The Mikado: Institution and Person

Front matter

The Mikado Institution and Person

William Elliot Griffis

A Study of the Internal Political Forces of Japan

Chapter 1

Chapter I

A Nation on Its Knees

At forty-three minutes past twelve on the morning of July 30, 1912, Japan’s greatest Emperor breathed his last. With him ended the era of Enlightened Government (Méiji, 1868–1912) the most brilliant in the long history of the Empire.

Mutsuhito, Man of Peace, was born in Kyoto, November 3, 1852, when Japan was a hermit nation, inhospitable to the rest of mankind, her people numbering but 30,000,000 and living in an area of 150,000 square miles. The archipelago of Riu Kiu then paid tribute to China, and except in the southern part of Yezo the knowledge, interests and claims of the Japanese nation as to the northern isles, a hundred or more, were exceedingly hazy.

Nor had the people at large any dream, which later so dazzled the nation, of Japan’s glory ever “shining beyond the seas.” For seven centuries the Mikados had lived and died in Kyoto, with little more attention from the populace than was given to the falling of the autumn leaves on the distant mountains, and with much less direct honor than that paid by multitudes to idols enshrined in many a temple. As a vague, mysterious, far off potency the Mikado indeed had an existence, but the man and the institution of Mikadoism were subjects of serious interest principally to those persons whose ambitions or patriotism led them to consider him and it as forming the chief but hidden motor in the engine of state. As such his person was jealously guarded, from 1604 to 1868, by the great military ruler or usurper in Yedo, who had surrounded Kyoto the Sacred City with feudal barons who were his own relatives. To the mass of the Japanese the Mikado was a sentiment rather than a personality. He was traditionally the embodiment of things sacred by inheritance from “the gods.” The transcendence of the one ruler in Kyoto and the immanence of the other in Yedo,—the former having no force at his command, while the other held at his beck and call a mighty army of eighty thousand personal followers and a vast host of feudal retainers,—were expressed, as in a clear picture, by the saying familiar in every home: “The Mikado all men love; the Shogun every man fears.” It had been forgotten by the people that the Mikado had ever been a visible ruler.

To all this the contrast, during the last days of July, 1912, was striking. On the esplanade fronting the Imperial Palace, in Tokyo, thous of people were gathered. On their knees, or bowing low in prayer, they pleaded with the Unseen Powers for the life of their Emperor. Many creeds were represented, but there was but one heart, and one silence of inward prayer uniting the Buddhist priest, the devotee of Shinto, and the Christian. Nothing like it had ever before been seen or known “Within the Four Seas.”

Yet this gathering in Tokyo, at once spontaneous and prophetic, was but the type of many such all over the land. Congregations of hundreds and thousands, numbering in all many millions, were offering the same prayer. Even in war time, when little Japan had twice risen, like the Syrian lad before the Philistine, to meet the giants, China first and then Russia, there had been no such unity of thought and purpose. Within the Forbidden Enclosure native men of science, trained in the best transoceanic schools of medicine, were at or near the Imperial bedside. Bulletins issued from the palace to the public like minute guns. A strange contrast with the past, for in the days when Japan was hermit, death might come to the ruler and be concealed from the public for days, weeks, or months!

Ancient myth told how, in ages unwritten, the Imperial spirit turned into a white bird and soared into the heavens. Many a mother, even in the modern Japan of electricity and steam, gathered her children at night around the floor hearth to tell them the story of these ancient burial mounds, whence the new embodiment in snow white wings emerged, and not a few fathers recalled the day when Jun-shi, or “dying with the master,” was a fixed custom. They told solemnly how around the mausoleum of the ancient Emperors, or Ministers of State, servants or retainers were buried alive; and then how in the advance of more humane, albeit artistic civilization, clay figures took the place of living men. But all such things were in the far past. None suspected that any element other than the long sweep of centuries would divide these customs from the death of the great, broad minded Emperor in the era of Enlightened Civilization, when suddenly like a lightning flash out of the unclouded sky, fell the news of a great hero’s suicide. Nogi, leader of the Ninth Division of the army, composed chiefly of the famed Echizen troops, the winner of Port Arthur, unquailing soldier, most loyal servant of the Emperor, white flower of Bushido, had gone to join his master. With like unquailing nerve the true Samurai woman, his wife, simultaneously with her husband bade farewell to earth. In strict faithfulness to the proprieties, with intention as clear as the dew, they left this world. In manifold ways, and spectacular, sad and startling, with the demise of Japan’s great Emperor blended the old and the new.

