Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (159 page)

With the steady dwindling number of Japanese who lived and worked during his reign, Meiji tended to become mainly a name, and his achievements were often confused with those of the military and civil officials who served him. He is still popularly remembered, for example, in terms of his heroic role in leading the country to victory in the wars with China and Russia, even though in fact his role in both wars was minor. Although he has not been forgotten, most Japanese would have trouble naming a single deed that indubitably should be credited to the emperor.

Not only have memories of the man faded, but many of the buildings that stood as tangible reminders of his reign have disappeared. Some were destroyed during the great earthquake of 1923 or the bombings of 1945, but even more were the victims of later generations of Japanese less interested in preserving the past than in accruing commercial profits. The Rokumeikan, the emblematic building of the Meiji era, was razed in 1941. The rows of red brick buildings in front of T
ō
ky
ō
Station that seemed to represent the hopes entertained by Japanese of the late Meiji era that T
ō
ky
ō
might one day achieve the commercial success of London, survived the war, only to be condemned afterward as inefficient and to be torn down. Other relics of the era have been moved to Meiji Village, where examples of city architecture are tastefully grouped in bosky surroundings.

Each New Year, the Meiji Shrine attracts the greatest number of worshipers of any shrine or temple in Japan, but probably no more than a handful of those who fight their way to the altar, hoping that theirs will be a record-breaking crowd, recall the enshrined emperor as they bow, asking his blessings in the year to come. Meiji’s tomb in Ky
ō
to is generally deserted. Meiji and his era grow more and more remote, as this often-quoted haiku by the poet Nakamura Kusatao suggests:

It is the task of the biographer to make his subject come alive again. Leon Edel, the celebrated biographer of Henry James, once said that a biographer must “fall in love” with his subject. It is hard to fall in love with Meiji, who even in his most informal moments never forgot himself or his ancestors and rarely revealed his feelings. Many accounts relate how the emperor at a party kept drinking as long as there was any liquor on the table and then staggered off. Such anecdotes provide a “human” touch to the portrait of the emperor, but in the end they prove only the uninteresting fact that like millions of other Japanese, he enjoyed drinking saké. They do not make us feel any closer to him. The gossip about his affairs with anonymous women, including those allegedly provided by hosts during his travels, is equally unilluminating.

Meiji seems almost to repel attempts by a biographer to come closer. Perhaps we would feel differently if those who knew him best had not been so reluctant to write down their memories. Obviously, Empress Sh
ō
ken would never have revealed details of her married life (for example, how she felt about the various
gon ni tenji
), nor could we expect that the future Emperor Taish
ō
would explain the causes of his strained relations with his father, but we would know Meiji much better if Fujinami Kototada had related what it was like to be the emperor’s friend or if Sono Sachiko, the mother of his last eight children, had indicated if this seemingly cold and distant man had a warmer side.

It may be that there was no other side to Meiji than the one that could be observed in public. He was a stoic who rarely expressed preferences and almost never complained of heat, cold, fatigue, hunger, or the other afflictions of ordinary men. He was almost ostentatiously impassive. A chamberlain recorded that during maneuvers when cannons were fired, he refused to stuff cotton into his ears, even though every member of his staff took this precaution.
²

Meiji’s indifference to comfort has been ascribed to his Confucian training, but this training was essentially the same as that received by his father and by other members of the court, yet none of them resembled Meiji in his stoicism. Unlike his father, he seldom gave way to anger or acted in a manner that might be termed arbitrary or irresponsible. He seems to have possessed some inner force that enabled him to follow with rare deviations a code of behavior that was his own creation. He followed this code to the very end, when he painfully dragged himself to the T
ō
ky
ō
University graduation exercises and to a session of the Privy Council. He was unwilling to admit, even to himself, that he was in pain.

Chamberlain Hinonishi Sukehiro recalled that the emperor seldom revealed his emotions by his expression: “I served him a long time, but I never saw him either extremely happy or extremely sad.” Hinonishi was unable for two or three days to summon up the courage to break the news to the emperor that It
ō
Hirobumi had been assassinated, but all the emperor said when informed that his most trusted minister had been killed was
un
. At a session of the constitutional convention, when the emperor learned of the death of Prince Akihito, he said
muu muu
and nodded. The meeting went on.
³

In the early years of his reign, he did not complain about the grueling progresses to different parts of the country, even though the accommodations at his destinations were likely to be primitive. In keeping with his personal code of behavior, he endured the torture of riding all day in a sweltering hot palanquin, sitting erect for long hours. He could not enjoy even the relief of being alone even after he arrived. As soon as he reached a destination, he would be surrounded by local officials, probably verbose in expressing their joy over his visit, and he had to listen to them all attentively, as if grateful for their words, never revealing boredom. He was obliged by his sense of duty also to examine carefully local products and relics, even when he was exhausted.

What did he think about while being tossed for hours in a palanquin? Much of the time, especially when the going was most arduous, he may have reminded himself, “This is
my
land.” He never forgot that he was the descendant of a long line of emperors who had ruled over the country through which he was passing, and he was obligated to see every part, following the ancient practice of
kunimi
. He never relaxed in his resolve to follow precedents established by his ancestors, and he was determined to do nothing that might disgrace himself in their eyes.

In the same way, the emperor also recognized the people he encountered on his travels as
his
people. He probably never saw farmers or fishermen at work until his first journey to Edo, but he knew when he saw them that they were his people. He did not think of them, in the manner of a Heian-period aristocrat, as menials who were scarcely human. He never disdained to share with the common people their pleasures at the circus, the horse races, or displays of fireworks, and sometimes, on his travels, he shared their simple food.

