Why the Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly

By John D Beatty and Lee A Rochwerger

Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan embarked on a program of aggressive military overseas adventures in Asia and the Pacific. From 1904 to 1941, Japan's desire for resource independence had driven them to conquer Korea, Manchuria, large parts of China, and French Indochina, and to occupy large swaths of Pacific islands. These conq

• Language: English
• Publisher: JDB Communications, LLC
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578345871

John D Beatty

John D. Beatty is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, living and writing in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Preface

M

ost histories of Japan in World War Two are narratives of battles won and lost, of campaigns doomed and promising, of men fighting and dying. Often, they begin their narratives with the Japanese war with China that began in 1937. This book is intended to be a fresh look at the foundations of the decision-making processes in Japan in the late 19th through the early 20th century that led inexorably to their war against the West in 1941-1945. We hope to dispel some of the hagiography usually ascribed to this conflict: that an enormous, modern and efficient Japanese military establishment came dangerously close to defeating the world's foremost industrial powers and their allies.

This work is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when a state tries to catch up with its neighbors and rivals by borrowing the wares and ways of life of faraway lands. Japan accelerated its technological development without allowing its people—those it was most supposed to help—enough time to assimilate the changes the new technologies required. Japan also had to adapt their way of life—from their calendar to their clocks to their mathematics—to accommodate not just the new technology but their interaction with the West.

But first and foremost, this book is an examination of the role, the successes and ultimate failures of a society unique to Japan—the samurai—who by dint of violence, numbers, breeding, habit, tradition and sheer force of will were the most influential society in Japan up until 1945.

Throughout this book, the collective term samurai is used to describe the believers in the philosophy of a very specific pre-industrial way of life and a set of moral codes in Japanese society. Since the 1930s these men¹ have been referred to in the West as simply Japanese militarists, and have generally been thought of as being members of the Imperial Army and Navy. Calling the samurai militarists tends to logically lump Japan’s samurai in with the German and Italian nationalist groups common in post-1918 Europe. It also hides the unique, dominant role of the samurai on the Japanese archipelago.

The concept of militarist² as defined in the West is but a pale shadow to what the samurai and their culture were to Japan until 1945. The term militarist itself, in the liberal Western mind, implies a kind of temporary aberration that can be alleviated by economic sanctions, some treaty-assured disarmament, and a few conferences. Much to the contrary, the 20th century samurai of Japan were dedicated to victory in battle or glorious death—for them there were no other paths. Japan’s neo-samurai of the 19th and 20th centuries used pre-modern imagery, allusion, mythology and collected moral wisdom profusely in their training and in their propaganda, so they themselves were keenly aware of the psychological power of the swaggering swordsman of Japan. The unique term samurai is thus the only word—or even concept—that adequately defines the ultra-monarchist, ultra-nationalist, ultra-militant, racial supremacist subgroup of Japanese society that planned and initiated Japan’s Greater East Asia War and every conflict that led up to it.

Some will argue that the samurai were extinct after 1876, but this book proposes that simply declaring a tradition to be at an end does not make it so. To the contrary, that tradition was the main unifying force and principle behind the state, and was embodied in the only reliable group at the behest of the monarchy. The concept of samurai, we submit, was far more than a bunch of colorful swordsmen who could simply be told to put their swords away. Samurai, indeed, was a way of looking at the world, a way of life…and ultimately, a way of death.

For those of you who read our earlier book, What Were They Thinking: A Fresh Look at Japan At War 1941-1945, parts of that work are included here. We beg your indulgence as you read this more comprehensive argument.

