
  ble. Both the revenue from the export trade and the grains imported
  from the peninsula were considered important to Japan's industrializa-
  tion, and the supervision of Korean military affairs ensured that noth-
  ing would happen to disrupt these emerging economic ties. It is un-
  likely that much thought was given at this time to imperialist rivalries
  in Asia in general, although the Japanese were quite aware of Russian
  expansionism in the north and its French and British counterpart in
  the south. Rather, it appears that it was considered desirable to use the
  opportunities provided by the nearby kingdom for the enhancement of
  Japanese power, economic and political.
  This objective was supported by the populace. If anything, politi-
  cally active segments of the population - the antigovernment press,
  dissident leaders who gathered around Okuma Shigenobu and created
  a minor crisis in 1881, and various political organizations - became
  even more interested in Korean affairs than the government was.
  Political movements evolved around the domestic issues of constitu-
  tional government and the convening of a national Diet, but the dissi-
  dents and popular rights activists often called on the nation to turn
  their attention overseas and promote reforms in China and Korea.
  Many of them felt frustrated in their challenge to the domestic leader-
  ship and believed that the best strategy was to arouse popular opinion
  about the government's alleged passivity toward Korea. Some were
  convinced that reforms in Japan would follow those in Korea. Others
  went further and advocated an alliance of Japanese and Korean reform-
  26 Hattori Shiso, Kindai Nihon gaiko shi (Tokyo: Kawade shobo, 1954), p. 105.
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  752 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  ers so as to enlighten and civilize their countries. Tarui Tokichi ex-
  pressed such opinions in his famous Dai-To gappo ron (Unification of
  great Asia), written in 1885, calling on the two countries to unite to
  become a strong Asian power. (Fukuzawa Yukichi's even more fa-
  mous Datsu-A ron - On leaving Asia - was also published that year
  and sought to refute Tarui's argument by asserting that it would be
  impossible to unite with a more backward country like Korea.)
  In this way, both government and populace came to incorporate
  Korean issues into their own respective visions of national power and
  domestic arrangements. Expansionism was domestic politics by exten-
  sion. It soon became apparent, however, that events in Korea itself
  were equally crucial to determining the course of Japanese expan-
  sionism. In a way similar to the circumstances in the "peripheral
  areas" that created and strengthened European imperialism in Africa
  and the Middle East, events in Korea played a key role in affecting the
  specific course that Japan was to take. In 1882, followers of the
  Taewongun, the de facto ruler of Korea between 1864 and 1873 who
  had been forced into retirement by the supporters of Queen Min for
  his extreme antiforeign policies, staged a coup against the Min and
  their alleged Japanese allies. The insurgents killed the Japanese offi-
  cers in charge of training the new army and attacked the legation in
  Seoul. Minister Hanabusa Yoshitomo and his aides barely escaped and
  returned to Nagasaki on board a British ship. The Taewongun was
  restored to power, only to be forcibly taken to China by Chinese
  troops that were dispatched to Seoul to prevent further disorder.2?
  The Japanese might have decided to disengage themselves from the
  Korean peninsula then and there. Such a decision would have spared
  them from becoming involved in complex Korean politics and, even
  more important, with China. It might also have compelled them to
  turn their attention elsewhere, such as Sakhalin or Taiwan. However,
  the leaders in Tokyo considered inaction an admission of failure and
  were unanimous that something had to be done. Nongovernmental
  opinion also called for a quick response; it would surely seize upon
  government inaction as a failure of leadership. Tokyo's approach to
  the crisis was twofold. On the one hand, it would eschew hasty mili-
  tary action against the Korean government, as it would exacerbate the
  tensions already mounting between Japan and China. Instead, Japan
  would try to conclude an agreement with the Korean court to prevent
  a recurrence of similar outbursts. At the same time, the Japanese
  27 Kim, Last Phase, pp. 316-25.
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  would make plans for a possible military engagement with Korea and,
  possibly, with China. The first approach led to the conclusion of an
  agreement in August 1882, stipulating that the Korean government
  would send a mission of apology to Japan, indemnify for the loss and
  damages to Japanese lives, and agree to the stationing of Japanese
  troops to guard the legation in Seoul. The second stipulation brought
  about a plan for strengthening armaments in preparation for a possible
  war with China over the Korean question. Particularly urgent ap-
  peared to be naval construction, in which Japan was believed to lag far
  behind China's naval building program. It would be necessary,
  Iwakura noted, to construct larger and faster ships. Because the Meiji
  regime eschewed large-scale foreign borrowing, funds for this had to
  come from domestic resources, that is, increased taxes. Popular opposi-
  tion to them could be mitigated by a rhetoric of national defense and
  an image of China as a potential adversary. The press and political
  organizations generally cooperated by accepting such rhetoric. As
  many historians have pointed out, from around this time, patriotism
  and national assertiveness came to characterize popular movements in
  Japan. Opinion leaders such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, as well as most
  political parties, supported the government's stand in Korea and the
  military-strengthening programs as a way to enhance national prestige
  and obtain recognition by the powers that Japan was one of them.28
  The growth of such patriotic sentiment deserves examination, for it
  came to provide a domestic context for Japanese foreign policy. Patrio-
  tism in the sense of particularistic ethnocentrism had, of course, ex-
  isted throughout Japanese history, fostered by geographical isolation,
  relative racial homogeneity, and cultural self-consciousness. It had
  manifested itself in an extreme form when bands of samurai attacked
  and cut down the foreigners who came to Japan in the 1850s. Thirty
  years later, however, this indigenous sentiment had been reinforced
  by deepening contact with other countries, East and West, and had
  also become more organized. It found its expression in the press,
  political movements, and educational institutions. As such, it was
  little different from the patriotism and "jingoism" in the West, which
  were also aspects of its modern transformation. It may be, however,
  that in Japan traditional ethnocentrism had developed into modern
  patriotism without a substantial metamorphosis, whereas in the West,
  nationalism had intervened in the process. Nationalism as it grew after
  the late eighteenth century was not simply an exclusive, particularistic
  28 Shinobu, Nihon gaiko ski, vol. 1, pp. 124-6.
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  sentiment. In its inception, it had been part of the democratic revolu-
  tion, in which national identity was sought less in a country's ethnic
  and historical uniqueness than in the belief that it embodied certain
  universal values such as freedom and human rights. That sentiment
  never completely disappeared from the emotive vocabulary of the mod-
  ern states in the late nineteenth century, and in fact the tension be-
  tween it and more romantic, particularistic emotions, extolling the
  greatness of a country for its culture and soil, provided a theme in the
  self-perceptions of modern peoples. In Japan, too, there were currents
  of thought that stressed the universality of goals of modernization.
  Industrialization, constitutionalism, popular enlightenment, and simi-
  lar objectives were viewed as universally valid, and it was thought that
  Japan would be considered a more self-respecting nation in proportion
  as it approximated these goals. But except for a small number of
  writers and activists, these objectives did not easily provide a vision for
  a more ideal international order. In the West, nationalism could often
  be transformed into internationalism because a nation could envision a
  world order that embodied some of the universalistic principles that it
  exemplified itself. Serious and sustained efforts in this direction were
  made by the Japanese only after World War I. In the late nineteenth
  century, universalistic objectives were usually viewed as a means for
  particularistic ends, for the strengthening and enrichment of the coun-
  try. Or else they would provide the vocabulary for an activist policy in
  Korea or China in the name of Asia's "awakening," a geographical
  particularism.29 It is not surprising, then, that movements for popular
  rights or constitutionalism could easily turn into patriotic moves or
  that the leaders of those movements would more often than not find
  themselves impelled to take a lead in chauvinistic adventures overseas.
  Such considerations help one understand the growing support dur-
  ing the 1880s for the use offeree against Korea or China. It was not, as
  is so often alleged by historians, that the Japanese felt superior to their
  Asian neighbors and resorted to military action; rather, they couched
  their belligerence in some universalistic vocabulary. They decided to
  prepare for possible armed hostilities with Korea and China for rea-
  sons that had to do more with the consolidation of the modern Japa-
  nese state than with any ideology. But they found it convenient to
  justify their action by stressing the need for Japan to emulate the West
  and "leave Asia," in Fukuzawa's famous words of 1885. Here patriotic
  assertiveness was combined with the language of universalism (that is,
  29 Sakeda, Kindai Nihon, pp. 63-5.
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  POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION 
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  Westernization). It was obvious that the former was a more potent
  force than the latter was. It was because of this that patriotism could
  be a double-edged instrument, for it would be boundless and might
  arouse national expectations that could not be fulfilled. Subsequent
  history showed that quite often the government had to restrain popu-
  lar patriotism in carrying out its foreign policy. Here too, one sees an
  instance in which mass incorporation into the polity was a fundamen-
  tal feature of the foreign relations of a modern state.
