Theater of Cruelty (23 page)

Keene’s book, however, is also about Meiji’s world, and specifically about the astonishing band of provincial samurai, later known as the oligarchs, who engineered the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and built the modern Japanese state. Such men as Ito Hirobumi, Yamagata Aritomo, and Matsukata Masayoshi, all of whom served as prime minister, were the architects of Japan’s new central government, the constitution, the modern armed forces, the education system, and much else that went with
bunmei kaika
(civilization and enlightenment). The other slogan of the time was
fukoku kyohei
(rich
country, strong army). The two slogans were, of course, conceptually linked.

One of the interesting aspects of Keene’s book, which is stronger on description than on original ideas (and those descriptions of court protocol can be tedious), is the emperor’s personal involvement in political affairs. The privy council, which Ito presided over for some time, was one of the most powerful ruling institutions. Like his grandson, Hirohito, the emperor dutifully attended its meetings and was directly involved in the appointment of his government ministers.

But his main significance was still symbolic, as a constitutional monarch and a sacred figure, half kaiser and half pope with bloodlines that supposedly went back to the Sun Goddess. The imperial institution was the national church, as it were, which gave religious sanction to the political arrangements of his time. The emperor personified the nature of the modern Japanese state: hence his interest in military matters, the quasi-traditional Shintoist mystique, and the speedy costume change from ancient Japanese court dress to a Western-style uniform. His Western style was meant to convey to the world the progressive, modern nature of the Japanese state. The Japanese tradition, tailored for this purpose, was meant to give the Japanese a sense of reverence and continuity in a world of lightning change.

Ohnuki-Tierney calls the Meiji oligarchs “intellectual cosmopolitans” who built the Japanese state as a fortress against Western colonialism. This is a fair way of putting it. Ito Hirobumi and his colleagues, including the very conservative Yamagata Aritomo, were passionately interested in Western ideas. They traveled to Europe and the United States, shopping around for models of the ideal modern state. The Meiji Constitution was modeled after the Prussian one, though an article was added about the “sacred and inviolable” nature of the emperor. The armed forces followed French and British examples. Education was organized along French lines. And from
elementary schools to the top universities, the doors had been opened wide to all manner of European and American influences.

Keene describes a visit of the emperor to a rural elementary school in 1876. The emperor, whose education included a close reading of Samuel Smiles’s
Self-Help
, was nonetheless taken aback when he heard Japanese schoolchildren recite Andrew Jackson’s speech to the Senate and Cicero’s attack on Cataline. In just the same way, many conservatives were annoyed when the Japanese elite held fancy dress balls for foreign guests. The idea of Ito dancing polkas and waltzes dressed up as a Venetian was not universally approved of, even if, like the adoption by educated Meiji men of Western clothes, it was meant to show foreigners that Japan was a serious modern country, worthy of their respect.

Alas, however, for the more liberal and pacific-minded Japanese, the quickest way to gain respect for a modern nation in the late nineteenth century and to stave off Western colonialism was to win wars and build an empire of its own. Here, too, Meiji Japan was amazingly successful. In 1895, the Japanese army, though vastly outnumbered, managed to humiliate China and acquired Taiwan as its first colonial spoil. Even more astonishingly, in 1905, Japan became the first modern Asian state to win a war against a European power, imperial Russia.

The Sino-Japanese War in particular was seen by most Japanese, even the liberals, as a blow for progress against a backward, decadent nation. Popular woodblock prints of the war show the Japanese as long-legged, pale-skinned heroes, and the Chinese as pigtailed little yellow men. Keene quotes Uchimura Kanzo, a free-thinking Christian, who later became a pacifist and bravely defied the excesses of Japanese emperor worship: “Japan is the champion of Progress in the East, and who, except her deadly foe, China—the incorrigible hater of Progress—wishes not victory for Japan!” The racist contempt
for Chinese and other Asians, later to explode in such atrocities as the Nanking Massacre, began at this time, in the name of progress, civilization, and enlightenment.

It was not entirely by chance that Japan’s victory over Russia should have coincided with the British agreement to finally end its extraterritorial privileges in Japan. The “plucky Japanese” were enormously admired for their military prowess, not only in Britain but in the US. President Theodore Roosevelt said he was absolutely “pro-Japanese,” because Japan was fighting for civilization. Victory in 1905 prepared the way for Japan’s gradual colonization of Korea. This, too, was done in the spirit of progress. It was Japan’s duty, after all, as the most advanced Asian nation, to benefit its backward neighbors with the firm smack of discipline.

At home, in Emperor Meiji’s Japan, progress was more open to question. Even though Japanese authorities (following the Chinese example) had done their best since the mid-nineteenth century to reserve “Western learning” for purely practical matters, such as building guns and battleships, and to preserve Sino-Japanese thought for ethics, morality, and social order, this didn’t really work. With Western ideas came demands for more democracy and civil rights. Exposure to European literature and philosophy encouraged individualism and a different perspective on sex and romantic love. Industrialization brought millions of rural people to the cities and changed social relations in the countryside. Political parties were formed. Critical journalism started to appear. And a national movement for civil rights began to spread fast.

