THE MEIJI REVOLUTION
Their Mission
• Toppling the feudal shogunate
• Terminating the mighty samurai
• Breaking up guilds, promoting mobility and literacy
• Sprinting ahead, while clutching at Old Nippon
It’s a cliché to say that Japanese people collaborate more than Americans or Europeans. During Japan’s economic glory days of the 1980s, when Toyota, Honda, and Datsun (Nissan) trounced Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, management experts lauded “quality circles” and even encouraged American assembly-line workers to imitate the Japanese by showing up early each morning to chant company slogans while performing jumping jacks together. Japan could do no wrong. A 1987 book on corporate Japan was subtitled “The Art of Fumble-Free Management.”1 The mania died down in the 1990s, when Japan’s soaring economy fell into a twenty-five-year stall. Some social psychologists challenge the idea of a Japanese “collectivist mentality” while others report that Japanese people feel group emotions more than Westerners do.2 Regardless, when we examine one of the most dramatic transformations in world history—the Meiji Revolution—we see the work of many. In this chapter, we will focus not on one individual but on several extraordinarily brave leaders who figured out how to overthrow a settled regime while facing down 2 million sword-wielding samurai.
HOLD FAST, FALL APART
Midnight. Ryoma slept next to a sword and he knew how to use it. A few feet away on a tatami mat lay his friend, also deadly with a blade. They had blown out the candles and locked the shutters. Ryoma and his friend were young men, still in their twenties, but they were precocious—they’d already amassed enemies. Real enemies, not sports rivals with grudges or jealousies. It was a distinguished list of foes, including some of the most feared samurai in the country. On this night maybe Ryoma and his comrade should have stayed awake like sentries, but when you’re on the run the adrenaline crash eventually catches up and forces your eyes to close. That was a mistake late on this night in 1866 at the Teradaya Inn, outside Kyoto.3
About twenty samurai were circling the inn, gauging the possible escape routes, in case the ambush went wrong. A young maidservant named Oryo knew Ryoma and his bodyguard friend. When they had arrived she noticed the jittery and weary look in their dark eyes. After they settled in for the evening, she soaked in a hot bath. She tilted her head back, when suddenly she heard a door flung open. From the corner of her eye she saw the glint of spears in the candlelight. She couldn’t get to the hook that held her robe, so she ran up the back stairs, stark naked, and burst into Ryoma’s room to warn him. Ryoma and his friend jumped up, threw a blanket around Oryo, and sent her back down the hidden stairs. They hauled up their loose-fitting trousers and grabbed their swords, but Ryoma grabbed something else, too. A Smith & Wesson pistol. If this was going to be a wild west duel, then Ryoma would come fully loaded. America had stirred up all this craziness, he thought.
Ryoma and his friend crouched in the corner, listening to the intruders rush up the stairs and duck into the room next door. Then the attacking samurai stormed into Ryoma’s room, swords slashing. Ryoma ducked behind a piece of furniture and began firing the revolver. Six bullets. They all hit. Six men dropped. But the samurai kept coming. Ryoma tried to reload but the swords were getting closer. One young warrior leaped at him and a blade slashed Ryoma’s left hand. He dropped the ammo. Ryoma and his guard swung their swords and knocked a few spears out of the attackers’ hands. But how many more attackers would show up? They were outnumbered and trapped. Except for a window. They grabbed the ledge and rappelled down into an empty courtyard. The courtyard had no exit to the street, though. Staying a few steps ahead of the attackers, they climbed back into the building through a first-floor window and hacked their way through the paper doors (shoji) that separated room from room. One of the bedrooms was not empty and a young couple were startled to see two sweaty, fleeing samurai rushing past their futon. Finally, they slit their way to an exit and tore across the road, leaving behind cutout figures of themselves and their swords in the paper screens. The attackers would not forget. They would come back for Ryoma. Would he be ready for them next time?
The true and tense daring of Sakamoto Ryoma has inspired seven television shows, six novels, five films, numerous video games, several long-haired action figures, and artistic flourishes atop coffee lattes. But Ryoma sliced his way into Japan’s history books not because of his katana blade but because of his heroic and shrewd political action. A survey by Japan’s leading television network showed that Japanese people rank Ryoma as the world’s most influential historical figure, just edging out Napoleon. Walt Disney comes in at number 40 and Shakespeare shows up at number 87, easily beaten by Freddie Mercury of Queen at number 52.4 Matthew Perry comes in last. Not the actor from Friends, but the American commodore who steamed into Tokyo harbor in 1853. These two characters, Ryoma and Perry, sparked a revolution in Japan’s government and culture that made Japan more open, less feudal, and more free. Japan turned away from a quiet, homogeneous culture of small villages and rice paddies and moved toward raucous cities built on smelting steel and dependent on foreign traders. In this chapter we will examine the Meiji Revolution and the collapse of the Tokugawa shogun regime. There are few examples in history of a society specifically choosing to upend its entire traditional order, a choice made without a cataclysmic civil war or a bloody revolution in which ruling families are summarily shot (as in Russia in 1917) or their heads are marched out on spikes (as in France in 1789).
The scene above, Ryoma’s escape from the Teradaya Inn, sets forth two key themes to discuss: First the role of samurai and the bitter split among them. Second, the Smith & Wesson. The Japanese revolution would not have taken place but for the wild west American revolver and its rifle cousins. Let’s find out how and why it matters to us today.
FEUDALISM UNDER THE SHOGUNATE: THE SWORD CUTS BOTH WAYS
The Tokugawa family had ruled Japan since 1603. Yes, a parade of emperors technically outranked the shogun, but the emperors were like jewels on the handle of the long blade, glimmering but useless. The Tokugawa shogun sat atop an elaborate feudal structure that stretched across Japan’s four major islands. While a shogun feigned loyalty to the emperor, he had the power to prohibit the emperor from leaving Kyoto without permission. This prevented the emperor from building up an independent constituency of knights or even from complaining too loudly of his treatment. In 1900 a popular song in the United States was titled “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” It could have been a Japanese song describing the life of an emperor: luxurious yet trapped.
