Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (11 page)

Did K
ō
mei use this pseudonym in the hopes that he, too, would, after a long winter, know the spring?

Toward the end of the letter, he denied that he was giving up the cares of office in order to lead a life of pleasure, but paradoxically, that is the kind of life that the shogunate and many members of his court thought was most appropriate for him. Only toward the end of his reign when his feelings turned from frustration to desperation did he indulge heavily in saké and women.
¹⁰
K
ō
mei emerges in this letter as a moving figure, a man of intelligence schooled in traditions that were rapidly becoming untenable in an age of change enforced from without.

K
ō
mei’s request that he be allowed to abdicate apparently never reached the shogunate. By dint of firm persuasion, Kuj
ō
Hisatada managed to mollify K
ō
mei, promising that a senior shogunate official would come to Ky
ō
to to explain the situation. But in the seventh month of 1858, the shogunate signed treaties (similar to the one concluded with America) with Holland, Russia, and England.
¹¹
On September 11 K
ō
mei, enraged by this new development, responded with an imperial edict declaring his intention of abdicating and demanding an explanation from the shogunate for its disregard of the imperial will.

After receiving the letter, Kuj
ō
Hisatada replied that although it was evident that the emperor had reason on his side, the matter was of such grave importance that he would have to give it his mature consideration before offering an opinion. He met with the Court Council. Most of the members agreed that the imperial message should be forwarded to the shogunate but felt that intemperate language should be avoided. When Kuj
ō
showed K
ō
mei’s letter to senior court officials, Konoe Tadahiro, the minister of the left, advocated sending a copy of the letter to Tokugawa Nariaki, the former daimyo of Mito, urging him to persuade the shogunate to reform the government and take steps to protect the country from foreign insult. If Nariaki could induce two or three of the major domains to join him, the emperor’s wishes could be carried out completely.
¹²

This was a dangerous plan. It proposed violating the shogunate’s order, which had expressly prohibited the court from communicating directly with the domains; worse, if it were successful, it would surely foment dissension, the one thing the shogunate most feared and hated. There was a sharp division of opinion among members of the Court Council, some afraid that sending the letter would ultimately harm the court and others insisting that unless the letter was sent immediately, the emperor would certainly abdicate. In the end, one copy of the letter was given to the representative of the Mito clan living in the capital, and another to a shogunate official stationed in the palace for transmission to the shogunate.

In his letter, K
ō
mei recognized that signing a treaty with America had, under the circumstances, been inevitable, but he reproved the shogunate for not having followed his suggestion that the major domains be consulted before taking further diplomatic steps. He also expressed concern over unrest within the country and urged a policy of
k
ō
bu gattai
, the union of aristocracy and military. This phrase summed up K
ō
mei’s ideal of cooperation by the court and shogunate in driving out the foreigners, as opposed to the more familiar
sonn
ō
j
ō
i
, and it would figure prominently in the discourse of the late Tokugawa period.

Once again, K
ō
mei was dissuaded from abdicating. On September 23 word of the death of the shogun Tokugawa Iesada reached the capital. He had died more than a month earlier, but the shogunate had kept this a secret, and only at this time was the court informed. The shogun’s death may have inhibited K
ō
mei from following up on his plan to abdicate. In any case, at the beginning of the ninth month he managed to get Kuj
ō
Hisatada, the chancellor and a supporter of the shogunate’s policies, replaced by Konoe Tadahiro, a man whose attitudes he found more congenial.

On October 13, 1858, Manabe Akikatsu (1804–1884), a senior councillor (
r
ō
j
ū
), arrived in Ky
ō
to. This seemed to be in keeping with the promise that the shogunate had made to send a senior official, but Manabe had no intention of apologizing to the emperor for having signed a treaty with the Americans without obtaining imperial consent. Rather, he had come by command of Ii Naosuke to restore Kuj
ō
Hisatada to his former position as chancellor. That was not all. He intended to rid the capital of all those who opposed the shogunate’s policies. This marked the beginning of what was known as the Great Purge of the Ansei era. Eight samurai leaders of the
sonn
ō
j
ō
i
faction were executed, including such admired men as Yoshida Sh
ō
in, Hashimoto Sanai, and Rai Mikisabur
ō
. Yoshida Sh
ō
in’s crime had been to join the plot to assassinate Manabe on his way from Edo to Ky
ō
to, but the “crimes” of the others were by no means so clear. Members of the aristocracy (even those of the most exalted families) who were suspected of
sonn
ō
j
ō
i
leanings were also questioned and forced to resign their offices. Others, judged to be more deeply involved, were confined to their quarters or ordered to shave their heads and become Buddhist priests.

Manabe, perhaps by way of consolation, brought for the emperor lavish gifts from the new shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi. K
ō
mei, however, declined to give Manabe an audience.
¹³
His feelings toward the shogunate official who had removed Konoe Tadahiro, his choice as chancellor, and replaced him with Kuj
ō
Hisatada, a man he did not trust, can easily be imagined. Manabe had a meeting instead with Kuj
ō
, reinstalled as chancellor, and told him why, in view of world conditions, Japan had to sign treaties of friendship and commerce with various foreign powers. He also presented to Kuj
ō
the memorials sent by various daimyos and a copy of the provisional treaty with America. These documents were afterward submitted to the emperor.