The Idea of Japan

I

t is said that Japan, or Nippon, is where the sun begins—the land of the rising sun. The islands that make up the Japanese archipelago are primarily volcanic, though the traditional creation legends of Japan are not unlike those found in Genesis. Some authorities claim that the islands were once part of mainland Asia that broke off during some geologic shift. Archaeological evidence shows that humans have lived on the archipelago since the Stone Age. Human activity in the Japanese islands is recorded as early as 30,000 BC when the islands were connected glacially to the mainland. In about 10,000 BC the islands were invaded by peoples from all over the Pacific rim.³ The earliest historical mention of the islands of Japan in any written form is in the 1st century Chinese Book of Han, or History of the Earlier Han.⁴ The brief mention refers to Japan as divided into more than a hundred countries that occasionally paid tribute to the Han dynasty of China.⁵

From its beginnings, Japan had been an empire where each clan controlled its own turf, and paid lip service—but not much else—to a central government. During what is called the Kofun period (250-538 A.D.) there was a degree of consolidation in the islands when the Yamato provinces⁶ gained nominal dominance and established the Yamato imperial dynasty.

Traditionally, the imperial family of Japan (that of the Emperor) descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu. The first emperor was Jimmu, Amaterasu’s great-grandson, who established the Yamato dynasty on 11 February⁷, 660 BC. The family’s divine bloodline had been diluted for centuries, acknowledging at least one physically inferior emperor out of every three, and causing apprehension before every royal birth.

There was another royal/imperial family that, though they could never reign, was nonetheless influential. In 670 A.D., the Tenji Emperor presented a pregnant concubine to his dying advisor, Nakatomi. The Tenji Emperor gave the male issue the Fujiwara name, which then became a bastard branch of the imperial family. The Fujiwara were among the Emperor’s most intimate counselors for more than a thousand years. Traditionally, the Fujiwara accepted responsibility for bad policies to shield the throne. Fujiwara women were also fertile producers of heirs for the royal house.⁸

While the succession of Japanese emperors and empresses may comprise the oldest continually reigning house on record, they had no real power or revenue for most of their history. However, for their entire existence, over a hundred emperors and eight empresses⁹ wielded tremendous social and moral influence as titular heads of state, and as spiritual heads of the Shinto faith.¹⁰

For most of its history, Japan has been beset by what would be called civil wars in other countries, but in Japan passed for everyday life. During its ironically-named Peace Period¹¹ (794-1195), the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force against the Barbarians (Sei-i Taishōgun, shortened to shogun) was given to a dominant noble for short periods to fight the emperor’s wars. When there were no more enemies to fight in the archipelago, the title was discontinued until 1192 when Minamoto no Yoritomo of Kamakura, whose domain was about three day’s march from the Imperial Palace, claimed it for himself. The Go-Toba¹² Emperor (1183-1198) awarded him the shogun title soon afterwards. Minamoto reorganized the social structure of the court and, with the help of the biggest daimyos¹³, defined the social structure of Japan for the next 750 years. There were only three social strata that mattered in Japan:

The Emperor and the Imperial family;

The samurai warriors and their shrines and temples;

Everyone else.

The first two groups made up perhaps 10% of the population, but they controlled what organs of government there were, the bakufu.¹⁴ The social groups inhabiting the lowest strata included, in descending order of status, peasants, craftsmen (except sword makers), and merchants.

More than any other society in history except the Spartans, the Japanese owed their identity to their warrior class—the samurai. The word samurai (shizoku) has a very old and somewhat confused origin. The Chinese character that usually translates into bushi, which originally meant to wait upon or to serve by one’s side, in Japanese gradually came to mean warrior. According to some sources, this term was given to the bodyguards of the nobility who were often extra sons compelled by primogeniture to find their own way in the world. However, recent scholarship suggests that the Kondei (Stalwart Youth), established in 792 during the Nara period,16 was an attempt to build a permanent officer class that gradually became elite swordsmen, and who set up their own bakufu at Kamakura in 1185.¹⁷

