Part 7

Prior to the Meiji era, which began in 1867, the Shogun (known in foreign countries as the Tycoon), who was the Emperor’s deputy at Yedo, now Tokio, personified the military supremacy of a feudal system which had existed for many centuries, the last occupant of the post being the direct descendant of the founder of the Tokugawa house in which the office of Shogun had been hereditary from the year 1603. Possibly the history of Modern Japan might have taken a different turn but for the recognition by the Shogun Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, otherwise Tokugawa Keiki, of the necessity of introducing reforms into his country if it were to hold its own against the tendency to deal arbitrarily with the nations of the Orient which was half-a-century since being manifested by some of the powers of the Occident. Prince Keiki placed his resignation in 1868 in the hands of his imperial master and counselled the adherents of the Tokugawa house to unite with those of the Southern clans in efforts for the well-being of the nation at large. That his followers could not be persuaded at once to take his advice can scarcely be regarded as the fault of the Shogun, who had only the year previously succeeded to the honours of the position yet was prompt to relinquish them in order, as he hoped, to avert some of the horrors of civil war. Tokugawa Keiki was chosen by the Mito branch of the family to follow the Shogun Iyemochi in 1866, and he succeeded to power at Yedo castle at a moment when Japan was racked with dissensions between the party which opposed the opening of the ports to foreign trade and that which was in favour of the admission of strangers. The Shogun Iyesada, who in 1854 and subsequent years had entered into the treaties with the representatives of the Occidental nations, had been repudiated by his imperial master, the Emperor Komei, who for a long time refused to ratify these agreements. Even though he eventually signed them the nation remained sharply divided within itself on the question of the introduction of foreign methods. It is almost necessary, in order that the position occupied at this period by the Shogun should be fairly comprehended, to allude briefly to the earlier history of Japan, from about the time of the Emperor Konoye, who was contemporary with King Stephen of England. The rise of the military caste in Japan dates from that era, when the Taira and Minamoto families were contending for the mastery, and it was a period which has been termed not altogether inaptly that of the Japanese “wars of the roses” (the badges worn were really red and white chrysanthemums), inasmuch as the rival clans were intimately related to each other, and strove to place their respective candidates in possession of the real executive power, which was even then becoming gradually acquired by the deputies of the true sovereigns who dwelt at Kioto. Ultimately the Minamoto family prevailed, in the person of the famous warrior Yoritomo, about 1185 A.D., and seven years later, when his authority had been firmly established, he received from the reigning sovereign the title of Sei-I-Tai-Sho-Gun—_i.e._ Barbarian-vanquishing-Generalissimo, in allusion to the duty of guarding Japan from the inroads of those northern savages who at that period made occasional descents on the coasts of Oshiu. The headquarters of the Shogun’s government were then at Kamakura, a place of great interest to travellers at the present day, and within easy reach of the port of Yokohama. Kamakura as it now stands contains but few traces of its former glories, but the temple dedicated to Hachiman, the Japanese Mars, is of noble proportions and annually attracts thousands of pilgrims who journey thitherward in confident expectation of obtaining relief or benefit from the virtue inherent in this celebrated shrine. In Yoritomo’s day it was a city of 1,000,000 inhabitants, but its _yashiki_ walls, crumbling to powder, are fast disappearing, and its magnificent avenues of cedar ceased to resound to the martial tread of mail-clad warriors centuries ago. Kamakura fell, as Yedo rose, and Yedo castle, some portions of which yet exist, adjoining the Imperial palace, was begun in 1592. It is Kamakura that boasts the possession of the bronze image of Buddha, over fifty feet in height, towering from its high pedestal above the groves of pine that surround the temple, and forming a conspicuous landmark as the village is first seen from a hill on the Fujisawa road. After Yoritomo’s death the Ho-jo family gained an ascendency in the affairs of the nation and practically ruled it until 1333 A.D., for the Shoguns of that epoch were scarcely more than figureheads. But it is to the everlasting credit of the Ho-jo that when Kublai Khan sought to subjugate Japan, in the thirteenth century, the defence of the country was in their hands so complete as to have led to as overwhelming a defeat of the Mongol armada as that which Queen Elizabeth of England inflicted upon the presumptuous Spaniards in 1588. The Mongol invaders had, like the Duke of Medina Sidonia, not only to contend against the very active defenders of the realms which they sought to invade, but also with fierce storms at sea that threw their vessels into confusion and exposed the scattered fragments of Kublai Khan’s immense fleet to separate and disastrous attack from the Japanese vessels manned by resolute _samurai_.