Thus fitly closed the era of Méiji, or Enlightened Civilization. The name was taken from two words, each expressed by an ideograph, from a noble line in the Chinese classics, and meaning respectively “light” and “rule.” The Occidental alien is apt to conceive of this new era, during which so many wonders have been wrought, as beginning with the arrival of the American squadron sent by President Fillmore in 1853. But the year periods of Japan are measured from the beginning of each Emperor’s reign and Mutsuhito was “crowned” and “ascended the throne” on October 12, 1868, the new era being named eleven days later. Fifteen years of internal commotion and reconstructive force were necessary between the advent of Perry and the transformation of the old into the new Japan.

Then began a brilliant era, during which the Japanese became a new nation. Besides internal political metamorphosis, the glory of Nippon “shone beyond the seas” and the dream of ages, the vision of a few, became a reality for all. Having taken her place among the great Powers of the world, Japan in the twentieth century had become the Land of the Risen Sun. Her place in the councils of the nations was sure. Mutsuhito wore the decorations of the great sovereigns of Europe and died a Knight of the Garter. His brocade Sun Banner hung in Windsor Castle’s chapel, while the President of the greatest repub , breaking all precedents and beginning a new order of things, sent the highest officer in his Cabinet across the Pacific to express the sorrow and sympathy of the American people at the bier of Great Japan’s greatest ruler.

What a wonderful era was that of Méiji! Greater than the humiliation of China, with the peace indemnity that enabled Japan to acquire a resistless navy, and, by commanding the seas, to humble Russia also, were Japan’s victories of peace.

First of all and among the greatest of the moral glories of Méiji was the uplift to citizenship of a million outcasts. To-day they and their sons, under the battle flag, or in peaceful toil, honor the nation by their patriotism and industry. In the forefront of a thousand political reforms were the abolition of duarchy, vindication of the supremacy of the Mikado, the ownership of the soil by its tillers, the sweeping away of feudalism, the abolishing of old abuses, the transformation of Japan, both in its main features and in a myriad details, into a modern State. Crowning all was the superb national Constitution of 1889, with its limitation of the prerogative of the Throne, separation of Church and State, the granting of freedom of conscience and the electoral franchise, with blessings innumerable to the people.

How did all this come about? Even to-day there are some who think that the coming of Perry, like a magician’s wand, wrought the transformation. In America and Europe, sensation mongers still deem the Japanese mind “unfathomable.” They wonder how such things as Nogi’s suicide could take place, or that the Mikado’s generals and admirals could win victories without an aftermath of personal squabbles and courtmartial trials. It seems to be a necessity to the mystery peddlers and the moneymakers to keep alive, on the stage and in popular fiction the purely literary legend of “the Oriental,” as if he were a creature different from “the Occidental.”

Two centuries before Perry arrived the great intellectual movement among scholars and thinkers had begun to leaven the nation and prepare it for the mighty change of 1868. Perry, or rather President Fillmore, did but add the tiny morsel to a supersaturated solution, which instantly crystallized to solidity. The President’s action only accelerated what was in potency already proceeding. Far more impressive to the scholarly imagination than even the contrast which the theatre board or the uninformed editorial writer can show, was that moment when the native scholar Mabuchi, who after a long life died in 1769, resigned his office and emoluments to give himself to research, making the revelations of history and starting the great line of influences which ultimately made Japan a new nation.

Chapter 2

Chapter II

Japan’s Secret of Power

This spectacle of a nation on its knees, with hearts stirred to the depths, suggests both politics and religion, the past and the future, the root and the blossom. What is the secret of Japanese unity and power? What is, what will be, the political morality of modern Japan in international affairs? Will the nation in the coming years have a spiritual rebirth, as she has already undergone material transformation?