  All these factors contributed to the development of Japanese rela-
  tions with Korea and China after 1882. The struggle for power in
  Korea between the followers of the Taewongun and Queen Min was
  now joined by that between the "independence faction" and the
  "conservatives," the former seeking Japan's support and the latter
  China's. An attempted coup by the "independence" group, openly
  assisted by Japanese minister Takezoe Shin'ichiro and his hundred-
  man legation guard, was executed at the end of 1884, resulting in the
  brief establishment of a pro-Japanese government under the reigning
  king, dedicated to the "independence" of Korea from Chinese suzer-
  ainty. However, this proved short-lived, as "conservative" Korean
  officials requested the help of Chinese forces that had been stationed
  in Korea. Two thousand troops marched to the palace and sur-
  rounded it. The coup collapsed, and an angry Korean mob retaliated
  by killing ten Japanese officers and thirty other Japanese residents in
  Seoul. Some leaders of the "independence" faction, including Kim
  Ok-kyun, fled to Japan. The result was a further exacerbation of
  Chinese-Japanese relations.30
  The situation tested the Japanese government's ability to maintain
  domestic control, for national opinion was aroused by news of the
  humiliation, and pressures mounted for punitive action against China.
  The use of force was called for in the popular press in order to occupy
  Seoul, protect Japanese lives, and, if necessary, diminish and elimi-
  nate Chinese influence in Korea. Those steps would enhance Japanese
  power and honor, it was asserted, and unite further the leaders and the
  people of the country. The Tokyo government was well aware of the
  need to respond to those pressures, but it considered the further use of
  force premature. Reinforcement of Japanese troops and ships would
  surely provoke countermeasures by the Chinese, and a situation would
  be created in which the two countries would find it difficult to avoid
  an open clash. Because Japan had just begun a program for an arma-
  30 See Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea: 1868-1910 (Philadelphia: University of
  Pennsylvania Press, i960) for an excellent treatment of the 1884 incident.
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  ment buildup, its military leaders were virtually unanimous in counsel-
  ing caution, at least for the time being. A premature war with no
  assurance of victory would not only devastate the national economy
  but would also cause the government's leadership to be questioned
  and lead to domestic turmoil. Civilian officials, too, were inclined to
  take a less belligerent stand in view of the fact that Foreign Minister
  Inoue Kaoru was in the middle of serious negotiations for treaty revi-
  sion. A foreign war would certainly complicate those negotiations. At
  the same time, it was considered dangerous to national prestige and
  domestic stability to acquiesce in China's military presence in Korea, a
  symbol of humiliation for Japan. The most plausible solution, then,
  had to be an agreement with the Chinese for a mutual reduction and
  evacuation of forces in Korea. With this as the key objective, ltd
  Hirobumi went to Tientsin to confer with Li Hung-chang, the Chi-
  nese negotiator. The 1885 Li-Ito convention was, in terms of the
  objective, a success. The two governments agreed to withdraw their
  troops from Korea; furthermore, they pledged to give each other prior
  notice should it become necessary once again to send armed forces to
  the peninsular kingdom.31
  The agreement, however, could not silence Japanese domestic opin-
  ion, which had been aroused by the rhetoric of national power and
  patriotism. Disappointed by what they took to be the government's
  passivity, advocates of stronger action in Korea or toward China con-
  tinued their agitation, often in clandestine meetings and secret plots
  for creating disturbances in the neighboring countries. They often
  employed the rhetoric of Asianism to present their arguments. The
  idea was that it was incumbent upon the Japanese to take the lead for
  the salvation of all Asia, in particular Korea and China. They should
  be willing to go to these countries, engage in efforts to eliminate corrupt
  and weak regimes, reform their institutions, and urge their people to
  join together to stop avaricious European nations.32 The emergence of
  Asianism in the mid-1880s marked the beginning of an interesting
  phenomenon in Japan's modern relations with the neighboring coun-
  tries: the activities of individual Japanese, without official backing, in
  Korea, China, and other countries whose behavior could often be an
  embarrassment but at times useful to the government in Tokyo. They
  31 See Bonnie B. Oh, "Sino-Japanese Rivalry in Korea, 1876-1885," in Akira Iriye, ed., The
  Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (Princeton, N. J.: Prince-
  ton University Press, 1980).
  32 On Asianism, one must still go back to the pioneering study by Marius B. Jansen, The
  Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
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  were, in essence, little different from Western missionaries, explorers,
  and filibusters who roamed all over the world; they had no explicit
  official sanction for their acts but could turn to their home govern-
  ments for protection when necessary. But the Japanese case was nota-
  ble because of its close connections with the internal politics of all
  countries, including Japan. Frequently, those Japanese - many of
  them were called shishi (heroes) - started out in opposition to the
  government and sought to influence domestic politics in their own
  country by bold acts in Korea or China. These acts were usually of a
  conspiratorial nature; they would contact antigovernmental factions
  and individuals in Korea or China and plot to undermine, if not
  overthrow, the existing regimes. If successful, their endeavors would
  be rewarded by changes in Japan's domestic politics. In this sense,
  they were a potential threat to internal political authority. On occa-
  sion, however, their activities might be useful for extending Japanese
  power on the continent, just as missionaries provided an opportunity
  for Western nations to obtain and extend their rights abroad. Japanese
  activists, in contrast with Western missionaries, were, at the same
  time, driven by the ideology of Asianism, and this made their support
  awkward for Tokyo's officials, particularly during the 1880s when
  they were trying to Westernize legal and commercial institutions so as
  to obtain their goal of treaty revision. In this sense, Asianism func-
  tioned as the antithesis of die official dedication to Westernization.
  Those who felt revulsion toward the fad of Western clothes, manners,
  dancing, and the like found in the Asianist ideology an alternative mat
  could give them a vocabulary with which to assault the government.
  For all these reasons, continental issues became bound up with
  domestic developments in the years after 1885. Political movements at
  home tended to challenge public authority and threatened to nullify
  the efforts of the government and military to obtain treaty revision and
  maintain calm on the Korean peninsula while strengthening the armed
  forces. It would be wrong to say, however, that this rift menaced the
  foundation of the modern Japanese state. On the contrary, it could be
  argued that all these popular movements were indications of an
  aroused national sentiment and that regardless of their Asianist opposi-
  tion to the government's Westernizing programs, they revealed a
  heightened sense of patriotism that, combined with stronger arms,
  could eventually be put to use in foreign wars. In that sense, there was
  no fundamental contradiction between public and private activities;
  they might differ on means, and they might represent their acts in
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  contrasting rhetorical frameworks, but they both were solidifying the
  basis of the Japanese state as it staged its first imperialist ventures.
  Moreover, it is worth noting that the use of force in Korea and
  armament expansion were not the sum total of the efforts that went
  into the consolidation of the Japanese state. Treaty revision negotia-
  tions went on throughout these years, as did the domestic reforms that
  led to the promulgation of the constitution in 1889 and the convening
  of the Diet in 1890. Efforts were being steadily made to regain control
  over Japanese trade from foreign merchants, to improve the quality of
  products for export, and to reduce imports by encouraging domestic
  industrialization in textiles and other light manufactures. These ef-
  forts were considered just as important to national wealth and strength
  as military activities. In fact, some writers and officials believed that it
  was in the nonmilitary spheres that the struggle for power among
  nations was being waged and must be won. This harked back to an
  earlier emphasis on "enriching the nation," but the situation was more
  urgent in the 1880s because the Western powers were visibly growing
  in economic strength and expanding rapidly all over the globe. It
  would not be enough, under the circumstances, for Japan to seek to
  maintain a balance of power on the Korean peninsula. Such an aim
  paled in significance beside the far larger goal of mobilizing the re-
  sources of the whole country for economic growth and expansion.
  This, too, was an important part of the story in the period before the
  Sino-Japanese War.
  It was from the 1880s onwards that foreign trade established itself as
  a serious objective of the Meiji state. The fiscal retrenchment policy of
  Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi, in office between 1881 and
  1892, had the effect of reducing government expenditures, encourag-
  ing private industry, discouraging foreign imports, and making Japa-
  nese commodities more competitive in overseas markets. Between
  1880 and 1885, total Japanese exports increased from ¥28.4 million to
  ¥36.7 million. Still an insignificant volume (world trade during the
  decade of the 1880s amounted to over £3 billion), it nevertheless
  marked a significant trend. Exports from Japan to Korea, for instance,
  increased by over 90 percent between the mid-1880s and the early
  1890s, of which commodities made in Japan increased by 160 percent
  from ¥511,000 to ¥1.313 million.« These consisted of cotton yarn,
  piece goods, and other manufactured items, products of industrializa-
  tion. Regardless of political and military issues, there was little ques-
  33 Hattori, Kindai Nikon, p. 107.
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  POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION 
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  tion that here was a fundamental development in Japanese capitalism
  that was finding a ready market nearby.
