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  A handful of Europeans succeeded, over the decades that followed, in making pioneering links between Western and Japanese medicine and botany. But for the most part, the Dutch presence in Tokugawa Japan was limited to traders who looked forward to doing a little business, playing billiards, drinking coffee (which first made its way into Japan in the 1690s, thanks to the Dutch), and perhaps paying for the company of a local woman or two – all from the confines of a small man-made island called Dejima, shaped like a fan and connected to the Nagasaki mainland by a single, guarded bridge. There was to be no free travel within Japan, no politics, and most certainly no religion.

  The shoguns’ power over the next two hundred years, and the single story of purpose and legitimacy that they sought to tell about themselves and a newly unified Japan, was built on firm foundations: military supremacy, control of huge swathes of richly taxable rice paddy, a thicket of legal and sumptuary codes, co-option of Buddhism’s popular appeal and temple networks, the sponsoring of Neo-Confucian thought (with its welcome emphasis upon filial duty), and finally the many fruits of an unprecedented peace. There was a reason why Perry was met, in 1853, by poorly drilled troops toting museum pieces: while Westerners had spent much of the past two and a half centuries honing the technologies of war through repeatedly tearing themselves and others apart, Japan had largely flourished.

  ‘Settled agriculture’ had come to mean something again, after the deadly disruptions of earlier decades. Cottage industries from sake to silk production had blossomed, while sea-borne trade spanned the length of the archipelago, from fur-clad Ainu people in the far north down to the tropical Ryūkyū islands in the south; across to China and Korea, and further beyond, courtesy of the Dutch. A modest proportion of the nation’s children received an education at schools run by temples or regional domains, or else at small, private institutions. Tourists tramped new roadways in search of great places and monuments, guidebooks in hand. Print-making and satirical storytelling emerged as just two of the many arts chronicling and enlivening city life in places like Edo, Osaka and Kyoto. Bureaucratic statecraft – orders and judgement from on high; organized self-surveillance from below, in groups of five or more households – was itself developed almost to the point of an art form.

  Detail from a sketch of Edo Castle The shogunate achieved stability at the cost of flexibility, with the codification of everyday life stretching even into which foods and fabrics people of differing social status might enjoy: fine silks for samurai, down through the plainer kind for townspeople – merchants and artisans – finishing at rough cotton for lowly peasants. For a long while, these arrangements seemed to be just what a war-torn country needed, to recover its balance. But they were too brittle to cope well with longer-term change, and by the early 1800s the rot appeared to be setting in. Japan found itself beset by weak leadership and a flagging economy, alongside periodically failing crops. Society was in turmoil as low-born farmers and merchants got steadily richer, while samurai families – on inadequate stipends and forbidden from working in potentially lucrative professions – slipped into poverty.

  Crop failures and fluctuations in the monetary system caused pain around the country. But some were able to pass it on. The shogunate could lean on daimyō for rice or cash; the daimyō in turn pressurized their samurai retainers. Merchants could hike prices or alter their rates of exchange, while wealthier country families could make new demands of, or dispense with the paid labour of, weaker ones. For those at the bottom, however, there was only desperation. Famine and forced migration became so bad at times that the authorities took to the surveillance of pregnant women and young mothers to prevent a loss of rural productivity through abortion and through a practice known by the agricultural euphemism of mabiki: ‘thinning out the seedlings’ to ensure better growth for the rest – infanticide.

  A guiding principle in the Neo-Confucian ethics of the time was mutuality. Within the social order, as within each family, the higher could expect of the lower, but the lower could expect from the higher too. Service travelled one way, care the other. What this meant in practice was that protest against insufficiently solicitous superiors was a right, even a duty – in the interests of restoring the social order. Many of the tens of thousands of protestors whom the leaders of late Tokugawa Japan saw as enemies were in fact quite clearly its products: they saw themselves not as rebelling against traditional values of sincerity, selflessness and self-cultivation, but as practising them properly.