Let’s take a few moments to set out the feudal classes beneath the Tokugawa shogun, starting with the 270 regional daimyo, feudal lords who presided over the agricultural output (chiefly rice) of their fiefdoms. The daimyo could impose their own specific laws and taxes, but were then compelled to send “presents” to the shogun, a cut of the revenues. To keep the daimyo from conspiring against him and to slyly drain daimyo resources, the shogun forced the daimyo to spend alternate years in Edo (as Louis XIV forced his nobles to live at Versailles), requiring them to expend money to maintain several homes. Even more severely, the shogun forced the daimyo’s wives and children to live in Edo, effectively as hostages, during those periods when the daimyo stayed in their home regions (han). The daimyo, who were the highest-ranking samurai, enjoyed an income of approximately fifty thousand bushels of rice.5 Confucian thinking prized hierarchies and an orderly class structure (as Elizabethan society in England embraced a “Great Chain of Being” that set forth a social structure from angels to kings to common workers and beasts). In Japan, beneath the great lords/daimyo was the main body of samurai, who served as government officials and honored soldiers. With their families, they numbered around 2 million, in a population of 30 million. The government paid a stipend to each samurai to keep his loyalty. Lower-ranking samurai included peasants who fought only in times of war. The most interesting and in some ways most pathetic among the lower-ranking samurai were the ronin. They had no master or lord. They were vagrants, for their masters had died or dismissed them, leaving them adrift. The word ronin means “wave man,” as if they were pushed around by the seas. If a samurai’s master died prematurely, the samurai was expected to commit ritual suicide (seppuku), for he must have been at fault. If the ronin did not kill himself, he might escape and wander in disgrace. We’ll return to Sakamoto Ryoma later in this chapter and see how he chose to turn from honored samurai to ronin.
Nonsamurai commoners also adhered to a rank, starting with village heads and descending down to farmers and artisans, who might shape and sharpen the samurai swords. Let us skip one tier and go to the very bottom for a moment. There languished the filthy beggars (hinin), as well as the eta, a caste of untouchables, who handled the dead, disposed of human waste, and served as executioners.6 Census takers did not even bother to count these people, since they were classified as animals and forced to live apart like lepers. In 1871 the government officially abolished the terms eta and hinin, though the stigma remained.
WHO KILLED THE SAMURAI? REVENGE OF THE LOWLY MERCHANTS
We skipped over one lowly caste in order to dive to the mucky bottom of the social barrel: the merchants (chonin). Their role is crucial to understanding why the Tokugawa regime crumbled. The samurai sneered at the moneygrubbing merchants, who lacked honor and had no formal code of behavior. Nor could the merchants defend themselves against physical attack. Only samurai were permitted to carry swords. In the late 1500s the great general Hideyoshi forced farmers to turn in their weapons. The merchants were not untouchables; instead they were deemed parasites and lived in the shadows of more polite society.
The tremendous status gap between samurai and merchants helped implode the Tokugawa regime. In short, the samurai grew deep in debt to the merchants. Since the merchants were not just social inferiors but social pariahs, this humiliated the samurai. The very idea that a bottom rung of the status ladder could clobber a high rung undermined the legitimacy of the society.
At the denouement of the original King Kong movie, starring Fay Wray and a twenty-two-inch-high rubber doll covered in rabbit fur, the leading man muses, “It was Beauty killed the beast.” The fearsome samurai did not fall off of a skyscraper or paw at airplanes but in the second half of the 1800s they were killed off by something we consider beautiful and good: peace and prosperity. In an echo of the Spartans, the code of the samurai (later named Bushido, the way of the warrior) emphasized self-discipline, self-sacrifice, bravery, and contempt for those who strive to acquire material possessions. The samurai were soldiers standing ready either to rush in and slice open the bellies of their opponents or, failing their mission, slice open their own bellies. They were a standing army. But here is the problem: all they were doing was standing around, and eventually lolling about. It was not their fault. What is a samurai to do when there are no enemies, when the shogunate succeeds at tamping down internal warfare and blocking foreigners from its ports? At the same time, peaceful towns and countrysides permit merchants to transport goods and create a more commercial culture, in which the merchants’ wealth inevitably climbs. Eventually the merchants appear less like parasites, and more like the people who can successfully get rice, zoris, and silk kimonos to show up in urban centers and in remote villages. Unfortunately for the samurai, their culture would not countenance joining the merchants in their own game. As a result, the samurai were revered but unemployed. They were lethal, and they had too much time on their hands. Their plight recalls the discussion in chapter 4 of Marienthal, Austria, where a shuttered factory threw men into a state of depression. The samurai felt the same way. “They may be called the samurai, but it is hard to keep up the samurai spirit,” a contemporary reported: “They lose their self-respect, and the samurai spirit is constantly on a downward trend, as if pushing a cart downhill.”7
THE SAMURAI DEBT AND DEATH SPIRAL
The downhill cart began careening out of control when the samurai and even the daimyo began to borrow from the merchants in order to keep up appearances. Because the shogun began displaying ostentatious wealth, the daimyo were forced to display their own lavish costumes and jewels while visiting the shogun in Edo and while back in their home fiefdoms. Where would they get the money? They shipped more rice and other farm goods through the merchants, who became even more powerful and even more despised. The samurai also needed to flash their nineteenth-century version of bling: silks, gleaming swords, etc. The Tokugawa economy was improving and everyone needed to flaunt his riches. The pressure showed up even at the kitchen table. Take this simple example: in earlier days of the regime, a guest at dinner would typically bring his own food and the host would serve cold soup. By 1816, as a witness described it, “people are so extravagant in their consumption of sake and food, and their pastries contain all sorts of delicacies” that a host could not get away with cold soup anymore: “For example the price of an elegant meal for one person is anywhere from two to three bags (hyo) to four to five bags of rice . . . nowadays even those lowly people who live in insignificant town houses and back alleys refuse to eat cold soup.”8 Notice how the observer converts the price of a meal into rice. Rice was the medium of exchange. But the Tokugawa economy soon grew more sophisticated and required cash and credit, managed by the bankers and brokers who ran the rice storehouses and markets in Kyoto and Osaka. The aristocrats and samurai were tempted, of course, to spurn the merchants or chop off their heads. One daimyo earned 300,000 bushels of rice per year but buried himself in debt equal to fifty to sixty years of crop yields.9 Overleverage was not a term invented in the 2008 US real estate market. The samurai might simply refuse to pay debts, steal the goods, or murder the merchant.10 But even dead merchants could retaliate, because the surviving merchants would soon hear of the deeds and cut off credit to the deadbeat daimyo or dishonorable samurai. The merchants switched from being an annoying pebble in the samurai’s shoe to a shoelace binding ever more tightly.11
