Part 27

Dying, as he did, prior to the adoption of the Western system of orders of nobility, Kido Koin—better known as Kido Takakoto, or still earlier in his career as Kido Jiunichiro,—won during his lifetime a title to the esteem and everlasting gratitude of his fellow-subjects of the Japanese Emperor far above any rank that he could have been rewarded with even had he lived to see his aspirations for his country’s welfare realised, as they have in great measure been, during recent years. He was a Choshiu man, a native of the same province as those other Makers of Japan—Ito, Inouye, and Yamagata,—and he was active throughout that troubled period in which his clan came to the front in affairs, and participated in all those stirring events in which it was engaged. As became a samurai of the great southern province, he was an expert swordsman, and he was likewise one of the most profound scholars of his time. The two things did not always go together, even in Japan, and it suited those knights of old whose tastes ran primarily in the direction of falconry or the chase, or who were given to fencing and drill, to somewhat undervalue culture, as scarcely deserving of their serious attention. Every fief had its college for the education of the youthful samurai, but they rarely aspired to literary excellence or renown, preferring the more robust accomplishments of archery and swordsmanship to the ability to pen an essay or compose a stanza, even though it were but one of the orthodox thirty-one syllabled kind that every gentleman was supposed to be able to produce at will. Kido’s energy was unbounded, his patriotism unquenchable. There was no risk that he would not cheerfully run if it afforded a prospect of adding to his store of knowledge of a character likely to enhance his ability to serve his country or the imperialist cause with which he was always identified. Dangers and disguises were for years inseparable from his daily life, as he never missed an opportunity of acquiring information that would the better qualify him for the services that he sought to render to the nation. How much he accomplished in his comparatively brief span of life is matter of common knowledge in Japan, though perhaps, for lack of information, his talents have hitherto met with but scant appreciation outside the borders of the Japanese Emperor’s dominions.

Entering the military service of the Nagato province at a very early age, Kido Jiunichiro proceeded to acquire a competent acquaintanceship with all those arts in which skill was demanded of the young samurai of the time, and in some he soon excelled. He was with the Choshiu men when they made their assault on Kioto, and was daring enough to remain behind at that capital and headquarters of his lord’s political opponents after the rest of the Choshiu forces had been compelled to beat a retreat to their own territory. It was at Kido’s house, on a later date, that the reconciliation which had such stupendous consequences for Japan as a nation between the clans of Satsuma and Choshiu was quietly arranged to the satisfaction of all parties, the two Satsuma leaders Kuroda and Oyama going to him and consulting with him, as the representative of Choshiu, in reference to joint action which had for its object the overthrow of the Shogunate and the re-establishment of the imperial regime.

When the new government was set up Kido, together with Goto Shojiro, of Tosa, and Komatsu Tatewaki, of Satsuma, were made _Ko-mon_, or advisers, of the So-Sai,—the title then conferred on the official head of the administration, but which is now applied to the president of a board,—and as it rested with the So-Sai to give or refuse the imperial consent to all measures proposed by the other departments of State, the position of _Ko-mon_ was one of great power and responsibility.

It will be understood that at this time the present sovereign had only just come to the throne, and that the establishment of the imperial government at Kioto was the outcome of the resignation of his office of Shogun by the present Prince Tokugawa Keiki, who had a few weeks before surrendered his rights and privileges and retired into private life, though his adherents were still fighting beyond Tokio, and the war of the Restoration was not yet over. The Emperor, of course, was still in residence at the Kioto Dairi, or palace, and Kido realised that before a settled order of things could be hoped for the feudal system must be abolished, root and branch. He clearly perceived the necessity for centralisation as a first step in the direction of the introduction of a constitutional regime, and, with Kido, to see his duty before him was to act.

The daimio of Choshiu, his own chieftain, was then at Yamaguchi, and by way of estimating the chances of success for the bold proposal by which he was resolved to stand or fall, Kido set out for that distant town, determined to ascertain first of all how the lord Mori might be disposed to view so audacious a proposition as that to be submitted for the consideration of the territorial magnates.

Arriving at Yamaguchi, which stands at a distance from the coast, in a hilly district—as its name, _lit._: “mountain’s mouth,” might imply—Kido lost no time in procuring an interview with the baron, and endeavouring to prove by every argument at his command how fatally feudalism was obstructing the progress of the empire. In conclusion he respectfully invited the lord of Choshiu to divest himself of his inherited estates and make a present of them to the Emperor!

Baron Mori listened to this astounding suggestion of his retainer with composure, and remained silent, Kido wondering, in all probability, what would be the nature of the punishment that would descend upon him for his temerity.

