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There were many events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were masters at holding a grudge.
The Tokugawas were still in charge when Perry arrived to “open” Japan.
In response to the “revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians” (sonno jōi) movement that was popular among the Young Samurai, Emperor Komei issued his “expel the barbarians” order in 1863. The Young Samurai—who revered the emperor and the imperial system in a dreamy, unreal sort of way—were also called “men of high purpose” (Shishi). Shishi violently opposed the bakufu (organs of government) of the Tokugawas. The Tokugawas had no intention of enforcing the order, but it did prompt Young Samurai attacks on their shogunate and the bakufu. These arrogant Shishi were responsible for the Shimonoseki Straights incident in 1864, and thus the retaliatory shelling of Edo by American and European ships.
A long history of violence.
Legend has it that at the end of his life, the Komei emperor was so frustrated with his weak reign and the decline of the power of the Tokugawa bakufu that he told his son, Mutsuhito, that the shogunate must end, and that he had to take control of the country directly. When Mutsuhito ascended on 3 February 1867 at the death of his father, the fifteen-year-old emperor sided with the Shishi. With no formal education in politics, Mutsuhito, who took the title of Meiji, declared the creation of a bicameral legislature along British lines, and thus political government. On 9 November 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun of Japan, resigned.
On 4 January 1868, Meiji read a brief statement declaring that he would “rule” directly.
But Japan was the land of gekokujō (the lower ruling the higher) and of the militant Shishi who believed in their sacred duty to overthrow those they disagreed with. Though the Tokugawas kept the peace from Kyoto, each clan or domain ruled itself in its own little empire with its own rules and hierarchy in its own ancestral lands, paying lip service to the Emperor and tribute to the Tokugawas. However, the Tokugawas still felt that they were in charge because the bakufu were still in their hands. On 27 January 1868, the Boshin War, sometimes called the Japanese Revolution, began outside Kyoto with a Tokugawa attack on soldiers allied with the Emperor and the Shishi Satsuma and Choshu clans. Savage fighting, defection, assassinations, and sieges marked the conflict until 27 June 1869, when the last holdouts of the Tokugawa bakufu surrendered and submitted to the Meiji’s rule.
In time, Japan lost the ideas of independent domains in confiscation and occasional gunfire.
The Meiji and his government gradually built a central administration, crushing all opposition with the power not only of the purse but of technology, and soon, a national army. The new central government realized that the patchwork military organization of pre-Meiji Japan had been useless against Western military encroachments, as shown in the Shimonoseki Straights. By 1871, the 10,000-strong national army was being organized by Meiji supporters, much to the grumbling of the holdouts among the samurai traditionalists.
Gradually, clan/family power, cultural distinctions, and even appearances were being sacrificed in the name of modernization.
The first Sword Abolishment Edict of 1870 forbade merchants and farmers from wearing swords or dressing like samurai: this the samurai minded little, but they saw what was coming. The Hair-cutting Edict, also in 1871, required the samurai to cut off their topknots and wear their hair in Western fashion, which was offensive to many samurai. A second sword edict on 26 March 1876 forbade the carrying of swords by everyone.
The sword edict was a step too far.
It was a factor for the beginning of the Satsuma Rebellion, or Southwestern War, from 29 January to 24 September 1877. Meiji reformers saw the Conscription Law of 10 January 1873—requiring all men in their twenties to enlist—as the best way to build a strong army similar to what had worked in Europe. Conscription was an important factor in the relatively swift and decisive defeat of the Satsuma. In the last battle at Shiroyama on 24 September 1877, Imperial forces outnumbered the rebels some 60:1.
1878 saw the creation of the Supreme War Council of Japan.
Built on the popular German pattern, it provided even the humbled, sword-less samurai who joined the national armed forces with broad powers for military planning and strategy and, perhaps just as important, direct access to their very own otherwise-despised zaibatsu (commercial cartels) for weapons and equipment development.
Controlling the clans was easy compared to controlling the masses of warriors without lords.