  To top things off, Westerners began once again to make mischief. In 1808 a Dutch ship was noticed sailing into Nagasaki Bay, a little later in the season than usual. A small party of Dutch residents on Dejima rowed out to greet it – and was promptly captured. The ship was in fact British: HMS Phaeton, flying a Dutch flag as camouflage. Her teenage captain made a curt request for supplies for his ship, in return for which he declared he would spare the lives of the Dutch. He followed this up with threats to destroy the other ships in the harbour, along with an admonitory volley of cannon and gunfire. The Dutch and Japanese scrambled their coastal defences: ageing cannons that mostly failed to fire, and a small handful of troops. Before reinforcements could arrive, the local magistrate had provided the supplies and a well-timed wind had seen the Phaeton breeze safely out of the bay.

  Detail from a street scene in Edo’s theatre district, section from Theatres of the East (Azuma yarō) by Furuyama Moromasa (c.1710–30) The magistrate disembowelled himself and the enquiries into foreign mischief began, in the course of which the Japanese made the belated discovery that America was now an independent country. It had, it turned out, been in Dutch interests to keep this from them. For similar reasons, the Japanese had been given a very late and very misleading account of the French Revolution. Thanks to the regime’s seclusion policy, there were few alternative sources about global affairs against which self-interested Dutch censoring of the international news could be checked.

  Ground plan of Dejima Blame did not lie solely with the Dutch, however. There had been few official attempts in Japan to make the most of having these well-travelled Europeans around for the last century and a half. On their yearly pilgrimages to Edo to pay their respects, the Dutch had found themselves invited to crawl and jump and dance rather than speak. People seemed to find their bodies and mannerisms hilarious, from the red hair to the thick-soled Dutch clogs which made some Japanese suspect that their wearers, just like dogs, possessed feet whose heels didn’t touch the ground. Mothers took to hushing their children with whispered threats about the demonic and malodorous Dutch coming to snatch them.

  The shogunate had relaxed the rules on imported Western knowledge in 1720, opening the way for crusading rangakusha – practitioners of ‘Dutch learning’ (ran from ‘Oranda’, Holland; gakusha meaning ‘scholar’) – to begin gathering in and around Nagasaki, hoping to absorb what they could from the books, artworks and artefacts that made it into Japan via Dejima. The physician Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817) pored over a Dutch anatomy text for hours on end, struggling with friends to guess at the meaning of words by their placement near pictures and their frequency of recurrence. Sugita recalled once spending a ‘long spring day’ wrestling with a single line: ‘the eyebrows are the hair growing above the eyes’. He went as far as performing autopsies on executed criminals – a rare transgression for his times – in order to compare the contents of hacked-open, torn-back torsos with Chinese and then with Dutch accounts. The former were woefully adrift, the latter spot on.

  A Banquet on Dejima: some of Japan’s first coffee-drinkers, relaxing amidst the mixed Western and Japanese decor typical of the era (tables and chairs on tatami-mat floors) But such information had always to be shared with caution. Despite rangakusha protestations that they were acquiring new knowledge for the furtherance of regional or national interests (in Sugita’s case, to secure the health of his lord), the shogunate in Edo could be acutely sensitive to having its prerogatives over policy and security infringed upon. The military
scholar Hayashi Shihei pointed out that a nation made up of small islands could not afford to rely for its security upon tactics rooted in Chinese treatises like The Art of War (fifth century BC), which focused on expanses of inland terrain. It ought instead to maintain a strong navy and credible coastal defences. For his troubles, Hayashi found his book, Kaikoku Heidan (‘Military Defence of a Maritime Nation’) (1787), burned, and the blocks on which it was created destroyed. He himself was placed under house arrest, where he soon died, a deeply disillusioned man.

