The Emperor Meiji

Today (July 30) marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the Meiji Emperor, great-grandfather of the current Emperor, and a figure whose 45-year reign saw perhaps the most rapid and dramatic changes in Japan’s history.

Right: Perhaps the most famous portrait of the Meiji Emperor, drawn in graphite or charcoal by Edouard Chiossone in 1888. Photographs of the work were distributed throughout the country, a crucial part of a nationalism centered on the emperor. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Admittedly, when we consider that 45 years is also the difference between today and 1968, it is not actually that short a timespan. So much has happened in the world between 1968 and today, and so I suppose the argument could be made that the Meiji reign, from 1868-1912, should not be seen as such a big deal. Yet, in addition to the fact that this period represents the first emergence of a non-industrialized non-Western country into a top, world-class Westernized, industrialized nation-state, the most dramatic changes took place in the first ten years or so of the period.

The shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu (Keiki) officially resigned in November 1867, and an Imperial government took command of the country for the first time in centuries. The Emperor, whose personal name was Mutsuhito, had taken the throne earlier that year. Though the Shogun resigned peacefully, not being militarily forcibly overthrown, pro-shogunate forces acting on their own (i.e. not commanded by the shogun or his government) continued to fight until 1869 (and then again a couple times in the 1870s). Early in 1868, the Emperor officially declared the restoration of direct Imperial rule, and sent missives to foreign powers reporting the change in government; later that year, the former shogunal capital of Edo was renamed Tokyo, and the Imperial capital was moved there, after being located in Kyoto for over 1000 years.

Right: The tomb-mound gravesite of the Meiji Emperor, on the former site of Fushimi-Momoyama Castle in Kyoto. During the Meiji Period, in conjunction with a crafted culture/ideology of emperor worship, all the imperial gravesites in the country were re-fashioned to conform to a more consistent style of site to visit and revere. Photo my own.

A new Constitution, heavily influenced by Western models, including especially the British and Prussian modes of government, would be promulgated in 1890, but as early as 1868, a new government based on historical Imperial models was already in place, replacing the administrative structure of the Tokugawa shogunate’s governance. The quasi-independent samurai domains, or han, were abolished in 1871, and reorganized as prefectures, absorbed into a much more centralized, unified state. By the end of the 1870s, the samurai class and traditional Court aristocracy would be abolished, and replaced with a new peerage system of aristocracy based on European models, while the various status ranks of peasants and townspeople were combined and elevated into citizens.

By the end of the 19th century, Japan would have a nationwide public education system; Western/”modern”-style banks, industry, and corporations; its first railroads; and numerous other elements of a “modern” nation-state based on Western models.

Of course, such rapid modernization & Westernization did not come without sacrifices and difficulties; a myriad of aspects of traditional culture became seriously threatened, and each of these fields, from painting and woodblock printing to kabuki and other traditional performing arts, to Buddhism, faced dramatic struggles for survival. Though regional specialties (e.g. foods, souvenirs, known as meibutsu) and a strong sense of regional cultural identity remain today, this was also a period of powerful homogenization efforts, as an ideology of a single, homogeneous Japanese people and Japanese state was emphasized in the public schools and throughout the country.

Meiji Japan was a place of great advancement, if we might use that word, improvements in civil rights, democratic participation, and public education for all, a place of beautiful style and aesthetics, and exciting constant changes. I can only imagine it would have been beautiful and exciting to live in, or visit, such a place, a place full of rickshaws and railroads, of Victorian hats and coats juxtaposed with traditional kimono, of busy, active cities filled with impressive new monuments and sites of great history, and of new and old traditions.

Left: A statue of Emperor Meiji, at Naminoue Shrine in Naha, Okinawa. The plaque identifies the subject of the statue not as “the Emperor” or “the Meiji Emperor,” but as “The State” (国家, ”kokka”), a dramatic symbol, perhaps, of attitudes at that time equating the Emperor with Japan itself, and a symbol of the imposition of Japanese political control, ideology, and culture into the territory of the formerly independent Ryûkyû Kingdom. Photo my own.

