Season 13, Episode 20: The Pax Meiji
The assassination of Ito Hirobumi in October of 1909 was certainly a shocking event but it did nothing to slow the absorption of Korea into Japan’s hegemony. The assassin was tried, found guilty of murder, and executed by hanging. The following year, 1910, the Empire of Korea would be officially dissolved and the people of the peninsula placed fully under Japanese imperial rule.
The Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910 began by stating that the sovereign of Korea was granting His Majesty the Emperor of Japan all rights and sovereignty over the whole of Korea. The document was signed by Emperor Sunjong, and at the time was accepted by the international community as legally binding and above board. The UK had renewed its mutual defense alliance with Japan in 1905 and the US had already signaled its acknowledgement of Japan’s hegemony over Korea via the “Taft-Katsura Agreement,” also of 1905. Given that Korea already had its own mini-Meiji government bureaucracy, full annexation was certainly a logical next step.
However, it’s worth noting that later generations would not agree with contemporary assessments of the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910. Retired Emperor Gojong, unsurprisingly, rejected the treaty’s validity due to the element of coercion. He had only signed the initial Eulsa treaty of 1905 under threat of violence by the Japanese troops that surrounded his palace and no doubt he pictured a similar scene for his son Emperor Sunjong. Although the 1910 treaty was probably not signed under quite as direct a threat of force as its predecessor, there can be little question that coercion was present.
The Imperial Japanese Army occupied the peninsula and busied itself rooting out and hunting down Uibyeong militias which sprang up across the land. The executive branch of the Empire of Korea was staffed solely by Japanese bureaucrats. Certainly there were some Koreans who welcomed Japanese rule and even assisted in the treaty process on Japan’s behalf, but they were largely from a disenfranchised political faction whose only hope at a decent future lay with supporting Japanese expansion onto their homeland. Generations later, they would be counted as traitors to Korea and their descendants deprived of the property they gained in service to the Empire of Japan.
This annexation was not purely political, either. Bourgeois Japanese settlers streamed into Korea in search of low-cost land from which they could launch their own agricultural enterprises and, they hoped, someday found their own zaibatsu conglomerates. By the time annexation was made official in 1910, Japanese settlers accounted for about ten percent of the population on the Korean peninsula. These newcomers were generally resented by much of Korea’s class of existing farm workers, who had for many years been made to labor under the harsh conditions demanded by the predatory Yangban Scholar-officials and were now expected to likewise labor on behalf of foreign landlords who were driven purely by a desire for profit, no matter the human cost.
As Japan and its settlers gradually expanded their practical control over the Korean Peninsula, profits soared on a level that actually outmatched that of the home provinces. The GDP of the Korean Peninsula slightly outpaced that of Japan proper. While there are several factors at play in this economic disparity, the primary factor was that Korean workers did not enjoy the same level of protections and wage expectations which laborers in Japan took for granted. It is also worth noting that the economic output of the Empire of Korea had been frequently disrupted by uprisings and also leeched by predatory officials.
Life for Korean people during the Japanese occupation would eventually become terribly unlivable, but during the initial phases of the annexation things probably seemed like they were on an upswing, at least in terms of economy. Greedy scholar-officials no longer extracted every last spare crum from the Korean peasants and farm workers through arbitrary taxation and extortion. Although they had effectively traded one form of taskmaster for another, the taxes expected by the Japanese empire were nowhere near as exploitative. However, the level of political representation in Korea was effectively zero. Japanese bureaucrats had taken charge of every last vestige left behind by the now-defunct Korean Emperors and the Korean people themselves were not allowed into any of those positions. This situation was not exactly the “robbers and the robbed” duality observed by British travelers during the years of the Korean Empire but, while it was an improvement upon their previous situation, it was still a far cry from ideal.
But what about Japan? Life in Meiji Japan was, by the early 1910s, completely different than when the period began in 1868. Railway lines now criss-crossed the country, the cities were filled with factories, banks, and other altars of twentieth-century capitalism, and the people’s attitudes, political ideals, and even their very diets underwent a radical change.