The armada which had threatened Japan’s independence had no sooner been disposed of than internecine strife began afresh, and rival dynasties of Shoguns kept the land in a ferment until, in 1392, the northern or Ashikaga line proved itself the stronger, and Japan entered into the enjoyment of two centuries of almost uninterrupted peace. Under the Ashikaga administration the country flourished exceedingly, and the epoch is famed in Japanese history as one in which learning and the sciences advanced to a degree of perfection never before known. High art and culture everywhere prevailed.

It was during the supremacy of the Ashikaga Shoguns that the geisha first became popular in Japan, and the musical instrument termed the _samisen_ was introduced from the Loo-Choo islands. The earliest trace to be met with of the use of this species of guitar is contained in a history of events for the year 1558, and it has been suggested that the Loo-Choo people obtained the instrument from the Spaniards who came to the Philippines in 1520, and continued their voyage under Magellan northward as far as Nafa. But this view of the samisen’s origin is not entirely concurred in by Japanese archæologists who hold that it is improbable, for many reasons, that it is merely a bad copy of the guitar. The Loochooans called it the Jamisen, and used it to scare away snakes, because its sound was, as they declared, much like the cry of the mongoose (ichneumon), which is the implacable enemy of the serpent tribe. Possibly this explanation of the purpose which their special instrument of music was made of old to serve may not altogether commend itself to the geisha body to-day, and it would appear to be more probable that snake’s skin was stretched on the drum where ordinarily vellum is employed,—in more recent time cat’s skin has been used,—and that ja = serpent, and mi = body, sen = strings, may be the actual derivation of the name, though as written now in Japan it might mean “three dainty threads.” The geisha’s office was to sing, dance, play the samisen or other musical instrument, to pour out wine for the guests, and generally to infuse gaiety and good humour among the convives, her title of gei = accomplishments, and sha = exponent, sufficiently indicating the nature of the services she was engaged to render. She was, in fact, a professional entertainer, and in the luxurious days of the Ashikaga Shogunate she became fashionable, and has never lost her popularity. Her taste in dress is considered to be unapproachable, her coiffure is a triumph of the hairdresser’s art,—the recognised style being some form or other of the “shimada,” a fashion brought to the capital centuries ago from the town of Shimada, a railway station midway between Tokio and Kioto,—she is entirely her own mistress, and often lives in her own house, though in the majority of cases she dwells with others and has an agent who makes contracts for her. Her attractions may draw patrons and benefit the landlord, as he is quick to perceive, of the restaurant to which she may choose to attach herself, and if she should be summoned to a house or to take part in an entertainment to which she does not care to go, she is at perfect liberty to decline the invitation. Anything less resembling the life of slavery that it is sometimes represented to be it would be difficult to imagine. Her singing and dancing are usually remunerated at a fixed price per half-hour, varying according to her status as an accomplished entertainer, and she is not infrequently called upon to display her abilities to a party composed exclusively of ladies, whose wish it may be, like that of the other sex, to beguile the tedium of a winter evening by her witty conversation and her skill in music. Finally it must be added that a geisha of good repute is more sought after than one whose morality is deemed to be somewhat lax. In any case her character is always known to the police, for it is the rule that she must take out a licence as an entertainer, and the Chief Superintendent of the Section, in handing the document to her, commonly adds some words of fatherly admonition to avoid the many pitfalls that of necessity lie in her path.

The nation once more experienced the miseries of civil strife towards the close of the sixteenth century, this time by reason of the introduction of a religion which differed from that which had been dominant in Japan for twenty-three centuries, and likewise from that Buddhism which had found its way eastward 1000 years before from India. The Portuguese had obtained the right, under the Ashikaga rule, to settle in Japan, and in 1542 they brought with them,—what were altogether strange at that time to the Ten-shi’s people,—firearms, and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith. The keen desire manifested by the Jesuits to make proselytes speedily provoked the antagonism of the Buddhist and Shinto priesthoods, but, as was the case in China, the climax seems to have been reached only with the assumption by the new-comers of political power. To such pretensions the ruling house at Yedo could but oppose all its strength, and the patriotism of the country asserted itself in the form of a persecution that left no stone unturned in the effort to rid the land of a direct menace to its existence as an independent monarchy, secure from the influences of the Church of Rome. But the expulsion of the visitors was not accomplished until many years after the supremacy of the Ashikaga line had been successfully challenged by Nobunaga, and to the renowned Hideyoshi,—the Taiko-sama, or Great general,—had succeeded the scarcely less famous Iyeyasu, “the Law-giver,” who founded the Toku-gawa dynasty of Shoguns, and himself to all intents and purposes governed the country, from his accession in 1603 to the post of Sei-I-Tai-Sho-Gun, to his death in 1616, for though nominally he gave way to his third son, Hidetada, in 1605, he really ruled in his son’s name, and retained the executive power in his own hands. His ostensible retirement was due to his desire for leisure to frame his system of laws for the better government of the empire, and he drew up a scheme for the effective subordination of the provincial dai-mios, or feudatories, to the ruling authority at Yedo, which remained in force until the Restoration of direct sovereign rule, in 1868.

