VI. Catching up with the West

Great difficulties faced the early Meiji reformers. Their essential task was to catch up with the West. For two centuries Japan had kept to herself. During this period the Western world had made gigantic technical advances, greater than man had achieved in all preceding history. Japan had been left far behind. She was forced to do in decades what the West had done in centuries.

How could Japan accomplish such a task? In both economy and government she was still largely feudal and decentralized. There was no real national state, as we understand that term today. Instead, there were a hundred competing clans, each with its own territorial lord. And over all lay the shadow of Western aggression, dictating speed and more speed.

TACKLING THE PROBLEM

From the outset of the Meiji era, anti-foreignism was dropped. Emperor Meiji’s famous Charter Oath (April 6, 1868) contained this statement: “Knowledge and learning shall be sought for throughout the world in order to establish the foundations of the Empire.”

A period of borrowing from the West, comparable only to the earlier imitation of China, set in. One after another, Japanese official missions were sent abroad. Foreign advisers—British, French, Dutch, German, American—were employed in many different fields. Large numbers of Japanese students entered the universities of Western countries. For a short time imitation of the West went to extremes; in many externals, Western ways became a fad. On the whole, however, there was strict control over the process of borrowing, and careful adaptation to Japanese needs.

In keeping with Japan’s traditions, a limited group maintained firm and despotic power at all times. The Meiji political reforms clothed old ideas of government in new garments. Emperor Meiji (1868-1912) reigned again, and with some degree of authority. But actual power during his long reign lay in the hands of the small group of men who surrounded him. There was no thoroughgoing mass upheaval, forcing recognition of popular rights. Reforms were dictated from the top down.

THREE NEW TRENDS

The great changes which occurred during the Meiji era may be grouped under three main headings. There were, in the first place, the economic reforms which merged the old feudal lords and samurai into a new society, and laid the foundations of Japan’s modern industries. Then, there was a political movement which led finally to the Emperor’s proclamation of a written constitution. Finally, there was a cautious development of foreign policy by which Japan, at first on the defensive, later embarked on an expansionist program and fought its wars with China and Russia. In this chapter we shall look at the first of these trends.

ABOLITION OF FEUDAL RIGHTS

Between 1868 and 1877 a series of basic reforms gave centralized control to the Imperial government. The four western clans returned their lands to the Emperor, thus enabling him to order the other clans to do the same. In this way the government took over the land taxes, the main source of revenue. But the lords, though they no longer held the land registers, were still political rulers in their feudal domains. So, in 1871, an Imperial decree established prefectures, with Imperial governors, in place of the old clan divisions. Finally, the feudal lords lost their private armies. At first, the Imperial government’s army consisted mainly of the military forces of the western clans. By 1873, however, the government was able to enforce a system of universal military service, and thus build up a national conscript army under its own absolute control.

Why, you ask, did the feudal lords accept so easily this rapid loss of their former powers? In large part, it was a result of the lead taken by the western clans, whose samurai statesmen held the reins in the Imperial government. For they were prepared to back the new measures with military action, if necessary. But a second factor was equally important. The clan lords, especially the great daimyo, were well paid for the surrender of their old privileges. Their lands were not confiscated outright. Large annual grants of money were allotted them out of central revenues. But the payments originally promised in this huge pension scheme turned out to be too heavy for the central treasury to meet. The government therefore first reduced the pensions and then, in 1876, compulsorily ended them by means of lump-sum payments, in cash or short-term bonds. Though this drastic scaling down of the original pension scheme amounted to repudiating its earlier promises, the government had no other way of avoiding bankruptcy. As it was, the total cost of commuting the pensions came to nearly 211 million yen—a large sum for that period. In many respects, this way of dealing with the pensions laid the basis of the new Japanese society which has since developed.

LORDS INTO CAPITALISTS

The daimyo, or great feudal lords, did not fare so badly in the financial settlement of 1876. They were relieved of all their debts, and of their previous obligations to support their military retainers, the samurai. They retained great slices of their former lands, which they now held as private owners—that is, with fewer responsibilities. Moreover, they acquired large sums of money when the pensions were commuted. These sums they invested in banks, stocks and industries, as well as in landed estates. The daimyo were thus merged into the new society, no longer as territorial rulers but as wealthy financial magnates, controlling the economic life of the countryside.

So, from their own point of view, commutation of the pensions was a master-stroke by Japan’s new rulers. It helped to throw caste distinctions of the old feudal type into the melting pot. It won the allegiance of the clan lords to the new order simply by making allegiance worth their while.