Many Japanese scholars who had studied abroad returned home with the conclusion that the Japanese people were, on the whole, woefully malnourished. We have discussed in prior seasons how this was legitimately true; the traditional Japanese diet did not sufficiently provide its practitioner with vitamin B1, also called Thiamine. At times when Japanese history revolved around certain individuals, those individuals sometimes suffered attacks of Beriberi, a condition which was created by Thiamine deficiency. You may recall, for example, that in the midst of a critical battle the rebel samurai Taira Masakado was afflicted by painful attacks in his legs which are believed to have been caused by a lack of sufficient levels of vitamin B1.
Scholars who had studied at foreign universities concluded that if the Japanese people hoped to grow big and strong like Europeans, they must adopt the dietary practices of Europeans, even if those practices were contrary to Japanese tradition. It no doubt helped that much of the Japanese diet had been influenced by Buddhism, a religion which saw a fair amount of unpopularity and decline during the Meiji Period.
The new diet consisted of including more animal proteins in one’s daily caloric intake, including beef, chicken, and eggs. The popular Japanese dish “Omu-raisu,” in which a French-style omelet is split open on top of a serving of fried rice, is believed to have originated during the Meiji Period, though another account claims that it was actually created around 1925 by a bored Japanese cook. Incidentally, if you’d like to make an easy home-made version of omu-raisu which is both delicious and simple, I recommend the recipe found on the website seriouseats.com.
The effort to convince the Japanese populace to adopt meat eating was, anti-Buddhist sentiment notwithstanding, not an overnight success. The taboo forbidding meat was a powerful one with the weight of over a thousand years of history behind it. During the Edo Period in particular, the only groups known to consume non-seafood meat were the hinin and eta groups -- the untouchables who occupied the lowest rungs of the Edo social ladder. The association of meat-eating to these undesirable classes was a powerful one. To help convince the public that meat was a perfectly fine and nutritious food source, the Emperor himself began partaking in various meats, which with the help of positive news articles helped speed up adoption.
The elevation of the emperor was a striking innovation of the Meiji Period which often goes unappreciated. Throughout the Edo Period, the shogunate had mostly pursued a policy of marginalizing the imperial court through economic and political impoverishment. The Tenno’s purpose was seen, by the Bakufu, as primarily performing the rituals scheduled throughout the year to ensure that the gods were properly honored and the nation aligned to be in harmony with the spiritual realm. The emperor handles the spirit world, the Bakufu handles the material world.
The events of the Bakumatsu Period resulted in the shogunate suddenly needing to rely on the Tenno for political support. Various members of the court had many different ideas about what they might do with their newfound political relevance but it was the restorationist faction, so-called, who eventually won out. Once the Boshin War began, the Bakufu was already so weak that the pro-imperial faction very quickly took control of most of the nation. As the remainder of the pro-Bakufu forces were defeated or surrendered, the emperor’s advisors and supporters set about forming a new government. Originally using long-outmoded titles from the Heian Period, the Meiji government eventually reversed course from a backward-looking restorationist ideal and instead adopted a relatively progressive and modern form of government for their time. The question remained, however - what was the proper role of the emperor in the new order which emerged during the 1870s?
Two broad schools of thought emerged very quickly among the Meiji elite throughout the period’s early decades. One was that the emperor should be a figurehead monarch, a national symbol rather than a head of state. The rival thought was that the emperor should absolutely be head of state and believed that making him a figurehead would drain the new government of its legitimacy. They would just be a new version of the Bakufu, an accusation which the Satsuma-Choshu clique was desperately trying to squash during those early decades. When the Constitution of 1890 was established after years of false starts and secret drafting meetings, the Emperor was officially declared the head of state and his orders considered sacrosanct.
The Meiji state took measures thereafter to ensure that the public understood that the Tenno was special, descended from Japan’s gods, and enjoyed the blessings of divinity himself. Rescripts throughout the 1890s ensured that every official avenue of education, from schools to military training, received an adequate understanding of the emperor’s special status and their absolute duty to display unyielding loyalty to him.