The Tokugawa regime did not fall because everything went wrong. It did not generally suffer from vanishing incomes, collapsing trade routes, ill health, or warlike conditions. Quite the opposite. The Tokugawa regime fell because it could not justify the reigning social order in the face of rising incomes, expanding trade, longer life spans, and relative peace. Now and then peasant farmers would rebel against a corrupt local official or pummel a merchant who foreclosed on loans after a crop failure, but these were exceptions.
Nor was the tax system a plague on wealth. Instead it prodded farmers to expand their businesses. Here’s how it worked: Once farmers had paid a certain annual tax based on an old census and historical yields of the land, they paid a very small tax if they could figure out how to grow more rice, soybeans, wheat, etc. This drove farmers to adopt new technologies including better fertilizers and plows. The tax rate on the additional output shrank toward zero. With more abundant crops, cities could expand since fewer farmers were needed to grow grain. In Osaka a thriving cotton-textile industry emerged. Literacy rates jumped up until nearly half the men could read (but only about 15 percent of women).12 The merchants, though deemed vulgar and crass, ignited an artistic outburst in the cities, funding and patronizing artists and playwrights. The woodblock prints that inspired Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet often depicted urban life in the 1800s, including erotic women, sumo wrestlers, and kabuki actors. These prints are called ukiyo-e, which translates as “floating world.” It denotes the ephemeral world of pleasure found in the cities. But I would suggest a second meaning. It shows that the formerly rigid social structure of the Tokugawa Era was starting to break apart and the barriers between castes were beginning to shift, mix, and ultimately float out to sea like jetsam and flotsam.
I have thus far neglected one other crucial force in the fall of the house of Tokugawa. From across the seas, Japanese patriots could see flickering lights. As the lights got closer, Japanese sentries could make out a flag: the Star-Spangled Banner. It was not a pretty sight to them. The new floating world would bring much danger.
HOW THE WEST WAS WON AND THE SHOGUN LOST
The Japanese had seen big-nosed, round-eyed Westerners two hundred years before. In 1542, a half century before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, howling gales blew Portuguese explorers off course, smashing their ship onto the rocks of Kyushu. The Japanese, holding spears, warily watched the strange men. After a while the sailors apparently got hungry, for they took out an odd tool that was long and metallic and aimed it at the sky. Then they shot a duck. When the duck fell, the Japanese put down their spears. Summarizing the next several hundred years in two sentences: First, foreign merchants began trading for Japanese pottery, lacquerware, copper, and silver, and eventually paraded Christian missionaries down their gangplanks. Second, when the Tokugawa regime took hold in the 1600s, the shogun grew increasingly annoyed by the missionaries and felt exploited by the traders, so he pulled up the metaphorical drawbridge, persecuted the missionaries and their converts, and closed Japan to foreign traders for the next two hundred years. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville calls Japan a “double-bolted land.” The Japanese isolated themselves (except for Dejima, a privileged Dutch trading post on a man-made island in Nagasaki Bay). They occasionally got wind of new intellectual currents. In 1720 the government lifted a ban on Western books as long as the books reported on medicine, military affairs, and geography. The Japanese were shocked and dismayed to learn that their medical texts, which were based on those of Chinese doctors, were inferior to the anatomical explorations of Europeans.
In 1853, when US commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay, the Japanese faced a force they could not easily repel. He was sent by President Millard Fillmore, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and the US Congress. When journalist Horace Greeley famously advised, “Go West, young man,” he was referring to places like Oregon and California. By 1850 those territories were under control. The White House turned to Perry and told him to, essentially, “go really West.” He did, sailing four ships under a coal-fired black cloud, on a mission to pry open Japan for trade, just as Britain had successfully opened up China. In addition, the Americans wanted a safe harbor so that whaling ships could restock their supplies (whaling was the fifth largest industry in the United States). The Japanese had never seen such naval power before. Like the sixteenth-century islanders who were shocked by Portuguese firearms, the Japanese elites felt simultaneously awed, repulsed, and paralyzed. Perry left behind a letter from Fillmore and returned six months later, this time with seven steaming ships and gifts, including a toy train set. The Japanese had never seen a real train or even a toy version. They soon realized how far ahead the barbarians had surged. They established an “Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books.” What did the institute study? Not the things we might associate with the word barbarian such as battle-axes, plunder, and Attila the Hun. Instead the institute’s researchers studied trains, trolleys, and rickshaws. Most Japanese had never seen a wheel because the Tokugawa banned the device, fearing that it could enable rebels to roll cannons to Edo. How could the Japanese of 1853—people without wheels and steam engines—compete militarily or commercially? That was the practical question. And here is the lacerating philosophical question that forced the Japanese to rethink and upend their social structure and economy: “How could the barbarians who smelled bad and were covered with body hair outthink the sons and daughters of a divine emperor?” Looking into the barrels of wide-bore Western guns and cannons and confronted by superior Western technology, the Japanese realized that they had misunderstood their place in the world. But what about the relative ranks within Japan? Wasn’t it possible that the Japanese leaders had misunderstood the place of each caste? Why couldn’t an untouchable rise up or a samurai fall down? And if a samurai fell down in society, must he then fall down on his sword?