Until “a cycle of Cathay” ago—that is, sixty years—events in the Far East attracted but languid attention from Occidentals, for the Asian peoples were for the most part hermits. Their one word to outsiders was “Keep off.” In Siberia tigers were shot in virgin forests where cities now teem. Korea’s coast was desolated to starve out invaders. Japan was a sleeping Thornrose. China recognized none of her people abroad, and wished nothing to do with them or the aliens. To the Central Empire humanity outside was made up of neglected recluses or cowering vassals or distant barbarians.

Even after Japan had entered the world’s social life the alien’s blindness to her real potencies was amazing. In 1872 I asked an English editor at Yokohama, long resident in the East, as to the profit of studying Japanese native history. With a wave of the hand, he dismissed the whole subject with the ejaculation: “Clan fights.” I remarked that there was more than foreigners might imagine. “No,” said he, “as one bucket, which a single cow could drain at a draught.” Nevertheless for over forty-five years I have found that the study of Japanese history reveals new deeps and brings fresh surprises.

Ignorance in America was equally dense and perception not less obtuse. The Japanese were associated with the laundry shop and hair tails. Even the more aesthetic, who admired the unquestioned proofs of taste and refinement, answered my plea for respect of their political abilities thus: “Oh, no, the Japanese are an interesting people, but now that they have opened their country they will soon go to pieces.”

But they did not. Crossing all seas and visiting all lands, they saw what other nations and civilizations could teach. Selecting, rejecting, they put all things to proof. The alien wanted dollars and the Japanese were ready to buy. Material resources being most needed and immediately at hand, they first armed themselves. They learned from the West the words, though they knew their reality already, that “self-preservation is the first law of nature.” They needed sure defence against sham Christianity, for they were not at one with the European notions about inheriting the earth and commanding the seas. The world wanted Japanese tea, silk, copper, tobacco, porcelain and lacquer. Selling these, the Mikado’s people bought the best rifles, artillery, battleships and hospital gear. Trade went on merrily.

Yet during all the years of traffic their feelings were hurt. They hated the name “Quaint Japan.” They said to themselves: “Why do these Western people admire us for that of which we are not proud? Of our finest art, our literature, our civilization, our moral stamina, our refinement, our codes of honor and ethics, the real secrets of our strength, they seem totally ignorant. Only here and there do we find a man who knows anything of our past, sees the true line of our advance or suspects our real ambitions. They do not want us to rise, and they say so. So let us hold back the robber hand and give the aliens a lesson. If they will not receive us for what we really are, in our Land of Great Peace, we shall force them to respect us in war. Both contemptuous China and aggressive Russia shall know our courage and power.”

When, in 1880, the Central Empire, violating a solemn agreement, insulted her island neighbor, by shelving the treaty concerning the Loochoo (Riu Kiu) Islands, which had been proposed and negotiated at the instance of General Grant, Japan pocketed the insult and waited. When in 1894 China again trampled on treaty stipulations concerning Korea, Japan went to war. Within six weeks the sea power of the Central Empire and her only disciplined soldiery were annihilated. Then, after Japan had scattered military mobs, exploded the bubble of China’s military reputation, conquered an area larger than her own territory and was on her way to Peking, hostile Europe woke up. Three of the mightiest nations, Russia, Germany and France, joined forces to block Japanese ambition on the Asian mainland. The islanders yielded, but the shattered Chinese dogma of universal sovereignty was removed from the world’s politics forever. By her might in war Japan had won the world’s respect.

When in 1900 China’s barbarism burst into eruption, and the legations of the civilized world in Peking were imperilled by a riotous mob called “the Boxers” Japan saved the situation. All the allies, except the Americans under Admiral Kempff, made war on a peaceful Power, by attacking the Taku forts. The Chinese dragon, stiffening its back for once, accepted the challenge of the unjust, and China’s regular troops, goaded to resistance, now for the first time active in offence, held Tientsin. By superior forces, totalling nearly 21,000 men, quickly landed, and by the astonishing efficiency of every arm of her military service, Japan held the van in the march to Peking. Had not Russia jealousy prevented, the Japanese, unaided, could have relieved the legations within twenty days.

