Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (2 page)

It may be that the biographers, whether or not they are willing to admit it even to themselves, have reached the frustrating conclusion that the personality of Emperor Meiji had no greater depth or complexity than the pieces of paper printed with his portrait, the conventionalized image of a monarch before which his subjects bowed in reverence without ever wondering what might lie beneath the surface. In order to illustrate their contention that Meiji had a “human” side, biographers often relate anecdotes suggesting that underneath his impassivity he felt great affection for his consort or that he thought constantly of his people or that he possessed a wonderful sense of humor; but such anecdotes are seldom memorable or even believable. Debunking critics of more recent times tend to portray Meiji either as a cipher who was incapable of performing the acts attributed to him or, conversely, as a ruthless tyrant whose actions betrayed his indifference to the welfare of his subjects. They are probably equally mistaken, and their efforts only deepen the mystery of Meiji’s abiding fame and the immense number of his worshipers.

Unlike Queen Victoria, his near contemporary, Meiji kept no diary and wrote virtually no letters. Meiji’s father, Emperor K
ō
mei, left many letters, most of them filled with the passionate anger that developments in the world had aroused in him; but the rare surviving letters of Meiji are without interest. Apart from his signatures on state documents, hardly anything in his handwriting survives.
⁴
There are very few photographs, perhaps no more than three or four altogether, although many less exalted Japanese of his day were frequently photographed. The portrait paintings made both while he was alive and after his death, whether showing him inspecting a silver mine or presiding over a conference on drafting a constitution, were effigies not meant to be literally accurate, the work of artists who had probably never had so much as a glimpse of Meiji’s face.
⁵

One way of knowing Meiji, apart from the official records and the unofficial, sometimes untrustworthy, reminiscences of his chamberlains, is by reading the poetry he composed. It is estimated that in his lifetime Meiji wrote more than 100,000 poems. Despite the conventional language and imagery that marks them all, they contain bits of autobiographical interest and suggest his feelings on various occasions; but the documents for which he is best known—the rescripts on the army and on education—were composed by other men, and it is difficult to find in their wording anything of Meiji’s personal beliefs.

The testimonies written after his death by people of the court who knew him are unsatisfying and sometimes mutually contradictory. One man recalls that Meiji was an unusually healthy and active boy, somewhat of a bully perhaps, a champion sumo wrestler in his youth. Another man, who knew him equally well, contends that as a child Meiji was delicate and prone to illness, testimony that makes one question accounts of his prowess at sumo. The story that Meiji fainted the first time he heard gunfire has been repeated by many biographers but denied by others. When faced with such contradictions, a modern reader tends to suspect the worst—that although Meiji as a boy was in fact sickly and timid, his biographers invented anecdotes that made him appear to have been a sturdy little son of Yamato. But can the man who many years earlier served as Meiji’s playmate have been lying when he recalled how regularly Meiji used to thrash him?
⁶

These contradictions are not confined to his boyhood: his intelligence, judiciousness, concern for his people, and other qualities befitting a sovereign have been questioned by recent scholars. To cite a minor example of such contradictions: Is it true that (as one chamberlain stated in his memoirs) Meiji not only received a dozen or more Japanese and foreign newspapers every day but examined them assiduously?
⁷
Or is it true (as another chamberlain claimed) that during the early part of his reign, Meiji read the headlines but later on did not even glance at a newspaper?
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There also are contradictions in his reported daily behavior that make it extremely difficult to decide what he was really like. If, as often mentioned, he was simple in his tastes and so reluctant to spend money on himself that his uniform was patched,
⁹
how does this square with his reported penchant for diamonds and French perfume?
¹⁰

It is difficult to feel that one knows Meiji even after plowing through the twelve volumes that record every day of his life. We know precisely when he set foot outside the Gosho for the first time, but what we really want to know is not the hour but the impression produced on him when he emerged from the walled enclosure that had been his entire world and (like Shakyamuni Buddha before him) saw, for the first time, poverty, illness, and death.

