Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan announced his intention to remain in his post until 2018, the 150^th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, the “dawn of modern Japan.” He made the announcement on August 12, at Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, formerly named Choshu during the pre-Restoration samurai era. Abe’s forebears were from Choshu, which played a leading role in the overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate and the restoration of Imperial rule – a significant point I have made in previous blog postings including “Samurai Lineage Underlies Japanese Premier’s Drive to Strengthen Military.” The Restoration heroes from Choshu are among the most revered men in Japanese history. There can be little doubt that Abe’s Choshu samurai lineage is connected to his intention to rebuild Japan into a military power. “I’m quietly resolved to make decent achievements as a prime minister from Yamaguchi Prefecture, home to key figures in the Meiji Restoration,” he is quoted in The Japan Times on August 13, 2015.

(I wrote extensively about Choshu and Satsuma, the other leading samurai clan of the Meiji Restoration, in Samurai Revolution.)

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Katsu Kaishu gave an interview to the Kokumin Shinbun which appeared in that newspaper’s September 21, 1898 issue, just months before his death in the following January. In the interview Kaishu imparted a moral lesson he had learned from “a holy man,” who had lived “long ago.” Since I didn’t include Kaishu’s moral lesson in Samurai Revolution, I present it here:

The holy man’s “prayers worked well in the lottery, which was popular back then—and for that reason he had a very good reputation,” Kaishu said. “Since my father was friendly with him, I visited him sometimes.” But eventually strict government controls were placed on the lottery and the holy man “was reduced to poverty. . . . But that holy man was quite a fellow. Not only did he eat meat and have a wife of his own, but he had no qualms about being with someone else’s wife. . . . Having wound up in such reduced circumstances, however, he grew weak in body and spirit. One day when I visited him, I brought a little something with me. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re still young, but perseverant and reliable. So I’m going to tell you a little story.’”

According to the holy man’s story, there were two other reasons that his prayers for the lottery stopped working. One had to do with a beautiful young woman who “came to ask for my prayers in the lottery. But since she was so beautiful I couldn’t help but desire her. I seduced her then gave her my prayers.” The prayers worked; the woman won the lottery. A few days later she returned to the holy man’s home to thank him. “I tried to seduce her again. But she only stared at me with frightening eyes,” saying that the only reason she had been unfaithful to her husband was so that he would get the lottery money. “Her eyes and the hissing in her voice pierced me to the quick.”

The other reason that the man’s prayers no longer worked had to do with a large snapping turtle he had bought because “I needed something nutritious to eat.’” But “’when I went to cook it, the damn turtle lifted up its head and stared right at me with its big eyeballs. I said, ‘What’s this?’ Then I cut off its head, cooked it, and ate it. But somehow I was bothered.” And because he felt guilty about those two incidents, his “prayers gradually stopped working.”

Katsube Mitake, in his biography of Katsu Kaishu, attaches a Buddhistic moral to the story: Never do evil. Always do good. When Kaishu “heard this story, its truth burst upon me like a sudden flash. And to this day I have not forgotten it. The reason that even at my present age [seventy-five] I am still mentally and physically sound is because its power remains with me at all times—and looking back upon my own personal experiences I don’t remember ever having mistaken the way that a human being should live.”

(The photo is of Katsu Kaishu in his old age.)

Sources

Hikawa Seiwa (Katsu Kaishu Zenshu 21) Tōkyō: Kodansha, 1973 (pp. 296-97)

Katsube Mitake. Katsu Kaishu. vol. 1. Tokyo: PHP, 1992 (p. 348)

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Samurai Revolution is the only biography of Katsu Kaishu in English.

Bushido, “way of the warrior,” was fundamental to samurai society. It was an unwritten code which incorporated the eight virtues of Confucianism: benevolence, justice, loyalty, filial piety, decorum, wisdom, trust, and respect for elders. Its most cherished values were courage and loyalty to one’s feudal lord. Chapter 8 of Samurai Revolution is titled “A Brief Discussion on Bushido.” I included it because a fundamental understanding of bushido is essential, I think, to understanding Japanese history.

Bushido Kyokai (武士道協会), a Tokyo-based NPO, describes bushido as “the spiritual foundation of the development of modern Japan.” The organization, which exalts life and world peace, states that its purpose is to “revive bushido in the hearts of modern Japanese people and people from around the world who live in Japan.” (http://www.bushido.or.jp/index.html) Kudos to Bushido Kyokai!

Yet there is another side of bushido which should be considered. In the spring of 1862, Shimazu Hisamitsu, the father of the Satsuma daimyo, sent a squad of nine expert swordsmen to the Teradaya inn near Kyoto to dissuade fellow Satsuma samurai from taking part in a planned uprising against the Tokugawa Shogunate in Kyoto. If they could not dissuade them, they were ordered to kill them. In other words, Hisamitsu ordered his men to kill some of their closest friends. The nine swordsmen readily acquiesced, a fact which is “almost incomprehensible to people today,” comments Kaionji Chogoro in his acclaimed biography of Saigo Takamori. Kaionji, himself a native of Satsuma, explains that the nine stoically accepted their orders based on “the aesthetics of the samurai of Satsuma,” who “held meanness, irresolution, and cowardice as the greatest immorality, and bravery and strength as the ultimate virtues. In a word, bushidō is the beauty of stoicism itself, but in a way it is also inhuman, brutal and almost immoral.” I wrote about the “Teradaya Incident” in Chapter 7 of Samurai Revolution.

