On 26 November 1868, a splendid procession wound through the massive gates of Edo Castle with musicians stepping out in front. At the centre, shouldered by sixty close-packed bearers, was the imperial palanquin topped by a golden phoenix, carrying the 16-year-old Emperor Mutsuhito. The imperial regalia – mirror, sword and jewel – were carried before him.
Ten thousand people lined the streets to kneel in respectful silence as he passed. Edo was renamed Tō-kyō, “Eastern Capital”, and Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace. The government declared a holiday and 2500 casks of royal sake were distributed around the city. And straightaway things started to change. Japan plunged into the modern world with unprecedented speed.
Edo had been an eastern Venice, a city of canals, where people walked or went by palanquin or boat. In no time rickshaws were hurtling through the streets, drawn by runners who yelled at pedestrians to clear the way. Buildings mushroomed, not of wood but of brick and stone. One of the first was the Tsukiji Hotel in the foreign settlement, another Mitsui House, a tiered five-storey confection, built by the shopkeeping and money-exchanging Mitsui family.
With the fall of the shogunate the lords returned to their homes in the provinces, leaving their vast Edo mansions empty. The government requisitioned the land to build ministries, barracks and parade grounds. Tokyo became a boom town just as Edo had been under Ieyasu.
In April 1872, a backwater called the Ginza burnt down. It was rebuilt with wide avenues lined with brick buildings and named Ginza Bricktown and became the new Japan’s most fashionable street. It housed the newspaper office and post office and at night was lit up with Japan’s first gas lamps.
That same year, the Tokyo–Yokohama line opened, designed by a British engineer with a train freighted over from Britain. The emperor, now twenty, was at the sparkling new station in full court regalia to open it.
He soon set an example by changing to western clothing, a military uniform with lots of medals, for official duties. He also made the revolutionary announcement, “I shall eat beef,” upending the centuries-old Buddhist prohibition against eating meat. After having been hidden away in the imperial palace in Kyoto all these years, the emperor was now out and about, being seen by his people, who no longer even needed to put their heads in the dust when he passed.
The author and intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi had travelled on the first Japanese missions to the United States and Europe in 1860. His books on Western manners and society were bestsellers. Western Clothing, Food and Homes, published in 1867, had illustrations showing how to dress, furnish your home, tell the time and even urinate western-style, with a picture of a chamber pot under a chest of drawers.
Men headed to the newfangled barber shops to have their topknots chopped off and their hair styled in the latest cropped cut. They tried out western fashions – trousers, capes, horribly uncomfortable leather boots – or wore a watch in their newly discovered fob pockets, mixing and matching Japanese and western styles with glorious abandon and showing off their new clothes at the beef restaurant, the haunt of the truly fashionable.
For the removal of the shogun was just the beginning; the changes that happened afterwards were the real revolution. The new rulers were oligarchs. They didn’t have to worry about elections and could plan for the long term. Fortunately, they were also idealists and they passionately wanted to ensure Japan’s survival. They deliberately and methodically reshaped society along western lines, adopting the elements of western culture which seemed suitable for Japan and building on the foundations that the Tokugawas had laid – the centuries of peace and stability, a well-developed merchant culture, a high level of education, a habit of duty and correct behaviour, a large, hard-working workforce and a formidable accumulation of capital.
These rulers were largely Satsuma and Chōshū samurai, headed by swashbucklers such as Saigō, Kido and Ōkubo, who had won their spurs in the battles to topple the shogunate. They were not bureaucrats who’d risen through the ranks or through family connections, but revolutionaries. They came to their task fresh and full of ideas. At the head were court nobles such as Iwakura Tomomi, who had done much to bring about regime change. Talented men and those with special skills were also included, even if they had sided with the shogunate.
These men had no legitimacy at all as a government; they’d arrived where they were by force of arms. But they had the emperor as a figurehead to provide the illusion of legitimacy and a sense of continuity.
The western powers were distracted by richer and easier pickings in China and elsewhere and didn’t seriously try to occupy or colonise Japan. Nevertheless, fear of colonisation was a great incentive spurring the new rulers on to arm and develop fast. This was the high noon of European imperialism and it was vital to make the country strong so that it wouldn’t be swallowed up like China. The way to resist the foreign powers was to fathom the secret of their military might. That meant studying their culture, learning their science and technology and catching up with their industrial development so as to make Japan a major power equal to the West.
Excerpted with permission from The Shortest History of Japan, Lesley Downer, Picador India.