The Meiji issued two of the most extraordinary documents endorsed by a modern monarch. The Emperor himself presented the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors on 4 January 1882 to War Minister Yamagata Aritomo in a ceremony at the Imperial Palace, an act that meant to symbolize the Emperor’s personal connection with the military. Inoue Kowashi, a Confucian who had studied law in France and Germany, and Yamagata Aritomo, a founder of the Supreme War Council who had studied European armies in Europe, were the authors. Fukuchi Gen’ichiro, a journalist who had traveled to Europe as a translator, added some language.
The authorities compelled all members of the Imperial Armed Forces to memorize the rescript.
The 2700-character document was a personal oath of loyalty for the soldiers and sailors to the people of Japan and to the Emperor, and of the Emperor to them. It contains many references to loyalty, obedience, valor, righteousness, and, oddly, frugality and simplicity. It also contains the famous phrase:
…duty is heavier than a mountain: death is as light as a feather.
While the Soldiers and Sailors rescript was being digested, there were fundamental problems with the education system that provided conscripts. For centuries, Confucians had been the primary teachers of Japan’s youth. The Ministry of Education and its imposition of universal education modeled after French and American systems displaced them in 1871. After that, the Confucians pointed out that public morals were not a part of the new curriculum. While true, the modernizers feared that any return to Confucian content would mean a return to the feudalist system they just spent a generation getting rid of.
They needed a Meiji-centric system and another rescript.
Much shorter than the Soldiers and Sailors rescript, the Imperial Rescript on Education issued 3 October 1890 had a purpose similar to that of the Soldiers and Sailors rescript: to bind the subjects to the Imperial will and the state. Like the soldiers and sailors, all schoolchildren had to learn the Education rescript by rote. Teachers read it at all school events. Pupils shouted it every morning before class began. Like the Soldiers and Sailors rescript, it bound schoolchildren to each other, to the Emperor and:
…should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard [sic] maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.
The two rescripts bound all Japanese to the will of the Emperor and the needs of the state from the time they started school. Despite Japan’s apparent predilection for political chaos and domestic obedience, there were cooler heads in the advisory bodies made up of elder statesmen who had direct and unfettered access to the Emperor. The Council of Elders from the Tokugawa Period was supposed to be strictly advisory, but their inheritor organization, the genrō, held some power. The genrō shared membership between the old Satsuma and Choshu domains, and nominated and recommend Prime Ministers for the Emperor’s approval. But the genrō was inconvenient for the military, who allowed the genrō to end with the death of the last member, Saionji Kinmochi, in 1940.
The jushin—elder statesmen advising the Emperor and the civil government—followed the genrō.
In the summer of 1944, the jushin—all of whom were former Premiers—exerted enough pressure on the powers-that-were in Japan to get Tojo Hideki removed as Prime Minister, and could persuade Togo to return to the Foreign Ministry during the crisis of the summer of 1945. Their influence, minor though it may have been, was still enough to give legitimacy to the peace factions that August.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study In Miscalculation And Folly
The stubborn resistance of the traditional samurai to any modernization (save their weapons) marked the long slog to both Pearl Harbor and Tokyo Bay.
And Finally...
On 6 September:
1914: The first battle of the Marne begins northwest of Paris, France. The titanic clash between German, British, and French armies would end in a pyrrhic victory for the Entente after nearly a million casualties.
1916: The first true self-serving grocery store, Piggly-Wiggly, opens in Memphis, Tennessee. The chain has since grown to over 500 locations in the United States, primarily in the Midwest and southern states.
And today is GREAT EGG TOSS DAY, commemorating Risto Antikainen’s (unofficial) throw of 317 feet, 10 inches to Jyrki Korhonen in Siilinjarvi, Finland on this day in 1981. The world record in the Guinness Book of World Records at that time was 323 feet 2 inches set in 1978 in Jewett, Texas. The World Egg Throwing Federation in Swanton, England, records the current record as a paltry 309 feet, set by a New Zealand team in 2016. Now, tell me…why?