By 1890 the forms of parliamentary democracy had been adopted as another badge of modern progress, like colonialism abroad. But all this made the Meiji oligarchs nervous. Their worry was how to control the forces they had unleashed, how to create a modern nation without being hindered by the “selfish” interests of party politicians
or the subversive influence of socialists and other dissenters. Even Ito Hirobumi, a relative liberal among his peers, was dismayed by what he saw as the unruliness of American and British politics. French republicanism was hardly a suitable example either. The newly unified German state, held together by a strong monarchy, authoritarian government, military discipline, and mystical ethnic nationalism, was by far the most congenial model.

Ito rather fancied himself as the Japanese Bismarck, and was impressed by such Prussian jurists as Rudolf von Gneist and Lorenz von Stein. What emerged was a German-Japanese concoction in which Stein and others had a hand. The following words by Ito, quoted by Ohnuki-Tierney, go to the heart of the matter:

It was Stein who advised the Japanese to make Shinto into a national religion, which would supply the reverential ceremonies of the imperial court and hold the nation together. Where such ceremonies didn’t exist, they were invented. This was not so different from Victorian England. But the mixture of Teutonic legalism and Japanese nativism laid the foundation for an authoritarian, militarist state, whose highest authorities became almost impossible to challenge because their decisions were wrapped in the priestly mantle of divine kingship.

Keene mentions, rather summarily, the two imperial rescripts, or
decrees, that had a particularly disastrous effect on Japanese politics until the very end of World War II. First, in 1882, came the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers, drawn up by the architect of the modern armed forces, Yamagata Aritomo. The idea was to remove soldiers from politics. Their loyalty was not to the civilian government but to the emperor, their “supreme Commander-in-Chief.” They were his “limbs” and he was their “head.” It went on:

This was one of the pillars of the Meiji state, which took the traditional loyalty of samurai to their feudal lords and focused it on the emperor alone. The rescript made the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the emperor official. Designed to take the military out of political affairs, it actually introduced a dangerous political element. For if a soldier’s loyalty was solely to his commander in chief, then it was legitimate to rebel against civilian politicians who were seen as a threat to his divine authority. This would lend justification to all kinds of attempted coups d’état and assassinations by military fanatics, especially in the turbulent 1930s.

While the unofficial coups, led by middle-ranking army hotheads, were crushed by the authorities, top military officials also used imperial propaganda first to undermine and then to destroy the authority of civilian politicians. By 1932, political parties were excluded from the cabinet, and military decisions were taken by a Supreme War Council, made up entirely of military figures. By the late 1930s, the Japanese Imperial Army was ready to carry out its version of the
emperor’s will and gather China and eventually the rest of Asia under one imperial roof.

The second Imperial Rescript, on education, was handed down by the emperor in 1890. Much discussion among the oligarchs and their advisers had preceded it. All were united in the worry that Westernization had gone too far, or at least had to be countered by an official dose of traditional morality. Some stressed the importance of Shinto, others, including the emperor himself, of Confucianism. The rescript begins with a solemn statement about the founding of the empire by “Our Imperial Ancestors,” and goes on to say that loyalty and filial piety of the emperor’s subjects are the unique characteristics of his empire. In the neo-Confucian tradition, people are taught to obey their fathers and social superiors. The Meiji Emperor’s subjects were told to “offer [themselves] courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial throne coeval with Heaven and Earth.”

Nationalism, then, based on neo-Confucian notions of obedience and Shintoist ideas of ancestral purity, was the basis of modern Japanese education. All Japanese were expected to bow to copies of the rescript, which was treated, quite literally, as holy writ. Again, there were elements of this kind of thing in European monarchies too, but Meiji nationalism was designed to destroy the substance of democratic politics with cultural propaganda. Instead of the legitimate contest among different political interests, the Japanese political space was filled with exhortations to be loyal, united, and obedient, and, above all, to worship the emperor.

If the emperor had actually been an absolute monarch or a military dictator, the system would at least have been coherent, but the Meiji Constitution was vague about political authority. The emperor was invested with absolute sovereignty without clearly defined government powers. The famous political theorist Maruyama Masao
later characterized the Japanese emperor as a sacred shrine carried on the shoulders of the men who ruled in his name. This worked quite well under the Meiji oligarchs, because they at least knew where they were heading and had the authority to keep the turf battles of court, parliament, and the armed forces under control. After they passed from the scene, no one inherited their authority, and these institutions were at each other’s throats most of the time. Once the imperial shrine had been hijacked by military leaders in the 1930s, it ran amok without anyone being able to stop it.

Keene concludes his mammoth study by stating: “Emperor Meiji definitely left behind the footprints of a great monarch.” Well yes, perhaps. But he also left behind an important lesson for developing societies. Contemporary China springs to mind. It is dangerous to modernize economic and military institutions without political reforms that lead to genuine popular sovereignty. Westernization without guarantees of political freedom makes no sense.

The great Meiji novelist Natsume Soseki warned his countrymen that the combination of nationalism and slavish imitation of the West would lead to a national nervous breakdown. He was not far wrong. The effect of Japan’s particularly virulent brand of authoritarian modernism was especially hard on the educated young. Their heads filled with Marx, Kierkegaard, and imperial propaganda, they were confused about their proper role in a quasi-totalitarian society. Where was a bright idealistic graduate of Tokyo Imperial University to turn when his country took on the world in the 1940s? He could become an extreme nationalist, a Communist martyr, or he could go down in flames as a human bomb, hoping his spirit would save the nation. So we should pity the poor Tokkotai. Their likes will not be seen again. For they were the last representatives of the very best of Meiji culture, and the modern empire’s final sacrificial victims.