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JAMES MURDOCH'
HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS
TO
THEARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD
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VOL. I |
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VOL. II |
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VOL. III |
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INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER
THE last
half-century has witnessed three great constructive efforts in the field of
practical politics. Two of these—the Unification of Italy and the
Reconstruction of Germany—have been accomplished among peoples constituting an
integral part of the Aryan stock and of the Comity of Modern Christendom.
Hence, pregnant with momentous consequences as they have been, and will
continue to be, it is not especially difficult for an American or an Englishman
to seize their import,—to understand the ideas in the minds of Cavour and
Bismarck and their coadjutors, to appreciate the motives by which they were
actuated, the ideals by which they were inspired, and the means they adopted to
enable them, to march triumphantly forward to the realisation of their projects.
The third of
the three great movements alluded to, stands on an entirely different plane. It
accomplished itself among a non-Aryan people, a people who made its first
acquaintance with Christianity only three hundred and fifty years ago, and,
after a brief experience of the political effects of the foreign cult, sternly
proscribed it within the national bounds. To this people, most of what is
considered to be most distinctive in the common heritage of Western Culture was
utterly alien. In some cases it was positively repellent, for the base of the
social structure in Japan was by no means identical with that of the West. With
us, thanks greatly to the Roman Law, the social unit is the individual; in
Japan from time immemorial it has been the family. Hence for our intense
individualism the islanders of the Far East could have, and had, but little
sympathy. Their art canons were not those of peoples that drew their inspiration
from ancient Hellas; the concepts of their philosophy and of ours seemed to
lie in entirely different fields; their ideas of poetry were such that the
highest fetches of the European muse were meaningless to them, while not a few
of the leading ideas in their literature, if they did not actually elude, at
all events failed to excite, any emotion, except perhaps sheer amazement, in
the mind of the European reader. When their thoughts were even as ours, the
expression of them was cast in an entirely different mould.
Everywhere the qualifying word, or phrase, or clause before what it modified,
no relative pronoun, little or no personification, and as often as not
predicates without subjects. And when it came to setting forth their thoughts
on paper instead of using an alphabet and writing from left to right, they had
recourse to logographs, eked out by a syllabary, and made the brush trace its
characters in perpendicular lines, beginning at the right-hand top corner of
the page and ending at the bottom of the left.
The sudden, the
almost meteor-like rise of an Empire with such a strange and peculiar culture
to the proud position of by no means the least among the Great Powers of the
modern world is indeed a startling phenomenon. Startling at all events to those
who have no intimate acquaintance with the past of the Japanese people. The
present open-mouthed surprise of the West at the unexpected development in the
North-East Pacific is mainly due to misconceptions of the import of the word civilisation. Many very worthy people seem to fancy that
anything that is not strictly synonymous with European, or so-called Christian
culture, cannot be regarded as civilisation. This
arises from the circumstance that for several centuries the European people
have not been in close contact with any great non-Aryan, non Christian Power.
But the domains of Haroun-al-Raschid were fully as civilised as those of Charlemagne eleven hundred years ago,
while for generations the highly developed culture of the Mohammedan Power in
the Iberian Peninsula continued to present a bright contrast to the barbarism,
the coarseness, the superstition, and the mental stagnation of contemporary
Western Christendom. These Semitic and non-Christian Empires could hardly be characterised as barbarian. With no more reason could Old
Japan be described as such. At the end of the sixteenth century; under the
great Taiko, Hideyoshi, it is abundantly clear from the Letters of the Jesuits
that the Island Empire was fully abreast, if not positively in advance, of con
temporary Europe in all the essentials of cultured and civilised life. It is true that this Japanese culture was different in many important
respects, and that the base it stood upon was different, to that of Europe. But
it was, on that account, none the less a real culture,—as stable and as
efficient. Then, before the middle of the seventeenth century, the islanders,
for what they deemed to be good and sufficient reasons, thought fit to expel
the Portuguese from their shores, and to seclude themselves behind barriers
which only a few Dutchmen were allowed to approach; and for 216 years,—for full
seven generations of mortal men,—all attempts by aliens to intrude upon this
seclusion were sternly repulsed by the national authorities.
At the date of
the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1637 Central Europe was being harried and
devastated and depeopled by the Thirty Years War—a
struggle conducted with a ferocity and marked by horrors unparalleled in even
the fiercest of Japanese wars. This welter of murder and rapine had still
eleven years of its course to run; and then, before Europe had scarcely time to
breathe, much less to recover herself, she had to face the disastrous series of
contests provoked by the ambition of Louis XIV. Later came the war of the
Austrian Succession, and then the terrible Seven Years War, costing the lives
of some 850,000 men, and still a little later the various international armed
debates involved in the American fight for independence. Lastly there were the
cataclysmic wars of the French Republic and of Napoleon (1792 - 1815). During
all this time Japan continued to enjoy the unspeakable blessings of profound
and all but unruffled peace. Her government was at once despotic and
repressive; but it is tolerably safe to maintain that the average individual of
the unprivileged classes, constituting at least ninety per cent, of the
population, enjoyed a greater measure of happiness than fell to the lot of the
average unit in the proletariat of Europe down to 1789 at least.
The foregoing
propositions are so obvious that the impatient reader may be tempted to
dismiss them as so many mere commonplaces. But it not unfrequently happens that
important truths get disregarded merely because they are commonplaces. On the
other hand, it must be frankly admitted that the preceding statement of the
situation is only the obverse—possibly, indeed, only the reverse—of the coin.
During these
two centuries (1637-1853) the energies of Europe were far from being absorbed
by merely militant enterprises. At all times there had been a frank exchange
of ideas between the philosophers and the scientific men of the various
nationalities constituting the European Comity of Culture, and the advance in
the knowledge of Nature and her great uniformities during these two centuries
had been marvellous. Furthermore, in certain quarters
of Europe, in Great Britain especially, there had been a steady accumulation of
the resources—call it capital if you will,—that made the application of the
discoveries to industrial processes not merely possible but highly profitable.
It is only necessary to refer to the invention of the steam-engine and to the
inventions that enabled England to prosecute her textile industries on the factory
system. Before the Japanese had sundered all connection with Catholic Europe in
1637, the greatest European novelty with which they had become acquainted was
perhaps the telescope. In 1853, Perry was able to present them with a miniature
railway and rolling-stock and a telegraph-line; while behind his steam frigates
with their powerful armaments, were dockyards, and foundries, and machine-shops
and spinning-mills innumerable, together with all the countless appliances with
which the patient workers in the physical and chemical laboratories were
enriching the material civilisation of the Namban (Southern Barbarian) men. And meanwhile, during all this time, when these
Southern Barbarians had been taking thought and adding cubits to their
intellectual stature, Japan, to all seeming, had been somnolently stagnating
in a circle of antiquated ideas.
