The revolutionary Meiji agenda of the 1870s drew inspiration from a fervent curiosity about Euro-American technology and ideas. This openness to the West is remarkable when compared to the expulsionist rhetoric and action of the 1850s and 1860s, which had been indulged in by some of the very people who led the new government. They typically began to change their attitudes by accepting the foreign presence and foreign technologies as an expedient measure: One had to learn barbarian tricks to defeat them. But many of the Meiji leaders went on to develop a more profound appreciation for the enduring power of Western things and ideas.
Travel abroad was the most important educational experience for the young rulers of the Meiji state. In the 1860s both Satsuma and Cho¯shu¯, as well as the bakufu, sent students to study in Europe. These experiences gave future government leaders such as Ito¯Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru of Cho¯shu¯and Okubo Toshimichi of Satsuma and ¯ business leaders such as Shibusawa Eiichi valuable firsthand exposure to the West.
But the most important venture abroad was the Iwakura Mission of 1871–73. Several dozen people, including some of the most powerful figures in the new government (Iwakura Tomomi, Okubo, Kido, and Ito¯) spent eighteen months traveling through the ¯ United States and Europe. They observed all manner of institutions and practices, from schools and factories to parliaments. The economic power of modern industry and the social power of the educated citizens and subjects of the Western nation-states impressed the mission members profoundly. This experience powerfully motivated the ensuing shopping spree in the mall of Western institutions, from central banks and universities to post offices and police forces.
This newfound respect for the value and power of Western ideas coexisted with ongoing anger at the unequal political relationship between Japan and the Western powers. The primary reason for sending the Iwakura Mission in the first place was to revise the terms of the unequal treaties of 1858. This prospect was slapped down sharply by the Americans and Europeans whenever it was raised. The Japanese were told they had to bring their legal and political system up to European standards before treaty revision could even be considered.
In such a context, the West continued to be seen as a source of danger as well as opportunity. Dangers included not just foreign armies and navies. The Meiji leaders viewed democratic political ideas with great concern. They decided that parliaments could be divisive institutions rather than sources of unity and strength. From an early point they worried about how to encourage popular support without inviting dangerous political challenge or mass rebellion.
In addition to political turbulence, the West was seen as a potential source of social anarchy. This was often described with reference to topsy-turvy relations be
tween men and women. The diaries of bakumatsu and early Meiji travelers to the
West are full of horror at the casual intimacy of men and women, and the unpleasant boldness of the latter. Such observers came to believe—wrongly perhaps—that the status of women in the West was higher than in Japan. Some Meiji men worried that they might face demands by women for equality in marriage or society at large.
The Meiji leaders and prominent intellectuals held similarly ambivalent attitudes toward Asia. On one hand, they sometimes called for an Asia-wide (or “pan-Asian”) solidarity against the predatory imperialism of Western powers. At the same time, the 1870s saw the first clear signs of a high-handed Asian diplomacy backed by a scornful attitude that placed Japan above its Asian neighbors. In this view, Japan was Asia’s natural hegemon. It would lead its benighted neighbors to modernization and equality with the West, whether they liked it or not.
This attitude surfaced with a vengeance in 1873 while the Iwakura Mission was abroad. Saigo¯Takamori, a zealous patriot from Satsuma, prodded the caretaker gov
ernment to plan an invasion of Korea. Japanese traders in the early 1870s were pushing the Korean government to open trade relations. When the Koreans firmly refused, Saigo¯ proposed an invasion to force the issue. In addition to considerations of national pride, Saigo¯ and his supporters in the government such as Tosa samurai Itagaki Tai
suke, hoped to ensure for the samurai invasion force a proud role in the new Meiji order.
Neither advocates nor opponents of invasion seemed particularly troubled by the irony that their behavior replicated that of the offensive Westerners in the 1850s. But the members of the Iwakura Mission strongly opposed the plan on strategic grounds.
Their travels were daily making them more certain that before Japan could project its power outward, it needed to enact major reforms at home. Alarmed at news of the impending invasion, Kido and Okubo cut short their itinerary and returned to Tokyo, ¯ where they managed to squash Saigo¯’s plan. They did not, however, repudiate the notion that Japan might impose its will on its neighbors by force.
Instead, they agreed the next year (1874) to a smaller action against the island of Taiwan. Taiwanese aborigines had killed several dozen shipwrecked Okinawan sail- ors—inhabitants of the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands—in 1871. The new Japanese government sought to include these islands in its territories, so it had demanded reparations, but the Chinese government also claimed control of the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands and had refused to pay. In 1874, with Okubo Toshimichi now in charge of the government, Japan sent ¯ a punitive military expedition of three thousand soldiers to Taiwan. They lost over five hundred men to tropical disease and made no significant military gains. But the Japanese government did extract a modest reparation payment from China.
The fact that military action came three years after the original incident reveals it to have been in part a strategic concession to the continued strong emotions of the faction in the government that had pushed to invade Korea in 1873. In addition, however, Japan’s young government initially sought to use the expedition to establish military colonies on the island with the long-term goal of “civilizing” the native in
habitants. Japanese leaders were influenced in their thinking by Western diplomatic practice of the time, which justified colonization when carried out in the name of a mission to civilize native populations. The plan to set up colonies was not made public, and it was shelved as the expedition began in fear that it might incite a war with China.10 But through the planning and execution of the Taiwan expedition new ground
was broken. Japan’s rulers not only established a precedent for gunboat diplomacy but also articulated among themselves the concept of a Japanese mission to bring “civi
lization” to the rest of Asia.
