“Expel the barbarians!” The cry rang out. Foreigners had “opened” the closed country, land of the gods. What had the shogun done about it? Nothing. Let the Japanese sword, instrument of Yamato-damashii (Japanese spirit) do its work, then.
Saigo Takamori has been called the ‘last true samurai’ in Japanese history. | C. NAKAGAWA/PUBLIC DOMAIN
Did not the shogun’s full title designate him “barbarian-subduing general”? Had not the incumbent’s remote ancestor, in the 1630s, closed the country to all foreigners, wrapping Japan in a splendid isolation worthy of its divine descent? If the shogun was impotent to fulfill his task, what was his claim to rule, in defiance of the divine emperor, who reigned but did not rule and called with rising stridency for “men of spirit” to rise to the nation’s defense?
Japan seethed. The 19th century was not the 17th. The world outside Japan was progressing, industrializing, expanding, colonizing. Could Japan remain closed if Europeans came calling? They began to, as early as 1800. In 1853 they came to stay. The treaties forced on the shogun by the United States first, followed by Russia, Britain, Holland and France, were morally humiliating and economically crippling. They were dubbed the “unequal treaties.” They opened seaports, admitted foreign consuls and merchants, skewed the tariff system for foreign profit. Most demeaning of all, foreigners were subject to their own countries’ laws, not Japan’s.
Shishi, “men of spirit,” roamed the land, ready for death and murder in the emperor’s name, their lives and their swords at the emperor’s command, as they interpreted it. They cut down foreigners for real or imagined disrespect; assassinated Japanese, including high shogunal officials, whom they saw as traitors, collaborators. Among their victims were temple statues of three 14th-century “traitor” shoguns convicted half a millennium later, in 1863, of having showed demeaning deference to China. Treason knows no statute of limitations. The statues were of wood. The heads were wrenched off and laid out for public display on a Kyoto riverbank, symbols — let current traitors beware — of “the vengeance of heaven.”
Foreign nations whose citizens fell victim demanded apologies and compensation. When balked they fired — on Kagoshima in 1863, Shimonoseki in 1864. Nothing better illustrates the dilemma facing the rebels. Yamato-damashii was invincible — or maybe not, against modern “barbarian” artillery. Even rebels, historian W.G. Beasley tells us, were awed into sending their sons abroad for technological training. The foreigners could be “expelled,” it seemed, only with their own weapons.
Japan in the 1850s and 1860s — the dying years of the sclerotic Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867) — was a nation split, a soul divided. What should it do — join the West, or resist it? Go forward, or go backward? Return to its “divine” roots, or jettison old myth for modern science, technology, trade, wealth, power? Who should rule — the emperor in the gods’ name? The shogun as chief among feudal lords? The shogun or someone else as head of a unified, post-feudal nation-state?
We saw — in the first two parts of this three-part series — an earlier phase of this national identity crisis mirrored in the divided soul of Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), the Confucian samurai-scholar-artist whose growing doubts concerning the viability of the status quo led him first to what little Western learning the closed country afforded, then to writing that dared to question shogunal policy, finally to prison, rustication and death by ritual disembowelment in physical and psychic agony.
A generation later we come upon a no less emblematic figure — Kazan’s spiritual son, in a sense: Saigo Takamori (1828-77). A samurai from the remote domain of Satsuma in southern Kyushu, he too came to doubt the viability of old values — only to be repelled by the brash vulgarity of the new order he himself did so much to bring about. His rebellion in 1877 against the infant Meiji government he’d helped form in 1868 was the biggest challenge it faced from traditional Yamato-damashii — and the last, for the outcome was decisive: modernity triumphant, Yamato-damashii routed — until revived under 1930s militarism.
“The last true samurai in Japanese history,” historian Ivan Morris called him. His samurai rank was low, scarcely above the peasantry. Perhaps that accounts for his unpretentious ways, his love of the land, his disdain for wealth and power and the corruption they bring, his uncomplaining acceptance of hardship, and the incorruptible moral sincerity that placed him so fatally at odds with the oligarchs — his fellows at first — of the nascent Meiji regime.
His Satsuma clan split along the same fault that bedeviled the pre-Meiji nation, one side favoring gods, emperor and Yamato-damashii, the other shogun and status quo. Saigo, in the Yamato-damashii camp, languished with the rise of the other beginning in 1858. He was 30. His cause seemed lost, his life over. He and a friend, a rebel Shinto priest, rowed a boat out into Kagoshima Bay and, clasped in each other’s arms, leapt into the sea. The priest drowned. Saigo failed to. He never got over it.
The next several years he spent mostly in exile on remote Okinawan islands. Restored to favor, he rose high in the clan government. As its war secretary he negotiated a coalition with the similarly anti-shogunate Choshu clan of southern Honshu. This was crucial. Satsuma and Choshu acting in concert overthrew the shogun. This was the famous Meiji Restoration — so-called because its stated purpose was to “restore” direct imperial rule. No such thing occurred. No such thing could have. Emperor Meiji was then a boy of 15. Authority in his name passed to progressive, able and vigorous young samurai, mostly Satsuma and Choshu men, Saigo high among them.
Disillusion set in early. He saw with revulsion his colleagues betraying their principles, growing corrupt, cozying up to financiers and industrialists, wallowing in the perks of power. Some Westernization was inevitable if the country was to be strengthened. He accepted that. “Western technology, Eastern morals.” That was his and others’ watchword. But here was the regime going “Western” morally as well as materially.
He quit the regime in disgust, retired to Kagoshima. He farmed, hunted, founded a school, taught, meditated, wrote. He seemed content — with his private life at least, certainly not with the direction the country was taking. The clans were abolished, samurai privileges annulled. Samurai swords went the way of samurai topknots — into oblivion. A new national army was made up of mainly peasant conscripts, not samurai. Saigo seethed — quietly at first, but when a party of his inflamed disciples attacked a government armory he declared himself ready to offer up his life — for and with Yamato-damashii.
In Morris’ view, the rebellion was a final act in Saigo’s almost lifelong courtship of death. If so it was a most extravagant indulgence. It went on for nine months, from January to September 1877 — and cost 30,000 lives, Saigo himself dying, as had Kazan, by ritual disembowelment.
A contemporary newspaper account sums up the ultimate fruit of the revolt: “The old spirit of the rule of the sword over constitutions and laws must now be regarded as defunct.” Saigo would have been mortified.
This concludes a three-part series on Yamato-damashii. Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.”