To the more
commonplace and vulgar-minded among the complements of Perry’s squadron, the
Japanese appeared but a barbarian people—quaint and picturesque and exceedingly
polite barbarians perhaps, but barbarians notwithstanding. Doubtless Perry and
the finer spirits among his officers and men did not fall into any such glaring
misconception. Yet even to those, the defects of the civilisation of Old Japan must have been far more obvious than its qualities. For the
defects were upon the surface,—plain and open, and apparent to the view. The
real strength of the nation lay so deep that its existence was scarcely
suspected. Then, before a small squadron of five unarmoured American vessels, Japan lay powerless and helpless; exactly one short
half-century later the Japanese navy was to win the greatest sea-fight of
modern times,—the greatest sea-fight since Trafalgar. A single one of the
units,— indeed a third-class unit—of the fleet commanded by Togo in the Battle
of the Sea of Japan (1905) could have dealt very effectually with the entire
American Expedition which forced Japan to open her doors in 1854. Forty years
after Perry’s summons, these quaint and picturesque barbarians were rudely to
awaken that sleeping giant, the Chinese Empire, and to demonstrate to a
hitherto incredulous, or rather credulous, Europe that, apart from its
territorial extent, its teeming millions, and its gross inability to read the
signs of the times, and to adapt itself to a rapidly changing environment,
there was at that time nothing gigantic about it whatsoever. Then ten years
later still these same quaint and picturesque barbarians were to more than
hold their own on foreign soil against one of the strongest, if not the very
strongest, among the military Powers of the world in one of the greatest wars
of modern times.
Now, a nation
with no real solid, albeit unapparent, because latent, strength in 1854, could
never have achieved the brilliant and gigantic feats of 1894-5 and 1904-5. What
then were the actual assets of Japan in 1854?
In the first
place we must set down her population of some 30,000,000 souls,—a population
considerably greater than that of either the United Kingdom or of the Great
Republic at that time, and a population considerably more homogeneous than that
of the British Isles, and very much more homogeneous than that of the United
States of North America. Then, whatever may have been the inherent political
weakness of the nation, the social organisation was
emphatically sound and stable. Next there was a keen sense of honour and of conduct; not so keen indeed in certain
matters on which the people of Christendom lay great stress; but keener in
others, and on the broad general average, certainly as keen. Furthermore,
although the Japanese had to all seeming been somnolently stagnating in a
circle of antiquated ideas, the national intellect had been neither somnolent
nor stagnant; on the contrary, it had been vigorously active, as it has been at
all times, for mental stolidity is the last thing of which an intelligent
Japanese could be or can be accused. In 1551 Xavier wrote; “These Japanese are
supremely curious,—eager to be instructed to the highest degree. Their spirit
of curiosity is such that they become importunate; they ask questions and argue
without knowing how to make an end of it; eager to have an answer, and to
communicate what they have learned to others. I wrote to Father Rodriguez and,
in his absence, to the Rector of the College of Coimbra to send to the
(Japanese) Universities none but men tried and approved by your holy charity (i.e.
Ignatius Loyola). They will be much more persecuted than they believe; at all
hours of the day and a part of the night they will be importuned by visits and
questions; they will be summoned to the more considerable houses, and no excuse
taken for their not going there; they will have no time either to pray or for
meditation, or to recollect themselves; at the beginning especially, no time to
say a daily mass; replying to questions will occupy them so much, that they
will scarcely find time to recite the office, to eat, to sleep.” Thus Xavier, a
very keen observer, represents Old Japan as being a sort of replica of the
Athens of the days of St. Paul, when “all the Athenians and strangers which
were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some
new thing.”
So much as
regards the alertness and receptivity of the Japanese intellect three hundred
and fifty years ago. Profound perhaps it was not; but then even at the best of
times in the West, profundity of intellect has been exceedingly rare. Marlboroughs with their “excellent plain understanding and
sound judgement” have been by no means so very common; yet men of that type
have been far more numerous than Aristotles or Aquinases or Galileos or Newtons
or Darwins or Spencers have
been. And of men of “excellent plain understanding and sound judgement” Japan
has generally had enough and to spare.
In addition to
Xavier’s, we have abundance of trustworthy testimony regarding the qualities of
the Japanese intellect three hundred years ago. In the latter half of the
sixteenth and the early years of the seventeenth century, Japan was one of the
chief mission fields of the great Company of Jesus. With their proverbial
adroitness in adapting means to ends and in selecting the proper agents for the
immediate or ulterior purpose in view, the Jesuits from first to last assigned
none but picked men for service in Japan. Time and again it is asserted that
the intelligence of the Japanese people made this precaution absolutely
imperative. Then the Jesuits were more than mere missionaries; they were not
only professional teachers, but among the finest, if not actually the very
finest, schoolmasters in Europe. Their educational work in Japan was on a very
extensive scale. Besides their seminaries for candidates for the priesthood,
they had thoroughly well-equipped and efficient establishments for the
instruction of high-born Japanese youths. In these schools the curriculum was
in the main the same as in their educational institutions in Europe. the
condition of things in these Japanese academies the reports we have are
numerous. Although they differ in details, they are unanimous on one point.
They rate the capacities of Japanese youth much higher than those of European
pupils generally; in some cases we are told that Japanese students acquire a
greater knowledge of Latin in a few months than many Europeans do in as many
years. And we must remember that these reports were not concocted for the
purpose of pandering to Japanese vanity; they were mostly meant for the eye of
the General of the Company or of his chief coadjutors in Rome alone.
A national
intellect of such a calibre may reasonably be
expected to go far and to accomplish much. That is, if it be exercised in a
field where solid practical results are possible. But just about the time that
Christianity and everything connected with it got proscribed, the Japanese
began to make acquaintance with the Philosophy of the Sung dynasty. This
philosophy, professedly an exposition of the doctrines of Confucius and
Mencius, but in reality a new system of ontology, ethics, natural philosophy, and
principles of government, was elaborated in China in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries,—the age of Anselm, of Roscellinus, of
William of Champeau, and of Abelard, in Europe. In fact, it might not inaptly
be termed the Scholasticism of the Far East. Only with this difference. Whereas
the main interests in Scholasticism were logical and theological, to the
comparative neglect of philosophy proper, it was to philosophical problems
that the great Sung thinkers devoted most of their attention. Theology with
them was practically naught; while they never had any body of logical
doctrines, or principles or apparatus. Yet, notwithstanding, they could reason
acutely enough. Like their contemporaries in the West it was not the processes
by which they reached their conclusion that had to be found fault with: it was
the assumptions with which they started that were unsatisfactory.
As has just
been said, it was at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the Japanese
made a first, and somewhat belated, acquaintance with this body of doctrine.
For a time it had to contend with the pretensions of Buddhism, whose priests
then claimed a monopoly of teaching in Japa ; and down to about 1700 the
exponents of the new Chinese learning were actually compelled to receive the
tonsure. Nevertheless, the Sung philosophy made at once sure and rapid headway,
and before a century had gone it had carried everything before it, and
triumphantly imposed itself upon the culture of the nation. By that time almost
every nook and cranny in the system had been explored by eager disciples: it
had been discussed and expounded and commented upon in thousands of volumes under
the superincumbent weight of which the shelves of Japanese libraries groan even
unto this day. By the middle of the eighteenth century the commentators could
find but little new to say about it. Still it lived on as the official system,—the
only system sanctioned in the University of Yedo and
in the great provincial schools in the various fiefs. And yet withal, the
Japanese contrived to add but little to what they had received from China.
Their attitude towards the Chinese books was closely similar to that of the
European Schoolmen towards the Bible, the Patristic writers, and Aristotle.