Yet, many scholars today trace the militarism of the 1930s-40s too back to the Meiji period. For a time, the dominant narrative was that the 1930s-40s represented a dramatic break, an anomalous deviation from the positive, liberal, democratic path Japan had been on. Scholars today, however, point to a more consistent path beginning in Meiji. The northern island of Hokkaidô, the home of the indigenous Ainu, was incorporated into the Japanese empire in 1869, and over the course of the next 10 years, the Ryukyu Kingdom was dismantled, and its territory – the string of islands to the south of Kyushu, from Okinawa down to Yonaguni near Taiwan – was annexed. Taiwan itself became a Japanese territory after the Japanese victory in the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War, followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910, the Japanese victory over Russia in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War being quite notable as a victory of a non-Western power over a Western power. Colonial history, fascism, militarism, and the like being very popular topics today in scholarship on Japanese history here in the US, the Meiji period is becoming less purely positive and more controversial.

Japan remains today one of the leading Westernized/modern non-Western countries, a country on the cutting edge of technology and culture in so many ways. The modernization efforts of the Meiji period did not grow out of nothing at all – they were built atop proto-industrial and “early modern” foundations set in the Edo period – but, even so, the advances and developments of the Meiji Period were, inarguably, invaluable, in making Japan the great modern power and vibrant cultural scene that it is today.

Read Full Post »

Fushimi: Historical Inns, Castles, and Imperial Graves

Yesterday was another busy day. It was a most relaxing morning, working through some photos, other stuff… but by around 1 or 2, when it still hadn’t rained, I decided that chances were it wasn’t going to rain the rest of the day, and that therefore I ought to take advantage of the opportunity, and get out and see things. I’m not quite sure why that works, why that makes sense, but it does seem to follow the pattern observed over the last week or two.

I had left my bike on campus, and so at the very least I felt I needed to go get it from there. What exactly I was going to do after that, I was unsure. I vacillated between taking it all the way home and then heading out on foot, and by subway, from there, and on the other hand leaving it at a station… In the end, fool that I am, I picked option C, and rode my bike all the way down to Fushimi, a good half-hour train ride at least. Okay, so it’s only 10 miles, now that I actually look it up. But, you know that feeling, when you haven’t been somewhere before, that it feels like it’s taking forever? I should be there by now. Have I made a wrong turn? Is it the next block? Or the block after that? Or the block after that?

I took the most direct route down to Fushimi, riding along Aburanokoji (“Oil Alley”), which, while relatively direct (lengthy detours to get around the highways and around the train tracks excluded), was hardly a pleasant ride. Once south of Kyoto Station, the road comes to follow alongside / underneath the freeway, making for an atmosphere far removed from the idea of still being in a city, in a commercial or residential neighborhood.

Anyway, after about two hours of riding, I found my way to the Teradaya, a reconstruction and tourist trap (especially these days, what with Ryoma-fever running wild throughout the country). What little I had seen of the residential/commercial streets of Fushimi at that point were quite quiet… I foolishly thought I was looking for something sort of hidden away, quietly just standing there, the woman at the desk perhaps dozing off. Ha. I asked at a liquor store on a quiet street how to find the inn, and after a few turns down narrow, quiet streets, I found a huge crowd of people standing opposite an old-looking building, cameras out, and several policemen managing traffic – asking people to move out of the way whenever a car came by.

Yeah. That’s what the Teradaya is like. For those unfamiliar, the Teradaya was an inn which was the site of two major incidents (read: swordfights) in the 1860s. I won’t bother going into details, but you can find some description of the incidents here. Personally, I am more interested in the former incident, in which a group of samurai in the service of the lord of Satsuma were dispatched to the inn to apprehend rebels who were known to be meeting there to conspire against the shogunate; most people, I presume, are more interested in the latter incident, which took place several years later and involved Sakamoto Ryoma, a samurai rebel and conspirator who is perhaps one of the most prominent historical “heroes” in Japanese history, mythologized and surrounded by legends of his dashing, awesome swordskills and such like that.

