Several other sharp challenges to the authority of the new government took place in these decades. Volatile reactionary demands to stem the pace of change or turn back the clock exploded in the 1870s. Commoners opposed to the military draft destroyed registration centers. Those upset at compulsory education and local school taxes de
molished thousands of newly built schools. In addition, several rebellions of the ex
propriated former samurai took place in the mid-1870s.
These samurai uprisings had some motives and goals in common with the less violent popular rights agitation. They shared anger at being left out of the decision- making process. Frustrated former samurai in the 1870s saw two ways to influence the new government. Some tried to write new rules of participation. Others forced the issue with swords and guns. In addition, both the popular rights activists and the samurai rebels shared a very bellicose stand on foreign policy. They were in fact more aggressive than those in the government. Thus, when the debate over a Korean invasion split the government in 1873 both Itagaki Taisuke and Saigo¯Takamori quit their posts.
Itagaki launched the popular rights movement. Saı¯go eventually led an armed rebellion.
Saigo¯’s insurrection, the Satsuma rebellion, was the largest of several. In 1874 another member of the war faction who left the government, Eto¯Shinpei, led a force of twenty-five hundred warriors in an attack on the prefectural government of Saga
Police interrupting a speaker at a popular rights rally in the 1880s draw the wrath of the crowd for this suppression. In response to the agitation for popular rights, the government tightened censorship laws and stationed police observers on the stage at all political rallies.
Speakers who crossed the line of acceptable rhetoric with strong anti-government statements were first cautioned, and then halted. For audience members, part of the excitement of at
tending these rallies was the possibility of watching or joining such a raucous moment.
Courtesy of Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko¯, Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo.
(in Kyushu). They wanted to reinstate their daimyo¯ and reclaim their samurai stipends.
Similar but smaller insurgencies, each involving several hundred former samurai, took place in Kumamoto and Fukuoka prefectures in 1876, also both in Kyushu. All these actions were quickly suppressed by troops of the new government, and the leaders were executed.
During these years, Saigo¯himself returned to his home of Kagoshima (the former Satsuma domain), also in Kyushu. There he founded a private military academy. His local support was so strong that Kagoshima prefecture had effectively seceded from
the national government by 1876. The prefecture forwarded no taxes to Tokyo. It ignored other social reform orders of the Meiji government. Then, in the winter of 1877, Saigo¯ set off with a force of fifteen thousand soldiers from Kagoshima on a march ultimately headed for Tokyo. His goal was to overthrow the government and restore samurai privilege. As the rebels proceeded through strongly anti-government territory into the neighboring prefecture of Kumamoto, Saigo¯’s army quickly mush
roomed to forty thousand men. It attacked the government troops who occupied Ku
mamoto castle. This siege failed when a large government army (over sixty thousand men) arrived to reinforce the local garrison. Three weeks of bloody fighting ended in a massive defeat for the rebels. They suffered about twenty thousand casualties. More than six thousand goverment soldiers were killed, and ninety-five hundred were wounded. Saigo¯committed suicide rather then be captured and executed. To this day, he remains a popular hero, revered as an exemplar of pure motives and loyalty to a cause, however hopeless. But his defeat made it clear that there would be no turning back to the old social order. Farmer conscripts had proven their worth against the samurai troops. Armed resistance to the new government was widely recognized to be impossible.
Even so, the poverty suffered by some farmers in the following years led them to raise arms against vastly superior forces on several occasions. These peasant up
risings were sparked especially by high levels of debt suffered by tenant farmers and small-scale producers of silk cocoons. Government economic policies of the early 1880s brought on sharp deflation. Rice and raw silk prices fell to roughly half their 1880 levels by 1884. Since overall prices fell by just one quarter, farmers who de
pended heavily on revenue from the sale of rice and silk products fared worse than others. Ambitious small landholders, sparked by dreams of just a bit more income in a new era of opportunity, had already taken loans to convert hillside fields to mulberry production for raising silkworms. They suddenly had to borrow even more simply to pay their taxes, which did not decrease with deflation. Many defaulted and lost their fields to moneylending landlords.
In numerous prefectures, especially in the silk-intensive regions in the Kanto¯
region, these farmers organized groups with names such as Debtors Party or Poor People’s Party. They demanded that creditors, usually local landlords, reduce or cancel their debts or suspend demand for payments. The largest uprising took place in the Chichibu region about fifty miles west of Tokyo. In early November 1884, six thou
sand men raised a ragtag army. They attacked and destroyed government offices and debt certificates. Marching from village to village, they drew in new supporters and trashed the homes of moneylenders. Local police were overwhelmed. The government eventually called in the army, and after about ten days the Meiji state’s troops put down this rebellion rather easily. Five leaders were later tried and executed. A number of local Liberal Party members took part in these rebellions, and some of the rebels called themselves “soldiers of the Liberal Party.” The party’s national leadership was not involved, but they nonetheless disbanded the party rather than risk accusation of supporting insurrection.
In addition to armies of samurai rebels and parties of poor farmers, a number of powerful new religions constituted a third challenge to the new government. Some of these, such as the Tenri and Konko¯ religions, had been founded in the late Tokugawa
decades. Others, such as the Maruyama and Omoto ¯ religions, emerged early in the Meiji era. By the late 1870s the Maruyama and Tenri organizations each claimed several hundred thousand adherents. These religions typically began when a founding figure, often a woman, became possessed of divine inspiration and wrote down or dictated the sacred scripture of the sect. Their teachings often called for restraint in this life in the expectation of salvation in the next. But as in Tokugawa times, they also preached messages of present-day deliverance through a sudden equalization of wealth, so-called yonaoshi, or “world rectification.” They shared fury at the inequitable social and economic system with supporters of the Debtors and Poor Farmer’s parties.
On occasion this led to similar sorts of violent action and rumors of organizational links. In one incident in 1884, for example, just a week after the Chichibu uprising, supporters of the Maruyama sect in Shizuoka prefecture demanded immediate equal
ization of wealth and launched attacks that destroyed government offices.
These challenges to the new regime had complex social and regional sources.
Former samurai, wealthy farmers, and poor farmers were three groups behind popular rights activism, while the former samurai and indebted farmers were main supporters of armed rebellion or new religions. Ironically, samurai resistance, whether through the popular rights movement or via rebellion, was strongest in the areas of greatest support for the 1868 restoration. These samurai, in Kyushu and Tosa above all, had expected to play a role in the new government that they brought to power. When they became disillusioned at its course, or felt excluded, they were more likely than others to act. Peasant protests were greatest in areas of commercialized farming, especially silk-producing regions where farmers were most vulnerable to the fluctuations of na
tional and international markets.