By the end of the Meiji Period, this propaganda appears to have been exceedingly effective. Boys who grew up hearing the imperial rescript on education read aloud at every special school event became adult men who served two years in the army or navy and swore a special oath to obey the emperor. When the angry horde of nationalist protestors launched the Hibiya Riot in response to the perceived lackluster gains at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, they very clearly avoided blaming the Tenno for their dissatisfaction, pointing their fingers instead at low-quality cabinet members as well as the United States for the unsatisfactory treaty.
While the Meiji Constitution had technically placed a check against imperial orders, requiring a cabinet member’s signature for validation, the conservatives who emerged by the end of the Meiji Period were developing a very emperor-centric interpretation. Liberals, meanwhile, argued for the continued expansion of the electorate and for the emperor to respect the limitations which the constitution had explicitly placed upon him. These arguments will continue well into next season and beyond.
Meanwhile, on the fringes, new philosophies were starting to take hold among working class Japanese people. While the Freedom and People’s Rights Party, as well as the Meirokusha, of the early Meiji Period had been broadly left-leaning, after a few decades they were thought of as a forerunner of the organized socialism that was growing throughout Japan. In 1896, Japanese socialists formed the “Shakai Shugi Kenkyukai,” or “Society for the Study of Socialism.” While initially they were little more than an academic book club, in 1901 their members formed the “Shakai Minshu-to” or “Social Democratic Party.” Interestingly, five of its six founding leaders were Christians, as socialism was still somewhat popular among Christians in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many Christian believers observed that its ideals were remarkably similar to those espoused by the apostles of Christ in the book of Acts.
One day after the Shakai Minshu-to, Japan’s first socialist party, was formed, the government banned it. This drastic action did little to prevent the further spread of far left thought throughout the nation and during the early years of the 1900s, reading and discussion groups considering leftist theories found fertile soil among a dissatisfied working class. Leftist political philosophy in the early 1900s was still a very fluid school of thought which enjoyed a wide spectrum of diversity partly because of its still-theoretical nature. When the Nihon Shakai-to, or “Japan Socialist Party” was formed in 1906, its founders had very different ideas of how to achieve a greater measure of equality and economic justice for the workers they championed.
The fact that this party was founded shortly after Saionji Kinmochi became the Prime Minister was far from a coincidence. Kinmochi and his faction generally advocated for a more open, tolerant society and upon his elevation to Prime Minister, the laws forbidding the formation of revolutionary parties were set aside.
More radical elements of the Nihon Shakai-to identified as anarcho-syndicalists, who believed that powerful trade unions could overthrow the state by organizing a massive general strike. They sometimes advocated violence in achieving their ends, including sabotage, assassinations, and other forms of direct action. Moderate members, however, were Marxists who believed in using a series of reforms to bring about social equality. As you might guess, this broad coalition did not endure as disagreements among its leaders led to infighting and factionalization within the party. By the time the government banned it one year after its foundation, it had already lost much of its membership and political potential.
This is not to say that no one tried to once more bring both sides together and organize a unified effort against government suppression. Two anarchist writers had been imprisoned because of articles they had written for their leftist newspapers. They had been prosecuted under the press censorship laws and given prison sentences of a few months each. The first to be released was Ishikawa Sanshiro, who felt greatly disappointed that both radicals and moderates had opted to host separate celebrations of his release. He suggested that they hold a joint celebration when his comrade Yamaguchi Koken was released the following month. In the spirit of solidarity, both sides agreed to a large joint celebration.
