A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan: Empire and Decadence [1st ed. 2023] 3031436458, 9783031436451

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A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan Empire and Decadence

Alistair Swale

A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan

Alistair Swale

A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan Empire and Decadence

Alistair Swale University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-031-43645-1    ISBN 978-3-031-43646-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © Chronicle of World History / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Yurika, Ryū and Sascha with deepest gratitude to Professor Kimura Masaaki

Foreword

This work builds on a previous body of research in various ways. And indeed the plan for the book came into shape after writing and publishing two articles that convinced me that there was a bigger project to undertake. The first, “Gesaku and the Renegotiation of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ through Illustrated News”, published in Japan Forum (Vol. 34, no. 5 (2022), explored the manner in which literary practitioners, gesakusha, who were continuing to be profoundly influenced by pre-­ Meiji conventions, were finding fruitful avenues of collaboration with practitioners of visual art, particularly woodblock prints (nishikie) and practitioners in performative arts such as rakugo and kōdan. Without exaggeration, they revolutionized print culture in Meiji Japan, so that the ostensibly ‘low brow’ illustrated newspapers such as the Tokyo Eiri Shinbun became the model for minor newspapers, ko-shinbun, to essentially drive their publishing ‘betters’, the major newspapers, o ̄ -shinbun, to radically revise their editorial practices and target a new kind of readership. The second article, “Public Speaking and Serialized Novels: Kōdan and Social Movements in Early Meiji Tokyo”, published in Japanese Studies (Vol. 41, No. 3) in 2021, consolidated some of the points made in the previous article and confirmed that the intersection between literature and performative arts was indeed intrinsic to the evolution of ‘modern’ Japanese literary culture. This intersection has already been covered to great effect by Seth Jacobowitz in his exceptionally insightful work on Meiji literature. This work simply takes some of those discussions a step further and explores what he rightly suggests is the blind spot of commentary on later Meiji cultural history—the elements that don’t deal with Empire. vii

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Examining the disaffected elements in Meiji culture is not simply a matter of examining the usual dissidents—Socialists and Anarchists who made themselves very prominent targets for state sanction and persecution. There were others, and I have tended to gravitate to the rather flamboyant example of Miyatake Gaikotsu, who engaged in a patently ‘decadent’ trajectory—celebrating human individual desire and articulating the readily relatable ennui that would resonate with a populace that was reeling under the demands of empire—let’s call it ‘empire fatigue’. The costs to ordinary Japanese citizens of pursuing and supporting the objectives of the grand project of the Imperial Japanese state were demonstrably becoming intolerable by the time of the Russo-Japanese War. The violence unleashed at the announcement of the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth on September 5, 1905, was not merely a quibbling over the terms of a document but an outpouring of profound disillusionment with the government, and its incapacity to understand simple commonly held human concerns. One focus that this work aims to address is how Japanese popular culture developed under this profound strain. If the Japanese people were not only thinking about empire and the imperial project in late Meiji Japan, what in fact were they thinking about? What did they enjoy? How did they make life bearable and meaningful? On the other side of the ledger, and unfortunately there does seem to be a rather binary dimension to the cultural and political ecology of this period, there is the question of how political authorities, including persons and institutions engaged in cultivating social influence on the cultural level to counter those tensions, sought to rationalize and legitimate increasingly repressive and at times brutal punishment of recalcitrant activists and non-conformists. It seems they could not help themselves. This also builds on an earlier work of this author that attempted to examine the Meiji Restoration as not so much a grand project of ‘modernization’, but rather an ingenious attempt to play at modernization according to notions of Westernization, while ensuring that the business of state and the priority of maintaining national security would be carried out with conservative priorities. It was an essentially regressive political project but none of it was an easy sell for the domestic populace or the domestic intelligentsia. It inevitably led to dissatisfaction amongst the more nationalist minded proponents of Japan’s future development who felt that too much had been compromised. It would also inevitably fail to satisfy elements within the new national polity who felt that the new dispensation would hold out opportunities of hitherto unavailable avenues of political participation.

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This was the conundrum posed for the Meiji elite; they struggled to resolve it, and they were punished in turn. Having said all this, the energy and creative genius of the artistic and literary figures of the late Meiji period indicate a remarkable resilience and many of the most celebrated writers of the modern period that emerge in this era, Natsume Sōseki in particular, come out looking profoundly insightful and credible. I am grateful for the assistance I have received in producing this work. The ongoing support of colleagues at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, particularly Professor Takii Kazuhiro, has been instrumental in enabling me to develop the concept of this book towards fruition. I would like to acknowledge the very generous and professional support provided by the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, who have been instrumental in providing feedback that improved this work and have been also very patient with some of the delays that emerged in the process of its completion. Finally, I remain deeply grateful to my mentor at Kyoto University, Emeritus Professor Masaaki Kimura for his ongoing counsel and encouragement. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the University of Canterbury who graciously assisted in making the one year research furlough in Japan from 2019 to 2020 possible. And, of course, there is the long-standing debt I owe to my immediate family who have variously tolerated my absences, either while overseas or even in person when I have been engrossed in this work. A special mention is also due to my father-in-­ law, Emeritus Professor Arai Ken, who, given the scope of dealing with such a broad concern of interests related not only to Japan but to East Asia more generally, provided advice and feedback that proved immensely instructive and encouraging. Japanese Programme University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Alistair Swale

Contents

1 Introduction: The Genesis of Late Meiji Culture  1 2 The Constitution and Latent Anarchy 27 3 The Cultural Impact of the Sino-Japanese War 61 4 Fin de Siècle Japan 95 5 The Russo-Japanese War—The Dark Victory127 6 Meiji Twilight159 7 Conclusion191 References197 Index 207

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Ochiai, Yoshiiku, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, No. 191, published October 1874. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) 9 Fig. 1.2 Arai Yoshimune, Eiri Jiyū Shinbun, 1884, 31 July. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 14 Fig. 2.1 Kokkai Gahō, No. 1, published July, 1890. Courtesy of theNational Diet Library of Japan, Tokyo 32 Fig. 2.2 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, illustration from Sanyūtei Enchō’s A True Tale from Kasanegafuchi (『眞景累ヶ淵』), as published in the Enchō Zenshū, Vol. 1, Shuyōdō, 1926. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 37 Fig. 3.1 Nakazawa Toshiaki, “Our Forces Storming the Defences Above Port Arthur” 「日清戦争威海衛ニ於我軍激戦ス」, 1995. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 74 Fig. 3.2 Kobayashi Kiyochika, “Our Navy Attacking and Sinking the Chinese Fleet on the Yellow Sea” 「我艦隊於黄海清艦撃沈之 図」. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 76 Fig. 4.1 Image from Asakura Rosan’nin, Musume Gidayuū, Hifumikan, August 1895. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 107 Fig. 4.2 Frontispiece of Taiyō, No. 1, 28 December, Hakubunkan, 1894. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 112 Fig. 5.1 Senji Gahō, 10 June, 1904, Kinji Gahōsha. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) 138

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.2

Frontispiece from Engei Gahō, July 1907. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) 154 Fig. 6.1 Image from Kotoku Ippa Daigyakujiken Tenmatsu(『幸徳一派 大逆事件顛末 』Miyatake Gaikotsu, ed., Ryūginsha, 1946. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan) 160 Fig. 6.2 Image from Ishigami Kinya, Jōyū Jōshi (『女優情史』), Jitsugetsusha, 1929. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)176

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Genesis of Late Meiji Culture

February the 11th, 1889, marked a great step forward in Japan’s march towards the status of a ‘civilized nation’ as it formally became a Constitutional monarchy. But it was also marred by an act of extraordinary violence—Mori Arinori, the Minister for Education, was preparing to leave his residence to travel to the palace when an unexpected visitor arrived requesting to see him. The young man, upon seeing Mori descend the stairs, immediately attacked the Minister, delivering the eventually fatal wounds before being himself killed by Mori’s bodyguard. This Minister of State was assassinated on a day that should have most emphatically underscored a grand achievement of the Meiji government—a constitutionally based representative system of government that was intended to reinforce Japan’s credentials as an equal amongst the world powers. The ostensible motive for the assassination was an alleged act of indiscretion at the Ise Shrine a year earlier, which was construed as an insult to the Imperial Household. The assassin was not without public sympathy, his funeral attracting more attendees than Mori’s.1 This combination of events was reflective of the profoundly contradictory nature of Japan’s seemingly meteoric trajectory of modernization and progress. Japan was to go on to consolidate social and political advances, but on the domestic front there lurked a persistent contradiction between the greatness of Empire, and the apparent unwillingness of the populace to stay completely in step with their rulers. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_1

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Even so, with the first elections to the Imperial Diet held the following year, it made 1890 a major watershed in modern Japan’s development. It ushered in a new basis for interaction between the rulers and the ruled, as well as consolidating the foundations of the Meiji nation state. It would also indirectly facilitate the development of the fiscal capacity to pursue the buildup in military strength that would lead to two wars of empire, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894—95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—05. The period from the 1890s to the early twentieth century also witnessed the flourishing of the Meiji Bundan, the literary establishment that would include illustrious novelists such as Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ō gai, Shimasaki Tōson and Higuchi Ichiyo, along with poets such as Masaoka Shiki and Yamada Bimyō (to name just a few). On another level, however, there was an intensification of the antagonism between officers of state hailing from or associated with the Satsuma and Chōshū clans, and those who did not enjoy oligarchical patronage. The drive behind the Peoples’ Rights Movement in the 1880s towards obtaining representative government had immense frustration with the ‘closing of the political shop’ at its core. Ironically, the fulfilment of the promise to establish an Imperial Diet took the impetus out of one of the most glaring instances of institutionalized disenfranchisement but, as Andrew Fraser’s excellent scholarship on the early Meiji Diets attests, there were a multitude of antagonisms deeply entrenched in the political factions that emerged in the Diet, as well as a number of practical administrative procedures that needed to be ironed out before the parliamentary system could be characterized in any way as a success.2 While the Peoples’ Rights Movement of the 1880s could be said to have not exactly lived up to the high-minded political ideals that had been articulated with reference to radical political thought in Europe and the United States, it was nonetheless a valuable period of training. Political speech-making, though initially something of a craze, nonetheless gave some of the nation’s finest minds, both men and women (albeit less commonly), opportunities to find their place in the new political culture of a centralized nation state. They learned how to harness popular media to inveigh on the government’s at times ham-fisted attempts to push through blatantly self-serving or deeply unpopular policies. The attempt by Kuroda Kiyotaka in 1881 to sell off the holdings of the Hokkaido Colonization Office at a minimal rate to a Satsuma colleague, Godai Tomoatsu, was exposed and thwarted when details were leaked to the press. In the late 1880s, the attempt by Ō kuma Shigenobu in league with Satsuma and

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Chōshū oligarchs to push through highly watered-down reforms of the extraterritorial judicial system led to his attempted assassination. It was not just the detail of that particular policy that led to such an outburst of violence. There were also highly catalytic media events such as the coverage of the sinking of the postal ship Normanton which resulted in the drowning of all non-Western passengers and, more gallingly, the exoneration of the British captain and crew.3 This fueled a palpable fury with regard to the ineffectual initiatives of the government to rectify the deficit in contemporary international legal arrangements. The disaster was even dramatized in a zangiri-mono kabuki play entitled Sanpu Gokō Utsusu Gendo ̄ (三府五港 寫幻燈) —A Lantern Shining on the Events of Five Ports in Three Prefectures—which had the two leading roles played by Ichikawa Danjūrō and Ichikawa Sadanji. Productions such as this were a weapon of criticism that the government, no matter how aloof and secure as an oligarchy, could not dismiss or ignore with impunity. Beneath the foment of political activism and controversy of the 1880s, there was also a profound transformation occurring within the domestic media landscape. What initially began with a continuation of the distinction between the government-aligned ‘major newspapers’ (o ̄-shinbun) and the relatively populist ‘minor newspapers’ (ko-shinbun) was shaken up profoundly. Following the political crisis of 1881, which led to the broad expulsion of non-Satsuma and Chōshū political figures, a range of ostensibly politically inspired newspapers sprang up in quick succession, most notably the Kaishin Shinbun affiliated with Ō kuma Shigenobu’s Kaishinto ̄, and the Jiyu ̄ Shinbun that was affiliated with the Itagaki Taisuke’s Jiyūto ̄ (Okitsu, 1997). Accompanying some of these publishing initiatives was the arrival of ‘partner’ illustrated newspapers, in particular the Eiri Jiyū Shinbun which recruited the nishikie genius Tsukioka Yoshitoshi as the primary illustrator.4 Meanwhile, the Chōya Shinbun, which ostensibly aimed to retain a certain neutrality, also established an illustrated newspaper vehicle, the Eiri Chōya Shinbun. The Yomiuri Shinbun did not emulate these other publications but began to set a new standard for timely, factual reportage and indeed demonstrate that the erstwhile association of ko-­ shinbun with content “only fit for women and children” was increasingly inaccurate. By the end of the 1880s, the process of what Tsuchiya Reiko has described as “mid-sizing” of newspapers was more or less complete, with the former ō-shinbun coming to increasingly resemble ko-shinbun in format, and an increasing percentage of staff at both ko-shinbun and

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illustrated newspapers coming from relatively highly educated backgrounds.5 It is clear that even within the world of popular print culture, including magazines and newspapers, persons of considerable prestige in terms of their education and shizoku background (e.g. Yano Ryūkei and Suehiro Tetchō) were beginning to play a more proactive role in both the management of newspaper production and the generation of printed content through their own writing.6 This matrix of the emerging print culture, while entailing the increased integration of more respectable institutions and personnel, was nonetheless quite emphatically partaking of a cultural current that at its core included a certain decadence. By decadent I mean that there was an aversion to adhering to the narrative of “civilization and improvement” being promoted by the government and establishment figures. It also drew on an intuitive affinity with indigenous sources of inspiration as opposed to imported Western models of expression and content. The continuity of the gesaku literary traditions in Meiji Japan has been well-covered more recently,7 and although the Peoples’ Rights Movement did incorporate a notion of progress in relation to the promotion of a representative system of government inspired by Western nations perceived as being the epitome of civilization, there was increasingly a discernable resistance to slavish adoption of Western models both culturally and politically. By the late 1880s, the national essentialism (kokusuishugi) espoused by Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, the founders of the magazines Nihon and Nihonjin, respectively, was channeling a deeper undercurrent of ambivalence towards the ostensibly ‘Westernizing’ government led by the Satsuma and Chōshū oligarchy (Nakanome, 1993). These magazines were of course of a more high-brow and intellectualizing disposition, but there is much to be said for the persistence of native sources of inspiration for popular culture as well. The first editor of the Eiri Chōya Shinbun, Asano Kan, actually lamented in print in 1886 that the serialized novels modelled on more ‘elevated’ Western content were in fact not particularly popular—readers were clamouring for content that was based in Japan and based on gesaku genres, ninjō-banashi (romances) and crime stories in particular.8 Even so, a palpable change occurred in the late 1880s as a series of rather arcane novels that blended Japanese perspectives into Western contexts appeared. Yano Ryūkei’s Keikoku Bidan (Illustrious Tales of Statesmanship) depicted the heroic deeds of the leaders of ancient Thebes and Tōkai Sanshi’s equally successful Kajin no kigu ̄ (Unexpected Encounters with Beauties) depicted a romance between a Japanese man and two

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women in contemporary America. The writing style was highly Sinified and Yano Ryūkei in his introduction to Keikoku Bidan, used the classical Chinese term haishi shōsetsu (稗史小説) to refer to the object of their ‘improving’ efforts, the depiction of history in fictionalized form.9 From a broader perspective, however, these works were symptomatic of a fluid and dynamic working out of a tension between domestic and external influences, and we should not underestimate the degree to which indigenous cultural proclivities were winning out. While many are familiar with the movement to integrate written and spoken styles of expression in Japanese (genbun itchi 言文一致), it is worth noting the perpetuation of a profoundly hybrid mode of expression gazoku setchū (雅俗折衷), literally the admix of the elegant with the crude, is of abiding significance and perhaps underappreciated (an important exception is Twine, 1991). Indeed, setchū is arguably the more generalized characteristic that pervades the currents of popular culture in the mid to late Meiji period, and it is my contention that amongst the cultural currents of the time the persistence of a distinctly decadent strand was evident. To describe this strand as “decadent” naturally invites a number of comparisons with European decadence. Without wishing to suggest that this was yet another adaptation of a Western trend, it is worth carefully outlining some of the representative instances of “decadence” in both Europe and Japan, with the prospect of identifying social and economic factors held in common, as well as factors that indicate a significant divergence. Decadence in Europe divides into some fairly distinct regional trajectories but can be plausibly linked on the basis of a set of preoccupations with aestheticism, eroticism, mischievous playfulness and occasional morbidity. Decadence defies simple definition but it is still possible to detect varying combinations of these traits in a number of offshoots and adaptations. The literary scene of mid-nineteenth-century France providing some of the earliest and perhaps most readily recognizable instances of the genre with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).10 A fresh impetus in visual art was furnished by Baudelaire’s Belgian friend, Felicien Rops, who came to prominence in the 1860s. Thereafter we can identify a number of strands that share the similar preoccupations. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley unmistakably accentuating the aestheticist and macabre traits in their writing and art, while in the United States Edgar Allan Poe also edged towards the macabre.11 French art and letters evolved towards Symbolism while in the German language

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the trend veered towards a form of Nihilism, most notably in the writing of Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), which in turn eventually found a literary counterpart in Franz Kafka’s short-story writing and a distinctive visual style in the fin de siècle work of Vienna’s Gustav Klimt.12 Overall, then, there is no common time frame for these strands of Decadence—France clearly provides some of the earliest instances, with anglophone writers and artists coming to the fray some thirty years later. German-speaking Decadence, if we can speak of such a thing, emerges most strongly within the context of the Austro-Hungarian sunset of empire. What provides a clue to finding some unifying connection is perhaps the fact that the Decadent ‘impulse’ seems to become sharpened in the wake of a major social upheaval or a traumatic national event that leads to a loss of prestige or certainty. France had no shortage of events to spur such impulses—beyond those most wide-ranging upheavals endured through the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic era, France was again shaken by revolutions; the July Revolution of 1830 which led to the ascension of the House of Orleans and the February Revolution of 1848 which led to a Second Republic that was ultimately usurped by Louis Napoleon as the Second Empire. In the German-speaking regions of Europe, Bismarck’s nation-building proceeded apace from the 1860s onwards, culminating in the Prussian victory over France in 1871. Clearly not a national catastrophe for Germany as an Empire, far from it, but it was certainly a rather lean time for liberalism and engendered a turbulent phase of kulturkampf. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s fortunes and orbit of influence was incrementally and decisively diminished by century’s end. The case of England provides perhaps the most difficult instance to associate with national upheaval but it can be said that the 1880s in the United Kingdom (UK) were dominated by two trends—the intractable problem of resolving the question of Home Rule for Ireland and the dismantling of earlier shibboleths of a profoundly conservative social order; the right for married women to own property was granted, education for children below the age of ten became obligatory and there was a substantial expansion of the male electoral franchise. As the procession of novels produced by Dickens from the 1840s onwards reflects, the Great Britain of the 1870s had come a considerable way from its rather squalid and brutal urban culture of the early Victorian cities to embrace a certain civility—but a dark undercurrent persisted nonetheless.

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In each of the foregoing cases it is evident that there is, at the very least, a transitioning from one order to another, with the degree of overt upheaval being greater or less in each instance. Applied to Japan, the correlation is not difficult to make. The Meiji Restoration was precisely the supplanting of one social order with another, and there were plenty of pockets of social and cultural resistance that continued to attempt a contestation of that new dispensation. It was not complete, however, until the emergence of a generational shift to those who were the first to directly experience only a Meiji regime and only know the Edo legacy ‘after the fact’. The artists, writers and performers who were to become creatively active from the late 1880s onwards produced what I would suggest could be described as a first wave of Japanese decadence. We do see a palpable vigour in a later form of literary and artistic output from the late Meiji to Taisho periods, and it would seem that this is the result of the impact of intensified industrialization, the development of a self-aware working class that clamoured for enfranchisement and an even more concentrated urbanization—this we might describe as the grounding for a second wave of decadence. The pronounced eroticism, ennui and occasional predilection for the grotesque in Taisho literature is well-noted, and even attributed with a readily acknowledged decadence.13 It should not, however, obscure our awareness of the earlier phase. One of the few articles to address the notion of decadence in the Meiji period to date in some detail is that of W. Puck Brecher, “Useless Losers: Marginality and Modernization in Early Meiji Japan”. The “useless losers” sobriquet is chosen carefully in that losers were indeed often persons who had literally lost out through the dismantling of the Tokugawa system of patronage following the Boshin War of 1868. The useless were those who either suddenly found that they had literary and/or artistic proclivities that were no longer in demand and were struggling to adapt to new media platforms as well as expectations grounded in the promotion of “civilization and enlightenment”.14 There was no shortage of examples in more or less every facet of artistic endeavour. In literature, the likes of Mantei Ō ga and Kanagaki Robun continued to write in a style consonant with gesaku preoccupations—a mixture of frivolity, humour, as well as tales of romance, crime or the supernatural. Their response during the 1870s was to engage in pointed satire inveighing against the faddism of bunmei kaika. Ō ga is famed for his Akire Gaeru (Frog Fed Up with Modernity) and Kanagaki produced Agura Nabe (Tales Heard Around a Pot of Beef). The likes of Takabatake

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Ransen attempted to write in a more seriously moralistic tone, albeit within the kanzen cho ̄aku (“reward good, punish evil”) frame of Edo literary conventions.15 Narushima Ryūhoku was perhaps the most spectacularly decadent of the early Meiji literati who were disenfranchised through the Restoration, penning a subdued account of being cast into the periphery of society in Bokujō inshi den (Biography of a Recluse on the Sumida River). It nonetheless included a fair amount of reference to seeking the diversions of Yanagibashi pleasure quarters and otherwise finding amenable diversions.16 With regard to traditional woodblock print-making, we have already noted how Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku, found ways to have their skills back in demand by providing dynamic and impactful full-colour woodblock prints for the nishikie shinbun that came into vogue as companions to such mainstream newspapers as the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun and the Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun. Chelsea Foxwell has produced academic commentary on how this media phenomenon burgeoned in the mid to late 1870s and notes that the tenor of the content was more often attenuated towards the risqué, lurid, violent or supernatural.17 Certainly the shinbun nishikie treated the most exciting and talked-about incidents of the day, covering everything from grisly crimes to the escapades of notorious characters around town. Yoshiiku’s style was typically dynamic and well-suited to his forte of depicting violent action, a notorious murder incident or a public ruckus, but as the next image illustrates he was also adept at depicting scenes of debauchery such as (in Fig. 1.1) the depiction of a young man who is in a sexual liaison with two sisters and ties their mother to a post to taunt her. In contrast to Yoshiiku’s dynamic and more impactful coloration, Yoshitoshi tended to accentuate the aesthetic qualities of the image, even when depicting salacious topics such as adultery or the instances of the supernatural. In parallel with them there is also Kobayashi Kiyochika who emerged from a rather idiosyncratic background—he had formerly been a samurai in the Bakufu forces during the Boshin War but then devoted himself to nishikie following the Restoration. It is rumored that he received extensive tuition from Charles Wirgman, the founder of Japan Punch and long-time resident of Yokohama.18 Kiyochika, as we shall see in later discussion, was not as wedded to the sensational topics that Yoshiiku and Yoshitoshi were drawn to, and neither was he attempting to ‘cash in’ on the popularity of nishikie shinbun. His works were, on the whole, more meditative and still,

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Fig. 1.1  Ochiai, Yoshiiku, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, No. 191, published October 1874. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto)

with an inclination towards landscapes and the depiction of night skies or panoramic views of the countryside. To these nishikie artists we might add two highly regarded painters of the late Edo period that also figure in Brecher’s account—Awashima Chingaku and Kawanabe Kyōsai.19 Chingaku followed a familiar pattern of

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initially retiring into relative reclusiveness to emerge as an avid experimenter with Western art, while Kyōsai was a somewhat legendary Bohemian who combined extraordinary indifference to social convention with a prolific output of wild and often grotesque depictions of monsters, ghosts and occasionally pornographic content.20 Kyōsai famously kept an “illustrated diary” (暁斎絵日記) in which he spontaneously recorded social events, happenings or things that simply came to mind. He frequently depicts the company he keeps in caricatures, and it is apparent from the foregoing that he had Western acquaintances, including the recurring figure of the architect Josiah Conder. He was, in any case, an extraordinarily gifted draughtsman with a fertile imagination and a strong sense of playfulness and mischief.21 While Brecher’s commentary certainly is persuasive in terms of presenting these figures as, in most cases, relatively disillusioned and disenfranchised, the fact remains that a good proportion of them eventually reached a point where they were able to find a new place within Meiji society and culture, and it was one that could be surprisingly lucrative and viable. As already noted, Yoshitoshi succeeded in landing extremely well-paid work with the Eiri Jiyu ̄ Shinbun, collecting as much as the equivalent of a senior editor’s salary, and Narushima Ryūhoku established one of the leading newspapers of the time, the Chōya Shinbun, along with its sister publication the Eiri Chōya Shinbun. Kawanabe Kyōsai, despite an extremely anarchic lifestyle, managed to carve out a solid career as a social caricaturist. At the same time, all three of the artists referred to above died prematurely and it is broadly agreed that it was the impact of the strain of crossing from the cultural milieu of the Edo period to the new social and cultural dispensation of the Meiji period that contributed to physical and mental deterioration. Yet they all left an impact in their respective fields and, more importantly, paved the way directly and indirectly for their heirs to take up the challenge afresh. There is one major point of qualification that needs to be made, however, before we consider a continuation of the legacy of these ‘proto-­ decadents—namely that the nature of what was generated through their influence was conditioned in amalgam with the other currents of influence and social impacts that they were subjected to and was therefore profoundly hybridized. That is to say, although they refashioned themselves from within the tradition of a milieu that was deeply imbued with the proclivities of gesaku and other cultural conventions of the Edo period, those proclivities and conventions were not continued in an unreconstructed or unaltered form.22 The best example is perhaps furnished, again,

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by the transition from expertise in nishikie to sashie illustrations. This entailed a transition from full-colour woodblock techniques to lithographic productions, and a reworking of an understanding of visual impact based on colour as opposed to a visual impact constructed out of monochrome. Nothing exemplifies the skill of a nishikie artist adapting to the sashie format more than the ability to evoke water effects or represent light purely through the textures and contrasts created in one colour. The second point to accentuate is that the coterie of writers, performers and artists that would become increasingly active from 1890 onwards were definitively products of Meiji Japan, born on or around the time of the Restoration. Their education was part of the new model, nationally integrated system, and the linguistic conventions were far more streamlined than had been experienced by their predecessors. That is not to say that they were ignorant or indifferent to those precedents, but neither were they constrained by them. This too was profoundly hybrid and at times highly ambiguous, despite the best efforts of the Meiji bundan to regulate standards of literary taste. The publishing phenomenon that most clearly connects the transformation of print media in the 1880s to developments in the 1890s was arguably the serialized newspaper novel (tsuzukimono). Driven by writers of gesaku proclivities, these serialized, often illustrated ‘novels’ initially emerged amongst the ‘minor newspapers’ of the late 1870s, but then saw widespread appropriation within newspapers of various political stripes through the Peoples’ Rights Movement of the 1880s. “Political novels” produced amidst the turbulence of early political activism evolved in turn towards a bewilderingly diverse array of topics and themes—from romances set in foreign lands to historically based tales of heroism and crime thrillers. These have been broadly covered in existing scholarship with an emphasis on their relation to the development of more serious literature in the mid-Meiji period.23 An important adjunct to this genre of output was the inclusion of sashie, illustrations drafted by some of the leading exponents of nishikie prints but nevertheless rendered purely in black and white. When discussing the leading exponents of nishikie and sashie in the early to mid-Meiji period, Yoshiiku and, Yoshitoshi stand out but it is their legacy through their disciples that is also noteworthy. These figures have been given increased scholarly attention in recent times, with Yoshitoshi finally receiving the level of in-depth treatment that was clearly merited with Sugawara Mayumi’s timely biography (Sugawara, 2018). There is, however, relatively limited coverage of Yoshiiku except for scholarship focusing on his

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early foray into nishikie shinbun with Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun and his role as primary sashie illustrator for the Tokyo Eiri Shinbun which he set up with Takabatake Ransen in 1875. By the late 1880s, Yoshiiku had in fact diminished a considerable amount of his attention to nishikie and sashie preferring to devote his acumen and energies to newspaper publishing and occasional illustrative collaborations. He also did not take as many disciples as other practitioners continued to do, this being in stark contrast to Yoshitoshi who was quite extraordinary in his accumulation of personal acolytes. To date, there remains something of a gap in the discussion of the interchange between the writers of serialized newspaper novels and sashie artists. An important recent exception is the work of Bassoe (2018) who has built on recent Japanese scholarship to explore the interrelation of illustrations to the early works of Izumi Kyōka.24 It perhaps may come as some surprise to find that Izumi regarded the illustrators as integral to the artistic enterprise; they were not adornments or accoutrements but partners in a totality of artistic expression. And he was not alone—when examining the serialized material and the illustrative work produced alongside it in other cases, there are any number of instances where the artist and writer would quite literally commune over the story before deciding on the final form of the work. Given that the production of serialized material had a degree of time pressure around it due to newspaper deadlines, it cannot be assumed that this was a particularly drawn-out process. Nonetheless, the Japanese case studies to date suggest that, in the first place, both writers and artists spent a considerable amount of time in each other’s company socially, and the compass of their socializing incorporated persons from a broad array of backgrounds—print makers with kabuki play writers, rakugo exponents with newspaper entrepreneurs, on occasion also foreign artists working and living in Japan. These gatherings would almost certainly incorporate discussion of the latest ideas for compositions or projects, with in all probability impromptu renditions given to test the response of those in attendance. At the same time, it emerges that a number of the persons in attendance would be adept at more than one specialization, and in particular it appears that in some cases even writers of serialized novels made a point of sketching scenes from their stories to pass on to the artist who would then draft and produce the final illustrations. There are a number of disciples of Yoshitoshi that stand out as meriting closer attention from the late 1880s to 1890s. In particular, Arai Yoshimune, Migita Toshihide and Mizuno Toshikata. Their rise followed

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in the wake of Yoshitoshi’s lucrative ‘residence’ at the Eiri Jiyu ̄ Shinbun which enabled him to expand his coterie of disciplines substantially. To these we would add of course Kiyochika who presents a more independent trajectory of development which nonetheless does ultimately converge with the aforementioned figures in the mid-1890s with the trend for producing nishikie in celebration of Japanese victories during the Sino-­ Japanese War.25 Toshihide, Toshikata and Kiyochika will be discussed further in relation to the boom in nishikie depictions of the Sino-Japanese War in the ensuing chapters, but for the sake of illustrating how the extraordinary leap from polychrome nishikie depictions to monochrome sashie was successfully negotiated, it would be instructive to view the early output of Arai Yoshimune, who worked closely with Yoshitoshi at the Eiri Jiyu ̄ Shinbun, and is widely regarded as one of his most eminent protégés at the time. Yoshimune had been one of the first to enter into an apprenticeship with Yoshitoshi in the late 1870s but with Yoshitoshi entering into particularly straitened circumstances in the early 1880s, he was forced to find an alternative arrangement and he ended up inheriting the Yoshimune title as the second in line to Utagawa Yoshimune (the first). Yoshimune reunited with Yoshitoshi joining the Eiri Jiyū Shinbun in 1882. There were two aspects to Yoshimune’s technique that seem to be particularly outstanding, the first being a talent for composition. The images are not only inventively integrated as sashie into the newspaper text, but also depicted with an inventive manipulation of space and perspective. In one instance (Eiri Jiyu ̄ Shinbun, 1884, 22 August), he depicts fire fighters battling a house fire but they are both enveloped in smoke and one of them is falling from a building roof while being watched from behind. The enveloping of the figures in the surrounding smoke is at first a bit disorienting but there is a moment when everything falls into place and you recognize the nature of the event being depicted. Once the image is ‘decoded’ it has a rather ingenious effect of creating a sense that the fireman in the foreground is indeed plummeting, almost coming forward off the page, with the rather narrow column that the illustration occupies accentuating the up-down flow. The other particular talent displayed by Yoshimune is his capacity to depict lighting effects in difficult contexts, such as in the darkness of night or even under water. One of his most ingenious compositions depicts a room at night and in an adjacent frame the appearance of a ghost in the

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room (Eiri Jiyū Shinbun, 1884, 2 March). It demonstrates a rather clever combination of two perspectives, one in which a ghost appears as a luminescent presence floating in the darkness, contrasted with the adjacent view that depicts the interior of the room which is illuminated by a small lantern that reveals a folding screen in the dark. A further difficulty confronted when transitioning from polychrome to monochrome is the depiction of violent scenes that entail blood. In a full-­ colour nishikie bright red is used, quite copiously in some instances, to create a lurid and appalling impact. In sashie that is not an option. The convention that Yoshimune adopts is to depict spilled blood as solid blocks of black. In Fig.  1.2, the male in the frame is a jilted lover who takes Fig. 1.2  Arai Yoshimune, Eiri Jiyū Shinbun, 1884, 31 July. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

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‘revenge’ on the unfortunate woman who has fled from him. The gruesome scene is accentuated by the positioning of the head on a ledge, which makes it possible to illustrate blood trickling down the wall to the floor. A similar principle is at work in another work where blood flowing down the right leg of a criminal being executed is used to the same effect (Eiri Jiyu ̄ Shinbun, 1884, 3 May). This approach to depicting such content, incidentally, has a distinct resonance with the manner in which Beardsley depicts the head of John the Baptist in his Salome series of images appearing a decade later. The ingenuity displayed by Yoshimune is displayed to varying degrees more generally in the mass circulation newspapers that enjoyed considerable success based on the wedding of serialized novels with sashie illustrations, the Yamato Shinbun and Miyako Shinbun being two cases in point. These publications were established in the late 1880s by the veteran publishing innovators San’yūtei Enchō, Kanagaki Robun and Jōno Saigiku and were consistently successful—remaining in publication right up until World War II. The Miyako Shinbun was the brainchild of Kanagaki who initially named it Konnichi Shinbun. It started with an emphasis on the arts and performance but eventually was restyled as the Miyako Shinbun and became an evening edition newspaper featuring illustrated serialized novels in addition to diverse articles and updates on the performing arts. The Yamato Shinbun was established in 1886 by Jōno Saigiku but likewise developed from an earlier publication, the Keisatsu Shinpō. It had a broader focus on popular entertainments as well as the performing arts and became noted for the inclusion of rakugo or ko ̄dan performances of San’yūtei Enchō and Shōrin Hakuen  that were transcribed and then published as illustrated serialized novels (Tsuchiya, 1999, 45–63). For the remainder of the Meiji period, this blend of content in both publications was to prove highly popular and formed the basis for a continuity of expertise associated with the production of sashie throughout that period. Japanese graphic art produced from the later stages of the 1880s to the close of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 has been characterized in most commentary as a ‘last flowering’ of ukiyoe and nishikie. Certainly there was a marked change in emphasis with regard to how such artistic output was published, with illustrations (sashie) accompanying serialized novels in newspapers far outstripping more conventional nishikie which tended to be produced to depict topical events soon after they had occurred. At the same time there was also a refinement of techniques of representation, whether in purely black and white illustrations, or the

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more traditional nishikie medium, that incorporated more ‘realistic’ depictions of human figures and lived spaces, and this was due to some extent to the influence of Western artists residing in Japan as well as the impact of photography. It is certainly the case that formally wrought nishikie retained a certain cachet compared to illustrations, primarily because the production values were often higher (although that could not always be guaranteed for nishikie either). We should query how new visual techniques were being developed and ask who was refining them best. The period from the late 1880s leading up to the Sino-Japanese War was in fact a golden-age of illustration and we may be surprised to discover that the nishikie depicting the war with China that garnered the most praise were crafted by artists with substantial sashie experience—Toshihide and Toshikata to name two—including visual devices that in some cases be traced back to discipline of working in black and white for ten years or more. The foregoing overview of the matrix of several branches of artistic practice—literary, visual and performative—suggests a more dynamic basis for evaluating the currents of social and cultural development continuing into the late Meiji period. Apprehending these currents requires some careful nuancing—the overwhelming tumult of the factional conflict besetting the new constitutional government and the ongoing toxicity of frustrations related to extraterritoriality tend to subsume other dimensions of both social and cultural development. Indeed, with the commencement of hostilities between Japan and China in 1894, a pattern of rapid military expansion is set in train that reinforces the priorities of government and adds impetus to the increasingly antagonistic position in relation to Russia. With so many momentous developments, the cultural bedrock of post-1890 Japanese society can tend to be obscured, and I would suggest that indeed it has been obscured given that there are relatively few integrated accounts of social and cultural developments for this period with attention tending to converge on the emerging political system, international relations, and of course the newly emergent literary elite. There are nonetheless several sources of historical commentary to date that are relevant to this concern. Peter Kornicki’s Meiji Japan: Political, Economic and Social History, a four-volume edited collection of significant academic essays, is a major exception that provides some detailed perspectives in a thematically organized manner.26 Even so it is clearly the work of disparate academics with disparate intellectual concerns. Andrew Gordon’s pioneering scholarship on the emergence of labour relations from late Edo

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to Post-war Japan has provided detail and depth on that aspect of Japan’s modern development (Gordon, 1985). His A Modern History of Japan also makes a substantial attempt to provide a more holistic account of the social and cultural undercurrents of the era albeit with a broad compass, “from Tokugawa times until the present” (Gordon, 2003). In Japanese scholarship, Maeda Ai stands out, quite apart from his concerns with literary history, as making a number of important contributions to our understanding of the emergent culture of silent reading and its relation to the education of academic elites.27 At the same time, as Andrew Gordon notes, there is the burgeoning of the urban population as an additional 10 million people in the Japanese population congregate increasingly in urban centres while the countryside through domestic and international migration takes a slight decline. Through the expansion in particular of silk and cloth manufacture, along with other factory-based modes of production, a population with a close network of daily lived spaces emerges while not yet having the cultural products that will articulate their new awareness of community.28 To this can be added a perhaps tangential factor, but one that is arguably more significant than realized—the emergence of the first generation of elites who were born on or around the Meiji Restoration and therefore have no experience of the pre-Meiji social order. The new academic elite who were now nurtured through either prestigious private academies such as Keiō Gijuku or the state-funded High Schools and the Preparatory School for Tokyo Imperial University were also beginning to take a fresh interest in the world of letters, either as avid consumers of serialized novels or aspiring writers themselves. In tandem with the development of a new intellectual elite, there was also the emergence of a new class of urban labourer, the shokkō (職工). These were a category of citizens without precedent with no direct lineage to the former caste system. They were more often than not the impoverished who had migrated from the countryside following the “Matsukata deflation” of the 1880s. With the successful denouement to the Sino– Japanese War in 1895, substantial resources were being poured into expanding Japan’s still relatively nascent industrial base. It would be tempting to categorize this class as a working class on a par with the kind of working class witnessed in Europe and the United States, with similar political aspirations. However, as T. C. Smith’s brilliantly nuanced analysis makes clear in “The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers 1890–1920”, agitation such as it occurred in this early phase of

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development was couched more in the language of being accorded a certain moral acknowledgement as the shokkō endeavoured to better themselves and prove their worth in the service of Empire.29 And finally there is the class of urban disaffected drawn variously from the displaced rural population or the disenfranchised shizoku. The disaffected persons from rural backgrounds are relatively easily understood— failure to find constant employment, the ignominy of lowly occupations—however, the amalgam of discontent from the lower-class former shizoku was a somewhat more heterogenous affair. At root many continued to deeply resent the outcome of the Restoration if they had come from clans that were not aligned with Satsuma or Chōshū but it could be related to a number of frustrations—quite apart from the loss of stipends, there was the resentment at the apparently overweening Westernization pursued by the government in all facets of life. There was the still raw resentment at the ‘betrayal’ of heroes such as Etō Shinpei and Saigō Takamori and the ‘scandalous’ refusal to preserve Japan’s national honour by invading Korea in 1873—given a fresh impetus with the burning down of the Japanese Legation in Seoul in 1884. Regardless of the particular flavour of resentment being espoused though, there was a common sobriquet for that class of ruffian or potential political terrorist—the sōshi (壮士). They would increasingly vent their anger at the government and any elites deemed too ‘compromised’ by their attachment to Western values and practices, while their patriotic fervour would be directed toward the service of one figure, the person of the Emperor (Siniawer, 2011, pp. 43–51). The crucial nexus of contradiction in the late Meiji period was indeed this intersection between fervour for the Emperor and empire, with outright ruffianism and at times untrammelled hedonism brewing not far beneath the surface. As will be illustrated in the ensuing chapters, there were cadres of political activists of various stripes who actually combined promotion of patriotism and conservative interests, with relatively scant regard for the background of those who came along to serve those interests. It is ironic indeed that one of the most effective planks in the intelligence networks that underpinned Japan’s soft war before the breakout of full war with Russia was the network of brothels that had been established in the Eastern theatre, at times with the explicit collaboration of right wing associations such as the Genyōsha and high-ranking sympathizers within the military. A movement to ameliorate the position of women held in prostitution, initially spearheaded by the Salvation Army but later taken

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up by domestic activists in Japan, would find support of sorts from various quarters—but there was never any suggestion of abolishing prostitution itself. Indeed, as Kuroiwa Ruikō’s rather infamous naming and shaming in the pages of the Yorozu Chōho of public officials who were notorious for having relations with ‘kept women’ (often with illegitimate offspring) indicated, the moral compass of the elite was never particularly sharply elevated from the inclinations of the masses who were routinely extolled to exercise moral probity in the service of nation-building and the promotion of ‘civilization’. Itō Hirobumi, a prime minister in successive cabinets of the late Meiji period, was notorious for his predilections for drink and pursuing women, to the extent, as will be covered hereafter, he was characterized in the Kokkei Shinbun of Miyatake Gaikotsu as the modern Meiji incarnation of the hero in Ihara Saikaku’s famous Edo period novel, The Man Who Loved Love (『好色一代男』). Yet, this tension masks to some extent a more human and relatable trajectory in the evolution of popular entertainment and popularly consumed media during the period in question. The aforementioned genre of public political speech-making, Seidan, actually led to the establishment of new performative forms, particularly sōshi shibai, which were the first attempts by public performers to transpose the medium of political protest into a mode of popular entertainment. As will be illustrated in more detail in the ensuing chapter, Kawakami Otojirō, a somewhat provincial bit-­ player in the People’s Rights movement, capitalized on early successes to provide the public with a new theatrical form that had energy and novelty—shaking the foundations of accepted notions of theatrical practice and the appropriate handling of contemporary themes in popular theatre. Moreover, during the Sino-Japanese War nishikie woodblock print artists of various stripes, along with their publishers, utterly inundated the market with content of divergent technical and aesthetic merit, but in so doing nonetheless galvanized the public consciousness and gave it a certain ‘festive’ edge despite the desperateness of the times. It was precisely at this time that what might be characterized as the birth of ‘modern Japanese literature’ came into being, with the usual attributions of somewhat mythic influence to Tsubouchi Shoyō’s writings to that enterprise. In the following chapter, considerable attention is given to the activities of Ozaki Koyō and his collaborators in the Ken’yōsha society which established a fine example, through the Garakuta Bunkō magazine, of the possibilities of publishing material that presented intelligence and wit, along with a high degree of irreverence, combined, nonetheless, with

