Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (160 page)

Everyone agrees that Emperor Meiji had an extraordinary memory, but I can’t remember any specific examples. However, when I accompanied him to Ky
ō
to, he told me in detail how a certain room was used in the past. Or he recalled that when he was still a small boy, there was a ditch that ran along the wall of the crown prince’s pavilion, and he often used to catch
medaka
[killifish] there.
⁸

The emperor’s intellectual interests were limited. Hinonishi wrote,

I almost never saw him read anything. Apart from when he was listening to lectures at the beginning of the year, I never saw him look at a book. Probably when he was still at the Akasaka Temporary Palace, he had more leisure and read books, but this must have ended when the pressure of state business became more intense and there were many other things to occupy him. In all the time that I served him, I never saw any indication that he had been reading.
⁹

Even if Meiji did not read books or newspapers, he managed to acquire considerable information about the world from the officials he daily consulted. No doubt he was briefed before he met foreign visitors about conditions in their countries, and his knowledge impressed them. The lectures he heard early each year may have stimulated his interest in history or philosophy, but he was never inspired to make a deeper study of the subjects described. He seems not to have read contemporary works of literature or contemporary
tanka
poetry, let alone scholarly monographs.

The emperor’s formal studies, mainly in the Confucian tradition as interpreted by Motoda Nagazane, lasted until he was in his thirties and undoubtedly contributed to his abiding sense of duty. On rare occasions he refused to do what was expected of him, as when he obstinately insisted on not attending the banquet ending the maneuvers in Kumamoto. He seems to have disliked particularly the feeling that his ministers (or others) were forcing him to accommodate himself to their plans. This was revealed most clearly when he refused to take advantage of being in Nara to worship at the tomb of Emperor Jimmu. It was not that he was averse to worshiping at the tomb but that he did not like other people to decide what he should do. Generally, however, he yielded in the end to persuasion, and when he did not, he apologized afterward. There were periods in his reign when he seemed loath to perform even his ordinary daily business as the ruler, perhaps out of boredom with paperwork or with his advisers. On the whole, however, he was highly responsible and seldom went against the advice of his ministers.

Meiji’s reliance on his ministers makes it difficult to be sure whether decisions made in his name were in fact his or actually made by his ministers. At the very least the wording of his rescripts was surely the work of men better trained than he in classical Chinese; but we have no way of knowing the degree to which his personal opinions were reflected in his rescripts. Probably it is safe to say that nothing in the rescripts was contrary to his wishes.

One theme recurs in his rescripts so often that it is tempting to view it as an expression of the emperor’s deepest conviction—his repeated hopes for peace. This may seem no more than a convention, or even the excuse for crushing enemies as “obstacles to peace,” but the emperor’s behavior during the wars of his reign suggests that despite his fondness for uniforms and for observing maneuvers of his army, he genuinely disliked war.

During the Satsuma Rebellion, he was so given to apathy that he refused to perform his duties as head of the state or even to pursue his studies. He opposed the declaration of war on China in 1894. When informed of the victory at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War, his first reaction was not a cry of elation but the command that the enemy general be given proper treatment. The emperor’s insistence on his desire for peace impressed even An Chung-gun, the man who assassinated It
ō
Hirobumi, the emperor’s most trusted adviser.

Perhaps the emperor’s greatest achievement was reigning so long. In this respect he resembled his near contemporary Queen Victoria, who for years was attacked by the press for indulging in her griefs to the neglect of her duties; but in the end, thanks to the length of her reign, she acquired the reputation of a great monarch.
¹⁰
If Meiji, like his father, had died at the age of thirty-six, he would hardly be remembered today except as a young man who happened to be on the throne at a time of great changes in Japan. But the length of his reign, and the impression he increasingly created of unwavering steadfastness, gave him an awesome, almost sacred authority. Immediately after his death, a special issue of the magazine
Taiy
ō
was published with the title
Meiji seitenshi
(Meiji, the Holy Emperor). The day after his death, an article on the front page of the
Ō
saka mainichi shimbun
referred to the late emperor as
taitei
(the Great), in the manner of Peter the Great, and this term was frequently used of him until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Asukai Masamichi explained why he used it as the title of his
Meiji taitei
: “It was because in modern history—no, in the whole of Japanese history—there was no other ‘great emperor’ except this one. Emperor Meiji definitely left behind the footprints of a great monarch.”
¹¹

NOTES

Preface

1
. I shall refer to him as Meiji, even though this was a posthumous designation. During his lifetime he was referred to by Japanese simply as
tenn
ō
, or emperor; his personal name, Mutsuhito, was used mainly when communicating with foreigners or signing rescripts.

2
. It is often said that Meiji’s boyhood name, Sachinomiya, was taken from the name of the well, but the well was not drilled until the drought in Kyoto in the eighth month of 1854, when Meiji was about a year old. The name Sachinomiya (or Prince Sachi) was chosen by Emperor K
ō
mei from among seven names suggested by the imperial councillor (
sangi
) Goj
ō
Tamesada. Emperor K
ō
kaku (1771–1840), Meiji’s great-grandfather, had had the same childhood name. The well took its name from the prince, rather than the other way round; Emperor K
ō
mei himself, pleased with the quality of the well water, named it Sachi no i (
Meiji tenn
ō
ki
, 1, p. 59).