Those who knew him personally praised his fortitude, his evenhandedness, and other admirable qualities. Even if we accept their praise as literal truth, we would like to know how it happened that a prince, raised mainly by ignorant women and devoted to the traditional, elegant pastimes of the nobility rather than to the use of weapons, a descendant of many generations of monarchs who had never participated in warfare, is remembered above all as a soldier, a man rarely seen out of uniform?

When writing about Meiji, it is often difficult to keep one’s attention focused on the man himself because he was surrounded by officers of extraordinary ability and vividly contrasting personalities. Historians tend to discuss Meiji’s reign in terms of these men, leaving only a ceremonial role for the emperor in whose name their glorious achievements were performed. Yet surely it would be unfair to attribute Meiji’s extraordinary reputation solely to his having been, quite by chance, the emperor at a time of cataclysmic changes. In a more negative view, his youth and inexperience unquestionably helped the architects of the Restoration; one can easily imagine how their work would have been impeded at every stage if Meiji’s father, Emperor K
ō
mei (whose hatred of foreigners was implacable), had not providentially died at the early age of thirty-six. But Meiji was also capable of making important decisions even while he was young; for example, his intervention prevented the invasion of Korea advocated by Saig
ō
Takamori and a majority of the other ministers. On many later occasions, Meiji’s actions—notably his repeated tours of the country—helped create in his subjects an awareness of Japan as a unified, modern country. To label Meiji a mere cipher is as inappropriate as to dismiss Queen Victoria in the same terms.
¹¹

Meiji’s first name, Sachinomiya, or Prince Sachi, was given to him by his father a week after the infant’s birth. He was later known as Mutsuhito, the name that appears on documents he signed throughout his reign. Meiji, the name by which he is now normally known, was his posthumous designation; it was also the
neng
ō
, or reign-name, used in Japan instead of Western chronology. Until the adoption of “Meiji” as the name for Mutsuhito’s entire reign, the
neng
ō
was traditionally changed several times during the reign of a single emperor—at two fixed points in the cycle of sixty years, or when a series of natural disasters were attributed to an inauspicious
neng
ō
or when some prodigy of nature required recognition in the calendar. The name Meiji, meaning “enlightened rule,” was the
neng
ō
used for his reign from his first full year as a sovereign, 1868, until his death in 1912. It is now used also to characterize the whole of Japanese culture during a period of rapid and sometimes violent change.

I shall attempt in these pages to find Emperor Meiji, a man who was born in a country that for centuries had refused almost all contact with the West but who in his lifetime saw Japan transformed into not only a world power but also a member of the community of nations.

Chapter 1

There are two portraits of Emperor K
ō
mei (1831–1867). The first, often reproduced, shows him sitting on a raised tatami (the
gyokuza
, or jeweled seat), dressed in court costume and wearing the distinctive headgear of an emperor, a hat with a tall, projecting plume-like band. His oval face, turned somewhat to the right, is composed and utterly without expression, in the typical manner of formal court portraits. Nothing (except perhaps the angle of the plume) indicates that this portrait was painted in the nineteenth, rather than, say, the thirteenth century, and no attempt was made to suggest in the depiction of K
ō
mei’s features his long suffering during an unusually turbulent reign. Judging by this portrait, K
ō
mei differed little from his ancestors, the emperors of the previous 200 years, most of them figureheads who contributed little to the nation. During their lifetimes, their existence was unknown to most Japanese; today even their names have been forgotten. K
ō
mei, however, despite the blandness of his features in this portrait, is distinctly remembered.
¹

The second portrait creates quite a different impression. The face reveals a strong personality of which wrath seems to be the principal component. K
ō
mei was indeed angry throughout much of his life. His surviving letters and other documents make it plain that almost every development during his reign infuriated him, and his response to each was not merely anger but frustration over his inability to prevent the impending changes in the government and society.