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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has criticized what he claims are inaccurate depictions of “Japan’s actions during World War II, opening a new front in a battle to sway American views of the country’s wartime history,” The New York Times reported on January 30, 2015. Abe has “vowed to step up efforts to fight what he called mistaken views abroad concerning Japan’s wartime actions, when the Japanese military conquered much of Asia.” In fact Japan colonized Korea and Taiwan long before the war. But Japan’s imperialism in Asia was a direct reaction to similar behavior by Western powers in the nineteenth century—namely the United States, Great Britain, and France—which had threatened Japan’s sovereignty.

To understand Abe’s position, and the position of many conservatives in Japan today—which history teaches us is actually quite reasonable—we must know something of the history of the forced opening of Japan by the aforementioned three Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century. It is the history of the Meiji Restoration, also known as “the dawn of modern Japan,” which marked the transfer of power from the shogun to the emperor and unified the nation under the Imperial monarchy in late 1867. One of the most tumultuous and violent periods in Japanese history, the Meiji Restoration kicked off the rise of Imperial Japan—and with it Japan’s colonization of Asian countries.

Until Japan’s treaty with Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy, concluded under the threat of attack by American warships in 1854, and the coerced trade treaties with the United States, France, Great Britain, and other foreign nations that came a few years later, Japan, under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate, had been isolated from the rest of the world. Unlike the great Western powers, which had colonized parts of China and India, Japan had not conquered or colonized any foreign nation or territory during the two and half centuries of Tokugawa rule. Great Britain had subjugated much of India in the early part of the century; it had ceded Hong Kong in 1842, under the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the first Opium War. In reaction to Western imperialism, farsighted men in Japan advocated the development of a “strong military and rich nation” to protect Japan’s sovereignty. As I wrote in my recent book, Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai, (Tuttle, 2014), Katsu Kaishu, a founder of the Japanese navy, envisaged a “Pan Asian navy” to be led by Japan based on a “Triple Alliance” with Korea and China, as part of a far-reaching scheme to meet the Western threat from a position of strength. To defend against Western encroachment, Katsu wrote in the spring of 1863, Japan should “dispatch ships to Asian countries to persuade their leaders to form an Asian Alliance and build up our navies . . . and conduct international trade and academic research.” Katsu submitted his plan to the shogunate, which agreed with him.

Katsu’s plan had been triggered by Russia’s occupation of the Japanese island of Tsushima in 1861. Tsushima, located in the strait between Japan and Korea, was one of hundreds of feudal domains comprising Japan before the Meiji Restoration. About a month after Katsu submitted his plan to the government, Tsushima proposed a plan of its own to invade and conquer Korea before that country could be taken over by Western powers, which would not only endanger Tsushima, but all of Japan. Other voices in Japan, including Shimazu Nariakira, the lord of the great domain of Satsuma, also called for overseas conquest as a means of protecting Japanese sovereignty. As I noted in Samurai Revolution, Nariakira, who died in 1858, perceived China’s weakness against France and Britain as a direct threat to Japan. He said that Japan must establish military bases in China and Taiwan to demonstrate its military power to the West to avoid “the same fate as that which has befallen China” because “as soon as England achieves its design on China, it will most certainly direct its military might eastward” toward Japan. Japan must “take the initiative,” Nariakira asserted, and “dominate China, otherwise “we will be dominated. We must prepare defenses with this thought in mind. Considering the present situation, it behooves us first to raise an army, seize a part of China’s territory, and establish a base on the Asiatic mainland. We must strengthen Japan without delay and display our military power abroad. This would make it impossible for England or France to interfere in our affairs despite their strength.” But it was not Nariakira’s purpose to bring about “the liquidation of China, but rather to see China awaken and reorganize itself in order that together we might defend ourselves against England and France”—which resembles Katsu’s vision of a Triple Alliance with China and Korea. But, according to Nariakira, based on China’s self-asserted superiority over Japan, it was doubtful that China would agree to cooperate with Japan. “Consequently, we must first undertake defensive preparations against foreign encroachment. . . . The initial requirement is the acquisition of both Taiwan and Foochow [Fuzhou].”

Satsuma (modern-day Kagoshima Prefecture) was one of two feudal domains that orchestrated and led the revolution to overthrow the shogunate and restore the Imperial monarchy. The other one was Choshu (modern-day Yamaguchi Prefecture). Prime Minister Abe’s forebears, including his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a prime minister in the 1950s, were from Choshu. After the Restoration, continuing with their drive to build a “strong military and rich nation,” former samurai of Satsuma and Choshu, as leaders of the Imperial government, developed a military strong enough to defeat China and Russia in wars and colonize Taiwan and Korea. Future Japanese leaders created a “Greater East Asia” sphere to counter Western power. Their policy was inextricably entwined with the events leading up to World War II. Abe and other conservatives “have bridled at historical depictions of Japan as the sole aggressor in the war, saying that it fought to liberate Asia from Western domination,” The Times reports. The leaders of Asian nations such as China and South Korea, which call “Abe a revisionist out to whitewash Japanese wartime atrocities,” might, along with their counterparts in the United States and other Western countries, benefit by considering the origins of Japan’s aggression through an unbiased review of Meiji Restoration history—including the ideas of Shimazu Nariakira, Katsu Kaishu, and other leading personalities in that history.

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