  Equally important was the beginning of Japanese emigration over-
  seas. It was more an idea than an achievement, but already during the
  1880s, writers were stressing the need for resettling the country's
  surplus population so that they would contribute to the nation's
  wealth and strength. In one of the earliest treatises on the subject,
  Muto Sanji, a businessman, wrote in 1887 that Japan's lower, laboring
  classes should be resettled in large numbers overseas, particularly in
  Hawaii and the west coast of the United States. It would not only give
  them better opportunities to earn a livelihood but would also contrib-
  ute to enriching the nation through their remittances home.*4 At the
  time, it is true, there were fewer than five thousand Japanese in Ha-
  waii, and only a little over one thousand in California and other west-
  ern states.« But these figures were roughly equal to the number of
  Japanese in Korea and China. Whereas those in the neighboring coun-
  tries were engaged in commercial, educational, and, frequently, politi-
  cal and military activities, quite often under the supervision of the
  Japanese authorities, Japanese who crossed the Pacific were predomi-
  nantly agricultural and manual workers. To men like Muto, these
  were far more productive pursuits and far more beneficial in the long
  run for the country, for the rich climate and soil of Hawaii and Amer-
  ica, as well as the high cost of white labor, ensured that Japanese
  would have no trouble obtaining employment and contributing to the
  economic growth of the host territories. Even more important, they
  would become better known to Americans and other Westerners
  through their overseas immigration, settlement, and hard work. That
  in turn should redound to enhance the country's prestige.
  It is interesting to note that the theme of augmenting national power
  by engaging in "peaceful warfare" throughout the world never disap-
  peared in the 1890s, despite the continuing tensions with China that
  ultimately led to war in 1894. If anything, treaty revision, trade expan-
  sion, and emigration were pursued with even greater vigor than ear-
  lier. As during the 1880s, this reflected the Japanese leaders' percep-
  tion of both domestic needs and the further growth of the West's
  economic and military power. On the domestic front, the convening of
  the first session of the Diet under the new constitution, taking place in
  34 Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911 (Cambridge,
  Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 23.
  35 Nichi-Bei bunka kosho shi: fju hen (Tokyo: Yoyosha, 1955), pp. 50,382.
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  November 1890, established a basic framework for political action.
  The first election gave the voters - albeit with a restricted franchise,
  enabling only 1.1 percent of the population to vote - an opportunity
  to experiment with a Western system of political choice. Political
  parties now geared their activities toward gaining influence in parlia-
  mentary politics; they sometimes supported, and at other times col-
  laborated with, men in power in order to gain their influence. The
  unenfranchised, of course, would seek to organize themselves and
  agitate for their rights, but here too, the framework was largely de-
  fined by the new parliamentary system. Henceforth it would be the
  political parties that would mediate between government and people,
  as was the case in most Western nations.
  If domestic developments were gradually falling into place, contin-
  ued Western power and influence defined Japanese perceptions of
  external affairs. What particularly attracted their attention was the fact
  that the Western powers that had steadily extended their spheres of
  action, incorporating ever-wider regions of the world into their do-
  mains, now appeared to be bent on massive undertakings in Asia and
  the Pacific. Having established control over Burma, Indochina, and
  the Maritime Provinces, they seemed to be pushing for the interior of
  China as well as Korea, as exemplified by the launching of the con-
  struction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891 and the various pow-
  ers' attempts to gain influential positions in Korean politics by provid-
  ing the kingdom with financial and military advisers. In the West,
  moreover, voices began to be heard, stressing that the future of world
  politics would be decided in Asia and the Pacific. Alfred Thayer Ma-
  han, Henry Norman, Charles Pearson, and others started writing
  alarmist tracts, urging their readers to pay close attention to this re-
  gion for its geopolitical and economic significance. Having penetrated
  Africa and the Middle East, it now seemed incumbent upon the West-
  ern powers to extend their influence to Asia and the Pacific. The
  region was of strategic significance because of its landmass and the
  wide ocean; it contained a majority of humankind; and it was rich in
  natural resources. Rivalries among the powers were likely to be increas-
  ingly played out and determined in this area.^6 Such activities and
  views were well known to the Japanese, heightening a sense of urgency
  that they too must act more energetically, both in the passive sense of
  avoiding victimization by the more aggressive West and also in the
  sense of extending their own power in order to join the ranks of the
  36 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, pp. 19-20.
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  great powers. As Inagaki Manjiro, who had studied with Robert
  Seeley at Cambridge University, asserted in Tohosaku (Eastern policy,
  1891), a work comparable to the English historian's expansionist writ-
  ings Japan must understand its geopolitical requirements and strive
  to strengthen itself economically and militarily. The two went hand in
  hand, but the most urgent need was for further economic growth
  through commerce and industrialization. This would be a momentous
  task but a crucial one, for the center of world politics was shifting to
  Asia and the Pacific. The powers that emerged victorious in the compe-
  tition in that part of the world were destined to be the leaders in the
  coming century.37 Few would have disagreed, and similar ideas made
  their appearance throughout the first half of the 1890s. That this was
  no idle talk can be seen in specific instances of economic strengthen-
  ing. For example, 1893 marked the year when domestically manufac-
  tured cotton yarn surpassed imports for the first time since the 1860s.
  Although imported cotton products still surpassed exports, the gap
  was steadily narrowing, thanks to phenomenal increases in the export
  of cotton yarn to Korea and China.*8 Equally significant, overseas
  expansion through emigration, colonization, and even outright sei-
  zures of some tropical islands came to be vigorously advocated in the
  early 1890s. It was around then that the term hatten (expansion) took
  on the connotation of establishing Japanese communities and enclaves
  throughout the globe as a source as well as a symbol of national power.
  As writer after writer noted, only a vigorous, expansionist people,
  willing to take risks and fight against obstacles in strange countries,
  deserved to be powerful. Like Westerners, the Japanese must go
  abroad, work hard, and bring as many areas of the world as possible
  under Japanese influence. Because the country was far from prepared
  militarily to push for such expansion and because Western nations,
  too, appeared to be enlarging their domains through peaceful means
  such as commerce and emigration, Japan should do likewise. It should
  particularly look to regions that were relatively sparsely populated but
  richly endowed with natural resources. Many writers thus pointed to
  the importance of the South Seas. Expansion in the south, they as-
  serted, recalling the memories of Japanese activities in the Philippines,
  Siam, and elsewhere in the sixteenth century, would prove to be the
  answer not only to Japan's population problem but also to its quest for
  great-power status. There were others, however, who continued to
  believe that Hawaii and the American continent would prove to be
  37 Ibid., pp. 35-6.
  38 Sumiya Mikio, DaiNihon teikoku no shvren (Tokyo: Chud koronsha, 1965), pp. 66-7.
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  even more advantageous. Already in 1892 there were 4,500 Japanese
  in America; in 1893, there were 22,000 Japanese in Hawaii. They were
  viewed as a spearhead of much larger waves of emigration across the
  Pacific. In order to assist in such activities and to find other suitable
  areas for "colonization through peaceful methods," a colonization soci-
  ety was organized in 1893 by some of the leading publicists and politi-
  cians of the time.» Summing up this rising expansionist sentiment,
  Tokutomi Iichiro (Soho) declared on the eve of the Sino-Japanese
  War, "Certainly our future history will be a history of the establish-
  ment by the Japanese of new Japans everywhere in the world."-*0
  The crisis in Korea that culminated in the Chinese war in 1894
  should be put in the context of this expansionist sentiment. Extending
  Japanese power and influence on the continent of Asia was part of a
  larger vision, such as Tokutomi's. Only by developing itself through
  expansion, it was believed, would the Japanese nation be able to
  emerge as a power in the world arena and to cope with the expanding
  powers of the West. At the same time, expansionism would provide a
  new national objective for the Japanese people. Instead of being preoc-
  cupied with internal squabbles and domestic concerns, they would be
  driven by a vision of boundless opportunities overseas. "Overseas
  settlement," as the manifesto of the colonization society put it, "is a
  vital aspect of the national policy, adopted at the Meiji Restoration, of
  elevating our spirit, broadening our vista, introducing new knowl-
  edge, and reforming people's minds." Having just had their first na-
  tional election for the convening of the Diet, it was as if the Japanese
  people were now being exhorted to concern themselves with grandiose
  schemes for overseas expansion, not just with internal political mat-
  ters. In this fashion, overseas expansionism could serve as a device for
  turning national opinion outward. Whether consciously or uncon-
  sciously, the country's literary and educational leaders, too, delighted
  in stressing patriotic themes and exhorting readers and students to
  consider Japan's unique history and traditional beauty as well as its
  modernizing achievements. The focusing on these themes, however,
  did not mean the fostering of a neoisolationist mentality. Rather, they
  were cited as evidence of the strengths and virtues of the Japanese
  nation on the threshold of overseas expansion. They would give confi-
  dence to the people as they sought to pursue activities abroad. It is
  true that some thinkers took strong exception to patriotism as a basis
  for expansion. They were more interested in individual liberty, human
  39 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, pp. 40-1. 