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serious social and cultural awareness and literary aspirations. The talisman work of Ozaki, The Golden Demon (『金色夜叉』), was indeed in some sense a distillation of these energies into one iconic novel that presented a new kind of youth hero—a student, impecunious, desperately in love, but finding that the only way to get ahead in this new Meiji society was to become a money-fixated ‘demon’. It was, from a literary perspective, highly idiosyncratic, and still to this day struggles to find resonance with a Anglophone readership, but its significance was enormous. As was the work of one of his ‘disciples’, Izumi Kyōka, who took idiosyncratic but highly sensual aesthetics in early modern Japanese literature to a new level. He likewise presents something of a conundrum for both translators and a non-Japanese readership. The avenues by which such writers found interactions with popular culture were nonetheless surprising. As we will see in Chap. 3, the adoption, for example, of one of Izumi Kyōka’s works by Kawakami Otojirō for the follow-up to his colossally successful Nisshin Sensō, speaks volumes regarding how synergies between exponents of literature and performative arts persisted—indeed as a continuation of tendencies evident from well before the Meiji Restoration. As will be examined in further depth in Chap. 4, Japan entered a rather intriguing parallel in cultural developments in other parts of the globe. At the same time that Japan, as with many of the European powers, was consolidating colonial acquisitions and indeed contemplating next moves for potential future expansion, the domestic cultural scene was caught up in the early stages of the development of mass entertainments that exhibited, in some cases, a decidedly hedonistic if not decadent orientation. Tokyo in particular became the focal centre of these phenomena but they could have their roots in that other dynamic cultural hub—Osaka—or even as far afield as northern Kyushu. But Tokyo was almost always the final object for the success of a career in letters, arts and entertainments. The metropolitan audience of Tokyo was a more urbane and, to some degree, more literate entity, comprised of a more self-conscious amalgam of the workers, artisans, and students already alluded to. Various aspects of popular entertainment will be reviewed in this chapter but perhaps the most representative and intriguing was the phenomenon of women’s gidayū. Drawing on a repertoire of tales that were initially compiled early in the 1700s by Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714), the late Meiji incarnation of the tradition had emerged from Kyoto and Osaka and rather surprisingly took Tokyo by storm. That process is discussed further in Chap. 4 but suffice to highlight that the key to women’s gidayū, or tare gidayū’s success was a

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combination of visual novelty—the performers would be attired in classical male formal attire—and the women themselves were strikingly attractive. The segment of the Tokyo populace most smitten by these performances was the young male audience, particularly the students attending universities or other institutions of higher learning in the metropolis. They formed fan clubs, swore undying love to their favourite performer, and were not averse to rowdy ‘crowd participation’ or even brawling with other students. Officialdom was horrified, and various editorials ‘tut-tutting’ at the poor behaviour were trotted out with censorious admonitions and exhortations to curb the phenomenon. The fin de siècle period covered in Chap. 4 also witnessed the apogee of the tabloid press, particularly as exemplified by the likes of theYorozu Cho ̄hō and Niroku Shinpō. They would from time to time join in the chorus of disapproval for the latest instance of student or urbanite misconduct but at the same time they more or less revelled in reporting scandal and to fan moral panic with news of the latest horrific murder case or example of sexual degeneracy. The early 1900s also saw the emergence of a particularly successful satirical publication, the Kokkei Shinbun, which under the editorship of Miyatake Gaikotsu would enjoy burgeoning circulation and, unsurprisingly given the at times ribald content, the constant attention of the official censors. What distinguished it from most other publications was its combination of wit and commentary on contemporary affairs, with a penchant for very directly calling out persons in high places who were discovered to have engaged in corruption or abuse of power. Other newspapers were apt to accept ‘inducements’ to refrain from such reportage and the Miyatake made it his business to call out these publications and their editorship in no uncertain terms. If the fin de siècle had been characterized by exuberance, excess and hedonism, the shadow of impending war with the Russian Empire was bound to cast a pall over the popular mood. By mid-1903, with the Russians reneging on a pre-agreed staged withdrawal from Manchuria, the minds of those in government were sharpening their focus on how an armed conflict with Russia might pan out. Moreover, with the Trans-­ Siberian railway being near completion in the next three to four years, the window for action was narrowing. But in addition to the government solidifying its position with regard to the threat of Russian expansion there was an intensification of official measures to clamp down on what were perceived as critical internal threats, and they were explicitly identified as the emergent social movements of Feminism and Socialism (or more

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extreme notions of Anarchism), along with more pronounced advocacy of the primacy of personal choice and personal fulfilment in sexual relations. These were increasingly branded as injurious Western ideological influences that posed a direct threat to indigenous Japanese traditions and the fabric of the Meiji nation state. It is this intensification of official and unofficial attempts to repress these ‘threats’ while also aiming to prosecute the war to a successful denouement that forms a key focus of Chap. 5. So far as the cultural impact of the Russo-Japanese War is concerned, there were continuities in the manner with which writers, artists and performers responded to the conflict—woodblock prints continued to be produced in substantial quantities, noted authors such as Mori Ogai and Kunikida Doppo continued to follow the conflict in the field and produce diverse literary responses while patriotic theatrical productions, both in tradition kabuki and the “new theatre” (Shingeki) enjoyed enthusiastic receptions. But unlike the previous war of 1894–1895, there was not the broad popular consensus in favour of the war against Russia, and as astounding casualties mounted, not even persons as illustrious as General Nogi Maresuke were immune to direct criticism for the painfully slow progress in the first year. As will be covered in more detail in the ensuing commentary, there was also the emergence of newly sombre modes of public performance. On the one hand, there was the naniwa-bushi of Tōchūgen Kumoemon (1873–1916), a recitative genre of story-telling performance which relied on a staple of historical tales of military bravery and honour, such as Chūshingura (the tale of the loyal forty-seven rōnin). At the same time, there was the enormous popularity of performances by Bitō Itchō (1847–1928), the content of which was derived from the military-­themed kōdan repertoire. These performances were consonant with the tenor of mourning that stemmed from the mounting count of the war dead, but they were also in fact patronized and promoted by high-­ ranking government officials and military figures, along with nationalist private associations that saw this ‘reform’ of popular entertainment a vital complement to more overt political activism. The end of the Russo-Japanese War, though nominally a victory for the Japanese Empire, and a dire humiliation for the Russian counterpart, nonetheless did not lead to the outpouring of optimism and energy witnessed following the resolution of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The terms of Treaty of Portsmouth, announced on the 5th of September 1905, included no reparations from the Russians—a facet that immediately ignited public indignation and intense opprobrium for the government.

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On the evening of the day of the announcement, a public protest organized at Hibiya Park in Tokyo erupted into a savage riot, taking three days to quell and requiring the declaration of martial law on the 6th of September. The final years of the Meiji period covered in the final chapter could be characterized as a period of intensifying contradictions and intractable problems with no simple solutions. The social unrest that broke out in the Hibiya riots was not a one-off. Exactly a year later, similar outbreaks of violence and riot visited the capital as a series of protests at the scheduled raising of metropolitan train service fares spiraled into similarly chaotic and shocking episodes of mayhem. This was compounded by unrest at some of Japan’s most iconic centres of heavy-industrial production, most famously at the Ashio Copper mine which also saw a major outbreak of violent rioting in 1907. On the political front, initial attempts to offer something of an olive branch to the Socialist Movement under the premiership of Saionji Kinmochi fell into disarray as factional infighting between those advocating political engagement and those advocating violent revolution spilt into public stand-offs. The so-called Red Flag Incident of the 22nd of June, 1908, put paid to any possibility of rapprochement between political activism and government. At a social gathering of various factions of Socialists and Anarchists at the Kinkikan theatre to celebrate the release from prison of the broadly supported leader Yamaguchi Koken, the initially cordial proceedings dissolved into a rather raucous unfurling of banners and chanting of Anarchist slogans by representatives of the more activist factions. Police were on the scene immediately and several arrests of high-profile activists were made, including several leading Feminists such as Kanno Sugako. This was a watershed in turning political activism towards insurrection, with several of the figures involved in the incident later arrested for their alleged plot to assassinate the Meiji Emperor in 1910. In the end, twelve of the accused, including the Anarchist intellectual and  feminist Kanno Sugako, were sentenced to death and executed. On the external front, Japan’s relation with Korea which it had practically taken governmental control over in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War morphed into a predictable predicament of making choices about what kind of coercive subordination would be feasible. The answer of course was that no coercive relationship with the Korean people and government would work—hatred would only deepen, and that was indeed what happened. As if to underscore the futility of a ‘constructive’ colonial

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policy, Itō Hirobumi, the former Governor-General of Korea (or Chōsen as it was referred to by the Japanese government at the time), was assassinated at the Harbin train station in October of 1909. In the event, the more aggressive factions within the Japanese military, in a manner somewhat prescient of future tendencies, succeeded in forcing the move toward annexation in 1910. Two years after the annexation of Korea, the Meiji Emperor, who now ruled over a colonial dominion that included what is now modern Taiwan and Korea, passed away at the relatively young age of sixty on the 30th of July, 1912. He purportedly was suffering from several chronic health issues including diabetes and kidney failure. The passing of the Emperor was duly noted in the international press and it was in most cases with genuinely warm admiration that the obituaries commented on the extraordinary achievements of Japan in the course of the forty-four years of his reign. The Meiji period was rounded off with the astounding response of General Nogi Maresuke to the death of the Emperor—he performed ritual suicide along with his wife on the same day as the funeral, the 13th of September, 1912. This added a note of astonishment to the final events surrounding the end of the Meiji epoch. So it was indeed a rather diverse and complex tapestry of social and cultural forces that was emerging during the period under review in this volume. There was a new urban culture coming into being and within it a number of trends were coalescing, some of which were highly innovative but there were also others that were deeply retrospective. It also bears emphasizing that even while there was a fair degree of tumult throughout the second half of the Meiji period, there was also a freshness of energy and even downright playfulness. In Chap. 2, we will focus on two initiatives—those of the disciples of Yoshitoshi as they refined their skills in sashie illustrations in popular newspapers and, in parallel, the satirical bent of writers such as Miyatake Gaikotsu who brought an astonishing fearlessness and humour to the business of critiquing contemporary society. This relatively subversive cultural animus would seem to require a name, and accordingly I have put forth the notion of decadence in counterbalance to the modernizing and empire-oriented discourse of civilization.

Notes 1. Swale (2000, 183). 2. Fraser (1995, 8–36).

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3. Swale (2009, pp. 160–162). 4. For the most comprehensive account of Yoshitoshi’s career and impact on the community of artists in late Meiji Japan see Sugawara Mayumi, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi Den: Bakumatsu Meiji no Hazama ni, Chuō Kōron Bijutsu Shuppan, 2018. 5. Tsuchiya (2002, 183–185). 6. Mertz (2003, 212–213). 7. Foxwell (2018), Swale (2022). To this can be added Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (2020). 8. Rinbara (1993, 42–43). 9. Rinbara (ibid., 44–45), Yamada and Rinbara (2003, 550–551). 10. McGuinness (2000, 1–18). 11. Beckson (1981, pp. i–xxi). 12. Krobb (2004, 547–562). 13. Amano (2013). 14. Brecher (2012, 803–817). 15. Brecher (ibid., 809–811); see also Jones and Inouye (2017), for translations. 16. Brecher (ibid., 808), Fraleigh (2016). 17. Foxwell (op. cit., 47–51). 18. Brecher (op. cit., 811–812). 19. Brecher (ibid, 812–813). 20. Buckland (2013, 259–276). 21. Satō (2011, 324–341). 22. Swale (2022, 1–8). 23. Mertz (2003), Marran (2007), Saito (2012), and Fraleigh (2016). 24. Bassoe (2018) is one of a remarkably limited set of scholarly writings on Izumi Kyōka despite his significance. 25. Keene (1971, 161–166). 26. Kornicki (1998). 27. Maeda (2004, 223–233). 28. Gordon (2003, 94–103). 29. Smith (1998, 587–613).

CHAPTER 2

The Constitution and Latent Anarchy

The promulgation of the Meiji Constitution was a national showpiece for “civilization and progress” and regardless of how things transpired on the day and thereafter, it was by any measure a momentous turning point in Japan’s modern development. Yet, as was outlined in Chap. 1, a number of profound transformations had already been set in train in the world of popular culture and mass media that, in certain regards, were already setting the parameters for all future developments. We have seen the emergence of the new ‘mid-sized’ newspapers, along with the integration of pre-Meiji literary and cultural practices into the mainstream, reflected in not only the profile of publishing personnel but the hybridity of the content that was being circulated broadly through serialized novels. This was a formidable matrix of popular expression and interaction, and so it should not surprise us that the emergence of these phenomena was also accompanied by the establishment, in 1887, of the Peace Preservation Ordinance. The Peace Preservation Ordinance consisted of seven articles, each with rather draconian implications. Apart from variously designating the targets of the Ordinance as secret associations and assemblies, or published material injurious to the public peace, the most significant aspect was the degree to which the metropolitan police were given powers of discretion to identify persons or places to restrict, with added discretion with regard to the penalties as well. Article 4 was the most severe in that it gave the police the authority, in consultation with the Home Minister, to compel persons identified as participating in offending practices to absent themselves from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_2

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the central area of Tokyo to a point outside the radius of 3 ri, approximately 12 kilometers, from the Imperial Palace. In the first iteration of the implementation of Article 4, the persons identified were given little or no warning of the expectation that they were to comply immediately or face incarceration.1 The Ordinance coincided with a rather palpable change of tone and energy in contemporary urban culture in the late 1880s. As already alluded to, this period saw the advent of a new young readership schooled within the Meiji education system as well as journalists and writers who went through those same educational institutions. It was not that this generation would supplant veterans such as Kanagaki Robun and Jōno Saigiku but they would be the ‘fresh blood’ to make the new mediascape, which had indeed emerged with their input and influence, it would be their very own and they would be the ones to drive it forward. As if to announce the presence of this new generation with an astounding combination of daring and recklessness, Miyatake Gaikotsu published a highly provocative satirical cartoon on the day the Emperor bestowed the Constitution on the people of Japan. It illustrated the scene of the Emperor presenting the Prime Minister, Ito Hirobumi, with a copy of the august document but with the Emperor depicted as a skeleton. A particularly harsh punishment was meted to Miyatake who was imprisoned for 3  years and 8  months.2 Following release, Miyatake was to go on to become an extraordinarily prolific publisher of unashamedly frivolous content along with writing sharp lambasting critiques of figures within the government and even one of the most venerable denizens of civilization and enlightenment, Fukuzawa Yukichi. In certain regards, Miyatake can be regarded as the flag-bearer for the nascent ‘decadence’ of the late Meiji period. Miyatake developed as a maverick publisher and essayist in the years preceding his famous escapade, but he was by no means alone. The early works of James R. Morita (1969) and Peter Kornicki (1982) have dealt with the emergence of the Ken’yūsha, a coterie of literary-minded young men who had studied at Tokyo University, and who also initiated what is generally recognized as the first journal series dedicated primarily to literature—Garakuta Bunko, established in May of 1885. It was a significant initiative in the world of letters, yet anything but conventional in terms of its content and distribution. Its core members included Ozaki Kōyō 1867–1903), Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), Ishibashi Shian (1867–1927) and Maruoka Kyūka (1865–1927) and the first series of eight publications

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were all hand-written and only circulated amongst the members. Then there was a further series of eight publications (November 1886–February 1888) that were conventionally printed but still only retained for the members. Finally, from May of 1888 to October 1889, a total of twenty-­ seven issues were published and sold to the public. 3 As Morita’s outline of the output of the Garakuta Bunko suggests, there was a noted reluctance to exclude any kind of literary output, be it nonsense verse such as dodoitsu (versified limericks), satirical sketches or ghost stories. Morita is very much on the nail when he suggests that this was a very modern incarnation of the gesaku literary ethos, and there was little or any inclination to dabble in politically themed novels or adaptations of Western classics. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Morita suggests that the members of the Ken’yūsha were unconcerned with establishing a literary aesthetic for the novel and indeed lacked a seriousness of purpose. He even goes so far as to suggest that “What is conspicuously absent from Garakuta Bunko is a literary ideal”.4 I would suggest that there was a very clear conception of an aesthetic ideal and there was also a very pronounced aspiration to make a statement about where Japan’s literature should be going. It was a profoundly retrospective view of literary aesthetics in the sense the group imbibed so heartily the joie de vivre and diversity of outputs so typical of the pre-Meiji gesaku ethos.5 There was a very palpable thumbing of the nose at attempts to rework Japan’s literary aesthetic through adaptation of Western literary models. As the leading figure amongst the core members, Kōyō from time to time issued ‘announcements’ that would set out the Ken’yūsha’s ‘policies’ and aims. They were invariably pun-laden and amusing, and at times satirical in the attitude towards the more ‘elevated’ (i.e. Westernized) attempts at promoting serious literature. The youth of the members belied a quiet determination to see that if the ‘novel’, or indeed Japanese literature as a whole, was to become ‘serious’, it would not be based on prescriptions rooted in external cultural models, which of course had the inevitable cachet of being associated with ‘civilization and progress’. In December of 1886, prior to Garakuta Bunko going fully public, Kōyō penned an ironic set of ‘Regulations’ for the Ken’yūsha, but instead of using the standard characters for kisoku (規則) for regulations, he adopted the first character for gesaku which can also be pronounced gi, hence the title was Ken’yūsha Gisoku (硯友社戯則). This is an ingenious pun that also pointedly states the society’s literary ideal. The announcement stated (boasted?) that the publication would include novels, comic prose, rakugo, riddles and “akkō

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zōgen” (悪口雑言), a Miscellany of Bad-mouthing.6 Two years later, in the first issue of the publicly issued Garakuta Bunko, the Ken’yūsha posted a formal ‘Code’ (shasoku, 社則) that stated rather tellingly: This Society wishes to help develop literature in Japan. Therefore we would not reject either dodoitsu, amorous words based on actual love, or kyōku – mean words based on whatever you saw or heard;…7

So an emphatically indiscriminate commitment to earlier popular literary and performative traditions was indeed the precise point of their literary aspirations, and it was being expressed in a manner that was mischievous, witty and quite explicitly critical of the ‘official’ ideal of promoting ‘civilization’ in all things. Peter Kornicki’s later commentary on the output of this group and its relations with contemporary senior figures such as Tsubouchi Shōyō has gone a long way to provide something of a corrective for the view that the Ken’yūsha were not serious in their pursuit of literary ideals or indeed that they disregarded the admonitions contained in Tsubouchi’s The Essence of the Novel. Kornicki is at pains to emphasize that Tsubouchi was well aware of the output of the Ken’yūsha and was actually supportive of the more promising members whose works were beginning to be sought after in other publishing vehicles. A chief instance is when the publisher Yoshioka Tetsutarō visited Kōyō in late 1888 with a view to persuading him to write the first of a new series One Hundred New Works (『新著百集』) and upon receiving agreement requested Tsubouchi to write a preface for the work. Understandably, Tsubouchi requested the opportunity to review Kōyō’s work, Irozange, which was to be the first instalment. Yoshioka politely refused citing the need for complete confidentiality prior to release. Tsubouchi did not flinch, and proceeded to submit an effusive endorsement of the publishing initiative and to speak fulsomely of his appreciation for the writing he had seen of Kōyō’s in the Garakuta Bunko.8 The period under consideration saw a ‘shaking out’ of preconceptions regarding what constituted ‘proper literature’. Two scholars have contributed to clarifying the nature of that process. Seth Jacobowitz, in his Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (2015) traces continuities with regard to how decidedly pre-Meiji traditions such as Kōdan and Rakugo were finding a new life through new media technologies that facilitated

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unprecedented accuracy in transcription and dissemination based largely on the refining of short-hand techniques in Japanese. Daniel Poch, in Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (2020), has taken things further by taking the trope of ninjo ̄ and tracing how this too finds a new life in the hands of diverse writers and critics in the late nineteenth century. Both scholars are rather scathing of the rather simplistic characterization of the influence of Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel. Jabobowitz states, quite provocatively, but nonetheless accurately, that there are few figures among the Meiji intelligentsia who have had their work and impact oversimplified and mischaracterized. Poch gives this further nuancing by accentuating the essential conundrum of the time—capturing emotion and speech ‘as it is’ in literature while somehow retaining a concern that it would not be an exercise in presenting human relations, particularly romantic relations, as simply an exercise in personal gratification. Everyone shared the challenge, Shōyō included, and there was no clear pathway ahead.9 Accordingly, the attempts to resolve that conundrum were diverse indeed. Ozaki Kōyō in time took things head on in Golden Demon (serialized 1897–1902), which depicts the futility of romantic aspirations in an age of utilitarian self-promotion and money-grabbing (the climactic scene entails the hero being rejected by the woman he loves who opts for a more socially and financially advantageous match). His disciple Izumi Kyoka embraced the supernatural, ghosts in particular, as vehicles for engaging with intense personal emotions and thereby rejecting the positivist premises of the drive for “Civilization and Enlightenment”. Natsume Soseki, after a detour through engagement if shaseibun (literary sketches with a strong Sinifind influence) finally settled on his idiosyncratic riposte—I Am a Cat (1905–1906) —the perfect response to the problem of the individually ‘authentic’ voice of an author. Ultimately, the Ken’yūsha’s move to rename Garakuta Bunko as Bunko signaled a renewed focus on producing serious literary works, but it was not sustained for a considerable amount of time. This did not necessarily signify the demise of the Ken’yūsha’s members or indeed the futility of having a society magazine—a number of more weighty and inclusive magazines were beginning to appear and the members of the Ken’yūsha slipped smoothly into a new milieu where their work was in most cases enthusiastically welcomed. It signaled the beginning of a much more protracted and at times uncharted trajectory of experimentation and refurbishing of existing traditions.

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We have seen that some of the veterans of gesaku-oriented literature and traditional performance were driving ahead with new formats of illustrated newspapers—the Miyako Shinbun established by Kanagaki Robun and the Yamato Shinbun established by Jōno Saigiku being the primary examples. There was also a proliferation from this time of illustrated magazines, gahō (画報), one of the most representative being the Fūzoku Gahō. As the ensuing image illustrates (Fig. 2.1), these included lively and varied illustrations and were intended to be accessible for a very broad audience.

Fig. 2.1  Kokkai Gahō, No. 1, published July, 1890. Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan, Tokyo

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At the same time, there was a new force emerging in literary magazine publishing and it was eventually to become one of the most respected and established publishing houses in modern Japan—Hakubunkan (博文館). Strictly speaking, Hakubunkan was established in 1887 but in fact it was the latest incarnation of a publishing venture initiated by Ō hashi Sahei (1836–1901), a veteran entrepreneur who had an already significant profile with his publishing house that bore the family name. 1887 marked a significant change of direction and it was to be overseen by his son Ō hashi Shintarō (1863–1944) who took up the mantle and forged the publisher into a powerhouse of literary and cultural magazine publishing in the late Meiji period (it remains one of the largest and diverse publishers even to this day). The flagship publication for Hakubunkan was Nihon Taika Ronshu ̄ and it was to draw contributions from a very broad range of contributors—from veteran Meirokusha scholars to contemporary leading lights of the Nativist kokusuishugi movement and indeed the likes of the literary Ken’yūsha membership alluded to above. According to Asaoka Kunio, the publication layout was visually styled rather blatantly in emulation of the contemporaneous Kokumin no Tomo which was edited by Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), but it did not share the stridently pro-­ popular rights and liberalism of Tokutomi’s editorial stance. The very naming of the publishing house mirrored the first name of the prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, which could be read as “hakubun” in the alternative on-yomi pronunciation.10 Ō hashi Shintarō’s impact on the trajectory of the new publication was palpable from the start. When conferring with his father over the merits of establishing a specialist publication in two new fields, one dealing with religion and another aimed primarily at women, Ō hashi Shintarō argued as follows: Even though the perspectives put forth in articles in each of the respective journals will have their merits, a too specialized focus will attract few readers and sell fewer copies. On account of these things the publications will also be expensive and not really suited to the general reader. For these reasons we should gather the articles together in one magazine, lower the price and endeavor to sell as many copies as possible. If we do that, then we will be making a much better contribution to society.11

Nihon Taika Ronshu ̄ was precisely the exemplar of this model and from the 1890s in particular it went through a number of iterations in layout

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and composition of content with the aim of expanding the readership and sales as much as possible.12 From its early inception, Nihon Taika Ronshū was also known to reproduce from time to time material from other publications without permission from the author or publisher. This eventually came to a dramatic end in 1894 when Hakubunkan was sued by the Kokka Gakkai (国家学会), an academic association based in the law faculty at the Imperial University in Tokyo. In February of 1894, Nihon Taika Ronshū published the text of a speech that had been given by Konoe Atsumaro to the Kokka Gakkai in November of the previous year. It had been transcribed at the time and published soon after in the journal of the association, Kokka Gakkai Zasshi (『国家学会雑誌』). The text of the reprint in Nihon Taika Ronshū was essentially the same in content albeit rendered in the “desu/masu” register as opposed to the more austere tenor of the original speech. The suit could be brought against Hakubunkan due to the promulgation in 1893 of statutes that protected copyright, the Hankenhō (版権法). This was new terrain for all publishers in Japan and the case would serve to reset the tenor of editorial attitudes towards appropriation of material form other publishing sources. In the end, after rather intensively apologetic lobbying from Hakubunkan, the matter was resolved with a full apology published simultaneously in both the Nihon Taika Ronshū and the Kokka Gakkai Zasshi.13 The denouement of this episode did not have a direct impact on the continuity of the publication as such but it did mean the end of unauthorized reprinting of content from other publications. Moreover, as Asaoka argues, the composition of the editorial staff at Nihon Taika Ronshū had evolved to the point where they had substantial ties with the literary world and could increasingly procure bespoke content for the publication.14More significantly, Hakubunkan by this stage actually developed a very broad stable of publications which could be categorized in three ‘constellations’. The first we might style as being oriented towards commentary on broadly social interests: apart from Nihon Taika Ronshū, already discussed, there was Nihon Shōgyō Zasshi (『日本商業雑誌』) which dealt with commerce, Nihon Nōgyō Zasshi (『日本農業雑誌』) dealing with agriculture, Nihon no Hōritsu (『日本之法律』) dealing with legal affairs, and a publication aimed at women’s issues, Fujo Zasshi (『婦女雑誌』). In 1895, these would be amalgamated into one publication, Taiyō (『太陽』), which would become one of the most popular and influential publications of the late Meiji period.

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A second ‘constellation’ was much more clearly aligned with purely literary interests: Bungei Kyōshinkai (『文芸共進会』), Sekai Bunko (『世界 文庫』), Meiji Bunko (『明治文庫』), Itsuwa Bunko (『逸話文庫』) and Shunka Shūtō (『春夏秋冬』). At the same time as the establishment of Taiyō, these would also be amalgamated into a single title, Bungei Kurabu (『文芸倶楽部』), which rapidly established itself as one of the central publishing organs of the Meiji literary elite, the Meiji Bundan. Finally, there was a constellation of publications that were broadly oriented towards a youth audience: Nihon no Shōnen (『日本之少年』), Yōnen Zasshi (『幼年雑誌』), Gakusei Hitsusenjō (『学生筆戦場』), Shōnen Bungaku (『少年文学』) and Yōnen Tamatebako (『幼年玉手 箱』). These too were amalgamated at the same time as Shōnen Sekai (『 少年世界』).15 So Hakubunkan went from being a successful publisher and purveyor of popular titles in Nagano to become one of the most pivotal and influential players in mass-produced popular print media in the early to late 1890s in Meiji Japan. Certainly at the core of their success was the acumen to identify untapped audiences and provide an avenue for expression and reception. At the same time they had the commercial nous to realize that in the long term niche publications could not survive. Their corralling of these several currents of popular and literary interest into flagship amalgamations was a stroke of genius—and certainly formed the bedrock of their latter success that even has vestiges to the present day. Perhaps one aspect of their astuteness that stands out is their identification of an audience that was emergent but also in a state of flux. Just as the Ken’yūsha had emerged from the ranks of the Imperial University, there was in fact an increasingly significant cohort of young students, men and women, who were engaged in their publications and were not only keen to ‘consume’ as readers but also to generate content to contribute. The emergent phenomenon of the “student” —literate, passionate, and not always a “good subject” of the Emperor—was in fact increasingly to become one of the most defining elements of late Meiji culture. From the perspective of the ‘official line’, students were supposed to be devoted to their studies and not engaging in any material that was not related to their specialization. In point of fact, from the 1890s onwards the problem of “extracurricular reading” (kagai yomimono, 課外読み物) amongst students began to receive serious comment amongst educationists and expressions of deep concern from within the Education Ministry.16

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One of the key contentions of this chapter is that this broad strand of literary output and consumption was very much at the heart of literary developments in the early to mid-1890s. It was centred on serialized novels published in mass-circulation publications such as the aforementioned literary magazines or newspapers that specialized in such content, − the Yamato Shinbun, Miyako Shinbun, and to perhaps a lesser extent the Yomiuri Shinbun. It modifies significantly the perception that the intellectual commentary and literary output of writers such as Tsubouchi Shōyō and Futabatei Shimei was the core driver of literature during this period, and places writers and illustrators of a distinctly hybrid set of literary and artistic proclivities alongside, if not to the fore. The essential difficulty is that this output is not ‘endorsed’ by proponents of ‘civilization’ or ‘empire’, either within government or amongst the government aligned literati, but produced by persons whose output was routinely regarded as suspect and unworthy of serious minds. Part of this is due to either perceptions of negative associations with deeply ‘backward’ literary tendencies from late Edo gesaku. At the same time, and with some irony, deprecations were hurled at this material based on the fact that there was a seemingly increasing frivolity in the content of such literature, in that it drew on loose translations of Western classical or popular literature, or became increasingly infected by the fad for “detective novels”. This does present something of a conundrum, in that, on the one hand, this new vein of literature was excessively retro, and, on the other hand, it was increasingly faddish and obsessed with novelty.17 This is not quite the contradiction that it seems, particularly if we consider the possibility that, for the first thing, gesaku predilections did not in themselves preclude a capacity to transpose certain conventions into new material, and for the second thing there may well have been more “method in the madness” of running to everything from Shakespeare to Conan-­ Doyle to do precisely that. One might describe it as a hybrid literary enterprise—but I would prefer to characterize it as a synthesis of forms where a new strain emergences with relative consistency, albeit with a number of variations. It is the first stage in the establishment of a self-consciously decadent literary movement, − decadent in the sense it cannot be accommodated within the aims of a civilized high culture, and neither do the proponents of the material regard it as their business to convince their detractors otherwise. In the following section, I will undertake do demonstrate the transition with a few key examples. One of the first hugely popular works to be presented in the pages of the Yamato Shinbun was a transcription of a Sanyūtei Enchō classic, an

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earlier tale of the supernatural (怪談, kwaidan) that was restyled and performed as A True Tale from Kasanegafuchi (『眞景累ヶ淵』). It was a tale of supernatural calamities visited upon the descendants of a man who killed a money lender to expunge his debts (for an illustration from the work produced by Yoshitoshi see Fig. 2.2). In the preface to the work that was in due course published as a stand-alone work in 1888 Enchō feigns

Fig. 2.2  Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, illustration from Sanyūtei Enchō’sA True Tale from Kasanegafuchi (『眞景累ヶ淵』), as published in the Enchō Zenshū, Vol. 1, Shuyōdō, 1926. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

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despair that something as retrospective as a kwaidan could command such interest: From today I am presenting a kwaidan, a tale of the supernatural, despite the fact that some might say that such tales have become greatly denigrated and therefore not often performed. The mere mention of such tales leads people to point out that there are no such things as ghosts and that accounts of the supernatural are simply the result of people being afflicted with nervous disorders. For such reasons esteemed exponents of civilization and progress despise kwaidan. However, even though for some time now these tales have been held in such low regard, in the current situation we find that, contrary to expectations, these seemingly antiquated tales are regarded as fresh and lively to the ear.18

This set the tenor of a realization that certain elements of the pre-Meiji literary tradition remained pertinent and popular for a broad array of readers—the tropes of gesaku literature were not going anywhere. Contrast this with the publication in 1890, again within Yamato Shinbun, of a serialized novel by Jōno Saigiku entitled Sannin Musume (『三人令攘』).19 Meanwhile, at the Miyako Shinbun, there were some subtle transformations afoot and they had a great deal to do with the editorial input from Kuroiwa Ruikō. Ruikō was quick to spot the appeal of the fresh new settings and plot twists that were being afforded by adapting Western material and he embraced the policy of incorporating such material with gusto. His particular forte, however, was to be the development of a particular genre of literary output, the detective novel, exemplified for example by  Kettō  no Hate  (『決闘の果』). He pursued this line until he parted from the editorial staff at the Miyako Shinbun in 1892 and established another hugely significant newspaper aimed at the general public, the Yorozu Chōhō. There, Kuroiwa carved out a distinctive niche as an adapter of Western literary texts, particularly detective fiction, into vernacular Japanese for the masses. If we take an overview of the foregoing examples, the first, Kasanegafuchi by Sanyūtei Enchō is emphatically and actually unapologetically rooted in pre-Meiji tropes, the second, Sannin Musume by Jōno Saigiku, is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear but is transposed essentially into Meiji Japan, with the characters bearing Japanese names and an elaborate set of titles and positions consonant with the elite of contemporary society. The third example, Kettō no Ka by Kuroiwa Ruikō, had Japanese names and titles,

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but was set in France, almost inviting the reader to indulge in an impossible fantasy. What links them all is a gesaku sensibility, with a retained proclivity with dokufumono, ninjōbanashi and kanzenchōaku, and some entertaining exposition on the accoutrements of civilization in Europe thrown in for good measure.20 The question of the literary merit of such output does arise, and has indeed come up in commentary to date, with most verdicts falling towards the negative. But as some recent scholarship on Sannin Musume has argued, and I think correctly, there is a literary ingenuity in terms of the manner in which the components have been put together despite the incongruity, and the prose itself is in places well-finished and highly evocative by gesaku standards. Where it ‘fails’ of course is in relation to the lack of resemblance to Western conventions of authorship and the reliance on material from exogenous sources.21 There has been a preoccupation in commentary on early modern Japanese literature with the emergent psychology of the Japanese novel in terms of the consciousness of self, of individual authorship. However, what these foregoing outputs emphatically imply is not the forging of an authorial consciousness but the emergence of a common sensibility, one synthesized from a variety of sources that make no sense in their combination if you expect them to cohere like the thoughts of an actual person, or writing about the actual world. It is, after all, fiction, and the sensibility is profoundly communal,—it is indeed a shared realm of imagination that transcends the preoccupations of the here and now while aiming to speak to it nonetheless. Various tropes from Edo traditions pre-exist the literary act, while at the same time tropes appropriated from Western sources are often predetermined and not up for easy renegotiation—what makes the literary acts of writers engaging in the production of these works new and remarkable is the literary act of synthesizing the varied tropes into a world that somehow feels plausible, and indeed entertaining. It is a very different kind of authorship within a very distinctive cultural milieu and for a very distinctive readership. 22 This is not to suggest that there was no development at all of a sense of individual authorial voice or consciousness amongst contemporary writers, or that they were not engaged in depicting the actual world (after all that is indeed the preoccupation of the “Naturalist” authors), but if we focus only on those things we lose a great deal of the picture. For example, we could consider I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki as a key early expression of a definitive and distinctive authorial voice—and that would of course be

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correct. However how much better to see the links between gesaku tropes of using animals as the protagonists of a novel in the former, or to acknowledge the distinctly counter-authorial ploy of using the foil of a cat rather than one’s purely adult perspective as the spring board for the narrative. Neither of these facets should surprise us given the foregoing.23 One other figure whose career should also give us pause to reconsider the nature of the literary community emerging in late nineteenth-century Japan is Fukuchi Gen’ichirō. Fukuchi is renowned as one of the early editors behind the rise of the Tokyo Nichi-nichi Shinbun, a legend amongst the leading figures of the early Meiji press. Paradoxically, however, he left the editorial office of that newspaper in 1888 and never returned to journalism again. This was indeed a quite astounding turn of events in one sense and James Huffman relates that it was due to a decisive change in the political climate and the culture of popular press at the time. Fukuchi was decidedly reluctant to take up the Minken side as most other publications had done and this left him few options. What he did next is intriguing but also highly instructive—he dropped journalism for writing about contemporary performing arts and literature while himself embarking on an astonishingly prolific output of scripts for kabuki plays and serialized novels. He took the pen-name Ō chi (桜痴). On top of this he was a key figure in providing broad translations of the English sources that would be used by other writers who had no direct knowledge of the source texts—this being the case with Jōno Saigiku’s adaptation of King Lear, Sannin Musume.24 Another figure meriting particular attention is Miyatake Gaikotsu— alluded to earlier for his Quixotic parody of the Emperor in the guise of a skeleton. There is not a great deal of scholarship available in English on this journalist, writer and publisher but as the ensuing pages should reveal by and by, he is perhaps the person who most accurately personifies the decadent riposte to the Meiji government and its attempts to mould the populace into a compliant and Emperor-revering citizenry. Gaikotsu was born with the name Kameshirō in 1877, one year before the Restoration and was the fourth son of a village headman, sho ̄ya (庄屋), in the vicinity of Takamatsu within the former Sanuki no Kuni, now Kagawa Prefecture. While not of a samurai background, his family would have had substantial means and indeed the young Kameshirō was entered into the local school to study the classics and later joined the Takamatsu Eigi Juku in 1878 to further an evidently classical education. Kameshirō was a capable student but was evidently distracted by the content of contemporary satirical

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magazines such as Marumaru Chinbun and Kibi Dango which he avidly collected. It was after a stint studying in the juku that he abruptly dropped his classical studies in 1880 and returned to his home near Takamatsu. The following year, he set out to join his brother in Tokyo and there, while undertaking further study, began to write contributions for some of the less than ‘scholarly’ publications that he had come to admire. In 1883, he returned to Takamatsu and set up a publishing company although the projected works, eighteen in all, never actually went to print. The following year he legally changed his name to Gaikotsu, which literally meant skeleton, basing the change on the fact that the “Kame” in his original name referred to a turtle which had an exoskeletal physiology. In 1885, aged 19, he had formed a serious relationship with the daughter of a samurai family in Takamatsu, Nishimura Fusako, and despite opposition within the family married her and set out with 500 yen to return to Tokyo and reside with his older brother Kiheiji.25 From 1886 Miyatake began to look into writing and publishing in earnest. After establishing the publishing house, Hichamucha Sha, he published the Hichamucha Shinbun, which was immediately censored and closed down due to its content being classified as detrimental to the public. Hichamucha (屁茶無茶) was a play on the term for things being in a complete mess, muchakucha (無茶苦茶), but it retained only the mucha and preceded it with Hicha wherein the hi was the character for a fart. His connections with local writers and publishers nonetheless blossomed and he began to accrue something of a reputation for wit combined with an intense drive to succeed. In 1887, the year of the promulgation of the Peace Preservation Ordinance, he set about publishing, with evidently greater care to avoid censorship, his first major foray into satirical publication—theTonchi Kyōkai Zasshi (『頓知協会雑誌』).26 Translating this title is not altogether straightforward as the word Tonchi does not have a ready parallel term in English. It denotes someone who is clever, perhaps even a bit of a trickster, who finds ingenious ways to get ahead in life. Perhaps in some ways a sobriquet for Miyatake himself. The publication was a resounding success, securing an initial print run of 4000 copies, which was produced in several additional print runs in haste to meet popular demand. By 1888, Miyatake was at twenty-two a successful publisher and had amassed a considerable degree of wealth—money that he did not hesitate to lavish on a rather hedonistic lifestyle.27 There are a number of factors behind the success of this new publication—and some of the clues can be gleaned from a comparison with Tonchi

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Kyōkai Zasshi’s renowned predecessor, Marumaru Chinbun. The first thing to note about the predecessor is that it ran into quite a few pages more than a typical four-sheet illustrated newspaper, and that it was packed with an array of content that was organized to a familiar format in every issue. During the period that Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi was being produced, Marumaru Chinbun maintained the same frontispiece that could be said to resonate with the visual style of the British publication Punch. This was followed by a table of contents and the order was almost invariably as follows: An editorial purportedly articulating the thoughts of a “drunken frog”. 珍報(chinpō) A series of news snippets of a more serious nature. 狂画 (kyōga) A hand-drawn cartoon often with an English language title and caption that was reframed by the ensuing cartoon to apply to contemporary developments in Japanese society. 和漢蘭 (wakanran) Poems composed in Chinese with kanbun annotations, often followed by “mad poems” (kyōka 狂歌) and/or Japanese limericks (dodoitsu都々逸). 出放題 (dehōdai) These were riddles or puzzles submitted by the readership with answers from previous issues presented. 英和対訳 (eiwa taiyaku) A page where short passages of English would be presented with a Japanese translation in the adjoining column. 内外奇談 (naigai kidan) Stories of happenings of an odd or amusing nature from within Japan or from overseas. 是難題 (kore nandai) A corner where topics would be pitched to the readers to respond to. Although literally meaning “This is a difficult topic” and is also a pun for the colloquial way of asking “What’s this”.28 酒蛙説(shа̄setsu)

The end of each issue was rounded off with another topical cartoon and the advertisement section. Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi by contrast had a more polished look to it—the illustrations were of a much higher quality—on a par with publications such as the Eiri Jiyū Shinbun or Jiyū no Tomoshibi (indeed some of the

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illustrations seem to have been repurposed from those publications which featured the work of either Tsukioka Yoshitoshi or his disciples). The content was more anecdotal and had a stronger cynical edge whether depicting scenes or events from within Japan or from overseas, or referring to episodes from ancient history. Contributions were accepted from members and there was content transferred from other publications, such as the Konnichi Shinbun and even Marumaru Chinbun. Initially, the format was relatively open but by the tenth edition there was clearly a grouping of content based on whether they were general anecdotes from far and wide or more topical comments on recent contemporary happenings. There was very little in the way of topical poetry or limericks. While Marumaru Chinbun was consistently aiming for amusement and entertainment that drew on the wit and skill of contributors who submitted compact bon mots, poems or limericks, with occasional mischievous but very indirect pokes at contemporary Japanese politics and society through cartoons, Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi was in a sense more subtly subversive. The fact that the magazine had a title that suggested an august assemblage of the great and the good behind it was in a sense a parody of the self-important public associations that sprang up to promote cultural or social causes. As it turned out, Tonchi Kyo ̄kai Zasshi did have the support of a number of important persons—amongst the membership list published in the first issue there can be found a member of the Prefectural Assembly, Postmasters and Civil Servants, along with an array of persons engaged in commerce and business. Perhaps more significantly, Miyatake had both Kanagaki Robun and Sanyūtei Enchō in the membership. And by the seventh issue, Miyatake had secured a contribution from no less a notable literary figure than Tsubouchi Shōyō. At root Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi had a tenor that was more clever than simply amusing, and it would seem that it was very much a relatively well-read audience that would be drawn to the content. This would include the new cohort of university students that were beginning to become a more prominent feature of urban life. The anecdote of two Oxford students discussing classical Greek drama (Sophocles and Aeschylus) and then being corrected by a scholar who happened to be riding in the same carriage (and also had the original texts in his bag) would appeal to precisely that readership.29 Miyatake’s sense of mischief was also reflected in occasional visual gags that were arcane but nonetheless captivating. The frontispiece would be restyled from time to time and the content would often take the Tonchi moniker and apply it in some absurd manner. For example, there was a