For a few years, the Tokugawa regime tried to stave off these questions and gave only minor concessions to the Americans, sometimes with comical results. The Japanese government shunted the first American consul, Townsend Harris, to Shimoda, an isolated port that had just been destroyed by a tsunami. No Americans visited Harris for fourteen months to deliver supplies and the Japanese sold him roosters that were too tough to chew and required him to live in an old temple, which apparently was godforsaken though infested with rats.13 Despite losing so much weight that he said he looked as if a vice-consul had been sliced out of him, Harris proved an effective diplomat. He eventually got the shogun’s signature on a treaty that became a blueprint for Russian, Dutch, French, and English delegations. It opened more ports, shaved tariffs, and dampened the opium trade. Americans who broke Japanese law would be tried in American courts. Many samurai, including Sakamoto Ryoma, grew furious. One prominent daimyo, the former lord of Mito, was disgusted merely by seeing the Americans steaming into Edo Bay and firing guns in salute, in addition to conducting surveys without permission: “this was the greatest disgrace we have suffered since the dawn of our history.”14 To retaliate for the shogun’s concessions, a band of ronin tracked down and killed Harris’s interpreter.15
Japan faced a dilemma. Option one: open up to the West and learn its technology but lose face. Option two: try to repel the Westerners. The shogun faced with this momentous choice was only twenty-nine years old. He was also sickly and had no heir. But he made a choice: he signed the Harris Treaty of Amity and Commerce because he knew he would lose a humiliating naval war against the United States. Knowing that he was on shaky ground with samurai, who felt degraded, he tried to recruit the largely ceremonial emperor to support the decision by proposing marriage to the emperor’s sister.
Many of the daimyo opposed the treaty and refused to accept the end of isolation. They blamed the shogun and, sensing weakness in Edo, pushed for the end of the Tokugawa reign. They, too, appealed to the emperor and marched under the slogan sonno joi, “Restore the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians.”
TOPPLING THE FEUDAL SHOGUNATE: RYOMA’S MARCH OF REBELLION
The Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa domains began rebelling both against the Westerners and against the timorous shogun in Edo. Samurai from Satsuma killed a British visitor who was traveling to Yokohama. The United States and the British retaliated by bombing feudal forts. The daimyo in Choshu unleashed their own gunboats to fire on Western boats using American Civil War rifles. But then came the most infuriating insult of all: the shogun allowed the listing, smoldering Western ships to be repaired in Japanese boatyards. Traitorous! thought the samurai.
Now we come back to Sakamoto Ryoma, a few years before our opening tale when the shogun’s troops stormed the Teradaya Inn on a mission to kill him. He was a master swordsman and living in the Tosa daimyo where about two hundred samurai shouted the sonno joi battle cry. They called themselves shishi, men of high purpose. Ryoma joined the enraged group, which schemed to overthrow or assassinate a regional leader. But Ryoma thought the focus should be on the shogun in Edo, not his local surrogate. Ryoma left his master and became a ronin, a rootless renegade trained to kill. His first assassination target was one of the shogun’s highest-ranking military and policy advisers, named Katsu Kaishu. At the time, Ryoma was hardly a theorist. He said he had been born a poor potato farmer and had no scholarly interests. As a child he’d been bullied in school, perhaps because he looked weak, perhaps because his father was a lower-rank samurai who sold sake. Like many kids who were abused on the playground, he wanted to learn how to defend himself. So he took up swordsmanship and mortal combat. The kids stopped bullying him. But as an adult, he resented the bullying of the shogun and of the foreign invaders.
When he confronted his target, Katsu, Ryoma’s physical skills were fearsome. But when he began to speak with Katsu about Japan’s future, he realized that his own intellectual insights were those of a child. He must learn more. Katsu explained that merely destroying the shogunate was not enough. Nor was expelling the barbarians. Japan must learn the ways of the barbarians, the weapons and technology that propelled their navy to dominate the seas. Instead of an assassination target, Katsu turned into a master teacher for Ryoma. Katsu taught him about military strategy, corporate structures, and the US Bill of Rights. Ryoma soon realized that he must transcend sonno joi. Japan’s goal should be harvesting the knowledge of the foreigners, not slaughtering them. While sailing on a Japanese warship, he composed his Eight Point Plan for a new Japan that would end the shogun’s reign, bolster the emperor, create a bicameral legislature, and establish a modern navy. All of these things would come to pass. Some were more urgent than others. A new navy could not wait for politics. Ryoma founded a private navy (a precursor to Mitsubishi). His navy’s first mission: attack the shogun’s forces. To this day, Ryoma is known as the Father of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Ryoma, the rootless ronin, realized he could do none of what he sought to accomplish alone or even in concert with Katsu. He needed to recruit daimyo. Unfortunately, the daimyo were now arguing among themselves and engaging in armed skirmishes. Choshu and Satsuma were longtime rivals. Yet each felt aggrieved by the shogun’s mandates and his willingness to allow belligerent foreign vessels to be repaired in Edo shipyards. Calling on his skills of persuasion rather than his sword, Ryoma brokered a military alliance between Choshu and Satsuma. Tokugawa leaders learned of Ryoma’s negotiations and slapped a target on his back, sending its loyal hitmen in pursuit. Ryoma’s negotiations with the two rebellious daimyo were tiring and dangerous, of course. It was amid these talks that Ryoma and his guard hoped to rest at the Teradaya Inn, only to be awakened by the shogun’s murderous but unsuccessful band of assassins. Remember in our telling of the Teradaya story that Ryoma picked up a Smith & Wesson. How ironic—an original leader of the “expel the barbarian” movement escaped with his life by firing a barbarian weapon at his countrymen, who were defending the invasion of the barbarians. It does, however, make sense, for Ryoma’s political strategy called for drawing from the foreigners their best tools, which on that evening included drawing a pistol on fellow samurai.
