Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (39 page)

The emperor’s message was largely conventional in its phrasing, and it is unlikely he had any part in composing the text;
³
but it is clear that he expected to participate in whatever future decisions were made by the government. He would be present not only at meetings of his cabinet but at innumerable official functions, almost to the day of his death. Usually he did not say a word during the discussions at the meetings he attended, but his presence added enormously to their dignity and importance.

It did not take long for the festive New Year atmosphere to be harshly interrupted. On February 15 at about two in the afternoon, the
san’yo
Yokoi Sh
ō
nan was returning by palanquin from the court when, just as it passed Teramachi, several men suddenly began to fire pistols at the palanquin. Yokoi pushed open the door and, emerging from the conveyance, attempted to defend himself with his dirk, but he had been weakened by a recent illness and, powerless to resist, was killed on the spot. The assassins got away despite the efforts of Yokoi’s retainers and servants.

When word of the assassination reached the emperor’s ears, he was extremely perturbed. He immediately sent a court attendant to Yokoi’s lodgings to ascertain what had happened. The emperor presented the retainers and servants who had been wounded in the attack with 400
ry
ō
for medical treatment. The next day he directed the Kumamoto daimyo Hosokawa Yoshikuni to see to it that Yokoi was buried with suitable honors, and he himself contributed 300
ry
ō
for the expenses. These immediate, warmhearted reactions are memorable if only because they contrast sharply with his impassivity in later years when men, even those closer to himself than Yokoi, were assassinated. His youth may account for the spontaneous concern he displayed at this time. Later, as his concept of the appropriate behavior for a monarch developed, such spontaneity tended to be replaced by a detachment that seldom permitted him to display personal feelings.

Yokoi Sh
ō
nan’s assassins were eventually found on Mount K
ō
ya after a widespread search and such measures as sealing off all entrances into the city of Ky
ō
to. The captured murderers declared that they had killed Yokoi because they despised him as a traitor, a man in contact with the foreigners who planned to propagate Christianity in Japan.
⁴
They were imprisoned in the Ky
ō
to residence of the Fukuoka domain where they soon became objects of compassion: the daimyo of Fukuoka asked that they be treated with leniency, and many people urged an amnesty. Even the government prosecutor, in the hopes of justifying the assassination, searched for evidence that Yokoi might have acted improperly. Such sympathy suggested that behind the enlightened facade of the new regime, the old xenophobia persisted, and the murder of anyone who favored the foreigners would be condoned. The four assassins were not executed until November 1870.

Needless to say, Yokoi’s purpose had not been to convert the Japanese to Christianity. He was a convinced Confucianist (the teacher of Motoda Nagazane, Meiji’s conservative tutor) and never abandoned this belief. Yokoi had been a passionate advocate of
j
ō
i
in early years but had shifted to
jitsugaku
,
⁵
practical learning. This, in turn, led him to favor the importation of foreign learning, including Western economic and political ideas. Christianity was by no means fundamental to his thought, but as one Western authority on the period has stated, “Christianity appeared to Yokoi as the ethic of practicality or rationality…. Yokoi, more perceptive than much later Japanese writers, in seeing the intimate relationship between Western technological and economic power and Christianity, perceived the relationship between modernity and an adequate ethic.”
⁶
The assassins declared that they feared that the pristine purity of traditional Japanese beliefs might be defiled by foreign influence, and they refused to recognize that Yokoi’s learning was of value to the new Japan.

Yokoi was ahead of his time. Sir George Sansom, tracing the development of Yokoi’s political thought, believed that eventually “he even developed ideas of universal peace and the brotherhood of man, propounding a kind of One World doctrine.”
⁷
A traditional Confucian education might well foster a belief in the brotherhood of man, but this was not the aspect of Confucianism most typical of Japan at the end of the Tokugawa period. The men who assassinated Yokoi believed that their violence was authorized by the Confucianism they had absorbed as young samurai; both tolerance and intolerance were justified according to Confucian texts.

The young emperor’s studies, typifying what people of the time supposed to be orthodox Confucianism, consisted of reading canonical works of Chinese thought, along with a few works of Japanese history. Six lectures on the
Analects
and six on the
Records of Japan
were delivered in his presence each month. Somewhat later the curriculum was expanded to include (among Japanese works) Kitabatake Chikafusa’s
Jinn
ō
sh
ō
t
ō
ki
,
⁸
as well as others of the Four Books of Confucianism. As yet no attempt was made by his mentors to acquaint Meiji with the geography or history of the world, let alone science.

The one concession to the modern age made by his tutors at this time was to permit Meiji to ride horseback six times a month. His interest in riding had been awakened two years earlier when he rode a horse for the first time, and in the following year he had many occasions to witness displays of horsemanship. Kido Takayoshi, who became one of the emperor’s rare friends, related in his diary how the emperor had rolled up the bamboo screen of his royal box and commanded Kido to ride at the Grand Equestrian Review. Kido rode so brilliantly that the emperor placed a flowering branch on his tray of food and cakes and gave him so much saké that Kido became intoxicated.
⁹
Before long, horsemanship became an obsession with the emperor—to the distress of some members of the court, who thought he should spend more time reading books and less time on horses.
¹⁰
Such activities of the young emperor strikingly contrasted with the sedentary life led by his father, who not only never rode a horse but virtually never left the Gosho; they may also account for Meiji’s closeness to the samurai class, the repository of Japanese martial traditions.