But to his everlasting honour the daimio raised his head and said, after a while,—“Let it be so: act as you think best.”

Although Kido knew that his lord’s patriotism was of a kind that would prompt him to make enormous sacrifices, and that with Choshiu as with Satsuma, the overwhelming superiority of foreign armaments had been so effectively demonstrated as to make it clear that unless Japan was to fall a prey to some enterprising foe she must bestir herself and reform her institutions to a degree that would enable her to present a united front to an aggressor, it was with a feeling of intense gratitude that Kido received his chieftain’s answer. He had had no expectation of obtaining so ready a consent to his excessively venturesome proposition.

As he was retiring the baron called Kido back and warned him, “You must be careful, for the samurai are excited with their recent achievements and may not take it quietly. You had better watch for a convenient opportunity before making my decision known.”

Kido’s joy at this initial success was great beyond measure, and he forthwith made his way to Kioto, where he found Okubo Toshimichi, and they entered deeply into the question of approaching the other daimios with a similar suggestion. Okubo thoroughly shared Kido’s views as to the imperative need of abolishing the feudal system, and was not less surprised than Kido himself had been at the willingness shown by the lord of Choshiu to relinquish his possessions. He accepted it, however, as a good augury in his own case when he should attempt to convince the lord of Satsuma, to which province he belonged, of the wisdom of adopting a course similar to that taken by baron Mori.

Representations were made most cautiously to one daimio after the other, and Kido drew up a paper in the form of a memorial to the Emperor, which the feudal chiefs were asked to subscribe to, and to which four of them at once appended their seals, they being those who had been most active in bringing about the situation which culminated in the fall of the Shogun from power. The very essence of this epoch-making document, conveying an unequivocal renunciation of their possessions and entire submission to the imperial will by the leading daimios throughout the land, was patriotic devotion to the sovereign and repose in his wisdom and virtue as their restored monarch. “We hereby offer up our possessions, our men, and ourselves to his Majesty,—let the imperial commands issue for the remodelling of the clans,—let everything henceforward be done exclusively in his sovereign name, and let the internal affairs of the country be so regulated and placed on a true and safe basis that the empire shall be able eventually to take its place side by side with the other enlightened countries of the world.” Such was the tone and in great measure the phraseology employed when the grandees of Japan spontaneously relinquished their positions as lords of the soil and unconditionally bowed themselves before the throne in readiness to conform to their ruler’s mandate, relying implicitly, for their future, on his justice and benevolence.

To Kido Koin, in the first place, must be assigned the credit of this truly diplomatic triumph, and in a second place to Okubo. Though Choshiu was willing, it would have been impossible without the approval of Satsuma to carry the proposal through, nor would it have been probable that some, at all events, of the less prominent daimios could have been induced to renounce their all but for the brilliant example set them by the powerful barons of the first rank (kokushiu) of the south.

To the memorial the Emperor replied that the proposal should be debated in Council, and in the course of a few weeks the scheme was definitely adopted which provided for the change from daimiates or _Hans_ to provincial administrations, and the appointment of the former lords of those territories as _Chiji_ or Governors. The entire revenues, it was arranged, should go to the imperial exchequer, and on the other hand the sovereign took it upon himself to provide for the samurai who had thereunto been the retainers of their feudal chiefs. The daimios were themselves invited to return to their territories for the last time and send in statements of their possessions, which they did, and ultimately, when their own incomes had been apportioned in accordance with a settled basis of commutation, they evacuated their old castles and went to dwell in retirement whithersoever their tastes led them. Some entered into trade, with a part or all of the capital obtained by commutation of their assigned incomes, but the majority, realising their total inaptitude for commercial pursuits, having been accustomed all their lives to leave such matters to their factors, were warned in time and refrained from embarking in enterprises for which they were obviously unfitted.

Meanwhile Kido Koin was called to the post of Minister of the Interior in the newly established Government. In 1871 he left Yokohama in company with Prince Iwakura, Ito Hirobumi, and others on the Embassy to Europe and America, elsewhere referred to, and returned to Japan with them in the autumn of 1873. Resuming his position at the Home Department, he continued to fulfil his arduous duties until increasing illness obliged him to withdraw, and he died of consumption in 1875, at the age of thirty-seven, regretted by the whole Japanese nation. His monument at the Aoyama Cemetery is all that visibly reminds this generation of one who was a patriot and a statesman of the highest ability, but Japan at large acknowledges its indebtedness to his unselfish devotion and keen perception of the requirements of the age in which he lived.

The rank of Marquis was posthumously conferred on Kido Koin, and the present holder of the title is a nephew of the great statesman.