  40 Ibid., p. 44.
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  POLITICS AND OVERSEAS EXPANSION 
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  rights, and other Western values. In some instances the conflict be-
  tween the two was unbridgeable. In most cases, however, it would
  appear that the Japanese managed to embrace patriotic themes while
  holding onto a more universalistic rhetoric. After all, that was what
  they thought they observed in Western countries. Whether compla-
  cent or uneasy about the juxtaposition of such visions, the Japanese
  found themselves defining their personal and national objectives in an
  environment of deepening contact with the outside world.-"
  Given this background, the war with China from 1894 to 1895 was
  viewed with equanimity and often enthusiasm by most Japanese. It
  seemed to fit into their policies, economic programs, and expansionist
  mentality. The occasion for war was provided by a rebellion (led by
  the Tonghaks, a banned organization) in Korea, impelling the court in
  Seoul to seek Chinese assistance in putting it down. Over two thou-
  sand Chinese soldiers landed at the western port of Asan. The situa-
  tion threatened to test the Chinese-Japanese agreement of 1885, ac-
  cording to which the two countries were to coordinate their action in
  case they decided to reintroduce forces into Korea. As it turned out,
  the Korean authorities were able to suppress the rebels even while the
  Chinese forces were confined to Asan. But the Japanese government
  decided to seize this opportunity to reduce Chinese power and extend
  Japanese influence in the peninsula. Such a decision implied war, and
  the Japanese leaders were well aware of it. In fact, such men as For-
  eign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu and other cabinet members wel-
  comed the opportunity, for military action could be presented to the
  populace and the Diet as a necessary step for obtaining more rights in
  Korea and otherwise expanding Japanese influence on the continent of
  Asia. They correctly judged that they would obtain national support.
  The Diet, which had caused trouble to the cabinet on budgetary is-
  sues, quickly fell into line, and the press was similarly compliant.
  Japan's armed forces, too, were judged to be ready. Since the 1880s
  they had been steadily augmented. Moreover, it had been considered
  most likely that they would first be used in Korea. This was because of
  the view, which Yamagata Aritomo had expressed openly at the first
  session of the Diet in 1890, that national independence hinged on the
  defense of the country's "lines of interest." Every country, he as-
  serted, must protect its boundaries by defending these lines. Such
  views were similar to strategic conceptions being developed in the
  West and expressed the eagerness of the Japanese to identify with the
  41 Irokawa Daikichi, Kindai kokka no shuppatsu (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1966), pp. 464-78.
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  764 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  advanced Western countries by accepting their formulations of na-
  tional defense. And it was clear in Yamagata's speech, as well as in
  more secret military plans being worked out in the early 1890s, that
  these "lines of interest" primarily meant the Korean peninsula. If
  Japan were to consider Korea of immediate relevance to the national
  defense, it followed that its military spending and war plans would
  have to be geared to at least maintaining the status quo in the penin-
  sula through a balance of power between Japan and China. But such
  an objective might lead to armed clashes with China, and thus prepara-
  tions had been made for a hypothetical war with that country.
  Here again, Japanese behavior fitted into the general pattern of the
  modern Western states which, too, were engaged in making elaborate
  war plans and armament programs as means for augmenting national
  power. What is particularly notable about the Japanese case is that it
  was the first non-Western state that was now joining the ranks of the
  militarily strong, imperialistic powers. It is significant that on July 16,
  1894, Japan finally achieved its goal of concluding a new treaty with
  Britain, providing for the abolition of extraterritoriality in five years in
  return for the opening up of the country for "mixed residence." Un-
  like earlier treaty drafts, the Japanese-British treaty contained no pro-
  vision for an interim appointment of foreign judges in cases involving
  foreigners. The successful consummation of this agreement, after
  close to thirty years' efforts, symbolized the growing status of Japan as
  a modern state and the willingness of the West to recognize it as such.
  The Japanese people, whose views were now channeled through the
  political parties and expressed in often-acrimonious debate in the
  Diet, were not united in welcoming the prospect of foreigners residing
  in the interior of the country, but they nevertheless took the signing of
  the new treaty as evidence that Japan was emerging as a major power,
  now in a better position than before to assert itself in the world arena,
  in particular in the developing crisis with China.
  War was declared against China only sixteen days after the signing
  of the British treaty. Actually, the first shot was fired on July 25, when
  the Japanese fleet off the west coast of Korea attacked Chinese war-
  ships; four days later, Japanese troops that had been dispatched to
  Korea engaged Chinese forces in Asan. By then Japan's objective in
  Korea was no longer the maintenance of a balance between Japan and
  China, but the ejection of Chinese influence from the peninsula. This
  goal could be achieved by destroying Chinese land forces in Korea and
  ships in the Yellow Sea, which was accomplished with relative ease by
  September. After October, the Japanese expanded their spheres of
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
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  action, invading the Liaotung peninsula, later Weihaiwei in Shantung
  Province, and engaging in a sea battle with China's Peiyang fleet. By
  March 1895, Japanese forces had occupied Lushun (Port Arthur),
  Talien (Dairen), and Weihaiwei and had destroyed most of the Chi-
  nese fleet. The Chinese government saw no alternative but to seek to
  end the war. On March 18 it approached the United States minister in
  Peking to obtain America's good offices as a mediator.
  The war was enormously popular. The political parties vied with one
  another in expressing their support and voting funds for military sup-
  plies and manpower. They, as well as the press, considered the conflict
  eminently justifiable in view of Korea's need for reform and China's
  alleged refusal to promote it. Japan, as the most modernized nation in
  Asia, had the obligation, it was asserted, to come to the aid of its weaker
  neighbor and to punish the Chinese who had not awakened to the
  importance of cooperating with the Japanese to spread civilization in
  Asia. All such rhetoric reflected Japan's self-perception that the nation
  was now behaving as a modern power, one prerequisite for it being a
  willingness to extend national horizons to assume responsibility for the
  peace and stability of nearby areas. Perhaps one of the most notable
  statements about the war was made by Tokutomi Soho when he as-
  serted, two days before the opening of hostilities, "I do not advocate war
  just for the sake of it. I am not advocating plundering of other lands. But
  I insist on war with China in order to transform Japan, hitherto a
  contracting nation, into an expansive nation."42 By waging war, Japan
  would establish a beachhead in Asia and be recognized as an expanding
  nation, a symbol of its great-power status. Self-consciousness about
  overseas expansion emerged as the most significant product of the Chi-
  nese war. The few thousands that had already gone abroad, to Asia,
  Hawaii, and North America, would now be joined by hundreds of
  thousands, just as the expanding countries of the West had been send-
  ing overseas waves of merchants, settlers, and adventurers. The Japa-
  nese would dedicate themselves to the task of expansion, for only by
  doing so would they be counted among the world's great nations. In
  short, they would join them as an imperialist nation.
  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM, 1895-I912
  Imperialism, as we noted, characterized part of the external behavior
  of modern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  42 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 44.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  It expressed the energies, orientations, and interests of a modern state
  at that particular period, but not necessarily of modern capitalism at a
  certain stage of development. Obviously, Japanese capitalism and in-
  dustrialization were just getting under way when war with China
  came, and it would be impossible to treat them as sources for Japanese
  imperialism in the way that one might treat the subject for more
  mature capitalist countries. Industrial and finance capitalism, rather,
  should be viewed as one ingredient in a modern state, but not always
  the most predominant factor. It was the state that undertook the
  overseas expansion. And the key to this phenomenon was the coales-
  cence of domestic forces toward both the creation of centralized author-
  ity and the generation of mass society. Imperialism affirmed and fur-
  ther strengthened these trends. Japan was no exception. It undertook
  military action in Korea and sought to entrench its power on the
  continent of Asia because it was politically and militarily equipped to
  do so and because national opinion firmly supported such action. The
  war and its aftermath, in turn, strengthened the centralizing tenden-
  cies of the polity, contributed to industrialization, and militarized
  society. As in other modern nations, however, these developments in
  turn created new divisions and tensions among segments of the popula-
  tion. Although external expansion never ceased to be a driving objec-
  tive of both state and society, this did not prevent a rift between the
  two about the mode of expansion and about the ways in which the
  benefits of expansion might be distributed. Like Europeans and
  Americans, the Japanese began to recognize the burden as well as the
  glory of empire; although all partook of the latter, the burden was
  unevenly shared, giving rise, at least in the minds of some, to ques-
  tions about the inequities of the modern Japanese empire. The years
  after the Sino-Japanese War, then, may be seen as a period in which
  imperialism came to occupy a central position in the politics, econ-
  omy, and culture of the Japanese state and in which tensions as well as
  convergence characterized national opinion.
  Victories on land and sea caused Japanese politicians, publicists,
  and citizens to dream of empire, just as a war three years later would
  drive the American people in the same way. Empire connoted prestige
  and power and also fitted into the vision of implanting Japanese inter-
  ests and influence extensively abroad. But specific questions had to be
  raised about the immediate goals of expansion. Expulsion of Chinese
  power from Korea - the so-called independence of Korea - no longer
  satisfied the expansionist urge. Both government and people assumed,
  after all the victories, that the nation deserved more. The army
  thought a foothold in the Liaotung peninsula indispensable for defend-
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
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  ing the now enlarged concept of national defense; the navy looked
  southward to Taiwan; the political parties insisted that Japan should
  aim at obtaining these and more, including some provinces in China
  proper; and the country's press generally took the view that the war
  was but an opening chapter in Japan's new status as an empire.^ The
  final terms of peace that the Japanese delegation, headed by ltd, pre-
  sented to Li Hung-chang at Shimonoseki in April 1895 reflected such
  optimism and ambitions. China was to recognize that Korea was an
  independent state, cede the Liaotung peninsula and Taiwan to Japan,
  pay Japan an indemnity of 200 million taels (about ¥300 million) in
  seven years, open up four treaty ports, grant Japan most-favored-
  nation status as well as the right to navigate the Yangtze River, and
  give the Japanese the right to engage in manufacturing in China.
