Meiji 1868

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Japan

Paul Akamatsu, Miriam Kochan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415585262
• eBook ISBN: 9781136928260
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Among the revolutionary movements which shook the nineteenth-century world, the change of government in Japan in 1868 occupies a special place. A new, dynamic ruling class provoked the overthrow of the old rule of the shogun and in a few years the visible structure of feudal society disappeared. The founders of the new Meiji rule had themselves been warriors and thought they were able to resist foreign pressure, but very quickly they adopted western dress gave their country a modern army, built railways and contributed to establishing a great empire. The nature of this transformation has been regarded by western historians as "revolution" and "restoration" – two quite contradictory ideas. But in this book Paul Akamatsu clarifies the picture of the forces at work in this conversion of a backward feudal state into a modern power in a few decades.

PART ONE
THE DECLINE OF SHOGUNAL POWER

[Chapter One]
Famine and Reform

THE roju Mizuno Tadakuni stayed late at the shogunal palace at Yedo on April 1, 1837. He normally disposed of current government business between ten o’clock in the morning and two o’clock in the afternoon, with unrivalled speed; but that day alarming news had arrived from Osaka; the council was deliberating. On March 23, Oshio Heihachiro, former horse-guard from Osaka, had incited a revolt: the town was burning, the shogunal police and army were outflanked. What steps could be taken at Yedo? The courier had taken eight days to bring the dispatch announcing the disaster: the roju’s orders would reach Osaka with the same delay. The Bakufu could do nothing but hope for the return of peace to the great western market.

And in point of fact, the town of Osaka, one fifth of it burned, did return to order at the end of March, but feelings there were not appeased. The revolt had been the explosion of the people’s anger after five years of suffering. The famine had lasted since 1832. Oshio, a retired official and a learned scholar into the bargain, had been roused by the poverty of the small folk in the town. Bringing some of his former colleagues and subordinates in his wake, he had decided to punish the shogunal authorities who were incapable of allowing the poor their share of rice. Born in 1793, he inherited the position of horse-guard from his father, but he resigned at the same time as the governor of the east (Osaka like Yedo had two governors, one for the east, the other for the west) under whose orders he was placed. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to study, having passed on his position to his adopted son, He had been educated in the Tchou Hi school, as was usual for all officials of the Bakufu, but he opened a school to teach the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming which he had learned on his own.¹ A few years later, the famines began.

The deterioration in the shortage of rice followed its relentless course. The peasants in the area around Osaka, stripped of their granaries, flowed into the town, but merchants raised their prices on the pretext of their obligation to comply with orders from Yedo and of increased demand on the market. The official rate tripled between 1830 and 1837. Osaka filled up with a population which came dying of hunger and ravaged by epidemics. Oshio lavished advice on his former superiors in order to organize relief: he was listened to by the governor of the west but harshly repulsed by his eastern counterpart, the proper brother of the roju Mizuno Tadakuni, who had come to Osaka to take up his duties in 1836. He then turned to the merchants and asked for a loan of 60,000 ryo, which he would have distributed to the poor: he met with refusal. Later he sold his books, and on February 12, 13 and 14 gave alms to the poor. During the winter he was also preparing for revolt: he practised shooting; took into his confidence a few horse- and foot-guards from whom he had obtained an oath of conspiracy; lastly, procured arms and ammunition. He waited for the departure of the governor of the west who had covered him with favours. The latter’s successor was to make his first tour of the town on March 23, 1827: that was the moment chosen to launch the revolt.

Oshio was warned that one of the conspirators had informed the governors of the plot. He therefore decided to surprise the authorities of the town despite everything, by setting the time for the outbreak of the revolt a few hours earlier than arranged. On the morning of March 23, he set fire to his own residence and advanced into Osaka with his comrades, firing shots, setting up banners with inscriptions which invoked the gods, and distributing leaflets. Some three hundred men of modest condition joined the conspirators. The rioters set fire to several districts. The fire raged until the next day: some eighteen thousand houses were destroyed. On May 24, the governor of the shogunal castle at Osaka had the town occupied by troops. Twenty-three of the rioters were captured or found dead. The revolt was over. Oshio, hidden in the town itself, defied the two governors for over a month. Knowing that he was surrounded by police, he killed himself by once again setting fire to the house which sheltered him. The trial of the rebels took place much later, in autumn 1838: seventeen of them, including Oshio, all already dead, were sentenced to crucifixion.¹

