The Enigmatic Emperor

The second half of the 19th century was the last grand age of monarchy in Europe and Asia. In England, Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. In Germany, Wilhelm II was the last kaiser of the German Empire, proclaimed in 1871. In China, the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi dominated Chinese court politics from 1860 until her death in 1908. And in Japan, Mutsuhito reigned as tenno, or emperor, from 1867 until his death in 1912. Like Victoria, Mutsuhito became synonymous with his place and time, but while Victoria bequeathed her name to an era, Mutsuhito inherited his name from his. He is thus known as the Meiji Emperor, or even more simply as Meiji, “enlightened rule.”

Little is known about Meiji’s inner life and thoughts because he kept no diary and few of his letters survive. But his biographers have worked around this silence in the historical record. Like all good stories, the narrative of modernity requires a beginning, and it is common among historians of Japan to begin the story of Japan’s modernization with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a coup d’etat engineered by disgruntled daimyo, or feudal lords, from the western provinces who claimed to be acting in the name of the teenage emperor.

The young monarch, thus, personifies the young state. At first, they both were rooted more in the past than in a future whose outlines were only dimly discerned. But, as Meiji grew in stature and wisdom, so did Japan, which at his birth was made up of little more than the islands of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku and by the time of his death could lay claim to an empire that included Hokkaido, the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan and Korea. The erstwhile conservatives who initially surrounded Meiji came to embrace reforms that cloaked the feudal polity in the garb of a modern nation-state, much as in public appearances Meiji himself shunned the traditional robes of his imperial ancestors for Western military-style garb. Juxtaposing the modern and rational Meiji period against its Tokugawa forebears, Meiji emerges as the physically vigorous enlightened paragon of a militarily robust and scientifically and technologically advanced nation-state.

Recent biographers are also attracted to Meiji for a more practical reason: A 13-volume official chronicle of his life was published in Japan from 1968 to 1977, yielding a treasure trove of information on the day-by-day activities of Japan’s first modern monarch. We know such details as which well provided the water for his first bath; when Meiji first used chopsticks, tried painting or used a microscope; who were the first Europeans he saw face to face (his father had never seen a European); when he first saw the sea and Mt. Fuji; when he first drank milk, tasted beef, listened to a phonograph or looked through a microscope; how often he indulged his passion for horseback riding; whom he honored by pouring sake with his own hand; and how tall he was--but not how much he weighed, about which he was sensitive--at the time of his death.

We also know that he was a heavy drinker and an avid observer of military maneuvers despite an apparent dislike of war, cared deeply about his subjects’ well-being, was indifferent to his personal comforts and had an aversion to doctors.

We encounter poignant reminders of how different Meiji’s world was from our own. For example, it is said he refused to allow electric lights in his private quarters in the palace, owing to his concern over fire. And we learn that in his personal life, Meiji had 15 children by five women, none of whom was his wife, and that of the 15, only four daughters and a son survived infancy.

This sea of detail notwithstanding, as Donald Keene repeatedly reminds us in his definitive account of Meiji’s life and times, “Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912,” it is remarkable how elusive Meiji the man remains. There are no more than a handful of surviving photographs of him, despite his being by far the most public Japanese monarch in more than a millennium, and almost nothing in his handwriting survives, despite there being 100,000 poems attributed to him.

Keene reminds us that we know nothing of Meiji’s feelings over the deaths of his children, whether he ever entertained the wish to travel abroad or even whether he liked or disliked his commissioned portrait by Eduardo Chiossone. On political matters, Meiji is even more opaque. Thus, even though we know that he was present during hundreds of meetings that determined virtually every important event in the growth of the new state and that he regarded his attendance at such meetings as an important part of his duty, it appears that he typically said nothing during these gatherings. One thus knows little or nothing about his political stances or reactions. Meiji’s opinion on such matters appears to have been consulted only when necessary to break deadlocks between politicians or between the cabinet and legislature and, even in such instances, his counsel only occasionally succeeded in putting an end to bickering.

One searches for examples of the exercise of imperial authority--after all, we are told that in 1868 he was “restored” to direct rule--yet the best examples we find are his involvement in the decisions against making peasants pay taxes in rice, against seeking a foreign loan and for using a chrysanthemum (instead of a rising sun) to decorate the boundary marker separating Japanese from Russian territory in Sakhalin.

Perhaps more troubling for those who would embrace an image of imperial agency is the fact that, time and again, Meiji’s expressed views on matters large and small were either ignored or defied. He appears to have been vigorously opposed to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, although once hostilities commenced, he sought to support the troops through a variety of public gestures. He apparently had great difficulty in 1896 over as simple a matter as ordering a 20-minute postponement of his train’s departure from Kyoto Station for Tokyo.

It is thus understandable that Keene’s biography of Meiji is as much, if not more, about Meiji’s times than about the man himself, and it is here that the volume’s greatest strengths are to be found. Keene provides an utterly brilliant exposition of Japanese history from about 1850 until Meiji’s death in 1912. The broad strokes of this narrative have long been well known, but it is Keene’s day-by-day detail that makes this the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan and that will happily require the rewriting of many a university lecture.

All the key events are here in striking detail. From the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry to the departure of the Iwakura Mission overseas, from the turbulent early post-Restoration years to the establishment of a stable state with a parliament and a constitution, from the struggle to revise a series of unequal treaties to the emergence of a colonial empire, and from the rise of politics to the demise of successive generations of political leaders, there is no important event in modern Japanese history on which Keene does not shed new light.

At times, Keene comes uncomfortably close to the perspectives of the time and place he studies, so that one reads about Taiwanese “savages” and “high-handed” Koreans or how King Sho Tai of the Ryukyu Islands, forcibly exiled to Japan, welcomed the opportunity to be removed from the political bickering back home. But for a work of such length, instances like these are remarkably few.

Still, there are the silences in the historical record, and these silences have their implications. When one tries to “see” the history of a period as richly variegated as that of Meiji Japan through the prism of Meiji himself, and when one acknowledges in the end that the man at the apparent center of affairs remains something of an enigma, one can easily slip into the dangerous conception that the history also is enigmatic. To his credit, Keene never lapses into such mystification.

Keene is well known as the world’s foremost authority on Japanese literature, although it is less well known that his first scholarly monograph was a superb look at the 18th and 19th century study of Europe by Japanese scholars who were themselves forbidden from traveling abroad. Keene, in turn, has done the reverse, dedicating his life to the introduction of Japan to those who live elsewhere. With his study of Meiji, Keene has come full circle--he has returned to his first love, the writing of history, and he has done so brilliantly and with all the dignity befitting his subject.