THE LOT OF THE SAMURAI

But in other respects this bold reform created a number of serious difficulties. The samurai class as a whole was plunged into great distress. A few of them, especially those from the western clans, immediately won high positions in the new government. But most of them were left to sink or swim in a strange new world. Their small pension payments soon dribbled away, and it was hard for them to find means of support. They had other grievances. A law of 1877 forbade them to wear their two swords—traditional mark of honor of the samurai class. 1877, too, was the year when the samurai were replaced by the new conscript army. During this critical year a serious military revolt, centering in Satsuma but joined by all the forces opposed to the new order, broke out. It was crushed by the Imperial government’s new army, made up largely of commoners and partly modernized. Thus the last challenge to the new order was defeated.

HARD TIMES FOR THE PEASANTS

The peasants had an even harder time than the samurai. Many local peasant revolts took place in the years up to 1877. Imperial forces suppressed them, and so prevented the peasants from indulging in mass confiscations of lands.

Yet great changes were taking place. For the peasants were no longer feudal serfs. They became landholders, and they could serve in the army. But the individual peasant secured only a very small plot of land. As a private owner, his situation was most precarious. He had to face the risks of drought or flood, pay taxes in money instead of rice, and cope with price changes in the market. His land soon had to be mortgaged, and could then be taken away by foreclosure. Indeed, many peasants quickly lost their lands in the early years of the new order. By 1892 nearly 40 per cent of the total cultivated area was worked by tenants. This proportion has persisted, while the number of part-tenants has increased.

Japanese agriculture, moreover, remained backward in technique and social organization. The landlords became parasites. Instead of working the land as a capitalist enterprise for profit, they were intent only on drawing high rents—often as much as 60 per cent. This system had far-reaching effects on Japan.

As the number of tenants grew, and the land became divided into smaller and smaller plots, the farm areas in Japan became overpopulated. Only a part of the unneeded farm workers could find a place in industry. Competing for jobs, they kept wages low. Low wages, of course, were a boon to industrial development. But what industry gained in one way it lost in another. For the farmers and the workers were too poor to buy much. The country’s purchasing power grew only very slowly. Thus the home market for factory products was limited, and industry did not develop as fast as it might otherwise have done. Very early Japan’s new factory industries had to turn to the foreign market. As the limitations on Japan’s home market have persisted down to the present time, the pressure for foreign trade expansion has grown steadily more urgent. Here is one underlying cause for Japan’s current policy of military expansion.

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT

But changes in agriculture, as we have seen, did help to make possible the growth of a modern Japanese industry. Peasants who lost their lands, or artisans thrown out of work, became available as factory workers. Here was industry’s labor force.

Many other changes helped industry along. Foreign trade, long prohibited, had begun to grow rapidly in the ’sixties. Clan barriers to internal trade were leveled. Hundreds of different kinds of money, issued by the various clans, had circulated. These were now abolished, and a single national currency instituted. Railways were built, and telephone and telegraph systems laid down. These improvements made a freer sale and exchange of goods throughout the country possible. Thus a home market—even if a very limited one—was established.

For the introduction of modern, large-scale industry, however, two further things were needed—technique and capital. Foreign experts, acting both as direct advisers in industry and as instructors in the new technical schools, provided the first of these requirements. The second was harder to fill. The banking-trader houses and the pensioned-off lords had some capital. But it was not enough to finance the big factory projects, especially where quick profits seemed unlikely. So the Imperial government had to step in and supply the capital in most of the larger enterprises. It paid special attention to the armament industries—mining, metallurgy, shipbuilding.

NURSING INFANT INDUSTRIES

The clan bureaucrats in the government nursed the construction of this new industrial plant with extreme care and pride. Many of them fell in love with machinery and engineering technique. They worked closely with the great business houses, grafting industry on to firms that had been mainly concerned with trade or banking. The budding capitalists were not financially strong enough to develop industry by themselves. So the clan statesmen took them into partnership. It was the clan statesmen, however, who headed the combination—an important factor in Japan’s political growth, then and later.

But the clansmen did not wish to keep all industry under government control. They only wanted to see that it developed quickly. Then the businessmen could handle it, or at least all but the strategic industries. The government kept control of railways, telephones, telegraphs, arsenals and naval shipyards. But in the case of many other industries, it supplied the capital and started their development, then turned them back to the great business houses, often at very low prices. In this way the capitalists were spoon-fed by the government. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and other houses obtained ready-made facilities in many fields—cotton-spinning mills, glass and cement factories, mining enterprises, shipyards. The giant Mitsubishi monopoly in commercial shipping, for example, got its start through the gift and cheap purchase of government vessels.

By 1890 some 200 steam factories were in operation in Japan. The development of a machine industry was making good headway.