The revolt itself had been of small significance, outside the fact that it had been instigated by officials of the Bakufu, Even the fire was only comparable to other disasters which ravaged whole districts of Yedo and Osaka. Peasant revolts, as we will see, reached far greater size in numbers of participants. The gravity of the event lay in the fact that the shogun’s authority had been flouted and that Oshio’s example had long-lasting repercussions in the western provinces. The shogun’s dignity had been ruffled because of the uselessness of his representatives: the two governors, although forewarned, had not been capable of taking measures in time to prevent the revolt. What was worse, they had been so upset when they learned that the revolt had broken out that they were said to have fallen off their horses when they mounted to set out to meet the conspirators. The population of Osaka jeered and made jokes at their expense…. The small folk of the town, far from regretting the damage by the fire, blessed Oshio who had revolted on their behalf, despite their distress. Craftsmen found work rebuilding houses on the burned ground: this, they said, even if they themselves had suffered disaster, was thanks to Oshio. However, poverty was deep-seated. A chronicler wrote in 1838: “Last year, those who were hunted down by famine had fallen to the state of beggars, good-for-nothings. They came and went, not being able to tell night from day, plaintively calling out with tears in their eyes. Most of them have disappeared through death, it seems, because the number of beggars has greatly diminished.¹ The lowly no longer had anything to lose, the great were appalled.”

And there were more serious matters. Other violent revolts were breaking out. On July 3, 1837, at Kashiwazaki, in Echigo, Ikuta Yorozu, master of a private school and himself a follower of Hirata Atsutane,² first attacked the shop of a large merchant and then the seigniorial garrison. He was accompanied by five conspirators. The revolt was quickly checked. But in western Honshu, particularly in the provinces of Settsu and Bingo, the peasants revolted, openly linking themselves to Oshio. The blaze of rebellions only died down in 1838 with the end of the famine.

It is difficult to estimate the effects of these famines which lasted for six years. In certain fiefs, particularly in the north, the dead were reckoned in tens of thousands.

From 1831, the Bakufu was to distribute rice which it stocked against possible scarcity. The following year, the rice harvest was estimated at a third below the average, at least in the northern half of the country. In 1833, prolonged rains in summer again jeopardized the harvest. That year, the Bakufu’s rice stocks ran out. The effects of the bad harvest were felt in the west and then in the south-west. In the province of Harima, some ten thousand peasants in seventy-six villages joined forces to revolt: nearly two hundred merchants’ houses were ransacked. Between March 16 and 20, 1834, an immense fire destroyed several districts in Yedo. In the same year, fifty-two thousand dead were counted between May and November in the fief of Akita, in Dewa in the north; after the famine, epidemics spread. From 1835, the large towns were gravely stricken, while revolts became more frequent and more violent in the countryside: some ten revolts took place every year on an average; twenty-six cases were mentioned in 1826.

After this succession of unending disasters, life nonetheless fairly quickly made good its losses. The population was estimated at 27,200,000 in 1828. It fell to twenty-seven million in 1834, then to 26,900,000 in 1846. But in 1852 it seems it had regained the 1828 level. It therefore took Japan some twenty years to recover the population it had had before the famines. The Bakufu and daimyo launched a campaign against the practice of infanticide which was not rare in the villages. A pamphlet on the birth-rate, dated 1850, notes these practices: “We hear it said that in the far-off regions where people live in mountainous heights, [parents] when they have one or two children say to themselves: Others who would come afterwards would increase our troubles and be a burden to us! The mother then miscarries, by swallowing or injecting a medicine, or else, if [the child] is already born, gives it up—and to give up is to kill a newborn child—with her own hands, or ruthlessly sees that it is given up by abandoning it to women called wetnurse-buyers [?]”.¹ The fact is reported as a story, but its truth leaves no room for doubt. The authors of these pamphlets gave practical advice and appealed to the parents’ religious feelings. They were careful to site the places where infanticide was practised “in far-off regions”, “in mountainous heights” but their small pamphlets were disseminated all over the countryside.