The Shogun Iyeyasu was descended from the Minamoto family, and the name Toku-gawa, _lit._: stream of blessings, is said to have been taken from a river and village of the same name in the province of Shimo-tsuke, and not far from the celebrated Nikko Shrines. On the banks of the little Tokugawa the Shogun’s ancestors had dwelt, as farmers, for centuries, but the father of Iyeyasu,—Toku-gawa Shiro,—lived in the village of Matsudaira, in the province of Mikawa, which borders on the Pacific, about midway between Kobé and Yokohama. Here the “Law-giver” was born in 1542, the year that the Portuguese voyager, Mendez Pinto, first set foot on the soil of Japan. Iyeyasu fought under Nobunaga, and Hideyoshi, and ultimately succeeded the renowned Tai-ko Sama in the supreme command of the military forces, occupying thereafter the position of Sei-I-Tai-Sho-Gun. Iyeyasu first acquired property in his native province of Mikawa, and all his early associations were with that region, so much so that his opponents in after years were accustomed to allude to him somewhat slightingly as the “man from Mikawa.” When Iyeyasu obtained the position of Shogun in 1603 he elevated his birthplace to a position of honour by conferring its name as an extra title on many of his supporters, and down to the date of the abolition of such territorial distinctions there were not a few prominent dai-mios who thus preserved their connection with the Tokugawa regime from the beginning of its supremacy. The traces were to be found in titles such as “Nabeshima Matsudaira Hizen no Kami”—the baron Nabeshima Matsudaira of Hizen province,—Kuroda Matsudaira the dai-mio of Chikuzen,—and a host of others. In accord with the plans formulated by Tokugawa Iyeyasu every one among the number, some 300 in all, of the provincial barons was personally required to spend a moiety of each year in residence at his Yashiki in Yedo, and to leave his family there for the other six months,—the Yashikis being town mansions dotted about the capital in which a semi-regal state was kept up, and where the barons were surrounded by hundreds of their own retainers, ready to do their chieftain’s bidding on the instant. The remnants of these mansions are still to be found in modern Tokio, but they were in great part utilised, on the Restoration of Imperial rule, as Government offices and barracks for the troops of the army then about to be formed on Western lines. One of the most remarkable of these mansions of Old Yedo was that occupied by the Mito family, and it still retains much of its ancient splendour, inasmuch as it has been converted into a public park, and its magnificent gardens are maintained at the expense of the State, while the buildings and site of the historic residence of the Mito princes have been made over to the military for the purposes of an arsenal. It was part of Iyeyasu’s plan to adequately provide for the preservation of the Tokugawa line in the office of Shogun, and to that end he conferred upon three of his sons dukedoms in Owari, Kishiu, and Mito respectively. These three provinces are somewhat widely separated, for Owari is the region of which the flourishing city of Nagoya is at the present day the centre,—Kishiu is the province that borders the Kî channel at the eastern entrance to the Inland Sea,—and the Mito territory was that which is situated north-east of Tokio, and to the north of the river Toné, where it enters the Pacific near Cape Inuboye. Kishiu is now known as Wakayama _Ken_ or Prefecture, Owari is Aichi _Ken_, and Mito is now Ibaraki _Ken_, though the boundaries do not exactly correspond with the ancient frontiers. The tripartite grant of territory to his seventh, eighth, and ninth sons respectively under this arrangement was accompanied by the proviso that in the event of the failure of the direct line the Shogun should be chosen from among the cadets of one or other of these families. In after years it frequently became needful to fall back on the wisely ordained succession thus laid down at the beginning of Iyeyasu’s reign at Yedo, wise in the sense that the extinction of the line was provided against, though it was not always possible to make a selection that met with the approval of all parties, since it sometimes happened that more than one branch of the Tokugawa house was ready with a candidate for the post of honour. It will presently be seen that a difficulty arose in this respect only a few years prior to the abolition of the Shogun’s office altogether, and which was not disposed of without many heart-burnings.

Some idea may be formed of the scale of magnificence on which the feudal system inaugurated during Iyeyasu’s tenure of the Shogunal office was based from the subjoined table of the barons’ revenues. For convenience’ sake I have added the approximate value of the _koku_ of rice, in terms of which the incomes were formerly calculated, at the prices ruling in Japan for that commodity at the present day.