On June 22, 1908, the Kinki-kan theater in Tokyo was rented for the release party and many prominent socialist leaders took to the stage and made fiery speeches as well as congratulating Yamaguchi Koken for his recent release from prison. The party began to wind down in the evening and, still invigorated by the revolutionary atmosphere of the celebration, the radical anarchists marched out of the Kinki-kan holding red flags with white kanji emblazoned upon them. These kanji spelled out “Revolution,” and “Anarchism,” as well as “Socialism.” As they marched down the street displaying these flags, they sang anarchist anthems and chanted revolutionary slogans. Police, who had gathered nearby in case of exactly this kind of behavior, quickly attacked the demonstrators, seizing their flags. The demonstrators fought back and a brief melee ensued. Dozens of men and women were arrested and taken to police stations where they were brutally beaten by police. Most were later charged with incitement and given prison sentences of various lengths, the longest being two and a half years.
The Aka-hata Jiken, or “Red Flag Incident,” of 1908 was a fairly minor incident in the grand scheme of things but it would prove to have dire consequences for Saionji Kinmochi, who resigned soon afterward under pressure from the emperor. Kinmochi’s old rival Yamagata Aritomo eagerly pointed to the Red Flag Incident as proof that Kinmochi’s policies of tolerance toward the far left were only emboldening the most radical and dangerous wings of that movement. As we discussed in the previous episode, Katsura Taro then returned to the Premiership and formed a new cabinet which reinstated the laws forbidding revolutionary political parties.
The specter of leftist revolution continued to haunt the halls of power in Meiji Japan. Yamagata Aritomo and his faction insisted on more frequent and punitive crackdowns on leftist organizations and continued to bludgeon their opponents with accusations of coddling anti-state terrorists. A few years after the Red Flag Incident, they received confirmation that their fears were well-placed. In May of 1910, police discovered bomb-making material in the home of a lumbermill worker in Nagano Prefecture. Their ensuing investigation uncovered a massive conspiracy against the Japanese government by anarchist revolutionaries.
According to investigators, the plot involved multiple co-conspirators executing a bombing assassination campaign against multiple high-ranking members of the Meiji government, including Emperor Meiji himself. The trial of those accused of participating in this plot was a closed affair - the crime for which they were accused was high treason - and, frankly, it was later revealed that the evidence tying the entire case together was entirely circumstantial. However, the result of the trial that ensued from the Taigyaku Jiken, or “High Treason Incident,” resulted largely in guilty verdicts for all twenty-six defendants and death sentences for twenty-four. The remaining two were sentenced to life in prison. On the day that followed the sentencing, an Imperial rescript was issued which commuted twelve of the death sentences to life in prison. The remaining twelve were executed by hanging the following year, in late January of 1911. Decades later, the proliferation of public records revealed that only five of those convicted were directly linked to an actual plot to assassinate the Emperor.
The High Treason Incident confirmed, in the minds of conservatives, that the leftist factions which were organizing throughout Japan were a direct threat to the Meiji government. The incident itself would later be used to justify crackdowns and political imprisonment of socialists, anarchists, and communists in the decades to come, especially targeting those groups for which anti-imperialism was a cornerstone value.
However, government repression would not be enough to withstand the general tendency toward liberalizing reforms. Just two percent of Japan’s population enjoyed the right to vote in parliamentary elections. This relatively small minority of landowners and industrial magnates would not be able to hold back the tide of wider suffrage forever; incidents like the Hibiya Riots were signs that the people were politically activated. The expansion of voting eligibility was around the corner, though it would not occur during the Meiji Period itself.
Life for the average Japanese citizen certainly improved in many ways during the Meiji Period. The economic fallout of the Bakumatsu Period, however, meant that it would have been difficult for the new government to do worse. And the course had been anything but smooth and steady. The early days of the Meiji government had been defined by the political domination of Okubo Toshimichi and the occasional civilian riot which resulted from unpopular policies like conscription and mandatory public education. The decade following his assassination was largely spent trying to work out a new form of government which would include a constitution but also preserve the political supremacy of the emperor.
The twenty years following the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution were punctuated by two wars - the First Sino-Japanese War in which the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces triumphed easily and the Russo-Japanese War, in which victories came at a great cost both human and monetary. The benefits of industrialization which Japan had so eagerly chased throughout the Meiji Period’s early years were swallowed up in the gaping maw of modern warfare. Foreign loans were needed to keep the government funded and the end of the Russo-Japanese War did not include a war indemnity like the war against China did.