  Other voices in Japan had sought to warn about the intensifying threat from abroad. The world’s great powers had stayed away from Japan until the 1800s not out of fear or respect but out of lack of interest. There had been richer pickings elsewhere, from India to China to South East Asia. That time was now coming to an end. The Russians had pushed ever eastward across their continent during the 1700s, arriving at the Pacific and eventually heading for Nagasaki, seeking trade (Nikolai Rezanov, bearing a letter from Tsar Alexander I, was made to wait there for six months in 1804–5 and was then sent packing). The Americans had pushed ever westward during that century and since, arriving on the other side of the same vivid-blue expanse with much the same thoughts about Japan in their heads. President Fillmore, in his letter to the Emperor delivered in 1853, wrote proudly of his country stretching ‘from ocean to ocean’, its ‘great State of California’ lying ‘directly opposite the dominions of your imperial majesty’.

  This moment, of no longer being able to fob off or fend off the neighbours, seemed to be captured by an Edo artist named Hokusai, working away in the early 1830s at thirty-six landscape prints depicting Mount Fuji. In some of the pictures, Fuji dominated the scene completely, its perfectly gradual gradient drawing the eye skywards. In others, it provided the serene backdrop for Tokugawa Japan going about its peaceful, confident, highly civilized business: people building, crafting, selling, fishing and leaning languidly over temple balconies to appreciate the awesome mountain.

  But in one picture, Fuji appears differently. It has shrunk far away into the background, framed by tempestuous waters whose undulations and claw-like curling spray dominate the scene. Three boats ride the waves, their oarsmen too small and indistinct for us to know their thoughts. They may be mastering a stormy sea, thrilling at the possibilities that travel may soon open up. Or perhaps they are nervously hunkering down, clinging on for dear life as an approaching wall of water looms and threatens to engulf them.

  A great many daimyō, samurai retainers and commoners alike had acquiesced in their country’s new political arrangements after 1600 more out of weariness with war than any particular affection for the Tokugawa family. Amongst the most important of those who never learned to love the shogunate were the rulers of two great domains: Satsuma, on the southern island of Kyūshū, and Chōshū, just across the water on the westernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshū.

  Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (c.1830) Satsuma’s dominance over the Ryūkyū Kingdom to the south-west of Japan had brought it wealth and allowed it to build useful trading contacts with China and Korea – quietly flouting Tokugawa control of Japan’s contact with the outside world. Its warriors donned full armour every year on the anniversary of Sekigahara, visiting a temple near the castle town of Kagoshima to meditate on what had been for them an epochal defeat. In Chōshū, mothers had their boys sleep with feet pointing eastwards – an insult to Edo – and told them never to forget Sekigahara, even in their dreams.

  The weaker the Tokugawa shogunate looked, especially in the wake of Perry’s visit, the fresher that memory appeared: a seizure of power, which could always be reversed. It had long been traditional for senior figures in the household of the Chōshū daimyō to appear before their lord at the first cockcrow of each new year. ‘Has the time come to begin the subjugation of the bakufu [the Tokugawa military government]?’ they would ask. The intoned reply – ‘It is still too early’ – never seemed likely to change. Until now.

  *

  Such were the swirling waters into which Perry sailed his ships for a second time, returning as promised in 1854 for his answer. The shogunate had concluded that in the circumstances there was only one answer it could give. Irony became one of the first things Japan learned at the hands of the modern West, as its representatives sat down to sign a ‘Treaty of Peace and Amity’ surrounded by five hundred American sailors and Marines, while a thousand more Americans waited aboard ten heavily armed ships out at sea, lest the friendship not get off on the right foot. Three American bands blared out martial music in celebration.

  Signed at a fishing village later renamed Yokohama, this treaty and a successor in 1858 covering trade became for Japan an opening of the international floodgates. Soon the British, the Russians, the French and others were clamouring for similar deals. They managed to secure access to Japanese markets with guaranteed low import tariffs, together with the promise, as in China and elsewhere, of ‘extraterritoriality’: when non-Japanese committed crimes in ‘treaty ports’ like Yokohama, they would be tried under their own, rather than Japanese, jurisdiction.

