Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (151 page)

It is almost unbelievable that the emperor should have learned now, for the first time, of the trial of K
ō
toku Sh
ū
sui and the other defendants, the subject of immense interest throughout the country ever since the trial began on December 10. The only explanation is that people at the court, aware that he did not read the newspapers, had deliberately not informed the emperor.
⁴
If, indeed, he had no knowledge of the planned attempt on his life, the fact that any Japanese would have desired to kill him must have come as a shock. From time to time, Meiji had received word of assassinations of foreign heads of state. Czar Alexander II of Russia, King Umberto I of Italy, and King Carlos I of Portugal had all been killed in recent years.
⁵
President Sadi Carnot of France and Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley had been assassinated. Queen Min of Korea had been killed by Japanese ruffians. In addition, there had been unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Alfonso XIII of Spain and even of Queen Victoria.
⁶
Closer at hand, a Japanese policeman had attempted to kill Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia at
Ō
tsu in 1891.

The emperor regularly sent telegrams of grief when he learned of assassinations and telegrams of joy when he heard that the intended targets of assassination attempts had escaped, but probably it never occurred to him that he himself might one day be a target.

The plot against his life, characterized as “high treason” (
taigyaku
), was planned by anarchists whose spiritual mentor was K
ō
toku Sh
ū
sui (1871–1911), a journalist and translator.
⁷
K
ō
toku grew up in Tosa Nakamura, a small town in Shikoku, where he early demonstrated unusual scholarly ability, A poem in Chinese he wrote when he was seven years old has been preserved.
⁸

In his autobiographical “Why I Became a Socialist,” K
ō
toku suggested various reasons that he was attracted to socialism while still a boy. He recalled one misfortune with resentment: his family had suffered such severe financial reverses during the period after the Restoration that he was unable to continue his studies.
⁹
He did not mention two other misfortunes—the death of his father when K
ō
toku was a year old, depriving him of parental protection, and the discrimination he suffered at school because he did not belong to the samurai class.

As a boy, K
ō
toku felt restive in the closed world of Tosa Nakamura. Recognizing his unusual ability, his family made sacrifices in order that he might attend a school in K
ō
chi, but he hated the regimen and felt like a “prisoner.”
¹⁰
His restlessness (and the poor food) is said to have induced pleurisy, the first of many illnesses that dogged him. When he recovered, he returned to middle school, but his long absence had a deleterious effect on his studies, and he decided to quit school and go to T
ō
ky
ō
. He raised money for the journey by selling his books. He had just turned sixteen when he arrived in T
ō
ky
ō
in September 1887.

K
ō
toku found work as a houseboy, attending an English-language school in his free time. Three months later, he, along with others members of the Tosa Freedom Party, an association of K
ō
chi men with advanced political views, was ordered by a public security ordinance to leave T
ō
ky
ō
. Their principal crime was having protested against the weakness of the government’s handling of treaty revision. This “crime,” shared by persons of many varieties of political belief, probably would have escaped punishment had it not occurred just as the draft of the new constitution was being completed. The government (especially It
ō
Hirobumi) feared that such protests might threaten the successful completion of the constitution and therefore issued the decree in the name of preserving public order. K
ō
toku was one of 570 men ordered to stay away from T
ō
ky
ō
for a period of three years.
¹¹

K
ō
toku walked all the way back to Tosa Nakamura, and his suffering on the road from cold and hunger created in him a hatred of It
ō
that he never lost. No sooner did he get back home than he was subjected to complaints that he was not doing anything to relieve the family’s financial problems. Once again he decided to run away, this time to China, but his money took him only as far as
Ō
saka. This city turned out to be of critical importance to K
ō
toku, as it was in
Ō
saka that he met Nakae Ch
ō
min (1847–1901), a materialist philosopher and popular-rights advocate who, by his own testimony, was his only teacher. K
ō
toku, now in his eighteenth year, served for two and a half years as Nakae’s houseboy and disciple.

Nakae (who was also from K
ō
chi Prefecture) was living in
Ō
saka because he, too, had been ordered to leave T
ō
ky
ō
.
Ō
saka was an exciting place: most of the liberal or radical thinkers who had been expelled from T
ō
ky
ō
had settled there, giving rise to discussions, meetings, and publications devoted to political issues.

K
ō
toku began at this time to keep a diary of his impressions. On February 11, 1889, the day the constitution was proclaimed, Mori Arinori, the minister of education, was stabbed and killed by a young man named Nishino Buntar
ō
. K
ō
toku wrote nothing in his diary about the constitution, but he composed a funeral oration in classical Chinese expressing sympathy and admiration for Nishino, identifying himself with an assassin who had chosen the dangerous course of implementing his convictions with direct action.
¹²
K
ō
toku’s admiration hinted at his future politics, although at the time he was not even a socialist, much less an anarchist.

Although the constitution was joyfully welcomed by most Japanese, K
ō
toku’s silence probably reflected the influence of Nakae, who questioned the value of this “gift” from the emperor and mocked the foolishness of Japanese who acclaimed the word “constitution” without any conception of its probable effects.
¹³

To earn a living, K
ō
toku for a time wrote plays for a popular actor, including one on the assassination of Mori Arinori, contrasting the arrogance of the cabinet minister with the powerlessness of ordinary Japanese. K
ō
toku also began to write articles for political magazines. Once the celebrations of the proclamation of the constitution had passed without incident, the ban on radicals in T
ō
ky
ō
was lifted, and the center of political activity reverted to the capital. Nakae moved back, taking K
ō
toku with him.

