Season 13, Episode 11: The Battlefield of Ideas
When the dust settled from Japan’s first national election in July of 1890, many of the newly-elected members of the Imperial Diet’s lower house formed political parties and focused their agendas. Likewise, the other branches of Japan’s Imperial Government continued their own work and prepared to incorporate this new electoral body into their political machinations. The first Prime Minister of Japan had been Ito Hirobumi and when the election of 1890 was held, the third prime minister was already in the middle of his term. His name was Yamagata Aritomo.
Born in 1838, Yamagata Aritomo was the eldest child of an ashigaru who managed to climb the ranks of samurai employment. He served as a minor official in Choshu when he was fifteen and continued to gain promotions while also seeking out education. He was a student of Yoshida Shoin, the radical teacher we discussed last season whose students, like Aritomo, would become influential leaders during the Meiji Period. He was no soft-handed scholar, however; he had served in the Kiheitai militia of Choshu and later was a staff officer during the Boshin War. In 1873, when the Meiji Government disbanded the samurai army in favor of a conscription-based defense force, Yamagata Aritomo, as the head of the War Ministry, designed the conscription system. He had also led troops against Saigo Takamori during Seinan Senso.
One of his most immediate actions following the election of 1890 was to finalize an imperial edict regarding Japan’s education policies. Conservative members of the Meiji oligarchy had, since the advent of the Meiji government itself, been advocating strongly for Japanese education to emphasize Confucian morality and values. More progressive members of the government feared that a focus on old-timey values in education would be a step backward. Confucian philosophy was strongly associated, in the Japanese political imagination, with the shogunate and feudalism. The progressive wing advocated for an emperor-centric version of Confucianism, in which the sovereign was the father of the nation and his subjects were children whose duty bound them to display filial piety and absolute loyalty.
In the end, the Imperial Rescript on Education was proclaimed initially on October 30, 1890, and the end result largely represented the progressive version of emperor-centric Confucianism. Part of the text exhorted the Japanese to (quote) “pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers.” (endquote) They were also instructed to respect the constitution, obey the law, and (quote) “should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State.” (endquote)
Copies of the Imperial Rescript on Education were distributed to every school in the nation along with a picture of Emperor Meiji. The text of the edict was read at every important school function and students were required to study and memorize it. The purpose behind the rescript was, bluntly, the patriotic indoctrination of Japan’s youth.
The newly-elected lower house of the Imperial Diet enjoyed one primary means of political power - the so-called “power of the purse.” They proposed the initial outlays of the imperial budget for the coming year, which would be altered and ratified by the kazoku house of peers and then ultimately approved by the Cabinet. If the lower house failed to approve a budget for the coming year, then the budget for the previous year would be adopted. While this might seem like a way of undercutting the lower house’s power, in reality this reinforced it. As the realities of inflation were made apparent upon the Japanese populace, new annual budgets were demanded and the practice of carrying over the previous year was almost political suicide.
While the cabinet and thus, the prime minister, might seem more powerful than the Imperial Diet, budget deadlocks and policy disagreements would, throughout the early 1890s, result in the resignations of many prime ministers who would eventually return to office after their political opponents failed to make good on their counter-proposals.
Considering the outsized power that Okubo Toshimichi, Iwakura Tomomi, and even Ito Hirobumi had previously enjoyed, this new revolving-door-style of the office of prime-minister signaled a significant shift in the nature of Japanese politics. Whereas Okubo Toshimichi might have steamrolled his vision for the future of Japan over recalcitrant members of the Meiji government, the new manner of holding the highest office in the land, outside of the emperor himself, required patience and a willingness to walk away from unsatisfactory political deals.
However, the early 1890s was, in particular, a time of high stakes for the newly-established constitutional Meiji government. Since the failed Gapsin Coup of 1884, the problem of what to do about Korea loomed large over Japan’s geopolitical landscape. To more fully understand how the coup’s failure and its aftermath affected Meiji leaders, we need to take a brief step back to the 1880s.
