Sources of Japanese Tradition by Wm. Theodore de Bary

Author:Wm. Theodore de Bary
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History/Asia/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-27T23:00:00+00:00

THE MEIJI EMPEROR

The Restoration was carried out in the name of the Meiji emperor, Mutsuhito, who in 1868 was a mere boy of sixteen. With time, he grew into a formidable figure, perhaps one of the greatest individuals to occupy the Japanese throne since Emperor Tenchi, who was responsible for the Taika Reform of 645. Asukai Masamichi, a late-twentieth-century biographer of the emperor, referred to him as “Meiji the Great,” in the way that Peter the Great and Frederick the Great were seen in Russia and Germany. And yet unlike Queen Victoria, who was his contemporary, Meiji never kept a diary and wrote almost no letters. As Donald Keene noted in his biography of the Meiji emperor, there is hardly anything now extant in the emperor’s handwriting. Even very few photographs, perhaps no more than three, exist of him in an age when most Meiji leaders were widely photographed. Instead, what knowledge we have of the emperor comes largely from the men who worked with him and who venerated him as the leader of the circle dedicated to transforming the country into a modern state. With time, the emperor became increasingly shrouded in mystery as the Meiji leaders used him to structure the ideology of the imperial state. This was particularly true after the 1890s, but earlier he seems to have functioned more as part of the group that set Japan on its new course. He worked closely with Kido Takayoshi, Ōkubo Toshimichi, and Saigō Takamori. His respect for Saigō was such that even after his death as a “rebel” in 1877, the emperor subsequently pardoned him in view of his earlier contributions to the Restoration. Many of the edicts issued in the Meiji emperor’s name—such as the Charter Oath, the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, and the Imperial Rescript on Education—were composed by his advisers, but it seems unlikely that they could have been issued without his sanction. Keene also noted that the one remaining clue to the emperor’s personal feelings can be found in the more than 100,000 poems he composed during his lifetime. But here, too, the majority were transcribed by others. In short, the Meiji emperor remains largely an enigmatic figure; his official presence was clearly larger than life, and for many Japanese he came to symbolize the whole era of renovation and reform that covered his lengthy reign from 1868 to 1912.

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