The rulers also established an expanded set of borders to the Japanese nation in this first decade of nation-building. The northern island known to the Tokugawa rulers as Ezo, home to the Ainu, was formally incorporated into the Meiji state as the prefecture of Hokkaido in 1869. Over the following years, Meiji rulers sent former samurai and others, including prison labor, north to open farmland in this newly claimed territory. A decade later, in 1879, Japan forced the Ryu¯kyu¯ king to abdicate and incorporated the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands as the prefecture of Okinawa. But the matter of integrating the inhabitants of these territories as members of the Japanese nation was not resolved simply by drawing new borders. The Ainu living in the northern island of Hokkaido were included in the new system of family registration of 1872, by which the government defined people as “Japanese.” But they were marked off from the rest of the nation in these registers with the label “former native,” and they were not drafted for military service until the 1890s.11 Okinawans were drawn into the nation even more slowly, for fear that a full-scale “Japanization” program would provoke conflict with China. Not until the late 1890s and early twentieth century were policies such as the draft or the new land tax system extended to Okinawa. While people in the newly claimed borderlands thus were recognized as Japanese subjects from early in the Meiji era, the policies to include them in the nation were ambivalent and slow to develop.
For more than a century, historians have been arguing over how to describe the pro
found changes of the first decades of the Meiji era. Early historians typically used the French and other European revolutions since the late eighteenth century as their model, describing the changes set in motion by the Meiji restoration as an incomplete or distorted revolution. If one accepts the premise that France in the 1790s furnishes the paradigm for a true revolution, then the changes in Japan indeed were not “complete.”
If one argues that the untrammeled ascendance of a capitalist bourgeoisie that attacks and defeats an aristocratic old regime is the essence of modern revolution, Japan’s changes do appear “distorted.” After all, it was a faction of the samurai “aristocracy”
more than an emerging class of bourgeois capitalists that imposed the Meiji changes.
Even in recent years, many historians, both in Japan and outside it, have explicitly or implicitly understood the history of the Meiji era and the early twentieth century from this sort of comparative perspective. But such an analysis is not helpful. It arbitrarily imposes a Eurocentric model onto world history and does not make suffi
cient effort to understand the history of other places on their own terms.
The great changes of the Meiji era constituted a sort of modern “revolution from above” because they were imposed by members of the hereditary samurai elite of the old regime. But until 1868, many of these leaders had been frustrated, insecure, and ambitious men in the middle to lower ranks of the samurai class. They held greater privilege than the mass of the population, but to call them aristocratic revolutionaries from above and leave it at that is misleading. It leaves us with an image of men who
were cosseted in privilege and then gave it up. It was precisely their intermediate status and their insecure salaried position, coupled with their sense of frustrated am
bition and entitlement to rule, that account for the revolutionary energy of the Meiji insurgents and their far-reaching program of reform. This was a revolution of a frus
trated subelite.12
In addition to avoiding Eurocentric comparisons, it is crucial to recognize that the Meiji revolution, like modern revolutions the world over, was an ongoing, turbulent process. Public schools, the new tax system, and the draft were imposed upon an often defiant population. The unequal treaties remained extremely controversial. Beginning with the birth of the new Meiji regime, the question of who would participate, and on what terms, was of the greatest importance to a quickly expanding public. The Meiji revolution had changed much but settled little.
6
Participation and Protest
In Japan of the Tokugawa era, the idea that common people could play a legitimate political role hardly existed. Commoners were to be the object of political action, not actors in their own right. A good ruler kept the common people alive, but barely so.
In one stern Edo era injunction, attributed to Tokugawa Ieyasu, “peasants should be neither dead nor alive.” Alternatively, peasants were likened to oil-producing sesame seeds: “The harder you squeeze them, the more you extract.”1 Political debate among educated samurai often centered on what one might call the “stupid commoner” prob
lem. Thus, Aizawa Seishisai in 1825 had written:
[T]he great majority of people in the realm are stupid commoners; superior men are very few in number. Once the hearts and minds of the stupid commoners have been captivated, we will lose control of the realm. . . . Thebarbarians’ religion [Christianity]
infiltrated Kyushu once before, and spread like the plague among stupid commoners.
Within less than a hundred years, 280,000 converts were discovered and brought to justice. This indicates how fast the contagion can spread.2
What to do to keep the plague of barbarians from capturing the hearts and minds of the stupid commoners? Aizawa’s solution in the early 1800s was certainly not to seek commoner loyalty by drawing them into politics as active participants. He wanted to indoctrinate them more thoroughly than before with a sense of the glorious essence of the emperor and their need to be loyal to him.
The Meiji political elite extended Aizawa’s reasoning in some very important ways. They came to anchor the new political order in the absolute sovereignty and transcendance of the imperial institution. But in order to do this, they sought to keep the emperor outside of politics and above it. The effort contained contradictions and a certain danger. The logic of the emperor-centered polity offered the potential for various actors to claim to represent the imperial will.
Despite (and in some ways because of) government efforts to contain and indoc
trinate the populace, the Japanese political world was quickly opened up to far more of the “stupid commoners” than the early Meiji leaders—not to mention Aizawa—
could have possibly envisioned. Already in the early 1880s popular movements had some impact on the critical decision to promulgate a constitution. In the late 1880s political agitation in the streets of Tokyo derailed diplomatic negotiations to revise the
77
unequal treaties between Japan and the Western powers. In 1890 a parliament, called the Diet, was opened. Elected representatives immediately began to play a significant political role. The political debates and practices of the first decades of the Meiji era opened the way to this unexpected outcome.