Kim Ok-gyun, who would later lead the Gapsin Coup, had been a promising civil servant before his anti-conservative radicalization. His branch of the Andong Kim Clan had been rather impoverished but he was adopted by a wealthier relative when he was six and enjoyed a privileged upbringing as his adopted father secured increasingly higher offices. Throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, he pursued his natural curiosity of western inventions, often gawking at contraptions smuggled into the country in violation of the exclusionary policies. Photographs of foreign nations and peoples were of special interest.
He joined with like-minded scholars, many of them young and idealistic, and their advocacy for rapid westernization meant that they were repeatedly passed over for promotions by the still very conservative court. In 1881, however, the Joseon government granted his request to visit Japan on one condition: they wanted him to spy on their island neighbors and discover whether the Japanese were preparing to invade Korea.
While in Japan, he lived in Tokyo and attended Keio University, a school specializing in western studies. He was awed by the rapid progress of Japan’s modernization initiatives but held true to his mission. He wrote to his superiors in Korea that, from what he was able to observe, Japan was not preparing an invasion of the peninsula. However, he spent more than a little of his time in-country hobnobbing with many elite members of the Meiji Oligarchy. It is not exaggerating to describe his relationship to Inoue Kaoru, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the First Ito Cabinet, as a friendship.
It’s easy to understand why the grim fate of Kim Ok-gyun was especially upsetting to the leadership of the Meiji government in the spring of 1894. While the Joseon government felt more than justified in their actions -- arranging Kim Ok-gyun’s murder and then dismembering his corpse afterward -- the Meiji leaders who knew Ok-gyun, who had treated him as a friend and protege, probably took the news rather personally.
None of this is to say, however, that the impending war between Japan and China, which erupted in July of 1894, was inevitable or was undertaken lightly. The Meiji army had thus far acquitted itself fairly well on the battlefield but this was in part due to the fact that Yamagata Aritomo had proceeded in small steps and with an excess of caution.
You may recall that conscription had been extremely, violently unpopular among the commoners of the early Meiji period. This resulted in lower than expected rates of draft, which was also complicated by financial difficulties. Soldiers needed to be paid. The conscript army had been trained and drilled as best as they could, but no one really knows how well an army will perform until they take the field. The 1874 invasion of Taiwan was as much an opportunity to learn the shortfalls of Japanese army training as it was a chance to show off their newfound imperial capabilities to nearby colonial powers. The target had been chosen carefully; an island populated by separate confederations of indigenous peoples using inferior weapons seemed like a safe enough proving ground. The blunders of that invasion, especially the moments when Japanese troops punished neutral villages believing they were helping their enemies and thus turned most of the islanders against them, were instructive.
The next big test of the army was, of course, the Satsuma Rebellion. While they were ultimately successful in both suppressing the rebellion and eventually killing its ringleaders, the campaign had taken the better part of a year and plunged the economy into a crisis. While the Meiji leaders learned many valuable lessons from these experiences, and while the armed forces benefitted from the presence of experienced veterans, the next test of Japanese military capability had mixed results.
While the Gapsin Coup was not part of a larger official coordination with the Japanese government, the relatively poor performance of their own troops versus the modernized Qing troops they faced left some military leaders concerned that they would be outclassed in a war with China. This opinion was far from universal, of course, and many supporters of the coming war pointed out that the Japanese troops had been outnumbered and that they did safely and successfully evacuate many of the coup ringleaders from the peninsula. When China’s navy began to receive serious modernizing upgrades, however, doubts loomed in the Japanese leaderships’ minds about their chances against their august western neighbor.
However, one factor which Meiji leaders could not ignore was the continued unrest which erupted on the Korean Peninsula throughout 1894. The trouble began in Jeolla Province on the peninsula’s southwestern coast. Gobu was a very prosperous farming community which helped support over two dozen nearby villages and exported massive amounts of food from several local ports. This wealth attracted avarice in the form of appointed Joseon magistrates who sought every opportunity to squeeze the local population. One especially greedy official arranged to have a secondary reservoir built, which may have seemed to the locals like a good idea because it would mean more available water for farming. However, the new reservoir was fed from the same streams as the old one, which shrank and receded as the new one filled. The official then introduced new taxes levied against farmers who used either reservoir for their irrigation. He also engaged in a lot of the usual corruption -- hiring laborers and never paying them, arbitrary fines for minor or imaginary infractions, promising tax forgiveness and then reversing course.