Thus, with the demographic crisis surmounted, poverty remained deep-seated. Symptoms of an abatement were present during the 1840s, at least in the towns: weaving again became active in the large centres, particularly in the east. New difficulties probably appeared after 1850. Should it be thought that the estimated twenty-seven million inhabitants represented a sort of demographic ceiling level? No accurate statistical data make it possible to confirm this hypothesis. However, it is true that in both 1782 and 1832, famines began at a time when the population was approaching or had exceeded this threshold of twenty-seven million. Perhaps a new demographic crisis was augured when Commodore Perry landed in Japan in 1853, and, more still, when the civil war broke out in 1866.

The administrators of the shogunal domain and the fiefs were aware of the general malaise. From before 1832 in some cases, and after 1838 in others, they embarked on reforms. Nevertheless, their aim was to restore order to the society as it was, rather than to change its structure. They proceeded from an ethical conception of the human world according to which the disorders originated in lack of desire to act rightly on the part of the leaders and those they administered within the traditional framework of the social organization. In all the fiefs where reforms were applied, we find three tendencies. The first, agrarian, was a movement towards equalizing the portions of land the peasants used, but always as a function of payment of dues. The second was a strengthening of seigniorial monopolies, in order to minimize the autonomy of the merchants, intermediaries who were indispensable to economic development. The third and last, the strengthening of the seigniorial armies, underlined the logic of the other two measures. The reforms of the Bakufu, whose domain taken as a whole covered a vast territory, had a slightly different character. We will examine the first reform measures applied in four fiefs which were going to play an important rôle in the change of régime from 1853 to 1868, before analysing the Bakufu’s reform which came later and which was destined to fail.

In point of fact, while a number of fiefs had embarked on reforms in the 1830s before the bad harvests came along to jeopardize their effectiveness the shogunal government had to await the return of calm to the whole population before it officially proclaimed reform. Reform must always be understood in the sense of an ethical revival by applying traditional wisdom in what is thought to be the most reasonable way. The official announcement of a reform was most frequently motivated by the accession to power of a personality fitted to make a complete change in the personnel of the shogunal administration and to recognize in orthodox Confucianism the qualities necessary to the normative government of a country.

This doctrinal aspect of reform was particularly marked in the reforms made in the fief of Mito, owned by one of the three large younger branches of the Tokugawa family.¹ The Tokugawa of Mito had, since the seventeenth century, jealously preserved the privilege of perpetuating the tradition of loyalty to the imperial family, within the shogunal dynasty. This deferential attitude to the imperial court had given birth to a school of historical scholarship in the fief, which was preparing a chronicle of the whole past life of the empire. The composition of the Dai-Nihon Shi, “History of Great Japan” was the doctrinal expression of this study. The team of intellectuals in the fief involved in it had finished the part devoted to the chronicles proper in the seventeenth century and the lord of Mito offered it to the Bakufu in 1720. Preparation of the section devoted to monographs was then begun, and was on the way to completion at the beginning of the nineteenth century.² The scholars of the school in the fief often passed the work on from father to son and the continuity of the tradition was perfectly ensured. The conception of the work, its plan and the philosophical categories used in the interpretation of history were inspired by old Confucianism, but the compilers had also left a large share to Japanese mythology in the Shintoist tradition. The work, indisputably original, particularly in the Tokugawa family, was a crystallization of the theories peculiar to the Mito school, which preached the dual loyalty to emperor and shogun.

From the 1820s, this school was enlivened by masters who were eminent scholars and men of action at the same time. One of them, Aizawa Yasushi, wrote a veritable political pamphlet, Shin-Ron, The New Doctrine, in 1824, the same year the English landed on the coast of the fief of Mito.³ “… Our divine land,” he wrote at the beginning of the preamble, “is situated where the sun rises, at the origin of all energy. The descendants of the sun (our emperors), sit on their throne, from century to century, without interruption. They are the leaders of the land, an example to all countries. Their glory should shine in the universe, and their light should be carried everywhere.” The translation cannot faithfully render the conciseness of the text; an expanded commentary on it would cover pages. We will merely emphasize that the original was written in Chinese, that it remained true to the terminology of that language, without excluding loans from old Japanese canon...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE THE DECLINE OF SHOGUNAL POWER
• PART TWO THE CHANGE IN RÉGIME
• Conclusion
• Chronological Table
• Glossary
• Index