Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (15 page)

Even after this arrangement had been reached, a fresh obstacle to the marriage arose. Since the middle of 1860, the shogunate had been privately conducting negotiations with Prussia, Belgium, and Switzerland for opening diplomatic relations, and at the end of the year a treaty with Prussia was signed.
¹⁰
When K
ō
mei received word that the shogunate was concluding three new treaties with foreign countries, he was, predictably, enraged, and he declared that the engagement of Kazunomiya and the shogun should be broken. He said that it was precisely because he had trusted the shogunate’s promise to abrogate the treaties that he had consented to the marriage. The chancellor and other court officials, panic stricken at the thought of the effect that K
ō
mei’s decision might have on relations between the court and the shogunate, attempted to mollify him, and in the end succeeded in getting him to agree to postponing for a few years (rather than terminating) the marriage plans. When Kazunomiya was asked her opinion, she answered with startling frankness that she had never wished for the marriage and that she hoped that she would not have to go to Edo until every last foreigner had been expelled and the East was peaceful; if this failed to happen, she hoped that the wedding would be called off.
¹¹

The marriage was preserved by an adroit maneuver by Sakai Tadaaki, who objected to transmitting to the shogunate the angry reactions of the court. He insisted that the information he had given concerning the new treaties had been privately transmitted to the chancellor and that it would be a violation of confidence if a formal protest were lodged with the shogunate. K
ō
mei was eventually persuaded to leave everything to the chancellor. On New Year’s Day of 1861, the shogunate sent the court a message explaining in detail the circumstances of the three new treaties and promising once again to expel the foreigners in seven to ten years.

Several other crises threatened to destroy the marriage plans, but in September 1861 Emperor K
ō
mei, his anger abated, agreed that Kazunomiya should leave for Edo in November. Princess Chikako, as Kazunomiya was now officially known,
¹²
left Ky
ō
to reluctantly.
¹³
She visited the Shugaku-in, which had been refurbished for her grandfather, Emperor K
ō
kaku, and on the return journey worshiped at the Kamo and Kitano Shrines. She attended a performance of n
ō
in the palace. When she went to pray at the Gion Shrine for a safe journey, the emperor and the prince watched as her procession left the palace gate. On November 17 she visited the palace to bid farewell to the emperor, empress, and prince and received presents from them. Before her departure, the emperor wrote the princess a letter asking that when she was married, she would use her influence over her husband to effect the expulsion of the barbarians. Finally, the day she dreaded, the day of her departure, arrived. On November 22 her palanquin left the Katsura Palace, accompanied by court officials. A year later, when patriots decided that the princess’s departure for Edo had been an unspeakable affront to imperial dignity, the two nobles who accompanied her all the way to Edo (Chigusa Aribumi and Iwakura Tomomi) were punished for their role in the affair.
¹⁴

The marriage procession was on a grand scale—as many as 10,000 armed men,
¹⁵
horses, and an enormous amount of food, gifts, and baggage, including a dismantled Ky
ō
to-style house that was to be erected in Edo, in keeping with the second of Kazunomiya’s five conditions for agreeing to the marriage. The princess traveled in the utmost luxury, with frequent stops along the way at places of touristic interest, not reaching Edo until December 16, though two weeks was usually ample time for the journey. The huge number of people in her entourage was deemed essential to guarantee her absolute safety. (There had been rumors that the princess might be abducted along the way.) Males over fifteen were forbidden to cross the path of the procession, and in the cities men were ordered to remain in back rooms, leaving the women to bow from their doors. The route taken was devious, in part to avoid places with inauspicious names; for example, in order not to cross Satta Pass, whose name suggests
satta
, or “divorced,” the procession left the T
ō
kaid
ō
, the normal route to Edo, and took a long detour through the mountains along another highway. Unfortunately, there was no way of avoiding the
enkiri enoki
, whose name meant “broken vows nettle-tree,” highly inauspicious before a marriage, but every last leaf on the tree was concealed with straw matting so as to protect the princess from any harmful effects from its name.
¹⁶

The marriage between the princess and the youthful shogun did not take place until March 11, 1862, but even before then, opponents of the marriage had resorted to violence. On February 14, 1862, the senior councillor And
ō
Nobumasa (1819–1871), a leading proponent of both
k
ō
bu gattai
and the marriage, was set upon by six
r
ō
nin
from Mito while on his way to the shogun’s castle. One man fired a shot into And
ō
’s palanquin, wounding him. The other five men attacked with drawn swords, but And
ō
was protected by some fifty retainers (the assassination of Ii Naosuke having alerted shogunate officials to the danger of traveling without sufficient escort), who quickly disposed of the would-be assassins.

The
r
ō
nin
carried with them a manifesto in which they stated why they had been impelled to take this action.
¹⁷
They accused And
ō
of having deceived the court: although he had given
k
ō
bu gattai
as the reason for making the emperor’s sister marry the shogun, in reality it was no more than a scheme for obtaining imperial consent to the treaties with the foreigners. The
r
ō
nin
had been aroused in particular by a rumor circulating at the time. Hori Toshihiro (1818–1860), a shogunate official who committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, was said to have left behind an open letter to And
ō
accusing him of disloyalty.
¹⁸
According to the letter, And
ō
had, at the instigation of Townsend Harris, plotted to depose the emperor. To this end, he had employed two scholars of national learning to produce examples from the distant past of emperors who had been dethroned.
¹⁹
The assassins, believing the rumors and angered by And
ō
’s apparent friendliness with foreigners, decided that he had defiled the sacred Way of a true subject. For this reason they had no choice but to impose Heaven’s punishment on him. The term
tench
ū
(divine punishment), though ancient in origin, first came into vogue at this time as a justification for the political murders of the 1860s.