In 1904, thrice armed because her quarrel was just, Japan challenged the idea of a Russian Manchuria, which meant also a Russian Korea—which no man born of a Japanese woman could endure without a fight to the death. The national public schools, incarnated in an army, smote ignorance on the war field and won. Russia gladly made peace.

Japan has won the admiration of the world and also the applause of the Anglo-Saxon nations by her political stability, elasticity and power. Duarchy and feudalism are deep in the ooze of oblivion. Exactly one century after the Philadelphia instrument of 1789, Japan’s written Constitution of 1889 guaranteed liberal political rights to persons and conscience. This supreme law of the land, higher even than the Emperor’s will, has in its working passed the stage of experiment. Old privileges abolished, all lines of promotion are open to the people. Once there was “a nation within a nation” and authority was divided, so old and strong had been privilege and custom. Now one nation, of over fifty million souls, is linked to the Throne in unsurpassed loyalty. Now all unite in one ambition, to make Japan great. At home or abroad the native, intensely patriotic and ambitious, is resolved to raise his country to the equal of the world’s best.

A proser in patience and work, the son of Nippon is a sentimentalist at heart. Japanese confess freely their debt to Cathay—witness the superb “Chinese Portal” at Nikko—and to sixteenth century Europe, as well as to the modern Occident. Nor is gratitude an unknown trait among them. They have raised memorials to Seibold, to Commodore Perry, to Townsend Harris, to “Verbeck of Japan,” to General Meckel, who taught them strategy and tactics and, in one form or another, to scores of their British and Continental teachers. They have awarded decorations to half a thousand aliens, half being Americans. Great have been the meetings in Tokyo presided over by native statesmen and educators to express their indebtedness to American diplomatists, teachers, missionaries, and experts in every line of human achievement. It is absurd to ascribe the progress of Japan exclusively to forces within or without. Rather is it true that the best powers of the Orient and the Occident have here coalesced.

Yet great as are these external influences there seems but one answer that crystallizes the history of the Japanese and reveals as through a lens their hopes for the future: Mikadoism. Standing as a portal to the national Constitution of 1889 is this declaration:

“The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.”

Chapter 3

Chapter III

The State or Ancestors?

The Mikado is the living symbol of all that is glorious in the history of Everlasting Great Japan. He expresses to the sons of Nippon whatever is dearest in the present and auspicious in the future. He incarnates history and religion. His person embodies the nation’s memory and the people’s hope.

But who, politically, are “the people”? Iyéyasu (1542–1616), greatest of all Japan’s statesmen in the past, who gave to the land more than two hundred and fifty years of peace (1604–1868), declared that “the people are the foundation of the Empire.”

In 1912 a fierce controversy raged among the intellectuals of the Imperial University in Tokyo, as to whether the Emperor created the State or was himself the creation of the State. Against an ecstatic conception of loyalty was set the truth of history. The Japanese are supposed to be, like the Chinese, an old nation; but they are not. They talk of their “twenty-five hundred years of history” as foolishly and as baselessly as the Koreans do of their “four thousand.” As well may one date the achievements of Thor, or Cinderella, as to accept the Tokyo chronology, which was officially manufactured in 1872. Then were the “ages eternal” mapped and made orthodox by fiat.

The islanders of Nippon came into history about the same time with the Germanic nations of northern Europe, and are no older. Until the sixth century there were various tribes of diverse origins and of several ethnic stocks in the archipelago, Ayran, Semitic, Malay, Negrito, Mongolian, Tartar and Ainu; but these had no common bond of union or even knowledge of each other. There was then no more a Japanese than an English people.

Like all great nations the Japanese are a composite of various stocks. The ancestral homes of the various tribes had been in both continental and insular Asia, in Tartary, Korea, Formosa and the southern Pacific islands; while in the northern half of Hondo and in Yezo dwelt the Emishi, or the Ainu, whose characteristics and language point to their being a branch of the Aryan family. At the base the Japanese are as truly a “white” as they are a “yellow” race.