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phase where the figure on the front page was styled Tonchi Lad (頓知 郎)—as if there could be such a thing—followed thereafter by Tonchi Lass (頓知嬢). As time went on there were specially commissioned illustrations that would venture into the absurd. For example, an illustration of a shrine that had a sign “Tonchi Shrine” at the entrance, or another that depicted women in a bath-house—visually provocative in one sense and seemingly unconnected until the eye alights on the sign “Tonchi Bath-house” (頓知 の湯). 30 Another indication of Miyatake’s quick-witted, if random, flourishes is an illustration that depicts a scene from a serialized novel where an English expat is attempting to force a Japanese woman to become his mistress. In the centre of the image, a woman is bound up and being remonstrated by the Englishman. On the left side there is the face of a young boy peering through a window at the scene. On the next page, on the reverse of where the boy’s head would be on the preceding page, there is a depiction of the same boy outside the house peering in as if the same moment was being viewed by a passerby outside.31 Perhaps the fundamental appeal of the publication was its sheer breadth and diversity of topics, with plenty of references to episodes and anecdotes from overseas, including Persia and China as well as the West, as well as a very broad reach in terms of historical setting. As one early commentator remarked in a contemporary newspaper, the Sakushin Nippō, “There could be no-one who would fail to be amazed at the extraordinarily comprehensive array of intriguing stories that come from East and West and cover the ancient past to the present” (Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi, No. 3, in Yoshino, Ed. 1993, p. 110). The success of the publication may well have been intoxicating and it was perhaps sheer over-confidence that led Miyatake to embark on the folly of satirizing the Emperor on the day that he was to present the Constitution to the Japanese people. Commenting in later years, he felt that the offence could only be construed as provocative and he certainly did not conceive of it as something that would lead to his being convicted and incarcerated. Initially, Miyatake engaged legal assistance to attempt to repudiate the charges, but they were in any case upheld and he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with no allowance made for the eight months he had already spent in gaol. He was transferred to the prison facility on Ishikawa Island where, as might well be anticipated, he established associations and friendships that would remain with him for the rest of his life, including

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the publisher Seki Hironao. His wife returned to her parents’ home, thus terminating the marriage.32 One year following the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution the first elections to both the House of Representatives were conducted. The electorate was extremely limited, being based on a taxation rate that would ensure that only the relatively financially secure would be eligible for participation in the election. There was plenty of fodder for satirical depictions in the likes of the Marumaru Chinbun particularly as representatives from throughout the country including the more remote and rural electorates brought ‘yokels’ into the august arena of political deliberation. The House of Peers was of course limited to members of the peerage, the composition of which the Satsuma and Chōshū controlled through recommending appointments to the Emperor. From this time, significant transformations in political culture were beginning to emerge through the implementation of a limited but nonetheless meaningful form of ‘representative government’. Through the conducting of elections and the formation of the first political parties, a configuration of party political alignments based on relative support or relative animosity toward the government of the Satsuma/Chōshū oligarchy emerged. This was no major surprise, but the nature of political agitation and the bounds on political activism were redefined. Siniawer (2011) has adeptly outlined how agitation and activism metamorphosed in the figure of the sōshi, the term for activists who were first given the nomenclature during the foment of the Peoples’ Rights Movement of the 1880s, but who later came to be synonymous with ruffians and fixers who could be relied on to add muscle and intimidation to political gatherings. As Siniawer notes, the shift from outright direct violence and threats to life and limb gave way to a politics of intimidation as so ̄shi realized that the establishment of representative politics had dispersed the locus of power and there was now more value in being able to intimidate and manipulate an ongoing member of the assembly rather than to have a particular politician dead. A parallel shift occurred in the manner in which the government responded to political dissent, including that of the press. There had of course been fairly draconian policies in place during the People’s Rights Movement that ensured that ‘problem’ journalists and writers could be exiled from Tokyo, or in some cases subject to incarceration. These were, on the whole, still relatively benign compared to the severity of punishments following the promulgation of the Constitution, as Miyatake’s

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punishment duly demonstrated. The thinking was that now that Japan had an Imperial Constitution, as promised, there should be no dissent or activism directed at the Imperial government—that should not be tolerated under any circumstances. The major newspapers, ranging from the general broadsheets such as the Chōya Shinbun, Yomiuri Shinbun and Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun to the more literary illustrated newspapers such as the Yamato Shinbun and Miyako Shinbun, covered the business of both Houses when in session. Even the Miyako Shinbun ran daily updates and commentary for both Houses separately. There was something of a nervous hiatus as journalists and writers surveyed the post-promulgation environment and gauged the limits of official tolerance for critical or morally questionable content. A significant shift occurred in the period from 1890 to 1892 Kuroiwa Ruikō, the leading member of the editorial team at Miyako Shinbun, began to draw on a variety of texts from primarily French sources that were in essence detective novels or mystery pieces that were loosely reworked into a Japanese milieu with Japanese protagonists. They featured a proliferation of scenes and props from contemporary Western society which of course added to their interest for a Japanese readership. As Saito Satoru has argued, however, Kuroiwa was a past master of employing Western sources for political novels in the mid-1880s and he made a prominent contribution to the production of fictional material that was nonetheless a thinly veiled critique of contemporary Japanese politics.33 It is reasonable to draw a line of continuity into the early 1890s and construe Kuroiwa’s gambit as part of a hitherto successful mode of producing material that could not be classed as politically sensitive as such, but had the potential for social commentary mixed with stories of criminals and scoundrels being tracked down by a wily sleuth. Kuroiwa also in novels such as Yūzai Muzai (1888) demonstrated the capacity for detective novels to entwine the narrative with the foibles of adultery and duplicity and the processes of legal proceedings in court. As already mentioned, Kuroiwa left the Miyako Shinbun in 1892 to establish the Yorozu Chōhō. Saito again astutely notes that although perceptions of Kuroiwa and the Yorozu Chōhō are strongly coloured by associations with detective fiction, there was in fact a gradual moving away from the emphasis on that genre and a more explicit raking through the misdeeds of contemporary elites, businessmen and other notables, ironically all in the name of promoting moral standards. 34 As for Miyatake Gaikotsu, he was eventually released in October of 1892 and immediately returned to journalistic and literary activity. It goes

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without saying that he was deeply embittered by the experience of prison and his initial attempts at regaining his earlier success were not altogether fruitful. He produced a succession of magazines that had only one first issue and were then abandoned. It would be fair to say that although the content was essentially satirical, Miyatake was nonetheless working through his anger and bitterness. The Bunmei Zasshi (『文明雑誌』) was of substantial length and covered a broad range of topics that could conceivably be related to the theme of civilization. There was a thinly veiled cynicism about ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ as it continued to be promoted within the country by the government but Miyatake had not completely lost his sense of humour or eye for mischief.35 Even so, the format of the earlier Tonchi Kyo ̄kai Zasshi was not revived—there was no anecdote-­ telling and there were fewer high-quality sashie illustrations. It is tempting to conclude that Miyatake had no intention of establishing a continuing periodical publication and that would seem to be reasonable given that he had just been released from internment and could expect keen attention from the government and censors.36 Arguably, it was perhaps better to close down a publication before the repressive apparatus of state was fully activated. It might also explain why there was no attempt to include anything that would be serialized—illustrated novels being a case in point. In any event, the content and the diversity of topics suggest that Miyatake was exploring new ways of packaging his distinctive outlook. The Bunmei Zasshi was actually a collection of four subdivided “magazines” which follow a brief introduction and discussion of civilization and then proceed to progress thematically from psychology, (Shinri Zasshi, 心 理雑誌), to wit (Tonchi Zasshi, 頓知雑誌), to beauty (Bimyo ̄ Zasshi美妙雑 誌) and thence to morality (Dōtoku Zasshi道徳雑誌). Shinri Zasshi is a broad discussion of psychology that draws on Japanese, Chinese and Western sources and establishes a framework for the next three ‘issues’— thought (意) corresponding to Dōtoku Zasshi, wisdom (智) corresponding to Tonchi Zasshi, feeling (情) corresponding to Bimyo ̄ Zasshi. The discussion of psychology almost has a feel of a philosophical treatise and Miyatake seems eager to display familiarity with a variety of texts and terms, including material taken from diverse English sources such as Samuel Smiles and Herbert Spencer. The psychology section is rounded off with some rather arcane observations about certain human foibles such as the tendency to fall asleep during the day and people immediately attempting to put things back into their original form when they break them.37

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Tonchi Zasshi is clearly labelled in English as “WIT SCIENCE” and presents a detailed table of contents that is not actually followed up in the ensuing pages. As with the preceding section, the proposed Wit Science table commences with definitions of key terms, key distinctions between different manifestations (e.g. passive and active forms of wit, individual and social forms of wit), as well as its relation to feeling and morality more generally. The remainder suggests discussing wit as a basis for various modes of action along with an outline of the methods requisite to get the most out of one’s wit, through abilities either naturally possessed or actively cultivated. What Miyatake does proceed to present before proceeding to the Bimyō Zasshi is a very detailed exposition on his crime of disrespect for the Emperor and the process of conviction and incarceration. Miyatake is at pains to stress that his crime was not one of evil intent (目的上ノ犯罪ニアラズ) but of mistaken methods (方法上ノ犯罪ナル). This is followed by an apologia of sorts explaining why he took the name Gaikotsu even though it might be perceived as an act of disrespect to his parents. On the following page he also writes an open letter to the former members of the Tonchi Kyōkai, which acknowledges the gravity of the circumstances of the magazine’s closure and the impact on the members.38 The section on beauty in Bimyō Zasshi is relatively brief and inconsequential—apart from defining beauty in a conventional relation to the beauty of a woman, Miyatake goes on to discourse on how beauty is not based on skill or lack of skill, nor the achievement of an abstract ideal, but the process of working out an action, sometimes in a manner that takes us away from what we are normally regarded as capable of doing. He gives several examples, including the Japanese language presentations of rakugo by Henry Black which Miyatake values precisely because Black was working in another language and in a performative idiom not from his own culture. The final ‘magazine’, Dōtoku Zasshi, goes through the familiar process of creating a taxonomy of morality using both Western and Japanese sources before discussing the potentially positive relation between a questioning attitude and morality. Miyatake also presents the conundrum of distinguishing the good from the bad, as well as the difficulty of doing the thing that one knows one should do. He even quotes St Paul’s lament from Romans 7:15 “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”. Miyatake rounds off the Dōtoku Zasshi with an extended discourse on “The Special Character of Our Nation”, wherein he avers that no-one fails to love their own country (implying that it applied to Miyatake himself as well) and that the recent interaction

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between the West and Japan had prompted the Japanese to become more acutely aware of the country’s “beautiful essence” (美風国粋).39 Consequently, the Bunmei Zasshi is a rather puzzling mix of commentary and reflection, quite erudite in places while also mildly playful in others. At root, it would seem that Miyatake was aiming to come straight with his readership—acknowledging the significance of what he had got himself into, the gravity of the consequences and the need to make apology where apology was due, meanwhile presenting himself as a serious thinker who was as eager to see the nation prosper as anyone. As such, it is rather uncharacteristic when compared to his other published outputs but it was almost certainly a necessary gesture if he wanted to re-engage in writing and publishing. We get a taste of the more familiar Gaikotsu in an addendum to the Bunmei Zasshi entitled Methods for Surprising People (Hito wo Odorokasu Hō, 「人を驚かす法」). This reads more like a manifesto that lays out explicitly the virtues of the eccentric person (奇人) vis-à-vis the ‘normal person’ (常人). His thesis is that the promotion of civilization needs eccentrics as much as conformists—indeed he argues that progress without the eccentric’s capacity to surprise is quite impossible. While characterizing the eccentrics and the normal persons as interrelated through the allegory of longitude related to latitude Miyatake suggests that the end of the ordinary person is happiness, while the end of the eccentric person is the improvement of civilization (奇人ノ目的ハ文明 常人ノ目的 ハ幸福). After a characteristic discourse on the distinction between positive and negative modes of generating surprise through unconventional conduct (i.e. not generating surprise just for surprise’s sake), he relates this to the nature of change in nature and the physical world which, he suggests, always draws change from the odd or unexpected elements. Ultimately, after enumerating an array of persons from Western history that have been unconventional or eccentric but contributed to civilization, Miyatake argues that in Japan it can also be those who are eccentric or unconventional but nonetheless retain a strong moral compass that have much to offer through their non-conformity. It is, in sum, a declaration from Miyatake that he had no intention of abandoning his interest in the odd or the arcane, or modes of communication that might shock or surprise his readers. In fact, he was almost arguing that it was his duty to do so.40 We can be reasonably sure from Miyatake’s future output that he did not subscribe to a conventional sense of morality but he did maintain a keen sense of awareness of injustice be it exhibited through the arbitrary

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use of government power or the scandals and corruption evident among the ‘great and good’ who were readily able to be exposed in their hypocrisy. As a close to home example, not long after his release Miyatake remarried and discovered that his father-in-law was in financially straitened circumstances. He also discovered that his father-in-law was in fact the blood brother of a member of the aristocratic Hosokawa family (he had been adopted out as a child with a promise of a stipend before the Restoration but that undertaking was not fulfilled following the abolition of the feudal clan system in 1871). Miyatake began to publish indignant opinion pieces intended to shame the Hosokawa family into honouring their obligations and he even contemplated a legal case. He found an ally, for a time at least, in Kuroiwa Ruikō who ran several pieces in his Yorozu Chōhō under the title of “The Hosokawa Incident”.41 By the beginning of 1894, a new ecology of print media had taken shape and it was evident that the coalescence of illustrated serialized content in newspapers and magazines, whether drawn from kōdan or rakugo, or produced as original or adapted Western content with a strong infusion of gesaku sensibilities, would continue to hold the attention of a relatively well-read audience. Kuroiwa’s venture with the Yorozu Cho ̄hō was similar in most regards but by 1894 it was apparent that the serialized detective fiction was holding down only approximately half a page of the entire content of an issue, with the second and third pages being dedicated to commentary on trivial misdemeanors or scandals in the government. Every issue would almost without fail have an ‘update’ on the latest happenings in the brothel district of Yoshiwara, to which would be added shocking stories added as they came to hand, such as an account of the fate of some employees of a Japanese company being captured and eaten by cannibals in New Ireland.42 Even so, Kuroiwa also maintained a strong interest in social issues, for example a report on the cruelty meted out to the parents of some burakumin citizens which is notable for its concern for social equality. By contrast, the production values of the Yamato and Miyako newspapers remained of particularly high quality and the serialized content retained a significant proportion of the output. While the Yamato Shinbun maintained a stronger focus on the arts the Miyako Shinbun went on to consolidate coverage of current affairs and developments of national and international significance in terms of commerce, culture and politics. The Yamato Shinbun’s ongoing interest in following the performing arts was also reflective of an ongoing passion for theatre amongst the Japanese public and it would be a grave oversight not to include

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commentary on the changing cultural status of that other major popular performing art, kabuki. In comparison to rakugo and kōdan, kabuki had a steeper challenge to overcome official disapproval through its association with frivolity and immorality, both on and off the stage. With the promulgation in 1872 of the Three Article Educational Constitution (Sanjō no Kyōken, 三条の教憲), the government stipulated three cardinal principles that would guide education, namely: –– Respect for the ancestral deities and love of country –– Clarification of heavenly principles and human conduct –– Reverence towards the Emperor43 This was to be applied to all persons producing material for public consumption so that gesakusha artists and nishikie artists would have to desist publishing in their hitherto familiar formats. Fortunately, by the end of the 1870s, through the efforts of pathfinders such as Takabatake Ransen and Ochiai Yoshiiku, a relatively effective refashioning of the traditional association could be found in providing nishikie shinbun editions for major newspapers such as Tokyo Nichi-nichi Shinbun and the Yubin Hochi Shinbun. Ransen and Yoshiiku went on to establish one of the first ‘minor’ newspapers with black and white sashie illustrations, the forerunner of the latter newspapers running illustrated serialized novels as we have been discussing above. For kabuki, the road to finding a space of rehabilitation amongst government-approved arts was more fraught. Kabuki in a completely un-refashioned form, either in terms of the classical content or the mode of presentation was perceived as being incompatible with a civilized nation, particularly when compared to contemporary Western models of theatrical production. On the one hand, kabuki lost audiences to other modes of public entertainment, including the fad for public speech-­making in the early 1880s and did not readily have avenues for providing the novelty that the public craved. Attempts were made to even develop kabuki performances that looked more like a Western-style production. At one point zangiri-mono were penned and performed making reference to contemporary events and developments, one in particular covering the sinking of the postal ship Normanton which lost all Japanese passengers while the English crew were rescued unscathed. These were fleeting experiments that produced no long-term changes.44 The breakthrough in establishing kabuki’s status as a serious art form came in the 1880s and the figure at the centre of that success was the actor

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Ichikawa Danjūrō (the Ninth). After a period of itinerant performances around the country Ichikawa returned to Tokyo in 1881 and enjoyed the firm patronage of Morita Kanya, a theatre impresario who had established a modern-styled theatre for kabuki in 1878, the Shintomi-za. This new theatre had a Western layout with seats and gas lighting and had also been the venue for presenting Japanese theatre to foreign dignitaries, amongst them Ulysses S Grant, the former US president in 1879. Certain members of the government, particularly Inoue Kaoru the Foreign Minister, were pursuing a policy of attempting to impress the foreign diplomatic corps with entertainments and social occasions, particularly at the Rokumeikan which was built for precisely such events. They were also keenly aware of the need to be able to present a form of theatre that would impress foreign guests—and Ichikawa was at the forefront of promoting a genre of kabuki play, katsureki (活暦), which dealt with historical themes with heroic main characters. Through the combined support of Morita Kanya and Inoue Kaoru, Ichikawa was eventually able to perform before the Emperor in April of 1887. In 1889, the Kabuki-za was opened in Tokyo and Ichikawa became its inaugural Director. Another kabuki theatre was opened in 1893, the Meiji-za and Ichikawa performed along with other leading actors at the opening. As already alluded to, Fukuchi Gen’ichirō was highly active in promoting a ‘new and improved’ kabuki, including the writing of plays, and it was Ichikawa that was his main contact in the theatre world and to whom he gave his unwavering support until Ichikawa’s death in 1903. As Kurata Yoshihiro notes, Ichikawa was not necessarily the most dynamic or engaging of actors—he was not given to expressive movement and preferred classical kanbun terms that would sound erudite but not be familiar to all in the audience—but he was single-minded in his determination to promote kabuki under his tight personal control, even to the extent of insisting against broad opposition that women could in certain instances play female parts when the edict forbidding mixed troupes of actors was abolished in August of 1890. On top of this, Ichikawa was apparently a person of near impeccable discretion in his personal life, being involved in no marital scandals and not even being much inclined towards drinking.45 In stark contrast to the rise of Ichikawa Danjūrō to unchallenged hegemony over the world of kabuki through strong official and commercial patronage, there was another genre of performance, that was to make a flamboyant appearance in the late 1880s that was distinguished by its

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broad popular support and capacity to break the mould of the highly constrained art forms that persisted from the late Edo period. This new genre grew out of the turbulent foment of the People’s Rights Movement that saw a surprisingly vibrant outpouring of energy into publications such as the Eiri Jiyū Shinbun, Jiyū no Tomoshibi and the Eiri Cho ̄ya Shinbun, all established in 1883 and tending to feature adaptations of Western tales of political activism and heroic deeds that were exquisitely illustrated by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and acolytes such as Arai Yoshimune and Migita Toshide. In parallel with this phenomenon there was the proliferation of events that featured political speech-making (Seidan 政談). These were often predictably dedicated to excoriating the government and extolling the rights of common citizens but they also had considerable overlap with pure entertainment, especially as they on occasion adopted the format of offering the audience the opportunity to propose topics that the speech-­ makers would have to extemporize spontaneously on. It should not surprise us then that performers of popular entertainment would engage in the political movement with gusto, especially as the mid-1880s saw unprecedented poverty generated through the deflationary policies of the Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi.46 The single most successful proponent of adapting popular entertainment into a new theatrical art form was Kawagami Otojirō. Born in 1864 in Fukuoka, Kyushu, Kawagami moved at a relatively young age of thirteen to Tokyo where he embarked on a career of performance. The People’s Rights movement saw him establish a reputation as a Seidan performer using the stage name Jiyū Dōshi (自由童子, literally “child of freedom”). From these performances there gradually emerged a genre of theatrical performance termed variously as Sōshi Shibai (壮士芝居) or Shosei Shibai (書生芝居). Sōshi in the period prior to the promulgation of the Constitution referred to dedicated proponents of political reform and did not have the associations with thuggery that emerged in connection to Sōshi in the 1890s. Hence, Sōshi Shibai were performances that corresponded profoundly with the content and aspirations of the People’s Rights movement. They were not formalistic in the manner of traditional theatrical forms; indeed they had a more naturalistic bent even though the standard of performance could be variable to say the least. Shosei Shibai featured performances of the new model students, both young men and women and would tend to feature on the newly established campuses of Tokyo and Kansai. Kawakami dropped the earlier stage name and as head of his own troupe performed around the Kansai region at minor theatres.

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In time, he established a home base at Shinkyōgoku in Kyoto. The performances of this Shingeki were topical, political and laced with wry humour—more significantly, they began to draw crowds of a magnitude that kabuki performances could only hope to emulate.47 Kawakami’s most significant break came with his penning and performance of a song Oppekepe, a compact but passionate piece denouncing the ruling class who entertained Geishas and lived a life of luxury while ordinary people suffered enormous hardship. The term “oppekepe” had more of a rhythmic function than a semantic message and it bookended the song at the beginning and end. It would be anticipated that the audience who were increasingly familiar with the song and knew the words would join in at these junctures. The lyrics would alter to some extent from performance to performance but the tenor of both the commentary and invective would be consistent. Here is a translation of one performance that was recorded some time later in Kawakami’s career, but it resonates with earlier records of his performance: Nothing works out quite as planned It’s just the way of the world We’re lucky to have a bit of rice at hand Ah, oppekepē oppekepeppō peppoppō Today hard times are just getting harder Poor people just keep on getting poorer But you shade your eyes with a tall silk hat Gold rings on your finger, gold watch on a chain You bow and scrape before the powers that be Blow your money on geishas and servants Pile up the rice in your private storehouse Think you can take it as a present in the next world? When you get to hell and stand before Lord Emma Maybe you think a bride will send you to heaven? Do you really think so? I don’t think so Oppekepē oppekepeppō peppoppōi!48

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The great test for the viability of this new theatre form in the broader country would come when Kawakami took his troupe to Tokyo in 1891. After two very brief individual forays previously, Kawakami and his troupe performed in March of that year an adaptation of the political novel by Yano Ryūkei, Keikoku Bidan (経国美談) at the Tsuta-za in Yokohama. It was a great success. On the  20th of June the troupe performed at the high-profile Nakamura-za a play Itagaki-kun Sōnan Jikki that lionized the leader of the Liberal wing of the People’s Rights movement. The season was extended and then extended again so that the troupe held the theatre for seventeen days. They returned to the same theatre from 31st July until 15th August and reprised their rendition of Keikoku Bidan, again to great acclaim.49 It was hard for commentators to know how to characterize this new mode of performance as it moved from formal story-telling to humour, to sword fights with bamboo swords and sung accompaniments to the action. What was clear was that this form of performance had actualized a new theatrical genre, and even the editor of the magazine Kabuki Shinpō opined that Kabuki was currently as ossified as the former Bakufu and that Kawakami had brought “Black Ships” to the world of the theatre (a reference to Perry’s astounding visit to Edo in 1853). Not everyone was impressed by the new theatre form, and a sharply critical article appeared in the issue of Nihon for September the first that lambasted Kawakami’s work and labelled the performances as “the greatest poison under heaven”. Nihon was of course the premier vehicle for the promotion of kokusuishugi, or “national essentialism”, which promoted indigenous culture and traditions while lamenting the impact of Western influences. The article had no major impact on the reception of Kawakami’s troupe and in time even dignitaries from the aristocracy and government began to attend performances. The 1890s saw Kawakami rise to the peak of popularity and he even married into a well-connected family through the offices of Kaneko Kentarō, an elder statesmen of the Meiji government and also a fellow former denizen of Fukuoka. Ever eager to explore new frontiers in theatre, he departed for France in 1893 for a two-month sojourn to observe the theatre scene there first-hand.50 Shingeki was known increasingly as Shinpa (新派) the “new school” as opposed to the classical “old school” (旧派) of Kabuki. The parallel trajectories of their development during this period reveal starkly the ongoing

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chasm between government-sponsored cultural initiatives and the more organically evolving modes of performance and communication. Whether looking at the new print culture or the newly emergent theatre, they both invariably had at their core a debt to a decidedly pre-Meiji cultural ethos while nonetheless adapting that content to the new media platforms of the illustrated newspaper and magazines, along with ostensibly Westernized performance spaces. The flourishing of Shingeki also underscored that the drivers of these innovations could emerge from unexpected sources—out of Fukuoka via Kansai to Tokyo in the case of Kawakami for example. The reaction of cultural purists to certain of these innovations was perhaps predictable—there was certainly a subversive undercurrent that made defenders of authority uneasy. While it would be hard to classify this subversion in the majority of cases as decadent in some extreme sense, there is a certain iconoclastic vitality and even latent eroticism that underscores those dimensions of human experience that a newly urbanized public eager for entertainment and tropes of identification would latch onto. Miyatake Gaikotsu was the most emphatic and bold dabbler in topics and content that was liable to get him into major trouble, as indeed it certainly did. He emerged from that experience chastened, but as the ensuing chapters will demonstrate, in some ways he was just getting started.

Notes 1. Mason, R.  H. P., “Changing Diet Attitudes to the Peace Preservation Ordinance, 1890–1892” in Fraser, Andrew, R.  H. P.  Mason, and Philip Mitchell. Japan’s Early Parliaments, 1890–1905: Structure, Issues, and Trends. Routledge, 1995, 91–120. See also Huffman, 1997, 160–167, and Rubin, 1984, 15–31. 2. Yoshino Takao, Miyatake Gaikotsu Den, Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2012, 42–58. This is arguably the most authoritative account of Miyatake Gaikotsu’s life penned by Miyatake’s nephew, the son of his elder sister. Yoshino has been pivotal in editing and publishing Miyatake’s works. 3. Kornicki (1982, 58–94). 4. Morita. J.R., “Garakuta Bunko”, Monumenta Nipponica, 24 (3), 1969, 222. 5. Morita recognizes the gesaku lineage, − “Was not Garakuta bunko a late variety of the gesaku…” but seems to conclude that that makes it therefore somehow non-serious or non-literary. Morita, ibid., 222–223. 6. Morita’s analysis is detailed, and has been referred to extensively here, but it is perhaps surprising that he does not alight on this fairly clear visual pun

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that signposts the group’s gesaku proclivities. “Miscellany of Badmouthing” is my translation. 7. Garakuta Bunko, No. 1 (May 1888), 14. Translation as per Morita, ibid., 223. For a comprehensive review of dodoitsu in relation to Meiji period bunmei kaika see Okazaki Hajime, Kaika Dodoitsu: Bunmei Kaika no Mangekyō, Bunka Shobō Hakubunsha, 2012. 8. Kornicki (op. cit., 25–42; 95–96). 9. Jacobowitz discusses, particularly in Chapter 7 “Regime Change”, the intersection of three “constellations” of oratory, literature and print output. He also notes the largely misguided interpretations of Tsubouchi Shoyō’s Essence of the Novel, noting his evidently positive estimation of the supernatural and romantic genres of pre-Meiji literature as well as the positive role of short-hand transcription of performances of material based, however loosely, on those genres. He also is largely affirming of Maeda Ai’s scholarship which discussed precisely such continuities. See Jacobiwitz (2015, 171–194). Regarding Poch’s commentary see Poch (2020, 120–148). 10. Asaoka (2003, 201–214). 11. The original text is: 「而して各雑誌の記事主張は何れも尊重すべきもの なるも、餘りに専門に偏して読者少なく、発行部数少なき為に、其価 比較的に高く、為に何れも広く一般に読ましむるには適せぬ。故に若 し各雑誌の主張なる記事を一雑誌に集め、価を廉にして数多く発行す る こ と に 努 め ば 、 必 ず 世 を 益 す る こ と が 多 か ら う 。 」 Asaoka (ibid., 206). 12. Ibid., 206–209. 13. Ibid., 209–213. 14. Ibid., 209–212. 15. The collection of essays edited by Suzuki Sadami in Zasshi “Taiyō” to Kokuminkokka no Keisei (Shibunkaku, 2001) does indeed focus on Taiyo ̄ magazine but two essays in particular provide broader perspectives on the Hakubunkan publishing house, particularly Suzuki Sadami, “Meijiki Taiyo ̄ no Enkaku, oyobi Ichi”, 3–39, and Yamaguchi Masao, “Meiji Shuppankai no Hikari to Yami – Hakubunkan no Kōbō”, 115–152. 16. Meguro (2022, 95–104). 17. One of the most detailed and comprehensive reviews of Kuroiwa Ruikō’s role in the promotion of the detective novel genre and the subsequent impact on the evolution of the novel is provided by Saito Satoru in Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930, Harvard University Asia Centre, 2012, particularly pages 60–110. 18. Translated from the original introduction, San’yūtei Enchō Shū, Meiji Bungaku Zenshū, Vol. 10, Chikuma Shobō, 1971, 212.

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19. See Kondō (2019, 25–55). 20. Silver (2004, 191–205). 21. Kondō (op. cit., 25–55). 22. Regarding Maeda’s discussion of the emergent Meiji readership see Maeda (2004, 223–233). 23. Matsubara (2020, 47–62). 24. Kondō (op. cit., 37–38). 25. Yoshino (2012, 70–90). 26. Ibid., 38–41. 27. Ibid., 110–116. 28. Refer for example to the table of contents for Marumaru Chinbun published 5 January 1888 which is replicated a year later in the 12th January, 1889, edition. 29. Kanagaki Robun appears amongst the list of subscribers in the first issue Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi, No. 1, Yoshino, Ed. 1993, 37. The story about the Oxford students appears just before the list of subscribers, 33–34. 30. Miyatake Gaikotsu,Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi, No. 13, Yoshino, ed. 1993, 447. 31. Miyatake, ibid., 267–268. 32. Yoshino (Op. cit., 117–119). 33. Saito (op. cit., 65–87). 34. Ibid., 108–110. 35. Bunmei Zasshi is reproduced from the original in Yoshino, T. (ed.) Bunmei Zasshi/Tonchi to Kokkei Hoka, in Miyatake Gaikotsu Kono Naka ni Ari, Vol. 22, Yumani Shobō, 1995, 65–144. 36. Yoshino (op. cit., 119–128). 37. Miyatake (1995, Vol. 22, 66–83). 38. Ibid., 83–90. 39. Ibid., 96–102. 40. Ibid., 111–135. 41. Yoshino (op. cit., 128–136). 42. Yorozu Chōho,̄ May 23, 1894. 43. The original Japanese is「三条の教憲」:敬神愛国、天理人道を明らかに する、皇上の奉載」. See also discussion of Jōno Saigiku and Kanagaki Robun’s「著作道書き上げ」(1872) in興津要, 1997, 40–42, 62–64. 44. Swale (2009, 160–163). 45. Kurata (1980, 60–72). 46. The author has discussed this nexus between Seidan and popular culture in “Public Speaking and Serialized Novels: Kōdan and Social Movements in Early Meiji Tokyo.” Japanese Studies 41, no. 3 (2021): 343–360. 47. Kurata (op. cit., 98–99), Saya (2011, 74–81).

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48. This translation by David Noble can be found in Saya (ibid., 75–76). There is a record of an earlier version in Kurata’s account of Kawakami’s rise in fame and apart from the opening stanza it is largely the same in terms of references to gold jewellery, geisha, and attempting to bribe one’s way out of hell. 49. Kurata (op. cit., 99–108), Saya (ibid., 77–78), Keene (1971, 156–161). 50. Kurata, ibid., 109.

CHAPTER 3

The Cultural Impact of the Sino-Japanese War

In Chap. 2, the focus was very much on the internal dynamics of popular culture and the response of the literati and artists to government initiatives aimed at national ‘improvement’. By 1893–1894 an internal resolution of sorts had been attained and there was a certain clarity about how the various artistic and literary practices, and indeed the various media that were adopted and adapted to convey that content to the public, were integrated with each other and formed a coherent albeit diverse whole. By this time, the newly established House of Representatives and House of Peers had been through a series of upheavals and mis-starts, but they were more or less stable and functional enough to be regarded as a limited success. Make no mistake, while newspapers like the Miyako Shinbun would run detailed commentary on the business of both Houses, they were not averse to lampooning their goings on in their giga (戯画) cartoons with satirical commentary on the side. However, while these domestic developments were progressing there was quietly building up a set of complications and tensions in Japan’s relations with China and Korea as the conflict with China over who would have de facto control over Korea’s internal affairs intensified. It culminated in a full-scale war—the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. The lead up to the Sino-Japanese War was not a foregone conclusion, but there had been ample instances of proxy conflict between Chinese and Japanese aligned parties in Korea for over a decade, as well as direct conflict in limited instances where the Japanese or Chinese governments dispatched © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_3

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troops to support their respective client groups. Following the Restoration in 1868, the Japanese government initiated diplomatic contact with the Korean court in Seoul as representatives of the new Empire of Japan. The very notion of Japan being an Empire distinct from the Qing Dynasty was anathema and the approach was rebuffed. This was ostensibly the incident that drove certain factions within the new government to call for an armed incursion into Korea to avenge the perceived ‘insult’ (viz. Seikanron, 征韓 論). Not much came of this until Ō kubo Toshimichi and most of the senior leadership embarked on the Iwakura Mission in 1871, which visited the United States and the major countries of Europe with the aim of renegotiating the unequal treaties that granted extraterritorial rights to these nations. Left in charge as caretakers, Saigō Takamori along with Etō Shinpei and Gōtō Shojirō, began to plan in earnest for a military expedition. Saigō had been the military brain behind the success of the Restoration forces in the Boshin War and although likely not indifferent to the risks inherent in such a gambit nonetheless did not deter more eager proponents such as Etō Shinpei.1 When Okubo returned in 1873, he was appalled at how far the plans had proceeded and promptly cancelled any thought of carrying them out. As something of a gesture of consolation, an expeditionary force was sent to the South East coast of Taiwan in April 1874 to exact revenge on the indigenous Paiwan tribe who had killed almost the entire crew of a Ryūkyū vessel that had shipwrecked there in 1871. The expedition was significant in two major ways, first in that the shipwrecked sailors were characterized as Japanese subjects even though the Ryūkū Islands had not been formally recognized as part of Japan. It was significant in a second regard in that Japan called the Qing Dynasty out on its assertions that Taiwan was part of its jurisdiction. If that were indeed the case, then it was incumbent, the Japanese government argued, that the Chinese government apprehend the tribesmen and exact punishment. As it turned out, the Chinese government refused to do so, and refused claims for reparations to boot. The outcome of the expedition was that the military adventurists got something of their wish fulfilled, while China ultimately ended up capitulating to the Japanese demands for reparations. So Japan’s relations with China and Korea had been off to a very bad start indeed from the beginning of the early period.2 As it turned out, the Korean court did ultimately relent and sign a trading accord with Japan in 1876, the Ganghwa Treaty, but there were competing factions at the court of King Gojong and these factions had rather

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different conceptions of the pace and degree of reform needed to refurbish the nation’s administration, finances and military. From 1879, Li Hongzhang, one of the Qing government’s most capable and influential statesmen, encouraged King Gojong to embrace reform after the Chinese pattern, with the added explicit emphasis that Korea would continue to be a vassal state of the Qing court. In May of 1882, a Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation was signed between the Korean court and the United States government but the Chinese were adamant that Korea should not be a signatory without acknowledgement of its tributary status in relation to the Chinese court. Consequently, reforms of a limited nature were pursued but they had not been particularly successful on a fundamental financial and social level, and following a completely botched attempt to pass off payment of the military with inedible provisions rather than rice, there was a major military mutiny that broke out on 23rd July in Seoul. Mutineers stormed the main prison releasing recently arrested soldiers and political prisoners and thereafter stormed various government buildings and the residence of Lieutenant Horimoto Reizō who they killed. The Japanese abandoned the Legation which was burned to the ground and eventually the Minister and Legation guard were able to retreat with several casualties via ship to Nagasaki.3 The Chinese government dispatched 4500 troops to quell the rebellion and the Japanese government sent a naval force and substantial ground force to Seoul. In the Treaty of Chemulpo of the 30th of August, 1882, Japan was given a formal apology, permission to station troops at a legation that would be rebuilt, along with reparations. This saved face for the Japanese to some extent but in practical terms China now had the upper hand in the Korean court and would go on to consolidate influence. A final humiliation came for Japan when in 1884 it actively took sides with the instigators of the Kapsin coup d’etat which was pursued by the reformist faction in the court. King Gojong was captured and entrusted to Japanese custody while the reformers aimed to establish a new government based on more progressive and egalitarian lines. The Chinese sent troops to intervene and the coup failed with considerable casualties amongst the forces at the Legation. The following year, Itō Hirobumi sent another naval force with an army detachment and succeeded in reestablishing diplomatic ties with Korea with reparations again secured for damage received. Unlike the previous time, however, Itō Hirobumi negotiated with Li Hongzhang the Treaty of Tianjin (31 May), which established an arrangement where neither China nor Japan would station troops in Korea

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and they would only dispatch troops in future with prior formal notification beforehand.4 This stabilized the situation on the Korean peninsula as well as relations between China and Japan for some time, but there were always simmering tensions. In 1886, there was a riot in Nagasaki allegedly instigated by Chinese sailors who were ashore during the repair of some Chinese naval vessels. In 1889, the Korean government closed down the export of soy beans to Japan after a bad harvest year—the unilateral cancellation of export contracts was not taken to kindly by importers in Japan who then sued exporters in Korea.5 Commentary in the mass circulated newspapers and magazines appeared constantly throughout the early 1890s, usually with a negative characterization of the Qing government. There was also a concerted amount of coverage appearing in magazines aimed at Japan’s youth—more often than not having the term Shōnen in the title. As mentioned in Chap. 2, the publisher Hakubunkan had a substantial array of youth or child-­ oriented publications, Nihon no Shōnen (『日本之少年』) and Yo ̄nen Tamatebako (『幼年玉手箱』) being of particular note. These continued separately until integrated into Shōnen Sekai (『少年世界』) in January of 1895. The other main publications of the genre at the time were Shō Kokumin (『小国民』) and Eisai Shinshi (『穎才新誌』). The tenor of these publications was educational and didactic rather than purely entertaining and so they had a significant role in shaping young citizens’ perceptions of the world.6 In terms of providing commentary on contemporary Korea, Shō Kokumin was easily the most proactive, followed by Eisai Shinshi. From December of 1889 to February of 1890 the Shō Kokumin serialized one of the earliest accounts of Korean social conditions that were penned by an officer of the US Navy and it was entitled in Japanese Chōsen no Chisō (「朝鮮の馳走」).7 There remains some controversy over the accuracy of some of the details contained therein but it was clearly a noted source of information and coloured understanding of contemporary Korean society. The articles focused initially on the position of outcast female entertainers, kisaeng, but also ventured to present a general commentary on the position of women and girls in general (Ō take, 2003, 77–103). Although Japan at this time was by no means egalitarian in the treatment of women, the depiction of girls being separated off at an early age and forbidden to leave the home would have come across as regressive. If there was one aspect of the ethos for the condition of women in Korea that was

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commended, it was the strict observance of complete fidelity of wives to their husbands, to the point that even after death they would not remarry but remain constantly attentive to the husband’s grave. There is a sympathetic yet distinctly patronizing tenor to the commentary—Korea is routinely depicted as backward and uncivilized, and serves as a pivot to assert, of course, that Japan was far more advanced and civilized. Even so, there were also instances where a more purely educational function was pursued as in the 18th November issue of Shō Kokumin in 1892, which introduced readers to the fundamentals of Korean language and Hangul.8 An event that was not only diplomatically inflammatory but also underscored the narrative that Korea was uncivilized was the assassination of a former leader of the 1884 Kapsin coup d’etat, Kim Ok-gyun, in March of 1894. Kim Ok-gyun had succeeded in escaping Seoul after the abortive coup and was resident in Japan under the protection of the Japanese government. Nevertheless, he was lured to Shanghai and was assassinated by an agent of the Korean government. The act was committed in the international sector of the city and not within the precinct of the Japanese Legation so there was no direct violation of Japan’s diplomatic jurisdiction but the act was perceived as a direct assault on Japanese diplomatic prerogatives and the fact that the Chinese government permitted the assassin to accompany the body of Kim Ok-gyun back to Seoul was taken as complicity of the Chinese government in the incident.9 Upon repatriation of Kim Ok-gyun’s body, it was dismembered and displayed publicly throughout the realm—this too was regarded as disgraceful and indicative of Korea being uncivilized. An article on the fate of Kim Ok-gyun was included in the 15th May issue of Shō Kokumin entitled “Korea’s Barbarism” (「朝鮮 の野蛮」) and complete with a rather graphic illustration of what was done to the corpse in public.10 The overall tenor of the perception of contemporary Korea is perhaps epitomized in the following quote from the article: Given that Korea is a neighbouring country, our country has taken pains to engage in steps to encourage improvement but the rather barbaric tendencies never seem to abate. This stubbornness will probably not be redressed before the country reaches a demise. They cannot afford to wait another fifty years – it is truly unfortunate but the lack of magnificent achievements in this country is largely due to self-inflicted harm that cannot be averted.11

