To Stand with the Nations of the World by Mark Ravina

Author:Mark Ravina [Ravina, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Prudent Empire

LIKE THE CARETAKER government, the Ōkubo administration sought to establish Japan as a sovereign power within the nineteenth-century European international system. Unlike the caretaker government, however, the Ōkubo administration was convinced that this project would take decades. Those who had seen Europe and America firsthand on the Iwakura mission were deeply aware of Japan’s material and technological inferiority. Only after decades of economic development and technological modernization could Japan overcome that inferiority and negotiate with the Great Powers from a position of strength. Accordingly, the government focused on consolidating state power and promoting economic growth. It reformed the land tax, creating the most uniform national tax system in roughly a millennium. It dismantled the samurai class and began building a modern army and navy based on commoner conscripts. It poured funds into a range of infrastructure and industrial projects, including mines, railroads, telegraphs lines, iron and steel foundries, shipyards, and textile mills as well as factories for glass, lacquer ware, ceramics, and soap.1 The new government fully believed that it could raise Japan to great power status, but it knew that such a transformation would require mastering the Industrial Revolution, not stoking revolutionary passions. Former samurai might clamor for a war of honor in Korea or Taiwan, but Japanese diplomacy needed to be grounded in prudent realpolitik. Popular sentiment was something to be tamed rather than mobilized. Historian Banno Junji has described this face of Meiji politics as “developmental despotism” (kaihatsu dokusai).2

The Ōkubo government confronted two main forms of opposition: reactionary opposition to reform and burgeoning demands for popular representation. Despite their differences, those two movements were united in their opposition to the autocracy of the Ōkubo cabinet. In response, the administration tried both to placate and to suppress its challengers. In 1874, it staged a punitive attack on Taiwan to appease demands for a more aggressive foreign policy, specifically from disgruntled samurai in the southwest. But when small groups of disaffected samurai launched violent attacks, the state responded with overwhelming force. In January 1877, such confrontations exploded into a full civil war after followers of Saigō Takamori raided an armory in Kagoshima and began marching north to Tokyo. The Meiji state mobilized nearly 60,000 soldiers and sailors against a rebel army of roughly 30,000, and by March the rebels were in retreat. The fighting dragged on until late September as the rebels managed to evade the advancing Imperial Army. The Meiji state won the War of the Southwest, also known as the “Satsuma Rebellion,” but at enormous financial and human cost. At least 10,000 combatants died in the fighting and the Meiji government’s direct military costs were over 40 million yen, roughly a half-year’s revenue. The financial implications of the war lasted well beyond the nine months of combat. The government covered its expenses largely by printing money, causing the value of the yen to plummet. Prices soared for basic commodities such as rice, charcoal, and salt.3

The government also faced non-violent demands for greater political inclusion, most pointedly, calls for the creation of an elected national assembly.

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