In the 13th century, though Japan was physically isolated from continental Asia, it was not left entirely alone. The Mongols demanded the fealty of Japan’s Kameyama Emperor in 1266 and 1268, which was not forthcoming. A Mongol army of up to 40,000¹⁸ landed at Hakate Bay on Kyushu on 19 November 1274. The first encounter went badly for the Japanese, since it had been half a century since they had engaged in large-scale battle, and the Mongols used gunpowder weapons with which the samurai were unfamiliar. Delaying and suffering, the Japanese withdrew from the field at nightfall. The next day the Japanese were reinforced enough to defeat the weary Mongols. That night, a typhoon wrecked many of the Mongol’s 800 or so ships. Having lost a good number of leaders in two days of fighting, they chose to withdraw. When the Mongols returned in 1281, the Japanese had been preparing for them. Having captured some of the larger Mongol/Chinese ships in the earlier campaign, the samurai met the invading fleet on a number of islands and were victorious each time. Though the record is clear that the Japanese had defeated the Mongols by early July 1281, a typhoon on 15 August 1281 (the date usually given for the kamikaze¹⁹) scattered and swamped most of the survivors. While there are disputes about details, the basics of this story seem to have a substantial basis in fact, even though in centuries of retelling they have been distorted.²⁰

By that time, the roles of the samurai had evolved beyond that of mere retainers and bodyguards, and well into those of senior and middle grade military leaders, and, because of their trustworthiness, as managers of estates. The samurai nearly died out after the great armies of Japan’s Warring States period (1467-1603)²¹ were disbanded during the Toyotomi Hideyoshi shogunate in the 16th century. Only a few retainers remained, and they were outnumbered by the numerous ronin—samurai without masters. These men were looking for the only work they knew: fighting. The most financially successful of these ronin were scholars who started their own dojos, or schools for teaching martial arts, and those who wrote down their precepts, lore, legends and the outline of the codes that would much later become known as bushido.²²

During Japan’s Warring States period there emerged a cultural phenomenon one might expect almost anywhere except socially-stratified Japan. Gekokujō—variously translated as overthrowing or surpassing one's superiors, or the lower rules the higher, or the low overcomes the high—began in a time when groups of farmers, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, minor nobles and ronin banded together and rose up against some daimyos. Gradually, the custom of taking power from leaders because of disputes large and small, religious and secular, economic and land-driven, somehow became something of a sacred obligation to one’s ancestors. No matter how successful these insurrections were (and many of them did what they meant to do), there was always someone waiting to knock off whoever won the last round of bloodletting. Further, given how aloof the emperor was from everyone else, every rebellion could always be justified as a sacred obligation to the Emperor because he was being misled by his councilors. Gekokujō gave the Western axiom one man’s rebel is another’s patriot real meaning. It also made governance in the archipelago an eternal and deadly game of king-of-the-hill. It is difficult to imagine how any decisions were reached at an empire level if gekokujō was always hanging over the leadership. Because of gekokujō very few momentous decisions were made without an outbreak of violence somewhere in Japan.²³

The samurai traditions were resurrected during each conflict that wracked Japan for centuries. Wars and rebellions continued to ravage the archipelago until the Tokugawa clan finally defeated the last of their (and the Emperor’s) enemies at the battle of Sekigahara on 21 October 1600. After consolidating his gains, rewarding allies and punishing surviving enemies, Tokugawa Ieyasu was granted the title of shogun on 24 March 1603 by the Go-Yōzei Emperor. While the Tokugawas, from the imperial seat at Kyoto, generally kept the peace, each clan (which controlled a domain bearing the clan name) ruled itself in its own little quasi-empire, with its own rules and hierarchy on their own ancestral lands. They paid lip service to the Emperor and tribute to the Tokugawas. What followed was a period of relative peace and prosperity in Japan.²⁴

During the Tokugawa period, which was punctuated by at least three gekokujō revolts somewhere in Japan every year, Japan depended upon the merchants to buy and sell rice, the only real economic commodity Japan had in any quantity for export. Consequently, merchants became extremely wealthy and branched into other enterprises, such as banking (as did the Mitsui clan). The samurai warriors were impoverished by this system, struggling to survive on stipends from the daimyos that collected taxes from the merchants in their domains, while the merchants became rich. As a result, many warriors traded their swords for quills to become bureaucrats—a galling economic necessity. However, samurai retainers were trusted as bodyguards, so that in many cases the former swordsmen were far more trustworthy clerks than some stranger/scribe hirelings. ²⁵

Bushido: A Code Interpreted Many Ways

The philosophy/moral code known as bushido²⁶ first appeared in Kōyō Gunkan, a chronicle of the Takeda clan that was started in the middle of the 16th century by Kōsaka Masanobu, a samurai retainer of the Takeda domain. The chronicle was completed in 1616 by Obata Kagenori, a Confucian scholar/samurai who also founded a military school that went beyond swordsmanship and hapkido.