Meanwhile, government corruption continued to plague Meiji Japan, especially as the factories which had been built using taxpayer funds were sold for fractions of their value to private capitalist ventures. The merchant interests which had managed to accumulate no small amount of influence and power during the Edo Period now completed their ascension with the formations of zaibatsu conglomerates which worked hand-in-glove with government interests.
After the Russo-Japanese War, the government grew to fear explosive mass movements like the one that sparked the Hibiya Riots. Fears of leftist revolutions were fed in part by actual leftist actions but were still largely used as bait by paranoid conservatives to reverse course on issues like free expression and government censorship.
The Meiji Period officially ended on July 30, 1912 when Emperor Meiji died at the age of 59. In his later years he suffered from a variety of chronic ailments including diabetes, gastroenteritis, and complications from failing kidneys. The reign of the first sovereign ruler of the Empire of Japan was at an end.
However, while Emperor Meiji was technically the sovereign, his understanding of the issues facing his nation was heavily filtered by the oligarchy who controlled his flow of information. This particular group emerged after the deaths of the Meiji Triumvirs - Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, and Saigo Takamori. They were called the Genro, meaning “Original Elders,” and they acted as a kind of shadow privy council to the Emperor. They were not elected nor enshrined in the constitution, but had been elevated by the Emperor himself to serve as his personal advisors. Nine of the most influential and powerful Japanese politicians of the Meiji Period enjoyed this exclusive designation. They were Ito Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, Kuroda Kiyotaka, Oyama Iwao, Saigo Tsugumichi, Yamagata Aritomo, Katsura Taro, and Saionji Kinmochi.
Hopefully you recognize most of the names on that list, especially the final two. The rivalries that developed between various prime ministers and their proteges often began with behind-the-scenes infighting during meetings of the Genro, which the Emperor attended and largely observed. The Genro made suggestions to the Emperor regarding who should next serve as prime minister and thus form a new cabinet, usually agreeing among themselves on a certain order of service to be recommended. This shadowy group would continue to play an outsized role in Japanese politics during the reign of the next sovereign and beyond.
Throughout the Meiji Period, Japan had seen rapid and radical change in nearly every level of its social and economic strata, some for better and some, arguably, for worse. The Empire of Japan now had a sizable and even formidable body of armed forces and their impressive performance in the First Sino-Japanese War led to the quiet expiration and non-renewal of several unequal treaties. Their victory against the Russian Empire was marked by many of their fellow colonial empires as a sign that the Japanese were gaining equal footing to so-called “western” nations. As Japan had found a way to preserve monarchy while still pursuing modernization and reform, the people of China were taking a decidedly different path.
In 1911, China was once again rocked by a revolution. A coalition of anti-Qing secret societies banded together and launched what came to be called the Xinhai Revolution. We will cover this event in greater detail next season, but for today it’s enough to note that in early 1912, the battlefield successes enjoyed by the rebels were enough to pressure Dowager Empress Longyu into arranging the abdication of her nephew, the six-year-old Emperor Xuantong. In the edict in which the emperor’s abdication was declared, all of the Qing Dynasty’s pre-existing national sovereignty was ceded to the governing body of the Xinhai Revolution, a group which had named itself “The Republic of China.”
While Japan may have appeared to be more stable than China, however, that stability would soon be put to the test. Almost a year before the death of Emperor Meiji, Sainoji Kinmochi had been made Prime Minister once again. His attempts to bring military spending under control and the military’s subsequent obstructionism would fan the flames of a full-fledged constitutional crisis. Something to look forward to next season.
Well, here we are- at the end of the regular episodes covering the Meiji Period. It’s been a wild ride upon a long road. I’ve done my best this season to cover the most important shifts but no doubt there are a few that I’ve neglected. The upcoming bonus episodes, which begin next week, will hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Next time, we will discuss the literary luminaries of the Meiji Period, some of whom are among my favorite authors.