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Ironically, with the formal commencement of hostilities with China in August of 1894, the emphasis turned to a more intensively instructive approach. In August, the magazine Shōnen En (『少年園』) published a ten page article “Conditions in Korea”, which was significant for its length and its comprehensiveness. The article had fourteen sub-topics that introduced Korea’s history, geography, cultural practices (including weddings and funerals) as well as the institutions of the monarchy and administration. It was something that even an adult readership could make ample reference to. As if to outdo Shōnen En, from December 1894 to June of the following year Shō Kokumin published an even more comprehensive series of articles in ten instalments under the title “Scenes from Korea” (「朝鮮見物」). To be sure, the paternalistic narrative about Korea evident in publications aimed at the young was further amplified in material aimed at the adult public. But what needs to be remembered is that the Sino-Japanese War was indeed a war with China and not against Korea per se. Their attempts to characterize Japan’s moves prior to full conflict as an attempt to ‘rescue’ Korea from the Chinese by forcing the country into a path of reform and change that was closer to the Japanese model did of course imply stronger influence from Japan. The Tonghak Rebellion that broke out in April of 1894 and continued until May of the same year was inspired by a religious sect that had resonances with Christianity but retained a shamanistic dimension as well. It was initially aimed at the highly corrupt administration of Jo Byeonggap in the province of Gobu where particularly egregious cases of corruption and exploitation had become rampant. After successfully deposing Jo Byeonggap, the movement came to blows with the Joseon government and actually enjoyed considerable military success. By May, the movement had begun to run out of impetus and it was becoming apparent that a military intervention from China might be imminent—this brought the government and rebel forces to the table and a peace agreement, the Treaty of Jeonju, was signed on 7th May. The uneasy peace was tipped into a crisis when the Korean government requested military assistance from the Qing government which sent in a force of approximately 2700 troops. In accordance with the Convention of Tientsin, there should have been advance notice of this mobilization and technically there was but with no obvious intention of taking Japanese objections as something that should preclude the move in the first place. The Japanese, in any case, decided that a military response would be made on their own part and from the  9th of  June Japanese warships began

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arriving in Pusan and Chemulpo and from the 12th of June a substantial body of 8000 Japanese troops began landing at Chemulpo. By the 25th, the government was deposed and a replacement progressive and pro-­ Japanese regime established.12 It is generally believed that initially Li Hongzhang did not think that a military confrontation would ensue, but developments on the ground and on sea led to a precipitous conclusion. The Japanese government proposed a joint resolution to the shape of the new government—this would never be accepted by the Chinese government and so no diplomatic solution was realized. The Chinese began to reinforce their troops on the Bay of Asan. The decisive clash that triggered the war occurred on 25th July when the Yoshino, Naniwa and Akitsushima of the Imperial Japanese Navy intercepted reinforcements on their way to Asan. The Chinese battleship Tsi-yuan with a gunship escort, the Kwang-yi, were guarding the entry to Asan as the Kowshing, an English merchantman under lease to the Chinese government and escorted by the gunboat Tsaokiang approached to transfer 1100 reinforcements. The Japanese formation drove off the Chinese escort and the Kowshing was instructed to follow the Japanese ships to port—the Chinese on board refused to comply and there was an uneasy period of negotiation as the Japanese attempted to negotiate the release of the English captain and crew. In the event, the Japanese navy fired on the Kowshing and it sank. A considerable proportion of the English crew along with the Captain were rescued but it was a nearly run thing in terms of causing a major rupture with the English. It was, fortunately for Japan, accepted in Britain that the Chinese had ‘mutineered’ and taken over the vessel, leaving the Japanese with the avenue of legitimate use of force. Thus commenced the Sino-Japanese War, which was formally declared on the first of August, 1894.13 This was now a full-on conflict and not the business of children’s magazines. As already mentioned, there was a major realignment of commentary in the mainstream press and in popular culture which swung behind the prospect of a potentially disastrous confrontation with China. Most foreign commentators and diplomats gave Japan a very low chance of coming out of the conflict without serious harm. Most Japanese commentators seem to have been fully aware of that assessment and the reality of how enormous the military challenge in front of the nation would be. The course of the conflict diplomatically and militarily requires little further embellishment as it is well-covered in the existing academic commentary. But the account of how the experience of the war had a fundamentally

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transformative impact on national consciousness, particularly in relation to the content of popularly circulated literary and artistic output, is perhaps less well-covered. One relatively comprehensive discussion of the cultural dimension to the build-up to conflict, as well as the cultural legacy, has been penned by the doyen of Japanese literary studies, Donald Keene.14 It is an extended chapter covering some 50 pages and gives an outline of the historical context before giving a survey of the response to the war across a number of media platforms and artistic genres. Keene notes that the perception of Chinese culture was in fact overwhelmingly positive even right up until the breaking out of hostilities, with China’s regained strength in naval forces duly noted (e.g. as seen during the war with France from 1883 to 1885). Chinese emissaries were welcomed amongst the Japanese government elite, many of whom were well-versed in Chinese classics and enjoyed the opportunity to engage in social exchanges that entailed sharing erudite classical quotes or penning complimentary verses in classical Chinese. However, with the commencement of hostilities, the tendency to denounce the Chinese as ‘enemies of Progress’ and Japan as an ‘agent of Civilization’ became more strident. As conflict intensified and land battles ensued, the familiar contempt among the Japanese for forces that are prepared to surrender rather than fight to the bitter end came to the fore, with even the sight of Chinese prisoners of war marching through Tokyo while eating as they went evincing particularly sharp criticism. This did not culminate in the repudiation of respect for Chinese classical learning but rather a discourse that the Chinese had failed to remain worthy bearers of the legacy. The curious dichotomy that emerges, at least from Keene’s perspective, is the role of established literary figures, Mori Ō gai, Kunikida Doppo and Masaoka Shiki, in being involved quite directly in observing the conflict, either as military personnel (as in the case of Ō gai) or as correspondents. Yet in so far as any prospect of a ‘serious’ literary response was concerned, very little was produced. Kunikida in fact indulged in fairly facile enthusiasm and unmixed patriotism when his series of letters to a “Beloved Brother” were published after the war.15 A patriotic endorsement of Japan’s role in the war was all but the default response for most members of the literati—even Uchimura Kanzō, who would distinguish himself as one of the minority of intellectuals who opposed the war with Russia a decade later, came out in support of Japanese actions and characterized the war as indeed a “righteous” one. In justifying the war over the Korean

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peninsula he rather curiously evoked the precedent of Saigō Takamori’s Seikanron which was based on a ‘principled’ resistance to Western Imperialism and a moral imperative to act on Korea’s behalf to resist Chinese hegemony and set out on a progressive path toward progress and civilization.16 In parallel with literary responses to the war, there were also the publishers and artists behind the production and sale of polychrome nishiki-e which gave the public a constant stream of dynamic depictions of Japanese heroism and Chinese fecklessness. The Japanese soldiers were almost invariably imbued with the kinds of heroic virility often associated with poses found in earlier depictions of kabuki performances or famous warrior figures, while the Chinese were commonly depicted as relatively anonymous, sharing highly stylized features based on a derogatory perception of ‘typical’ Chinese facial features and almost invariably running away or dead. Popular newspapers such as the Yomiuri played a key role in whipping up public fervour through initiatives such as a patriotic song contest or by serializing melodramatic depictions of heroism. 17 This character of the literary and artistic response to the war should not surprise us, particularly if we consider the precedents for communication through the popular press in the preceding two decades. From the mid-­1870s, the first “minor newspapers” such as indeed the Yomiuri and the Tokyo Eiri Shinbun emerged and although they did not enjoy the kind of tacit endorsement from the government as with “major newspapers” such as either the Yūbin Hōchi or Tokyo Nichi-nichi newspapers, they succeeded in carving out a niche and a mode of operation that set them up to outperform their ostensibly more respectable counterparts. The key exponent of nishikie-derived illustration techniques adapted to newspapers, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, produced a quite extraordinary array of disciples who were initiated in the late 1880s and then ultimately figure as key exponents of nishikie depicting the war in the mid-1890s, Migita Toshihide (1862–1925) and Mizuno Toshikata (1866–1908) being the most eminent (Swale, 2022, 568–600). In contrast to the popularized and jingoistic content of newspaper reportage and nishikie illustrations, there were also two publications that were established in the first months of the war which focused on factual accounts of the course of the conflict and they went on to become highly successful. The first was the Nisshin Sensō Jikki (『日清戦争実記』), which was published by Hakubunkan with the first issue appearing on the 30th of August, 1894. It ran for fifty issues before being closed down

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following the successful outcome of the war in January of 1896. Following close behind there appeared the Nisshin Sensō Zue, (『日清戦争図会』), which was published from the 25th of September 1894 and ran to ten monthly issues until it likewise was wound up in July of 1895. Nisshin Sensō Jikki was more comprehensive expanding from the initial 104 or so pages to 130 pages from the tenth issue onwards whereas the Nisshin Sensō Zue was shorter at around 30 pages per issue but with a stronger emphasis on visual presentation.18 Both publications were distinct in that they tended to include photographs, often of the officers in command of the forces or the ships involved in naval encounters, along with scenes from the battlefield or of Japanese troops in situ. There were no photographs of actual fighting as the technical capacity of contemporary photographic equipment would not lend itself easily to deployment in the heat of battle. This is where the nishikie depictions had the advantage—they could place the view right in the midst of the fighting right up close beside the Japanese heroes. If we take the respective accounts of the Battle of the Yalu River which occurred on 17th September 1894, Nisshin Sensō Jikki presented photographs of each of the main component vessels of the fleet with a detailed account of the progression of the battle using diagrams of the ships and their movements. Nisshin Sensō Zue featured a more condensed account with full-colour illustrations, including a large kuchie by Shimazaki Ryūu which depicted the Japanese navy in the heat of battle. Another aspect relevant to the impact of nishikie is the manner in which the viewer engages with the image. In the case of a photograph, an image is presented as taken by the ‘dead eye’ of the lens—it provides incontrovertible evidence of a place and the elements assembled therein but a nishikie entailed the use of imaginative devises to enable concise depiction on the part of the artist and a process of decoding and recoding on the part of the viewer. There was, as Harada Kei’ichi points out, a ‘silent pact’, or at least a tacit understanding, between the artist and viewer which underpinned the experience of creating and viewing the image.19 This is not to suggest that a similar relation between a photographer and viewer cannot occur but at this point of time it is clear that photographs were being employed for information rather than aesthetic effect.20 One particular point to note with regard to the impact of these wartime publications is the degree to which they both exhibit a strong visuality. As was exemplified in the World Wars of the next century, the war effort of any nation when engaged in total war with full mobilization of its forces

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and resources is reinforced profoundly when the populace is subjected, to the point of saturation, with visual representations of actions and events in the war. Without this reinforcement, there is only text and statistics— abstractions in the minds of many whereas the visual image captures the imagination, provoking strong emotional responses and promoting a will toward action. This is not to suggest that the likes of Nisshin Sensō Jikki and Nisshin Senso ̄ Zue were the main component of this—it was the full package of everything from cartoons to postcards and nishikie, along with the above, which achieved that saturating effect. Donald Keene does discuss the output of nishikie and their remarkable popularity during the war, some individual prints enjoying runs of up to 100,000 copies, but he focuses primarily on Kiyochika and seems to concur with some commentators that the nishikie were generally of dubious aesthetic value and were largely destined to be superseded by photography over the next decade.21 The degree to which nishikie were somehow enjoying their last swan song in popular culture is perhaps debatable but, in any case, if we examine the relative numbers of journalists (shinbun kisha, 新聞 記者), artists (gakō, 画工) and photographers (shashinshi, 写真師) who were accredited with the army during the conflict, they amount to 114, 11 and 4 persons, respectively. The Japanese government was keenly aware of the value of having journalistic coverage from the field as indeed it had found in previous conflicts including the Taiwan Expedition of 1874 and the Seinan War of 1877, and showed considerable foresight in formalizing the process whereby such reporters and commentators could be ‘embedded’ with the forces and placed under the jurisdiction of a particular unit’s command.22 The number of journalists was actually remarkably high, with regional newspapers being as proactive in securing accreditation as the main newspapers of the large urban centres in Kantō and Kansai. There were only four photographers and they entered the fray towards the end of 1894. With eleven artists, loosely described, we do not see a correlation with the volume of prints that would soon ensue. The main reason is that nishikie artists were quite happy, and indeed quite adept in taking written accounts along with occasional photographic images and letting their imaginations do the rest. As the Yomiuri Shinbun in its 9th August issue described the initial situation, “[f]rom the outbreak of the war, publishers of illustrated popular literature suddenly became intensely busy in fighting to produce new works, to the extent that it felt like being in the midst of a battlefield”.23 Based on Harada’s research, which is comprehensive but does not

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claim to be exhaustive, there were approximately twenty particular artists active in producing nishikie prints from within the established lineages of traditional ukiyoe art who were producing works for the main publishing houses of the Tokyo and Osaka regions, with an almost exact balance between the two regions (nine publishers for Tokyo, eight for Kansai). Amongst the various stables of nishikie practitioners, it was that of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi that had a prominent place at the time, Yoshitoshi having no less than seven disciples (of particular note, however, were Migita Toshihide and Mizuno Toshikata). Amongst the remainder of the artists, the ones that have maintained a particularly positive critical reception are Yōsai Nobukazu (1872–1944), Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920), and of course Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1914). Even so, there were an extensive number of practitioners who could not be tied to the prominent ukiyoe lineages and as an example we could take the output of the Nisshin Sensō Zue published by Tōyōdō which presented 120 nishikie in all but with only Gekkō being one of the ‘recogized’ artists. There were, incidentally, two of the established artists who had previous experience of producing nishikie to depict the Seinan War of 1877, Toyohara Kunichika (1838–1912) and Adachi Ginkō (1853–1902).24 So the picture that emerges is that there was in fact a bewilderingly vast array of artists ready to take up the challenge of imaginatively connecting the Japanese populace with the events that were occurring on the ground in Korea. There was also a highly developed infrastructure of publishing houses with national reach that would ensure mass production and mass consumption almost instantaneously. Some of the more artistically reputable contributions by the likes of Kiyochika naturally deserve to be highlighted, but the sheer abundance and pervasiveness of the material is the main point and it should be noted that even at that upper level the field was more diverse than the most praise-worthy artists. There were of course different phases in the character of this response, in terms of content and relative quality, that ebbed and flowed in relation to the course of the war. In the very initial stage, there was a rather explosive outpouring of relatively ‘cheaper’ content, involving lesser-known artists and with lower production values, which nonetheless set the initial tenor of the national response to the commencement of hostilities. As already noted, outright conflict between China and Japan began with an unplanned naval battle on the Bay of Asan on the 25th of July, which resulted in the sinking of the Kowshing and the entire loss of the Chinese

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reinforcements on board. This was followed on land by the successful landing of troops near Asan on the 27th of July and the routing of the Chinese forces stationed nearby at Seonghwan. By the next day the Chinese forces were routed, and by the end of the 29th the city of Asan itself fell. At this stage, a formal declaration of war had not even been made.25 Over the next few weeks, a wave of effusive reportage in newspapers and lionizing illustrations in nishikie bombarded the public who were struck with the euphoria of a previously inconceivably emphatic military success at the very outset. The ‘big three’, Yōsai Nobukazu, Ogata Gekkō and Kobayashi Kiyochika, were not featuring prominently yet. The compositions appear rushed and cluttered in some cases, or they rely of the earlier pre-Meijii conventions for depicting battles where a main heroic figure, more often than not on a horse, would be at the centre of the composition with supporting troops to the right and cowering foes to the left. Harada notes the proliferation of rather implausible scenes, for example a commander of a Japanese field gun battery remaining on horseback, or a naval officer marshalling sailors in a gun position with a sword drawn— flourishes for visual effect rather than relevant to the practical demands of operations. A particularly effective example of how the inclusion of horsemen could transform a scene is provided by Toshiaki’s “Our Forces Storming the Defences Above Port Arthur” (日清戦争威海衛ニ於我軍激 戦ス, Fig. 3.1). It would arguably be unlikely that horses would have been used to storm the steep terrain, but the two horsemen anchor the scene and form a dramatic contrast to the harbour in the distance. Their impact, as even Lafcardio Hearn who observed the reaction first-­ hand at the time was to note, was to fan a near delirium of patriotic fervour—the Japanese people, who until this time may rightly have felt ambivalent about the wisdom of having gone to war with China, now felt no qualms in extolling the virtues of the Imperial Army and Navy, and unreservedly excoriating the Chinese.26 Fukuzawa Yukichi enthusiastically endorsed the war and its civilizing potential in the Jiji Shinpō, Tokutomi Sohō of the Kokumin no Tomo completed his transition from tireless champion of People Rights to enthusing about the victories and the virtues of Japan’s forces. Even Itagaki Taisuke, the former leader of the most vociferous People’s Rights political party, the Jiyūtō, dropped any sense of ambivalence and enthused as effusively as the rest. It was a pivotal moment where the nation dared to believe it was in fact not just going to be a ‘worthy opponent’ but an unstoppably glorious and courageous force destined

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Fig. 3.1  Nakazawa Toshiaki, “Our Forces Storming the Defences Above Port Arthur” 「 日清戦争威海衛ニ於我 軍激戦ス」, 1995. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

to mete out stiff justice to the Chinese.27 It was perhaps historically one of the most significant inflection points for the evolution of national consciousness during the Meiji period, but it surely also encouraged the Japanese populace to indulge in a premature triumphalism. If that

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triumphalism had been thwarted, it might well have gone down as a salutary lesson in chastisement, but when it was rewarded with further victory, it had the potential to become a poisonous source of intoxicating self-delusion. From the formal Declaration of War on the 1st of August the main business of resolving the war on land and sea ensued. The first major blow was the occupation of Pyongyang on the 16th of September after an intense two-day barrage and assault by the Imperial Japanese Army. As if in a kind of parallel with the previous engagements there was a near simultaneous encounter at sea. The Chinese government had been aiming to deliver reinforcements by sea to the north at the Yalu River under the cover of the main Chinese naval force, the Beiyang Fleet. After initially succeeding in landing some 4500 troops, the Beiyang Fleet was attacked late on the morning of the 17th by the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy. By the end of the day, eight out of ten of the principal vessels of the Beiyang Fleet had been either seriously damaged or sunk—the balance of power on the sea had swung decisively toward the Japanese. The Chinese regrouped north of the Yalu River, their task now being to defend Chinese home territory. The Japanese army struck north for ‘Mukden’ (modern day Shenyang) with a second group pressing across the Yalu River near the coast and aiming to press into the Liaodong Peninsula—the ultimate goal being the port of Lüshun (later known as Port Arthur). Following the landing of the Second Corps on the peninsula on the 24th of October, the Japanese proceeded to besiege Lüshun, which eventually fell on the 21st of November.28 The array of nishikie artists that were engaged in the depiction of this phase of the war was now very much replete with the masters along with the more commercially oriented opportunists. Gekkō depicted the storming of the battlements of Pyongyang in the first major land engagement, while Kiyochika devoted the greater part of his attention to the naval battle at the Yalu River. Apart from the higher quality of draftsmanship exhibited by both artists there was more thought given to composition and perspective. This was particularly the case with Kiyochika who added his distinctive ability to evoke ambient light at dusk and in the night-time. To this we could add his sheer ‘out of left field’ inventiveness, such as his dramatic capturing of the moment a Chinese battleship was sinking from an underwater perspective in The Sinking of Two Qing Naval Vessels by our Forces on the Yellow Sea (我艦隊於黄海二清艦ヲ撃チ沈ル之図, Fig. 3.2).

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Fig. 3.2  Kobayashi Kiyochika, “Our Navy Attacking and Sinking the Chinese Fleet on the Yellow Sea” 「我艦隊於 黄海清艦撃沈之図」. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

To these should be added the works of Migita Toshihide and Mizuno Toshikata. Toshihide excelled at the depiction of battle scenes, either ‘right in close’ battle moments or depictions of significant group actions such as the storming of Lüshunkou. His capacity to imbue his figures, and

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indeed every element in the frame, with a vibrant intensity was distinctive and would have provided a ready source stimulation and interest for a routine member of the public. Close observation regarding the draftsmanship and composition indicates more than an interest in cheap thrills—his works are generally well-thought out and well-rendered pieces. He was also one of the principle nishikie artists who excelled in depicting particular heroic figures and episodes, such as Captain Matsuzaki Nao’omi, one of the first casualties of the war who fought on regardless of receiving a leg wound, or the young bugler who continued to his last breath—eventually attributed as the act of Private Kiguchi Kohei.29 By contrast, Toshikata’s work was less action-driven but retained impact nonetheless. He shared with his master Yoshitoshi a delicate sense of line and colouration which, in combination with the elements of mis en scène, could make the movements of the figures seem quite balletic and the overall composition in terms of perspective feel remarkably cinematic. The depiction in “Our army capturing Pyongyang” (「我軍平壌ヲ陥ル之 図」) makes the Japanese soldiers appear to almost dance, while in “Five Japanese Sappers in the Jincheon region drive off more than a hundred Chinese soldiers” (「鎮川地方ニ五名ノ日本工兵清兵百余人ヲ撃退」), the battle scene revisits the hackneyed trope of Japanese soldiery chasing off the feckless Chinese while also presenting, on closer examination, an ensemble of five Japanese soldiers who as a group reveal a remarkable harmony of movement. Another piece, “Our army breaks through the ramparts of Pyongyang” (「平壌攻撃我軍敵塁ヲ抜ク」), looks as though it could have been shot with a panoramic camera lens, with the energy of movement stemming from the composition of moving figures through the terrain from right to left rather than relying on the evocation of individually dynamic movements.30 One further image which really does encapsulate Toshikata’s knack for composition is “A depiction of the Imperial Navy firing near the island of Haiyang” (「海洋嶋附近 帝国軍艦発砲之図」), which achieves the difficult task of turning a grouping of sailors around a naval cannon firing a salvo into a dynamic and impactful image with all the elements within the frame. It is not just that Toshikata uses the smoke and fumes of gunfire to evoke the moment of detonation but the manner in which the gun itself sits as a hypnotically monstrous black feature that draws all figures around it to it. The gun crew seems transfixed and each expresses some sense of anticipation combined with grim determination. These figures are contrasted with two officers who stand apart in an almost casual repose to the

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right—detached, in control. There is a strong visual pull from the gun that sets off a sense of drama in the surrounds, − it is again almost photographic in the nature of its intensity. What arguably gave the likes of Toshihide and Toshikata something of an edge in the development of techniques for creating more innovative forms of tension and impact was, ironically perhaps, their substantial experience in illustrating serialized novels. These sashie illustrations were of course not in colour, but therein lay the very particular discipline of learning to evoke subtleties of light and shade, intensities of form, movement, and texture based on ever more thoughtful composition and blocking of figures rather than relying on colouration for impact. In the course of the conflict heroes would come to be celebrated in song—jingoistic and sentimental to be sure, but avidly adopted by the public. Saya Makito, drawing on the scholarship of Horiuchi Keizō, alights on the motif of “The Valiant Sailor”, which was the title of a song turned out by the poet Sasaki Nobutsuna based on contemporary newspaper reports. It was initially based on a Jiji Shinpō report of 6th October that covered the Battle of the Yalu River and described how a dying sailor, wounded and close to breathing his last, asked his commanding officer if the Dingyuan had been sunk yet. Upon being assured that the Dingyuan was near destruction he smiled and encouraged his comrades to “go and get them”. As Saya goes on to detail, the sailor was not initially named but was most likely Sailor Third Class Miura Torajirō of Matsushima. But he also goes on to relate that there were in fact as many as three sailors that could have fit that ‘final death’ scenario—Sailor Second Class Tagami of the Hiei, Sailor First Class Satō Chōsaku of the Itsukushima, and Hashiguchi Kojirō of the Akagi. The tales of heroism were thus based on a degree of factuality but increasingly infused with more generic narratives with more composite hero-figures.31 What applied to “The Valiant Sailor” on sea, equally applied to the patriotic figure of the bugler’s death on land. The tale of the valiant bugler was derived from events at the outset of the land war in late July of 1894 at the ford of the Ansong River during the Battle of Songhwan. Ultimately the bugler would be identified in school textbooks as Kiguchi Kohei the soldier who led the charge and continued to hold the bugle to his lips despite being shot. The initial reports however named him as Shirakami Genjirō whose feats were described in the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun of 9th August (he was explicitly named again the following month in the Tokyo Nichinichi as well as in a 21st September article in the Yorozu Cho ̄ho ̄). In any event, the episode was turned into a war song

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entitled “The Bugle’s Echo” by an army musician attached to the Imperial Guards, Kikuma Yoshikiyo. Eventually, it emerged in an article published by the Yomiuri Shinbun on 20th of August, 1895 that although Shirakami had fought and died at the Battle of Songhwan, it was in fact Kiguchi Kohei who was the actual bugler. This did not immediately allay confusion as Shirakami had already been celebrated in word and song as the valiant bugler for a year and that perception would continue until the early 1900s. Saya refers to the scholarship of Nishikawa Hiroshi who went so far as to suggest that in fact it was highly likely that Shirakami drowned crossing the river while Kiguchi was also almost certainly killed instantly by a bullet to his chest. The “valiant bugler” was potentially another composite fictitious hero.32 With the fall of Lüshun, the most emphatic statement of Japanese victory had been made, short of marching on Beijing itself. The remainder of the war centred on consolidating gains on the Liaodong Peninsula and the area around Mukden to the north. This phase of the conflict ushered in a relative calm in the tenor of visual commentary, most singularly epitomized by Kiyochika with his pensive and deeply ambient evening and night-time scenes that were of troops and personnel away from direct fighting at the front. Perhaps the most representative examples are the famous works by Kiyochika, one which depicts a solitary officer atop a hill gazing down on an enemy encampment below (我斥候鴨緑江附近に敵陣を窺ふ圖), along with another which depicts the Japanese army encampment at night with groups huddled around fire in the dark and the red cross of a hospital tent being illuminated in the background (冒榮口嚴寒我軍張露榮之図). There is an elegiac if not pastoral turn in the nature of his treatment of the war— victory is at hand, and so reflection seems to be in order. The formal cessation of the war came on the 30th of March 1895 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed on the 17th of April. It provided for the ceding of the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan.33 One further change that occurred in the visual representation of the war from this point is the manner in which the Chinese are depicted. The Chinese soldiery had been, almost without exception, hitherto depicted with angular jaw lines, jutting cheeks and garish facial expressions. This took an attenuating turn and both Toshikata and Toshihide went so far as to depict the defeated Admiral of the Beiyang Fleet, Ding Ru-chang, in his last moments before committing suicide to atone for the disaster. In particular Toshihide, who actually was rare in not always depicting Chinese soldiers as grotesque or cowards—indicated

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considerable sympathy for the disgraced Admiral who is depicted bearing an expression of profound bitterness and regret (『清国北洋艦隊於威海 衛全滅遂提督丁汝昌我海軍敵不能於官宅自殺図』). This event actually did much to ameliorate Japanese perceptions of the Chinese sense of honour in war, and in some ways it presaged a return to a less hysterical and jingoistic attitude towards the Chinese. One of the other perhaps unanticipated by-products of the war was its impact on popular erotic art, or shunga (春画). Certainly shunga as crafted and circulated in the pre-Meiji period did not survive in the same mode of popular consumption, especially given that such material was explicitly banned by the early Meiji government by Ordinances that proscribed ‘uncivilized’ practices from mixed public bathing to urinating in public. But as with almost every other aspect of Edo culture, there were avenues of perpetuation that were pursued even if by relatively isolated individuals. The figure who stands out as being one of the most unabashed ‘standard-­ bearers’ for erotic art was Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) whose highly inclusive and notorious heavy-drinking salon included the greater part of the gesaku and nihikie artist fraternity, and also occasionally saw the participation of foreign visitors to Japan such as the British architect Josiah Conder who admired Kyōsai and studied under him during the last part of his life in the 1880s. As already noted, the government during the 1880s was depicted as publicly moralistic and authoritarian but privately dissolute and hedonistic. The Rokumeikan, which had been built as a show-­ piece venue to entertain foreign dignitaries was also notorious as a hot-bed of debauchery and womanizing. Kyōsai had penned a number of sketches depicting contemporary elite women and men in the latest fashions of Western attire posing in front of ornate Western buildings. He also took the same figures and depicted them engaged in sexual acts in extremely graphic detail, very much in poses resonant with earlier shunga images. These sketches were not publicly circulated but their existence would have been known to his immediate friends and acquaintances.34 The advent of the Sino-Japanese War gave an unexpected impetus to the resurgence of shunga as, very much unofficially, it was thought that erotic images would form some sort of diversion for troops in the field. It is here that nurses, who had hitherto been the emblem of Japan’s signing up to internationally recognized institutions of ‘civilized war’, became a pervasive theme of erotic images circulating amongst the soldiery. These were not shunga in the sense of entailing reasonably high production values and adopting Edo period visual conventions—they were a much more

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tawdry and low-brow approximation. This was a rather arcane sub-genre of visual media at the time, and although it could not be taken seriously as art it does constitute a notable component of the evolving visual culture of the late Meiji period. It should not be forgotten that this was precisely the moment when the fine arts in Japan were not only grappling with the rather thorny issue coming to grips with new techniques such as oil-­ painting, but also the rather perplexing convention of high art in the West to depict women in the nude. On the one hand, following such visual conventions would signify adhering to the ‘higher’ artistic standards of the West, yet it was patently contradictory to the more generalized drive in the earlier part of the Meiji period to stamp out any suggestions of public immodesty or lewdness. As seen in the preceding sections, the popular perceptions of the war, its causes, progress and outcomes, were profoundly shaped by visual media, and although photography had definitely become part of the array of technologies on offer to capture the war in its several phases, it was the traditional nishikie which far and away had the stronger grip on the popular imagination and this medium succeeded in galvanizing national sentiment and solidarity to an unprecedented degree. Alongside the foregoing visual art, theatrical performance also underwent a radical transformation and succeeded in harnessing popular sentiment in novel and intense ways. As outlined in the previous chapter, there were two streams of theatre emergent in the early 1890s, the reinvigorated traditional kabuki theatre led by Ichikawa Danjurō and Ogata Kikugorō (often referred to in a kind of short-hand as “Dan-Kiku”) and the new theatre rooted in So ̄shi Shibai which was led by Kawakami Otojirō. As already mentioned, Kawakami resolved to visit France early in 1893 and he did not waste time seeking out the theatres that were at the forefront of popular entertainment. There were several reports that made their way back to newspapers in Japan, particularly the Chūō Shinbun, which provide some detail of what he saw and where he saw it. Of particular note is his viewing of a battle re-enactment at Le Théâtre du Châtelet (Chūo ̄ Shinbun, 1893, May 24th) which apparently featured scenes from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. There were some 400 soldiers on stage, fourteen horsemen and the scene was replete with the sound of cannons thundering, the sound of a hail of bullets and artificial smoke. It is actually not altogether clear whether it was the Franco-Prussian War or not, − there was in fact another play on at the time entitled Michel Strogoff co-written by Jules Verne and Adolphe D’Ennery, that seems the more

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likely bet but, in any case, it was an experience that completely transformed Kawakami’s perception of what was possible on the stage. The response of the audience in terms of spontaneous emotional outpouring and expressions of patriotism were also duly noted.35 A further play that would have more immediate resonance for Kawakami with East Asia was another long-standing favourite of the Parisian public, The Capture of Peking (La Prise da Peking), again by Adolphe D’Ennery. This depicted the combined operations of the French and British in 1861 to punish Chinese breaches of diplomatic agreements leading to the occupation of Beijing, the denouement of the Second Opium War. But the scene that apparently most bowled him over was a scene that dealt with the hallucinogenic effects of opium and depicted female nymphs emerging out of the mist to dance on a water pond covered in lotus flowers (Chūo ̄ Shinbun, 1893, May 26th; Saya, 2011, 77–83). Kawakami was back in Japan by the 30th of April and apparently kept a low profile for some time. He broke the silence with an enigmatically entitled Igai (意外, Unexpected), which opened at the Asakusa-Za in January of 1894. It was apparently based on another Adolphe D’Ennery work, Mère at Martyre, and introduced Japanese audiences to the Western convention of darkening out the entire theatre and focusing attention purely on the stage through lighting. This was followed by an even more successful Mata Igai (又意外, Unexpected Again) and even Mata-mata Igai (又々意外, Unexpected Yet Again) which was apparently an adaptation of King Oedipus (Kurata, 1980, 109–110). By the time war was declared on the 1st of August, Kawakami was well-­ ready to adapt his Parisian experiences for the local audience. The work he ventured to put in front of the censors was entitled simply  The Sino-­ Japanese War (Nisshin Sensō, 『日清戦争』) and did not encounter major difficulties in gaining approval. This was in stark contrast to public sentiments about the kabuki theatre, where the thought of ‘uneducated’ actors playing the parts of officers and generals was regarded as potentially denigrating. Kawakami’s play had been crafted to avoid depicting Japanese officers, the main characters being a reporter, Hirata Tetsuya, his female counterpart, Haruta Shigeko, along with some low-ranking Japanese foot-­ soldiers, Katō Kiyotarō and Konishi Kōzō, and a fellow journalist named Mizusawa. After Hirata Tetsuya and Haruta Shigeko are taken prisoner near the front, the only high-ranking figures to appear are officials of the Chinese court, including Li Hong-zhang and the Chinese Emperor.36

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Although not following the plots of either Michel Strogoff or La Prise de Pekin directly there are plenty of sequences and motifs that justify the conclusion that not only were these works influential, they were also in some instances quite closely followed. Hirata provides an ideal foil for the audience’s identification in that he is not a military officer, but he is educated, resourceful and patriotic. He meets Shigeko as she becomes embroiled in the conflict and is separated from her parents. Hirata takes her under his wing and she travels with him as his ‘older sister’. The two soldiers appear as a contrast to the main hero and heroine, initially exhibiting a tendency to be fractious but through hardship and near death becoming inseparable. When Shigeko discovers that her parents are dead, she joins the medical corps as a nurse with the Red Cross. The interplay in the original between two reporters at a telegraph station near the front in the French is used for light relief but not in Kawakami’s adaption— Mizusawa meets a grim end. After both Kawakami and Shigeko are captured they are taken to Pekin where they are interrogated and beaten. They refuse to do obeisance to the Chinese Emperor and Hirata gives the Qing court a lecture in international law and its obligations. Hirata and Shigeko manage to escape but Hirata is shot upon reaching the Japanese front lines.37 Overall, the adaptation fits more with Japanese conventions of exemplary patriotic conduct and the relationship between Hirata and Shigeko, though clearly of an obliquely erotic nature is kept well in check, and they do not live happily ever after. Shigeko also provides an opportunity to present to the Japanese public phenomena that would have been relatively unfamiliar to the home audience—references to the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross and of course female nursing staff on or near the battlefront. The script for the play had been foreshadowed in the Yamato Shinbun from 24th August until 4th September. The ensuing season at the Asakusa-Za ran for weeks and enjoyed sustained popularity throughout. By contrast, the attempts of the “Dan-Kiku” school to join in were both belated, commencing in November of 1894, and were not crowned with popular success. A play entitled Kairiku Renshō Asahi no Mihata (『 海陸連勝日章旗』) —Successive Victories on Land and Sea, Our Glorious Flag of the Rising Sun—penned by no less that Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, was something of a flop. To be fair, critical responses to Kawakami’s work amongst theatre reviewers had not exactly been enthusiastic, perhaps primarily because they did not know what to make of it, but even commentators who were more inclined to endorse kabuki as a traditional art form

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had to concede that Kawakami had captured the popular imagination and been catapulted into the cultural stratosphere by comparison.38 As it turned out Kawakami did not remain confined to military themes in his productions but the earlier success with Nisshin Senso ̄ formed the basis for his next foray into the development of his theatre style into a distinctive genre of Shinpa, the “new school” of theatre setting itself apart from kabuki or Kyūha, the “old school”. It was an initiative that was definitive in capturing the symbiosis between newspapers, literary writing and theatre. In November of 1894 Izumi Kyōka published in the Asahi Shinbun a serialized form of one of his earliest short stories, Giketsu Kyōketsu, (『義血侠血』, Loyal Blood, Valiant Blood). The editorship of the Asahi Shinbun had been taken up by Izumi’s mentor Ozaki Kōyō and this enabled him to provide an avenue of publication for his protégé. At some point in the following year Kawakami alighted on this story and resolved to use it as the basis of his next major production. In November of 1895, the customary preliminary notifications of what was in store were made in the Miyako Shinbun but no explicit reference to Izumi’s work being the basis of the play was made even though its title Taki no Shiraito gave a fairly clear indication of where the original idea had come from. Ozaki immediately intervened and insisted that Izumi (and by extension the interests of the Asahi Shinbun and himself) be given due acknowledgement. Without full resolution of the dispute the play premiered in December of 1895 and was an immediate success. It featured the ill-fated romance of two star-crossed lovers, Shiraito, a female entertainer who specialized in conjuring, and Murakoshi Kin’ya, an impecunious coachman who aspired to become a lawyer. Shiraito provides Kinya with a stipend to live on and pays his tuition fees, but at the last hurdle she is robbed and so resorts to breaking into the house of a wealthy benefactor who she ends up inadvertently killing during the botched attempt to steal money. The newly minted Kinya is brought in as the prosecuting lawyer in the case and when Shiraito confesses to the murder in court she is in turn sentenced to death. Kin’ya, distraught and inconsolable, kills himself—the scene was apparently cleverly contrived to have Kin’ya, played by Kawakami, instantly transformed back to the guise of a coachman, whereupon he draws a pistol and shoots himself.39 Reviews of this play, even that of the Asahi Shinbun, were largely positive and as Cody Poulton persuasively demonstrates it was the pivotal moment when Shinpa came of age and set the mould for future naturalistic modes of theatrical production, ultimately forming the basis of Japanese

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approaches to cinematic production, as will be covered in ensuing chapters.40 It is also important to acknowledge that this production was very much something that emerged out of the highly innovative phase of experimentation and adaptation that Kawakami had undertaken during the Sino-Japanese War. As a contrast to the meteoric success of Kawakami, there was the rather sobering string of misfortunes that afflicted Miyatake Gaikotsu. He was mortified at the manner in which so many illustrious figures of the world of letters, the arts and journalism were so quickly won over to a slavish and uncritical support of the war, and he was not at all inclined to ‘cash in’ by producing the kind of cringe-inducing jingoism as evidenced by the likes of Kunikada Doppo. His personal financial circumstances became increasingly straitened as the conflict ensued. Earlier in the year, on the  7th of April, his first and only child with his partner Yayo was born, a boy they named Tenmin (天民, literally meaning “the people of heaven”, and signifying Miyatake’s belief in the sanctity of the common people). In order to support his family he was forced to move his household back to his parents’ home near Takamatsu where it was also thought that Yayo could obtain some respite while his parents could dote on their grandchild. Various ventures to take on editorial work, which had worked quite well in the past, came to nothing. And as if things could get no worse, his son passed away in July of 1895, aged just over a year old. This was indeed Miyatake’s darkest hour and he could not escape the sense that he had yet again brought profound misfortune to those he held most dear.41 Prior to the death of his child with Yayo, he had embarked in May of 1895 on a reprise of what had been the tried and true model for popular entertainment, a miscellany of commentary and humorous illustrations laced with wit and satire, and it was a magazine entitled Tonchi to Kokkei (『頓知と滑稽』). It ran to seven issues in total, the final issue appearing on 10th November, 1895. As such, its content seemed to resonate with his earlier successful sortie into publishing with the Tonchi Zasshi—the issues were typically divided to two broad divisions “Tonchi” and “Kokkei”, with the obligatory advertising section at the end. The content was provided by a number of contributors and it seems there were no topics out of bounds, including a pseudo-erudite treatise on the merits of doing away with urination and defecation (Tonchi to Kokkei, No. 1, 5th May 1895).42 The sixth and seventh editions had supplements added entitled Meiji Tengu ̄, with a completely thinly disguised evocation of the phallic connotations of the Tengū nose, which is unmistakable given that the

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first supplement commences with a discourse on the fact although the characters for “yin” (陰)and “yang” (陽) are opposites, they can both be used in Chinese compound character words to describe male genitalia. Each supplement was rounded out with a list of the good and the great characterized as the ‘Tengū’ of their field—Fukuzawa Yukichi was described as the “Kaika Tengū”, Itō Hirobumi as the “Kempō Tengū”, and the theatre impresario Morita Kan’ya described as the “Money-­ lending Tengū”. There is no obvious reason why this publication failed other than that the content was perhaps disconsonant with the mood of the public at the time. Yes, the war with China had been successfully concluded, and there was a sense that things were about to get substantially better for all Japanese, but this was clouded by the intervention in the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki by France, Germany and Russia, who effectively vetoed the ceding of the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan. It was a time when the classical literary phrase gashin sho ̄tan (臥薪嘗胆) became current in the popular imagination signifying a reluctant willingness to tolerate an unacceptable situation (literally “lie on firewood and swallow bile”) but implying that this would entail appropriate revenge being exacted in due time. This was in a sense exactly what was attained through the war with Russia less than ten years later. As for Taiwan, which had been formally ceded to Japan and not contested by the Western powers, this was not simply handed over to the Japanese government—an expeditionary force had to be dispatched to placate the Han Chinese and indigenous inhabitants who wanted no part of being incorporated into the Japanese Empire.43 Japan’s achievement as an imperial power by the end of the conflict had garnered considerable prestige for the country overseas, despite the outcome of the Triple Intervention, but it would be useful to contemplate some of the domestic developments in technology and culture that were shaping urban experiences in the major urban centres. Taking a slightly longer-term view from the early 1890s to the period following the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, there were several strands or themes that kept reoccurring and being consolidated during this period. First of all, there was the introduction and gradual mass-dissemination of new technologies. Perhaps the bicycle is a highly representative example of this. Although introduced and employed by members of the Japanese elite classes since the 1970s, it was not until 1889 that more user-friendly and financially more accessible models became available. The impact was not instantaneous but it was palpable. In the early 1890s the national postal

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service began to adopt bicycles for delivery of mail, making their utility amply evident to all. But there were also moments of moral alarm sounded when it became apparent that young people, even young women, were picking up the new, highly emancipatory machines. As William Steele has outlined in his excellent commentary on the role of the bicycle in transforming late Meiji society and beyond, the bicycle was actually building on a prior application of bicycle technology in the form of the Jinrikisha, with the numbers of such vehicles burgeoning—100,000 by 1875  in Tokyo and peaking thereafter by the mid-1890s to some 210,000 vehicles nationwide. They could be used for even relatively long excursions between the metropolis and outlying areas in Yokohama, taking about as long as a horse-drawn vehicle and entailing none of the cost.44 Jinrikisha drivers were accordingly a dominant feature of the urban scenery, and figured as at times a rough and ready element in street life and also somewhat ‘over-­ represented’ in arrests at times of social unrest. Even so, the bicycle had arrived and there was even a bicycle association formed by the end of the war. The telephone was another technology that was to become more ubiquitous as time went on—introduced in limited circumstances from the 1870s onwards, it had become more accessible for private service by the 1890s and by the time of the Sino-Japanese War there were public telephone booths dotting the downtown area. In parallel there were a number of more novel technologies introduced, such as the elevator housed within the Ryo ̄unkaku (凌雲閣) a twelve-storey tower in Asakusa, which was routinely used as an exhibition space for goods and gadgets sourced from around the world. The war also saw the introduction of canned goods, indirectly a result of logistical developments necessitated during the conflict, and the more pervasive entertainments afforded by advances in cinematic projection technology. There were popular entertainments that continued to burgeon as well. Baseball had been introduced since the 1870s but by the 1890s had come to be an established feature in public events, along with, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the emergence of rowing as rather elevated sporting fixtures held amongst the major universities. Such popular events and spaces were profoundly tied up with the intensification of not only mass-­ circulated newspapers and magazines, but also the establishment of the first advertising agencies—consumerism was here to stay and there were entities that developed precisely the expertise needed to capture the urban markets. There were also the first explorer-adventurers who captured the