About the same time that our Teutonic fathers, unlettered and savage, came into contact with the Romans the tribes of Nippon entered definitely into relations with the Koreans and Chinese, who were the lettered and civilized peoples of eastern Asia. Borrowing as much in the sixth century as in the nineteenth, these islanders became inheritors of a civilization which had already blended the ideals of India and China, and whose transcendent superiority was at once manifest.

Herein lay the vast difference. The Germanic tribes came into collision with a grand civilization in its decay. Receiving its culture, they hastened its destruction. The Germanic peoples made Latin the basis of their law and theology, but, retaining their vernacular, they built their own institutions and developed their life from within. The Roman Empire was but a temporary model. They refused to rewrite their ancestral story in the terms of Tacitus or Thucydides, and rejected the cult of Venus or Jupiter. Their poetry, legend and folklore were left untouched in the ancestral tongue and in time their thoughts and aspirations found a voice in their own cultivated poetry and prose. Only the priest and monk Latinized their speech and writing. For centuries, during their political evolution, the northern nations of Europe preserved external unity through the dogma and ritual prescribed at Rome.

With the Asiatic islanders something entirely different occurred. One tribe, or group of tribes, became dominant in Japan, giving the archipelago political unity, largely by means of dogma superimposed upon the aborigines by force of arms. Their simple ancestral cult, when made an engine of state, ensured uniformity of administration. Then they proceeded not only to wipe out the varied tribal histories but to cover up all linguistic differences, in the interests of centralized monarchy, by the revolutionary measures of A.D. 645. The primeval names of mountains, rivers, places and even of persons were concealed or made unrecognizable by the use of official Chinese characters. The appeal of these ideographs to the eye and the method of their pronunciation made everything on the map seem uniformly “Japanese.” Both politics and religion combined in this process. Buddhism, with its literary veneer of Chinese on everything, has been even more powerful than the Government in the making of the Japanese people. Shut off from the continent as they were, within an archipelago in the distant seas, the process of assimilating many tribes into uniformity was as easy and the results were as thoroughgoing as in Britain.

The vast element of difference in the experiences of the early Nipponese and of the Teutonic tribes was that the former, isolated islanders, were far more likely to come under one political influence and organization in order to make one nation, than were the northern nations on the European continent.

The Teutonic peoples, on the contrary, mi widely. Separated by mountains, rivers and morasses, they wrought their different destinies under varying conditions, their one bond of visible unity being the Christianity represented by Rome. But the Nipponese, instead of confronting a decaying civilization, came first in contact with the Chinese system, when in the noontide of its glory under the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618–905). The European barbarians were not so overawed as to borrow wholesale and preserve almost intact, as were the islanders who became the intellectual bond servants of China. The Teutonic peoples despised, rejected and finally destroyed Roman civilization. The Nipponese for a thousand years glorified China as the mother of all nations and made her civilization their standard of perfection.

The lines of evolution in the Far East and in the Far West were still further differentiated. In their social organization, the clan or family being the unit, the islanders were communal. They first borrowed from China and then retained ancestor worship. The Teutons were individualistic. In the West personality was cultivated in the intensest degree, in the East it was annihilated in institutions. Individuality, the glory of the Anglo-Saxon, was the bane of the Nipponese. All language, art, custom, history in the West show the spirit of individuality. The East, with its communal civilization, smothered this feeling and made the clan or the family the unit. The individual is nothing; the dynasty, the commune is everything. The structure of the Japanese family is abhorrent to Western ideas. In the social systems of the West adoption is a rare episode, an exception. In the Far East it is the general custom, so that even the modern codes are gorged with the details of a system distinctly lower and most worthily despised in the West.

In a word, the old Far East, building its polity on ancestor worship, faced the past to find the golden age, allowing the graveyard and ghosts to tyrannize over the living. The West long ago heard the call to “let the dead past bury its dead,” and dropped ancestor worship as a clog to progress. To the West it was, as it still is to China and Japan, a fountain of moral pollution. The eyes of the Occident are ever presented to the front and future. “Forward” is the watchword. In the Orient the dogma that “devotion to ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues” is the false doctrine ever preached. In the Occident consecration to the bettering of descendants is the supreme motor that secures progress. Nogi commits suicide to follow his Master in death. Lincoln, at Gettysburg, facing the future, charges the living to continue the work left undone.