ANNUAL INCOMES OF THE BARONS UNDER THE SHOGUNATE

The _San-ke_, descended from the three youngest Sons of the Founder of the Tokugawa house

Title Residence Income At present value koku £ Owari Nagoya 610,000 = 762,000 Kii Wakayama 559,000 = 700,000 Mito Mito 350,000 = 440,000

(All bore the family arms of the Tokugawa, three heart-shaped leaves in a circle.)

Mostly sprung from the Governors appointed by, or the personal connections or vassals of Tokugawa Iyeyasu, A.D. 1603-16

Dai-Mio’s Clan Family Name Residence Income At present value koku £ Kaga Mayeda Kanazawa 1,027,000 = 1,284,000 Satsuma Shimadzu Kagoshima 710,000 = 887,000 Sendai Date Sendai 625,000 = 780,000 { Close Echizen Matsudaira Fukui 320,000 = 400,000 { Relatives Aidzu Matsudaira Wakamatsu 230,000 = 280,000 { of { Iyeyasu Higo Hosokawa Kumamoto 540,000 = 655,000 Chikuzen Kuroda Fukuoka 520,000 = 650,000 Geishiu (Aki) Asano Hiroshima 426,000 = 535,000 Choshiu & Suwo Mori Hagi 369,000 = 462,000 Hizen Nabeshima Saga 350,000 = 463,000 Inaba Ikeda Tottori 350,000 = 463,000 Bizen Ikeda Okayama 315,000 = 419,000 Ashiu (Awa) Hachisuka Tokushima 258,000 = 323,000 Tosa Yamanouchi Kochi 242,000 = 304,000 Chikugo Arima Kurume 210,000 = 267,000

Descended from Hachiman Taro

Dai-Mio’s Clan Family Name Residence Income At present value koku £ Akita (Ugo) Sataki Akita 206,000 = 258,000 Nambu (Mutsu) Nambu Morioka 200,000 = 250,000 Yonezawa (Uzen) Uyesugi Yonezawa 150,000 = 188,000

At the time of Iyeyasu the total revenue of the Empire was calculated to be equal to 28,900,000 koku of rice, out of which he distributed 20,000,000 of koku among those daimios and other dignitaries who were closely attached to the Tokugawa house, and retained 8,900,000 koku for the support of his own household and the maintenance of Government in Yedo. From this immense sum he also had to make, it must be borne in mind, suitable grants to the Court at Kioto, including the privy purse, and it was incumbent on the Shogun at all times to secure to the Emperor ample funds for the support of the imperial dignity and honour. In former years this duty had not invariably been executed on a fitting scale of liberality, the Ashikaga Shoguns in particular having made it a point to keep the Emperors poor. Under the regime of the Tokugawa, however, this had never been a cause of complaint, and in the days of Iyeyasu especially the apportionments of revenue to the service of the Court were made on a satisfactory basis. The repair of roads, and the cost of local administration in general, were matters to which the Daimios were expected to give attention without any allowances beyond those made from headquarters, their own incomes having in the majority of cases been ample for all purposes.

Following these eighteen “kokushiu daimios” ranked the eighteen “Ka-mon” (Members of the family) who were all relatives of the Tokugawa house, and bore the name of Matsudaira, the revenues they enjoyed ranging from 10,000 to 200,000 koku.

Next to the Ka-mon were the “To-sama” (outside lords) with incomes of 10,000 to 100,000 koku. They numbered from 90 to 100. These were representatives of collateral branches of the Kokushiu or greater barons, but were “outside” the Tokugawa.

After the “To-sama” ranked the “Fu-dai” (successive generations) and of these there were 115 families, with revenues ranging from 10,000 to 350,000 koku. The fu-dai were the main support of the Tokugawa house under the Shogunate regime.

It is not surprising to know that the feudal castles of these numerous barons were at one time to be counted by the hundred, or that many are still extant.

Among the Fudai families ranked two which became exceptionally conspicuous in the later days of the Tokugawa Shogunate,—as will presently appear, one for the defection of its chief to the opposing side in the battle of Fushimi in 1868, the other, on the contrary, for the sturdy loyalty which the head of the house exhibited to the engagements which on behalf of the Tokugawa Shogun he, as Regent, had entered into with the nations of the West. The first was Todo, the chieftain of Tsu, in Isé, whose followers went over to the imperialists and turned the scale against the Tokugawas,—the other the famous Ii Kamon-no-kami, who was killed in Tokio by political assassins in 1860. These two barons were the richest of the Fu-dai, each having a rent roll valued at half-a-million sterling.