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popular imagination—Major Fukushima Yasumasa’s trans-Siberian solo expedition from Berlin to Vladivostok commenced in 1892 and took a year and four months to complete, igniting feverish coverage and hagiography. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and his horses were donated to the Ueno Zoo where they became a popular tourist attraction. A crowd of more than 40,000 attended a public event in Osaka welcoming him back as a hero on the 25th of October. On the domestic front there was even a celebrated attempt in 1895 by a meteorological researcher, Noguchi Itaru, to send an expedition to climb Mt. Fuji and conduct experiments over the winter. The team of approximately eighteen personnel, including Noguchi’s wife, were unfortunately forced to descend from the mountain in December. From time to time there were other more arcane entertainments such as beauty contests featuring geisha and events involving exceptional feats of human endurance such as eating contests.45 One less well-known series of advances in Japan in this period relates to improvements in responding to medical crises such as outbreaks of cholera and, occasionally, plague, along with gradual advances in the identification and treatment of tuberculosis. In many cases, these advances were introduced from overseas, with German research success featuring prominently in news reportage. It is during this period that X-ray technology was also implemented following successful experiments conducted by Wilhelm Röntgen. But there were also domestic successes produced by Japanese researchers who began to establish themselves with novel discoveries. Chief  among them  was Kitasato Shibasaburō (1853–1931), a physician and bacteriologist trained at Humboldt University in Berlin, who attained international recognition for his role (along with other researchers) in identifying the pathogen that causes the bubonic plague during an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1894. His connection with Robert Koch also led to new initiatives to explore vaccine cures for cholera and tuberculosis in Japan. One final public controversy that warrants returning to in more detail is the previously alluded to debate regarding nudity in fine art. Since the 1870s, there had been ordinances promulgated to curb modes of behaviour that were regarded as ‘uncivilized’, mixed bathing and urinating in public being primary instances of such undesirable public conduct. Ironically, as awareness of the conventions of Western fine art became more well-known, there emerged a contradiction in the sense that ‘serious’ art on a par with that of the civilized West would of necessity entail

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the depiction of the human form, more often than not the female form, in explicitly naked poses. In October of 1887, Ernest Fenellosa, in league with Okakura Tenshin and leading Japanese nihonga artists Kano Hōgai (1828–88) and Hashimoto Gahō (1835–1908) established a fine arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. It became a central vehicle for promoting a new conception of Japanese fine arts, including those employing Western techniques of painting. At the same time, Fenellosa was also pivotal in promoting the preservation of traditional Japanese arts and so it could not be said that it was a purely Westernizing exercise.46 Even so, the rather uneasy balance between adopting Western aesthetic conventions such as the nude in fine art and vestiges of profoundly conservative attitudes to women and their sexuality continued unabated. In April of 1895, a particularly sharp controversy arose when a noted nihonga artist Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924) exhibited a near full-length female nude entitled Chōjō (朝妝 or “Morning Toilette”) standing in front of a mirror with the reflection revealing a clearly discernable genital area.47 It was presented at the Fourth National Industrial Exhibition in Kyoto and was in fact a work that had been completed some years earlier while a student studying painting in France. One of Georges Bigot’s most well-­ known and indeed humorous caricatures from the time depicts the public display of the painting to the general public with the viewers, from men and women to children, making a baffled inspection of the work from very close up. For his own part, Kuroda remained unapologetic and had the support of other more progressive artists who had come from a similar background.48 The Japan that emerged following the war and embarked on a new wave of national development rooted in progress would also witness darker events that would give pause to unbridled optimism. There were several major outbreaks of cholera and influenza (including the 1891 influenza outbreak that took the life of the Interior Minister, Sanjō Sanetomi), along with the tsunami disaster of 1896 which inflicted massive devastation and loss of life on the Sanriku coast of north-eastern Japan. There were also aspects of Japan’s external colonial activities that reflected badly on the Imperial government. Primarily there was the assassination of the Korean Consort to the King, Queen Min, carried out under the direction of the diplomatic envoy to Seoul, Lieutenant General Miura Gorō. International outrage led to his recall within weeks but the damage to Japan-Korean relations in the long term was incalculable.49 There was also the less than smooth or effective pacification of Taiwan, which was

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plagued by military set-backs, including the death of Imperial Prince Kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa who died of malaria following the landing of forces in Taiwan on 29th May, 1895 . Corruption amongst government officials was also rife, with the dismissal of High Court Judge Takano Takenori making the pages of newspapers back in Japan in October of 1897 and signifying the depths of official corruption.50 Yet for the Japanese subject, one of the single greatest takeaways from the victory in the Sino-Japanese War, regardless of all the variety of light and shade in the national experience, was the consolidation of the sense of unity as Japanese citizens and the enhancement of the prestige of the Meiji Emperor. Following the victory over the Chinese at Lüshun, the sense of impending victory became prevalent. On the 9th of December, 1894, a public event to celebrate the capture of Lüshun was held at Ueno Park. It was organized and sponsored under the auspices of the Tokyo municipality in association with the leading financial and mercantile interests in Tokyo. It commenced at 9 in the morning and was attended by the Crown Prince as the Emperor, and indeed the entire parliament and government had been temporarily relocated to Hiroshima for the duration of the conflict. The Emperor and Empress were represented through large photographs that were wrapped in purple bunting. Following the arrival of the Crown Prince, Kawakami Otojirō’s troupe launched into a performance of scenes from their iconic Nisshin Senso ̄. This was followed from 10:30 with a series of addresses by the Crown Prince and other dignitaries. This part of the festivities was wound up by noon, but it would soon be followed at 1:00 by a memorial service for the war dead. This too was only one stage in the build-up to what for the public was the ‘main event in the evening’, a re-enactment of the sinking of China’s finest battleships, the Zhenyuan and the Dingyuan, at the Battle of the Yalu River. This was to be carried out from 5:00  pm on the Shinobazu Pond and commercial sponsors ensured that an actual torpedo was used to sink the second battleship before it broke apart in a blaze of firework explosions. The response of the crowd, which was estimated to be in excess of 60,000, was predictably fevered and ecstatic. There was an element of mayhem as the mass of men women and children attempted to disperse and wend their way home.51 If the Ueno Park was something of a watershed in the degree to which the public could be brought together en masse for public celebrations of Empire, this was to be eclipsed even further by the triumphal return of the Emperor Meiji to Tokyo on the 30th of May, 1895. The Emperor was scheduled to arrive at Shinbashi Station at 2:00 pm and make a procession

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via Hibiya Avenue and Kasumigaseki to the Imperial Palace. Arriving on schedule at 2:00, the entourage, which included every key Minister of State and the Chiefs of Staff for the Army and Navy, made its way along the thronged route which included a passage through a 110-metre long triumphal arch that was thirty meters high and festooned with flags and banners. The crowd resounded with cries of “Long Live the Emperor” and “Long Live the Empire!”. By the time the procession arrived in the governmental office precinct of Kasumigaseki, the depth of the crowd had increased substantially, bolstered by students from leading universities. The Emperor travelled in an open carriage and in this way made his person, dressed in full military uniform, the accessible embodiment of the national military fervor and patriotic celebration. The entourage entered the Palace via the Sakurada Gate at approximately 2:45.52 As this account demonstrates, Empire was now in the blood of every Japanese citizen, and the Emperor was more than ever the unambiguous unifying figure of national unity.

Notes 1. Swale (2022, 579–584), Eskildsen (2019, 63–67). 2. Eskildsen (ibid., 123–131). 3. Duus (1995, 49–65). 4. Paine (2003, 93–95). 5. Ibid., 95–96. 6. Kaneyama (2020, 15–35). 7. The name of the American author is unclear, rendered as 「チャールズ チ ェイレーロング」 in katakana with only the first name being decipherable. 8. Ō take (2003, 77–84). 9. Paine (2017, 18–20). 10. Kaneyama (op. cit., 9). Contemporary reportage on the assassination features in Suzuki (1995, Vol. 5, 106–108). 11. Quoted from “Korea’s Barbarism” in Sho ̄ Kokumin (May 15th issue of 1894), 34–35, see Ō take (op. cit., 92). 12. Paine (op. cit., 132–135). 13. Paine (op. cit., 20–21). 14. “The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and its Cultural Effects in Japan” in Shively (ed.), 1971: 121–175. 15. Keene (1971, 121–124). 16. Uchimura was a baptized Christian who had studied at Amherst in the late 1880s. Upon his return he had hoped to take up a position as a teacher but

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came into intense criticism for his refusal to bow reverently to the image of the Emperor or the Imperial Rescript of Education. See Saya (2011, 18–23). 17. Keene (1971, 133–140). See also Judith Fröhlich’s “Pictures of the SinoJapanese War of 1894–1895.” 2014, 214–250 which includes coverage of content published in China as well as Japan. 18. Okamura Shigako, Nisshin Sensō wo egaita zasshi – Nisshin Sensō Jikki to Nisshin Senso ̄ Zue no bijuaru hyōgen, in Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan Geppō, No. 611, 2012.2, pp. 12–20. 19. Harada Kei’ichi, Sensō wo Tsutaeta Hitobito – Nisshin Sensō to Nishikie wo megutte in Bungakubu Ronshū, Bukkyo Daigaku Bungakubu, 2000, 1–15. 20. Donald Keene goes so far as to suggest that none of the photographs of the wartime period had “the least artistic interest”, Keene (op. cit., 162). 21. Keene even suggests that the demise of the ukiyoe (presumably nishikie included) is marked quite precisely at the point where the Yomiuri announced a drastic fall in sales following the declaration of victory, Keene (ibid., 161). 22. Harada (op. cit., 2). 23. 「日清の事変起こりてより、都下の絵草紙屋は大いに忙しく新絵出版 を競つて恰も戦場の如くなるが、…」, quoted from Ukiyoe Jiten (『浮 世絵辞典』) by Yoshida Eiji in Harada, ibid., 3. 24. Harada (ibid., 4–8), Keene (1971, 161–166). 25. Paine (op. cit., 21–22). 26. Hearn (1896, 71). 27. Keene (op. cit., 126–133). 28. Paine (op. cit., 26–36). 29. Keene (op. cit., 143–154). 30. Ichimura (2013, 108–123). 31. Saya (2011, 52–57). 32. Ibid., 57–67. 33. Paine (op. cit., 36–38). 34. Yamaguchi Seiichi & Oikawa Shigeru (ed.s) Kawanabe Kyōsai Gigashū, Iwanami Shoten, 2015. One of the most significant collections of Kyōsai’s works, including shunga, are held in the Israel Goldman Collection, London, UK. 35. Kurata (1980, 108–109). 36. Saya (op. cit., 87–88). For contemporary reportage see Suzuki (1995, Vol. 5, 168–169. 37. Ibid., 88. 38. Ibid., 82–90). 39. Cody Poulton, “Drama and Fiction in the Meiji Era: The Case of Izumi Kyōka”, Asian Theatre Journal, 1995, Vol. 12, No. 2, 285–288. 40. Ibid., 280–306.

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41. Yoshino (2012, 139–140). 42. Miyatake Gaikotsu, Miyatake Gaikotsu Kono Hana ni Ari, Vol. 22, 157. 43. Paine (op. cit., 37–40). 44. Steele also notes that the horse was of course typically the preserve of the most high-ranking of aristocrats and government officials — the jinriki-sha was filling a rather niche gap indeed. 45. Jiji Shinpō, 18th and 21st January , 1893; Osaka Mainichi Shinbun 26th June, 1893, regarding public reception. The account of the expedition to maintain a meteorological team on the summit of Mt. Fuji can be found in Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 19th October, 1895; its unsuccessful conclusion, Jiji Shinpō 26th December, 1895. William Steele’s excellent study of the adoption of the bicycle can be found at: Steele, M. William. “The Speedy Feet of the Nation: Bicycles and Everyday Mobility in Modern Japan.” Journal of Transport History 31, no. 2 (2010): 182–209. 46. Satō (2011, 44–47). 47. In 1906, amongst the enormously popular screenings of katsudō shashin there were other variations such as tableau vivant performances, katsujinga (活人画), and on one occasion a final session was appended that presented a nude woman. The stage was specially rearranged with red and white bunting and special lighting, presented with some degree of fanfare and musical accompaniment. It caused a predictable sensation and caused predictable moral consternation, not in the least because it was particularly popular among young men and women. It was described in detail within the magazine Nihon (May, 23, 1906) which in turn excoriated the event. 48. For recently published collections of Bigot’s works with commentary see Shimizu Isao (ed.) Bigō Nihon Sobyōshu ̄, Iwanami Shoten, 1986, and Shimizu Isao (ed.) Bigō ga mita Nihonjin: Fūshiga ni egakareta Meiji, Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunkō, 2011. Regarding Kuroda Seiki see Satō (2011, 248, 264–266). 49. Paine (op. cit., 46–47). 50. Miura’s unsanctioned move essentially demolished the pro-Japanese support at Court in Seoul and drove the Korean aristocracy and elites more firmly towards allegiance with Russia. Paine, ibid., 41; Jiji Shinpō, 6th October, 1897 & Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, 8th October, 1897. For original text see Suzuki (1995, Vol. 5, 216–219). 51. Saya (2011,109–114). 52. Ibid., 114–118.

CHAPTER 4

Fin de Siècle Japan

In the decade following victory in the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese public, quite unsurprisingly, continued to be enamoured with the continued celebration of victory in war and the feting of particular Japanese martial virtues and the Japanese spirit. The success of Kawakami’s Nisshin Senso ̄ during the war was duly noted by practitioners of kōdan and rakugo and it led to a pronounced reorienting of the themes of recitations, particularly in ko ̄dan, towards accounts of military exploits and heroism from the recent conflict. New technologies such as the moving image of katsudo ̄ shashin were also co-opted to provide popular entertainments that depicted scenes of overseas military conflicts (indirectly reinforcing Japan’s status as a military power) as well as curiosities and amusing scenes from around the world. At the same time, the financial dividend of victory in the war with China gradually became palpable as the government increased the ratio of fiscal expenditures on military-related industries to a staggering 30% as opposed to the already substantial 10.5% for the period before the war. 1 It led to an expansion of the labouring class and a new cultural ecology coinciding with the new social configuration being bedded in. As T.C. Smith illustrates in his incisive study of the emerging working class, the shokko ̄ (職工), there was a class of worker with marginalized status living in relatively precarious circumstances in the urban centres, particularly Tokyo and Osaka. This class was developing a collective consciousness with a proclivity with certain modes of entertainment and even a drive for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_4

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self-improvement but as Smith convincingly argues, the driving force for improvement of treatment in the workplace and, by extension, a degree of dignity as citizens and subjects in common with the remainder of society, was not so much indicative of an emergent proletarian consciousness, but the adaptation of an existing conception of relations based on moral obligation and benevolence. Andrew Gordon’s The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry 1853–1955 (1985) largely bears out Smith’s thesis and adds further detail regarding the changing dynamic of the management of skilled labour, particularly the movement from the decentralized sourcing of technicians through off-site bosses (oyakata) to a more organically integrated in-house mode of training apprentices which included providing accommodation and catering for education. Naturally, as will be discussed in further detail later in the chapter, the influence of Socialist and Anarchist thought from Europe would become more pronounced and proliferate in the early twentieth century but both Smith and Gordon encourage a tempering of inclinations to draw too many direct parallels with the rise of working class movements in Europe and North America. 2 While there is little to add to both Smith and Gordon’s account of evolving labour relations, there would still seem to be space to outline the further reworking pre-Meiji cultural traditions and a profoundly enhanced matrix of mass-produced and mass-consumed popular entertainments for all classes of urban citizens. Huffman’s recent Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2018) very thoroughly outlines the patterns of acclimatization, domestication and ultimate self-improvement that became possible even for the lower levels of the working class in Tokyo. And while there is again little to add to that depiction of urban life for the poor, there is perhaps still space to sketch out the stage for the broader population where the press and popular entertainment came to have a new pervasiveness, and we find that the last vestiges of the Edo cultural legacy are played or reworked into new forms that enable metamorphosis into the heart of daily urban life in a more generalized sense. In particular, the final legacy of the three key strands of Edo tradition that find new life in the mid-Meiji period merit further consideration— namely theatre (Shinpa and Shin-Kabuki), performative traditions such as rakugo and kōdan, along with recitative musical forms of performance such as gidayu and naniwa-bushi, and of course the ever-evolving ‘novel’ with occasional sashie illustrations or kuchi-e. A distinction is being made here between the canon of pure literature associated with the Meiji

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Bundan, and the kinds of fiction that were populating mass circulation newspapers, the likes of the Miyako Shinbun and Yamato Shinbun, publications continuing to have a significant impact on reading tastes. The Yorozu Cho ̄hō, the newspaper established by Kuroiwa Ruikō in 1892 was becoming increasingly set as the go-to source for gossip and scandal. It has had scholarly attention from Huffman and Aoyama, but in this chapter we will focus also on the contributions from major left-wing figures such as Uchimura Kanzō, Kōtoku Shusui and Sakai Toshihiko and the emergence of a rift over support for military interventions from 1900 onwards. 3 Another dimension to social and cultural change was the transformation of the cohorts of students that were being produced throughout the country. As one of the leading scholars on the origins and development of the educated classes in Meiji Japan, Takeuchi Yō, demonstrates, the late 1890s saw the emergence of a new class produced through proliferating Middle Schools throughout the Empire, with a concomitant expansion of the system of High Schools that were established to cater to the aspiration of ‘getting ahead’ through education. Prior to the Sino-Japanese War there had in fact been two regions that had predominated in the maintenance of High Schools, − Yamagata and Kagoshima, in essence the Prefectures that corresponded to the two leading clans behind the Restoration, Chōshū and Satsuma respectively. This may seem to have been the result of the political impact of those two former clans on education policy but Takeuchi argues persuasively that this was in fact not just a reflection of political connections but also the result of pre-existing legacies of higher education, the Meirinkan being the precursor of the High School system in Yamagata, with the Zōshikan being a precursor to the High School system in Kagoshima. 4 Toyama Masakazu, whose career was profoundly intertwined with the development of the higher education system, was acutely aware of the significance of this situation—the High Schools were the conduits for admission to Tokyo University and the aforementioned regions were substantially ‘over-represented’. Toyama had held a succession of professorial posts at the various stages of the development of what was to become the Tokyo Imperial University, ultimately not only becoming the head of that institution but also a Minister for Education under Itō Hirobumi in his third cabinet in 1898. His tenure was short-lived but he was to nonetheless attempt to leave his mark on the national discussion on how to address the impact of this predominance on the High School system. After resigning toward the middle of 1898, he made a visit the following year to two

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relatively large and well-populated prefectures, Niigata and Nagano. In Niigata he made a three-hour speech that outlined his concerns that a prefecture as populous as Niigata had as yet not established a High School. He even presented figures that quantified the degree to which the prefecture was under-represented within the national cohort of students emerging from Tokyo University. He followed this visit with a similar presentation in Nagano—in both cases the response was enthusiastic and the prefectures began to lobby vigorously both within the prefecture and in the capital for assistance to realize that aspiration. As it turned out an additional High School was established, but it was in Kagoshima, ostensibly to reinstate the Zōshikan within the national system (the clan influences were not able to be so easily negated after all). In late 1899, Toyoma published his observations and policy prescriptions in The Future of Clan Factions (Hanbatsu no Sho ̄rai, 『藩閥之将来』) which appeared shortly before his death the following year. 5 Toyama was not to live beyond 1900 and did not see his advice or lobbying have a substantial impact on the development of the national higher education system. Even so, changes did gradually emerge and they did so despite the seeming dominance of the schools in Yamagata and Kagoshima. It was that very proliferation of Middle Schools that made the difference as, quite distinctly from vocational institutes or teachers’ training schools, the new model Middle School had a relatively generalized curriculum (Japanese, Kanbun, a foreign language, History, Geography, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics) with an emphasis on more abstract learning. It had one primary function—determining who would be the elites to enter High Schools (and thereafter the national universities). From approximately 1900 to 1910, the number of aspirants to enter High Schools expanded by three- to fourfold. By the time of the lead up to the First World War, the country saw a broad proliferation of graduates from High Schools in most regions with an eighteen-fold increase from the early 1890s, this in turn creating a burgeoning of the number of students aspiring to enter further education in the gradually expanding network of imperial universities. 6 A further dimension of these trends to note is the increase in the proportion of women who were entering the education system. Though not significant as a percentage of the overall total there was a noted expansion of female participation and it was facilitated in no small part by the establishment of institutions of higher learning exclusively for women by missionary associations. These same associations were also active in promoting

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the well-being of women more generally, either through the establishment of publications aimed purely at a female readership, such as the Fujin Shinpō (『婦人新報』), or social activism to promote monogamy and emancipate women from prostitution. Arguably chief amongst these associations was the Japan Christian Women’s Association (日本キリスト教婦 人矯風会), which published Fujin Shinpō and is still active today, known in Japan as the Kyōfūkai (矯風会). As recounted in Chap. 3, Miyatake Gaikotsu’s experience during the Sino-Japanese War was unfulfilling and negative, as well as crowned with the profoundest of personal tragedies with the death of his infant son Tenmin. The ensuing years were unfortunately no better—Miyatake took up a licence to become a purveyor of books and stationery in 1896 but next year his mother fell seriously ill and Miyatake was forced to return to his home town. She died soon after he returned on the 7th of June. Apart from the obvious emotional impact, as Miyatake and his mother had been very close, there was an immediate impact on the avenues for financial support that had constantly been made for him through his mother’s ongoing support, despite all the notoriety that Miyatake had garnered throughout his earlier career. Two months after his mother’s death Miyatake seems to have embarked on something of a reset in his personal affairs and publishing ambitions. He established a publishing association to produce the Kotto ̄ Zasshi (「骨 董雑誌」), which led to the sporadic production of themed instalments. In June of 1898, he also formally married his partner Yayo and during the following December he placed a prominent advertisement in the Yomiuri newspaper announcing the impending publication of a new magazine Kotto ̄ Kyōkai Zasshi, which duly appeared in January of 1899. Four instalments were produced in total but the publication was an abject failure. To boot, Miyatake had incurred the unfathomable debt of 4000 yen, more than fifty times what would have constituted a well-off official’s annual salary. This included a debt of 150 yen owed to one of Miyatake’s best friends and confidantes, Seki Hiranao, who had stumped up the funds to advertise in the Yomiuri. This was a colossal disaster and Miyatake took the desperate measure of fleeing from Japan to the newly subdued Taiwan where he aimed, rather Quixotically it might seem, to establish himself as a chicken-farmer. 7 The farming venture, perhaps rather predictably, did not fare well, and while based in Taipei Miyatake could not resist applying himself to producing material for publication. Of particular note was a contribution to a

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new magazine produced in October of 1899, Karyū Suishi (『花柳粋 誌』). Under the pen-name Yūtei Haijin, (有底盃人, literally “a confident drinker”), he contributed a piece entitled “Shunga Monogatari” (「春画 物語」) which rather squarely brought up the topic of pornographic literature and its universal appeal. It was arguably problematic enough that Miyatake broached a topic that was bound to attract the attention of censors and other guardians of public morality, but he took it to the next level by suggesting that erotic literature had a long-standing appeal not only across any number of cultures throughout history, but also across all ranks and classes, suggesting that aristocrats were as much into this material as anyone else, which of course implied that even someone as august as the Meiji Emperor himself would be no different. Miyatake did in fact have it as a matter of principle that the Emperor was a human like any other and would not baulk at that interpretation. Predictably, his article was lambasted in more auspicious outlets such as the Taipei Nichi-nichi Shinbun, where he was condemned as a person with utterly degenerate tastes and an inveterate disrespect for the Imperial household. 8 The detour into chicken-farming and brief dalliance with controversy in print while in Taiwan came to an end after five months—Miyatake cut his losses yet again and decided to return to Japan in February of 1900, albeit to the relative safety of Osaka where those he owed money to were at a distance. After his return he made ends meet initially by being an itinerant salesman of lithographic prints as well as acting as an occasional proof-­ reader and manager of advertising accounts for the Osaka Shinpōsha. The Japan that Miyatake was encountering at the turn of the century was somewhat altered in its journalistic culture from ten years before. The prevalence of muck-raking and scandal-mongering hid a darker trend towards the peddling of influence and offering of favourable reportage in return for money, so that in fact the majority of newspaper concerns could be classed as having become to a greater extent client-publications of the well-to-do and the elites, goyō shinbun (御用新聞). Miyatake resolved to embark on a publishing crusade that would “not bow to authority or get into bed with wealth and power, neither indulge in blackmail or engage in intimidation”. This was the beginning of a major turning point for Miyatake personally as well as the tenor of ‘low-brow’ journalism in Meiji Japan. 9 Within just under a year of having returned to Japan, Miyatake released in January of 1901 the first issue of what would become one of his most successful publishing ventures ever, the Kokkei Shinbun (「滑稽新聞」). It

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was premised on a complete commitment to no holds barred forthrightness and confrontation, but also tempered by only going after the figures that Miyatake would say fairly deserved it, while also employing his signature eye for the humorous or satirical barb. He wrote under the pen-name Ono Murao (小野村夫), which was based on the name of his birthplace, Ono Mura. His editorial policy would have serious consequences as his publication came under the hostile scrutiny of censors and public prosecutors. During the newspaper’s eight-year run Miyatake would be imprisoned twice, his various associates a total of three times, the newspaper itself would be ordered to delay publication four times, cease publication three times and be subjected to thirty fines. An early target of his magazine that got the publication into legal trouble was the printing of a contribution that commented on the scandalous circumstances of Yosano Tekkan, the founder of the literary magazine Myōjō (「明星」). The magazine was dedicated to new trends in poetry and included work from up and coming poets such as Kitahara Hakushū and Yoshii Isamu, along with an array of newcomers. Myōjō was at the vanguard of a new literary movement that championed a particularly fervent romanticism—an orientation that would not have been welcomed by conservative cultural commentators. The reputation of the publication was also compromised in part by the fact that Yosano had become involved with two women who were contributing to the magazine, one of whom, Hō Akiko, he would later leave his wife for and marry (later becoming recognized as the eminent poetess Yosano Akiko). The literary community was somewhat scandalized by this development and an anonymous pamphlet, Bundan Shōmakyō (「文壇照魔鏡」), was circulated in March of 1901 that excoriated Yosano Tekkan for his immoral conduct. 10 This was picked up on in the April edition of Kokkei Shinbun under the title “Sleaze Within the Literary Establishment” (「文壇の淫風」). It was actually little more than a short parody of the poetic style of a poem by Hō Akiko that had been published in Myōjo ̄. The poem was a fervent and untrammelled expression of erotic passion by a woman, rather provocative for the time, but it was also ripe for satire. To Miyatake’s surprise Kokkei Shinbun was subject to a notice from the prosecutor’s office accusing the newspaper of offending public decency. It was based on the assumption that Kokkei Shinbun had lifted material directly from Myōjō and reprinted it, the piece in Myo ̄jō being something that had itself been subject to a cessation notice. The nature of the parody is hard to translate into English but some idea of how it worked can be found in the following translation of the opening stanza:

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まくりあげて早く○○てきみ○て君. ふりすてますかどぶに落ちしを. 妾はもふ○○ますが○○ますか. Lift up my hem, hurry up and ○○ me, ○me, you. Would you cast me off and leave me to fall into the mud? This mistress would ○○, would you still ○○?

The satire ingeniously employs fuseji (伏字,「○」) which were usually employed to cover a word that a person could infer the meaning of without it being explicitly stated. It could be used for any topic or term that was likely to attract the ire of the censors but in this case it is used to provide a blank space for the reader to imagine the erotic or sexual acts that they ‘might be’ referring to. 11 In any case, Kokkei Shinbun was alleged to be guilty of having deliberately flouted a suppression order. Somewhat baffled by the notice, Miyatake visited the office of the prosecutor to enquire about the basis of the allegation. He was informed that they had not actually seen the original Myōjo ̄ material and had simply assumed that what Kokkei Shinbun had printed was lifted verbatim. The officer in charge of the matter even had the nerve to ask Miyatake to send a copy of the Myōjo ̄ magazine to make it possible to compare the two publications. Miyatake was incensed, and did not hesitate to expose the buffoonery of the handling of the affair. The charge of breaching public decency against Kokkei Shinbun proceeded to court and Miyatake was duly acquitted. However, as an act of retribution a new charge of breaching public decency was levelled at the newspaper for an illustration accompanying a serialized novel in the same issue which depicted a priest flirting with a young woman. The image was by no means explicit but it yet again led to a court case. This time the court found against the newspaper and it was fined 20 yen. 12 What Miyatake did next was indicative of both his determination to neither be cowed by censorship nor refrain from printing content that was sharply satirical and bound to garner more official opprobrium. In ensuing issues of the newspaper (from the tenth volume to be precise) Miyatake established a regular column that was themed around Itō Hirobumi’s well-known predilection for womanizing. With a variation on a theme that always referred with faux deference to “Marquis Itō”, the column would be given such titles as “Marquis Itō’s Views on Beautiful Women”,

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“Marquis Itō’s Trouble with Beautiful Women” and so on. The illustration employed within the text was the figure of the woman who had been in the earlier image of a priest flirting with a woman that had been the basis of the newspaper being fined for indecency. It was a case of when the government ‘went low’, Miyatake would strike lower. Miyatake realized, correctly as it turns out, that the more the government took the trouble to make his life difficult, the more he had something to write about and lampoon. He discovered that ‘doubling down’ was the key to future success. Consequently, the Kokkei Shinbun was beginning to look somewhat immune to suppression through censorship but that was naturally too good to be true. It perhaps came as no surprise that the police began to call in advertisers in the newspaper and caution them against continuing to patronize the publication. In July of 1902, an angry denouncement of the police’s actions appeared in the thirty-second issue of the newspaper and was followed by an even stronger excoriation in the thirty-fourth issue. The member of the editorial team responsible for the articles, Miyoshi Yonekichi, was charged with a criminal act of insulting public officialdom and after conviction was incarcerated in the Horikawa Penitentiary. Miyoshi was the son of a wealthy family that resided in the Edobori area of Osaka which was very close to the Kokkei Shinbun offices. Miyoshi by this time had become Miyatake’s right-hand at the publication and so this was a keenly felt blow indeed. 13 Two weeks after Miyoshi entered the penitentiary Miyatake was summoned to the office of the Prosecutor at the Osaka District Court, Tezuka Tarō, who informed Miyatake that the decision to charge Miyoshi had been made while he had been away on vacation and without his approval. He promised to overturn the conviction and release Miyoshi, requesting however that in future the newspaper would curb its inflammatory tendencies. Miyatake was doubtful of the Prosecutor’s intentions but Miyoshi was released within 24 hours. Following Miyoshi’s release, Miyatake had a choice to either accommodate the request of the Prosecutor or return to his usual modus operandi—he chose the latter, revealing the entirety of his interaction with the Prosecutor and lambasting officials that attempted to cajole the relatively defenseless into compliance, as well as the kinds of journalists that went along with such officials. 14 Entering into 1903, the tussle between Kokkei Shinbun and the censors continued unabated. New topics and targets emerged including Noguchi

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Shigehira, the founder of a major pharmaceutical company that had made him one of the wealthiest businessmen in the Kansai region, if not Japan. The Kokkei Shinbun ran an article alleging that a particular medicine for lung-related illnesses was in fact ineffectual and a con, to which Noguchi responded with a law suit for defamation. As the court proceedings played out the newspaper included a regular section updating the situation and appending a small illustration of a decapitated head on a pillory with a sign attached reading “The Charlatan Noguchi Shigehiro”. In the fifty-first issue of the newspaper, Isono Shūsho, a leading figure in the literary establishment specializing in Chinese poetry, was depicted in the act of peeping into a women’s changing room at a bath-house, which he had allegedly been caught in the act of doing. The newspaper was fined 50 yen for, yet again, offending public decency. Itō Hirobumi continued to be subject to ridicule, this time depicted as the Meiji incarnation of Ihara Saikaku’s Edo-period lothario in the novel The Man Who Loved Love, to wit Meiji Ichidai Kōshoku Otoko. 15 Producing derogatory material involving the super-wealthy, political leaders and members of the literary establishment was a constant theme and it ensured that the newspaper maintained a loyal readership. At the same time, however, a major complication was brewing on the horizon, and that was the increasingly explicit talk of an impending military confrontation with Russia. Since the Triple Intervention by Russia, France and Germany at the end of the Sino-Japanese War there was an undercurrent of continued resentment towards the three protagonists in the move but it was Russia, which had come to encroach increasingly on Korea in the Far East via Manchuria, that was shaping up as a particular object of enmity. France, Germany and England all had misgivings about Russian aims for expansion in the Far East and elsewhere but it was England in particular that gave Japan diplomatic cover from interference through the establishment of a formal military alliance in January of 1901. Co-operation in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China over the previous year had cemented trust in Japan as a diplomatic and military partner and although the alliance was localized to refer to matters in the Far East, it would form the basis for more comprehensive agreement from the end of the RussoJapanese War to the end of the First World War and, for a time, into the early 1920s. 16 These diplomatic developments would certainly have emboldened commentators within Japan and indeed on 26th June, 1903, a clique of seven eminent academics at the Tokyo Imperial University published a

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memorandum in the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun addressed to the then Prime Minister, Katsura Tarō, arguing explicitly for the initiation of war with Russia as soon as possible. The Minister for Education, Kikuchi Dairoku, contacted the President of the University to demand a formal caution to the professors but no particularly significant disciplinary action was taken and indeed the professors were in fact articulating a view that was becoming increasingly accepted and prevalent in the wider population. Amongst mainstream newspapers the winds of anti-Russian sentiment were intensifying with Nihon, Yomiuri Shinbun and Ho ̄chi Shinbun all coming out in support for the idea of military confrontation. The Yorozu Chōhō and Mainichi Shinbun were exceptional in their direct disagreement with the professors’ statement. But as Kuroiwa Ruikō was to discover, not explicitly supporting the notion of war with Russia would have consequences for the newspaper’s circulation and indeed there was an instant decline in the wake of the criticism of war advocates. The Yorozu Chōhō had amongst its editorial staff the Socialists Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko, along with the Christian Uchimura Kanzō who all variously criticized the Tokyo Imperial University academics and the advocacy of conflict. The argument against war in the case of Uchimura was primarily based on a consideration of the inhumanity of war but in the case of Kōtoku Shūsui and Sakai Toshihiko, it was the fact that most of the people that would be most directly impacted and affected would be the poor and lower class citizenry while the wealthy and elites would suffer relatively little. 17 From the spring of 1903, even the Kokumin Shinbun under Tokutomi Sohō, which had always styled itself as the defender of the common citizen, began to quietly realign its editorial stance in support of the Katsura Cabinet position which favoured war. As for the Yorozu Chōhō, the end of any attempt to maintain an anti-war stance came with the expiry of a Japanese-government stated ‘deadline’ for Russia to remove troops from Manchuria by 8th of October. Kōtoku, Sakai and Uchimura were quietly ushered out of the editorial line-up at Yorozu Chōhō and they duly left the newspaper. In November of 1903 Kōtoku and Sakai founded the Heimin Shinbun, which became an isolated voice amongst contemporary newspapers in opposition to military conflict. Uchimura published anti-war pieces in the theologically titled magazine “Studies of the Bible” (Seisho no Kenkyū, 「聖書之研究」) which he had established in 1900. As for Miyatake, he continued in the same vein of baiting the usual targets but also established a section in the Kokkei Shinbun entitled “Nichi-Ro Shinbun” (「日露新聞」) during the build-up to war that satirized some

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of the more ludicrous or excessive instances of fervour for war with Russia.18 While the impetus toward military conflict with Russia was gaining momentum, there were other cultural developments that indicated a more hedonistic inclination within certain quarters of urban society, and it was to originate from outside Tokyo. Just as Osaka had become the haven for Miyatake Gaikotsu to re-establish himself in publishing with the Kokkei Shinbun, and Kawakami Otojirō had established Shinkyōgoku in Kyoto as the platform to launch his foray into the new model of Shinpa theatre, there was at the same time a new phenomenon within popular culture that had its roots in Osaka and it was to emerge as one of the most subversive forces in the field of entertainment, − women’s gidayū. Gidayu ̄ (義太夫) had its origin in the recitative jōruri (浄瑠璃) story-telling pioneered by Takemoto Gidayū (1651–1714) in the early Edo period. It became part of the staple accompaniment for the puppet theatre, bunraku, and the standard repertoire for performance of gidayū stemmed from this legacy. Women’s performance in the genre prior to the Meiji period was limited but the Restoration saw the prohibition of women performing on stage in public rescinded, which thereby ushered in an opportunity for women to establish a new niche within public performance. At approximately the same time as women had begun to figure in events that featured political speech-making (seiji enzetsu), with Kishida Toshiko becoming a household name as a serious exponent of public speaking, there were two exponents of gidayū, Takemoto Kyōshi and Takemoto Tōgyoku, who had attained fame in Osaka and decided to embark on a full shift to Tokyo with their acolytes en masse in 1885. From modest beginnings, 1887 was their ‘break-out’ year and women’s gidayū, otherwise known as musume gidayu ̄ or onna gidayu ̄, became a significant feature within the popular entertainment scene of Tokyo. Both Kyōshi and Tōgyoku were in their thirties but their disciples were substantially younger. There were of course standards to maintain in terms of performance but there was clearly a degree of novelty of female performers that drew crowds and it was not merely incidental that the spotlight was increasingly on young and attractive performers. Kyōshi had also been the originator of what became the common practice of wearing hakama and the wide shouldered kataginu that was ostensibly the guise of male performers, so there was another layer of subversiveness to the performance (see Fig. 4.1). The genre was not without its detractors as well, in that the perception of gidayū performers was several ranks

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Fig. 4.1  Image from Asakura Rosan’nin, Musume Gidayū, Hifumikan, August 1895. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

below that of kabuki artists or ko ̄danshi. The term tare gidayu ̄ (女義太夫) was a derisive epithet employed by critics and even used in mainstream newspapers. Naturally enough, onna gidayu ̄ did not exist in a vacuum, and there was a burgeoning number of male gidayu ̄ performers such as タレ

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Takemoto Koshiji (1836–1917, later Settsu Daijō) who also enjoyed considerable success and fame. Male performers still outnumbered the women in performance and both the male and female gidayu ̄ were in turn outnumbered by geigi (芸妓) who performed with shamisen. 19 By 1887, there were 571 male performers, 425 female performers and 1588 geigi registered in Tokyo, but things were about to be shaken up by the arrival in November of that year of a twelve-year-old prodigy from Osaka, Takemoto Ayanosuke. Apart from possessing a fine voice, Ayanosuke also ramped up the masculinization of her appearance by tying her hair in the manner of a man and not wearing facial cosmetics. She was by all accounts a striking person to watch perform and her popularity went from strength to strength so that by 1891, and aged just 17, she was broadly recognized as the leading exponent of women’s gidayu ̄ in Tokyo. She was the object of news reports and gossip, and enjoyed a level of celebrity that was not dissimilar to the kind of adulation that teen idols might experience in the twentieth century. According to Kurata Yoshihiro, she was adept at manipulating the young men in the audience, wheedling them for money as long as possible before leaving them dangling when their sources of funds dried up. She would write to the newspapers to ‘set the record straight’ which would be duly printed to be avidly lapped up by her fandom. On the whole she was not regarded as morally on a par with the geigi who were involved in sexual entertainment and in fact her popularity continued beyond the Sino-Japanese War and throughout the 1890s so that in 1897 she was still confirmed as one of the most popular performers in Tokyo. The extraordinary popularity of women’s gidayū was even commented on wryly in the press, as in an article appearing in the Miyako Shinbun on the twenty-first of September, 1898, which remarked that Deden-kai (essentially Gidayū Associations— “deden” was an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of striking the strings of a shamisen) had proliferated exponentially. It joked that even the cats of Nihonbashi had succumbed to “deden fever”—apparently one could be found rambling the words of a passage from the famous Yūgaodana. Even so, just as the popularity of women’s gidayū seemed to be at its height, on the 15th of June, 1898, Ayanosuke made a sudden announcement during a performance that she was about to retire—she was about to marry and it constituted a very sudden denouement to a stellar gidayu ̄ career. 20 During the 1890s there were other aspects of women’s gidayū that indicated that trouble was brewing. From 1892, there emerged a schism between a traditionalist faction, the Sei-ha (正派) and a more adaptive

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faction, the Mutsumi-ha (睦派). 21 It was the latter faction that trended towards prosperity but it did not diminish the stand-off between particular traditionalist exponents and their allied theatre owners and impresarios. By the time of Ayanosuke’s retirement, there had also emerged a rather boisterous culture amongst the women’s gidayū fandom. In the post SinoJapanese War environment, young male students from relatively prestigious institutions as Waseda University and Keio University took to establishing fan clubs, or ren (連), for various performers. The performer who took over as the leading figure in women’s gidayū was Takemoto Kyōshi, a disciple of the previous performer of the same name from the 1880s, who quickly attracted an avid following—her fan club referred to itself as the Kikyōren (輝京連). Her followers would abandon all sense to waste inordinate sums of money, lose their dignity and in some cases even take their own lives as part of the fervour that became directed at her. She was vilified in some quarters for these effects which, to be fair, were more the responsibility of the fans than Kyōshi herself. 22 In time, behaviour that started out as fairly playful audience participation during the lead up to climactic passages of the performance known as sawari where young men would either clap in rhythm with the performance or take to tapping everything from cigarette trays and utensils together, evolved into more full-blooded verbal interventions including chants of “dō suru, dō suru” (“how will you do it? how will you do it?” This grouping became collectively known as the Dō Suru Ren and became associated with increasingly appalling conduct that either targeted female performers away from their performances, petty criminal activities of theft of patrons and all-out brawling in theatres. On the 11th of August, 1900, Kuroiwa Ruikō took the unusual step of publishing an editorial in the Yorozu Cho ̄hō very sternly criticizing the conduct of such students, lambasting them as “a moral scourge”, “degenerates” and “a threat to society”. 23 Given the newspaper’s reputation for doing a stock in trade in scandal and impropriety amongst elites, this was a rather extraordinary departure into social commentary aimed at the conduct of youth. There was heightened attention from the government and the metropolitan police and this went some way to curbing the excesses. In late 1901, another combination of female gidayū performers, Toyotake Shōnosuke and her sister Shōgiku (eleven years old and fifteen years old, respectively) arrived in Tokyo from Osaka and initiated another resurgence in the popularity of musume gidayu ̄. As before, the ardour of young male students continued to be aroused and indeed Kurata Yoshihiro