On February 25, 1869, the emperor attended a display of riding, and he himself, dressed in white with crimson trousers, mounted a horse. The other riders included not only daimyos (whose education had naturally emphasized martial sports) but members of the aristocracy, including Sanj
ō
Sanetomi and Meiji’s grandfather, Nakayama Tadayasu. Originally the emperor had been encouraged to ride in order to free him from the debilitating effects of having been raised mainly by women; now the passion he had developed for riding was communicated to those around him. He esteemed men to the degree that they demonstrated ability in the saddle.

The emperor’s education was a matter of great concern to the men serving him. Kido’s diary reveals again and again his particular anxieties, especially in the following decade. Iwakura Tomomi was also aware of the necessity of surrounding the young emperor with the proper advisers. On March 5, 1869, he sent a memorandum to Sanj
ō
Sanetomi in which he stressed the importance of cultivating
kuntoku
, the virtue of the ruler. “Now, at the beginning of the renovation of imperial rule, the emperor is not rich with years, and for this reason he should not be without guidance for even a single day.”
¹¹
Iwakura recommended that persons be selected from among the nobility, the daimyos, and the senior samurai for their sincerity and strict morals, their ability and lofty purpose, or for their knowledge of Japan, China, and the West. Iwakura stressed that the emperor was intelligent and possessed of outstanding virtue and that once he had grasped the essentials, the government would have the man it needed.

At first there were few concrete proposals. In 1871 the emperor’s study schedule was changed to include some materials relating to modern times. A program was drawn up for each ten days of instruction. On four of the ten days the emperor was lectured on “Success Stories from the West,” the Japanese translation of Samuel Smiles’s
Self-Help
, published only a few months earlier. It must have been startling for a young man—whose knowledge of books had been confined mainly to Confucian texts and accounts of the divine descent of the Japanese emperors—to read descriptions of men like Benjamin Franklin who had been able, thanks to their native intelligence and hard work, to overcome the barriers of poverty and class. The emperor was also expected to study German every day,
¹²
but before long it was decided that the press of official business was too great to permit him to continue these lessons.

Despite the introduction of the new, imported learning, the old-style culture still prevailed at the court. On February 21 the first concert of the reign was held in the palace, attended by the emperor and empress. All the performers were members of the court: the
sh
ō
was played by eight nobles, including the former minister of the left; the
hichiriki
, by six nobles; the flute, by another six nobles, including the emperor’s grandfather, Nakayama Tadayasu; the
biwa
, by three nobles; and the
koto
, by five other nobles. The ability to play one of the musical instruments used in
gagaku
was prized at the court, just as it had been in the Heian period.

Meiji does not seem to have studied any musical instrument, but from early childhood he had composed
tanka
under his father’s guidance, and he retained this avocation during the rest of his life. On February 19 Meiji attended the first poetry gathering (
utagokai
) of his reign. The emperor’s poem was on the topic “Spring Breezes Cross over the Sea”:

The empress’s poem on the same topic was

There is little or no individuality in these poems; they express pleasure over the arrival of spring in exactly the same manner as had innumerable court poets of the preceding millennium. No attempt was made to surprise with the language or images, because composing these metrically exact poems was above all a demonstration of familiarity with the court culture.

Another aspect of court tradition can be detected in the laconic announcement on March 20 that Natsuko, the daughter of Acting Major Counselor Hashimoto Saneakira, had been appointed as lady-in-waiting (
tenji
). On the following day the emperor granted her an audience and bestowed on her a cup of saké.
¹⁴
The saké was followed by gifts of silken cloth. The girl was only twelve, too young to become a concubine of the emperor, but three and a half years later, on November 12, 1873, she gave birth to a daughter by the emperor and died the same day.

Although the marriage of the emperor and empress was happy, they seem to have recognized early that she was barren. Even if the emperor had been reluctant to share his bed with another woman, he had the duty of providing an heir to the throne; and from about this time, he spent his nights with carefully selected women of the high nobility in the hopes that one or more of them would conceive. The women were mainly girls in their teens (Hashimoto Natsuko was fifteen at the time of her death) and, though of impeccable ancestry, were poorly educated. Indeed, their sole ambition was to give birth to an imperial child. Fierce rivalries developed among these women for the emperor’s attentions. However, even if a woman was fortunate enough to bear the emperor’s child, she was unlikely to know the joys of motherhood, as the baby would be taken away from her and officially treated as the child of the empress. All the same, as we know from the example of Nakayama Yoshiko, Meiji’s mother, the mother of an imperial child received superior court rank and other marks of favor. Even if her child died, she continued to live in comfort, lonely though her life might be.
¹⁵

Meiji had fifteen children by five women, inconspicuous figures at the court who in surviving photographs look almost identical in their rigid hairdos and formal court robes. It is difficult to say if the emperor had any favorites, although two (Sono Sachiko and Ogura Fumiko) served him much longer than the others. Sono gave birth to eight of Meiji’s children, four of whom survived. In Europe the illegitimate children of kings were not eligible to succeed to the throne, but according to Japan’s different traditions, no distinction was made between children born to the empress and those who came into the world from the “borrowed” womb of another lady.