These latter never dreamt of questioning the dicta of Holy Writ, while they
ever appeared to contemplate the universe of Nature and Man, not at first hand
with their own eyes, but in the glass of Aristotelian formulae. Their chief
works are in the shape of commentaries upon the various Aristotelian treatises.
Their problems and solutions alike spring from (he master’s dicta and from the
need of reconciling these with one another and with the conclusions of
Christian theology. In short they are interpreters, not original and
independent investigators. They hold fast to the Stagirite’s results, and turn
their backs upon his methods, which were so fruitful in his own hands, and are,
and can be so, wherever they are courageously and conscientiously ap plied. In
a similar way the Japanese Kangakusha (Chinese
scholars) seldom or never travelled beyond the scope and results of the
original Chinese texts. Buch being the case, the sum of positive knowledge was
not very appreciably added to during the Tokugawa regime.
Yet the Sung
philosophy rendered great services to Japan,—services similar in kind, and
equal in degree, perhaps, to those which European Scholasticism rendered in its
day. We can now afford to admit that between the twelfth and the fourteenth
century there were intellectual giants in Europe. The pity of it was that they
were condemned to walk in intellectual leg-irons and to work in mental
manacles,—under conditions which made any substantial advance in positive, and
especially in physical, science, all but hopeless. And as it is only advance in
physical science that enables man to extend his command over the forces of
Nature, and to harness them and subordinate them to his purposes, the progress
in the merely material aspects of civilisation was
far from considerable. All this is true,—trite, indeed. But it is not the
whole case. Education and mere information, or the mere imparting of
information, are by no means synonymous terms. If the aim of education is to
build up character and to train and discipline the intellectual powers, and
especially the reason, the trivium and the quadrivium and the ancillary courses
of study in the great mediaeval schools cannot be sweepingly and unreservedly
condemned. No more can the Sung philosophy in Japan, for it, equally with
Scholasticism, proved an ecellent apparatus for sharpening the mind and
developing intellectual alertness and acuteness. As soon as it began to appear
that there were truths unrecorded either in the letter of Holy Writ or in the
dicta of Aristotle, and men began to venture to look upon Nature and her
mysteries face to face, the human intellect, emancipating itself from the
trammels of Scholasticism, had yet to thank it for what was wholesome in the
discipline it had provided for generations. Logic and Theology had been the
passion in the thirteenth century, and the really practical results bad then
been scant; but by assiduous exercise in these seemingly barren fields the
European intellect had been drilled and disciplined and its powers developed;
and the advantages of the discipline it had thus received could be appreciated
when it began to apply itself to humanism, to art, to the inchoate science and
the practical discoveries of the fifteenth century, the prelude to that great
intellectual efflorescence known as the Renascence. Then emancipated from the
hide-bound authority of the theologians and of the dicta—not the methods—of
Aristotle, a steadily increasing number of the more commanding intellects in
every country in Europe found their passion in “ascertaining the causes of
things.” Among a host of minor gifts we have to thank the seventeenth century
for the Novum Organum, and the discoveries of Kepler, of Galileo, of Leibnitz,
and of Newton. The history of the eighteenth is illuminated by a long roll of
renowned mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, inventors, and great
engineers, while the first half of the nineteenth saw the birth not merely of
illustrious scientists, but of many new sciences.
In the middle
of this nineteenth century, in the year 1854, Japan intellectually speaking
stood, mutatin mutandis, pretty much where Europe did in the days of William
of Occam. Chinese philosophy had done and was then doing for Japan what
Scholasticism had done for Europe four or five long centuries before. William
of Occam died in 1347, and with him all that was vital in the lore of the
Schoolmen departed. Yet Scholasticism continued to stalk abroad as a sort of
venerable gibbering ghost until the death of Suarez in 1617. It was just about
this date that the Sung philosophy was beginning to make real substantial
headway in Japan. Fujiwara Seigwa (1500-1610) was
its Gerbert (d. 1003). For two centuries and a half it was all-powerful in the
Island Empire; even in 1854 it was lustily, nay militantly, vigorous. Now in
this year 1909 even its wraith is chary of making its appearance. After 1854 it
soon became moribund; it made a brief rally somewhere about 1880, and then
quickly expired and got quietly and unobtrusively and not indecently consigned
to the tomb.
Thus at the
very date at which we had finally succeeded in emancipating ourselves from the
trammels of Scholasticism. Japan was submitting herself as a bond captive to
the allurements and the not unmitigated blessings of an analogous intellectual
system. During her two and a half centuries of subsequent scholastic tutelage,
she was almost entirely engrossed in the work of sharpening her mental
faculties by their assiduous exercise on problems whose solution could advance
her merely material interests but scantily at the best. Meanwhile Europe had
been grappling with Nature and her mysteries even as Jacob had grappled with
the angel at Peniel; and had been wringing from her secret after secret
pregnant with possibilities of material social—and, also, unsocial—progress.
The process had been slow and the yearly advance had occasionally been almost
imperceptible. Yet, when suddenly brought face to face with the cumulative
result of three centuries of the Western effort to “ascertain the causes of
things.’’ Japanese national pride and self-complacency received a very rude
shock indeed. Japan differed from less favoured outside barbarian realms in that her origin alone was divine, and that she
alone was the country of the gods. But whatever Amaterasu-no-Mikoto might have
effected against the great Mongol Armada of Kublai Khan in 1281, it would have
been a very serious task for the Sun-Goddess, reinforced by all the eight
million deities of the Pantheon, to attempt to argue with Perry’s Paixhans. So much the Shogun’s Ministers, at least, very
quickly grasped. So they fell back upon their Sung philosophy and dispatched
Hayashi Daigaku-no-Kami, the President of the
University of Yedo, to make the beat terms with the
intrusive barbarian chief which he could.
Meanwhile,
however, this body of Sung philosophy, as an instrument of intellectual and
moral discipline, had not been entirely without rivals in Japan. To some of the
finer spirits in the Empire the illegitimate symbolic concepts on which the
most considerable portion of the edifice was reared appeared to be no more than
so many senseless pedantic aridities. Some of these
turned towards the idealistic intuitionalism of Wang Yang-ming (1472-1528),—Oyomei as the Japanese call him. Although
the public teaching of his doctrines was frowned upon by the Yedo authorities, yet it was from Oyomei that some of the finest and greatest men in Tokugawa Japan drew their
inspiration. Then about the middle of the eighteenth century there was a sudden
revival of interest in old Japanese literature, old Japanese history, or rather
in Japanese mythology (for to the scholars of those days there was little
distinction between history and mythology),—a diversion of interest to the
national origins in fact. As was the case with the revival of English
antiquarian studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this
resuscitation of pure Shinto in Japan was destined to exercise an important and
wholly unexpected influence upon subsequent political developments. It was then
that the dogma of the divine origin, not merely of the Imperial line, but of
the entire Japanese people, and even of the seas and soil of Japan was, if not
first formulated, at all events first militantly and uncompromisingly insisted
upon. All outside peoples wore evil-hearted, unclean barbarians; and the very
presence of such in the sacred land of the gods was contamination. Half a
century after the death of the coryphaeus of this misguided movement (Motoori,
d. 1801), such barbarians were knot king at the close-bolted doors of the
Empire, rudely insisting that they should be unbarred. Thereupon the “patriots”
raised their two-fold cry of “Honour the Emperor; sweep away the barbarians”. It is
Motoori who must be held primarily responsible for not a few of those outrages
on foreigners in Japan that were perpetrated two generations after his decease.