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highlights the case of the future novelist Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) who in his diary at the time recorded being profoundly love-struck and attending performances with extraordinary frequency. Nonetheless, he had the good sense to curb his fervour in the interest of taking care of his studies and eventually took a more dispassionate view of the performances (Kurata, 1980, 152–155). As already remarked, there was also the sobering prospect of a seemingly military conflict with Russia and this would have induced a certain degree of sobriety on the entire population. From as early as 1897 there was official commentary from within the Ministry of Education regarding the problem of regulating the conduct of young students, with the term gakusei fūki mondai (学生風紀問題) coined for the new social malaise. As already discussed, the student population in the capital had burgeoned significantly and its members were a distinctive social force in their own right. This was underscored by the fact that when the surplus of gidayu ̄ performers attempted to take their performances to the regions they had relatively limited success—the students of Tokyo were a distinct part and precondition of very distinct cultural phenomena. As the research of Meguro Tsuyoshi has discussed, there were a number of policy papers circulated within the Ministry of Education from 1897 onwards and they focused more generally on the “extra-curricular” reading of young students, by which they tended to generally associate with the new trends in novels. Meguro traces this disdain for novels to the pre-­ Meiji traditional contempt for any form of literature that wasn’t part of the formally endorsed canon of the “Four Books and Five Classics” (四書五 経). The haishi shōsetsu (稗史小説) was the early Chinese body of historical works that were based on material collected by minor officials from unofficial sources outside of government and anything that resembled or resonated with that lineage of ‘fiction’ could not be taken seriously. In the late Meiji period, it was perhaps unsurprisingly that it was the new trend in novel writing that highlighted actual social conditions and aspired to a more naturalistic depiction of human affairs that came in for particular criticism. The novelists seemed happy to have their main protagonists fraught with moral defects and it seemed requisite that a literature appropriate to a civilized nation should have a literature fit to a more exalted moral purpose. 24 The criticisms contained in these policy documents were of course artistically speaking unrealistic and certainly not viable if a writer wanted a contemporary readership but since the Rescript on Education in 1890 there was a concerted effort in various quarters, both within the Ministry

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and without, to endeavour to promote a broadly Confucian conception of the role of the arts. As we saw with the case of Kawakami Otojirō’s successful theatrical productions, publications such as Miyake Setsurei’s Nihonjin could be relied on to take a dim view of any decadent Western influence that seemed likely to encroach on Japan’s “national essence” (kokusui, 国粋) and the former member of the Meirokusha, Nishimura Shigeki became instrumental in promoting Confucian values through his highly influential association, the Nihon Kōdo ̄kai (日本弘道会) which produced a widely bought manifesto on Japanese morality, Nihon Dōtokuron, in 1892. So the disdain for this “extra-curricular’ literature was palpable and sustained, and there was, unsurprisingly, reference to the phenomenon of young students spending too much time visiting theatres as well. The magazine Taiyo ̄ regularly carried commentary on the question of the defects of contemporary novels, in particular the tendency towards a certain “decadence” (daraku, 堕落), as seen in articles such as “Taste in Novels” (「小説の趣味」appearing in the April 5th edition in 1899), but it also took the relatively liberal editorial line of calling for the proper education of young persons through the promotion of more wholesome literature from an early age whereby they might attain the right faculties of discernment to develop a better taste in literature. It should be added that ‘literature’ in this context, indeed the “taste in novels” was not limited to purely printed media—the content of novels, as has already been demonstrated, was profoundly interrelated with all other artistic practices from the visual, to the recitative, musical and the theatrical. Later articles in Taiyō discussed further what an appropriate diet of reading might be for pre-adolescents, with noted emphasis on British juvenile classics such as the muscular and rugged adventure of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or the more harmlessly playful but also adventurous Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Again, whether this was a realistic response to the problem of “decadence” or not was another matter, but it was a theme that held attention toward the end of the 1890s and beyond (see Fig. 4.2 for an example of the frontispiece). 25 As Taiyo ̄ weighed on moral debate in relation to literature, one article, interestingly enough, also extolled the virtues of an ‘ideal’ family—a father, a mother, and dutiful children (of a not determined number). As Meguro notes, such a family was far from what contemporary families looked like, and the further you went up the social hierarchy the less likely it was that this would be the case. This had been a long sticking point in Japan’s drive

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to be considered ‘civilized’ in domestic matters in a manner similar to the West. From the early Meiji period, the custom of wealthy men maintaining a mistress (mekake), not at a discreet distance but even living under the same roof with the ‘illegitimate’ children domiciled alongside those of the married couple, became a source of embarrassment. Mori Arinori wrote to condemn the practice in the Meiroku Zasshi and famously undertook to marry in a contractual marital relationship that flouted traditional

Fig. 4.2  Frontispiece of Taiyo ̄, No. 1, 28 December, Hakubunkan, 1894. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

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conventions of commitment that permitted either of the parties to terminate the arrangement according to their free will. The wedding was witnessed by none other than Fukuzawa Yukichi. The marriage unfortunately did not weather the test of time, but, on a sanguine note, it is perhaps unsurprising that relations between men and women were not easily or quickly renegotiated in the wake of the Restoration. Divorce was in fact relatively easy to effect in Japan for a woman and so that was not the primary issue—the problem was the more fundamental one of how a woman could exist and support herself outside of a marital arrangement, obviously even more perilous if offspring were involved. There was also the rather invidious tradition of young girls and women being sold into prostitution, often to pay off the debts of the parents. This presented an even more harrowing predicament for women as the arrangement was often practically impossible to reverse. 26 And so it is curious indeed that the turn of the century in Japan was marked by the rather unlikely confluence between a moral campaign to take on the plight of prostitutes and the power of the scandal-driven press. Research has been devoted to various phases of the reform of marital institutions and the position of prostitution in modernizing Japan, with particular emphasis on the Emancipation Edict of 1872, which formally freed prostitutes from their existing arrangements and de facto slavery. This was perhaps predictably not an abolition of prostitution but a reset which rearranged the mechanism for legalized prostitution to be co-ordinated through registration at local law enforcement agencies. Botsman has argued persuasively that, despite the continuation of prostitution, the Edict was not a totally meaningless gesture but actually reframed the legal parameters of prostitution and made it possible for future initiatives to challenge the status quo. 27 It took a further fifteen years or so but things did come to a head by the late 1890s. The movement to promote the voluntary relinquishing of roles as prostitutes indeed stemmed from legal actions that were undertaken in the late 1890s which were duly covered in the main by low-brow publications such as the Yorozu Chōhō. In a move that was arguably in some regard opportunistic, the popular press embarked on a campaign to champion the rights and freedoms of prostitutes, Shōgi (娼妓), who were endeavouring to escape the profession but were finding it nearly impossible despite having the theoretical legal recourse to do so. As already noted, there had already been a substantial influence in the public commentary on women’s affairs and the promotion of publications

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aimed at women through the activities of missionaries associated with the World Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WWCTM) which was deeply associated with the aforementioned Kyōfūkai. An international organization that was to take things to a new level of activism was the Salvation Army, which sent its first high-ranking officer, Henry Bullard, to set up a branch in Tokyo in 1895. 28 Academic commentary on the activities of the Salvation Army in Japan has been relatively scarce but the scholarship of Hayashi Yōko has done a great deal indeed to fill the gap in our understanding of what was actually a quite momentous and convulsive period of activism. Botsman has already made the observation that there was a fine line not to be crossed in terms of dismissing the activities of such external agents as imperialistic initiatives to colonize Japanese culture and, likewise, merely create Japanese clones to perpetuate their impact. It assumes that there were no otherwise sensitive, intelligent and concerned citizens who wanted to take the opportunity to assist their fellow humans and to do so despite a seeming external impetus. Hayashi’s research has very skilfully navigated through that hazardous terrain to establish two major conclusions—yes, the Salvation Army was a pivotal influence in driving emancipation activism in Japan for prostitutes, but it was also not a one-way initiative with Japanese figures playing the most decisive role in how things played out on the ground in practice. Her key contention is that, if anything, the personnel of the Salvation Army in Japan did not have the level of bilingual capability and in-depth knowledge of local circumstances to be remotely effective in directing operations in a hands-on fashion. Their chief contribution, she argues, was to take lessons from earlier initiatives in Ceylon to establish refuges for the women that they were aiming to assist—the provision of a physically safe haven was what made the definitive difference in determining whether a woman could successfully extricate herself from the clutches of a vengeful brothel-owner or not. 29 The impact of the invigorated campaigning to promote the rights of prostitutes emerged over time as the officers of the Salvation Army employed tactics that had proven to be effective in other contexts. In particular, there was the use of publications that either publicized the group’s activities and successes, such as The Deliverer or All the World, or the likes of War Cry, which provided material to promote the cause and also provide information on how to gain assistance. The most controversial activities were to step inside the confines of actual brothels and attempt to distribute copies of these publications—in the Japanese context the War

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Cry title was rendered as Toki no Koe (「ときのこゑ」). The local chapters of the Salvation Army were ably supported by the likes of Henry Burrell and women such as Inie Newcombe who coordinated information and resources out of Tokyo, but they were joined by enthusiastic converts such as Yamamuro Gunpei and Satō Kieko. Moreover, the local Japanese adherents developed networks beyond the urban centres and began to have an impact even in the countryside. 30 The attempts to take the campaign directly into the businesses engaged in prostitution led to predictable physical conflicts with the owners and their clientele and so it was more often than not that it was the male members such as Burrell and Yamamuro who were engaged in this aspect of things, Yamamuro being severely wounded in one encounter. These activities gained a wide audience in both the established and less elevated press outlets, with the plight of women seeking to escape virtual slavery first attracting sympathy and the deeds of the members of the Salvation Army garnering respect. Things came to a peak in the period 1899–1900 as the organization managed to establish its first women’s refuge in Tokyo. This level of support was one of the primary means by which the Army could make a tangible difference and as women found a means to escape, there was slowly but surely a take-up that provided tangible results. Satō Kieko married Yamamuro Gunpei in 1899 and thereafter became the main officer superintending the running of the refuge. By 1901, the activities of the Army were being reported in England as a great success with a photograph of “Girls of Our Tokio Rescue Home”. 31 One of the newspapers that made a particular point of following the emancipation movement and the activities of the people working to assist prostitutes aspiring to get out of the profession was the Niroku Shinpo ̄ (『 二六新報』). It was a reincarnation of a previous publication of the same name which had folded five years earlier at the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Under the editorship of Akiyama Teisuke, the newspaper was looking to re-enter the highly competitive fray of low-brow publishing—setting itself against the likes of the Yorozu Chōhō and the Yamato Shinbun. Examining the coverage of this newspaper provides a number of insights into how this deeply controversial social issue became a driver of public debate. In the editorial of the 5th September issue entitled “Enraged over Issues of Human Rights and Freedom”, the newspaper makes one very significant distinction for the readership—their campaign was not about abolishing prostitution, which was likely to be impossible at any rate. The key phrase was jiyū haigyō (自由廃業), the freedom to leave the

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profession, not do away with it altogether. Even the local officers of the Salvation Army were aware of this tension and in English the term “free cessation” was coined to accentuate the aim of providing sanctuary for women who needed assistance to get out of prostitution. Certainly the ultimate aim of both the WWCTU and the Salvation Army would be in principle to abolish prostitution but it is informative that it was, just as Hayashi argues, the domestic populace who were impacting on the agenda rather than an unreconstructed domestic British perspective being imported and implemented from the outside. The staff of the Niroku Shinpō were also not content to simply report the events unfolding but also become personally involved. On the sixth of September they visited the establishment in the new Yoshiwara precinct, where two prostitutes, referred to as “Ayaginu” and “Nakamura Yae”, had been petitioning unsuccessfully to be released from their contracts and had enlisted the support of the newspaper. The women had in fact been set upon and beaten up after a large crowd of ruffians broke into the brothel they were situated in with the police doing little to intervene. Akiyama himself went to the local police station and demanded that the police act—the pressure worked and the superintendent of the police station gave permission to his officers to use force to secure the release of the women. They were successfully rescued and the article describing the dramatic events ends with a reference to cheers that went up outside the building where the women were transferred— “Hooray for freedom!! Hooray for the Niroku Shinpō!!”. 32 The campaigning of the Niroku Shinpō needs to be understood, then, as part of the evolving discourse of rights and freedom that had been core to the anti-government movements of the 1880s. By now, however, it was focused on a more generalized sense of indignation and indeed a sharpened sense of moralism that would be directed at ‘deserving’ miscreants. Akiyama arguably took his cue from Kuroiwa Ruikō who in a rather stunning editorial move prior to the reappearance of the Niroku Shinpō issued a series of exposés on the private familial arrangements of the ‘good and the great’. The campaign was given the theme of chikushō (蓄妾) which literally referred to “keeping a concubine” but was also a pun on the homonym that denoted a lowly animal. One example of an exposé aimed at no less a figure than Mori Ō gai ran as follows: Mori Ō gai, residing as Lieutenant General Mori Rintarō at Hongō Komagoma Sendagi Chō 21 Banchi, became deeply attached to a woman

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Kodama Seki (32 years old) whom he had known since the age of eighteen or nineteen…. Although hoping to make her his wife proper he was unable to do so due to his mother’s objections. Even so、 his mother was aware of the depth of his feelings for her and recommended that he keep the woman as a concubine and, in order to avoid contact with the affairs of the household, the woman was in fact permitted to stay with his mother Nami (60  years old) at the nearby address of Sendagi Bayashi Chō 11 Banchi, supported thereafter with funds provided by his mother. 33

It would be hard to see exactly where the public interest in revealing the details of mistresses and illegitimate offspring might lie, but it makes more sense when one recalls that the personnel of government were acutely aware of how foreign dignitaries tended to perceive these sorts of arrangements, or how they might even be picked up by the foreign press as evidence of widespread immorality. It had its uses because it made these elites, predominantly Satsuma and Chōshū affiliates squirm uncomfortably, which in turn fed an appetite for schadenfreude amongst the public. The series of exposés was extraordinarily ad hominem and played a part in Kuroiwa being labelled a “viper” (mamushi) by Miyatake Gaikotsu. The campaign by Akiyama in the Niroku Shinpō did not have quite the same aims as the exposés referred to above but they exposed the degree to which the police, key representatives of authority, were in the pockets of thugs and racketeers, and it enabled the newspaper to burnish an aura of moral superiority, albeit in this case more generalized. As something of an auxiliary illustration of how status and morality played out in the public arena, there was also the rather distinctive experience of Kawakami Otojirō and his wife Sada, who had in fact been a rather illustrious geisha from the mid-1880s to early 1890s before meeting Kawakami and being smitten by him. She had in fact once been the mistress of no less than Itō Hirobumi. When she met Kawakami, she dumped her erstwhile paramours and committed to supporting him in his meteroric rise to stardom and theatrical success. She was supportive of him as dutiful wife all through the heady years of the initial successes and the even more astoundingly successful performances staged during the Sino-­ Japanese War. The success of Nisshin Sensō and other productions, already described in Chap. 3, formed the basis for his ambition to open his own theatre, the Kawakami-Za, which was duly opened on 6th June, 1896. 34 But Kawakami was not a naturally careful manager of finances and had well and truly overspent the substantial income and taken on

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extraordinary debt to establish the Kawakami-Za. The shine began to fall away on the success of his plays and increasingly debtors became clamorous for restitution, with eventually personal possessions being forcibly taken as security. Kawakamai’s response to this was to double-down and become even more ambitious. In 1898, he ran for parliament, to the surprise of everyone including his wife Sada. His campaigning was lavishly staged and ran up even greater costs. The campaign drew the very unwelcome attention of Kuroiwa Ruikō, the “Viper”, and Kawakami’s lowly background and scandals from the past were published extensively in the Yorozo Chōhō with scathing denigrations of Kawakami by Ruikō himself. The campaign was a dismal failure, and Kawakami was forced to sell the Kawakami-Za, one of the most modern in Tokyo. 35 What happened next was somewhat resonant with the response that Miyatake Gaikotsu made when faced with financial disaster—Kawakami and Sada fled Tokyo by boat and made their way West along the southern coast of Honshu. The inexperienced couple almost perished at sea during the voyage and they had no particular plan beyond simple making their way to Kobe. They arrived on 2nd January, 1899, and were not shadows of their former selves in physical appearance. They attempted to organize performances but it would take weeks for them to recover. It was at this juncture that they met Kushibiki Yumindo, a theatrical impresario who specialized in staging, installing and presenting performances of Japanalia in the United States. He persuaded them to take up the offer of travelling to the United States and conduct a performing tour. They set sail with a troupe of nineteen persons on 30th April, and after arriving in San Francisco, debuted on 25th May. Kushibiki was clear that if the tour were to succeed, it would be Sada the former geisha who would need top billing. Coming up with the stage name “Sada Yacco” (her first name combined with Yakko, her former name as a geisha), Sada was informed that she would be the star attraction. She performed the dance from the classic kabuki play, Musume Do ̄jōji, which entailed a grief-stricken young woman who returns to the temple where her lover was murdered and gradually transforms herself into a serpent. Perhaps to Kawakami’s consternation, it was this element in the performance that received the most enthusiastic reception, and this illustrious geisha was readily compared to the contemporary leading English actress, Ellen Terry, or the internationally renowned Sarah Bernhardt. Unfortunately, that was as good as it got at first, with Kawakami frittering income on expensive accommodation and entertainments before realizing that the manager that Kushibiki had assigned them

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was incompetent and indeed had absconded. Hardship after hardship ensued and it was almost Kawakami and the troupe’s utter demise. Their fortunes changed somewhat once they arrived on the east coast and while based in Boston they were able to recoup some of the enthusiastic reception they had enjoyed in San Francisco. This success was tempered by the deaths of two young onnagata actors they had brought with them, one from excessive use of painkillers, the other from a brain haemorrhage and excessive drinking. After a further season in New  York and Washington DC, the troupe eventually sailed for England in April of 1900 where they remained for two months. They had met none other than Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Boston, and Kawakami had so impressed Irving that he received a letter of introduction. The sojourn in London began much slower than was hoped, but with positive support from General Kamimura of the Japanese Legation and Arthur Diosy of the Japan Society, doors began to open and after a modest start Kawakami and Sada Yacco became instant celebrities. They were ultimately even to perform before the Crown Prince Edward along with a host of noble and wealthy dignitaries. This was followed by a highly successful season in Paris where they were supported by the famous American actress and dancer Loie Fuller who had a residency at the Exposition Universelle. She was an established performer in Paris and well-connected, as well as being a budding impresario. She arranged for performances by the troupe, with of course a particular focus on Sada Yacco, to commence from July. The response was ecstatic as she had refined her performance considerably during her initial sojourn in the United States and she won plaudits for the increasingly wild girl in Musume Dōjōji, gradually removing kimono layers until she was a disheveled banshee and then finally collapsing in death. The contracts with Fuller were renewed month after month and to early November, after which the troupe set sail to return to Japan, arriving on 1st January, 1901. 36 There is a great deal to unpack in assessing both the successes and cultural impact of Kawakami and Sada Yacco in the United States and Europe. The first thing to note is the fin de siècle fever for all things Japanese, which was more evident the further eastward they travelled. The pinnacle was undoubtedly Paris where Art Nouveau was in its apogee. This of course did not constitute a serious interest in Japan or actual Japanese culture, but a highly idealised and mystique-laden conception of the Orient in general and Japan in particular. The geisha was synonymous with this delicacy and mystique, as well as the allure of an undercurrent of

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sensuality. Sada Yacco herself spoke clearly of the differences in the cultural mores for women in Japan and the West, quite openly expressing envy for the relative status of women and freedom of association. But she was also careful not to completely puncture the fascination that her performances generated. Even while in the United States, David Belasco dramatized a one-act play entitled “Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan”, which was derived from a retelling of “Madame Chrysanthème,” a French novel by Pierre Loti. The play followed them to London where Puccini saw it and decided to pick up the storyline for his opera. In all these incarnations the quietly intense beauty and smouldering passion of the heroine culminates in a tragic final death—Sada Yacco’s forte to a tee. One person who failed to be impressed was in fact Sarah Bernhardt herself, who found Sada Yacco’s performances abhorrent—but she was very much in the minority (the critic Max Beerboem would later write that he would place Sada Yacco ahead of Sarah Bernhardt). In any case, both Kawakami and Sada knew that they were not presenting purely authentic traditional Japanese theatre but highly stylized vignettes that prioritized action and movement over dialogue and recitation. Apart from Sada Yacco’s death scenes, there were performances of hara-kiri which awed and fascinated the audiences. Prior to returning to Japan the troupe signed another contract with Fuller for another season commencing in June of the following year. 37 In contrast to the gap between perceptions of Japan and whatever authenticity the performances made by the troupe may have had, Kawakami and Sada found a new ‘home’ of sorts in Paris precisely because they themselves were scions of the demimonde. In fin de siècle Paris, perhaps more than anywhere in Europe, there was the daily intersection between those of wealth, artists of all stripes, performers and persons of high office, and this was palpably intertwined with the world cheap theatres, brothels and various places of ill-repute. It was the epitome of decadence, and it suited Kawakami and Sada Yacco perfectly well. Their return to Europe in June of 1901 was a literal tour de force, feted at every stop, mounting raptures at Sada Yacco’s performances and the added bonus of interacting with even more significant artistic figures, Isadora Duncan the budding dance performer, Pablo Piccasso, who produced a sketch impression and of course Giacomo Puccini, who followed the troupe gleaning whatever essence of Sada Yacco he could to complete his characterization of the heroine in his opera Madama Butterfly. After the giddy whirlwind of touring both Kawakami and Sada knew full well that their celebrity in Europe would not translate back in Japan. They would not forget that even with

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illustrious patrons such as Ito Hirobumi, there was a thin line protecting them from being shielded from vilification and contempt at home. Sada bought land to settle in the countryside near the sea while Kawakami began to contemplate ways of reforming theatre in Japan. 38 Apart from the foregoing overview of some of the salient trends in popular entertainments, literature and particularly notorious scandals, it would not be possible to comment on the developments at century’s end without referring to some of the major developments in industry and politics. As already alluded to, the reparations from China secured in 1895 were very assiduously devoted to the expansion of Japan’s industrial capacity. There were of course major private initiatives such as the Shibaura Engineering Works, the Tokyo Ishikawajima Shipyard, the Yokohama Dock Company, and Mitsubishi’s shipping company the Nihon Yu ̄sen Kaisha. These were variously financed through the concentrated wealth of zaibatsu such as Mitsui, Sumitomo and Mitsubishi. As Andrew Gordon demonstrates, however, the great engines of development in terms of promoting training of workers to handle new industrial technologies lay very much with government-owned enterprises such as the Yahata Ironworks, Nagasaki Ironworks and the Yokosuka Shipyard. These provided a conduit for the transfer of personnel and skills out of these facilities and into private enterprise. The government was aware of the need to have a very accurate grasp of how this new industrial capacity was developing and accordingly a series of detailed reports. The Shokkō Jijo ̄ report of 1902 was compiled by a team of researchers that covered the numbers of private and publicly owned companies in each branch of industry and included the numbers of workers both female and male in each facility. It was in certain regards an enlightened initiative as particular attention was paid to the situation of women in factories and how their conditions of work and accommodation could be improved. As intrepid journalists such as Yokoyama Gennosuke were to report, the situation for workers financially was precarious for the most part and the male working class was unruly and given to reckless spending of wages on drinking, gambling and womanizing. They were also often ill-disciplined, as Gordon summarizes: Japanese workers of this era were neither keen on taking orders nor enthusiastically committed to their jobs, and persuading them to submit to the discipline of factory labor was no easy task; it was far from accomplished by the turn of the century. 39

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This culture was compounded by an artisanal approach to organizing training which engendered de facto guilds for each specialization. A worker’s primary obligations were to an oyakata boss rather than the immediate manager or superintendent and in some cases the oyakata was not on site at a particular factory but still maintained a network of acolytes within the industry. A further burgeoning issue in relation to industry was a very modern one—the problem of pollution. A particularly prominent case was the environmental impact of the Ashio copper mines, which under Furukawa Ichibei had grown from accounting for around a quarter of national production of copper in 1877 to exceeding 40% by the late 1880s. Sulphuric acid was used to refine out the copper and this was the primary cause of water contamination, which had a severe impact on agriculture as well as physical well-being. Arsenic was also produced as a by-product and contributed to the broad array of illnesses and premature deaths. Tanaka Shōzō, the local member of parliament from 1890 onwards, was a vigorous campaigner on behalf of his constituents in the area and he regularly protested vociferously about the dire impacts of the mine and the government’s relative indifference in the Diet. In 1896, a major flood had spread slag from the mine throughout the countryside and devastated crops and generated widespread health problems. Tanaka renewed his pressure on the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, Enomoto Takeaki, in 1897 the Minister was forced to establish a committee to investigate the impacts of the mine. This led to the issuing of the Third Mine Pollution Order which was ostensibly intended to improve the management of industrial waste. The Furukawa’s, and indeed the workers on site, were reluctant to comply with any measures that would curtail the profitability of the mine but considerable sums were invested to implement improvements in the management of industrial waste. Even so, evidence of a significant turn-­around was slow in coming. 40 In February of 1900 activists from the countryside surrounding the mine marched on Tokyo from Tochigi and aimed to force the government into a response. A major confrontation occurred at a bridge crossing at Kawamata in Gunma Prefecture. Some sixty-seven farmers were arrested and approximately a hundred persons, both farmers and police, were seriously wounded. The arrested farmers were arraigned for trial, and fifty-­ one of them were charged with sedition and incitement to riot. The trial lasted until December of 1900 and in the end twenty-nine were convicted of the lesser charge of resisting officials with the remaining twenty-two being found innocent. The defendants appealed and in the ensuing appeals

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process in the Tokyo Court of Appeals the scope of the reviewing of evidence was greatly expanded to encompass conditions at Ashio. The entire court was transported to see conditions first-hand and the coverage in the mainstream media was substantial and strongly sympathetic to the farmers. The trial, unsurprisingly, took considerably longer to conduct and in March of 1902, all but three of the farmers on trial were acquitted. 41 This was a major victory for the protesting farmers and demonstrated that if a trial became infamous enough it would become subject to that secondary trial in the ‘court of public opinion’ once it garnered the right level of media coverage. A further incident that occurred during this process and achieved considerable notoriety was the attempt by Tanaka Shōzō to take the unprecedented step of presenting a petition in person to the Emperor directly. In October of 1901 Tanaka had already resigned from parliament in disgust, and in one last desperate act to have an impact on events he rushed the Emperor’s carriage as it was en route to the House of Peers on the 10th of December. He was immediately apprehended before he could go anywhere near the carriage—the event did have an impact though as it was broadly covered by the newspapers. The government, for its part, chose to release Tanaka with no further action citing his alleged ‘insanity’. They would also know that any attempt to punish Tanaka legally would have led to yet another very public platforming of a critic of the government. 42 The woefully inadequate response of the government was symptomatic of a broader dysfunction that might well be attributed to the bedding in of a new system of representative government. The two houses of the Imperial Diet had factions that were variously aligned or opposed to the government which itself was dominated by scions of Satsuma or Chōshū. As at 1890 there were no pre-existing ideological orientations such as those of the Conservatives or Liberals in England to draw on to establish political organizations that could count on being coherent and organized as a political force within the parliament. In the lower house in particular, there was a tendency towards destabilization and disruption and despite the relative hiatus during the Sino-Japanese War when the minds of all citizens were focused on a national goal, there was no sign that a basis for an orderly conducting of business in the Diet with a party in power and other parties constituting a loyal opposition was in the offing. There was, of course, the persistent presence of the Jiyūtō under Itagaki Taisuke, but this was no Liberal Party after the British model and was grounded more in anti-Satsuma/Chōshū resentments rather than a coherent policy platform.

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Okuma Shigenobu founded a rival party, the Shinpoto ̄ (‘Progressive Party’), in 1896 but this too was based more on that grouping of disaffected Anglo-oriented liberals that had been purged from government by Itō Hirobumi in the 1881 and was very much centred on the person of Okuma himself. 43 In 1898, however, a rather momentous political event occurred. The Jiyu ̄tō and the Shinpotō merged as the Kenseitō and achieved a landslide victory in the August elections. Okuma became the first non- Satsuma/ Chōshū prime minister of the country since the founding of the constitution. The startling success was relatively short-lived—Itagaki withdrew from the coalition alleging that the distribution of portfolios in cabinet had favoured the Shinpotō members—by November of 1898 the government of Okuma Shigenobu had fallen apart and the party formally split into two factions, the New Kenseito under Itagaki and the Kensei Hontō under Okuma. In an ironic turn, the Kensei Hontō threw its weight behind the new government led by Chōshū oligarch Yamagata Aritomo. The next major shift came in 1900 when Itō Hirobumi, already three-time prime minister of Japan, incorporated the New Kenseitō into a new party, the Rikken Seiyu ̄kai, which claimed a substantial majority in the Diet and ushered Itō into his fourth premiership. The Seiyūkai was to become the dominant force in parliamentary politics from 1900 to 1921 and although primarily conservative in orientation it participated in support for Constitutional Reforms in the early Taishō period. 44 The period that has been under review in this chapter has arguably been overshadowed by the two momentous wars that occurred either side. It is evident that there were equally momentous transformations on the domestic social front, with agitation for improvement of the conditions for women, including of course those engaged in prostitution, being very much to a publicly supported campaign as indeed was the case with the aforementioned agitation against environmental pollution at the Ashio mine. In the realm of popular entertainment, Osaka demonstrated time and again that it was capable of generating modes of performance, such as gidayu ̄ that were partly rooted in traditional arts but also highly innovative in terms of presentation and the handling of the now substantial audiences. Some components of those audiences, such as the cohort of university students, signalled a transformation in the nature of performer and viewer relations, as well as the scale and scope of cultural consumption in Tokyo. But what perhaps characterizes the period more significantly than anything else was the degree to which the likes of Miyatake Gaikotsu,

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Kuroiwa Ruikō and Akiyama Teisuke could use print media to really shake up things and explore the darker underbelly of contemporary society. In the case of Miyatake with more often than not humorous results, while in the case of Kuroiwa and Akiyama having more iconoclastic and socially transformative impacts. This was an epoch where decadence, whether found in high places or low, came to have a new resonance on the public sphere, with officialdom having no option to demand compliance in the name of “civilization” or “empire”.

Notes 1. Paine (2017, 42). 2. Gordon (1985, 17–50), Smith (1998, 193–218). 3. See Tierney (2015, 90–95). More recently, there is a very substantial monograph that has been produced by Oku Takenori, Kuroiwa Ruiko:̄ danjite Ri no tame ni arazaru nari, Mineruba Shobō, 2019; regarding the upcoming conflict with Russia, see 329–343. 4. Takeuchi (1999, 43–84). 5. Ibid., 87–94). 6. Ibid., 95–101). 7. Yoshino (2012, 140–144). 8. Ibid.,144–145. 9. Ibid., 147–148. 10. Ibid., 148–149. 11. Miyatake Gaikotsu, Kokkei Shinbun, No. 4, April 8th, 1901, as per Akasegawa. G. and Yoshino T. (Eds.). Reprint of Miyatake Gaikotsu, Kokkei Shinbun, Chikuma Shobō, 1989, 46. 12. Yoshino (op. cit.,149–151). 13. Ibid., 152–155. 14. Ibid., 156–157. 15. Regarding hostile characterizations of Ito Hirobumi as a Meiji ‘man who loved love’ (「明治好色一代男」), the see Kokkei Shinbun of 20th August, 1903, no. 55  in Akasegawa Genpei & Yoshino Takao (ed.s), Kokkei Shinbun, Vol. 2, Chikuma Shobō, 1989, 310–311. 16. Paine (op. cit., 51–52). 17. Tierney (op. cit., 96–114). 18. Yoshino (op. cit., 159–163). 19. Coaldrake (1997, 13–28), McQueen Tokita (2015, 99–104). 20. Kurata (1980, 160–162).  See also contemporary reportage in  Suzuki (1995, Vol. 5, 245–247) and  regarding the student audiences  the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun of 4th of March as reproduced in Nakayama (1982, Vol. 13, 225).

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21. Kimi Coaldrake in Women’s Gidayū and the Japanese Theatre Tradition refers to these factions respectively as the Authenticity Faction and the Friendly Faction. See Coaldrake (op. cit., 13–24). 22. Kurata (op. cit., 162–163). 23. 「腐敗々々、青年道心の大腐敗。危険々々、社会風教の大危険」is the original text. 24. Meguro (2014, 21–24). 25. Ibid., 24–26. 26. Botsman (2011, 1323–1347). 27. Ibid., 1327–1330. 28. Hayashi (2019, 35–42). 29. Hayashi (ibid., 42–60). 30. Hayashi (ibid., 42–50); also see Yamamoto Miki, 2015, “Yamamuro Gunpei Heimin no Fukuon oyobi, Kyūseigun Shozō Gentōyō Gurasu Suraido ni miru Kindai Nihon ni okeru Ningen Kyōiku to Shūkyō – Taishū to Kirisutokyō to no Deai wo meguru Ichi Kōsatsu”, Ningen Kyōikugaku Kenkyū (3), 73–81. 31. Appearing in The Deliverer October 1901, 57. For contemporary reports from the Japanese press on the activities of the Salvation Army see Nakayama (1982, Vol. 11, 120–122 & 140). 32. Niroku Shinpō, 6th of September, 1900. The exact words were 「自由万 歳、二六新報万歳」. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 6, 180–183). 33. Published inYorozu Choho ̄, July 9, 1898. Marquis Daionji was reported to keep more than one concubine and several figures named had multiple children with their concubines.  See original text in  Suzuki (1995, Vol. 6, 63–65). 34. Downer (2003, 56–73). 35. Ibid., 77–81. 36. Ibid., 149–180. 37. Ibid., 160–186. 38. Ibid., 187–207. 39. Gordon (1985, p. 27). 40. Ibid., 37–38. 41. Ibid., 351–383. 42. Ibid., 376–380. 43. Sims (2001, 80–85). 44. Ibid., 85–90.

CHAPTER 5

The Russo-Japanese War—The Dark Victory

Prior to the full-scale confrontation with Russia, there were, as we have seen, plenty of rumblings in all manner of media and in all quarters of the intelligentsia and the arts that foretold the inevitable necessity of that conflict. The popular culture of urban centres such as Tokyo and Osaka had displayed a propensity to accommodate frivolity and faddism, if not outright decadence, yet this was being slowly but surely countered by conscious efforts on many fronts by invoking the ethos of bushidō and “love of country”, aikokushin (愛国心). Public figures such as General Nogi Maresuke, who had attained fame and glory through his successful storming of Port Arthur in 1894, went on following retirement to actively promote bushidō in the public consciousness and indeed training academies for martial arts boomed in the wake of the successful Sino-Japanese War.1 One profoundly ironic event occurred prior to the conflagration between Japan and Russia and that was the fact that during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 they had been joint members of the international expeditionary force that was sent to Beijing to quell the revolt. It contained forces from eight countries—Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia and Japan. Japan had played a pivotal role in several engagements prior to relieving the besieged Legation quarter in Beijing, had in fact supplied the largest number of troops out of all the nations involved, and was party to the ensuing diplomatic resolution which saw the Qing government obliged to remunerate all eight nations through staggeringly punitive reparations.2 Japan’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_5

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participation in the expedition confirmed in the minds of many, indeed the national populace, that Japan had ‘joined the club’ of the Great Powers, that it was more or less a “civilized nation” on a par with the West. A Jiji Shinpō editorial entitled “Taking the Lead in the Eastern Century” was published on the first day of the new century, and spoke confidently about Japan’s new place in the world order. It added some further bold predictions as well: At the same time as Japan reaches the beginning of 1901 and celebrates the two thousand five hundred and sixty-first revisit of spring since its inception, the international measure of years is shifting from the world of the nineteenth century to the new world of the twentieth century. […]Japan is now established as a power in the East and last year during the Boxer Rebellion we were included among the allied powers and that gave considerable weight to our credentials in a short space of time. Now that Japan has finally been admitted to the company of the Great Powers, it can from this very day begin showing its true colours. We should acknowledge that we are on the cusp of a new age, and as many people now opine, the nineteenth century was the stage for the West, but the twentieth century will be the stage for the East.3

The editorial even goes on to predict, perhaps rather presciently indeed, that China would eventually rebound and become the leading market in the world, the only thing hampering this being the corruption of the government and administration. In any event, the salient observation, and one that underscores a major difference in the premises of the war with Russia as opposed to the preceding war with China, was that Japan was acting as an equal power. This may not have been quite the perception of the Western powers but so far as the Japanese people themselves were concerned membership of that club had been dearly earned and Japan would act accordingly. It also created certain kinds of expectations of greatness and obligations to sacrifice all to achieve it. So whereas the war with China felt like a moment where Japan could ‘try its hand’ as a plucky newcomer on the international stage, the upcoming war with Russia was an altogether much more weighty and onerous prospect. Another aspect of the editorial to note is the fact that Japan was, regardless of membership of the club, nonetheless an “Eastern” nation, part of the broader Sinitic civilization and having interests distinct from those of the West. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion, publications like Nihon actively sympathized with resentment towards Christianity and even called for the repression of

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Christian missions in Japan while promoting a proper patriotism, that is, aikokushin. Aikokushin was a theme that was to increasingly colour popular culture and popular entertainments in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese War. Prior to the emergence of naniwa-bushi as an overwhelming popular sensation through the performances Tōchūken Kumoemon, who excelled in promoting patriotism through recitations based on the tale of the forty-­ seven ro ̄nin, there was a significant precursor in the war-themed kōdan performances of Bitō Itchō (1847–1928). Bitō Itchō (original name Bitō Shin’ya, 尾藤新也), hailed from Kyūshū and was born into a samurai family of some wealth and status. In his youth, he had studied classical court music, gagaku, but following the Restoration he joined the Imperial Army and even participated in the Taiwan Expedition of 1874. Following his return, he resigned from the army and aimed to set himself up in business. These plans were disrupted with the outbreak of the Seinan Rebellion in 1877 and Bitō threw his lot in with Saigō Takamori. At the cessation of that conflict, he was arrested, tried and imprisoned. As a person of a samurai background, it was the epitome of humiliations and there were many in the same position who found themselves dispossessed of a means to make a living or being thoroughly disowned by even blood relatives. Bitō took the unusual step of committing himself to honing skills in the performance of kōdan, a move that was reacted to with utter chagrin by his family. Acutely aware of the shame entailed in becoming a performer given the status of his family, Bitō had himself registered as a common citizen, heimin (平民), and embarked on a career that would ultimately be crowned with remarkable success.4 Bitō’s specialty was the militarily themed gundan (軍談), which should not altogether surprise us given his background of military service and experience of warfare. He became notably successful in his home region of Kyūshū and following the Sino-Japanese War he relocated in 1898 to Osaka where he garnered considerable fame for his renditions of an account of the recent conflict in the Nisshin Sensō Dan (『日清戦争談』). His major ‘break’ in Tokyo came in July of 1902 when he performed a newly penned account of the Japanese army’s exploits during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, entitled Hokushin Jihen Dan (『北清事変 談』), “An Account of the Northern Chinese Incident”. The performance was picked up by the Tōkyō Asahi Shinbun which enthused over the quality and impact of Bito’s performance which featured a striking voice and included, rather unusually, the accompaniment of a shamisen. His style of

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performance was variously referred to as Shin Kōdan (「新講談」) or Shin Gundan (「新軍談」), a new school of kōdan that was entirely novel and evoked overlaps of association with naniwa-bushi. It was in this regard that Bitō was undoubtedly setting the scene for Tōchūken Kumoemon’s highly successful naniwa-bushi performances following the Russo-Japanese War.5 The performances of Hokushin Jihen Dan clearly struck a chord with a broad swath of the population, and indeed Bitō himself was explicit in his aim of trying to reach as many people as possible, including the less literate and the less educated (「無教育の人」). Bitō became quite wealthy and even set up a foundation that provided scholarships for the less fortunate to attend university. In trying to fathom the extraordinary appeal of Bitō’s kōdan, apart from the quality of the performances and their novelty, there was now a substantial proportion of the population who had relatives— husbands, brothers, sons, and uncles—who had fallen or been severely wounded in either the Sino-Japanese War or the more recent Boxer Rebellion. The writer and future collaborator with Tōchūken Kumoemon, Miyazaki Tōten, commented, “When the audience hears the esteemed Bitō sing [of their sorrows and loss], they feel consoled”.6 By the time of the immediate prelude to the war with Russia, Bitō’s reputation was so firm as to lead to his being invited to perform before the Emperor himself—a remarkable outcome for a former renegade samurai turned kōdanshi. Bitō was evidently a talented and impactful performer, but it should also be noted that he accrued considerable patronage in high places, particularly the military. In as early as 1898, the decorated veteran of the Sino-Japanese War, Major General Kawakami Sōroku (1848–1899) commended Bitō’s performances and referred to him as a kyōiku gunjin, an “educating soldier”, to highlight the positive educational aspect of his performances. And as a former scion of Kyūshū it is little wonder that his career would be closely followed by the likes of Miyazaki Tōten who had deep contacts with the increasingly active Gen’yōsha, which was based in Kyūshū and which included a rather extensive number of secret members in the upper echelons of the military. Kawakami Sōroku was an enthusiastic supporter of more clandestine and, at times, ruthless acts of espionage and subterfuge. In 1897, he ordered Captain Hanada Nakanosuke (1860–1945) to embark on a covert operation in Manchuria and Siberia in the guise of a Buddhist missionary with the false name of Shimizu Shōgetsu. As Ō hama Tetsuya depicts in quite startling detail, there was a network of brothels operating with

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predominantly Japanese women strung out across the region from the Philippines in the south up to Taiwan and across to Hong Kong and Shanghai and thence all the way through Beijing and Mukden up to even Vladivostok. It was tacitly acknowledged as an important basis of networking and communications which would prove, especially in the lead up to the war with Russia, to be an invaluable source of intelligence. Particular prostitutes were trained to efficiently lure their clients to divulge sensitive information or the brothels were able to use their knowledge of their clients’ public positions to engage in extortion. Hanada was something of a maverick and particularly outspoken in his criticisms of the government’s soft-pedalling in its dealings with Russia. Hanada spent two years based in Vladivostok developing his spy network and gathering intelligence from far-flung corners of Siberia, Manchuria and Mongolia. He was adamant that a war was inevitable and that the war, when it came, would not just be a set of strategic operations but a fight to obliterate the enemy (kessen, 決戦).7 The clandestine network established and fostered under Hanada would prove highly useful in the long term but Hanada chafed with other heads of staff and resigned in a fit of pique. By 1901, he was back in Tokyo and focusing on establishing an association, the Hōtokukai, which aimed to promote patriotism and morality. He referred to the Japanese people as the shimin (士民), literally “warrior people”, and lamented how degenerate they had become. Aiming to promote respect and loyalty to the Emperor, he wrote “Our pressing need at this time is to cleanse our warrior people of their current degenerate ways and replace this with a resolute fighting spirit focused on our enemies”. Being fervently averse to the factionalism of clan politics he also spoke of the need to supplant the love of home village (kyōdo, 郷土), with love of country. The likes of military personnel such as Hanada welcomed the emergence of performances such as the new kōdan of Bitō Itchō and the naniwa-bushi of Tōchūken Kumoemon with enthusiasm. These were modes of communicating with the masses that would turn out to be highly effective in inculcating a fervent patriotism. The fact that Bitō and Tōchūken came from socially problematic backgrounds made little difference—after all, Hanada, amongst others, had no qualms about employing prostitutes in the national cause. The glue that held everything together and gave actions ultimate meaning was aikokushin.8 In a parallel development with the broad regional network outlined above, there was the emergence of a social movement that led to the