In promulgating the Constitution in 1889 Mutsuhito said: “That We have been so fortunate in Our reign in keeping with the tendency of the times as to accomplish this work We owe to the Glorious Spirit of the Imperial Founder of Our House and Our Other Imperial Ancestors.” It was an empty concession to ancient form. Mutsuhito had departed far from the ways of his forefathers.

Chapter 4

Chapter IV

“Unbroken for Ages Eternal”

Japan claims the world’s oldest unbroken line of rulers. In the Emperor’s state documents, using the imperial “We,” he calls attention to his own heavenly descent and ascribes ineffable virtue to his predecessors. The preamble to the Constitution, issued in 1889, reads:

“Having by virtue of the glories of Our Ancestors ascended the Throne of a lineal succession unbroken for ages eternal; desiring to promote the welfare of and to give development to the moral and intellectual faculties of Our beloved subjects, the very same that have been favored with the benevolent care and affectionate vigilance of Our Ancestors; and hoping to maintain the prosperity of the State, in concert with Our People and with their support, We hereby promulgate, in pursuance of Our Imperial Rescript, of the 12th day of the 10th month of the 14th year of Méiji [1882] a fundamental law of state, to exhibit the principles by which We are to be guided in Our conduct, and to point out to what Our descendants and Our subjects and their descendants are forever to conform.

“The rights of sovereignty of the State We have inherited from Our Ancestors, and We shall bequeath them to Our descendants. Neither We nor they shall in the future fail to wield them in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution hereby granted.”

Seventeen articles, setting forth the place of the Emperor, in law and fact, as the fountain of order, power and privilege, and as the maker of war and peace, form Chapter I. of the Constitution. His person is sacred and inviolable. He combines “in himself the rights of sovereignty and exercises them according to the provisions of the present Constitution.”

In the declarations of war with China in 1894 and with Russia in 1904 the same tone of language and coloring of ideas are continued. In all this there is nothing new. Such expressions are in harmony with all Japanese literature and with traditions at least a thousand years old. In his “Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan” Marquis Ito reinforces the text.

In spite of the brilliance of their modern achievements the Japanese are not yet wholly out of their intellectual or ethical childhood. Little conception of history as a science, apart from their opinions and feelings, as yet exists. The glib but utterly worthless statements of even “educated” Japanese and renowned statesmen concerning “their twenty-five hundred years of written history” have as little basis in literal fact or contemporaneous record as have the traditional notions concerning early Hebrew history, long dominant in the Jewish and Christian world. Even the Japan of the books, as known in the West, is the Japan of the Samurai; not of the great mass of the people. Rural Japan, that is, nine-tenths of all, is yet unknown.

It was about the opening of the fifth Christian century that Chinese culture began to filter into Japan, causing a profound revolution in the thoughts and habits of the islanders, giving them a new mental outfit, and altogether accomplishing a change as great as that wrought in the nineteenth century. Yet not till the eighth century were either annals or history written. All before that time is prehistoric. Native scholars now acknowledge this.

The story of Wani the Korean bringing letters to Japan, in A.D. 286, may have some basis of fact, but writing by a class, or body of scribes, was not practiced until after A.D. 552, for instead of the dishonest accuracy of the chroniclers of A.D. 712, who filled up the morass of ignorance by the manufacture of minutely dated events and dynasties, we have in the records after this date an entire change in atmosphere. From the fifth century sobriety and likeness to other historic records mark the chronological list of Japa Emperors. In fact, the table of Mikado sovereigns—the first seventeen, of exceedingly long life, being clearly mythical—begins to look wonderfully human and actual. After Nintoku, who reigned A.D. 313–399, no Emperor reached the age of 100, nor even that of 90, and only two the age of 80. The days of thirteen of them were “three score years and ten.” During the second period, in the Middle Ages, many short reigns of infants and little people of the nursery, puppets of the politicians, are noted, some lasting less than a year.