On the other hand the impulse he gave to the movement for the rehabilitation
of the Imperial House in its prerogatives and for the reestablishment of a
strong centralised government in Japan must plainly
be imputed unto him for righteousness.
A third, albeit
an insignificant, rival of the dominant scientific philosophy of Sung was what
was called Dutch learning. Active interest in this began in the days of the
eighth Tokugawa Shogun (Yoshimune, 1717-1745).
Shortly afterwards the Dutch were instructed to supply an annual copy of the
Nautical Almanac; and by the end of the century certain Japanese had mastered
such works as Lalande’s, and were calculating eclipses correctly. Two or three
decades later on we can see from Siebold that in certain circles in Japan the
acquaintance with the developments of contemporary European science was far
from contemptible, while of the general course of events in the West the
Shogun’s officers continued to be kept pretty fully apprised by the Dutch. Of
Perry’s projected expedition, for example, the Yedo Cabinet had very precise information. Forty years before, Golownin,
a captive in Yezo, was told by his jailors of the
occupation of Moscow by the French. From the beginning of the nineteenth
century the Bakufu had official translators of Dutch
books, and in the fourth decade of that century there were two considerable
rival coteries of Dutch scholars in the capital. These unofficial associations
were not looked upon with any favour by the
Government, however. The Dutch were kept in Deshima to play for Japan the part
which Bacon’s “Merchants of Light” did for his Utopian New Atlantis. Now, just
as the Bakufu monopolised the Dutch trade, so it was minded to have Dutch learning confined to its own officials,
or to those strictly under its own control. Rin Shiliei of Sendai was by no means the only scholar who met with punishment at its hands
for publishing abroad inconvenient truths of “barbarian” provenance. Thus,
such “light” as these Dutch merchants purveyed was far from proving of the
general national benefit it might well have done. The interests of the
Shogunate were bound up in the maintenance of the status quo as far as such was
possible; and, exceedingly jealous of the great subject feudatories, it was
utterly adverse to the diffusion of new practical knowledge in, or the
introduction of pestilent inventions into, the great outside fiefs where they
might very well presently lead to menacing developments. Hence a partial
explanation of the rigid restrictions upon all free intercourse with the “Merchants
of Light” in Deshima. The Yedo bureaucrats were
anxious indeed to have the “ light,” but they were no less solicitous about
retaining full and perfect command over the meter, so that in its distribution
and diffusion there might be the strictest economy and not the slightest risk
of disastrous explosions.
From this
succinct and all too imperfect sketch of the Japanese intellect and of the
arena in which it exercised and disciplined itself under the Tokugawa regime it
may be possible to gather why the subsequent seemingly marvellous development has been possible. Yet, withal, that a nation should in less than
two generations leap from a condition of culture analogous to that of the
fourteenth century in the West to one fully in line with that of the Europe of
the twentieth century can hardly cease to be the subject of amaze. A very
simple analogy, however, may serve to throw some gleams of light upon the
situation. The average Senior Wrangler of today, although of excellent mental
capacity, if placed in the seventeenth century with the immature intellect of a
youth of twenty-one or twenty-two, would have been signally incapable of the
grand fetches of discovery achieved by the fully matured mind of Newton. And
yet these discoveries of Newton form only a mere fraction in the mathematical
and physical acquirements now needful to place a man high in his Tripos. As the
average Senior Wrangler of today is to Newton, so has Japan been to Europe.
All the secret lore Europe has been laboriously wresting from Nature for the
last three centuries she has brilliantly mastered in less than fifty years. It
is a commonly accepted article of faith that the Japanese are incapable of
original discovery or invention. At present indications are not wanting that
this article of faith must be greatly modified, if not actually abandoned. In
Medicine, in Chemistry, in Physics, in Seismology, in Bacteriology, Japan is
beginning to make contributions of her own to the general store of international
knowledge. And surely the successful effort to make up the intellectual leeway
of three hundred years should be admitted to be ample occupation for one or two
generations of a people whose thoughts are cast in a different mould to ours, and whose normal mode of expression is at
utter variance with that of the foreign text books they have perforce been
condemned to use.
In the
enumeration of the national assets of Japan in 1854, the national intellect may
well seem to have been dwelt upon at disproportionate and inordinate length.
The excuse, nay, the justification for this, is at once easy and plain. It is
simply that of all the assets of Japan, the national intellect is by far the
most considerable.
Furthermore, to
the national credit must be set down a high and a seemingly inherent capacity
for organisation. In the history of Meiji the display
of this capacity has been conspicuous; without it the brilliant military and
naval successes of 1894-5 and 1904-5 would have been impossible. In the latter
gigantic struggle, apart from the fleet, a force of 600,000 or 700,000 men was
provided for easily and handled with signal success. But then to provide for
and to handle large masses of men is a task for which not a few Japanese
commanders have proved themselves competent. About the time of the third
Crusade Yoritomo was launching an army of 284,000 men to deal with Fujiwara Yasuhira in the extreme north of the main island. In 1221
the Hojo Regent concentrated 100,000 upon Kyoto to deal with the malcontents
there. In the war of Oniu (1469) one of the
contending chiefs began the strife with 160,OvO men, while his opponent had
90,000. In the latter half of the sixteenth century several of the great
feudatories took the field with very considerable forces. When Otomo of Bungo
was routed by the Satsuma men at the Mimikawa in 1578
he was in command of 70,000 troops. The largest force mobilised by Nobunara amounted to about 185,000 men. On several
occasions Hideyoshi was at the head of still larger hosts. In 1592-3 there were
205,000 Japanese soldiers on Korean soil, while it was only the dislocation of
the Japanese strategy by the exploits of the great Korean Admiral that prevented
the dispatch of some 100,000 more troops held in reserve at the headquartes of Nagoya, in Hizen.
At the great battle of Sekigahara (October 21, 1600)
not more than 130,000 on both sides actually went into action; but on each side
there was a column some 40,000 strong within striking distance. Then besides
these 210,000 troops there was a strong confederate garrison in Osaka, while
the war also raged in Kyushu and in the north of the main island, the forces
operating in the latter region being nearly as numerous as those that decided
the real issue on the field of Sekigahara. In the
first Osaka campaign the figures on each side were 180,000 and 90,000
respectively; in the second (1615) the Tokugawa levies amounted to 250,000 and
probably more. Again, when the rebel stronghold of Shimabara fell in 1638, the
beleaguering force of Kyushu troops footed up to 100,000 men. It is impossible
to verify the figures for the earliest of these campaigns; about the five or
six later ones there can be no reasonable doubt, for the muster rolls are
easily accessible. Oyama is indeed the first Japanese commander who has had to
handle as many as 600,000 men in an over-sea campaign. But when Ukida commanded a host of 205,000 combatants on Korean soil
in 1592-3 we must remember that Europe had never seen more than 60,000 men in
the field together under one flag in that century. Thus with the traditional
national aptitude for warlike enterprises and the inherent capacity for organisation there is nothing so very surprising in Japan’s
rapid ascent to the rank of a first-class military Power.