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establishment of the Patriotic Womens Association or Aikoku Fujinkai (愛 国婦人会) in February of 1902. The initial establishment of the organization was led by Okumura Ihoko who had accompanied a Buddhist delegation from the Higashi Honganji temple to observe conditions first-hand during the Boxer Rebellion operations. She was appalled at both the brutality and immense suffering caused by the war and was acutely aware of the impact that the conflict was having on the soldiers and ultimately their families back home if they were killed or wounded. She sought the patronage of auspiciously high-ranking women and, at the establishment of the Association, it was the wife of the eminent aristocrat Iwakura Tomosada, Iwakura Hisako, who was the inaugural president. The Association aimed to establish local chapters throughout the country to support women who had lost male family members in war. Okumura Ihoko was an assiduous campaigner throughout Japan and from the initial membership of just under 19,000 it ballooned to a staggering membership of 435,000 by 1905. Okumura was also acutely aware of the suffering of ordinary people in the wider East Asian region and saw the Association as having the potential role of providing charitable assistance overseas as well. The first overseas chapter was established in Manila by the former head of the Nagasaki branch in February of 1903. It later became involved in the amelioration of living conditions for women throughout the Asian region by establishing branches in places throughout East Asia. These offshore Aikoku Fujinkai had an altruistic social mission that in one sense complemented the social activism for the emancipation of prostitutes in the late 1890s. This, however, was a home-grown movement and was tinctured with a much more explicit commitment to patriotism and promotion of Japanese values. Ironically, it came to act as a kind of auxiliary to what had been established through the activities of Hanada Nakanosuke, but it aimed to bring some uprightness to the spread of the Japanese Empire while attempting to provide dignity for the unfortunate women who were working in that network. It was an astonishing contrast to the darker activities of figures associated with the military or the Gen’yōsha. The work of the Associations was rightly celebrated given the caliber of patrons within the homeland which included members of the Imperial family and the wives of members of such illustrious aristocratic families as the Iwakuras.9 In the meantime, the Japanese government in 1901 had succeeded in nominally negotiating with Russia a withdrawal of troops from Manchuria. It was to be done in stages and indeed the first stage was scheduled for October of 1902. But unease about Russian long-term objectives

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remained. Given that the Russian Empire had consolidated its presence in the area northwest of Korea by leasing the Liaodong Peninsula from March 1898, it was evident that the strategic aim would likely be to link up between Siberia and the peninsula via Manchuria—a monumental land acquisition that would have huge significance for the balance of power in East Asia. Not even the Western powers could countenance that prospect and that is precisely why Britain was particularly eager to create a bulwark against Russian expansionism through the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Alliance which was concluded in January of 1902. This was greeted with great enthusiasm within the media and amongst the public in general—it confirmed Japan as having become worthy of the support of a power that up until this time had preferred to keep other powers at arm’s length in “splendid isolation”. This was a major turnaround from previous diplomatic policy and did signal that Japan was not without support from other quarters amongst the powers.10 Although the Anglo-Japanese pact of January 1902 led to an intensifying of antagonism and to a potential ‘renewing’ of the Triple Alliance between Russia, Germany and France, in April Itō Hirobumi travelled to Europe and met his counterparts in St Petersburg. Negotiations still seemed to be proceeding with some hope of resolution and in October the first phase of the withdrawal of troops from Manchuria occurred as planned. However, thereafter the mood seemed to harden within the Russian government and by March of 1903 the Foreign Minister and the Tsar were discussing sending reinforcements to Manchuria. In July of 1903, Russian troops crossed over the Yalu River at Yongamp’o to set up a new base inside Korea and made it clear that the prior agreement was unlikely to be complied with. When the deadline for the final phase of troop withdrawals came and went without compliance, a grim realization began to dawn on those commenting on affairs in the media, and indeed amongst the general public, that a compromise was unlikely to be effected. From the 9th of September, negotiations had been transferred from St Petersburg to Tokyo and from October a series of proposals and counter-­ proposals were sent back and forth from one party to the other.11 On the 21st of December, the Japanese government presented its third and “final” proposal—the Russian government responded on the 6th of January with a third counter-proposal that gave recognition to limited influence by Japan in Korea. On the 13th, the Japanese government presented what it regarded as its absolutely final offer and it included an ultimatum. Just as the Russian government was in the process of formalizing

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and submitting a response to Japan’s last proposal and ultimatum, the Imperial Council on the 4th of February formally resolved to end negotiations and commit to going to war with Russia. On the 6th, diplomatic ties with Russia were severed and the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy set forth from the port of Sasebo. An attack by the Combined Fleet on Port Arthur was made on the 8th of February and took the Russian Fleet by surprise. Torpedo boats were used to particularly good effect and inflicted damage on several of the larger Russian vessels including two battleships. Even so, the Japanese fleet was in range of the large artillery emplacements on the hills above the harbour which inflicted serious damage, forcing the Japanese navy to pull back. During this operation, the Japanese laid mines in strategic locations aiming to block lines of exit from the harbour. At the same time, as the naval assault commenced, forces of the Japanese Imperial Army were landed at Incheon and had as their objective the occupation of Seoul. War was formally declared by the Japanese Emperor on the 10th of February. The response from the public was ecstatic. There had been considerable unease within the public prior to the commencement of hostilities, not least of all because, as it had become so apparent that an all-out conflict was likely, there were major falls in the Japanese stock market. Indeed the Western commentary was tending to predict that if it came to a full-scale war, Japan would almost certainly come out the worse. The declaration of war, issued as a personal statement of the Meiji Emperor, certainly promoted the perception that the decision was a personal one of the monarch. The Emperor stated that he had not wished for war to come but the Russian Empire had left Japan with no other option. In downtown areas of Tokyo such as Hibiya and Ginza, large crowds thronged and marched along exclaiming “banzai” enthusiastically while bearing lanterns with patriotic inscriptions.12 Predictably, the outbreak of war led to intense anti-Russian sentiment and unfortunately the target for that antipathy was Russians who had already had a long-term relationship with Japan and of course the ‘Nikolai Cathedral’ (formally known as the Holy Resurrection Cathedral) which had been built in Chiyoda Ward in 1891. It was rumored to be full of Russian spies and the government had to intervene to ensure that random acts of violence were not directed at the church or its members. The government was in fact acutely aware that the war with Russia could easily be characterized as an attack on a Christian nation by a non-Christian one. On the 19th of February, the Internal Affairs Ministry issued a stern

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public warning against persecuting Russian or Japanese adherents to the Orthodox Church, even going so far as to say that the war with Russia was not a war against all Russian people. In a surprising move, the government also took pains to avoid generating perceptions that it would crack down on dissent regarding the war from the likes of Socialists and Christians, being ever eager to present Japan as liberal and enlightened as opposed to the despotic regime of Russia. Obtaining a positive perception of Japan amongst the international community was just as important as making gains on the battlefield given that Japan would need to secure loans and securities to fund the campaign. Between the 11th to the 13th of February the United States, Britain, France, China and Germany all declared neutrality but there was a way to go in enlisting more active support.13 Accordingly, on the 24th of February, the veteran statesman Kaneko Kentarō, was dispatched to the United States. Being well-versed in American affairs and being personally acquainted with President Theodore Roosevelt, he was an ideal choice for so important a mission. Kaneko himself was fully aware of the stakes and privately confided that he knew Japan might well come out as the defeated party in the conflict. Securing a sympathetic view of Japan from at least some of the major powers, particularly the United States and Britain, was a vital long-term objective.14 It is not intended here, incidentally, to give a blow by blow account of diplomatic developments or the progress of particular military actions, but in order to appreciate the longer-term impact of the war and its legacy for ordinary Japanese citizens the enormity of the conflagration and the increasing losses entailed in the siege and final storming of Port Arthur bears some relating in detail. It is of course the most immediate cause of a particularly dark undercurrent of grief that seemed to pervade popular perceptions of the war, even in the midst of celebrating victories, as well as the profound resentment that erupted when diplomatically Japan’s case was perceived by the Japanese public to be treated unfairly. The arena of conflict that turned out to be most pivotal was indeed Port Arthur. Neutralizing the Russian Pacific Fleet was necessary not only to ensure that there were no threats to the maintenance of logistics between the Japanese homeland and the continent, but there was also the additional possibility that the Russian Empire would send its Baltic Fleet to the Far East, and if the two fleets were to combine, Japan would lack superiority. A number of successes were achieved in the land campaigns— the First Army had victories against the Russian forces near Pyongyang in early April and Japanese forces went on to cross the Yalu River on the

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norther frontier of Korea after a protracted operation from the 25th of April until the final “Battle of the Yalu River,” which concluded on the 1st of May. On the 13th of April, two Russian battleships were badly damaged by Japanese mines with the flagship Petropavlovsk sinking with all hands, including the Admiral of the Fleet Stepan Makarov. These victories would be celebrated enthusiastically at home but not everything went Japan’s way. The third and final unsuccessful  attempt to blockade Port Arthur ended on the 3rd of May. On the 15th of May, two Japanese battleships, the Hatsune and the Yashima, struck Russian mines off Port Arthur and sank. Port Arthur remained difficult to break.15 The conducting of conventional operations to attack the Russian forces was accompanied by more covert operations far behind the enemy lines. One such operation was launched out of Mongolia and had the aim of destroying rail infrastructure and disrupting supply. In early 1904, a series of detachments were formed with a view to organizing sabotage operations out of a base that was set up in the capital of the Qaračin tribe’s domain in Mongolia (now Inner Mongolia), where from the plan was to simultaneously wreak havoc on the railway network. It was audacious and ambitious, and would have had a significant impact if successful. In early April, Yokogawa Shōzō led a detachment from the Qaračin capital to Qiqihar in Siberia, which had historically been a major trading link between China and Russia. They arrived in Qiqihar on the 11th of April and attempted to demolish a bridge to the West of the city the next day. The attempt was unsuccessful and two leaders of the detachment, Yokogawa Shōzō and Oki Teisuke were apprehended and then taken to Harbin, where they were executed. Their fate was widely reported in the media and they were feted as national heroes—it did in any case much to consolidate anti-Russian sentiment among the public and confirm the national commitment to the conflict.16 As with the previous war with China, there were instances of heroic exploits and deeds of self-sacrifice that were latched onto and used to generate celebrated war heroes. One of the first “divine fallen”, gunshin (軍 神), to be lionized was a sailor named Hirose Takeo who died during the second attempted blockade of the harbour on 27th of March. He had penned a particularly poignant and stoic poem contemplating his likely demise and it became something of a sensation. Unlike the previous major war of 1894–1895, however, not all commentators were quite as eager to be completely uncritical of how the war was being sold to the public. In fact Natsume Sōseki, for instance, was openly sceptical of the merits of

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Hirose’s poem and even some of the motivations behind having written it in the first place.17 The sheer scale of the mobilization meant that young men were being torn from their home towns and villages from one end of the empire to the other—for many it was the first time to experience a major metropolis before embarking on the troop ships that would take them to the battle zones. The exhilaration of being cheered by flag-waving citizens and choruses of “banzai!” was tempered by the poignancy of leaving their rural homes for quite possibly the last time. An awareness of this would most likely have been acute among the body of young soldiers as well as the elderly in the crowd who knew all too well what lay in store. And there were no special circumstances for even the well-connected and higher-ranking officers. On the 26th of May, the Second Army conducted a full-frontal attack on the Russian positions at Nanshan to the north of Port Dalny and Port Arthur and in this engagement Nogi Katsusuke, the eldest son of General Nogi Maresuke, was killed.18 Apart from the feting of heroes and noble deeds, there was of course the continued generation of patriotic commentary along with the penning of military songs and the production of colour illustrations—compared with the previous war of 1894–1895, this war did have certain parallels. Although there was not quite the mass fervour for colour woodblock prints that kept both artists and publishers flush for the duration of the previous conflict, it is nonetheless surprising the degree to which the practice continued, and some of the same artists remained to the fore— Toshihide, Toshikata and Kiyochika chief among them. As some commentators have noted, there were even instances where the stances of certain notable heroes or the composition of previously ‘successful’ depictions of action from the previous conflict were more or less replicated.19 This should not surprise us entirely, as it had always been part of the ethos inherent to popular culture and literature to routinely mine precedent for inspiration, to indicate respect or highlight a depth of continuity. There was also an unsurprising parallel in the manner in which popular theatrical productions were generated with great success as well. Mori Ō gai and Kunikida Doppo also reemerged with significant roles in the war period. Ō gai was once again seconded to the war front as a high-ranking medical officer and on this occasion penned a literary work, Verse Diary, that has attracted some scholarly attention but has not become a widely read or acknowledged addition to his oeuvre. Aoyama Tomoko has highlighted the influence of the travel diary genre of diary that has its roots in Heian literature, noting that Ō gai was carrying a copy of the

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Man’yōshu during his sojourn on the battlefield and had penned the ‘verses’ in yamato kotoba. Kunikida Doppo did not travel to the front but he was nonetheless active on the home front as editor for the The Wartime Graphic (Senji Gahō), a publication adapted by the owner Yano Ryūkei (a veteran of Meiji newspaper publishing) from an existing illustrated newspaper Kinji Gaho ̄ (see Fig. 5.1). Sakai Yū has noted Kunikida’s earlier stint as arch-patriot during the Sino-Japanese War but argues persuasively that he had privately come to regret the jingoism and was indeed hoping to

Fig. 5.1  Senji Gahō, 10 June, 1904, Kinji Gahōsha. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto)

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aspire to something more constructive and humane. With copious illustrations provided by the eminent artist Kosugi Misei, Kunikida walked a subtle line between support for the war and a nuanced appreciation of its human cost.20 The author who did make it to the front apart from Ō gai was Tayama Katai, the famed “Naturalist” writer who would following the war produce some of his most well-known works, The Quilt (1907) and Country Teacher (1909). Again Aoyama notes the rather stark contrast with Ō gai’s highly literary response to the war—Tayama also wrote a record of his experience but it was clear that he was quite overwhelmed by the intensity of the experience and the enormity of what one might only try to grasp in fleeting fragments of observation (Aoyama, 1999, 60–70). Apart from the Senji Gahō, which ran from February 1904 to November 1905, there were several other heavily illustrated gahō magazines that sprung up either as special editions separate from a parent publication or as completely freshly minted publications. The publisher Hakubunkan produced an offshoot of the Nichiro Sensō Jikki, which was entitled Nichiro Sensō Shashin Gahō and it ran from April of 1904 to December of 1905. Another leading publisher, Fuzanbō, produced the Gunkoku Gaho ̄ running from April 1904 to October of the following year and the publisher Jitsugyō no Nihonsha issued the Seiro Shashin Gachō which ran from August of 1904 to February of 1906. Together, these four titles were the most prolific and successful but they were complemented by a number of other titles including Tōyōdō’s Seiro Zukai produced as a special edition separate from the parent title Fūzoku Gahō and the more niche Shōnen Shashin Gaho ̄ (Ikubunsha), and Nichiro Sensō Gaikoku Gahō (Kinji Gahōsha), among many others. The success of these publications was in some cases extraordinary—the first edition of the Senji Gahō sold 50,000 copies while the Nichiro Sensō Shashin Gaho ̄ sold a staggering 335,000 copies through twenty-three print runs.21 The appeal of these publications stemmed from the combination of copious photographic images, reproduced as either lithographs or copper plate prints, with more traditional multichrome nishikie woodblock prints. As Ishihara Wasaburō, one of the editors of the Gunkoku Gaho ̄ opined, the images drafted by an artist “depicted the affairs of the world as a form of poetry produced through the interaction of the brush and the artist’s imagination” while a photographic image “depicted things of the world as they actually exist”. It was not so much a matter of one being inherently superior to the other but that there was a kind of distinct functionality that would appeal in differing ways. The artistically produced sketch had a

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distinct resonance that appealed to imagination while the photograph gave people a direct impression of circumstances on the ground. The war was in a sense a “great tumultuous drama” (daikatsugeki, 大活劇) that the public were eager to see presented to them in multiple ways. It is true that the woodblock print did not garner quite the same proportion of visual representations compared with the previous war with China but this represents the result of a number of subtle influences and impacts rather than a down-grading of their merits altogether. One primary impact came from the transformation of image production technology—it was simply more cost-effective to have images produced in one place by essentially one set of technicians when compared to the rather distributed and diverse production process entailed in the production of the woodblock print where the initial draft of the artist would be turned into a carved woodblock by an expert carver and then individually run off in a printer’s workshop. The second factor was the fact that those who had beloved relatives fighting and dying overseas put a premium on tangibility and verifiable records of conditions as they actually were on the front. They would never get a physical keepsake and so the more ‘veracious’ the depiction the better.22 This demand for visual veracity was reflected in the works of a number of nishikie artists. Kiyochika has already been noted for his almost photo-­ real attention to lighting and form. This style was more generalized by the time of the war and there were others who were able to emulate his distinctive perspective. As with the previous conflict with China, the works of Migita Toshihide figure as being of a high order in terms of graphic detail, colouring and composition. He was joined by his fellow disciple of the Yoshitoshi stable, Mizuno Toshikata as well as Toshikata’s own disciple Kaburagi Kiyokata. But there were new names appearing, most notably Ryūa(柳蛙), Kyōgo (耕漁), and Gessan (月三), along with the Otake brothers, Kunimi and Takeba. There were in fact an extensive number of woodblock artists contributing to the illustrated magazines discussed above but the tendency now was to feature woodblocks at the beginning of the publication as kuchie (口絵), a frontispiece of sorts for the remainder of the material to be presented.23 There were some new tendencies that emerged in relation to the content and composition of woodblock prints of this period. First of all, because there was so much action going on between the Japanese and Russian navies, naval engagements featured much more significantly than the previous conflict with China. There were also more dynamic depictions of Japanese and Russian sailors combatting on the decks of ships,

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which was not altogether inconceivable given the occasional direct skirmishes between torpedo boats and other smaller vessels. Searchlights used in night encounters also feature and they provide a dramatic point of contrast in the composition or even literally spotlight action within the frame. Kiyochika continued to feature naval encounters in imaginative ways, either depicting the results of an engagement with exploding or burning ships in the twilight, or depicting action beneath as well as above the water as seen in his “Our Torpedo on Target to Make a Direct Hit on a Russian Battleship in the Great Naval Battle of Port Arthur” (旅順ノ大海戦ニ我 水雷命中スル露艦之図). Another significant characteristic is the manipulation of perspective. In many of the depictions of land battles there were of course the more conventional large-scale encounters between two sets of attacking forces from left and right with a climactic encounter in the centre of the frame. What stands out in contrast to these scenes though is the number of occasions where the figures are Japanese soldiers grouped facing away from the viewer toward the enemy, either as an artillery placement or a detachment preparing to charge, so that one is given the feeling of being in the setting and witnessing the events unfold in situ. One final salient trend was the tendency to choose cavalry forces as the main figures within the image. Unlike earlier woodblocks that would tend to have a single figure in a climactic moment of striking down an enemy, there were a number of prints that depicted cavalry charges. This was slightly disingenuous as even foreign correspondents noted that the Japanese forces had limited reserves of cavalry and were forced to rely on massed infantry charges, often with heavy casualties. From an artistic perspective, however, massed horses in a charge provided an opportunity to present a level of intensity and spectacle that was hard to let pass. Ohara Koson’s “Our Army’s Charge at the Intense Battle of Jiuliancheng” (九連城蛤膜塘之激 戦我軍大捷) is highly representative and Kiyochika also provides us with one of the best examples with his “Advance of the Konoe Artillery Brigade” (「近衛砲隊之進軍」). In addition to domestic attempts to create a visual record of the conflict through a combination of traditional media and more recently developed printing techniques, there was also considerable interest from European and American publications. Chief of these would be The Illustrated London News and The Graphic in England, along with L’illustration in France, and there were a number of lithographs that were reprinted in Japanese publications. It is arguable that the trend towards creating a sense of in situ observation was in some regards fostered through observation of the

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visual style of these illustrations, and it is noteworthy that a large number of images, even when produced in Japan, would be accompanied by a translated caption in English. In point of fact, the Senji Gaho ̄ even had “The Japanese Graphic” inserted in its masthead, so there was no small degree of awareness of the English language precedents. As for how the foreign press viewed the conflict, it would be accurate to say that there was keen interest across the board—this was the first major armed conflict between two similarly armed modern fighting forces. There would if nothing else be ‘lessons to be learned’. Initially in Britain there was a degree of trepidation as there were, quite understandably, concerns that the newly minted alliance with Japan would see England directly embroiled in the conflict or at loggerheads with France. As it turned out, the declarations of neutrality from all parties held and the home audience in Europe was presented with detailed commentary and richly illustrated depictions of the war supplied by a sizable contingent of correspondents who had been dispatched to the theatre of war. As Alexander Nordlund has described in one of the few detailed discussions of foreign commentary on the war, the British press was broadly sympathetic towards the Japanese—as one might well expect given the alliance—but there was also a degree of bafflement and incomprehension. Nordlund highlights how the case of Japan’s becoming capable of taking on one of the Western powers through having adopted Western technology and military organization made it indeed ‘one of the club’ but the ethnicity of the Japanese made it also something that was intuitively hard to fathom. This was indeed, as he argues, counter-factual to the conventional modes of Orientalist discourse that casts the Far East as populated by despotic and cruel traditionalist regimes incapable of modernization. What emerged, rather paradoxically was an ‘othering’ of both the Japanese and the Russians, with the Russian imperial regime tarnished with negative associations of despotism and bureaucratic incompetence. As for the Japanese, there was an acknowledgement that they were indeed militarily competent but the prevalence of the evocation of martial spirit based in Bushido was in part admired, the feeling being that in fact Western European nations had become ‘soft’ in the intervening years of burgeoning industrial and commercial power. At the same time, the sheer ferocity of Japanese attacks on land engendered a certain unease—this was a combination of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ that some felt ought to be viewed with caution.24 There was also increasing criticism of the manner in which the Japanese Imperial Army resorted to the totally unimaginative tactic of conducting frontal

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daylight assaults on heavily defended machine-gun positions, invariably with catastrophic loss of life (the irony of course is that these lessons were not learnt at all well by the British army in the conflict that erupted a decade later). The engagements on land that were to prove extraordinarily costly and without precedent up until that point, followed the successful occupation of the port of Dalny north-east of Port Arthur in late May. The Japanese Third Army began disembarking at the port on the 6th of June and prepared to make the arduous push towards Port Arthur over land. It was soon after this development that the Tsar decided on the 20th of June to rename the Russian Baltic Fleet the Second Pacific Squadron and dispatch it to the Far East. On the 23rd, the Russian fleet at Port Arthur attempted to break out and sail for Vladivostok but was thwarted by the Japanese navy. A land siege was laid on Port Arthur from the 30th. In early July, the Japanese Government made efforts to develop a peace proposal and sound out the willingness of the Russian Government to negotiate. Elsewhere, the Japanese army continued its push towards Liaoyang in Manchuria and thereby cut-off rail links to the peninsula. The attempt to broker a peace was fruitless and on August 20th the attempt by the Third Army to take the hills surrounding Port Arthur to the East commenced. It ended in very limited gains with the loss of some 16,000 killed and wounded causing General Nogi to pause and regroup. Seeing the futility of repeating attacks on the same hills to the east, Nogi receiving advice from General Kodama shifted focus to include a hill to the north-west of the port designated as “203-meter Hill” as it afforded a direct line of sight on the port. A second major assault was undertaken on the 29th of October but this too ended in failure and entailed massive casualties on the Japanese side. After a brief respite the attack was renewed in earnest on the 26th of November and 203-meter Hill was successfully taken on the 5th of December. This operation also entailed massive casualties, but with this strategic coup the fate of Port Arthur was sealed and the Second Pacific Squadron was still only traversing the West coast of Africa. From 203-­ meter Hill the Japanese artillery could direct artillery fire on the town and vessels in the harbour. Lieutenant General Anatolii Stessel, the commander of the port decided to surrender on the 1st of January 1905, and the following day the port was occupied by the Japanese.25 So Port Arthur was captured, and seemingly a major strategic victory had been achieved but it had come at an enormous cost. In this phase of the conflict during the second half of 1904, the scale of the carnage and

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futility of repeated large-scale attacks was not lost on the home front. General Nogi, previously the hero of the capture of Port Arthur in the Sino-Japanese War had his reputation severely tarnished, to the extent that there were instances of vocal criticism and citizens tossing abusive missives into the precinct of his residence in Tokyo. Morale amongst the troops in the field was not impervious either. A high-ranking army surgeon, Tsuruta Teijirō, maintained a record of his experiences in A Diary of Service in the Russo-Japanese War Campaigns (『日露戦争戦役』) and details how he witnessed not only the appalling rates of death and maiming but also dealt with the cases of soldiers reporting unfit for duty for a variety of reasons. Not only were there soldiers presenting with the common afflictions of dysentery, beriberi and symptoms of syphilis and gonorrhea, but an increasing number of soldiers were appearing who had clearly inflicted wounds on themselves to avoid service. His principle means of telling the difference was the circumference of the exit wounds and traces of powder burn at the entry point. He noted that as the second attack on Port Arthur commenced in late October of 1904 the number of soldiers with self-­ inflicted wounds increased dramatically and came to include officers as well.26 Foreign commentators on the prosecution of the war were apt to take the loud and vociferous evocations of the Bushido spirit and its hold on the minds of Japanese soldiers at face value with little questioning of its pervasiveness. It certainly was true that the repeated spectacle of Japanese soldiers unflinchingly sallying en masse towards the enemy positions with apparently scant regard for their own lives left a marked impression. And as the record of prisoners of war taken suggests—there were approximately 79,000 Russian prisoners of war taken by the Japanese as compared to under 3000 Japanese prisoners of war taken by the Russians—the Japanese fought to the end with little thought of seeking quarter. At the same time, however, it should be noted that the Japanese took, by almost all accounts, extremely good care of the Russian prisoners of war under their ward. Japan had established a branch of the Red Cross and trained a corps of Red Cross nurses who were seen to parade down the streets of Tokyo before embarking to field hospitals. The commitment to this care was regarded as imperative for Japan presenting itself as the civilized party in the conflict, and certainly any opportunity to depict the Russian soldier as unruly or violent to civilians wasn’t missed. As the war situation with Japan deteriorated and morale amongst the Russian troops began to evaporate,

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there were indeed significant lapses in discipline leading to drunken violence and robbery, particularly on the part of the Cossacks.27 As for the home front, Lafcadio Hearn was to comment on the Japanese civilian population as being remarkably cheerful and positive during the course of the hostilities, noting of course that evidence of the toll was being seen increasingly on the streets of Tokyo. The fact is that there was something of a sombre pall that fell onto the home population as was evidenced by the precipitous decline in attendance at Sumo wrestling tournaments. These typically attracted sell-out crowds and enjoyed a lively coverage from the press, including blow-by-blow illustrated accounts of final bouts between great rivals in which the tournament victor would be decided. With the advent of war, these were dialed down somewhat and if we were to take the case of the Miyako Shinbun and the Yamato Shinbun as two contrasting instances, it could be said that while the Miyako Shinbun continued to run serialized novels and commentary on theatre and popular entertainments, the Yamato Shinbun took a decidedly subdued turn. From even as early as middle of 1903, the Yamato Shinbun began to step back from illustrated novels, the quality of the illustrations being palpably quite cursory, and then by the end of 1903 non-existent altogether. From the commencement of war there appeared small portraits of commanding officers in the Imperial Army or Navy or images from the war front. The tendency was to prefer photographs. By mid-1904, there appeared a series of vignettes which featured widows of fallen servicemen with an accompanying outline of the circumstances in which their loved ones had died, heroically of course, and the stoic resignation and devotion to duty of the bereaved. The tone was indeed somewhat funereal. So while entertainments continued after a fashion, there was never a sense that the dreadful impact of the war was never too far away.28 One of the entertainments that civilians felt was perfectly acceptable in a time of war was the simple venturing out into one of the parks in the city. Hibiya Park was particularly popular and the cherry blossom season of Spring 1904 saw citizens throng to such places for the innocent pleasure of promenading and gathering with friends and family. This was also partly reflective of a shift in government thinking about the merits of popular amusements for the general population. Initially a somewhat novel idea, it had become accepted that a working week with a modicum of respite was in fact highly conducive to a more healthy and productive citizenry who in turn might be less inclined towards disgruntlement and resentment

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towards the government. In August of 1905, the government even erected a band rotunda in Hibiya Park where military bands performed on either a Saturday or a Sunday. This was later followed by performances of Western music including operatic music although it was met to some extent by incomprehension by many spectators who found the music entirely unfamiliar and alienating. It was, in any case, a replication of the kind of scene played out in the capitals of Europe and was regarded as part and parcel of Japan being on a par with their Western counterparts.29 Not all developments in popular entertainment were completely deaf to the very human need for moments of levity and humour. One quite remarkable development, which certainly did not conform to the broader social sobriety, was the emergence of a new comedic form that had its roots in the entertainment culture of Osaka. Soganoya Gorō (original name Wada Hisaichi) was born in Osaka in 1877 and originally trained in Kabuki performance under Nakamura Sangorō. After debuting in 1893, he continued to hone his craft but by 1902 he had become somewhat disillusioned with a career in kabuki and in 1903 he teamed up with a fellow stable-mate, who changed his performance name to Soganoya Jūrō, and together they formed the “Soganoya Brothers Comedy Duo”. After performing with great success in Osaka they transformed their comedic act to Tokyo in 1904 and, rather surprisingly, made a great hit performing material that used the war as its basis. This collaboration was to have long-­ term significance as together they established a tradition that formed the basis for a new comedy style, shinkigeki (新喜劇) which eventually morphed into the famous Shōchiku Shinkigeki established in 1948 following the Second World War.30 One of the other major innovations in popular entertainment was of course cinema, or “moving photographs” (katsudō shashin活動写真) as they were known. Initially introduced in Kobe in 1892, there was an immediate fever of interest and slowly but surely equipment for creating and projecting such images was disseminated amongst the public that could afford them. By the Russo-Japanese War there were a number of places where films were exhibited, but given the times almost all of the content was related to the ongoing war. Nonetheless, this would serve as an important foundational phase for ensuring that the grip of cinematic images on the popular imagination would be strong and indeed after the cessation of war the move to gradually develop more domestic and nonmilitary themed content prevailed. Sound recording devices also enjoyed considerable popularity at this time. Initially introduced in the late 1880s

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and even demonstrated to members of Cabinet including Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru and Mori Arinori at the Rokumeikan in 1889, the technology of “sound storing devices” (chikuonki, 蓄音機) became established and slowly spread. In October of 1903, the shop Tenshōdō in Ginza began to import and sell cylinder records and playing devices from the United States. Locally recorded content began to emerge as well, including performances of gidayu ̄, gunka (military songs) and rakugo.31 By the time of the winding down of hostilities in June of 1905 and the commencement of peace negotiations mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, the range and variety of media employed to depict contemporary developments had diversified markedly. The emphasis had come to be on actual scenes witnessed in person by correspondents and, perhaps again in emulation of what was being seen with foreign artists following the conflict at the front, Japanese artists began to adapt their skills to make sketches and paint watercolour scenes in situ—material that was lapped up by the press at home. There were a number of highly trained artists supplying this material such as Miyake Katsumi、Kubota Kinsen and Ishikawa Kin’ichirō but there was also a welcoming of the works of skilled amateurs or even servicemen on the front. A particularly significant case was a sequence of sketches by a Lieutenant Kōno Michiyoshi who fell at the battle for Liaoyang and had his works published posthumously in the November edition of Nichiro Sensō Shashin Gahō. What unified all these visual outputs was a commitment to a more personal and intimate perspective, along with a willingness to adapt artistic techniques to the demands for easily reproduced lithographs. This meant that subtly but surely the aesthetics of woodblock prints were retained to some extent, particularly in terms of composition and the depiction of human forms, but this was transposed to a new idiom of representation. Perhaps one of the most indicative instances of how this fusion was emerging can be found, for instance, in Koyama Shōtarō’s poignant treatment of the image of Japanese cavalry in “Patrolling the Banks of the Yalu River”(「鴨緑江 畔偵察の図」). Koyama was trained in Western artistic techniques but the manner in which the moon is partially subsumed amongst night-time clouds at the top centre and casts down a bright path of light from the midground of the river to the foreground where a group of mounted cavalrymen are grouped in a conference over a map lit by a torch, reflects rather typical aesthetic conventions of nishikie composition. It is also highly reminiscent of the kinds of treatment of a night scene and the skillful deployment of light found in the work of Kiyochika.32

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The progress of the war from 1904 through to early 1905 was accordingly marked with a sense of elation at the fall of Port Arthur but also tinged with grief. Unfortunately, the war was far from over. From January into February the armies to the north-east set to a military confrontation that had been unprecedented in human history. There were over half a million soldiers altogether on both sides arraigned over a 150-kilometer front. It was prescient of the scale of conflict that would be seen in the First World War made possible by nearly universal conscription, the logistics of mass-production of munitions and the development of mass transport by rail. It has accordingly been characterized in recent research as “World War Zero”.33 By the time that the Imperial Japanese Army was turning its attention toward the north, the Trans-Siberian railway had been completed and the commander of the Russian forces General Alexei Kuropatkin now had a Second Army group under the leadership of General Oskar Gripenberg. From the 20th of January until the 29th, Gripenberg launched a surprise massed assault on the Japanese lines at Sandepu. It almost succeeded but ground to a halt with Kuropatkin ordering Gripenberg to withdraw with no major advantages gained in the engagement. There were 16,000 casualties on the Russian side to Japan’s 10,000. The Japanese were able to reinforce themselves and on the 20th of February launched their own attack on Mukden. The front was some 80 kilometers long and the Japanese pressed in on the left and right. Fearing encirclement, the Russians withdrew on the 10th of March with the loss of some 90,000 dead and wounded.34 The fall of Mukden might well have signaled the end of the war for all intents and purposes, but the lines of supply via Siberia continued to flow and the renamed Baltic fleet was nearing the theatre of war. The Tsar was not inclined to accept defeat and calculated, perhaps with some justification, that Russia could simply win out over time through a prolonged war of attrition with superior availability of resources. The decisive moment did come, however, when the Second Pacific Squadron under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky attempted to pass through the Straits of Tsushima en route to Vladivostok on the 27th of May. In a famous naval encounter, the Japanese Imperial Navy under Admiral Tōgō annihilated the Russian fleet—all battleships lost and only three smaller vessels making it to Vladivostok. This startlingly complete victory did much to enhance the prestige of the Japanese forces and change the complexion of any consideration of future continuation of the war. The news of the victory at Tsushima was greeted ecstatically at home and even President Theodore

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Roosevelt of the United States thought it was an astounding statement of Japanese military prowess. Still in contact with Baron Kaneko Kentarō, he enthused at the significance of the outcome and warmly congratulated his old friend.35 When President Roosevelt proposed a mediated peace settlement, there was an appetite on both sides to engage in earnest. During protracted negotiations at Portsmouth in the United States, it also became apparent over time that Japan probably had just as much to lose by attempting to protract the war—the reserves had been spent and resources were stretched. The issue of paying an indemnity was the main sticking point. The Russian negotiators remained staunch, making concessions over geographic spheres of influence but refusing outright to countenance an indemnity. The Japanese government reluctantly accepted the terms. In the case of Russia, it was already clear that the disastrous course of the war was having a cataclysmic impact on domestic politics, with brutally suppressed marches such as the Bloody Sunday of the 12th of April and the famous mutiny of the battleship Potemkin soon after paving the way for the eventual coup of 1907. What happened in Tokyo was almost immediate and unexpectedly savage. With the announcement of the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth on the 5th of September 1905, a protest was called for at Hibiya Park that evening. As the mass of citizens gathered at the Park, they found it barricaded closed and protected by police officers. The assembled crowd turned into a riotous mob and began to rampage through the city centre, targeting police boxes, government buildings and anything that could be linked to either Russia or the United States that had brokered the agreement. Martial law was declared the next day and the rioting suppressed. In his essay, “Social Protest in Imperial Japan”, Andrew Gordon has presented a highly accessible and nuanced account of the riot. Focusing on the illustrated magazines that had sprung up during the Russo-Japanese War, such as the Senji Gahō (『戦時画報』), he also highlights the specific issue released by the same publisher as a special issue dealing with the riot, the Tōkyō Sōjō Gaho ̄ (『東京騒擾画報』) on the 18th of September 1905, just under two weeks after the event.36 Through a deft analysis of the visual records, photographs and graphic illustrations by roving reporters, along with a careful review of records regarding arrests and incidents, Gordon is able to provide an insight into the fact that perhaps the most immediate spark for the unrest was not just anger towards the persons involved in negotiating an immensely dissatisfying peace settlement, but the act of the

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authorities to attempt to close down Hibiya Park as a venue of protest. In the public mind, the park was synonymous with a constitutional right to express the views of the people and to barricade it shut was incensing in the extreme.37 It should also be recalled that parks such as Hibiya Park and Ueno Park had also been focal points for national solidarity, celebrations and commemorations during both the wars, and there was a genuine sense of ownership as a people. Gordon highlights what had in fact become a tension between, on the one hand, a combination of nationalist fervour and an unqualified reverence of the Emperor, and a profound distrust and disregard for officers of state on the other. The then prime minister, Katsura Tarō, was vilified not only for being the leader presiding over the debacle of the Treaty, but also a typical oligarch who was known to be routinely consorting with a geisha, Okoi, who was his more or less live-in mistress. The fact that the buildings targeted for attack were the residences of the Home Minister and Okoi, not the residence of the Foreign Minister, suggests a venting of simmering hatred for the officers of state immediately presiding over the population on the home front. Police stations we attacked and set alight, as were approximately three quarters of the police boxes in the city. One other facet of the riot that Gordon uncovers is the possibility that it included a broader cross section than the arrest figures suggest. The overwhelming number of arrests were of persons from trades and assorted artisans, followed closely by laborers and then a variety of smaller percentages of rickshaw drivers, students and others. The visual record of the riot in the case of both photographs and sketches depicts persons dressed rather well for ‘low lifes’ and there were also women included even though theoretically they were legally forbidden from participation in political activities and protests. This was a societal event rather than a moment where the lower classes were running amok. Kunikida Doppo, the editor of the Senji Gaho ̄, was reported to have mused when gazing over the rooftops of the city with pockets of fire and smoke rising here and there that maybe a revolution had in fact begun.38 In the event, calm was restored to the city. The final aspect of the riot that Gordon discusses is the self-image of the population, one grounded in an intense wish to find validation in the notion that Japan had indeed become a modern, civilized nation like those in the West which was also combined with an acute anxiety that somehow it was not going to be validated. The frontispiece of the To ̄kyō So ̄jō Gaho ̄ was aesthetically quite sophisticated, presenting a stylized cross section of metropolitan figures

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running in single file across the top, with an image accentuating the modern cityscape beneath. The Japanese nation, as a people beginning to share a unified view of themselves, had arrived, and was beginning to assert itself against the old ‘business as usual’ approach of the Meiji state.39 In one sense, the intensity of the feeling released at that moment was entirely understandable. Yes, Japan had secured control over the Korean peninsula, the south of Manchuria and the southern half of Sakhalin but by September of 1905 the reality of how much the Japanese people, from every corner of the country, had suffered and how much the country had taken on and, more importantly, would need to continue to bear financially as a result of the war was acutely felt. For the citizenry, a redrawing of the international ‘zones of influence’ was cold practical comfort for domestic privations and the burden of increased taxation, both of which would continue for some time. On another level, it is possible that perhaps there was a gnawing irritation at the continued evocation of empire, bushido and the nobility of sacrifice which was a thin mask for the fact that the only sector of society that seemed to benefit were elites. Yes, the empire was growing, but there was at this juncture little to commend it to the rank and file. Apart from these rather intense demonstrations of internal contradiction and strain, there were, at the same time, certain aspects of urban life that were beginning to fall into place and would in fact become integral to a particularly modern Japanese milieu. Baseball, from relatively modest beginnings, was emerging as part of the fabric of the annual sports calendar, with a derby between the teams of Keiō Gijuku and Waseda University becoming a new feature, and Waseda even sent its baseball team in June of 1905 to play against Stanford (Nihon, June 28, 1905; Kokumin Shinbun, June 28, 1905). The supporters, in a manner not disconsonant with the customs of expressing support even in the post-war period, became noted for the intensity of their conflict with each other. The following year, the third of a series of games scheduled to be played between Keiō and Waseda was postponed indefinitely given concerns that the event could lead to an outbreak of violence between the supporters of the two teams.40 In the world of urban retail there were some of the first department stores being established, with traditional kimono merchants such as Mitsui Gofukuten (三井呉服店) and Shirokiya(白木屋), establishing new multistorey premises, the latter boasting a new glass shop front. Mitsui Gofukuten renamed itself as Mitsukoshi in December of 1904 and Shirokiya would become the forerunner of the Tōkyū Hyakkaten. They

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were joined by Daimaru (大丸) and became known as the ‘big three’ in downtown Tokyo.41 These commercial concerns, though obviously a target for vandalism during rioting, were nonetheless in part regarded as of a piece with Japan’s progress and civilization, and were often described as evidence of such in newspaper reports. Other notable milestones were the establishment of the Morinaga store which specialized in the sale of confectionaries, especially chocolate.42 The epoch of the Russo-Japanese War was a period of extraordinary turmoil and change but if we were to perhaps seek a thread of continuity within the performing arts and the popular tastes in entertainment then the meteoric rise and sustained success of Tōchūken Kumoemon’s performances of naniwa-bushi merit sustained attention. The career of Tōchūken Kumoemon straddled either side of the Russo-Japanese War and reveals the interaction of various strands of performance, particularly kōdan and gidayū, and a process whereby a rather unlikely champion of national morality and the Bushidō spirit emerged. Tōchūken Kumoemon was from an unambiguously lowly background having been born on the 25th of October, 1873, into a family of itinerant exponents of the street performance genre deroren saimon. This was a story-telling mode of sung performance with the recitation accompanied by the shaking of a staff with jangling metal attachments. In 1887, his father, Yamamoto Shigekichi, led the family to set up in one of the three main slum areas of Tokyo, Shin’ami-chō, which had a strong association with itinerant performers. Two years later, his father died and the young Kōzō, as he was then known, embarked on a career as a performer of naniwa-bushi. Naniwa-bushi was distinguished from deroren saimon by the fact that it was accompanied by a shamisen player who would punctuate the performance of the main artist with calls of encouragement and responses. These performances were also increasingly being housed in the yose theatres typically employed by kōdan and rakugo performers and indeed the repertoire reflected an increasing affinity with the kōdan material. In October of 1891 the authorities in Tokyo issued an edict that closed down the street stalls used by the saimon performers, forcing many of them to reassign themselves as exponents of naniwa-bushi.43 From 1889, the young Kōzō had become the disciple of Mikawaya Baisha and by 1896 he was established enough to take the name Shigekichi II based on the name of his father. From this time, he became intimate with Baisha’s wife Ohama who was one of the finest shamisen players in Tokyo. In February of 1898, they eloped to the Kansai region causing a

