A History of the World (70 page)

There had been other Western jabs at Japan through the first half of the nineteenth century, provoking growing Japanese worry and anger. But before their own war broke out, the Americans already had a special interest in the Pacific. Their ‘mountain men’ crossing the Rockies, and their whalers cruising the coast, had begun to colonize California. There was now a voracious appetite for whale oil, and the Yankee whalers had already depleted the whales around the American coasts, so were pushing ever further across the Pacific (an ironic reflection on today’s whale politics, which pits conservationist Americans against plundering Japanese).

We last left the Japanese in the early 1600s, self-isolated and about to experience their more than two centuries of enclosed development under the Tokugawa shoguns. This conservative rule had brought order and stability, but only slow economic development. It allowed the intensity and otherworldiness of Japanese culture, a society of strict hierarchies and exquisite art to flourish; but meant there was
little of the industrial and commercial development that was revolutionizing Europe and America.

This ‘Japaneseness’ did not translate directly into a strong national political feeling. Here was a land divided by its mountainous spine, by the gaps between its many islands and its long coastlines, where most people felt only local allegiances. For hundreds of years the emperor, though revered for religious reasons, had been politically insignificant. At the top of the Tokugawa system, under the shogun himself, was his
bakufu
, or military government (the word means ‘tent government’). Around that, on their lands – the most loyal nearest – almost in concentric circles, were the great landlords or barons, the
daimyo
, who in turn depended on the far larger class of privileged warriors, the famous samurai.

Hundreds of thousands of fighters, some 6–7 per cent of the population, boasted of their ancestry and told tales going back to the fierce civil wars of the 1400s and 1500s and beyond. The samurai enjoyed special privileges, such as wearing two swords in public, and received payments (in rice) which roughly accorded to the landholdings most of them had given up. Many still lived in all-male barracks or in towns clustered around the castles of the
daimyo
. The life of a samurai was supposed to be dominated by military training, the contemplation of death, and the higher arts.
³⁰
In practice, the long peace of the Tokugawa period had given most of these men little or no experience of battle. There were plenty of popular complaints that these so-called warriors had never seen a fight in earnest except for quarrels around brothels or drinking-dens. In practice, the more ambitious had evolved into an administrative class, running the territories of the rulers in a country still organized into around 280 different
daimyo
estates, or domains, rather like a version of pre-unity Germany, in which local dialects were often mutually incomprehensible.

The
daimyo
, whom most Samurai served, were themselves organized into categories, depending on their historic family loyalty, or absence of loyalty, to the Tokugawa clan. A system of one-year-in, one-year-out enforced residence in the capital Edo (today’s Tokyo) made the
daimyo
families effectively hostages of the shogun and of his government, and they posed little threat. In a country that had spent so much of its history engaged in complex civil and clan warfare, the peace that resulted was a major political achievement.

Tokugawa Japan was no paradise, particularly for the farmers at the bottom of the social pile and the outcast families who (as in India) did the dirtiest jobs. There were periodic famines, peasant revolts, volcanic eruptions and serious crime problems in the cities. But these were centuries without civil war or imported epidemics, during which the population grew faster than in Europe. The production of rice wine, paper luxuries, expensive cloth, lacquered and wooden items, grew, and the roads between the towns, generally larger than those in Europe, were crowded with traders. But this period also brought a complacent, even arrogant, attitude to the outside world. As Western ships began to arrive off the coast again, one Japanese critic complained: ‘Recently, the loathsome Western barbarians, unmindful of their base position as the lower extremities of the world, have been scurrying impudently across the Four Seas, trampling other nations under foot. Now they are audacious enough to challenge our exalted position . . . What manner of insolence is this?’
³¹