Bushido was alluded to without mentioning any specific codes, or the word bushido itself, in Yamamoto²⁷ Tsunetomo's Hagakure (Hidden Leaves). This 18th century work—essentially a collection of advice, stories, lore and axioms—does mention that the way of the samurai is death. Nor does the word appear in the swordsmanship manual, Go Rin No Sho (A Book of Five Rings) by Miyamoto Musashi, which first appeared in 1645. Nonetheless, Miyamoto’s book is sometimes credited as being the modern origin of the concept of bushido. The term bushido first appeared in English in Nitobe Inazo's Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899, which by some lights was the definitive modern description after it was shorn of the nationalistic, anti-modern, anti-Christian and racial supremacy aspects of the concept as it had developed in the Warring States period.²⁸

While bushido was being articulated, those samurai who worked for the daimyos were notable for their ambition, seeking of glory, and, above all else, a sense of duty and honor deeper and more strident than any code of nobility for warriors anywhere else. The name of a samurai’s family, of his lord, and of himself was more than a means of identification: it was a symbol of his fighting skill, valor, and willingness to risk his life for his master and his family. A samurai who distinguished himself in any way was to be honored. Dishonor, on the other hand, was attached to a variety of events; failure to complete the simplest task perfectly, or bearing false witness, or incurring an unpayable debt, or adultery, or other ignominy. But bushido carried no degrees of punishment to match the severity of the infraction. Dishonor had only one possible path—death. Death was not considered a punishment but the consequence of failure of any kind. Notably absent in these prescriptions, however, was the dishonor of being captured in battle, though outright and deliberate surrender meant that the warrior had not expended all his energies in the fight,²⁹ and was thus dishonored.³⁰

During the Tokugawa period, bushido and the samurai mindset also became self-justifying, and gradually evolved into a system of political thought. Arguments circulated among the upper echelons of government advocating the centrality of the samurai’s philosophy in affairs of state. Yagyu Munenori in Heiho Kadensho (The Life-Giving Sword) stated:

…At times because of one man’s evil, ten thousand people suffer. So, you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives.

So, for those who followed bushido, the way of war was the way of peace. This kind of attitude was eagerly accepted and helped justify the bakufu, even though peace prevailed. It would later be described as a "left-shoulder forward³¹" attitude—as samurai seemed constantly ready for a fight.

By the 17th century the lower echelons of samurai, many of whom had been fully transformed into civil servants, were searching for meaning to their lot in life if they had no one to fight. A 15th century scholar, Yamaga Soko, became popular when his Chucho Jijitsu was widely circulated in the 18th century, where he rhetorically observed that all samurai:

…eats food without growing it, uses utensils without manufacturing them, and profits without selling. What is the justification for this?

His solution? The function of samurai in society was to serve his lord loyally, and to act as an exemplary moral example worthy of emulation by all Japanese. To live one’s life in strict observance of correct moral behavior and etiquette, maintaining a high level of military preparedness through practicing and perfecting the military arts, and keeping proficiency in aesthetic arts and scholarly pursuits was deemed just as glorious as fighting bravely in battle for one’s lord. This was a safer and less exciting substitute for war, but it satisfied the needs of a growing number of restless samurai under the Tokugawas.³²

Shinto: The Faith of Japan

Since its pre-8th century beginnings, Shinto has been well understood by the Japanese as less a religion than a practice of faith in the continuity of the Yamato throne and its role as the ruler of the people of Japan. The meaning of the word Shinto has at its core an explanation for what it is. Kami no Michi in pure Japanese³³ translates into way of the gods, which in a cultural etymology is a practice, not a belief: imagine the Mass removed from the Catholic liturgy and treated as a stand-alone practice. In 1904, an Irish-born British diplomat, William G. Ashton, described Shinto to non-Japanese audiences:

