The Transformation of Wa | Plurality, Duality, Singularity

Part 2, Section 1; Meiji Restoration

Starting this week, this publication has changed its name from Shitsurae to From the Tideline.

The name has changed, but the root of what I think about has not. If anything it feels closer to this. What I have been writing toward all along has finally come together in a single word. A tideline is a boundary that no one fixes, where land and sea meet and the moon and the tides redraw the line again and again. The stance of this place, which is to look at flux and difference as they are and to think from there, is exactly what the name From the Tideline carries.

Thank you for staying with me, as always.

Wa [和] does not equal mass conformity. I position Wa as the invisible action and working that generates mass conformity. These two easily confused domains must be clearly distinguished in thought. What Wa requires to generate mass conformity is not the government, society, or any specific leader or group. Wa transforms by its own will, and we continuously suffer the influence of that transformation. It is therefore impossible for human beings to intentionally correct or modify Wa. This recognition is the foundation for understanding Wa as the invisible force that generates mass conformity.

Building on this premise, I will begin the continuation of the Transformation of Wa released last week. The original plan has changed, and the history from the Meiji Restoration through the modern and contemporary periods that I had intended to discuss in this Part 2 of 3 will be split into broader sections. What I will cover this time is the period from the late Edo era called Bakumatsu leading up to the Meiji Restoration through the success of the Restoration itself. Since I will proceed on the premise of the content in Part 1 of 3, please read Part 1 first if you have not done so.

The era I focus on in the transformation history of Wa is the period around the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The direct cause of the structural turning point born in this era can be read through the perspective of the transformation of Wa. The theme this time is the movement in which Wa began a great variation aimed at unification.

This era ended the three hundred years of the Tokugawa shogunal house’s Edo shogunate and has been beautified as the structural turning point of modern Japan that led to the establishment of a new government backed by the Western powers. Yet the people who carried out the Meiji Restoration did not share a single thought or purpose. They were in essence a miscellaneous armed group brought together by the drift of the era. In this respect they differ greatly from the unity of the later Imperial Japanese military. The form of Wa in the two eras is entirely different. In modern history this context has been considerably beautified, and the Meiji Restoration is defined as having been consistent under the cause of “Sonno Joi” [尊王攘夷] (revere the emperor and expel the foreigner). The substance was “overthrow the shogunate,” and not many people genuinely believed in this kind of grand cause.

The great majority participated for practical reasons such as earning money, seeking position and honor, or selling their names to gain employment with some domain. People like this are always opportunists who swing right or left according to the conditions of the era. For the portion of people who advocated overthrowing the shogunate, the problem became how to bring these opportunists to their side even temporarily, execute the revolution, and govern them afterward. The era just before the Meiji Restoration is called Bakumatsu [幕末] in the sense of the late Edo shogunate. The principal forces that carried out the Meiji Restoration and built the Meiji government from Bakumatsu were Choshu Domain (present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture) and Satsuma Domain (present-day Kagoshima Prefecture).

The Edo period in its broad flow can be thought of in three dimensions. These are the shogunate in Edo, the imperial court in Kyoto, and the domains in each region. What is easily misunderstood is that no “unified Wa” existed across the three hundred years of the Edo period. A monolithic conception like “Japanese Wa” or “the Wa of the Japanese people” did not exist in the Edo period. It is a “new way of thinking” formed in the history after the Meiji period. My own view is that the Edo period was the form on the Japanese archipelago of what is now called a multipolar world in geopolitical terms.

The upheaval of the Meiji Restoration is often simplified, but Choshu and Satsuma were not necessarily the sole driving force. The essential point occurring in this turbulent era comes down to one thing. How would Japan resist the external Western forces that were trying to occupy it? In the process of declining centripetal force toward the shogunate, when the imminent crisis of occupation by the West was at hand and unless the shogunate, the domains, and the court joined together, Wa varied first toward a state of unification. This variation over years became transformation and was eventually reflected in the era as history.

The people who lamented Japan’s future at the time threw themselves into a new problem. How could they shape Japan as one when no consistent force was acting upon it? This is the critical point. As we decipher this, it becomes a problem of how to unify the countless dispersed forces of Wa into one and to exclude the West that was trying to intervene in that unified Wa. The movement here was not the integration of multiple Wa as in a multipolar world but an attempt to drive back the West through the force of unification. From this a new perspective of “one force” was born.

If Wa is to become one force, the problem becomes “who” holds the initiative. The Tokugawa shogunal house and the shogunate no longer had that power, and the emperor did not have that level of power either. Everyone at the time was aware of this. The problem then shifted to “which domain” would hold the initiative. This is one of the truths of the Meiji Restoration as a contest over hegemony.