  Political unrest and economic woe followed, as stories of intrusive and overbearing foreigners did the rounds in the treaty ports and beyond. A five-man Commission for Foreign Countries, established in 1858, made its way through seventy-four members in just ten years as it struggled to work out what to do about Japan’s newfound and unwanted popularity abroad. Younger, low- and middle-ranking samurai began to band together as shishi, or ‘men of high purpose’, a great many of them hailing from south-western domains including Satsuma and Chōshū. Where the nation’s leaders appeared unable to deal with foreigners and guide the country forward, these activists resolved to intervene directly: intimidating their political enemies and attacking non-Japanese who set up home in the treaty ports.

  The British diplomat Ernest Satow, serving in Japan in the 1860s, reported that such was the widely acknowledged risk during these years of ‘coming to an untimely death at the hands of an expert swordsman’ that he had bought himself a revolver, powder, bullets and caps. ‘No one leaves their compound without a weapon,’ he claimed. ‘Most sleep with one under their pillow.’

  Preying particularly on expat minds were the events of July 1861. Laurence Oliphant, stationed with the British Legation in Edo, was enjoying the sight of a comet passing overhead one night when he heard a dog begin to bark, followed closely by the sound of a Japanese watchman’s rattle. He rushed out of his room, and down a dark corridor:

  Just as I turned the corner I came upon a tall black figure, with his arms above his head, holding a huge two-handed sword. I could only see indistinctly that the figure had a mask on, and seemed in armour. Short time for observation, had to dodge the sword, and get back a step to get at him with my whip, yelling loudly. He made no sound; we were at it for a minute or two …

  Others at the Legation seized hold of their guns and rushed in. Joined by their Japanese guards, they successfully fought off the attackers across the course of a busy, bloody night. Only in daylight did Oliphant, badly wounded, discover what had really saved his life: an enormous wooden beam running across the ceiling of his quarters, badly damaged by heavy sword blows that had been intended for him.

  The number of actual killings by shishi ran into the tens rather than the hundreds, mostly of Japanese perceived to be collaborating with foreigners or otherwise participating in a treasonously wrong-headed foreign policy. What mattered more was the atmosphere of heightened crisis that their actions helped to create, together with a growing sense in south-western domains especially that, as in 1600 so now in the mid-1860s, the time was ripe for radical change. The shogunate was mired in a mix of too-little-too-late interest in Western technology and interminable dithering over how to deal with foreign pressure. Meanwhile, a mismanaged economy ensured that inflation, unemployment and hunger were amongst the early rewards of participation in the global economy. Riots broke out in city and countryside alike
, alongside millenarian predictions of world renewal and joyously fatalistic festivities – of drink, dance, food, and sex. Ee ja nai ka?! ran the refrain. Who cares anymore?!

  Leading figures in Satsuma and Chōshū began to go their own way, using relationships that Satsuma had built up with Western traders – including the Scottish merchant Thomas Blake Glover, based in Nagasaki – to purchase and later manufacture up-to-date guns, ships and cannon. The two domains concluded a secret alliance in 1866, agreeing to help one another should the shogunate, desperately building up and re-equipping its own forces, seek to impose its will on them. They need not have worried. A punitive expedition sent from Edo against Chōshū that year was so underwhelming – the best troops were needed to stop Edo and Osaka going up in flames, while some domains refused outright to contribute forces – that Chōshū men alone were able to see off the threat. The Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, found himself faced with an impossible military, political and economic situation, just as influential imperial courtiers in Kyoto (sentenced to poetry all those years ago by Tokugawa Ieyasu) decided that the time had come to retake the reins of power from a family that had well and truly forfeited the right to hold them.

  In 1867, Yoshinobu reluctantly allowed leaders from Tosa domain, allied with Satsuma and Chōshū, to persuade him to resign. Sitting amidst the splendour of Nijō Castle, built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, he gave up the title so hard-won by his illustrious ancestor. Yoshinobu expected that in exchange he would sit at the head of a new ruling council of daimyō. Instead, early in 1868, radicals from Satsuma and Chōshū led a coup in Kyoto and gained control of the young boy-emperor Mutsuhito, who was encouraged to proclaim his own full restoration to power. The confiscation of all Tokugawa lands was announced, forcing Yoshinobu into all-out conflict.