As regards her
sudden rise to the proud position of Mistress of the Far Eastern Seas the case
is somewhat otherwise. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were,
indeed, daring, nay great, seamen in Japan. But of anything even remotely
resembling a national navy there was nothing. Such men-of-war as were then
built in Japan and manned by Japanese, mostly flew the Bahan flag. In plain
language, they were pirates. They harried the Chinese sea-board so badly that
the Chinese Government was ultimately constrained to order its subjects to
abandon their towns and villages on the coast and to remove several miles
inland. The depredations of these sea-rovers extended to the Straits of
Malacca, and further.
On account of
their daring all access to Portuguese India was denied to Japanese in Japanese
craft. It was in a Japanese piratical raid on the Chinese coast that Anjiro, the first Japanese convert to Christianity, and
Xavier’s pilot in his Japanese expedition, ended his picturesque and chequered career. Yet the only time when there was anything
like a Japanese navy was in the days of Hideyoshi, when the squadrons fitted
out for service in the Korean War carried some 10,000 marines. In that struggle
the Japanese were hopelessly outclassed by the Korean sailors and their great
Admiral on the blue water. Under Iyeyasu, under the
instruction of Will Adams, mariner of Gillingham, in Kent, they got as far as
building a European-rigged vessel of 170 tons, which made the voyage to
Acapulco and back with serious losses among the ship’s company. Then the
building of foreign-rigged vessels, of men-of-war, and even of large junks was
strictly forbidden just at the time that the mercantile marine was beginning
to give indications of a rapid and wonderful development. The attempt to
introduce ship carpenters and naval architect from Batavia in Titsingh’s time, some century and a third ago, proved
abortive. It was only after Perry’s appearance that the Japanese addressed
themselves to the problems of navigation, of naval architecture, and of
seamanship in earnest. And yet in May 1905 they fought and won the great battle
of the Sea of Japan. This special development is indeed something to excite
wonder and surprise.
It is to be
admitted, however, that it is in her armaments that Japan is seen at her best.
For the fabric of modem Japan has been reared pretty much in the fashion in
which the average Japanese builds his house. After laying a fairly stable support
for the uprights and placing these in position, it is the roof that next claims
his attention. When this is made thoroughly strong and serviceable, capable of
resisting typhoons and the other ravages of the sky, the builder proceeds to finish
the rest of the structure at his leisure, and it may be months, perhaps years,
before the walls and their lining and the general interior appurtenances
receive the attention that must be bestowed upon them before, with us, the
tenant enters upon occupation. In her army and navy Japan has provided herself
with a national roof more than strong enough to safeguard her against all
possible external dangers. But it has been reared somewhat at the expense of
the general efficiency of the national fabric which supports it, and which it
exists to protect. In other words the creation of her armaments has put a
severe strain upon Japan’s economic resources.
This brings us
to a consideration of the most considerable items in the debit pages of Japan’s
national ledger in 1851.
In the first
place the land was stricken with the curse of poverty. Old Japan was almost
entirely an agricultural country. Now what this means may not be readily
grasped at first. However, the import of this seemingly colourless assertion may become clearer when it is pointed out that chiefly on account of
the mountainous character of the surface, and partly of the vagaries of the
innumerable streams in their wide and shallow courses, not more than one-eighth
of her superficies of 112,000 square miles was available for cultivation. And
these 14,000 oi 15,000 square miles had to support a population of close on
30,000,000 souls; that is, nearly 2,000 to the square mile. This population
pressed at all times heavily upon the limits of subsistence. In spite of the
unbroken peace and tranquillity the nation enjoyed
for more than two centuries, the population showed no substantial increase.
Between 1721 and 1846, during just a century and a quarter, the augmentation
was no more than 900,000; a rate of 2% per cent, per century, whereas the
present is one of per cent, per annum. Of pastoral industry there was
practically none, for the Japanese were not meat-eaters or milk-drinkers. Thus,
apart from the produce of the fisheries, which gave employment to some one
million and a half of the population, the nation had to subsist on its
perishable crops. Rice alone could be stored, and even rice could be stored for
but a small number of years. As there was, of course, no export trade, even the
finest of rice harvests added nothing to the capital of the country. At best
the superfluity could only be employed to alleviate the miseries and the
horrors of the not infrequent years of famine. Thus any permanent accumulation
of wealth from agriculture—apart from sericulture, perhaps,—was impossible.
The
manufactures, such as they were, were conducted on the household system, and
were insignificant. Then there were mines. In mediaeval times from first to
last the amount of gold and silver obtained from the placers had been
considerable. But it had never been utilised for
specie until Hideyoshi’s days (1585); and the Macaoese Portuguese succeeded in carrying most of it away. From Iyeyasu’s time the reefs in Idzu, in Sado, in Iwami, in Tajima
began to be exploited; but again the Dutch and the Chinese prevented any great
accumulation of bullion or specie in Japan; while the value of copper carried
away by the Hollanders was considerable. Even so early as 1708 Arai Hakuseki was writing: “I compute the annual exportation of
gold at about 15,000 kobans (30s.); so that in ten years this Empire is drained
of 1,500,000 kobans (£2,250,000). With the exception of medicines we can dispense
with everything that is brought to us from abroad. The stuffs and other foreign
commodities are of no real benefit tons. All the gold, silver, and copper
extracted from the mines during the sway of Iyeyasu and since his time are gone, and what is still more to be regretted, for things
we could very Well do without.” The calculation is wild; but the argument is
perfectly sound. The gold and silver and copper of Japan was mainly exchanged
for luxuries and trifles and trinkets and geegaws that could stimulate native industry in no earthly way whatsoever. If the
produce of her placers and reefs had been retained in Japan until the era of
Meiji, and then utilised to purchase spinning machinery,
to start foundries, to establish dockyards and to facilitate her internal communications,
her industrial position would have been very different from what it is at
present. If this cardinal mistake had not been committed, the efficiency of her
armaments, in contrast to the inefficiency of her sons in the arts of peace,
would certainly have not been so conspicuous as it is.
Several
important factors have to be disentangled in any attempt to account for the
sudden expansion of English industry in the latter half of the eighteenth
century. Something more than the mere genius of inventors like Watt and Arkwright
must be recognised as contributing to the possibility
of the revolution in industrial methods that was then effected. There had been
no lack of ability and ingenuity among the engineers and mechanics of the
seventeenth century; but at that time there were no accumulations of wealth in
England available for the realisation of the most
ingenious of their projects; and consequently their most promising enterprises
came to nothing. By the eighteenth century the state of things was different;
the mines of America and the East Indian trade had meanwhile furnished England
with an ample store of superfluous capital; while at the same time there was a
worldwide demand for British manufactured goods. Watt and Arkwright were thus
in a position to seize and make the most of opportunities such as inventors had
never had before.
The bearing of
this seemingly inconsequent digression should now be readily apparent. Suddenly
brought face to face with the accumulated triumphs of two centuries of Western
scientific and inventive genius, the Japanese of the Meiji era have had neither
occasion nor time to invent. All that they have had to do has been to learn and
appropriate and to apply. The rapidity and thoroughness with which they have
mastered the new’ knowledge can only excite feelings of wonder and admiration.
But in applying their newly acquired knowledge they have been very seriously
hampered by the national poverty. To pass from household economy to the factory
system at a bound is only possible when there is an intervention of capital.