Ryoma took command of a warship and helped lead Choshu’s peasant militia to rout the shogun’s navy near Shimonoseki. Satsuma was preparing its own attacks. Japan was about to plunge into its own civil war, within a few years of the US Civil War. Then Satsuma and Choshu hatched a clever and nervy plan. They basically abducted the emperor and proclaimed that they had restored imperial rule. Suddenly, these mutineers looked like the real patriots. Ryoma’s Eight Point Plan was funneled to the shogun, who had watched his men get slaughtered. The shogun, whose family had ruled for two and a half centuries, picked up Ryoma’s plan and proclaimed it his own. He stepped down in November 1867, announcing that he had “put his prerogatives at the Emperor’s disposal.” The emperor was in charge. He was fourteen years old.
A few weeks after Ryoma’s stunning masterstroke, he stopped over at a Kyoto inn with a friend and his bodyguard, a former sumo wrestler. Again a band of commandos broke into their room. Again Ryoma grabbed his sword, but he could not find an escape route. He was assassinated, along with the sumo wrestler and his friend. Later, the former leader of the deposed shogun’s special police force was eventually executed for the crime, but real proof was elusive. The motive was not: Ryoma, through his sword, his cunning, and especially his diplomacy, had destroyed the shogunate.
Today politicians compete almost comically to sidle up to Ryoma’s memory. A few years ago Japan’s former justice minister bolted from the ruling LDP party because he “wanted to play the role of Sakamoto Ryoma,” while a competing party leader retorted that his group was already “playing the Ryoma role.” The land minister then admitted that he was “extremely displeased,” because he was a greater fan of Ryoma.16 Everybody seems to be a fan, and when the government minted Ryoma’s stern but noble visage on a thousand-yen coin, collectors immediately bid up the price by many times its stated value.
MEIJI RESTORATION OR MEIJI REVOLUTION?
The emperor’s name was Mutsuhito but they called him Meiji (the enlightened one). He did not know how to wield a sword, fire a gun, or ride a horse. The shogunate was gone but what would come next? Could this rigid society operate without Confucian order and a caste system enforced by bayonets and by shame? A movie from the early 1980s called Eijanaika reenacts the frenzy of confusion, depicting farmers, prostitutes, pimps, and former samurai riotously singing in the streets, in the brothels, and in the beer halls. They are not cheering new democratic rights and a bicameral legislature. They are cheering the lifting of the feudal barricades. In one scene women dance wildly, lifting up their kimonos and flashing their bottoms at the police. The title of the film translates as “Why Not?” The future was wide open—for better or for worse.
I disagree with those history books that refer to the Meiji Restoration. Highlighting the term restoration was campaign hype from the rabble-rousers who wanted to gather public support for the emperor. In truth, the emperor had not been in control since the twelfth century. Meiji was not a leader in hiding or a Hamlet waiting to retake the throne from a vicious usurper. After the shogunate disintegrated, the emperor was more the marionette than the puppet master. He was on the throne to witness a revolution, not to direct a restoration. The Meiji Revolution dissolved the feudal barriers; embraced a constitution to protect the people; glorified Western civilization; dismissed the samurai and replaced them with a conscripted army. The new government unveiled a Charter Oath, which promised open discussion and to end the “evil practices of the past.” All of this was achieved with far less bloodshed than the French and American revolutions, or the Russian revolution to come. I submit that historians do not generally call the Meiji period a revolution because the count of battlefield corpses was too low.17 Japan should get credit for achieving so much on the backs of so few bodies.
The Meiji Revolution allows us to ask the following questions that are crucially relevant today: Can a country stage a revolution while simultaneously (1) maintaining a sense of patriotism and (2) overhauling nearly everything? How can a country hold itself together while acknowledging that a huge swath of the population (the 2 million samurai) had for years been idle, unproductive, and demoralized? Before we answer these timely questions we need to discuss what the young emperor saw at the revolution that was conducted in his name.
We will not spend much time on the emperor himself. For those who want to know more, Professor Donald Keene of Columbia penned a masterful and thick tome. Quite briefly, the emperor did not have a normal childhood. He was born in a small, plain house away from the palace because custom held that the birth process was “polluting.” He was raised by his father’s consort, not his birth mother. His own mother did not die in childbirth but, since she was a concubine, she was destined to serve the baby by calling him “your royal highness,” not “my son.” When Mutsuhito grew up, he visited his father’s consort but “never set foot across the threshold of his real mother’s house.”18 This quotation comes from Mutsuhito’s doctor, who was a German.19 That is the real point. The imperial throne discarded the Chinese-trained doctors and chose instead a Western physician.