Its polytheism, the want of a Supreme Deity, the comparative absence of images and of a moral code, its feeble personifications and hesitating grasp of the conception of spirit, the practical non-recognition of a future state, and the general absence of a deep, earnest faith—all stamp it as perhaps the least developed of religions which have an adequate literary record. Still, it is not a primitive cult. It had an organized priesthood and an elaborate ritual. The general civilization of the Japanese when Shinto assumed the form in which we know it had left the primitive stage far behind.³⁴

Daniel C. Holtom, an American ethnologist whose pre-1941 study of Shinto was so comprehensive and accurate that he lectured Shinto priest aspirants in Japan, wrote that Shinto was regarded as part and parcel of being Japanese:

…from childhood the Japanese are taught that attitudes and usages connected with the shrines of Shinto are vitally related to good citizenship. To be a worthy subject of the realm requires loyalty to certain great interests for which the shrines are made to stand.³⁵

Most Japanese saw no dissonance between the requirements of Shinto and those of any other religious practice, and many samurai practiced Shinto concurrently with Buddhism or Confucianism, or both. However, the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Judaism required adherents to renounce all other beliefs.³⁶ Though some Japanese who converted to Christianity by Western missionaries before the 17th century maintained their Shinto practices along with the Mass and the Eucharist, the Tokugawas saw Christianity as a threat to the throne, and to their rule. Persecutions of Christians came in waves for two hundred years, stopping only with the Perry mission. Despite bringing a halt to persecutions, proselyting in Japan was banned from 1597 until 1871.³⁷

Japan before WWII had four rough forms of Shinto:

Imperial Household

Domestic

Shrine or State (Jinja)

Religious or Sect (Shuha).

The most common was the Domestic, for its practices were private and conducted in each individual household. The most public was the Shrine/State, for its practices and ceremonies were best covered in the media. The Religious forms are the closest analogs to any other faith, but even they lack elements such as theology or hierarchy. The Imperial Household practices were usually combinations of the other three.³⁸

All of these forms share one common characteristic: the belief in kami, the pantheon of thousands of spirits of dead ancestors of various stripes and hierarchies. What role they have in everyday Japanese life is one reason for the many different forms, sects, and styles of worship. The rulers of Japan who preceded the arrival of Perry had no problems with this common interpretation of Shinto.³⁹

An End to Isolation

Beginning in the 17th century, European merchants in Japan, dominated by the Portuguese and Dutch, had been allowed to buy a few token goods such as silk and bamboo in exchange for silver, but were restricted to tiny enclaves at Yedo and Nagasaki. Contact with Japanese without explicit permission outside these enclaves was strictly forbidden and punishable by death. The safety of sailors engaged in the lucrative China trade—which began for Americans within weeks of the end of their war for independence against Britain—had been a cause for concern for decades, as was the safety of New England whalers who ventured into the Pacific. American seamen before 1854 (and a few afterwards) who came to grief in the North Pacific and washed ashore in Japan were dreadfully maltreated, jailed, executed, or forced to perform anti-Christian rituals.⁴⁰

After the Mexican War (1846-48) the United States gained the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to the Gulf of Baja, and with these vast lands, a strategic dilemma. If there was an invasion of any kind in America’s new territories, it would take a year and a half for Washington to respond with any force at all, by which time any decent-sized invader could secure everything worth having west of the Rockies. America’s China trade was becoming increasingly important, as was the whaling industry in the Pacific. Safeguarding the Pacific coast became a priority of American foreign policy.⁴¹

By the 1850s the graceful American clipper ships had secured an advantage in sailing across the Pacific, and indeed around the world. However, the vagaries and vicissitudes of winds and currents controlled the sailing ship routes and schedules, and the days of the clippers were numbered. In 1851, the Americans learned from British sources that Japan had large coal deposits. Steam ships required coal, but no ship as yet was large or efficient enough to carry all of its own fuel requirements, so coaling stations were needed in the Far East. The steamers of a generation later could choose great circle routes (describing arcs on flat maps, but straight lines on spheres) that were days shorter—but only as long as the routes included coaling stations. Britain was out-building America in steamships, and by the 1840s, Britain’s steam-powered Cunard line was winning the battle for passengers and freight on the transatlantic route. And time is money in maritime shipping.⁴²