In early 1894, the peasants of Gobu could endure no more. They had been meeting in secret for some time and in early January of 1894 more than a thousand of them gathered at a public marketplace and anointed Jeon Bong-jun as their leader and urged the market-goers to join them in expelling the corrupt officials who were oppressing them. Their ranks swelled with fellow dissatisfied commoners and they stormed local government offices, beating up the officials and raiding the national granaries, restoring so-called tax payments to those who had been fleeced.
The massive uprisings which were sparked in part by the rebellion of Gobu were later broadly dubbed the “Donghak Rebellion.” In spite of the government’s attempts at persecuting the religion into the ground, Donghak continued to grow after the execution of its founder Choe Je-u. While it had been largely successful when suppressing Roman Catholicism, the Joseon government’s attempts to eradicate Donghak had been an utter failure. The reasons for this are numerous, but a lot can be said for Donghak’s tendency to synthesize things which were perceived as broadly Korean - like Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism. The organic growth of this new religious movement was due in part to its perception as being native to Korea, something which Christianity could not claim.
While many of the leaders of these rebellious uprisings were Donghak, the initial conflict was primarily a secular matter. The Joseon state was in the midst of decline and, for the common rural people, no longer served to alleviate any suffering or provide public services but largely existed solely to collect numerous taxes which often overlapped. The inciting incident of the Gobu Uprising was just the last straw in a long line of similar incidents involving crushing taxation and greedy, predatory officials.
Another factor in the successful spread of the Donghak Rebellion throughout 1894 was the sheer unreadiness of the Joseon army to suppress uprisings. The primary actors in this rebellion were peasants and whatever arms they attained were either stolen muskets or home-made spears. While it is true that the sheer number of rebels was overwhelming, especially in Jeolla Province, a well-drilled and well-armed domestic army should have been able to overcome them quickly. However, the Joseon army was in a state of crisis and still grappling with the realities of modernization and the desire to adhere to tradition. In the engagements that ensued between Joseon forces and the numerous Donghak host, many members of Korea’s army deserted and joined with the rebels.
The specific demands of the various groups that joined in the nationwide rebellion were a mixture of religious and secular objectives. They called for an end to the government’s persecution of Donghak, the expulsion of foreigners and foreign religions like Catholicism, an end to over-taxation, the expulsion of the Min family from government, and the execution of corrupt officials.
Throughout the first half of 1894, the peasant rebellion met with remarkable success. Jeolla Province became practically an autonomous zone followed by Chungcheong Province and bits of their surrounding areas. By spring of that year, the southwest quadrant of the Korean Peninsula was essentially outside the central government’s control. Because of this rebellion’s particular nativist, xenophobic bent, both China and Japan had legitimate reasons to express concern for the security of their citizens living on the peninsula. The Korean government could hardly guarantee their safety as their own military could not be trusted to contain the populist conflagration. Thus in late April of 1894, Joseon, on the advice of local Ming official Yuan Shikai, officially requested military aid from China. 1,500 Chinese troops arrived a few days later.
Here is where things become a little murky. Under the treaty of Tientsin, China and Japan are required to inform one another when they send troops to Korea. China claimed that it had done its duty and informed Japan; Japanese officials claimed that they were blindsided by this deployment and that China had thus violated the treaty.
Whether the treaty was actually violated is somewhat beside the point. The Japanese army and navy had been steadily mobilizing for some time and were fully prepared for a fight with China, if it came to it. Higher officials were still extremely nervous and completely uncertain about the outcome of the coming conflict, but they generally believed that China was not prepared to go toe-to-toe to preserve their hegemony over Korea. The Meiji leaders considered trying to ally with Russia to form a coalition against the Qing. Russia had been making its own inroads onto the peninsula and the Japanese government considered offering to support Russia’s position in Manchuria in exchange for Russia supporting Japan’s position in Korea. No such deal was ever struck.