Let me explain why this distinctively Japanese perspective was born. The leading figures of the Meiji Restoration were samurai who carried the practice of the martial arts (Japanese Budo). In Japanese Budo, victory and defeat are decided by whether one can unify the scattered Ki within oneself. Combat ability has nothing to do with victory. This principle had soaked into the samurai throughout the Edo period, and the teaching of Confucianism as the regime philosophy of the shogunate since Tokugawa Ieyasu had been carried through the warrior class. The important transformation that occurred among the samurai in the Bakumatsu period was that they took the unified state of the warrior’s body and spirit as a model for the healthy form of “the nation” and interpreted it independently. They acted toward the realization of that ideal nation. The intent to form a nation in resistance to the West was born here and transcended the previous dimension of each samurai’s way of life. The samurai-specific techniques of Budo and Confucianism intervened in the flow of nation formation.

The problem is that this thinking was specific to the samurai class in the Edo period and unrelated to people of other classes. However, in the swirl of the militarism of Imperial Japan this samurai-specific technique appeared in the form of coercion of the populace. A strange phenomenon occurred. Although the samurai status had been only a small portion throughout the Edo period, in the Imperial Japanese era every member of the populace was transmuted into the samurai class. This can be read as the influence of the intervention of Bushido (The way of samurai) into Wa during the Bakumatsu period.

What they treated as a special problem was the complete split between the shogunate that held up the shogun and the court that held up the emperor that left the force of Japan ununified. To form a nation with one force, the unification of shogunate and court was the basic premise. The conception that holds the key is the idea of “Kobu Gattai” [公武合体] (union of court and shogunate) particularly asserted in the Bakumatsu period. Kobu Gattai was the very attempt to fuse the court and the shogunate and forcibly produce a single force. This Kobu Gattai is hidden within this article’s theme.

To put it clearly, unless Kobu Gattai as a single force could be realized, it was visibly certain that Japan would become a Western colony. The idea of “Saisei Itchi” [祭政一致] (unity of ritual and government) advocated by Aizawa Seishisai of the Late Mito School in 1825 was typical. For the people of Bakumatsu these had become hollow slogans and were interpreted only as a problem of where sovereignty over the force would belong. The split was between realizing a “unified state” in the form of updating the shogunate and realizing a “unified state” under a new regime that overthrew the shogunate. These were not cleanly bifurcated, and both flowed together into the Meiji Restoration. Wa began to transform toward the unification of Japan’s national territory, and the movement of Wa containing this force aimed at unification was further altered by the provocative acts of the West in the waters around Japan.

Let us read the movement of Wa that gave birth to modern Japan. The first point to recognize is that at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the cutting-edge thinkers of the Late Mito School had all died. Meanwhile, the sweeping domain governance reform carried out in Mito Domain in 1829 had formed a new current of the era. The thought nurtured in the Mito school had at last begun to transfer to practical action. The leader of that reform was Tokugawa Nariaki, the ninth domain lord. While carrying out major reform as the lord of Mito Domain, he shifted to a policy of giving opportunity to the lower and middle samurai who had been ignored until then if they had ability. This reform by the domain lord was welcomed by the young samurai. Filled with vigor, they responded to expectations with action and swore loyalty to their lord as reformists. They drew strong opposition from the conservative faction within the domain who valued the old samurai status order. The Mito conservatives used the word “tengu ni natteiru” (becoming a long-nosed tengu) to despise the reformists, a Japanese expression meaning “getting carried away.” The reformists liked the ring of the slur “tengu” used by their political enemies and later became the matrix of the radical organization “Tengu-to” [天狗党] that connected to the Meiji Restoration.

The Mito reformists, enraged by the provocative acts of the West in the waters around Japan, strongly asserted that the Sonno Joi of the Mito school must move from thought into the execution stage. Tokugawa Nariaki’s sweeping reform influenced other domains as well. The lower and middle samurai who had been inconspicuous throughout the Edo period began seeking opportunity for themselves and traveled to Mito Domain to study. Yet the rulers of the shogunate did not move. The symbolic events of the gradually beginning turbulent Bakumatsu period unfolded.

Around the mid-1850s, the sickly thirteenth shogun Tokugawa Iesada had no heir, and shogunal politics split in two. One side prioritized traditional bloodline above all and pushed the young Tokugawa Iemochi of Kishu Domain (present-day Wakayama). The other side asserted that governing talent was more important than bloodline for surviving the national crisis and pushed the brilliant Tokugawa Yoshinobu. The former was the conservative “Nanki faction,” and the latter was the reformist “Hitotsubashi faction.” This split was the moment at which the problem of political dynamics that had continued since the start of the Edo period surfaced, and it gradually came under the influence of Wa moving toward unification.