XVIII

COUNT ITAGAKI

Though necessarily less active by reason of advancing age than he was a quarter of a century ago, when he succeeded in forcing the hand of the Government of the day to the extent that he extracted a promise of the establishment of a Diet in 1890, and though nominally he has retired from active political life, Count Itagaki Taisuke is still a power in the land of his birth, highly respected for his strict integrity of purpose, absolute sincerity, and wide philanthropy. As one of the leading spirits in the development of the project of Restored Imperial Rule he was particularly energetic in the years immediately preceding the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and displayed military ability of a high order in the War of the Restoration.

Born in the province of Tosa on the 17th of April 1837, of Samurai parents, he applied himself as a youth with much ardour to martial exercises, and was proficient in all the arts that the youth of the warrior caste was, in the palmy days of the Tokugawa Administration, expected to excel in. At Kochi, the chief town of Tosa, he devoted himself to military studies, and devoured such works on strategy as were then available, with the result that when the stupendous struggle of 1868 took place between North and South he was given the command of a division, in the army of the Imperialists, and displayed invincible talent in the leadership of his men throughout the campaign under Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and Marshal Saigo Takamori. The Tosa men were conspicuous for their steadiness, and were pronounced, in respect of drill and discipline, to be in the front rank of the forces that overcame the adherents of the Shogunate and made practicable the entire abolition of that long-cherished feudal system which so greatly retarded Japan’s progress.

As a reward for the eminent services rendered by him in the war, Itagaki Taisuke was made a _Sangi_ in the new Government, this being a position comparable to that of a Cabinet Minister at the present day. When, in the discussion of Korean affairs a sharp divergence of opinion was manifested in 1873-4 among the members of the Dai-jo-kwan or Governing Council, and the war party led by Saigo Takamori was outvoted, those who sided with him, one of whom was Itagaki, resigned office, and from that time forward Tosa, whither Itagaki promptly returned and vigorously applied himself to the formation of a democratic party, became known as the nursery of advanced political aspirations and the primary source whence sprang an irresistible undercurrent of opinion tending towards representative government.

As a matter of fact Itagaki had himself sent up a memorial to Government at the time he quitted the Council, urging the institution of a national assembly, and when he retired from the capital he found ready to his hand the nucleus of the political association that he had it in mind to form in the shape of the Ri-shi-sha, a Society which had been organised for the purpose of promoting the interests of those who espoused the popular cause. Though the Government rejected his memorial, Itagaki had reason to think that his plea had not been wholly unnoticed, inasmuch as an edict appeared summoning the Local Governors to consult at headquarters on matters of provincial administration, the improvement of communications, the regulation of public meetings, and so on, and in 1875 the Gen-Ro-In, or Senate (_lit._: Congress of Elders), was established and discharged its functions as a legislative body until it was superseded by the Diet in 1890. The Local Governors met again in 1878, and meanwhile the Satsuma clan had revolted and the country had been plunged into civil war. Itagaki and his friends had seized the right moment to point out how beneficial in allaying internal dissensions would be the institution of a Parliament which should voice the opinions and hopes of the nation. A memorial addressed by them to the Emperor urged that there could be nothing that would more directly lead to the welfare of the people than for the sovereign to signify once for all his disapproval of despotic measures and to emphasise his wish that public opinion should be consulted in regard to the conduct of affairs of State. The effect of this action on the part of the Emperor, pleaded the memorialists, would be that concurrently with the establishment of a representative assembly the people would show greater zeal in regard to the country’s vital concerns and would be able to take a genuine interest in its affairs, while with the disappearance of all traces of despotism the aspirations of the masses would rise to a higher plane and civilisation would be advanced simultaneously with the increase of national wealth and the cessation of internecine jealousies and antagonism.

The leaven had been introduced into the mass of the more reflective section of the population, it was clear, and Itagaki, in his retired home at Kochi, became the acknowledged head of the _Jiyuto_, or Party of Freedom, a term which has come into general use as signifying the Liberal Party as distinct from the Progressive Party originated by Count Okuma some fifteen months later. Tosa had long been the centre, in fact, of an agitation which in 1881 assumed truly formidable proportions, and its endeavours bore fruit in the autumn of that year in the form of an Imperial Rescript, dated the 12th October, in which his Majesty announced the grant of a constitution, to take effect in 1890, and his intention of convoking a Diet for the discussion of national affairs.