That same day, November 29, the emperor promoted the new shogun to the senior second court rank and on the following day named him “great general subduing barbarians.” It may have seemed to K
ō
mei as if he were bestowing the highest honor in his power on a likely enemy. During the next months, K
ō
mei continued to write letters expressing his rage over the prevailing situation. At the end of the year, he finally gave an audience to Manabe Akikatsu, who was about to return to Edo. He gave him a letter that opened, “Friendship and commerce with the foreign barbarians constitutes a fatal flaw in the Imperial Land, a pollution of the Divine Land.” The emperor urged a return to “the good system of the closed country [
sakoku
].”
¹⁴
He was willing to pardon the signing of the treaties, although he himself did not approve of them, in view of conditions both inside and outside Japan. Nonetheless, the breathing space obtained by signing the treaties should be used to implement the policy of
k
ō
bu gattai
. Although this concession was the first of many that K
ō
mei would have to make, his ultimate objective, freeing Japan of the barbarians, never wavered.

The sixth year of Ansei (1859) opened with the traditional New Year festivities at the palace. There were exchanges of presents, performances of
bugaku
, and the consumption of ritual food and drinks. Sachinomiya, now in his seventh year, was presented by the court with a cask of saké and appetizers; he had reached an age when he could participate in some court activities. On February 21 he witnessed
bugaku
for the first time in the company of the emperor and received, also for the first time, a cup of saké from the emperor’s hand.

On May 24 four nobles who had been arrested by Manabe Akikatsu in the previous year—Takatsukasa Masamichi, Konoe Tadahiro, Takatsukasa Sukehiro, and Sanj
ō
Sanetsumu (1802–1859)—were granted their “request” that they be allowed to shave their heads and enter Buddhist orders. This was the shogunate’s punishment for the courtiers’ audacity in communicating directly with Tokugawa Nariaki. Takatsukasa Masamichi and his son Sukehiro had been among the few nobles to support opening the country to foreign trade, but they had been persuaded by “men of high purpose” (
shishi
), mainly lower-ranking samurai of nationalistic beliefs, to shift to favoring the closure of the country, thereby angering the shogunate.

Before the shogunate could pass sentence on these men, the Ky
ō
to
shoshidai
Sakai Tadaaki (1813–1873) informed them that he wished them to commit suicide, but they refused to comply. K
ō
mei, taking pity on the men, sent a letter to the chancellor Kuj
ō
Hisatada asking him to intercede with Sakai and obtain a pardon for them, but Manabe proved to be adamant. He had firm proof that secret communications had been exchanged between these men and Nariaki. Court secrets had been passed to Mito samurai, and samurai of Mito and Fukui had been incited to subversive activity. It was possible that these men had been deluded by the wild ideas of vagabonds, but regardless of the reasons, they had acted in contravention of
k
ō
bu gattai
.
¹⁵

On April 9 K
ō
mei had secretly sent a letter to Sanj
ō
Sanetsumu relating his special respect and affection for the accused men. During the reign of Emperor Nink
ō
, Takatsukasa Masamichi had served for a long period as chancellor, and when that emperor had suddenly died, bringing the inexperienced K
ō
mei to the throne, he had helped him in every conceivable way, acting almost as the regent. K
ō
mei could not bear to think of this man, who was now aged, being found guilty of a serious crime. Again, Konoe Tadahiro had been K
ō
mei’s tutor, his teacher of calligraphy, and the one who had placed the cap on his head when K
ō
mei had his
gembuku
ceremony. The other two men had also served diligently and well during the previous reign. When the foreigners came to Japan, all four men had done everything humanly possible to accord with his wishes. They may have made mistakes at times, but they could not possibly have entertained seditious plans regarding the shogun.
¹⁶

K
ō
mei’s letter concluded with the hope that he might be able to persuade the shogunate to show leniency. Sanj
ō
Sanetsumu received this letter at the village outside the capital where he was living in retreat. Although he was suffering from illness, he rose from bed, changed to a court costume and cap, and, after first purifying himself, read the letter. He wept at the graciousness of the emperor’s compassion. He felt sure that the praise for his services to the court would demonstrate that he had not been unfilial to the spirits of his ancestors and would save him from leaving a shameful name to his descendants. Nonetheless, Sakai sternly refused K
ō
mei’s plea for leniency, and even for a stay in implementing the punishment of the four men. K
ō
mei, still reluctant to order the men to shave their heads, asked them once again if this was really their wish. They answered that it was, no doubt resigned to their fate, and K
ō
mei finally had no choice but to issue the command.

Sakai Tadaaki appears as the villain in accounts describing how the Ansei purge affected the court, but he was only the agent of shogunate power in Ky
ō
to. Behind his unfeeling rejections of every attempt by K
ō
mei to obtain leniency for men who had served him and his father was the decision by Ii Naosuke, the most powerful man in the shogunate, to erase all opposition. Ii began the purge almost as soon as he took office as
tair
ō
in 1858 and continued it until he was assassinated two years later. The purge was occasioned mainly by the need Ii felt to remove opposition to shogunate policies with respect to treaties with foreign powers, but it also had a domestic aspect, the naming of a successor to the office of shogun. The purge proved to be a total failure and ultimately contributed to the shogunate’s collapse, but the two years during which arrests and imprisonments were carried out would be remembered as a reign of terror.

For K
ō
mei, the purge was a source of personal humiliation. Surely it was not necessary for the security of the shogunate that old men who had faithfully served K
ō
mei and his father before him should be made to enter Buddhist orders merely because at some stage they had expressed opposition to the treaties. But Ii was determined to make an example of each, even if this meant incurring K
ō
mei’s hatred. Rarely has the contradiction between the reality and the actuality of imperial authority been so clear. It must have been galling for the emperor, performing the prescribed rituals in the robes of his office, to recall that there was not a single command he could pronounce that might not be contravened by the shogunate.