And in Japan there was very little accumulated capital. Hence, although the
Japanese army and navy have been organised in the
most economical way, if not indeed at a minimum of cost, yet the effort of
providing a national roof of the strongest has told seriously upon the economic
development of the Empire generally. And since the industrial international
warfare of modern times is, if not a fiercer, at all events a more insidiously
serious thing than the red-handed war of armaments, this causes Japanese
patriots of keener and more extended vision no small measure of disquietude.
The second
great disadvantage in 1854 was the political organisation.
The mosaic patchwork of Iyeyasu, put together as a
safeguard for a succession of possible mediocrities in the seat of that great
statesman, had done rare work in its day, and for eight generations it had
given Japan almost unbroken peace. Between 1603, when Iyeyasu was formally invested with the Shogunate, and 1854, the internal tranquillity of the Empire had been disturbed on two
occasions only. The years 1614 and 1615 had witnessed the great Osaka struggle;
that of 1637-8 the émeute of Shimabara. During the preceding four
centuries and a half, from 1156 to 1603, Japan had enjoyed scarcely a hundred
years of domestic repose. Between 1221 And 1322, under the strong and
beneficent administration of the Hojo regents for full three generations, the
Japanese had had to abstain from slaughtering each other. Even so, in 1274, and
again in 1281, they had been called upon to repel great Mongol invasions. And
then during all the rest of these four centuries and a half the country had
been racked and harried and devastated by internecine civil war. Thus in spite
of its tyrannical high-handedness, its jealous, narrow-minded repressive
spirit even in its best days, and the pitiable ineptitudes and inanities of its
later years, the Yedo Bureaucracy is not without
some claim upon the gratitude of the Japanese people and the sympathies of the
historian who essays the task of recounting the story of their fortunes.
But by 1854,
the Tokugawa administrative machine had outlived its usefulness. For decades
its gear had been creaking ominously. In a few more generations its breakdown
from sheer internal rot and decay would have been certain. And then, just at
this point, the foreigner appeared in the land. The ablest thinkers and the
truest patriots in Japan were swift to perceive that the Yedo Bureaucracy and the Hoken Seiji (Feudal System) were alike anachronisms; both
equally impossible if Japan was to continue to exist as an independent State.
All honour to such men as Sakuma of Shinano and Sakamoto of Tosa!
The outcome of
all this was the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, the abolition of
Feudalism in 1871, the rehabilitation of the Imperial line in its just
prerogatives, the establishment of a strong and strongly centralised Government, the emergence of Japan from her seclusion of centuries, and her
meteor-like ascent to the rank of one of the great Powers of the world, with
the unique distinction of being the only nonChristian Power in the modern comity of civilisation, the only
non-Christian Power that commands for itself the unfeigned respect of the most
advanced, and even of the most militantly powerful, nations of Christendom.
Now, in the
interpretation of the import of this sudden and startling development most
European writers and critics show themselves seriously at fault. Even some of
the more intelligent among them And the solution of this portentous enigma in
the very superficial and facile formula of “imitation.” But the Japanese still
retain their own unit of social organisation, which
is not the individual as with us, but the family. Furthermore, the resemblance
of the Japanese administrative system, both central and local, to certain European
systems is hot the result of imitation, or borrowing, or adaptation. Such
resemblance is merely an odd and fortuitous coincidence. When the statesmen who
overthrew the Tokugawa regime in 1868, and abolished the Feudal system in
1871, were called upon to provide the nation with a new equipment of
administrative machinery, they did not go to Europe for their models. They
simply harked back for some eleven or twelve centuries in their own history and
resuscitated the administrative machinery that had first been installed in
Japan by the genius of Fujiwara Kamatari and his
coadjutors in 645 ad and more fully supplemented and organised in the
succeeding fifty or sixty years. The present Imperial Cabinet of ten Ministers,
with their departments and departmental staff of officials, is a modified
revival of the Eight Boards adapted from China and established in the seventh
century. Again, the present system of local administration in Japan with its Fu
or Ken (Prefecture), its Gun (County), its Son (Village or Township) may well
seem to be on the model of the French Departement,
Arrondissement, and Commune. But it is really nothing of the kind. It is also a
revival of the local administrative divisions introduced with modifications
from China into Japan some twelve and a half centuries ago.
The present
administrative system is indeed of alien provenance; but it was neither
borrowed nor adapted a generation ago, nor borrowed nor adapted from Europe. It
was really a system of hoary antiquity that was revived to cope with pressing
modern exigencies.
This single
consideration alone might well serve to cast suspicion upon the adequacy of the
easy “imitation” formula as an explanation of Japan’s modern institutional
and social development. The origins of modern Japan have to be sought for much
farther afield than in the economy of the Tokugawa feudal regime. It is true
that an adequate knowledge of the Tokugawa period is imperative if we mean to
write, or to read, the subsequent history of Meiji with real understanding. But
such knowledge is only one of a complex of factors, every one of which has
claims upon our attention. It is only when we have seized upon the totality of
these, assigned each its relative importance, and co-ordinated and integrated them, that the history of modern Japan ceases to be the
perplexing riddle it seemingly is. Certain Japanese publicists will have it
that the political organisation of Meiji is simply a
reversion to the original institutions of Japan. But this is not only not
correct,—it is glaringly incorrect. It is, as just stated, a reversion to the
institutions of 646 and the following years. But these institutions were more
than mere innovations; they amounted to nothing less than a Revolution,—a
Revolution as fundamental, as radical as, and no less startling than, the
Revolution of 1868. That Reform of Taikwa (645), as
it is called, has profoundly affected the whole subsequent course of the
history of the Empire,—so much so, indeed, that without at least a working
acquaintance with its causes, its leading incidents, its more important
consequences, many of which were entirely unforeseen and unexpected by the
authors of the movement, any just appreciation of the worth of the solutions
found by the statesmen of Meiji for some of the weightiest problems that
confronted them thirty or forty years ago is virtually impossible. And so far
is the Restoration of Meiji from being a return to the “original” state of
affairs in Japan that the closest analogy to that “original” state of affairs
is to be found in that very Tokugawa regime which the Meiji statesmen shattered
and swept away. Only it is to be noted that the Tokugawa system was a fully
developed Feudal system, marked by practically all the characteristic features
that enter into our definition of Feudalism, while the state of society in
ante-Taikwa (645) Japan presented many analogies,
not, indeed, to the Highland clans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
but to the Celtic communities in contemporary Ireland and North Britain when
Palladius was preaching to the Scots and Columba converting the Picts.
In presenting
the story of centuries historians find it convenient to have recourse to the
expedient of epochs or periods. Inasmuch as the successive stages in national
development shade into each other in most of their leading features and
interests almost imperceptibly, these subjective divisions are now and then
wont to prove somewhat unsatisfactory and misleading because of their more or
less arbitrary character. In this respect the writer who essays to recount the
story of the Japanese people is perhaps more happily circumstanced than his
fellows who have to deal with Western annals. While Japan is one of the few
countries under heaven that can make the proud boast that she has never had to
bend her neck to the insolence of a foreign invader, the course of her
development has been profoundly influenced by contact with alien cultures on
three separate occasions. The first of these was in the seventh century, when
admiration and reverence for the splendours of the civilisation of the Middle Kingdom led her statesmen to
recast the national policy in most of its details. Dread of foreign aggression
and of internal commotion constrained her to expel Spaniards and Portuguese
alike in the seventeenth century and, abandoning her immemorial traditions of
liberality and hospitality, to bolt her doors in the face of the alien from
over sea. Then after a hermit-like seclusion and an apparent intellectual
torpor of full two hundred years, the Japanese once more found themselves
forced to face a foreign culture seemingly the hopeless superior of their own,
with the alternative of assimilating and utilising its most important intellectual and material products, or of losing their
existence as a nation. Which alternative was then adopted is now plain to all ;
the Japanese have not lost their existence as a nation.