In early June, Japan dispatched its navy which transported troops who eventually encamped outside of the capital, Hanseong. News of an impending influx of both Japanese and Chinese soldiers spread throughout the land, including into rebel territory. The rebels, alarmed that their actions were now inviting the very foreign presence which they had hoped to excise, pressed the government to negotiate a truce. The Joseon state, hoping to prevent being caught in the middle of a war between China and Japan, settled with the rebels and met many of their demands. Donghak was recognized as a legal religion exempt from persecution, promises were made to punish corrupt officials, remarriage of widows was legalized, slavery was abolished, and discrimination against Cheonmin - an undercaste which included the Baekjeong - was abolished.
At least, these were the promises which the government agreed to when they signed the treaty of Jeonju and the Donghak Rebellion officially came to an end. The peasant army decamped from Jeonju fortress and proceeded to implement their reforms throughout Jeolla and Chungcheong Provinces. Throughout the summer of 1894, however, they found that many of the cities on the peninsula’s southwest were not as prepared to compromise with the rebels as the central government had been. Ferocious, ugly fighting would persist throughout that region for some time to come.
One of my favorite passages from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” appears in its first chapter and is translated thus: (quote) “All warfare is based on deception.” (endquote) Both China and Japan had seized upon the Donghak Rebellion as a just cause for putting boots on the ground in Korea, China doing so to affirm its hegemony over the peninsula and Japan doing so in order to stake their own claim. The conflict that followed was in many ways in keeping with Sun Tzu’s description of warfare.
The Chinese viceroy Li Hongzhang was assured by his Japanese counterparts that Japan had every intention of withdrawing its troops as soon as Joseon no longer required their presence. Japanese envoys inquired if the Qing Dynasty might be interested in a joint reform effort aimed at strengthening the Joseon government so that peasant rebellions, like the recent one, would not threaten Korea’s harmony and security. From the Chinese perspective, they had thus far resisted Japan’s efforts to bring Korea under their wing in a similar way that they had annexed Ryukyu and invaded Taiwan. Thus they saw no need for such a cooperative venture. They would assist Korea; Japan should withdraw its troops.
Li Hongzhang was convinced that the Japanese had no desire for war with China and that they would begin withdrawals as soon as Joseon requested it. China had already begun its mass withdrawals, which had been requested in the name of King Gojong. However, when Joseon made a similar request of the Japanese in the summer of 1894, they refused to leave. On July 23, 1894, 8,000 Japanese troops stormed the Joseon Royal Palace and soon the king and queen were both in their custody. Two days later, King Gojang made a startling announcement: he was surrendering his right to govern the nation in favor of his father, the deposed regent Daewongun.
Just when they thought he was out, the Japanese pulled him back in. Daewongun had been kept in exile in China but in 1885 the Chinese allowed him to return. Queen Min strongly objected to his return, but grit her teeth and placed him under an indefinite house arrest. It may seem odd that the Japanese would choose him to be the new head of the Joseon government, considering how hard Daewongun had fought to prevent their ascension over Korea. It may seem even stranger that Daewongun would accept the political sponsorship of Japan.
The reality was that this situation was not about politics so much as it was about power. Daewongun hated the Japanese but he hated Queen Min even more. He jumped at the chance to disempower the queen, whom he rightfully blamed for his earlier removal from power. Of course, while Daewongun was now the official head of state, the Japanese had no intention of allowing him to actually rule the nation, let’s not be ridiculous. His presence was meant to mollify the dissatisfied conservative elements throughout the nation and provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for the Japanese to begin enacting their own reforms on Joseon’s policies, foreign and domestic.
The Chinese were stunned at this brazen, cynical act of geopolitical gamesmanship. Surely the Japanese must realize that this means war! The bad news for the Qing dynasty was that not only did the Japanese realize that this meant war, they were counting on it. Two days after their seizure of the Joseon government, the first battle of a war between China and Japan would begin.
Next time, we will discuss the events of the First Sino-Japanese War and see how the modernized conscript army of Japan fairs against the reformed banners of the Qing Dynasty.