  These terms, which the Chinese had no choice but to accept, albeit
  reluctantly and after prolonged negotiations, represented the view, as
  ltd told Li, that a "victor is of course entitled to claim any place he
  likes" for territorial cession and that if the Chinese refused them,
  Japan would continue the war and claim even more.** Fundamentally,
  Japan's peace terms expressed the country's perceived requirements as
  a major power. The securing of the "lines of interest," overseas territo-
  rial acquisitions, equal status with the Western powers in China, eco-
  nomic rights on the continent, and an indemnity payment to enable
  Japan to continue with its industrialization program - these were con-
  sidered to be indispensable to the nation if it were to make good its
  pretensions as a power. Domestically, too, these cessions would appeal
  to the people's expansive sentiment, unite opinion and stifle opposi-
  tion, and justify additional military expenditures. The war and the
  resulting peace, publicists never tired of asserting, established Japan's
  reputation as a great power, and the Japanese would gain the respect
  that they had coveted so long from Europeans and Americans.
  Subsequent developments showed that the Japanese did gain such a
  reputation and respect but that these did not end their problems. If
  anything, they created complications in Japan's external affairs, which
  in turn deepened cleavages at home. As was the case in the West,
  imperialism, considered a prerequisite for modern states, threatened
  to undermine domestic order by generating expectations that could
  not always be fulfilled, by increasing governmental expenditures that
  had to be financed through taxation, by strengthening the bureaucracy
  43 Ibid., p. 46; Sumiya,DaiNihon, p. 36.
  44 Morinosuke Kajima, The Diplomacy of Japan, 1894-1922 (Tokyo: Kajima Institute of Inter-
  national Peace, 1976), vol. I, pp. 235-41.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  and the armed forces in defense of empire, and, most fundamentally,
  by creating new issues of national and personal identity. In Europe
  these problems and tensions provided an environment in which the
  modern imperialist states dealt with their external and internal affairs
  and which ultimately produced a calamitous war among them. At the
  same time, serious efforts were made to prevent war through such
  means as armament reduction, arbitration treaties, pacifism, various
  types of internationalist organizations, and the fostering of economic
  interdependence. This last was considered particularly crucial if inter-
  national affairs were to reduce tension in the world and within each
  society. Although economic interdependence would not develop as the
  guiding concept of capitalist international relations until after the
  World War, it began to be presented as an alternative to imperialism at
  the turn of the century. According to its theorists, such as John A.
  Hobson, Andrew Carnegie, Norman Angell, and others, imperialism
  was not a necessary condition or an inevitable phase of modern capital-
  ism; it was, rather, a perversion. Modern states, they insisted, could
  maintain amicable relations externally and stable order domestically
  by engaging in peaceful pursuits of business activities. Other analysts
  disagreed, asserting that modern capitalism inevitably led to imperial-
  ism and that imperialism produced war abroad and class tensions at
  home, both leading to revolutionary upheavals until noncapitalist,
  nonimperialistic societies emerged to ensure world peace.
  These and other kinds of debate on the nature of modern capitalism
  and imperialism were taken seriously by the Japanese, now that they,
  too, had joined the ranks of imperialists. They would participate in the
  drama of imperialist politics and contribute to the debate. Like West-
  erners, they had to consider how domestic stability could be preserved
  while they undertook overseas expansion and whether such expansion
  would lead to increased international tensions and war of to greater
  harmony and interdependence among nations.
  There was no easy answer. Immediately after signing the Shi-
  monoseki treaty, Japan's confidence and optimism were jolted when
  Russia, France, and Germany presented their "friendly counsel" that
  Japan retrocede the just-obtained Liaotung peninsula to China. The
  tripartite intervention expressed the powers' alarm at the quick tempo
  of Japanese expansionism and their determination to preserve as much
  of China as possible for their own exploitation. There was little un-
  usual about such maneuvers, but the intervention made an indelible
  impression on Japanese minds that imperialist politics was ruthless
  and kept nations in a perpetual state of potential conflict. This was a
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
  769
  confirmation of earlier views about the ambitiousness of the West, but
  it showed the Japanese that their achievement of great-power status
  had not changed the situation. All that happened was that Japan was
  now in a position to play the same game. Thus instead of giving up
  their dream of Asian empire, they took this incident as a merely
  temporary setback, determined that once opportunity presented itself,
  they would regain the foothold. In this sense their imperialism led to
  further imperialism and, because war would be inevitable in the pro-
  cess, armament and militarization. Likewise, there was also trouble in
  the other territorial acquisition, Taiwan. Although no power disputed
  its transfer to Japan, the Chinese and native Taiwanese on the island
  put up a fierce struggle against its incorporation into the Japanese
  empire without their consent. Hoping that the tripartite intervention
  in Manchuria could be extended to Taiwan, they resisted the Japanese
  army of occupation, numbering 60,000 troops. In the end the uprising
  was suppressed, but only after causing 4,600 deaths among the Japa-
  nese through fighting and tropical diseases.45 Still, few Japanese
  thought they should give up the island as unworthy of the effort. Huge
  expenditures to suppress the uprising could be justified only by main-
  taining it under colonial rule. Further expenses would be forthcoming
  to establish a system of administration for law and order, education,
  and the health of the island's population.
  Nor did Korea's alleged independence end all the problems on the
  peninsula. "Independence" amounted, in Japan's conception, to replac-
  ing Chinese with Japanese influence, and steps were taken to "reform"
  the Korean government and military administration by introducing to
  the country the kinds of measures that Meiji Japan itself had under-
  taken in the late 1860s. These measures provoked Korean resistance,
  and many, including the Taewongun and Queen Min, sought to under-
  mine Japan's influence by turning to foreign powers, particularly Rus-
  sia, the very country that the Japanese blamed for initiating the tripar-
  tite intervention in Manchuria. In October 1895, Japanese authorities
  in Seoul staged a coup to eliminate supporters of Queen Min and pro-
  Russian forces. The attempt ended up in the murder of the queen but
  not much else, and it produced fierce anti-Japanese agitation through-
  out Korea. Russian influence increased further. Thus, even Korean
  "independence," the initial aim of Japanese policy that had led to the
  war with China, could no longer be taken for granted.
  45 On the Taiwanese resistance movement, see Hsu Shih-k'ai, Nihon tochika no Taiwan (Tokyo:
  Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1972); and Hung Chao-t'ang, Taiwan minshukoku no kenkyu
  (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1970).
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  Yet despite all these frustrations, the Japanese were determined to
  push ahead with their imperialism, rather than abandoning it as too
  frustrating and hopelessly complicated. The Diet obligingly passed
  one military expansion bill after another, budgetary allocations for
  armed forces increasing from ¥24 million before the war to ¥73
  million in 1896 and ¥110 million in 1897. The political parties sup-
  ported these increases as a matter of course, for they all accepted
  imperialism as a necessary and desirable attribute of the Japanese
  state. If Westerners seemed interested in pushing the Japanese out of
  Manchuria and if the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans appeared hos-
  tile to their schemes, they would respond by affirming, rather than
  retreating from, their imperialism. Again, this was the standard re-
  sponse of the imperialist powers at that time. The costs were enor-
  mous, but it was generally believed that in domestic political terms,
  the cost of retreat and retrenchment would be even more devastating.
  Moreover, if the advanced capitalist countries of the West were hold-
  ing onto their imperial and colonial domains despite their obvious
  expense, it seemed even more imperative for Japan to do likewise, for
  otherwise the Western powers would further extend their control and
  grow even more powerful. It would then be too late, and far too
  expensive, to undertake Japan's own expansion. Such appeared to be
  the case when, starting in 1897, the European nations obtained bases,
  leaseholds, and concessions in China, so that within a year the whole
  of China had been divided into their spheres of influence. Although it
  was far from clear what specifically Japan would gain by acting like-
  wise and although Japanese capital for building railways and develop-
  ing mines in China was meager, Tokyo did not hesitate to join the
  scramble for concessions, successfully inducing the Chinese to con-
  sider Fukien Province, opposite Taiwan, Japan's sphere of influence
  where the Japanese would have prior rights.