K
ō
mei was born on July 23, 1831. His father was Emperor Nink
ō
, the
120
th emperor according to the official chronology. His mother was not the emperor’s consort but a
gon no tenji
, or lady of the bedchamber, the daughter of the nobleman
Ō
gimachi Sanemitsu. Officially, however, K
ō
mei was considered to be the empress’s own child. As the fourth son of Nink
ō
, he normally would not have succeeded to the throne, but all his elder brothers had died by the time he was born. The mortality rate among children of the imperial family at this time and even much later was astonishingly high. Of Nink
ō
’s fifteen children, only three lived past their third year; of K
ō
mei’s six children, only one (Meiji) survived him; and of Meiji’s fifteen children, only five lived to be adults.
²
It is not clear why the mortality rate should have been so much higher at the imperial court than among contemporary Japanese peasant families;
³
but it has been ascribed to various causes, such as excessively early marriage (the heir to the throne normally married by his sixteenth year), the backward state of medicine as practiced by the court physicians, and the unhealthy, gloomy atmosphere prevailing in the palace. Perhaps also—though this is rarely suggested—the extremely limited choice of women of the nobility as mothers of imperial children tended to promote inbreeding.

Especially after the beginning of the eighteenth century, emperors did not live long, although there were a few exceptions. Sakuramachi died at thirty; his successor, Momozono, at twenty-one; Go-Momozono, at twenty-one; Nink
ō
(K
ō
mei’s father), at forty-six; and K
ō
mei himself, at thirty-six. Accession to the throne was accordingly early: K
ō
mei’s grandfather, Emperor K
ō
kaku, ascended the throne at nine; his son, Nink
ō
, at seventeen; K
ō
mei, at fifteen; and his son, Meiji, also at fifteen. Under other circumstances, the accession of an inexperienced boy emperor might have created severe problems in the country’s administration, but in fact it hardly mattered to the Japanese state whether the emperor was a venerable exemplar of monarchical wisdom or a mere child; he took no part in the government, and his only public activities were the performance of prescribed rituals and ceremonies.
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The shogun did not have to ask the emperor’s advice when planning a course of action, and once he had made a decision, he did not seek the emperor’s consent. This situation would change with K
ō
mei.

K
ō
mei grew up in the Gosho, the area in the center of the city of Ky
ō
to (about 220 acres) where the buildings of the palace were situated and where most of the
kuge
(nobles) lived; this was the imperial family’s entire world. According to Higashikuze Michitomi (1833–1912), it was the policy of the shogunate to cloister the emperor as if he were some sort of living god removed from the world of mortals, and it was strictly forbidden to inform him of new or unusual happenings.
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Higashikuze, who was selected to be K
ō
mei’s playmate when he was ten years old, related in his old age everything he could remember about K
ō
mei’s boyhood, fearing that unless he set down his remembrances, the old traditions might be lost forever. His memory was extraordinary, extending to minute details of the many ceremonies he witnessed—exactly who was present, how they were dressed, what gifts were offered, and so on. Here is his account of a typical ceremony:

On the seventh day of the sixth month, his ninth birthday,
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there was the ceremony of “first reading.” It was not that the prince had never read anything before he was nine. He had in fact already read the
Classic of Filial Piety
and the
Great Learning
—Takatsukasa, the general of the left, was his tutor—and the ceremony was purely a formality. The prince sat at the middle level wearing an ordinary court costume, his sleeves held back by threefold purple cords and laced trousers with violet hexagonal patterns. The middle counselor Koga Takemichi brought forward a desk and placed it before the prince. Then Kiyohara Arikata of the third rank came forward and seated himself before the desk. He read the preface to the old text of the
Classic of Filial Piety
three times. The prince immediately afterward read through this text in the same way. Kiyohara of the third rank withdrew, and Koga, coming forward, removed the desk. The prince then withdrew to the inner quarters.
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