Throughout the preceding period of eight years the party headed by Itagaki Taisuke had never wavered in its resolute advocacy of the popular cause, though its members were often the objects of violent opposition from reactionary zealots, whose antagonism in the case of Itagaki himself took the form of a desperate assault, perpetrated by a youth whose imagination had become fired with a mistaken notion of serving his country, and who at Gifu stabbed, almost to death, the Jiyuto leader who at the time was engaged in making his first tour of the provinces after the establishment of the party on a definite basis. Fortunately the intending assassin’s aim was disturbed, for he failed to strike in a vital spot, and after a time Itagaki recovered, but he was perilously near sharing the fate of so many of his fellow-countrymen who have at various times suffered for their prominence in national politics. As has often been the result of political crimes, too, the foul deed had precisely the opposite effect to that which its perpetrator doubtless intended, for the exclamation of Itagaki as he fell to the ground,—“I may die, but freedom never!”—rang through the land, and did more to knit together the bonds of Liberalism than even floods of oratory could possibly have achieved.

The following year Itagaki journeyed in company with his life-long friend and fellow-clansman, Goto Shojiro, to America and Europe, and his subsequent career was inseparably connected with the spread of Liberal ideas among his countrymen, and of preparation for the exercise of those rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Eventually the control of the _Jiyuto_ passed in great measure to Count Ito, and the party was dissolved, to be resuscitated on a new footing in connection with the Constitutionalists. But this did not occur until various attempts had been made in the direction of Government by party, a system which, from one cause or another, seems in Japan to be doomed to failure. Itagaki was Home Minister in the Third Ito Cabinet, which fell in August 1896, and when in June 1898 Marquis Ito went out of office, he recommended that a trial should be given to party Government, and that the formation of a Cabinet should be entrusted to Counts Itagaki and Okuma. The experiment was in no sense to be regarded as satisfactory, and the rivalries that had formerly existed, and had merely been temporarily suppressed, were revived in an aggravated form. In less than six months the internal disagreements found vent in an open quarrel, and the idea of establishing Government on a party basis was abandoned if not for ever at least for an indefinite period. There was a brief repetition of the experiment in 1900-1, extending over seven months in all, when Marquis Ito headed his fifth Cabinet, but the result was no better, and save for that short interval the administration has been for the past seven years avowedly conducted on non-party lines.

The Jiyuto formed by Count Itagaki (who received his title in 1887) no longer exists, for it was abolished, to all intents and purposes, in 1900, and its place has been occupied more or less by the Sei-yu-kai, or Constitutional party, which was headed until July 1903 by Marquis Ito, and since that date has had as its president the Marquis Saionji. Count Itagaki has ceased to figure on the political stage in anything approaching the degree to which he at one period of his career filled the public eye, but there is ample ground for the conviction that his influence is yet very appreciable in Liberal circles, albeit many younger men than himself have recently come to the front. Close upon seventy years of age, he surely has earned the right, after a strenuous life, to retire from the political arena, and it is indisputable that he enjoys the respect and confidence of the entire nation in those minor enterprises which have of late received a large share of his attention, and which have as their object, for the most part, the amelioration of the lot of the poor of his own province, or are kindred efforts in the cause of humanity at large.

XIX

COUNT MATSUKATA MASAYOSHI

Born in Satsuma in the year 1835, the son of a Kagoshima samurai, the statesman whose name will for all time be identified with the adoption in Japan of a gold standard has played a very distinguished part in the affairs of his country, for it is to his untiring efforts that must in a peculiar degree be ascribed the circumstance that, in all Asia, his is the only nation which bases its financial system on gold monometallism. The Coinage law which brought about the great change that has had so vast an influence on the economic and financial conditions prevailing in Japan came into operation on the 1st October 1897. The hope which Count Matsukata entertained that capital at a low rate of interest might be attracted from gold standard countries, to help on the industrial growth of the country, has already to a very appreciable extent been realised. That in the long run the advantages of the gold standard would be deep and abiding, conducive to the healthy industrial growth of the country, was Count Matsukata’s firm and expressed conviction.

Matsukata Masayoshi when quite young entered the service of his Han and took part as a Satsuma clansman in the events which preceded the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He was a fervent advocate of the establishment by the Satsuma Chieftain of a provincial navy, and in this proposal he met with some success, as his clan purchased several ships which at a later date carried the Satsuma flag (a circle with a cross in it) into action against vessels of the Tokugawa squadron under Admiral Enomoto, though without achieving any substantial victory. The knowledge which Matsukata acquired in his young days of matters naval was mainly obtained at Nagasaki from the Dutch, and he was in this way brought into contact with Western people at an early age. This was prior to the opening of the Treaty ports, when the Dutchmen were the only foreigners allowed to reside in the Japanese Empire. Nagasaki was reopened to general foreign trade and intercourse on the 1st of July 1859, under the terms of the Elgin treaty of the previous year.