In the midst of this bifurcation of the shogunate over the question of the shogun’s successor, the conclusion of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States arose as the issue. The shogunate which had already lost its power to control indicated its intent to sign, but to avoid the impression that the shogunate had yielded to the United States, it appealed directly to the imperial court that held up the emperor. The intent was to transfer the locus of responsibility from the Tokugawa house to the imperial house and to position the court as having yielded to American pressure. This issue became the spark that deepened the antagonism between Edo and Kyoto. The shogunate’s intent was shattered by Emperor Komei who thoroughly detested any future of Western intervention in Japan. Emperor Komei rejected the shogunate’s request and showed the position of absolutely never yielding to American coercion, and the shogunate was driven into a corner. This decision by Emperor Komei was more than sufficient grounds for the rapid rise of the Sonno Joi faction, and the tone of overthrowing the shogunate as the quicker path became increasingly conspicuous.

Within this unsettled era, the elder of the Nanki faction Ii Naosuke appeared. Ii Naosuke became “tairo” as the highest authority of the shogunate, ignored the emperor’s command, signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States by his own authority, and decided the next shogun would be Tokugawa Iemochi of the Nanki faction. Tokugawa Iemochi was installed as the fourteenth shogun, but he was only twelve years old at the time. A child shogun could not possibly handle the chaotically collapsing shogunal politics, and resistance against Ii Naosuke’s dictatorial hard-line measures became active in many places. Seeing this as their chance, the Sonno Joi faction of Mito Domain that held up the anti-Ii Naosuke banner rose all at once. Ii Naosuke declared that he would sweep away his opposition and began a campaign of extreme suppression. Through the suppression that continued from 1858 to 1859, the daimyo (powerful feudal lords) of the rival Hitotsubashi faction were dismissed one after another, and people who criticized the shogunate were executed in succession. This major incident is called the “Ansei Purge.” It was a major turning point. The selection through which Wa would unify had gradually begun. I suspect this is the reason no dictator ever emerged in Japan. Wa uses those who hold particular ideologies but never pushes them up to an absolute position. Here lies the basal layer related to Japan’s distinctive reception of other cultures.

Ii Naosuke positioned the lord of Mito Domain who led the Hitotsubashi faction Tokugawa Nariaki as his greatest enemy and ordered him to lifelong house arrest within Mito Domain. This humiliation toward their lord was more than sufficient cause for the young samurai of Mito Domain who had cultivated Sonno Joi thought to radicalize. Holding up the cause of restoring honor to their lord, they gradually threw themselves into underground activity. The Mito samurai who made the decision to abandon the shogunate at the first stroke of the Ansei Purge left their domain on their own initiative so as not to cause trouble for the domain or their lord, hid in Edo, and set the assassination plan against Ii Naosuke into motion. To leave a domain meant to remove oneself from the domain’s registry and become an unaffiliated ronin. This action by the Mito samurai dispersed and weakened the Wa of Mito Domain that had been inherited as the spirit of the Mito school, flowed into underground activity, and was eventually transmuted into the principal thought of the radical faction. At that moment the lofty Wa cultivated in Mito Domain lost its potential to become the force of unification. From this point Mito Domain fell from the stage of the hegemonic struggle, and these samurai came to be called the Mito ronin.

On March 24, 1860, the Mito ronin succeeded in the assassination of Ii Naosuke. The shogunate’s conservative faction having lost its leader completely lost the power to rebuild. This incident opened the turbulent 1860s. What is interesting about Japan is this. The state of Bakumatsu that appears at first glance to be chaotic and lacking unity actually held considerably unified movement. I think this is the influence of Confucian teaching having soaked into the body and spirit of the samurai throughout the Edo period. Seen differently, in the Bakumatsu period Confucian teaching was elevated in a way that transformed Wa, and Wa began to encompass as one those people who appeared to be split into enemies and allies. By this era Wa had already unified the people of differing positions and beliefs across the land, and the problem was only where the final point of belonging would be decided. As noted, that point of belonging was neither the shogunate nor the court but a domain. The single force of Wa that the shogunate and the court had been forming was reaching the transitional fate of being swallowed by one of the domains. This process itself took more than a thousand years to occur, but the Wa that would unify the Japanese archipelago had at last begun to show its form.