Consequently, in part to appease the maritime New England states which had an interest in the safety of its sailors shipwrecked on Japanese shores while plying the China trade, President Millard Fillmore sent a small naval squadron to secure a treaty with Japan. The Fillmore administration and its successors in the 1850s were distracted by the sectionalism that was brewing to civil war, so they had little interest in actively or purposefully opening Japan to the West, though they did see a need to increase trade with China and to compete with Britain for coaling stations in Asia.⁴³

The Japan of the Tokugawas that Perry found was already in transition, if grudgingly. They knew before Perry arrived that the world beyond the sea was changing, and they were going to have to change with it—sooner or later. In the 16th and 17th centuries they had maintained what they called the Southern Barbarian Trade system with the French, Dutch and Portuguese, but because of the British, Russians and Americans this would have to change. The first steam powered ship appeared off the coast of Okinawa in 1846 under a French flag. In 1853 the shogun lifted the ban on large ocean-going ships (in place for 150 years) and purchased a steam vessel from the Dutch before the samurai ever saw one close up—in Perry’s squadron.

Firearms had been introduced to Japan by the Chinese in the 13th century, but it wasn’t until the Europeans reintroduced them in 1543 that the samurai took notice. In the Sengoku jidai preceding the Tokugawa’s ascent to power, firearms were locally manufactured and in widespread use. Once the Tokugawas became shoguns and began a period of national isolation, development of them stopped. The samurai confiscated large numbers of firearms because they were always fearful of mobs of peasants with weapons who might overwhelm a lord —in the traditions of gekokujō.⁴⁵

Japan Enters a New Era

O

n 8 July 1853, an American naval squadron of four ships under Captain⁴⁶ Matthew Perry arrived off Japan near modern Yokosuka. Perry and his men first surveyed the harbor mouth to Edo.⁴⁷ His squadron pointedly refused Japanese instructions⁴⁸ to leave for Nagasaki, threatened the Japanese with violence, and presented letters (translated into Chinese and Dutch) with offers of friendship to a representative of the shogun (Tokugawa Iesada himself was ill). After completing his initial mission, Perry and his squadron sailed for Hong Kong on 17 July, with a promise that he would return in a year.

Perry’s visit was not completely unexpected by the Japanese: they had been forewarned of it by their Dutch contacts at Nagasaki. After watching the collapse of China for half a century at the hands of European interests, the Tokugawas didn’t see the Americans as any different and believed they would have forced their way onto Japanese soil regardless of their reception. Given Perry’s instructions and temperament, they were right.⁴⁹

Traditionally, Perry’s visit ended Japan’s long isolation, but 1853-1854 was a busy time for East Asian diplomacy. A Russian fleet arrived at Nagasaki on 12 August 1853 with letters inviting diplomatic contact. While waiting for an answer from the shogun, the Crimean War broke out on 16 October 1853. This turn of events compelled the British, concerned about any expanded Russian presence in Asia, to hastily assemble a squadron and diplomatic representatives for Japan, arriving at Nagasaki on 7 September 1854.

Perry came back to Japan on 13 February 1854 with ten ships and a number of extravagant gifts (including a miniature locomotive and a few hundred yards of track) for the Kōmei Emperor. Perry negotiated with Tokugawa representative Hayashi Akira for weeks, eventually obtaining signatures on the Convention of Kanagawa on 31 March 1854, a treaty of mutual recognition that specifically forbade Japanese abuse of shipwrecked sailors (see Appendix). With this document, Perry and his fleet returned to America. The Convention took formal effect on 30 September 1855, after the US Congress ratified it and the Emperor signed it.⁵⁰

In the space of a few months, Japan went from relative isolation to being in the middle of Great Power politics in Asia. As a result of this flurry of diplomacy, the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty was signed on 14 October 1854, followed by the Treaty of Simoda with the Russians on 4 February 1855, and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France on 9 October 1858.⁵¹ Traditionally, these have been called the unequal treaties in Japanese history, as they offered little to Japan in exchange for Euro-American contact and diplomatic exchanges.⁵²