In 1890, when he was nineteen, K
ō
toku failed a physical fitness test for army service, the one fortunate result of his lingering illness. He studied at a government English-language school, graduating in 1893. In the meanwhile, he had become addicted to the pleasures of the Yoshiwara district. Nakae predicted that K
ō
toku would become a writer rather than a political figure, but K
ō
toku insisted that he intended to become a cabinet minister.
¹⁴

In September 1893 K
ō
toku took a job with the
Jiy
ū
shimbun
, a newspaper that had stood for liberalism in the traditions of Itagaki Taisuke but had been bought and turned into a government organ. K
ō
toku’s work was mainly translating articles that had appeared in English-language publications. Although he had learned at the language school to read Macauley, Dickens, and Carlyle, translating political dispatches was quite a different matter. In later years, he vividly recalled how hard this work had been.

As K
ō
toku gradually became more adept at reading political works in English, he fell under influence of the writers. He mentioned in a personal memoir having read early in his career the works of Albert Schäffle and Henry George, but he was still far from being a convinced socialist. K
ō
toku first attracted attention with an article he wrote in 1897 on the funeral of the empress dowager. Its reverent loyalty to the throne made the editor suppose that K
ō
toku was a model young Japanese, and he was promoted to writing editorials.
¹⁵

K
ō
toku first came in contact with socialist organizations in the following year. He joined a study group that met monthly to hear and discuss lectures on issues related to socialism. K
ō
toku was at first an inconspicuous member of the group, probably because his knowledge of socialism was limited, but on June 25, 1899, he delivered a lecture entitled “Present-Day Political Society and Socialism” that brought attention, particularly because he dealt with socialism in Japan, unlike the other lecturers, who delivered papers on foreign socialists like Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, Karl Marx, and Henry George.
¹⁶

In 1898 K
ō
toku moved (as an editorial writer) to the
Yorozu ch
ō
h
ō
, the most progressive of the major T
ō
ky
ō
newspapers, and wrote editorials for five years. His first (published in February 1898) bore the provocative title “Grief over Empire Day.” It opens:

It was just ten years ago today that our people, excited by the mere report of the proclamation of a constitution, had instant visions of an age of gold and danced for joy, all but crazed with happiness. Quite a few months and years have passed since then, but the absolutist, oppressive administration has not changed. The constitution has frequently been dishonored by the Satsuma clique, and the legislature has been trampled on by the Ch
ō
sh
ū
clique. The political parties are anesthetized, and society advances day by day in the direction of corruption and degeneration.
¹⁷

K
ō
toku’s criticism of the government, particularly its monopoly by the Satsuma–Ch
ō
sh
ū
cliques, was severe, but he had not abandoned hope for the political parties. In November he wrote an editorial welcoming the new Yamagata cabinet, not because he admired its policies, but because the failure of the
Ō
kuma–Itagaki cabinet had demonstrated that the existing political parties were not worthy of the name. He felt it was preferable to have as the prime minister someone who did not even pretend to lead a party. K
ō
toku continued to call for such reforms as an equalization of income between rich and poor, the spread of education, fair elections, an end to the aristocracy, the establishment of an inheritance tax, the establishment of laws to relieve poverty and to supervise the workplace, and the nationalization of monopolies and land.
¹⁸
He still seemed to hope that the existing political system could be reformed and made beneficial to the mass of the Japanese people.

K
ō
toku considered going into politics and seeking office. He joined a movement that advocated the creation of a system that would enable anyone who so desired to run for election. His goal at this time was a democracy based on the constitution, but as a result of his participation in the study group, his writings began to treat socialism more overtly. In an editorial written in September 1899, he recognized that the Japanese were not yet ready for socialism but urged readers before rejecting or persecuting socialism to study it seriously.

The central figure of the study group was Katayama Sen (1859–1933), a major figure in the history of Japanese socialism. Katayama had received a good education but had become dissatisfied with its traditional content. He declared that the study of Chinese texts was stupid, and that writing Chinese poetry and prose was of no use in earning a living.
¹⁹
In 1884, at the age of twenty-five he went to America and remained there for eleven years, earning a living as best he could while studying at various institutions.
²⁰
In 1886, while in California, he “discovered God” and became a member of the First Congregational Church of Alameda. Although in later years he sometimes mocked his conversion in terms of having prayed to Jesus, the god who dwelled in America, only because the Japanese gods were so far away, his Christian faith was of prime importance in his development. Katayama left the United States with a master of arts and a bachelor of divinity. But even more valuable than these degrees were his contacts with the social thought of advanced Protestant leaders, confirming his concern for workers and other exploited members of society.
²¹
Katayama wrote that socialism was the “new gospel” that would save twentieth-century society.

After his return to Japan in 1895, Katayama became the director of the first Japanese settlement house. His firsthand knowledge of the suffering poor undoubtedly contributed to his socialist convictions. The period following the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War was marked by rapid industrialization, an increase in salaried workers, rising prices, and great social change. But no matter how hard-pressed, workers had no means to protest against exploitation. In 1897 Katayama was active in the formation of labor unions and served as the editor of the first union periodical. The success of the railway strike of 1898 brought him celebrity and proved that the strike was an effective weapon with which workers could enforce their rights. But Katayama was convinced that efforts to improve the workers’ situation should always be in accordance with the law; he had no sympathy for anarchists.