The Tokugawa-era Japanese had no real answer to the insistent demands of the Americans for trade. Following Adam Smith and theorists such as David Ricardo, nineteenth-century economics saw trade as a great beneficent power in the world. As noted earlier, countries which were mutually enriching one another were thought less likely to go to war. What this happy liberal belief ignored was that so much of the really profitable trade brought huge riches because it was unequal and – from India to China to Japan – imposed down the muzzles of cannon: ‘Peaceful free trade – or we shoot.’ Once trade was fully opened up, the West found much in Japan that it wanted, from fine lacquered furniture and silks to the vivid prints that so influenced the Impressionist painters. The Japanese would take a radically different route from the Chinese, building a modern industrial economy and army. But the price for Japan was the destruction of its earlier self, and this was a painful and paradoxical process, which a century on would enmesh America in further war.

The paradox had started with those samurai. With some of the leading landowners they began to agitate against the Tokugawa shogun. As he and his advisers reluctantly accepted that they had to sign the unequal trading treaties being demanded by the Westerners, which included such humiliations as foreigners being immune to Japanese laws, there had been a fierce backlash. The Tokugawa
bakufu
,
the military government, was doing its best to reform the old system, but gently. The rebels wanted the foreign devils simply expelled. They appealed to that symbol of ancient Japan, so long out of politics, the emperor at his court in Kyoto. Which way should Japan turn? In a revealing story of this confusing time, one samurai, Sakamoto Ryoma, broke into the home of a
bakufu
official involved in modernizing the navy, intending to assassinate him. But the official, Katsu Kaishu, asked the samurai to listen to his explanations before he killed him: after an afternoon of discussion about the importance of a strong navy, the would-be assassin was convinced and changed sides.

Yet increasing unrest caused by opening up to the West, revolts, inflation and the desertion of
daimyo
supporters weakened the Tokugawa regime, creating a crisis into which more rebel samurai flung themselves. A national argument was taking place, about the need to shift from an essentially feudal and traditionalist society to a modern one, in essence not so different from the struggles in Russia and America. Japan would achieve her modernization with far less bloodshed than the United States had – though it would be a less democratic transformation – and far more successfully than Russia. Eventually, after more than two centuries of relative stability, the shogunate collapsed, and in 1867–8 the young emperor Meiji returned as the supreme ruler of Japan. This period is remembered as the ‘Meiji restoration’.

Traditionalists now got a horrible shock, which led directly to the confrontation between Saigo’s samurai and the Japanese army; for the new regime promptly did exactly what the conservative and anti-foreigner samurai had hoped to prevent. It modernized, and very fast. The 280-plus
daimyo
landholdings were abolished and turned into seventy-two Western-style prefectures, effectively creating a single national territory for the first time. Samurai lost their privileges, from the right to carry swords to their untaxed stipends. Who, in the 1870s, needed poetry-crazed, sword-fighting (and somewhat rusty) warriors? Old rules about dress, haircuts and where people could live were torn up. Japanese town-dwellers started to experiment with Western clothing.

A modern conscript army, based on Western military thinking, was created. Compulsory education was brought in. The capital moved from old Kyoto to Edo. A new land tax swept away complex
feudal arrangements, and in 1872 railways arrived. After a rocky start, the Japanese turned to the German experience of state-directed capitalism to create their industries, and to the British to help build a modern navy. By 1889 a new constitution, creating a house of peers and a house of representatives, the latter elected but on a tiny franchise (about 1 per cent of men had enough property to vote), had been unveiled. Japanese citizens were granted civil rights and there was a flowering of popular democratic movements.

This added up to the most dramatic, fastest (non-revolutionary) reform programme in modern history. It was almost a revolution – but not quite, because it was driven by samurai and landowners, albeit mostly middle-ranking ones, and occurred under the authority of an ancient imperial system. It made Czar Alexander II look lazy. Yet it produced turbulence and reactions almost as extreme as many another revolution. There were revolts by peasants and samurai who could not accept the loss of their old powers – and who were still supported by many conservative-minded Japanese in the cities and villages. Saigo Takamori was only the boldest of the rebels, and he, like so many other samurai, had started on the side of the Meiji restoration. He broke with the new regime only in 1873, when it failed to take his advice to invade Korea – a plan he hoped would restore the glamour and authority of the warrior class.