  There was general approval of such acts in part because they took
  place simultaneously with industrialization which, in turn, was consid-
  ered one of the keys to modern states. Industrial production, primarily
  of cotton and silk textiles but also including iron and steel, grew
  rapidly after the Sino-Japanese War, more than doubling in volume
  between 1895 and 1900. Some of this would have taken place even if
  the war and the resulting colonization had not taken place. But part of
  the industrial revolution was undoubtably linked to these external
  affairs. For instance, cotton textile exports, surpassing imports for the
  first time in 1897; were tremendously aided by the opening of more
  treaty ports in China as a consequence of the war and by an optimism
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
  TJI
  prevailing among industrialists at the time in investing capital in ma-
  chinery. The iron and steel industry, for its part, was a clear response
  to the needs of the armed forces. The Yawata Iron Works, created by
  an act of the Diet in 1895, was a typical example. It began producing
  iron by 1901, the first successful development in heavy industry in
  Japan. Likewise, the shipbuilding industry was given impetus by na-
  val construction, the government subsidizing shipyards to construct
  merchant ships to be used in the expanding opportunities of Korea
  and China.46
  Imperialism, then, coincided with rapid industrialization, confirm-
  ing the prevailing view that all these, as well as great-power status,
  were part of a single historical development. The Japanese state, it
  appeared, was now a bona fide member of the community of modern,
  industrial, great powers. The Asahi newspaper echoed this view when
  it asserted that imperialism was an expression of basic national energy
  made manifest through the organization of the state. Just as other
  countries had their dissenters from such a perception, however, in
  Japan too there existed currents of thought that questioned this equa-
  tion's alleged inevitability. One strain, comparable to some of the
  antiimperialist views in the West, was the theme of peaceful expan-
  sion, as opposed to militarism and imperialism. Perhaps the most
  influential writer in this vein at the turn of the century was Kotoku
  Shusui, who published Niju seiki no kaibutsu teikokushugi (Imperial-
  ism, the monster of the twentieth century) in 1901. In it he castigated
  patriotism, militarism, and imperialism as a waste of national re-
  sources that brought nothing but suffering to the people. He was not,
  he wrote, opposed to peaceful economic expansion through trade,
  production, and the spread of civilization. Another influential writer,
  Ukita Kazutami, did not condemn imperialism so harshly, arguing
  that the nation had no choice but to practice it if it were to maintain its
  independence and participate actively in world politics and civiliza-
  tion. At the same time, however, Ukita echoed Kotoku's stress on
  peaceful expansion, asserting that "peaceful, economic, and commer-
  cial" expansion in Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Western Hemi-
  sphere was as crucial to the national well-being as was more frankly
  militaristic control over Korea and Taiwan.47 Both writers, and numer-
  ous others who shared their views, assumed it would be possible to
  engage in less militaristic, more peaceful overseas expansion. They did
  not consider imperialism inevitable, but at the same time they took it
  46 Sumiya, Dai Nihon, pp. 61-75. 
  47 Wye, Pacific Estrangement, pp. 78-80.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  for granted that the country would continue to industrialize, expand
  its trade, and raise the people's level of education and well-being by
  means of peaceful activities overseas. They were echoing the strain of
  thinking in the West that eventually created an outlook known as
  liberal internationalism.
  Although this strain identified itself with comparable developments
  in the West, another strand of dissent took a more particularistic,
  Asianist stand. Asianism, as noted earlier, had tended to be sporadically
  mouthed by those who were impatient with the government's foreign
  policy. After 1895 the situation changed, with the Japanese having
  established themselves above other Asian peoples. This imperialism,
  however, did not altogether stifle Asianist activities. If anything, it
  encouraged the growth of Pan-Asianist ideology and organized move-
  ments for a number of reasons. First, there was a psychological need to
  justify Japan's seizure of Taiwan or establishment of spheres of influ-
  ence in China, not merely as something the nation had to do to emulate
  Western imperialists or to defend its "lines of interest," but also as a way
  to awaken and reform Asians by providing them with law and order and
  introducing them to the benefits of modern civilization. Japan had an
  obligation to do so as the only modernized country of Asia. Even though
  Japan had now joined the ranks of the great powers, some felt that it
  remained, and should remain, an Asian power, as Asia was where Japan
  lay geographically and historically. Japan, therefore, had a special mis-
  sion to perform in this region. This type of thinking produced a cultural
  and philosophical Pan-Asianism best exemplified by Okakura Tenshin
  who asserted in 1902 that "Asia is one." All countries and peoples east of
  the Suez seemed to be united in certain fundamental principles, as
  opposed to those in the West. This view could be used to rationalize the
  idea that 'Jie aim of Japanese imperialism was to reunite all of Asia
  against Western imperialism. Although no such sweeping view would
  be advocated until the 1930s, the concept of Asian uniqueness was
  sufficiently influential for it to give rise to a number of movements and
  organizations. Among the most powerful was the Toa Dobun Shoin
  (East Asian common cultural association), founded by Konoe Atsu-
  maro in 1898 and dedicated to the cooperation of the Chinese and
  Japanese. The two peoples, Konoe asserted, were destined to work
  together for the regeneration of Asia. There were, in addition, many
  smaller organizations and societies with similar objectives. They were
  carryovers from the earlier activities by the shishi, but they now found
  their spheres of action much enlarged and better protected because of
  the expansion of Japanese control over the continent. Some of them,
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
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  like Miyazaki Torazo, were interested in assisting Chinese revolutionar-
  ies, whereas others helped the constitutionalists like Liang Ch'i-ch'ao.
  There were many underground networks of personal ties between Chi-
  nese and Japanese, all imbued with the idea that the two peoples shared
  a common destiny. In all such movements, it was an article of faith that
  Japan must not be satisfied with great-power status but must do some-
  thing to give meaning to its national existence.48
  Japanese foreign affairs after the turn of the century, then, may be
  examined in terms of these various developments. Imperialism de-
  fined the basic framework, and it had a history of its own, but inter-
  locked with it were other themes such as peaceful expansion and Pan-
  Asianism which, too, affected official policy and popular perceptions.
  All these, moreover, must be seen against the background of domestic
  political and economic developments. The Meiji state was, by 1900,
  over thirty years old, and few thought it possible to challenge its
  legitimacy. The only direct threat came in 1910, when Kotoku, now
  an anarchist after having spent a few years in the United States, plot-
  ted to assassinate the emperor.49 But the state was too powerful to be
  destroyed by isolated violence. More important was the way in which
  state authority would be restrained by the maturing of the political
  parties and the growing self-assertiveness of the Diet. Moreover, as
  Japanese capitalism continued to make strides, giving rise to financial
  combines (zaibatsu) at one level and to the socialist movement at
  another, it remained to be seen whether the modern Japanese state
  would be able to accommodate these economic and social develop-
  ments and what new definition of domestic order and stability might
  emerge. Japanese imperialism both affected and was affected by the
  outcome of such questioning.
  The diplomacy of imperialism, that is, the interrelationship among
  the powers, fully incorporated Japan, and Japanese action in Asia
  played a crucial role in its evolution after the turn of the century.
  Nothing better illustrates this than the signing of the Anglo-Japanese
  alliance in 1902. A product of careful deliberations and cumbersome
  negotiations which historians have minutely described,*0 the alliance
  finally recognized Japan's status as a major power. In 1900-1, Japan
  48 Marius B. Jansen, Japan and China: From War to Peace, 1894-1972 (Chicago: Rand Mc-
  Nally, 1975), pp. 137-8, 162-4; and Miyazaki Toten, My Thirty-Three Years' Dream, trans.
  Eto Shinkichi and Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).
  49 See F. G. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge, England:
  Cambridge University Press, 1971).
  50 Ian Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: The Diplomacy of Ttao Island Empires 1894-1907
  (London: Athlone, 1966).
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  participated in the international expedition to China to fight against
  the Boxers and in the subsequent conference with the Ch'ing authori-
  ties to restore order. Whether one interprets the Boxer uprising as a
  manifestation of Chinese nationalism or of more traditional antiforeign-
  ism, there is little doubt that Japan played a role as a protector of
  Western interests in China, dispatching as many as ten thousand sol-
  diers, about the same number as the troops sent by all the Western
  powers combined. The Japanese were rewarded by being invited to
  the peace conference, the first time that Japan attended an interna-
  tional conference as a full-fledged member. After 1901 Japan became
  one of the "Boxer protocol powers," with the right to station troops in
  the Peking-Tientsin region. Its newly won status made the country a
  factor in power politics among nations, with Britain willing to allot
  Japan a role as its principal partner in Asia, and Russia sought to
  counter the trend by entrenching itself in Manchuria. But the impact
  of the Anglo-Japanese alliance was not confined to Asia. Although the
  subsequent chain reaction was but dimly foreseen in 1902, it is possi-
  ble to link it to the great war of 1914. For the alliance had the effect of
  forcing France closer to Britain, as the French, allied with Russia after
  1894, feared an involvement with the British on account of the
  Japanese-Russian rivalry in Asia. The British-French entente of 1904,
  mutually recognizing their spheres of influence in Egypt and Mo-
  rocco, was a harbinger of further strengthened ties between the two
  powers that eventually came to include strategic coordination against
  Germany. Russia, in the meantime, moved steadily closer to Britain,
  forming its own entente with the latter in 1907 over colonial questions.
  Because the world war of 1914 pitted the entente powers (Britain,
  France, and Russia) against Germany and its allies (Austria and Italy),
  its origins, as far as the power-political aspect was concerned, went
  back to the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance which, in turn,
  was a response to the rise of Japan as an imperialist power.