Although it is commonly believed that Meiji was first bathed with water from the Sachi well (see, for example, Kurihara K
ō
ta,
Ningen Meiji tenn
ō
, p 1), the official record plainly states that the water used was drawn from the Kamo River north of the Demachi Bridge (
Meiji tenn
ō
ki
, 1, pp. 20, 23).

3
. The building itself cost 100
ry
ō
, and Tadayasu asked for a loan of 200
ry
ō
. The request went through various officials and finally reached the chancellor (
kampaku
), who refused, stating there was no precedent for lending more than 100
ry
ō
. Tadayasu therefore borrowed the money, promising to pay back the loan in installments over the next fifteen years. Fortunately, Tadayasu’s great-aunt, Nakayama Isako, was serving as senior lady-in-waiting, and he was able to borrow an additional 50
ry
ō
in her name, to be repaid in ten years (
Meiji tenn
ō
ki
, 1, pp. 8–9). Tadayasu no doubt expected that if a child was safely delivered, his daughter would receive presents that would enable him to repay these debts.

4
. His many poems were written on scraps of paper, copied by expert lady calligraphers, and then destroyed.

5
. The Seitoku kinen kaigakan (Memorial Picture Gallery) at the Meiji jing
ū
contains eighty large paintings depicting highlights of Meiji’s life from his birth to his funeral. They were painted between 1926 and 1936 by outstanding artists of the period, but probably none of the artists had actually seen Meiji. The Italian painter Edoardo Chiossone (1832–1898) was one of the few to depict Meiji from life; his drawing, supposed by most people to be a photograph, was worshiped in schools throughout Japan.

6
. Kimura Teinosuke recalls (when he was seven and Meiji was eight), “If ever anything occurred that displeased him in some way, he usually clenched his little fists and struck whoever was to blame. I can’t tell you how many times I was the recipient of blows from his gracious fists. At any rate, because I was a year younger than he, I tended not to show sufficient awe. I was always venturing to do something that went contrary to his wishes, and each time he would deign to drub me” (“Meiji tenn
ō
no go-y
ō
ji” p. 17).

7
. B
ō
j
ō
Toshinaga,
Ky
ū
ch
ū
goj
ū
nen
, p. 15.

8
. For an account of why he stopped reading newspapers, see Hinonishi Sukehiro,
Meiji tenn
ō
no nichij
ō
, p. 53.

9
. Ibid., pp. 44, 175.

10
. See ibid., p. 59, where Hinonishi mentions that sometimes Meiji spent tens of thousands of yen on diamond rings. About the perfume, see p. 146, where it says he used up a bottle of French perfume every two or three days.

11
. Giles St. Aubyn comments, “Almost all nineteenth-century constitutional text books implied that the Queen was a cipher …. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth, and Gladstone must have smiled ruefully at such nonsense” (
Queen Victoria
, p. 218).

Chapter 1

1
. The lack of individuality in official portraits of emperors may have been due to their having been painted after the emperor’s death by an artist who might never have seen his subject. We know the circumstances of one portrait: on November 4, 1846, Toyooka Harusuke, who had painted Emperor K
ō
kaku’s portrait, was commanded to paint a portrait of Emperor Nink
ō
, eight months after the latter’s death. Toyooka was paid ten pieces of silver and two
tan
of silk for the portrait (
K
ō
mei tenn
ō
ki
, 1, pp. 270–71; Fujita Satoshi,
Bakumatsu no tenn
ō
, p. 141).

2
. For details on the children of these three emperors, together with
Ō
ya S
ō
ichi’s views on why mortality was so high, see
Ō
ya S
ō
ichi zensh
ū
, 23, pp. 24–26.

3
. The mortality rate for infants in Japan in 1899 was 153.8 per thousand. Even if it was somewhat higher forty years earlier, this was still a far cry from the mortality rate in the imperial family (Kat
ō
Hitoshi, “Meiji tenn
ō
o-tsubone go-rakuin den,” p. 62).

4
. The ceremonies were, of course, of the utmost importance to the court, and it had therefore happened twice during the Tokugawa period that because the male heir to the throne was still too small even to make a pretense of performing these ceremonies, a princess was chosen to rule as empress until the heir was more mature. Herschel Webb wrote, “Cycles of ceremonies, attestations of appointment, and calendrical affairs were the whole ‘national’ business of the emperor and his court” (
The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period
, pp. 119–20).

5
. Higashikuze Michitomi,
Ishin zengo
, p. 41.

6
. It was actually a week before his birthday. At the time, K
ō
mei was eight years old by Western count. Although I have elsewhere converted dates from the lunar to the solar calendar and the ages of people from Japanese to Western count, when making direct translations I have followed the original.

7
. Higashikuze,
Ishin
, p. 32. For an official account of this ceremony, compiled from various sources, see
K
ō
mei tenn
ō
ki
, 1, pp. 43–45.

8
. See the account by Sanj
ō
Sanetsumu of the devious activities of the
d
ō
j
ō
kuge
, nobles of the highest rank who were permitted to appear in the emperor’s presence (quoted in Fukuchi Shigetaka,
K
ō
mei tenn
ō
, p. 21). He mentions, for example, how they sold medicine, which they claimed had been passed down in their families for centuries, pretending that it was highly efficacious. Or when encountering a military person or rich merchant on the street, they would allege some trivial offense and demanded money by way of apology. Sanj
ō
, himself a high-ranking noble, said that the get-rich-quick schemes of the
d
ō
j
ō
kuge
were as numerous as bamboo shoots, popping up in all directions.