Thus the
Japanese historian—or rather the historian of Japan—will readily find
conspicuous land-falls to aid him in the distribution of bis theme of centuries
into orderly and convenient and well-marked subjective divisions. Inasmuch,
however, as the first and second of these land-falls are separated by a stretch
of some nine or ten centuries, it will be found advisable, nay almost
imperative, to find some intermediate halting-places between the middle of the
seventh and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Of such, three may be
conveniently interposed. And then the whole course of Japanese history will,
for purposes of presentation and easy comprehension, be distributed into seven
periods, each with some well-marked distinctive peculiarities of its own.
In the first
place the historian will treat of Ancient Japan,—of Japan before the Great
Reform of 645 ad. His work on this period can be only tentative at best, for the story can only
be reconstructed in the fashion in which the tale of contemporary Celtic
Britain can be reconstructed. Such written documents as deal with it were
composed in the subsequent period. Indeed, the earliest Japanese records were
compiled almost exactly at the time when the Venerable Bede was beginning work
on the Ecclesiastical History of our Island and Nation. And just as, apart from
the inferences that may be gathered from archeological remains, our most
trustworthy information about Celtic Britain is to be found in Cesar and other
foreign authors, so the historian of Ancient Japan finds stray notices in
contemporary Chinese records of inestimable value when he essays the task of
penetrating the darkness that enshrouds the origins of the Japanese people.
Inasmuch as the art of writing seems to have been introduced into Japan only a
little before the date when Honorius withdrew the Roman legions from Britain
(410 ad), these Chinese notices of Japan
become almost as precious to the historian as the leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl were to the Roman king of old. The second
period commences with that sudden and dramatic Reform, or rather Revolution, of
645, and runs a continuous but chequered course of
some five centuries, or fifteen generations. It begins with the organisation of a strong central government, modelled on
that of the Middle Kingdom, and, not indeed with the introduction, but with the
diffusion of that old Chinese culture whose impress has so profoundly affected
the whole subsequent social, political, and ethical development of Japan. The
early century of this epoch witnessed the production of the earliest
historical works in Japan. The compilation of such was a Government
enterprise, projected and carried out in the interests of the new centralised administration. A little later Shinto and
Shinto ritual, as we now know them, were also elaborated in the interests of
the new ruling powers. Buddhism, introduced from Korea in 552, was likewise
regulated and utilised as an instrument of
government. But after no great lapse of time it bade fair to display the
potentialities of an Aaron’s rod. It quickly absorbed and assimilated Shinto.
It not only became the religion of the Court, but in course of time we actually
read of an Emperor of Japan making solemn public profession of being the humble
servant of the three sacred things,—Buddha, the Law, and the Priests, to wit.
In 900 the abdicated Sovereign received the tonsure, and this practice soon
became customary; and a century or two later it was not the titular reigning
Emperor, but the Ho-d—or cloistered Emperor—who really ruled. In 769 a daring
intrigue all but placed a Buddhist priest upon the Imperial throne. But behind
all this, the most striking feature of these five centuries was the
predominance of the great Fujiwara family. The legitimate Empress of Japan and
the Regent during the minority of the Sovereign had to be chosen from among the
members of this all-powerful House. Most of the great officers in the Central
Government, and, in the early days, nearly all the provincial governors, were
FujiFujiwara Age.
The land system
introduced by Kamatari in 645 had some serious
defects; the chief being its numerous exemptions from taxation. It was this
that ultimately proved fatal to the Fujiwara predominance. It permitted the
rise of the great House of Taira in Western and of Minamoto in Northern Japan.
By the middle of the twelfth century these two provincial families had
appropriated much of the provincial resources that ought to have gone into the
coffers of the central, or, in other words, of the Fujiwara administration; and
the Fujiwaras, deprived of financial, and hence of
military means, began to find themselves shorn of their power, if not of their
prestige. In 1156, when a disputed decision was decided not by Fujiwara finesse
as it had been for generations, but by the rude clash of Taira and Minamoto
arms in the streets of Kyoto, Japan ceased to be governed by the ink-brush, and
for seven long centuries, down to a period well within the recollection of
living men, her destinies were to be decided by the strong arbitrament of the
sword. When the thirty years strife between Taira and Mina- moto reached its
term in the extermination of the former, the old centralised government, organised by Kamatari,
survived as little better than a shade. Nearly all the real power then passed
to Kamakura and to the newly arisen military class. After a somewhat
tempestuous period of thirty years, 1192- 1221, the remodelled Shogunate, ably manipulated by the modest Hojo Regents, gave Japan a century of
profound, yet healthy, repose. Then in 1322 began that series of internal
commotions which led to the overthrow of the Kamakura administration and the
interesting but futile attempt to revert to that system of centralised civilian government established by the great Kamatari in 645. Meanwhile, in the latter years of this period there had been a great
popular Buddhist revival analogous to, and contemporary with, that effected by
the mendicant friars in Christendom.
The Ashikaga
Shogunate (1338-1573) constitutes the fourth of the seven periods into which it
is purposed to distribute the long course of Japanese history. This period is
usually regarded as the most barren and the most unprofitable in the annals of
the nation. Foreign writers are wont to dismiss it in a few pages of abusive
epithets and inflated declamation on the wickedness and barbarity of the times.
This course has the very obvious merits of economising effort on the laborious task of original investigation and the advantages of an
effectual screen for ignorance. Whatever may have been the unrest and
turbulence so conspicuous in the farrago that enters into the composition of
the meagre historical epitomes of the Ashikaga age, and in spite of all its
barbarities and ferocities recurring with a frequency that becomes monotonous,
this age is by no means unworthy of the close attention of the conscientious
historian. It was between 1338 and 1550 that the system of predial serfdom was
finally shattered. It was then that a great development in pictorial art was
witnessed, a development analogous to, and contemporary with, that of Europe.
It was then that the first serious attempt to develop an oversea commerce was
made. And the period witnessed a still more singular phenomenon. What part the
Free Cities and the Chartered Municipalities played in the mediaeval history
of Europe and what services they rendered to the cause of progress and civilisation every schoolboy knows,—or should know. With
one single exception, such communities have been unknown in Japan, to her
present not inconsiderable detriment. Only in the City of Sakai do we find
anything similar to an Italian City Republic of the Middle Ages. And it was in
the latter days of the Ashikaga sway that Sakai attained a greatness that
enabled her citizens to challenge the arrogant pretensions of the rude and
overbearing Buke (military class) around her.