  There is little doubt that the Japanese welcomed the British alliance
  as an added confirmation of their status in the world. But the alliance
  was by no means the only alternative open to them. Some of their
  leaders, such as Ito, favored a Russian alliance to settle the dispute
  over Korea. Because it had been Russian influence that had been
  ascendant in Korea after 1895, and Russia that had seized the Liao-
  tung peninsula in 1898, they argued that only through some under-
  standing with that power would Japan be able to attain its objective,
  which was defined in a cabinet decision of 1903 as the "securing of
  national defense through the protection of Korean independence."
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
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  What Japan sought was the powers' recognition of its special interests
  in Korea and, as a longer-range goal, elsewhere in China. The Rus-
  sians' recognition of Japan's special interests would have been just as
  acceptable as a British alliance, but in the end Tokyo's officials judged
  that more would be gained through the latter option. What is striking
  was the assumption by the Japanese that this sort of imperialist collu-
  sion and understanding was the best means for protecting their rights.
  They were confident that the major powers would seriously consider a
  Japanese alliance. They were not disappointed, and after 1902 impe-
  rialist Japan established itself as a key factor in world politics.
  In that situation, it might have been possible to arrive at some
  understanding with Russia so that the latter would recognize Japan's
  special position in Korea, in return for Japanese acquiescence to Rus-
  sian interests in Manchuria. An "exchange" of Manchuria for Korea
  would have been in accordance with the imperialist practices of the
  day. Despite protracted negotiations between the two countries, how-
  ever, Tokyo and St. Petersburg were unable to come to terms, thus
  convincing the Japanese that their position in Korea would be vulnera-
  ble so long as Russian influence remained predominant in southern
  Manchuria. Even so, it might have been possible to continue talks in
  the hope that domestic conditions in Russia, China, or Korea or the
  international situation might change in such a way as to induce the
  Russians to loosen their grip on Manchuria. Certainly, there was no
  optimism that a war with Russia could be won or that Japan was
  economically prepared to finance it.
  The decision for war, made by the cabinet in early February 1904,
  can be understood only in the domestic context. The Russian presence
  in Manchuria was reported in sensational fashion by the press and
  helped create the impression that the czarist regime would persist in
  its intransigence unless Japan showed its determination to use force.
  Political parties, publicists, and intellectuals organized prowar move-
  ments and put pressure on the government. Their argument was that
  the struggle between the two powers in Korea would not end until one
  of them retreated; because it was unthinkable for Japan to do so, it
  must be prepared to use force to reduce Russian power. As seven
  Tokyo Imperial University professors asserted in a memorial that they
  presented to Prime Minister Katsura Taro in June 1903, "a fundamen-
  tal settlement" of the Manchurian problem was needed if Japan were
  to secure its position in Korea. They were supported by middle-
  echelon officials in the Foreign Ministry and the service ministries,
  who were convinced that Japan should strike before it was too late.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  Their argument could easily have been countered on practical and
  theoretical grounds, but it is suggestive that the only organized move-
  ment against the war was carried out by some socialists, several of
  Christian persuasion: men like Kotoku Shusui, Sakai Toshihiko, and
  Uchimura Kanzo. Socialism in a country that was just beginning to
  industrialize could not boast the authority and history that its counter-
  part in Europe did, but it nevertheless suggested an alternative to the
  definition of the modern state as an imperialist that was taken for
  granted by the supporters of an assertive policy toward Russia. Japa-
  nese socialists called for arms reduction and racial equality and con-
  demned chauvinism and war as serving only the interests of the aristoc-
  racy and the military but not the welfare of the people. Although
  recognizing that the majority of the people appeared to be clamoring
  for war, the socialists, who published their views in their organ,
  Heimin shimbun (People's daily), opposed it as unjust and wasteful of
  resources. In a famous editorial written shortly after the declaration of
  war, they appealed to the Russian people to join forces with the Japa-
  nese to condemn the two governments' imperialistic ambitions that
  had led to war. "Patriotism and militarism are our common foes," the
  editorial asserted, expressing a clearly alternative view of modern
  states and interstate relations.
  The enormous clamor for war revealed that such ideas were not
  widespread in Japan at that time. Patriotism, militarism, and imperial-
  ism were accepted as necessary conditions for the existence of the
  nation. If successfully waged, war would further enhance Japan's pres-
  tige and standing among the community of great powers. And even if
  unsuccessful, as many leaders feared, the war would have shown that
  the Japanese would fight for their "self-defense" and "rights" rather
  than meekly submit to Russian pressure and reduce themselves to the
  status of a second-rate nation. It was such a sentiment rather than
  specific gains that drove Japan's leaders and people to war with mighty
  Russia.51 This, of course, does not make the Russo-Japanese War any
  less imperialistic. It was quintessential^ an imperialistic war, fought
  between two powers over issues outside their national boundaries, at
  the expense of the Koreans and Chinese who had no say in the matter.
  But it was not a product of economic interests in any immediate sense.
  Japan was so poor financially that it had to borrow over ¥100 million
  in London and New York, an amount that accounted for more than
  Si The best recent treatment of war jingoism prior to the Russo-Japanese War is in Sakeda,
  Kindai Nihon, chap. 4. The most authoritative account of the coming of war is by Ian Nish,
  The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War (London: Longman Group, 1985).
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
  777
  one-third of the total cost of the war, whereas Russia relied on the
  financial markets of Paris. Japanese trade with Korea was extensive, to
  be sure, but that alone was not the cause of the difficulties with
  Russia. Japan's economic interests in Manchuria were not negligible,
  but they hardly comprised a substantial portion of the country's total
  trade. There was as yet no significant investment overseas. The war
  was not produced by economic pressures but by the sentiment inside
  and outside the government that it was the only alternative if the
  country were to remain a viable entity as a modern power. *2
  At first it appeared as if this judgment were a correct one. Not only
  did the country's armed forces achieve impressive military victories,
  but it also succeeded in raising loans abroad. Its prestige rose as never
  before, and the people once again showed unity and cooperation in
  executing the war. Patriotism, militarism, and imperialism were re-
  affirmed, and they in turn contributed to strengthening the Japanese
  state. At the peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the
  Japanese gained the southern half of Sakhalin as well as most of the
  rights that the Russians had enjoyed in southern Manchuria, including
  the ports of Dalny (Dairen) and Port Arthur and the branch of the
  Chinese-Eastern Railway between Changchun and Dairen. Moreover,
  before the end of the war Japan took the unilateral step in Korea to
  turn it into a protectorate. Not one outside power protested this or the
  peace settlement. Having consolidated its hold on Korea, extended its
  sway over south Manchuria, acquired the southern half of Sakhalin,
  and destroyed the Russian fleet, Japan had, by late 1905, emerged
  undisputably as a major power, even the key power in Asia. That was
  the moment of glory the Japanese had dreamed of since the humiliat-
  ing days half a century earlier.
  The glory, however, did not end the quest for great-power status
  abroad and social order at home that would be commensurate with
  each other. If anything, a new search began almost instantaneously
  after the end of the war, a search that in many ways would continue for
  several more decades. It was symbolic of the uncertain situation that
  the signing of the Portsmouth treaty should have been the occasion not
  for jubilation and thanksgiving but for mob attacks on police stations
  and official residences in Tokyo. The public, whose expectations had
  been raised by military successes and whose patriotic fervor had added
  fuel to insular arrogance, expressed their anger at what they viewed as
  meager fruits of victory. They thought they deserved more than was
  52 For a discussion of the economic aspect of the war, see Shimomura Fujio, "Nichi-Ro senso no
  seikaku," Kokusai seiji 3 (1957): 137-52.
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  778 
  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  obtained at the peace conference and blamed this on the government
  and the United States, who had mediated between the two combat-
  ants. It was as if domestic order was unraveling at the very moment
  when it should have been solidified.« The state of confusion at the
  moment of glory was well described by the novelist Tokutomi Roka,
  who had initially joined his countrymen in calling for a punitive war
  against Russia but later, before the end of the conflict, turned to
  pacifism. In a memorable essay written soon afterwards, Roka as-
  serted that Japan's "joining the great powers" had done little to ensure
  its security or economic interests. These were still dependent on the
  armed forces, alliances with other powers, and colonial products.
  Moreover, Japanese victory had aroused the fears of other nations
  which would try to cope with the new development by augmenting
  their own military forces. There was also a danger of racial antago-
  nism. Because Japan was the only nonwhite power, its victory might
  embolden colored races throughout the world and, by the same token,
  antagonize the white peoples. This would surely lead to a racial con-
  flict. All these problems indicated, he wrote, that the victory over
  Russia was a hollow one; it was a victory filled with "melancholy."