However, the Kōmei Emperor and two powerful rival clan domains of the Tokugawas—the Choshu and the Satsuma—did not think that treaties with the Americans or with anyone else were good things by any means. The fact that the American agreement was (at first) signed not by the Emperor but by the shogun alone caused (supposedly) great distress: though they had great power, shoguns still had to at least consult with the Emperors before making major decisions. The Kōmei Emperor was said to have been scandalized that Tokugawas had made concessions to the long-nosed barbarians, though it’s likely he was probably less scandalized than merely snubbed. Rival clans, seeing an opening and sensing weakness, began to gang up on the Tokugawas.⁵³

After the first diplomatic missions came and went and the first full-time envoys arrived, the revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians movement became popular in Japan, especially among the younger set who called themselves the Young Samurai, and who were also called men of high purpose (ishin-shishi that was usually contracted to shishi). The shishi were violently opposed to the bakufu of the Tokugawas and loved the emperor system (which was not yet truly imperial) in a dreamy, unreal sort of way, imagining that the emperor should take charge of the country directly and make it work the way it always had—with them in charge. The shishi were virulent supporters of the Choshu program of 1862 that called for national unification under the Emperor. They also favored long-range strategic planning against the barbarians that included expanding Japan’s borders across the sea to create buffer zones around the Home Islands. In response to the rising fever of isolationism, the Kōmei Emperor issued his expel the barbarians rescript on 11 March 1863, calling for war to rid Japan of all foreigners, regardless of origin. The Choshu and Satsuma domains both shared the Emperor’s sentiments, but only the Choshu responded to the emperor’s call for a war on the foreigners. It was the shishi of the Choshu domain who were responsible for the Shimonoseki Straights War of 1863-64, in which Choshu batteries fired on American and British ships. The Choshu in the Straights were commanded for a time by Yamagata Aritomo, a future non-hereditary prince, admiral and prime minister of Japan. The Tokugawas had no intention of enforcing the Emperor’s order for an undeclared war on the West, and their inactivity prompted attacks on their shogunate and the bakufu by rival clans.⁵⁴

Each domain kept a small standing army of samurai warriors, and used trained militias in traditional mass combat, while the bakufu maintained similar forces. There was no single navy as such when Perry landed: there were small fleets of fighting junks and small foreign-built warships owned by clan domains, but the bakufu controlled no warships of its own: indeed, no one in Japan could build a vessel of over 50 tons displacement by law. Though there was some naval training at Nagasaki, it was mostly for officers, and with the miscellany of ships owned by the clans, its value was limited. The shogunate opened its first modern shipyard and naval arsenal at Yokosuka in 1866, designed by French naval architect François Verny, where copies of small Western warships were built.⁵⁵

The Meiji Takes Over

After a bout with smallpox, the Kōmei Emperor died on 30 January 1867.⁵⁶ The new emperor was fifteen-year-old Crown Prince Mutsuhito⁵⁷, known as the Meiji Emperor⁵⁸. In January 1868 the Meiji announced that he would be directly participating in the administration and leadership of Japan. This was the first time since the 15th century that the Emperor would exercise direct authority. However, despite the resignation of the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu on 19 November 1867, the Tokugawas still felt that they were in charge because the bakufu was still in their hands.⁵⁹

Upon his enthronement on 7 April 1868, the Charter Oath⁶⁰ (see Appendix) was promulgated to set the legal stage for a civil government in Japan. At the age of sixteen the Meiji certainly didn’t write it himself: it was the product of Western-thinking members of his court who, among other things, wanted to abolish the classes that stratified Japan. Called by some the forerunner of Japanese constitutional government, it did nothing of what it was intended, but did inspire other Japanese to pursue reforms.⁶¹

Saionji Kinmochi of the Fujiwara clan was one of the Westernized court counselors who saw opportunity, not threat, from the West, and who hoped