WESTWARD HO: THE IWAKURA MISSION
When Meiji came to power the slogan sonno joi was also discarded and replaced with bummei kaika (civilization and enlightenment). The Charter Oath, which stemmed in part from Ryoma’s Eight Point Plan, urged the people to abandon “absurd customs” and to replace them with “accepted practices of the world.” A mania for Western ways broke out. The symptoms were sometimes cosmetic, sometimes much deeper. Former samurai chopped off their topknot hairstyle and adopted a Western mane, styled by a barber. A popular song blared, “If you slap a barbered head, it sounds back ‘civilization and enlightenment.’” Married women and former nobles stopped shaving their eyebrows and blackening their teeth. Toothbrushes came into style. Since Westerners ate beef, Buddhist priests were told to eat beef. The government began to discourage infanticide and abortion, which were common during the Tokugawa Era.
An official named Iwakura decided that the government needed more firsthand experience in the ways of the West. So he took a cruise on a spanking new, 363-foot-long, coal-fired ship that cost over $1 million to construct. It was almost as wide as the original Princess Love Boat and provided thirty first-class and sixteen second-class cabins. The name of the ship was telling, the SS America. It was built in Brooklyn. Along with forty-eight officials and scholars, Iwakura led a two-year mission to San Francisco, Washington, DC, England, France, and ports throughout Europe, followed by a return journey to Egypt, India, and China. In Washington he handed a letter to Ulysses S. Grant signed by the emperor and prime minister pledging that Japan will “reform and improve” so it can “stand upon a similar footing with the most enlightened nations.”20 It must have been a remarkable sight—the Japanese, fluent in English, significantly shorter than their American hosts, walking into meetings dressed in top hats and tails, while the Americans dressed more casually.21 An earlier Japanese visitor to the US Capitol had remarked that congressmen “shouted loudly to each other,” and dressed like workers in “our fish market.”22
In Victorian London the delegation visited the Crystal Palace and Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. They ogled the world’s first subway system and their designated historian noted that “[t]rains run beneath the street of our hotel, so we can hear their thunderous rumbling.” Describing the railways, the historian reported that passengers “boarding the trains cluster like bees, while those alighting scatter in all directions like ants.”23 The Japanese learned their lessons well. A century later, Tokyo subways would be famous for employing oshiya (pushers) to jam passengers onto cars during rush hours. The visitors also inspected carpet factories, dye works, and steel and cotton mills. The Japanese were trying to figure out how to modernize but also how to prevent being swallowed up by their more advanced trading partners. One prominent official asked a professor at the University of Glasgow, “Tell me, Professor Rankine, how do we in Japan set up a factory to make guns?” The professor replied that Japan should instead set up a college to train young men as engineers.24
Not all discussions were laudatory. At a meeting in Washington, DC, with US secretary of state Hamilton Fish, the Japanese testily debated religious freedom. The Japanese vice ambassador was offended and called the discussion “intolerable.” But then he changed his mind and upon returning home stated that “[foreigners will always] regard us as a barbaric nation” unless Japan abolished rules against Christians and others.25
The Iwakura mission was a very successful venture and the Japanese returned inspired to reinvent their economy and reorder their social priorities. Within a few years a sister ship of the SS America came along. The new one was called the SS Japan, and Mark Twain called it “the perfect palace of a ship.”26
Today on Japan’s ten-thousand-yen note is a picture of a prolific intellectual named Fukuzawa Yukichi. If Ryoma was the sword that sliced through the reins of the Tokugawa rulers, Fukuzawa was the pen that spread new learning throughout the country. He too was born of low-ranking samurai stock. He traveled to the West even before the Iwakura mission and came back to write a book called Seiyo Jijo (Things Western), establish a university, and launch a newspaper. His book An Illustrated Course in Physics became a standard text in schools. He argued that a woman should have equal rights in family property and should be educated, especially in matters of law and finance: “it will be like providing the women of civilized society with a pocket dagger for self-protection.”27 Most important, though, Fukuzawa encouraged an independent spirit. He believed that while money can buy schools and factories, civilization cannot be bought. It must be earned: “unless we can instill in people a spirit of independence, the outward manifestation of a civilization become merely vain appendages” to a country.28 Sounding like a combination of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan, he criticized government bureaucrats for intervening in everything from commerce to literature and treating common people like “mere parasites.” He pointed out that in his travels to the West, he found that “not a single invention in commerce or industry was created by the government. All worthy inventions were the products of great minds. . . . The steam engine was invented by James Watt and the railway was the brainchild of Robert and John Stevens.” At first the Meiji government ignored much of Fukuzawa’s economic advice and took over shipbuilders as well as silk and cotton textile factories. The government issued bonds to pay for them. However, by the end of the 1870s, the bills started piling up and the government careened into a U-turn, selling those businesses to private investors and subcontracting work to them.
Let us be clear about Japan’s Herculean efforts to learn the ways of the West: the vital motive was to strengthen the Japanese country, not simply to ape the democratic precepts of Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke. The slogan bummei kaika could be accompanied by fukoku kyohei, meaning “rich country, strong army.” Ultimately, Japan was more interested in advancing its economy, its finances, and its military might than in winning applause from moral philosophers. Its leaders were bigger fans of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie than of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Japan’s central challenge was to harvest the West’s know-how, blend it with the traditional heritage of Japan, and create a stronger, freer country. Could it be done? It sounded impossible for a nation that for two hundred years had been hiding behind thin paper screens, fat sumo wrestlers, and deadly samurai swords.
TERMINATING THE MIGHTY SAMURAI: WHO PULLED THE MARIONETTE’S STRINGS?