Although the emperor felt a special closeness to Iwakura Tomomi, a nobleman who for many years had been his mentor and whom he associated with the world of his childhood at the Gosho, the men closest to him in later life, like It
ō
Hirobumi, were of humble stock, and he did not look down on them because of their birth. As the case of It
ō
proves, talented men could rise within the ranks of the new aristocracy, regardless of their forbears.

In his dealings with foreigners, Meiji was invariably courteous and even cordial, ready to smile and shake hands with anyone who was presented to him. His meeting with former President Grant was especially memorable; probably no advice that he received is his lifetime created a deeper impression than Grant’s. He was friendly toward the king of Hawaii, although he expressed doubts concerning the feasibility of the king’s plan for a league of Asian nations to be headed by himself. His solicitude for Crown Prince Nicolas after he had been wounded at
Ō
tsu was dictated not merely by fear of a Russian attack but by compassion for a prince who had been attacked while in a distant country. Each member of foreign royalty who was presented to the emperor was persuaded by his gracious reception that never before had the emperor shown such friendship to a visitor.

Meiji’s meetings with foreigners were not confined to heads of state. Hardly a day passed without his receiving some foreign technician or teacher about to return to his country. Innumerable foreign dignitaries—chiefly military men and politicians but also such figures as the general of the Salvation Army—called on him to convey their compliments during their sojourns in Japan, and the emperor met most of them. Many foreigners received high-ranking decorations from the court; few countries have ever been so generous with their decorations as Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji.

It is difficult to say how the emperor responded to the changes in Japan during his reign. Although like many who followed Confucian doctrines, he generally looked to the past for guidance, he seemed increasingly unwilling to perform such traditional duties of the emperor as the worship of the four directions at the New Year. He undoubtedly believed in Shint
ō
, but he seldom visited shrines. When he returned to Ky
ō
to, he worshiped at the tomb of his father, rather than at a shrine; his religion was less Shint
ō
than ancestor worship.
⁴
It did not bother him that many of his ancestors had been devout Buddhists, even though he himself was indifferent or even hostile to Buddhism.

Well-meaning missionaries sometimes presented the emperor with copies of the Bible, but nothing suggests that he ever read them. Even if he had diligently perused the Japanese translation, it is unlikely that the Bible would have shaken his conviction that he was descended from the gods, the scion of an unbroken line of emperors. Christianity was too alien for him to consider its teachings, but many young intellectuals of his time became converts.

Even though he was not interested in Christianity, Emperor Meiji seems to have felt no antagonism toward the European things that flooded into Japan during his reign. In his daily life, he usually wore a military uniform or a frock coat and was rarely seen in public wearing Japanese clothes. He did not object, for that matter, to the empress’s preference for wearing European clothes. He seems to have enjoyed Japanese food best, but at formal dinners Western food was always served, and he ate it without complaint and even with relish. During the day, he sat on a chair in front of a desk in his study, and all the public rooms of his palace were in Western style. He disliked electric lights not because they were foreign but because he feared that faulty wiring might cause a conflagration.

After a fire destroyed his old palace, he put off as long as possible the construction of a new one, reluctant to allow money to be spent for this purpose. He eventually realized that in order to impress foreign visitors, the prestige of the country demanded that he have a palace of some magnificence; but those parts of the palace to which visitors were not admitted were shabbily maintained. He always seemed reluctant to spend money on himself, as the tales of his patched uniform attest.

Meiji’s pleasures included listening to the phonograph and singing along with it, especially martial tunes.
⁵
Late in life, a new pleasure came his way, the films. His enjoyment of nonnative diversions did not imply any rejection of traditional Japanese arts but merely demonstrated his acceptance of the latest inventions. But the sports he played—
kemari
and archery—were traditional, and he often expressed a preference for Japanese works of art.

The emperor had his foibles. Erwin Baelz recalled that

he could not endure that the empress’ throne should be as lofty as his. He wanted a higher one, but Inouye protested. When Inouye, paying a casual visit to the palace, found that a thick silken mat had been smuggled beneath the emperor’s throne, he dragged it out and flung it into the corner of the room, which naturally led to a great “row.”
⁶

He seems also to have had a streak of sadism, as when he deliberately dropped asparagus on the dusty dining-room floor, to be retrieved and eaten by a chamberlain. Perhaps this kind of sadism was inevitable in someone who (in theory at least) had absolute power; he may have wanted to see to what extremes of obedience he could obtain from a comically devoted retainer.

The emperor’s sadism (if that is the proper word) was closely related to his sense of humor. Everyone who knew and wrote about him mentioned the humor of this imposing, even awesome man. His humor, if the examples given are typical, was of masculine heartiness rather than witty. Chamberlain Hinonishi recorded this anecdote:

One day when I appeared in his presence, I found him laughing. He said something interesting had occurred the previous night. When I asked what it was, he said, “Last night Yamaguchi and Ayanok
ō
ji were sleeping in the next room. Yamaguchi was snoring loudly and Ayanok
ō
ji was grinding his teeth. Between them they made a most unusual concert.” Yamaguchi, who was standing nearby, said, “No, I believe that Your Majesty snored even louder.” At this His Majesty laughed a great deal.
⁷

The emperor was also reputed to have an extraordinary memory, but the examples given of his powers of memory are by no means dazzling. Chamberlain Hinonishi wrote,