Furthermore,
the decrepitude of the central Ashikaga administration during its last
half-century was not without compensating circumstances. The provinces were
thrown on their own resources, and in several quarters strong, stable, and compact
principalities were built up. Here men of real practical ability found a rare
field for the display of their talents. The years 1533, 1536, 1542 witnessed
the birth of Nobunaga, of Hideyoshi, and of Iyeyasu respectively; the great trio whose happy co-operation was destined to
reconsolidate the Empire under a single rule. These great men were simply the
products of the times. And they were by no manner of means so unique as is
generally represented. Several of the rivals they had either to crush or to
conciliate were not seriously their inferiors in ability. Takeda of Kai was
perhaps not the peer of Hideyoshi, but he was the equal of Iyeyasu,
and certainly a better man than Nobunaga. Then the Uyesugi and Hojo chiefs were
the reverse of contemptible, while Mori Motonari in
Western Japan, Chosokabe in Shikoku, Otomo, Ryuzoji,
and Shimadzu in Kyushu were all great Captains and
able administrators. Under a strong central government there would have been no
opportunity for these men to prove their sterling mettle. It was the very
stress and struggle of the later Ashikaga times that tested and tempered and
schooled the youth of such men, and furnished the early training and discipline
that lay at the base of their subsequent greatness. But for this very stress
and struggle, the annals of Japan during the first half of the century of early
foreign intercourse would have been less remarkable for the long roll of
illustrious names that lends such an unusual and dazzling lustre to them, and would have lacked many of their most stirring and picturesque
pages.
In short, no
matter what may have been the anarchy and desolation that reigned in the
streets of the capital and its environs, from the arrival of the foreigner in
the land in 1542 down to the deposition of the last Ashikaga Shogun in 1573,
Japan was then pulsing with a healthy, vigorous, lusty life. This is one
consideration which makes it advisable to detach these thirty years from the
Ashikaga epoch and to combine them with the forty odd years that preceded the
Osaka wars and the final triumph of the Tokugawas in
1616, into a single period of 75 years. The importance of the stirring events
and momentous developments that marked this short period justifies the
historian in treating it at seemingly disproportionate and inordinate length.
If any further justification for this course be needed, it is readily
forthcoming. This is almost the only epoch in the national history where native
records can be effectually tested and checked and supplemented by trustworthy
contemporary foreign documents. It was mainly for this reason that when I
addressed myself to the attempt to write a History of the Japanese People a
beginning was made with this epoch. To have to choose the best among several
not unsuitable titles for this stretch of seventy-five years is a somewhat
perplexing task. “The Re unification of Japan, —The Age of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi,
and Iyeyasu” might serve for a label as well as
anything that suggests itself.
The sixth of
the periods into which a History of Japan might be distributed,—that of the
Tokugawa regime,—offers a marvellous contrast to
those that preceded it In those, our ears are stunned with the clash of swords,
the braying of trumpets, the tramp of armies, and the shock of battle. From
1616 down to 1854, apart from the Shimabara affair of 1638, the prosecution of
some vendetta, or some agrarian disturbance of men with mat-flags and bamboo
spears, we seek and sigh in vain for the alarms and excursions that might
relieve the seemingly humdrum monotony of the narrative. Indeed the student
might very well fancy the Tokugawa interdict upon the writing of contemporary
history to have been a thoroughly needless and superfluous precaution. For apparently
absolutely nothing was happening. Such national life, or national development,
as there was, ran its course with no more noise than the growth of one of those
gigantic camphor trees that are supposed to go back to the age of Jimmu. And
yet, withal, this Tokugawa regime is a most fascinating study for the
historian, and still more so, perhaps, for the sociologist, for it is replete,
if not with stirring incidents, at all events with many and varied phenomena
distinctively its own and of surpassing interest to the student of institutions
and of national and social economy.
In spite of the
fact that the publication, if not the composition of contemporary annals was
strictly forbidden, and that such records as there are were tampered with, and
perhaps deliberately falsified, the modern historian of the Tokugawa age,
finds himself with an abundance of native materials at his command. The
unfortunate thing is that there is a great dearth of contemporary foreign
documents such as there are for the period immediately preceding. How much this
is to be regretted will become evident from a single instance. For the two Tanumas, all-powerful in Yedo before 1784, Japanese writers can scarcely find language too harsh. The younger
was assassinated in that year (1784). From Titsingh,
his contemporary, it appears that it was really his progressive tendencies
that cost him his life, as he stood at the head of a body of advanced liberals
who were anxious that Japan should emerge from her seclusion. Of this there is
no hint in Japanese documents. If Japan had opened her doors in 1784 instead of
in 1854, the whole course of her subsequent history would doubtless have been
profoundly affected. The fact that the question of re-opening the country to
foreign intercourse was well within the domain of practical politics so early
as 1784 is surely worthy of notice in the briefest summary of Tokugawa history.
Yet but for the lucky accident of the presence in Japan of an intelligent and
trustworthy foreign writer with excellent means of acquiring information, we
should never have suspected the existence of any such body of opinion at that
date.
Yet although
there must be many similar lacunae, not to say actual mistakes, in any
narrative of particular incidents, it is possible to limn the state of Tokugawa
Japan in its ethical, intellectual, institutional, social, and economic
aspects with tolerable accuracy in the broad outlines of the picture at least.
Until the arrival of the foreigner in the land in 1853, the changes in the
political and social fabric of the Empire since the times of Iyevasu and Iyemitsu had been
neither very important nor very striking; and of the state of the Japanese
people during the last decade of the Tokugawa Feudal Age we have numerous
accounts by intelligent European and American writers. Furthermore, although
to the younger generation,—to men, say, under thirty years of age,—the Feudal
System is now as much ancient history as the Wars of the Roses are to
Englishmen, we have still hundreds of thousands with us who can recall all the
pomp and arrogance of two-sworded privilege on the
one hand, and the miseries of abject subjection and oppression on the other;
and by a cautious co-ordination of the respective testimonies of samurai and
peasant it is not difficult to correct the mistakes and fill up the lacunae in
the accounts of the last years of Tokugawa Feudalism penned by contemporary
witnesses from Occidental lands. The passing of that Feudalism was relatively
as swift and sudden as the disappearance of the accumulated snowdrifts of
winter from a Scottish moor before the April sun; and the History of Modern
Japan, now entered upon that astonishing career which has gained for her not
merely admission into, but such a unique and distinguished position in the
Comity of Nations, begins to assume towards the record of the Tokugawa Age a
relation analogous to that of the fecund efflorescence of the spring landscape
to .the seemingly rigid and monotonous torpidity of frost-bound winter.
It is
undoubtedly this comparatively short space of forty years in the national
annals that is of the greatest and most absorbing interest to Western readers.
Rut, as already contended, it is next-door to impossible to hope to write a
satisfactory record of it without an accurate and fairly exhaustive account of
the thirteen or fourteen centuries that preceded it, and of which it is at
bottom, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, mainly a natural and
continuous development. It is true that during this period the Empire has been
tremendously influenced by the factor of foreign intercourse in many
ways,—political, social, and intellectual. But so it was in the seventh
century. And yet, then, as now, Japan remained Japan,—a nation with a distinct
and definite individuality and idiosyncracy of its
own. The aim of the present volume is limited in scope. It deals with the story
of the Japanese people merely from the origins down to the first appearance of
the Portuguese in the realm in the year 1542.
CHAPTER I.
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