Iwakura and about a hundred other wise men (a few not-so-wise men snuck in, too) took charge from behind the throne. While surely some may have been motivated by avarice, arrogance, and a desire to avenge past slights, in sum their pronouncements and the results of their decisions demonstrate a remarkable devotion to the future of their people. Many were young and most came from the lower and middle classes of samurai. The Charter Oath provided scaffolding for their emerging democracy, but it was a shaky apparatus. At the start of the revolution, the government had no power to tax in the form of money and, besides, the nation had no standard currency. The shogun was used to collecting bushels of rice. The daimyo had title to most of the land, and 2 million samurai expected their regular stipend. A full-fledged constitution (based on the German model) did not come along until 1889. Since the Charter Oath insisted that “the high and the low shall all unite in carrying out” affairs, one thing was certain: the feudal structure must be blown up. The Meiji leaders were fearless. A former radical named Kido Koin, who helped draft the Charter Oath, traveled across the country to persuade powerful daimyo to surrender their land titles to the emperor in exchange for bonds and for a voice in the new government. Kido succeeded and the daimyo moved to residences in Tokyo and told their loyal soldiers to report to the emperor’s commanders.
The biggest challenge came next: What to do with 2 million samurai?
The samurai were proud and restless and they were sitting next to swords that had gone rusty during roughly two hundred years of peace. What was their place in this new world of steamships, railroads, and education for women? The new leaders, in the name of the emperor, began by proclaiming that the caste system was over. Japanese citizens could now pursue any job they wanted. The low-caste people who had spent their lives hauling human waste would be given equal rights to study medicine and law. The truly heroic, literally death-defying decision came next: the samurai were terminated. The government sliced their hereditary stipend in half (and soon converted it into a bond). A society has only three goods to distribute: power, wealth, and prestige. The Meiji leaders had ripped all three from the samurai. The samurai were now called shizoku, an empty title that carried no special rights and only the sadness of prestige evaporating into the mist. In 1876 the government banned shizoku from wearing swords, though some tried to skirt the rules by carrying the swords in their hands (the ploy did not work).29 As the new rules were announced, Kido said that the samurai considered him “an extremely dangerous person. Those who never held a grudge against me became angry with me, and all the anger of the world was centered on me. . . . I was prepared to die for the cause.”30
Raging samurai began to rebel and organize an attack on Tokyo and on individuals like Iwakura and Kido. But the new leaders had made another brave and smart move. After abolishing the samurai class, they announced that they would form a new imperial army made up of commoners. The army would be ready to take on a samurai revolt or even an invasion from foreigners. One of the army leaders pointed out that Peter the Great had built warships in Saint Petersburg and commanded a standing army of several million. In response, he wrote, “we must now have a well-trained army . . . officers and soldiers . . . manufacture and store weapons.”31 Before the new army could think about facing Russia, it had to confront twenty thousand raging samurai in Satsuma. The new imperial army crushed the rebels and, in samurai fashion, the rebel leader Saigo Takamori committed seppuku.32 Often called “the last samurai,” the highly principled Saigo had led the fighting against the Tokugawas but resented the humbling of the samurai. His remaining followers, the last of the breed, raised up their blades and rushed into the deadly aim of the emperor’s army of commoners. Samurai would be resurrected in myths, movies, and books, but never again on a real battlefield. Twelve years later, in a display of magnanimity and a bow to their shared history, the Emperor Meiji pardoned Saigo posthumously, in the same year that the constitution was enacted.
The samurai rebellion was a life-and-death matter, but the Meiji leaders bravely decided to overhaul their feudal system. And they took the risk of angering a well-armed constituency. Today’s leaders in the United States and elsewhere who are too sheepish to reform entitlement programs or revisit government programs because there are too many beneficiaries and too many bureaucrats at risk should consider the samurai example. Perhaps it could give them some courage. The Meiji leaders showed great patriotism in making tough, and somewhat thankless, choices.
BREAKING UP GUILDS, PROMOTING MOBILITY AND LITERACY: THE MEIJI ECONOMY UNLEASHED
Earlier in this chapter I pointed out that the Tokugawa economy was not a failure, nor was it perched on a precipice waiting to collapse. Although it was chiefly agricultural, it did not rest on slavery, as did the American South. The tax system even incentivized peasant farmers to invest in their fields and grow more crops. But Meiji Japan needed an industrial revolution, too. To achieve this, it needed mobility. I mean not only trains and ships to deliver goods, but a greater mobility for people to move geographically, occupationally, and spiritually. Breaking apart the caste system was a vital first step, for it freed people to change occupations and to travel across regions to accept new work. Some of the ex-samurai put down their swords and picked up hoes, hammers, and rivets. Others left the farm for the cities. The new regime abolished road tariffs and tolls, creating a more fluid internal market. Less than twenty years after Commodore Perry had unveiled his gift of a quarter-size toy locomotive with a passenger car and 370 yards of track, which elicited ogles, Japan cut the ribbon on a real train connecting Tokyo to Yokohama. The government sacked the guilds, which had prevented young people from taking up new trades and had driven up prices. Here again, we see an extraordinary instance of reformers defying powerful, well-organized clans. Today’s congressmen who complain they are stymied by special interests should take note, as should public-choice theorists. Because productivity during the Meiji era jumped even faster than during the Tokugawa era, Japan imported less food. This was not a sign of hunger but a sign that the Japanese had figured out how to grow more food with fewer peasants toiling in the fields.