As discussed on the Samurai-Archives Forums in the past, the real Teradaya burned down in the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, and so what stands today is a reconstruction passed off as the real thing, even down to the bullet-holes and sword damage on the doorframes and such. I had actually forgotten it was a reconstruction, but was amused to overhear, as I was leaving, a Japanese couple comment to one another “We paid 400 yen to see a fake!?” lol.

Even if it were the real thing, the place is cluttered with photos and maps and other such things hung on the walls, destroying the possibility of really appreciating or understanding it as an inn; that is, destroying the visitor’s ability to imagine it as it once was, as the place where these rebels stayed, and met, and conspired, and where these skirmishes took place. It doesn’t even in any way resemble proper museum display techniques – if it looked like a museum, that would be one thing, but it really looks like the kind of thing one would expect from a private citizen just sort of throwing things together, throwing them up on the wall, in order to turn his own house into an “exhibit”.

…

But, I’m glad I went.

After a brief and amusing ride down “Ryoma Street,” and some failed attempts at finding lunch (my guidebook suggested one particular restaurant which it claimed was the best sushi in Fushimi, but which turned out to be just a tad more expensive than I might have liked), I made my way to Fushimi-Momoyama Castle Park.

The castle, originally built by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and destroyed just a few years later (and then rebuilt and used by various parties for a few decades and then destroyed again), was reconstructed in 1964. Access to the interior of the castle was closed to visitors in 2003, which I think a particular shame, since it was open to visitors for some time, and since therefore one can presume that there’s really something worth seeing inside (if it had been reconstructed with no intention of allowing visitors in, and therefore there was nothing to see inside, I’d be perfectly okay with the idea of it being a reconstruction intended only to be viewed from the outside). But, it’s still a gorgeous, fantastic castle.

A short distance away, on the actual original site of Fushimi Castle, is the most impressive gravesite of the Meiji Emperor. A complicated figure to be sure – represented, I think, for the most part in a positive light in history courses and textbooks in the West, as a modernizer and such, as someone who led the country in a great many modern reforms, looking to the future and to greater equality and better education etc etc. But, of course, his reign was also a period which set the foundations for the nationalism, imperialism and colonialism which was to grow in later decades to lead to immense violence and suffering for peoples throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, wide swaths of the Pacific, etc.

I try to avoid taking a side in such controversies, or, rather, that is to say, simply not getting involved. For good or for bad, the Meiji Emperor is a major major figure in Japanese history, and so, as a historical figure, seeing his grave was very cool. The grave of Emperor Kammu, also an extremely major figure, but from a very different time, is also nearby, and this I was also glad to see.

Emperor Konoe’s grave is in Fushimi as well, but I did not end up making my way over there.

The ride back up to Kyoto proper (Fushimi is today technically part of Kyoto City, but..) was much nicer, easier, and felt shorter than the ride down. I rode up further east, through the streets of the actual neighborhood of Fushimi/Momoyama, not alongside the highway, passing by shops, temples, shrines, and homes, and before I knew it was back at Gojô, then Shijô, then Sanjô, and eventually “home” in Kita-ku.

…

After getting some homework done, I hope to take advantage of the day to catch up a little more on my labeling/tagging of photos. Though I am quite far behind, and won’t be posting the rest of my Fushimi photos any time soon, you can, as always, see what I have uploaded so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/toranosuke/. When I do get around to uploading, tagging, and labeling my photos from this Fushimi trip, I will be writing much more (on the individual photo pages on Flickr) about my thoughts and opinions about each site, and about the history behind them, so if you’re interested, please do take a look.

Read Full Post »