  The only solution, according to him, was to end Japan's reliance on
  military force and to transform the country into one devoted to peace
  and justice. 54
  Few accepted Roka's pacifism and idealism, but many shared his
  diagnosis. It is one of the ironies of modern Japanese diplomatic his-
  tory that at the very moment when the country had gained recognition
  as a formidable power, its sense of isolation, insecurity, and lack of
  direction were also enhanced. As Ito wrote in 1907, Japan had never
  been so isolated in the world.55 Although in 1905 the British alliance
  had been renewed and in 1907 a new entente was signed with Russia
  for maintaining the postwar status quo in Asia, the country was faced
  with many other problems. The United States, the country that in the
  late 1890s had expanded into Asia and the Pacific simultaneously with
  Japan, now posed a challenge because of its naval expansion, its opposi-
  tion to exclusive rights and interests in Manchuria, and, above all, its
  hostility toward Japanese immigrants. The immigration crisis arose as
  a result of the influx of Japanese into California after the turn of the
  century and particularly after the Russo-Japanese War. In Japanese
  perception the immigrants were to have been the spearhead of an
  expanding nation, a bridge between the two countries. But the Ameri-
  53 See Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York:
  . Columbia University Press, 1970).
  54 Akira Iriye, Nihon nogaiko (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1966), pp. 4-5. 
  55 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
  779
  cans rejected such expansionism and began talking of war on racial
  grounds. Britain, Japan's ally, sided with the United States on this
  issue. In the meantime, the Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians grew
  increasingly resentful of Japanese imperialism. Although some of
  them openly expressed their pleasure at Japan's defeating a Western
  power, they soon came to view Japanese imperialism as no less evil
  than the West's. If anything, the sense of injustice was all the greater
  as they viewed the Japanese as Asians who dared to copy Westerners
  in subjugating fellow Asians. A nationwide boycott of Japanese goods
  in China in 1908 and the assassination of ltd Hirobumi by a Korean
  nationalist in 1909 clearly revealed the kind of trouble that the Japa-
  nese now faced in Asia. If they were not accepted in America and were
  opposed in Asia, where and how could they expand?
  That Japan should continue to be an expanding nation was taken for
  granted by virtually all publicists. Even Tokutomi Roka supported it,
  but in his case expansion was to be primarily a moral movement, in
  which Japan took the lead in spreading "justice in the four seas." His
  brother, Soho, wrote that Japan's mission lay in promoting the har-
  mony of the white and yellow races as a way to leading mankind to a
  world of humanism. Less abstract were those like Ozaki Yukio and
  Kayahara Kazan who exhorted their readers to "venture out to all
  parts of the world" as emigrants and settlers.56 Then there were others
  who thought the time was opportune for undertaking a massive expan-
  sion of trade. "Just as England tremendously expanded its foreign
  trade after the victory over Napoleon," wrote Kaneko Kentaro, who
  had raised loans in the United States during the war, "so can Japan be
  expected to take advantage of the new situation to increase trade and
  promote national strength."s? Finally, the official policy of "postwar
  management" referred to extending Japanese influence in Korea and
  Manchuria politically and economically. As much as ¥200 million was
  provided as initial capital for the operation of the South Manchuria
  Railway and its feeder lines. With the railway as the artery in southern
  Manchuria, private business entered the scene and invested in coal
  mines, soybean exports, and the importation of textiles. In Korea, in
  the meantime, Japanese advisers instituted monetary and police re-
  forms; efforts were made to settle Japanese farmers by having crown
  lands distributed to them; and large numbers of poor merchants and
  56 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 100; and Akiya Iriye, "Kayahara Kazan and Japanese Cosmo-
  politanism," in A. M. Craig and D. H. Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History (Berke-
  ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 373-98.
  57 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 128.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  laborers from Japan sought quick riches by attaching themselves to
  the colonial establishment.
  The more the Japanese expanded, and the more they talked of further
  expansion, the greater appeared to be the obstacles in the way. Diplo-
  matic complications, naval rivalries, and racial disputes mounted.
  These were inevitable by-products of expansionism, but few were will-
  ing to question the premise that expansion was vital to the country's
  development as a modern state. Although the government tried in vain
  to cope with the mounting crises overseas, it also directed its attention to
  the domestic base of imperialism. It strengthened martial laws to cope
  with internal disorder, modernized its armed forces, and extended com-
  pulsory education from four to six years, with an emphasis on ethics.'8
  But the people were now more politically and socially aroused than
  before the war, and they were less willing to accept what was given
  them. Constitutionalism and industrialization, which had earlier pro-
  vided a focus for national energies, were no longer sufficient as objec-
  tives. It was not modernization but the future of a modern society that
  concerned the public. Patriotism, which had defined its mission as the
  making of a great power, proved incapable of providing new aims,
  wrote Ishikawa Takuboku, the poet.59 Prime Minister Katsura shared
  the sense of crisis and sought to cope with the situation by having the
  emperor issue a new rescript in 1908, calling on the people to cooperate
  with one another, avoid waste, and work hard. This was a stale pro-
  gram, hardly enough to provide a vision of ideal domestic order.
  Publicists fared little better. They all accepted the need for solidify-
  ing a domestic basis for overseas expansion and exhorted the people to
  continue to develop commerce and industry. But these were ineffec-
  tual ideas in the face of social unrest. Some leaders tried to define the
  nation's domestic goals by talking of the importance of "creating a new
  Japanese people," as the Social Education Association, organized in
  1906, proclaimed. The new people were to be "a great cosmopolitan
  people" oriented toward peace and humanism. By molding themselves
  into such a people, they would contribute to both internal and interna-
  tional peace. The association typified these postwar concerns by stress-
  ing education and social harmony as means for avoiding a serious crisis
  in Japan's domestic and foreign affairs. These were to be made symbi-
  otic so that domestic order would approximate, as well as contribute
  to, international order. As Takada Sanae, a famous economist and a
  founder of the association, remarked, the Japanese must cultivate "a
  58 The best recent treatment of postwar state control is by Oe Shinobu, Nichi-Ro senso no
  gunjishiteki kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976). 
  59 Sumiya, Dai' Nihon, p. 344.
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  IMPERIALISM AND MILITARISM 
  781
  talent for engaging in worldwide activities through harmonizing inter-
  national and national tendencies."60 This was a plausible argument,
  anticipating the internationalism of the 1920s. But it had little specific
  to offer for coping with domestic problems. Education, designed to
  make the Japanese more cosmopolitan and tolerant, was about the
  only specific program that Takada and others like him could propose.
  Even then, there was no assurance that a more educated populace
  might not begin to question the basic premises of the Japanese state or
  that the intellectuals might not turn inward, aloof from the mundane
  concerns of society. In the meantime, cosmopolitanism was not yet
  effective enough to enable the nation to understand, let alone cope
  with, the issues of racial prejudice in the West or of antiimperialist
  movements in Asia - the twin challenge that was to baffle the Japa-
  nese for many more decades.
  The Meiji era ended in uncertainty, in both its external relations
  and its internal affairs. The last years of the Meiji emperor (1910-12)
  saw the formal annexation of Korea as a colony, another renewal of the
  British alliance, and the signing of commercial treaties with the United
  States and Britain, providing for Japan's tariff autonomy for the first
  time. These were achievements in line with the country's great-power
  status. The period also coincided with revolutionary movements
  within China, culminating in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in
  1912, and nationalistic upheavals in the Balkans that threatened the
  stability of empires in Europe and the Middle East. Unbeknownst to
  all but a handful of the most prescient, the great powers were fast
  sliding into a state of confrontation from which there could be no
  escape but war. All that the Western states, and Japan, had accom-
  plished in the preceding half-century would go up in smoke in a fierce
  struggle for no other cause than power, prestige, and patriotism. The
  Great War was a failure of the modern states to define a viable world
  order, and it also demonstrated how fiercely and blindly the central
  authorities and the people in these states would concentrate their re-
  sources in order to destroy one another.
  Japan was spared much of this destruction. Instead, it even took
  advantage of the European conflict to extend its hold on the Asian
  continent. By so doing, it ran headlong into antiimperialism in China
  and Korea, a clear manifestation of mass nationalism that became the
  basis for their own eventual emergence as modern states. In the mean-
  time, the Japanese people began to question the national objectives
  60 Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, p. 127.
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  JAPAN'S DRIVE TO GREAT-POWER STATUS
  and domestic arrangements that had been defined for them as part of
  the nation's growth as a modern state. They stressed other themes and
  looked for an alternative order at home. In so doing, they created a
  cleavage in their midst, between those oriented toward change and
  those entrenched in the existing order. The struggle did not end until
  after another major war.
  Japan's drive to great-power status during the Meiji era, then, was
  one device by which the nation's leaders sought to establish a connec-
  tion between domestic and external relations. Political and economic
  change at home, and the assertion of power and influence abroad,
  reinforced each other so that within forty-odd years after the Meiji
  Restoration, the nation was a modern state and an imperialist power.
  Like other countries, the Japanese accepted the two as interdepen-
  dent, as two sides of the same coin. Only a small number questioned
  the equation, and the majority of Japan's leaders and public opinion
  assumed that all viable modern states were also imperialist. It would
  be left to a future generation to recognize that this was not necessarily
  so and that the nation need not be militaristic or imperialistic in order
  to undertake domestic modernization.
  Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
  
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