Agricultural success freed up more resources, which entrepreneurs then poured into industry.33 Japan moved from exporting raw goods like rice to exporting fine, finished textiles. Japan’s prosperity was built in part on the hard work of a worm. The silkworm led Japan to become the greatest exporter of silk. Factories rose up and in the first decade of the Meiji regime, the number of cotton spindles multiplied. A British negotiator on cotton tariffs later compared the mills of Manchester and Osaka and concluded that Japan’s advantage came not from exploiting “cheap labour and lengthy working hours,” but instead because “Osaka has carried into practice the value and the economies of mass production.”34 A noted economist focusing on Japan called its ascendance “astonishing.”35 Cotton output jumped almost threefold in 1889 and over tenfold in the 1890s. Wages climbed in order to attract workers and kept rising into the twentieth century.36 Supporting Fukuzawa’s earlier arguments on entrepreneurship, a new and fascinating study by Carnegie Mellon researchers using precise company-by-company data reveals that the companies that boomed the most had received no government funding or assistance.37 With more businesses succeeding, firms sold stock to the public and the number of shareholders jumped from 108,000 in 1886 to 684,000 in 1898. The number of entrepreneurs grew, and they were not generally from the elite families. Roughly three-quarters came from families that had earlier been classified as commoners.38 Most important, the public was getting smarter and more educated. The Charter Oath pledged that there would be not “one family in the whole land, or one member of a family ignorant and illiterate.” By 1900 just about all Japanese children, including the girls, attended school. Meanwhile, the government built universities and sent talented students to study abroad, channeling business students to the United States, science scholars to Germany, lawyers to France, and maritime students to Britain.
SPRINTING FORWARD WHILE CLUTCHING AT OLD NIPPON
So now the cotton spindles were twirling faster than England’s, boys and girls were learning the hard sciences, and government officials were walking around in top hats and tails. There had to be a backlash.
In accord with our earlier findings, Japan’s higher standard of living soon brought a lower fertility rate and a bigger bureaucracy. But the backlash was more spiritual and cultural. Who and what had the Japanese become? Americans? Germans? Poseurs? Wannabes? The Japanese isles had once prided themselves on a spirit of unity and order. Was there room for rugged individualists, the nouveau riche, and the dead souls of the samurai? What about long-held traditions, good and bad? Could the Japanese sit comfortably among the leading nations of the world and defend their discriminatory, often infantilized view of women? How could Meiji preserve a uniquely Japanese character and hold his country together while still encouraging his people to borrow from the West? Few doubted that Japan needed to learn better ways to grow cotton, faster ways to run machines, more durable methods to build homes that could withstand tsunamis, and more advanced Western medicines that could defeat disease. But were those trains speeding from Tokyo to Kyoto in the shadow of Mount Fuji racing away with Japan’s soul? The most famous Meiji-era novelist, Natsume Soseki, wrote a haunting novel called Kokoro about the loneliness of people crowded together on streetcars in cities made of cement: “You see,” says an old man, “loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”39
Around this time, Giacomo Puccini composed Madama Butterfly, a poignant tale of the risks in giving up traditions and joining the fleeting ways of the West. Though Puccini was Italian, the tale stems from real stories that Japanese told to missionaries. After a few melodic notes cribbed from “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a young American navy lieutenant named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton arrives to take fifteen-year-old Cio-Cio-San, a former geisha girl, as his bride. He also takes a 999-year lease on a house that overlooks Nagasaki harbor. The lease can be canceled on a month’s notice. This is the Japanese way. The marriage can be canceled on a month’s notice. This, too, is the Japanese way, he suggests. In act 1 Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton warns that he will “play with the butterfly even if doing so will damage its wings.”40 Cio-Cio-San willingly gives up her Buddhist faith and converts to Christianity, but then her husband sails back to the United States. She waits three years, dutifully raising their son, awaiting the lieutenant’s return. Then a cannon blast. She sings the soaring aria “Un bel di” (One beautiful day), climaxing on a heartrending “l’aspetto” (I will wait for him). His ship, the Abraham Lincoln, is in the harbor. She decorates her home, “everywhere must be full of flowers,” and dons her wedding dress. But the lieutenant has not come for a second wedding night. He has come to take away his child, who will be raised by his American wife. In one of the most excruciating scenes in opera, Cio-Cio-San places a blindfold on her young son, puts an American flag in his small hand, and then picks up a dagger and stabs herself. She had surrendered all Japanese traditions but one—a noble death: “To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor.”
The government debated ways to avoid turning the entire country into a population of lonely streetcar riders and Cio-Cio-Sans. It went back in time to revive the Shinto religion and Japan’s mythological roots. In the centuries before Meiji, Shinto priests had been elbowed aside by Buddhists and Confucians. But the Shinto stories provided a more uplifting, singularly Japanese philosophy than the others, which were grafted from China. An eighth-century-AD text called Kojiki describes Japan’s mythical formation thousands of years ago. On a floating bridge to heaven the male god Izanagi and female goddess Izanami hoist up a “jewel-spear of Heaven” and then plunge it into the sea and stir. When Izanagi lifts the spear aloft, four drops of crystallized salt fall back into the sea, forming the lands of Japan. Therefore, according to the story, Japan is the result of a divine act. The government began exalting Shinto and a pantheon of deities led by the Sun Goddess. It established an office of Shinto affairs and a Ministry of Rites. Who was the Sun Goddess’s son? The emperor Meiji. So now the slender, young man had three mothers: his birth mother, his father’s consort, and the goddess of the sun. It was a big burden and few Japanese really believed that he was divine—until his navy clobbered the Russians in 1905. At that point the idea of divine imperial rule sounded plausible.
The Meiji leaders made four tough choices: First, to keep up with higher standards of living, they pried open their country to trade. Second, they faced down those who benefited from castes, guilds, and other barriers to social mobility. Third, they cut off the samurai, fearsome foes who had long stopped contributing to economic and social progress. Finally, they realized that money and genetics were not enough; they would have to promote some unifying, uniquely Japanese spirit in order to keep the four islands united.
When Meiji died in 1912 of diabetes and gastroenteritis, proving that he was human after all, Japan was far more prosperous and slightly more confused than it had been before he came to power. The barricades of the castes had come down, and now young men and women needed to navigate between the Wa and the Yo, between the Japanese tradition and Western styles. We still see that struggle in Tokyo today, in the young man who worships his ancestors at a shrine, but then slips on Beats headphones and rolls back to the street on his skateboard, uttering a hip-hop-inflected “yo.”