Having narrowly escaped death at the hands of assailants, And
ō
might have been the object of sympathy, and his position might have become even stronger than before; but in fact, he lost the considerable political power he had enjoyed as the leader of the shogunate faction favoring economic reform and trade with the West, probably because the anti-shogunate forces had moved into the ascendancy.

One other crisis occurred before the marriage could take place. The shogunate had promised Princess Chikako that she would be allowed to return to Ky
ō
to for the services in memory of her father to be held on the seventeenth anniversary of his death, but her departure for Ky
ō
to was repeatedly delayed. The princess finally sent her senior lady-in-waiting in her stead. K
ō
mei was angered by the shogunate’s failure to keep its promises, but the latter argued that the long journey would fatigue the princess before her wedding.

Chikako was treated with the utmost deference at the wedding. The ceremony went on for about ten hours, sufficient time for the bride to change costume many times. Her feelings on first encountering her husband were not recorded, but the marriage, despite its political background and later problems with her mother-in-law, was as happy as any dynastic marriage could be. The princess’s wedded life lasted for only five and a half years, until Iemochi’s sudden death, but when she herself was on her deathbed, she asked to be buried in the Tokugawa tomb rather than in Ky
ō
to.

The marriage of the emperor’s sister and the shogun achieved the aim of bringing about closer relations between the imperial family and the shogunate, and it ushered in a brief period when the emperor enjoyed greater influence than he had in centuries.
²⁰
k
ō
mei unswervingly favored
k
ō
bu gattai
and opposed those who advocated overthrowing the shogunate, but tension mounted as the shogunate continued to sign treaties of commerce and amity with foreign countries, even though the court desired nothing more than to have every last foreigner expelled from Japan.

Shifts of policy were frequent and abrupt in all the factions, resulting at times in surprising alliances or hostilities. In the past, Satsuma had often behaved like a separate kingdom, almost independent of the shogunate, but at the end of 1861 the youthful daimyo, Shimazu Tadayoshi (1840–1897), sent envoys to the capital, offering to serve as a conduit in transmitting imperial wishes to the shogunate. The envoys offered K
ō
mei a sword, for which he expressed gratitude in a poem inscribed in his own hand:

When Shimazu Tadayoshi and his father received the poem, they were moved to tears.

In June 1862 the Satsuma daimyo and his father sent envoys to the capital informing the former minister of the left Konoe Tadahiro and the acting major counselor Konoe Tadafusa of their support for the emperor and their conviction that change in the shogunate was of urgent importance. They also expressed fears that the emperor was insufficiently protected, and for this reason, they had decided to send troops of their own into the capital. Konoe Tadafusa, alarmed, tried to fend off this unwanted assistance, but the Satsuma leaders would not listen. On June 15 some 1,000 Satsuma soldiers entered the capital. Their leader explained that they wanted to see some high-ranking court officials dismissed and the chancellor Kuj
ō
Hisatada replaced by Konoe Tadahiro. They also had demands concerning the reorganization of the shogunate. What they sought was the dismissal of officials who opposed
k
ō
bu gattai
. They demanded that the shogun swear fealty to the court. Once the imperial dignity was fully ensured by this action, ways should be considered of how it might be extended overseas.
²²
That night, possibly as a test of the genuineness of Satsuma’s promises of loyalty, the emperor commanded Shimazu Hisamitsu to quiet the turbulent
r
ō
nin
in the capital.

Five days later, Hisamitsu moved into action. Before he arrived in Ky
ō
to, the samurai and
r
ō
nin
who supported
sonn
ō
j
ō
i
supposed that he would lead them in an attack on the shogunate, but when he made it plain that reform and not destruction of the shogunate was his aim, they were much disappointed. Members of the Hagi and other domains who favored violent action met at the Terada-ya, an inn in Fushimi south of the capital, with malcontent members of the Satsuma domain to plan the assassination of the chancellor and Sakai Tadaaki. The plotters and members of the Satsuma domain who were obedient to Hisamitsu’s orders clashed. The rebels were massacred, and the emperor, greatly pleased, bestowed on Hisamitsu a dagger from the imperial collection, praising him for his victory over lawless men. Shimazu Hisamitsu had won a high reputation at the court.

Mutsuhito figures hardly at all in this part of the chronicle of his life. We know that he saw off Kazunomiya when she left for Edo, and perhaps he was aware (even at the age of ten) of her sadness. In June there was a ceremony, patterned on the one K
ō
mei had undergone at the same age, to commemorate his beginning the study of the Confucian classics, although in fact he had started three years earlier. An epidemic of measles that summer caused alarm in the palace, and prayers were said to preserve the prince. Another baby sister died, less than a year old. On a more pleasant note that same year, Mutsuhito first tried his hand at painting.

These bits of information are scattered among the prosaic events recorded in the official chronology. It is easy to miss the facts of lasting importance. For example, the section describing events of September 1862 records in detail the religious observances at various shrines, the emperor’s evening spent admiring the moon, and his presentation of gifts to the crown prince. These and similarly unexciting events are followed by the entry for September 14, which opens with a flat statement: three nobles—Iwakura Tomomi, Chigusa Aribumi, and Tominok
ō
ji Hironao—accused of having cooperated with the shogunate in sending Kazunomiya to Edo, were confined to their houses, relieved of their posts, and urged to become Buddhist priests.
²³