Saigo had been born in the domain of Satsuma, or Kagoshima, on the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese islands. It was famous not only for its small oranges but for being backward, traditionalist and having an unusually high number of samurai – about a quarter of the male population.
³²
It was also famously independent-minded, and headed by an ancient
daimyo
family who represented themselves as the independent kingdom of Satsuma at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition. Saigo’s family were poor samurai, but he was bright and scholarly and worked his way up from clerking jobs to a role at the centre of Japanese political life in Edo. His political career had its ups and downs, including two banishments, but by the mid-1860s he was representing the interests of Satsuma at the imperial court in Kyoto. There he emerged as an opponent of the Tokugawa regime but, though conservative in much of his thinking, he became a political reformer.

After the Meiji restoration he even emerged as a hardliner, enthusiastic
about the creation of the modern conscript army that would later finish him off, keen on destroying the old samurai stipend system, and ruthless in destroying the power of the old regime and its supporters. He was about the least likely rebel against the Meiji emperor, whom he revered, that it is possible to imagine. Indeed, Saigo’s own Satsuma lord, Shimazu Hisamitsu, thought he was a destructive reformer bent on turning proud old Japan into a colony of the barbarian nations. The Korean crisis provoked his resignation from the government, but Saigo’s internal conflict as between the old samurai culture he had been brought up in and the demands of modernization may have made his life feel intolerable.

As soon as he left the government and returned to Satsuma, he began an almost Tolstoyan life of hunting, farming and setting up chidren’s schools to teach Confucian values. He did not write novels, but he did write poems:

Saigo was also, by now, an iconic national figure in Japan whose every move was watched.

Precisely what turned him from visionary in voluntary exile, warning of decadence in government, into the leader of a full-scale military rebellion is hard to pin down. But the revolt was provoked by the Tokyo administration, who sent spies – and possibly assassins – after Saigo, and tried to seize arms stored in Satsuma. It began as an uprising of private military school students in Kagoshima. Saigo put himself at their head and announced that he was setting off for the capital with this local army, to challenge the government. Beginning with more than twelve thousand men, armed with rifles, carbines, howitzers and mortars as well as their swords, they collected supporters as they marched north through the snow. But they then halted for an unsuccessful fifty-four-day siege of the huge seventeenth-century Kumamoto Castle, which allowed the opposition to land a much larger and far better-equipped army of sixty thousand loyal samurai and conscript soldiers. In ferocious battles, the rebels were forced back through a long retreat, fighting and losing men all the way, until their final downhill charge and Saigo’s death.
³⁴

So this is not quite the simple story of traditionalist samurai fighting hopelessly against a modernizing government that it first seems. Had it been, Saigo Takamori would not be the tragic hero he remains for many Japanese. His tale is more interesting, and sadder, than that. He was a modernizer, too, for much of his life (and fought more often in a French-influenced modern uniform than in samurai clothes). He was torn between his country’s past and its future, and it was only when he found himself with his back to the wall that he chose to fight for its past. Even then he had no coherent project beyond the very vague notion of wanting a more ‘virtuous’ government. The ambiguous nature of his revolt is shown by his declaration in the course of it that he was not fighting to win, but for ‘the chance to die for principle’ – in other words, to turn himself into a symbol. That he certainly did.

Japan’s success as a modernizing power would soon astonish the world when she defeated the Imperial Russian Navy at the battle of Tsushima in 1905. But though clad in modern steel and European uniforms, in its heart twentieth-century Japan retained many of the medieval instincts of the samurai class, with its emphasis on death, honour and family lineage and its contempt for outsiders – at least until the disastrous 1940s. Saigo represented both Japans, which was one too many for a single life.