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major scandal. There, taking the name Tōchūken Kumoemon, he performed at the yose of Kyoto and Osaka. Following the death of Baisha, both Kumoemon and Ohama returned to Tokyo in March of 1900. At one performance held in Shiba on the 23rd of March, a rather fateful meeting occurred as Miyazaki Torazō, known in fact more widely by his pen-name Tōten, introduced himself. Tōten who hailed from Kumamoto and had been active in China fomenting political agitation in support of Sun Yat-sen, had become active since 1900 as a journalist for the Niroku Shinpō but had since also developed a desire to take up naniwa-bushi. Soon after, Tōten became a formal disciple of Kumoemon. Things did not go smoothly for Kumoemon from this point—he struggled to support himself and his partner, encountering competition from fresh young performers such as Naniwatei Aizō who had developed an ardent following based on his vocal prowess and good looks. Kumoemon decamped to Kansai yet again in late 1902 and thence to Tōten’s home base in Kumamoto. Tōten remained in Tokyo for another year before also capitulating to the pressures of being in financial straits. Even so, the connection with Tōten was to have fateful consequences. While in Kumamoto Kumoemon developed associations with local eminent figures, thanks to Tōten’s introduction which included members of the Genyōsha, the right-­ wing activist association. Tōten had also introduced Kumoemon prior to leaving Tokyo to Koga Renzō, a rising bureaucrat who would eventually become the head of the police bureau within the Home Ministry. He was an avid believer in the utility of naniwa-bushi in countering the decadent and ‘effeminate’ tastes of the modern citizenry.44 Ironically, after Tōten returned to Kumamoto in July of 1903, the pair had a major falling out. Tōten found the incessant gambling, drinking and womanizing of Kumoemon rather too much to bear even for himself, and so there was a parting of the ways. By this stage, however, Kumoemon had the attention of the local audience and, more importantly, the kinds of patronage that could open doors in high places. From 1903 on to the duration of the war, Kumoemon consolidated his fame and began to focus almost exclusively on the ‘Forty-seven Rōnin’ stories, the Akō Gishi (赤穂 義士) tales, or Gishi for short. By the end of 1906, Kumoemon sensed that maybe the time was ripe to venture back toward Tokyo and see how far he could re-establish himself. After a successful stint in Kansai, including quite remarkably a performance in Kobe before a member of the Imperial family, Princess Arisugawa, Kumoemon’s entourage set out for Tokyo and in June of 1907 made a dazzling debut at the Hongō-za (see Fig. 5.2 for

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Fig. 5.2  Frontispiece from Engei Gaho,̄ July 1907. (Courtesy of the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto)

a striking photographic portrait of Kumoen from this period). His performance, which entailed setting up screens with Akō Gishi -related motifs and his own costume resonant with early Restoration shishi (志士), had immediacy and impact, as Kumoemon apparently had a very strong and sonorous voice and could sustain notes to extraordinary lengths due to having perfected the technique of inhaling through his nose while still vocalizing. The shimasen accompanist, Ohama, was kept concealed behind

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a screen, which further focused attention on Kumoemon exclusively (it has also been suggested that this was to protect Ohama from reproachful staring). The crowning achievement was a performance at the Kabuki-za, the bastion of cultural conservativism, from 15th July, 1912. What was the secret to Kumoemon’s success? Clearly a combination of raw talent and charisma mixed with commercial savvy and influential patronage played their part. But as Hyōdō suggests with reference to a critic’s assessment in the November issue of Engei Kurabu, the simple fact was that Kumoemon presented powerful stories that resonated with the concerns of ordinary people and did so in a way that was easy to understand and listen to. There was of course the ongoing irony that Kumoemon was purporting to be ‘educating the masses’, and that he could even claim lineage to a samurai family, which was in fact fictitious. He was something of a conundrum in that, so far as his personal background and daily dissipations were concerned, he could not be considered as a paragon. Yet his was one of the most stunning achievements of the late Meiji period, in that he almost single-handedly transformed naniwa-bushi into the dominant performance genre, supplanting to a considerable extent the previously ubiquitous kōdan and gidayū. Following the death of the Meiji Emperor, he continued to experience huge success, earning as much as 83,000 yen in 1913. This was, unfortunately the prelude to a rather steep descent towards his demise. He was notoriously bad at handling his money and when he finally succumbed in 1916 to the tuberculosis that had claimed his partner Ohama in 1914, he was mired in debt and had few personal possessions.45 Consequently, while the government would, quite justifiably in certain regards, see this as an era of “popular disturbances” (minshū sōjo ̄ki, 民衆騒 擾期) it was nonetheless the case that the beginnings of a new form of confidence in the urban populace was beginning to emerge and even amongst the poorer sectors of that population glimmers of improvement and progress were beginning to be sensed. As Huffman outlined in the chapter entitled “The Sun Also Shone: Embracing Life” (2018), there were an increasing number of amusements that city dwellers of all stations could enjoy. There were the promenades near long-established places of congregation such as Yasaka Shrine in Osaka or Asakusa Temple in Tokyo, or the new places of relatively inexpensive entertainments such as the concert stand in Hibiya Park, the zoological garden at Ueno Park and of course the Ryo ̄unkaku tower and its precincts already alluded to. If there was a sector of Japanese society that was doing it particularly hard it was

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the population of the rural regions, as would be underscored in the Great Northern Famine of 1905–1906. Otherwise, the stage was set for a further decade (covered in the ensuing chapter) where rambunctious citizens of various backgrounds occasionally flexed their collective muscle to the consternation of the authorities, while consolidating self-awareness and aspirations that were beginning to become increasingly strident and potentially capable of transforming Japanese society.46

Notes 1. Ō hama (2003, 78–88). 2. Zachmann (2009, 154–156). 3. Jiji Shinpō, 1st of January, 1901. For original text see Suzuki (1995, Vol. 7, 10–11). 4. Kurata (1980, 136). 5. Ibid., 116–130. 6. Ibid., 136. Specifically in Japanese「尾藤先生に歌はれば本暴だ」. 7. Ō hama (op. cit., 108–109). 8. Ibid., 101–120. 9. Ibid., 90–97. 10. Paine (2017, 49–54). 11. Ibid., 55–57. 12. Ō hama (op. cit., 121–125). 13. Ibid., 125–126. 14. Ō hama (ibid., 132–134), Paine (op. cit., 54–55). 15. Ō hama (ibid., 125–126). 16. Ibid., 115–120. 17. Ō hama (ibid., 99–100); for a more generalized discussion of pessimism and ambivalence pervading popular sentiments, see Shimazu Naoko’s “Patriotic and Despondent: Japanese Society at War, 1904–5.” The Russian Review (Stanford) 67, no. 1 (2008): 34–49. 18. Ō hama (ibid., 140–141). 19. A quite remarkable collection of digitized materials has been assembled and presented publicly on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Vizualizing Culture platform; in connection with woodblock prints as they evolved from the Sino-Japanese War through to the Russo-Japanese War note John Dower’s Throwing of Asia series, 2008, as sourced at: https:// visualizingcultures.mit.edu/throwing_off_asia_01/index.html. 20. Sakai (2021, 797–824). 21. Kōgo (2013, 80–83). 22. Ibid., 87–89. 23. Ibid., 83–87.

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24. Nordlund 2015, 28–46. 25. Ō hama (op. cit., 145–150), Paine (2017, 66–67). 26. Ibid., 142–145. 27. Ibid., 161–165. 28. Yamato Shinbun had a palpably high-quality illustrated newspaper on a par with the Miyako Shinbun, but the gradual departure from elegantly illustrated serialized novels and a rather funereal ambiance. 29. Kurata (op. cit., 179–180), Aoki (2004, 233–247). 30. Murakami (2013, 1–15). 31. Kurata (op. cit., 196–197). 32. Kōgo (op. cit., 86–91). 33. See Steinberg, John W. and David Wolff. The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero. Vol. 29, Brill, 2005. 34. Paine (op. cit., 49–50 & 67–68). 35. Ibid., 69–71. 36. See Andrew Gordon, “Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Volume 12, Issue 29, Number 3 for an open access reproduction of the original MIT Visualizing Cultures essay. 37. Gordon (2012, 1–10). 38. Ibid., 10–34. For some of the most comprehensive coverage of the riot see the September 6th edition of the  Tokyō  Asahi Shinbun as reproduced in Nakayama (1982, Vol. 12, 486–489). 39. Ibid., 35–41. 40. Jiji Shinpō, November 12, 1906. For original reportage see Suzuki (1995, Vol. 7, 117–121). 41. Regarding Shirokiya’s development see Hōchi Shinbun July 25, 1903 and regarding Mitsui Gofukuten’s transformation into the Mitsukoshi store see Chūgai Sho ̄gyo ̄ December 14 1904. 42. See Ho ̄chi Shinbun September 14, 1903 and Jiji Shinpo ̄ March 14, 1906. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 7, 55–58). 43. This account is largely based on Hyōdō and Smith’s “Singing Tales of the Gishi: “Naniwabushi” and the Forty-Seven Rōnin in Late Meiji Japan.” published in Monumenta Nipponica 61, no. 4, (2006), 459–508. It is itself a translation based on material originally published by Hyōdō in Japanese, “Koe” no kokumin kokka, Nihon (NHK Bukkusu, 2000). 44. Hyōdō and Smith (ibid., 490–494). 45. Ibid., 483–490, 501. 46. Regarding both the Hibiya riot and urban amusements see Huffman, 2018, 160–185. Regarding the development of Ueno Zoo see Miller, Ian Jared. The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo, University of California Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 6

Meiji Twilight

The final years of the Meiji period would see the aspiration toward Empire reach a defining watershed. It was the result of a stage-by-stage process of eliminating external competitors over the previous two decades and then moving in to take control. With China no longer the power it was when at war fifteen years earlier, and Russia also now taken out of play, Japan moved to formally annex the Korean Empire. Itō Hirobumi concluded an arrangement in 1905 through the Japan-Korea Treaty whereby Korea became a Protectorate of Japan. Itō continued to maintain a strong interest in the management of the Protectorate and, although initially not in favour of annexation, eventually acquiesced. His assassination on the 26th of October 1909 accelerated the direction of events and on the 22nd of August, 1910, a second Japan-Korea Treaty formalized the demise of the Joseon Dynasty and Korea’s subjugation to direct Japanese rule. In one sense, the clear fulfilment of an imperialist ideal that can be traced to the advocacy of invading Korea in 1873 had been realized. But just as the Russo-Japanese War had not generated unmixed enthusiasm for war and the aims of the Meiji state, there were ructions on the domestic front that were to reveal themselves with dramatic clarity. In the same year of Korea’s annexation, police uncovered what they regarded as a nation-­ wide ring of conspirators who were planning to assassinate the Emperor Meiji. Following initial arrests in May of 1910, a bewilderingly broad array of alleged activists, ranging from Buddhist priests to intellectual figures such as the anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui and his feminist common-law wife © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_6

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Kanno Suga were taken into custody. The trial continued into January 1911 and on the 18th all but two of twenty-six persons arrested were sentenced to death. An Imperial Edict spared twelve but the remaining twelve, including Kōtoku and Kanno were executed thereafter (see Fig. 6.1 for a set of portraits of the persons executed).1 The High Treason Incident, as this series of arrests, prosecutions and eventual executions came to be known, had deeper roots in a more

Fig. 6.1  Image from Kotoku Ippa Daigyakujiken Tenmatsu(『幸徳一派大逆事 件顛末 』Miyatake Gaikotsu, ed., Ryūginsha, 1946. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

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profound gap between the government’s imperial programme and the sentiments of the public. The Hibiya Riot of September 1905 revealed with stark clarity the degree to which this gap had already become entrenched and potentially intractable at the beginning of the new century. A profound transformation was afoot and the ensuing decade would indicate that if anything the schism would intensify rather than be attenuated. There were three strands to the social causes that might be considered pivotal to the intensification of this disjunct. The first was the continued movement to ameliorate the condition of prostitutes in particular and women more generally. Before Kanno Suga became the apparently would­be assassin of the Emperor, she had been involved in the domestic branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and engaged in both on the ground activism and activism through print media, becoming a leading editor in newspaper publishing. A second movement was rooted in an intensified interest in Socialist and Anarchist thought. This stemmed from simmering disaffection amongst a working population that was increasingly drawn into a broader array of labour, with workers in heavy industry, particularly mining, chafing at the conditions of employment and erupting into violent protest. The Ashio Riot of 1907 is well-documented but there were several other instances that also garnered national attention. The third movement was more specifically cultural and can perhaps be summarized as a drive to legitimate private pleasure and desire as opposed to the traditional imperatives to subject these things to family and state. This found adherents amongst a newly insurgent feminism, with a Japanese ‘Blue Stockings’ movement emerging that was represented by such colourful figures as Hiratsuka Raichō, who explicitly argued for the right of women to seek sexual pleasure on their own terms as well as become fully enfranchised members of the political system. More broadly, in the realm of literature, writers of the Naturalist school, such as Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Tōson, along with Neo-Romanticist coevals such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Nagai Kafū, commonly articulated, despite stylistic differences, a perspective that broadly endorsed and validated individual interiority and experience while acknowledging, if not embracing, sensuality (apart from The Broken Commandment of 1906 which dealt with the fate of a school teacher from a burakumin background, Shimazaki Tōson’s later works would tend to confirm that characterization). Natsume Sōseki, while not affiliating with either of these movements burst onto the literary scene with two highly idiosyncratic novels, I Am a Cat (1905) and Botchan

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(1906), which also distinguish themselves as highly effective novels resting on the fulcrum of a quirky individual narrator. During the Russo–Japanese War, Yosano Akiko had penned the famous poem Kimi that exhorted her brother not to die a senseless death in the name of the Emperor. It was extraordinary for its forthrightness and predictably landed her in enormous trouble with the authorities and with the public who were incensed at such a brazen challenge to the patriotic mood of the times. Yosano was also the author of the highly influential collection of tanka poems, Tangled Hair (Midaregami, みだれ髪), which was published in 1901 and became something of a beacon for independent and free-thinking women. One such woman that would almost certainly have read Yosano’s work and be inspired by it was Hiratsuka Raichō (1878–1942), who was to become increasingly prominent in the post Russo-Japanese War period as an advocate of a radically feminist programme of social activism. She was born into the wealthy Tokyo family of a high-ranking bureaucrat and attended the prestigious Japan Women’s University (日本女子大学) from 1903. She read widely in continental philosophy and took a literary interest in the work of Henrik Ibsen, particularly A Doll’s House (1879), a play depicting the predicament of an unhappily married woman. Before taking the pen-name Raichō, “thunderbird”, in 1911, she was Hiratsuka Haru and came to rather dramatic public attention in 1908 when she absconded with her married teacher, Morita Sōhei. She had left her home late at night on the 21st of March and was discovered by a policeman two days later with Morita in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture north of Tokyo apparently on their way to attempt a “love-suicide” (shinjū, 心中). The incident was a cause célèbre not least on account of the couple being regarded as supposed exemplars of modern well-educated and well-to-do citizens, as well as the fact that Morita was a protégé of Natsume Sōseki. After a rather cursory report of the basic facts of the incident in the 23rd March edition of the Jiji Shinpō, a more detailed account was produced by the To ̄kyō Asahi Shinbun on the 25th, which described the incident step by step as it had unfolded and the personages that were involved when they were taken into custody after being discovered. The affair was dismissed as a high tide example of the contemporary cultural movement that encouraged young people to pursue sexual gratification, seiyoku manzokushugi (「性欲満足主義」). This was followed by a personal retort from Hiratsuka herself in the pages of the Yorozu Chōhō on the 27th of March. The article initially relates how Haru’s mother and an intermediary from Morita’s side, Okabe Keiichirō,

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had travelled to Tochigi to retrieve the pair, returning the following day to Tokyo and staying the night away from the family home. The next day, Okabe’s wife met Haru’s father to explain the situation and he indicated that there was no need to send Haru away to another household. The following morning, Haru returned to the family home with her mother. Haru consented to be interviewed by a journalist from the newspaper and was forthright in her response: The reason I left my home was to act in a manner consistent with my own mind. Others have even threatened to kill me to repress my ideas. But I don’t care if I have to die as a result of not changing my convictions.2

The newspaper was not actually completely on her side either, as they simultaneously published the content of a letter that Haru had sent to Morita which she had apparently sought to have disposed of by a university friend before it fell into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, Haru had become the focus of a popular fascination in the press that fixated on the young woman’s exceptional beauty and intelligence while simultaneously expressing revulsion at her bold rejection of traditional social norms. At approximately the same time as the foregoing incident unfolded there was another public event covered in the press that revolved around the manner in which the modern Japanese woman should be idealized— Japan’s first national beauty contest. The contest was originally initiated by the Jiji Shinpō in response to an invitation from the Chicago Tribune to participate in an international competition that was received in September of 1907. The public call for participants specified that the initial selection would be through submission of a photograph and no woman who was employed in either theatre or other low-brow entertainments would be permitted to enter. The prizes were a combination of prize money and diamond jewellery.3 Over 200 submissions came in and the adjudicators who were to select the finalists were artists from backgrounds in Japanese and Western painting, kabuki onnagata actors, along with a photographer and even an anthropologist. There were thirteen in all and the panel was announced on the 1st of January 1908. The final adjudication occurred on the 29th of February and the winners of the first three prizes were announced on the 5th of March. The first place was given to a Miss Suehiro Hiroko, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the mayor of the city of Kokura in northern Kyūshū (announced in the Jiji Shinpō, 5 March, 1908). It turned out that

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the young woman who won first prize was also a student enrolled at the elite Gakushūin University, an institution reserved for the offspring of families with particularly elevated social backgrounds, and the President of the University was none other than General Nogi Maresuke. The response from the university administration upon hearing of the participation in the competition was to have her expelled for misconduct. The Jiji Shinpo ̄, though mindful of the implications of challenging so august an institution’s decision, nonetheless insisted in its pages that participating in the competition entailed no misdeed or moral misconduct whatsoever and criticized the head of her Faculty, Matsumoto Gentarō, for not even agreeing to meet representative of the newspaper to discuss the matter.4 The contrast between these two episodes is instructive in that it highlights the almost unfalteringly censorious treatment of women and the potential toxicity of attempting to negotiate the public sphere in any other capacity than as the dutiful daughter, wise mother or good wife within the family. But as the case of Hiratsuka Raichō also indicates, attempting to resist or even point blank refuse to coalesce with the social programme entailed making some decisions potentially impacting on future prospects, including the choice between life and death.5 In parallel with the kinds of social peril set in store for non-conformists in matters related to gender and family, there were also the rather draconian controls and penalties reserved for activists in the socialist or anarchist movements. And often the fate of feminists and political activists overlapped and merged. A particularly representative example is provided by Kanno Sugako and her involvement in the Japan Socialist Party. Initial attempts to establish an explicitly Socialist political party, such as the Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshu ̄tō, 社会民衆党), which was set up by leading figures including Kōtoku Shūsui and Katayama Sen in May of 1901, were immediately proscribed and outlawed. In 1906, with the passing of the baton of the premiership to Saionji Kinmochi, a compromise of sorts was reached where a Socialist party based among more moderate activists would be accommodated. The Japan Socialist Party was established in late January of 1906 and involved moderates such as Tazoe Tetsuji who advocated social change through parliamentary processes. But alongside him were the likes of Kōtoku Shūsui who continued to advocate a more revolutionary and violent programme of activism. Within months, the radicals came into open conflict with the moderates in the movement and the party split into factions. After a year in existence, the party was formally circumscribed and

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legally abolished. In March of 1907, not long after the party’s dissolution, Yamaguchi Koken published an article excoriating the traditional feudal family system in the Heimin Shinbun, which led to him being charged with a breach of the Newspaper Ordinances and receiving a three-month jail sentence. He was released on the 18th of June and it was planned to have a welcoming party at a cinema, the Kinkikan, which was situated in the Kanda district of Tokyo. The event, which was in fact a joint gathering of both the moderate and radical factions together, was held on 22nd June. But after the initial words of greeting from the editor of the Heimin Shinbun, Ishikawa Sanshirō, were made, the members of the radical faction unfurled flags that variously declared their allegiance to Anarchism and Social Revolution. They began to shout “Banzai for Anarchism” and sing the revolutionary anthem of the radical movement. As a scuffle broke out to take the flags from the radicals, police lying in wait intervened and a number of attendees, including four women, were arrested.6 Variously referred to as either the Kinkikan Incident or the Red Flag Incident, the ensuing trial of those arrested led to the conviction of leading radicals such as Ō sugi Sakai and Sakai Toshihiko with sentences ranging from one to two and a half years. The female members, including Kanno Suga, were variously found not guilty or released after being detained for several days. It was a pivotal event that led to a decided hardening of the governmental attitude to Socialism—Saionji’s cabinet resigned soon after and the premiership shifted to a more conservative leadership under Katsura Tarō on 12th July, 1908. Just as significantly, it hardened the outlook of Anarchists and Feminists who increasingly saw that revolutionary and violent action would be the only way to resist the government and change society. As already alluded to, Kanno Suga would later go on to be convicted in the High Treason Incident and be executed thereafter, and this experience of arrest and incarceration was undoubtedly formative of her perceptions of what constituted legitimate activism.7 It is possible to characterize the activities of such activists and the consequences for their actions as part of the foibles of an intellectual elite, but in fact there was a deeper malaise in social relations that was driving such disaffection. If we return again to 1906, there was a proposed raising of the price of train fares in Tokyo that sparked a major outpouring of protest. The train services in Tokyo, which were run by three main companies, had applied to obtain permission from the Governor of the city to raise fares. On the 8th of March it was announced by the Governor in the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun that fares would rise from 3 to 5 sen with a

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discounted fare of 4 sen available for students and workers up until seven in the morning. It was an increase of over 60% and drew instant howls of indignation. The Japan Socialist Party organized a public demonstration at Hibiya Park on the 11th of March and drew a sizeable crowd. Large flags with “Oppose the Rise in Train Fares!” were unfurled and at one o’clock, Yamaji Yakichi (later Aizan) addressed the throng. Three leading Socialists including Sakai Toshihiko were deputized to go around the head offices of the three train companies in the city and present the resolutions of protest that were ratified at the demonstration. With no positive response from either the train companies or the municipal government there was a larger demonstration on the 15th of March at Hibiya Park, but this time the radical Socialists were much more to the fore and they unfurled red flags and beat drums while chanting slogans. The resolutions of the previous meeting were more or less repeated and then after the main demonstration was wound up the radical Socialists proceeded to the Town Hall and the offices of the train companies, again unfurling large red flags, beating drums and chanting their demands. The protestors were joined by ordinary citizens and now stones were being thrown and windows broken. Leaders of the Socialist protest group were arrested and later tried in court, but found not guilty, indicating that it was in fact a more generalized segment of the urban populace that was involved in some of the most violent incidents.8 The next major initiative came in early August when it was suddenly announced that on the 16th the three companies had applied to be permitted to be amalgamated into one new company, the Tokyo Tetsudō Kaisha, and that the rise in the fare would be from 3 to 4 sen. This still constituted a rise of over 30% and seemed non-negotiable. The response from the Japan Socialist Party on the 10th of August was to announce that they would enforce a boycott on the trains from the day that the new fare regime was implemented. There was a period of calm until a major protest gathering was scheduled to be held on the 5th of September, the anniversary of the Hibiya riots of the previous year. On the day, special additional detachments of police were deployed and by two in the afternoon it was estimated that 10,000 people, mostly students and workers, had assembled. At approximately 2:30 the head of the organizing committee, Matsumoto Chiwaki, who had also been a leading figure behind the riots the year before, made his entrance to the park. Matsumoto was a flamboyant figure who evolved from working as a journalist to becoming an

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advocate of alternative medicines and also agitating aggressively against the outcome of the Treaty of Portsmouth. Sporting a mixture of Japanese and Western fashion accessories, he addressed the crowd and made it clear that there was a choice between repeating the rampage of last year or, waiting for what he understood to be an undertaking from government to intervene and address the issue by the 11th of the month. There was clearly an itching within the crowd to engage in destructive acts but he somehow managed to convince the crowd to disperse peacefully and wait patiently until the appointed day.9 But in fact many were not prepared to wait and later in the evening mobs began throwing stones at trains and yelling at people to get off. After being turned away from attacking a train belonging to the Kaitetsu Line by police officers, the mob headed for the Ginza precinct and began to attack any train that came their way, pelting them indiscriminately with a hail of stones. Eventually, the mob forced a train to stop causing the passengers and driver to flee in terror (Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 6th of September, 1908). There was a blind fury as elsewhere train carriages were set upon, windows smashed and in some cases set on fire. The Jiji Shinpō detailed how a mob moved from Ginza to Shinbashi and set upon a Toden train bound for Ueno. According to the report, a policeman on the scene warned the passengers to flee just in time and within moments it was pelted with stones, and whatever else was to hand, before being pushed off the rails and overturned. There were shouts of banzai and yells of encouragement to keep going. The police, apart from a few significant exceptions (one member of the kenpeitai fired shots in the air) showed relative restraint, knowing full well that any act of overt violence would only fuel the riot.10 A number of trains were unable to run the following day and it led to rickshaw drivers attempting to price-gouge commuting workers. Many refused their exorbitant demands and so they didn’t do as well as they thought they would. In any case, on the 12th, the announcement was made that the fares would forthwith be 4 sen and, to add insult to injury, a special transfer ticket would also need to be bought to move from one line to another. This led to major misunderstandings and disruption on top of everything else that had come before. The outcome of the disturbance was that several ring leaders were arrested, including, with some irony, Matsumoto Chiwaki who was tried and sentenced to three year’s prison. For the government’s part, the Home Ministry under Hara Kei made it abundantly clear that suppression

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was now the official priority and activists would need to resign themselves to being subject to political harassment and constraints of various kinds. More importantly, however, was the fact that the mayhem unleashed on the evening of the 5th of September, 1905, and a year later in 1906 was not solely the result of party political agitation but a more fundamental transformation of the cultural landscape that centred on workers and, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the student population who were often from a better-off background as well. Demographically speaking, there were several new strata of the population that were becoming increasingly empowered and energized, and they had an independent power to channel disaffection and, at times, outright insurrection. As already discussed in relation to the culture of students flocking to Onna Gidayū in the late 1890s, students were capable of generating a particular version of public disruption, but workers were a class of citizenry that presented even more distinctive prospects of activism and social disruption.11 The event that was the most iconic instance of workers pursuing redress for injustices and improved working conditions occurred at the Ashio mine in February of 1907. Situated to the West of Utsunomiya, the capital of Tochigi Prefecture, it was one of the largest in scale in the country, and the site, which housed as many as 35,000 inhabitants, was a full township with a town hall, post office, police station, as well as shops, theatres and brothels. Approximately 23,000 inhabitants were employed in some capacity by the mining company. There were three main pits at Honzan, Tsūdō and Kodaki and there were approximately 1200–1500 workers per pit that actually did the physical work of digging and dislodging the ore that would then be loaded onto electrically powered ‘trucks’ which ferried the ore to the surface. These were the workers that were at the core of the revolt.12 Conditions within the mines were predictably dark, dirty and dangerous, and well-documented by pioneering journalists such as Matsubara Iwagorō. What compounded this unpleasantness was a system of organizing workers based on lodges or hanba (飯場), essentially dormitories with a mess hall where groups of single workers would be domiciled under the supervision of a lodge boss. The lodge bosses were in charge of not only allocating rations and managing recruitment but also organizing rosters and administering payment of wages. They were, somewhat paradoxically, not paid as well as other workers but this they made up for with bribes extracted from the workers who were forced to be sycophantically deferential to these overlords. This pattern was replicated underground where

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the supervisors likewise had direct influence over the work done by individual workers and they too extracted brides for favourable treatment. This routinized humiliation was certainly a major factor in worker resentment and was further exacerbated by the practice of being provided with only cheap imported rice (called “Nanking rice”) and, in the case of injury or illness for more than three days, no rations at all.13 Such conditions were ripe for activists to come in and create associations aiming for the betterment of working conditions and elevation of the status of workers. One of the first such activists who achieved notable success who moved to the Ashio mine was Nagaoka Tsuruzō. He had been a miner most of his adult life and during that time he converted to Christianity and eventually became a missionary. In December of 1903, he took up lodgings at one of the pit lodges on the basis of the “brotherhood” system that gave shelter and food to travelling workers from other areas. Nagaoka stayed for as long as possible on that basis and then joined the mining workforce. Though initially not having much success he found that by holding events where he presented a show of “magic lantern” slides, he was able to address the assembled crowd and convince them of the need to organize to redress grievances. The Greater Japan Workers Association (Dai Nihon Rōdō Dōshikai or Do ̄shikai 同志会 for short), was set up in April of 1904. The aims of the association were not simply to obtain better conditions from the employers but, in part reflecting Nagaoka’s Christian background, to establish a basis for mutual aid and support for the injured or sick. Nagaoka’s impact on the miners in terms of organization was positive and noteworthy but it did not last more than a year. He was issued with a restraining order from the Ashio police station on the 7th of May, which radically curtailed his capacity to engage in public meetings or even be involved in the organization of the Do ̄shikai. On top of the restraining order, Nagaoka had also courted disapproval due to taking a mistress into his household in the guise of a cook. The ensuing void was filled by another activist, Minami Sukematsu, who visited Ashio from the Yūbari mine in Hokkaido the following year and eventually established an Ashio branch of the Greater Japan Society of Devotion to Japanese Labour (Dai Nippon Rōdō Shiseikai or Shiseikai 至誠会 for short) in December of 1906 after moving there with his wife. The Shiseikai, in contrast to the Do ̄shikai, was not oriented so much towards mutual support but rather focused more directly on improving wages and the quality of rations. Both Nagaoka and Minami had close ties with contemporary Socialists such as Sakai Toshihiko and Nishikawa Kojirō at the Heimin

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Shinbun, as well as personal acquaintance with Katayama Sen, the internationally active Communist. But it is noteworthy that the union movement was not driven by these political activists but mineworkers themselves and although the office of the Heimin Shinbun was visited by the authorities after the riot, there was no evidence that they had a part in organizing the actions in Ashio.14 In the lead up to the riot during February of 1907, there was a rather murky jockeying amongst the Shiseikai, the lodge heads and the brotherhood associations that were composed primarily of workers independently. Even Nimura’s celebrated scholarly  account of this phase describes a foment of unrest about wages and working conditions but also creates the impression that there was also a tussle between these entities about who would take the lead to wrestle concessions from the mine owners, the Furukawas. The Shiseikai were in fact in the process of being marginalized and it is possible that when the rioting did commence, it was partly an attempt to encourage action that did not enable the Shiseikai to take the lead. In any case, on the 5th of February, a shift of over a thousand miners at the Tsūdō pit downed tools in the morning and began to attack the supervisor’s shed and the guard posts underground. When the supervisor’s shed was vacated it was blown up with dynamite. The group eventually congregated at the entrance to the mine and meted the same treatment to the inspectorate office at the entranceway. The mines were in fact dotted with the offices of supervisors or patrolmen whose job was to routinely monitor the operation of the mine and snuff out any signs of disruptive behaviour. On the first day, that was more or less the extent of the action and it was considered that possibly that was the end of the matter. On the next day, however, the pattern was repeated but this time the miners ventured above ground to pelt rocks at symbolically offensive offices and the residences of officials. This too subsided and even Nishikawa Kōjirō who had been dispatched to cover the events was to remark that he was surprised at the relative restraint of the miners. Day 3 was yet another matter, as this time the mob swelled considerably and went on a rampage, targeting not only the head of the mine, Minami Teizō (no relation to Minami Sukematsu), but also policemen who were attempting to intervene. To cap it off, a storeroom with inflammable oils was set ablaze and then the storeroom that housed explosives was set on fire igniting massive explosions. The ensuing pandemonium set the backdrop for an all-out spree of brawling and looting. Minami Teizō had managed to hide before being too roughly treated when the mob came to his residence but when he was

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spotted attempting to escape he was captured and then endured a rather severe beating. A particular contempt was reserved for Minami because he was the quintessential Meiji bureaucrat—appointed not based on experience or expertise but on connections. Army personnel were called upon late on the afternoon of the 7th but by the time they had arrived the next day the riot had already subsided.15 So the Ashio Revolt of 1907 is an event that can be discussed in terms of classical notions of class warfare—a nascent proletariat that was learning to rise up and take its place in the international movement of Socialist emancipation. Yet this particular revolt in fact exemplifies the ways in which this event coalesced in some ways with this perception but nonetheless also completely epitomized a very particular Japanese experience of ‘modernization’. As already outlined in Chap.5, there was actually a dynamic emerging in the mine where in fact a certain sector of the workforce were actually in receipt of relatively steady streams of income and were wont to embark on a rather libertine existence which swung from payday to payday. The outbreak of violence was of course in response to claims against the management regarding mine conditions but also a demonstration of the power to make demands, not least of which was the demand to be not treated as second-class citizens. As James Huffman adeptly illustrated in his work on the sub-classes of Meiji Tokyo, the underlings of the working class were increasingly engaged in a process of habilitation where they came to gradually resemble, step by step, the aspirations of the more elevated middle class citizenry. But they were not clearly acculturated, certainly not given opportunities in education beyond the most rudimentary levels.16 Government surveys of factories and factory conditions initiated at the turn of the century intensified following the Ashio Riot, and a significant alteration in the social arrangements around work was brought about by an increase in the relatively paternalistic provision of accommodation and education by companies for their workers, rather than outsourcing the organization of recruitment, payment and accommodation to the lodges. It was arguably the genesis of a practice that would form the basis of life-­ long employment that attracted overseas attention in the post–Second World War period.17 In the wake of the Ashio riot, there were over a 160 convictions but Naraoka and Minami were found innocent. This was indeed a worker-­ driven incident and it was successful in obtaining concessions in wages and the power of lodge heads to act with complete independence was curtailed

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to some degree by integrating the modes of handling wages and rations more firmly within the administration of the company. The pattern of revolt was replicated at other mines at Besshi in Ehime and Yūbari in Hokkaido later in the year with similar characteristics and outcomes.18 Newspaper coverage of the unrest was thorough and, although not unsympathetic to the miners, nonetheless gave off a sense of revulsion at the ferocity of the riot at its worst point. Naturally, it compounded the perceptions of unruliness within the working class, something that had been etched into the consciousness of the urban population during the Hibiya riot and the train fare rise riot of the previous two years. But there was also a broader anxiety that was stoked through reportage on crime of various degrees of seriousness, from petty theft to gruesome murders. One particularly notable criminal incident was the arrest and later conviction of an alleged serial killer, Noguchi Osaburō in May of 1905. Noguchi was originally born with the surname of an Osaka industrialist Takebayashi Yūki but shifted to Tokyo with his mother in 1886 to pursue further study. He enrolled at the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages to study Russian in 1899. While boarding in Tokyo, he became acquainted with a woman Noguchi Sae, the sister of a well-known classical Chinese poet Noguchi Neisai. In 1901, he moved in with the Noguchis and in time took on the surname of his common-law wife Sae. In 1902, he was forced to leave the university due to continuing failed exams but he resorted to forging a fake graduation diploma to deceive his family. In December of 1904, he fell out with his brother-in-law and left the Noguchi home. His situation was financially perilous. The arrest the following year was primarily for the murder of a pharmacist Tsuzuki Tomogorō who Noguchi had killed after luring him to withdraw money for a bogus investment scheme. But it was soon apparent that he may well have been behind the unexplained death of his brother-in-law three days before the murder of Tsuzuki, and possibly even the mysterious murder and mutilation of an 11-year-old boy, Kawai Sosuke, in March of 1902. The theory was that Noguchi had removed the flesh of the buttocks of his victim in the superstitious belief that he would be able to concoct a remedy for the leprosy that his brother-in-law was suffering from. Noguchi was arrested on the 29th of May and just under a year later convicted of Tsuzuki’s murder on 15th May, 1906. He received the death sentence, which was carried out on 2nd July, 1908.19 The trial and conviction was closely followed in the press and Noguchi even struck up an unlikely

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correspondence with the anarchist Ō sugi Sakae who came to visit comrades at the same prison where Noguchi was incarcerated. Another murder that captured intense public attention was the Debakame Incident which occurred on 22nd March, 1908. Sachida Enko, the 25-year-old wife of a telephone exchange manager, was attacked on her way home from a public bath around nine o’clock in the evening and when she did not arrive home her family initiated a search. Her body was discovered in a vacant lot near the bath house where she had been raped and strangled to death. Newspapers reported a series of attacks that had occurred in the area since the previous November, and as many as six separate women had described being followed by two men who variously attempted to overpower the women and drag them to a secluded location. In the event, the police arrested a 35-year-old gardener, Ikeda Kametarō, who was known to be a Peeping Tom frequenting the bath house. It is thought that Ikeda had protruding teeth, “deba” (出歯), and this was combined with the “kame” from his name to coin the popular name for the incident. As a result of this incident deba was turned into a verb debaru (出歯る) and used to describe any kind of lewd or perverted behaviour. Given the precedent of several incidents involving two men working together to attack women, as well as misgivings about the validity of Ikeda’s guilt amongst the local community, there was considerable debate about the innocence of the suspect in the press. In the event, he was convicted of rape and murder in August of 1908 and received a sentence of life imprisonment. This was, rather unusually, commuted to 13 years on appeal.20 Upon his eventual release, Ikeda gave public lectures about his experience and he was even the subject of a popular song. The foregoing incidents became major media sensations and fueled a public fascination with moral torpor while also generating something of a moral panic about conditions in the metropolis of Tokyo. The safety of women was an increasingly salient theme in news commentary and the cohort of male students in the capital figured yet again in these accounts of misdemeanors. A club was even formed amongst certain male students which made it its mission to target female students travelling to and from their places of study. They would follow them and call out proposals to become more ‘intimate’, even on occasion following women to their dormitories and throwing unsubtle messages over the walls for the women to find. Things had become so bad that finally a women-only train was

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established so that female students could travel unmolested—the problem of groping on trains had become that serious.21 The issue of immoral conduct was not limited to male students, as there was increasing anxiety regarding young independent women becoming far too casual in their conduct with their male counterparts, and there were several articles produced which laid out appropriate rules of deportment for women, such as that they should never visit a young man’s apartment alone or, wherever possible, only meet men with a chaperone and have contact with the male students only in public places. Naturally, the Ministry of Education also continued to sound the alarm about the problem of “degeneracy” (daraku, 堕落) within the student body.22 A further sensational incident involving a young woman centred on the daughter of a well-to-do family in Osaka whose daughter named Kiyoko had clandestinely left the family home and travelled to Tokyo to take up study against the family’s wishes. She was apparently a young woman of extraordinary beauty, but with little money and no family to support her she soon fell into prostitution. She also became interested in Christianity and so within a short time she became known as “Bible Kiyoko” and was a noted figure within the sex trade in Tokyo. When news of her reputation reached Osaka, the horrified parents engaged a lawyer to arrange extracting her from her employment arrangement and relocate her back to her home.23 There were, furthermore, other spheres of activity where women were entering the public mainstream with greater independence and opportunities to succeed in areas where they hitherto had not been permitted to venture into. One instance that was highly symbolic of this transition was the reform of theatre to accommodate female actresses—the tradition of female roles in ‘serious’ theatre still being very much the province of male actors in kabuki and there being a thinly veiled assumption that to be a woman in theatre was tantamount to being engaged in the demimonde or worse. From 1906, at the instigation of the literary association, the Bungei Kyōkai「文芸協会」, which included luminaries such as Tsubouchi Shōyō, a call was made for the establishment of a national academy to train actors in the more ‘realistic’ style of drama as seen in the West—this was termed “new theatre” or Shingeki (新劇). Kawagami Otojirō, who had moved into staging of Shakespearean productions such as The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet over the previous five years, was also integral to this initiative. The academy began its intake that year and the artistic movement garnered influential patrons.24

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In 1908, again at Kawakami’s behest, an academy specifically for women was established. There were approximately a hundred applicants, and fifteen were accepted, among them Mori Ritsu the daughter of the noted lawyer Mori Hajime. The public response was dismay but in an interview with the Yorozu Chōhō she stated, “It is utterly disappointing that persons who take up the profession of actor are regarded as being of low class and generally held in contempt by the public.” She also expressed a determination to persevere in her chosen path regardless of the opprobrium she might encounter. Over the ensuing period, young well-educated women continued to enter the academy including graduates of the Miwata High School, which prompted Principal Miwata Masako to lament it as indicative of the “evil social trends of the times”. On the 1st of March, 1911, a brand new national theatre, the Teikoku Gekijō (帝国劇場), was opened with fanfare and was the fruit of long-standing patronage politicians such as Itō Hirobumi and Kinmochi Saionji as well as industrialists such as Shibusawa Ei’ichi and Ō kura Kihachirō. One of the first performances was a performance of ballet, The Waltz of the Flowers from Swan Lake, which in Japanese was entitled Furawaa Dansu (「フラワー・ダンス」). The performance by twenty young women was witnessed by a full house with intense bemusement. In November of 1911, Tsubouchi’s Association sponsored an eight-day season of a potentially controversial play, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (the play that had been regarded as iconic to feminists such as Hiratsuka Raichō). The lead was played by Matsui Sumako, a graduate of the women’s acting academy who by now was also an instructor at the academy. She had gained acclaim for her role in Hamlet in March earlier the same year and the latest production proved to be successful albeit provocative (see Fig. 6.2). She would go on to become something of a legend of early modern theatre, establishing a troupe with her second husband and touring extensively within the country. The actresses who emerged during this period garnered enormous popular interest, particularly amongst young women who began to idolize actresses just as much for their appearance as their artistic abilities. Matsui Sumako was even somewhat notorious for employing plastic surgery to enhance her appearance and developed a new line for her popularity by issuing recordings of her singing.25 As the foregoing parade of crime, misdemeanors, fads and celebrity entertainment continued from the end of the Russo-Japanese onwards, there was of course the steady and seemingly inexorable advance of the Japanese Empire’s moves to incorporate Korea within its orbit. From the

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Fig. 6.2  Image from Ishigami Kinya, Jōyū Jōshi (『女優情史』), Jitsugetsusha, 1929. (Courtesy of the National Diet Library of Japan)

outbreak of war in 1904, the Japanese Imperial Army had occupied the Korean peninsula, and signalled the intent to implement ‘reforms’ to transform Korea on the Japanese model. The implications of this were not fully clear until after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in early September of 1905. The Treaty forced Russia to recognize Japan’s claim to having paramount interests on the peninsula and on the 17th of November, the Japan–Korea Protectorate Treaty was signed and it formalized the status of Korea as essentially subject to tacit Japanese government. In January of 1906, the Korean army was disbanded save a thousand-man garrison in Seoul and the police were informed that their jurisdiction had now passed to a Japanese gendarmerie. Some elements within Korean society used the moment of transition to pursue a reform agenda but the rankling of Japanese hegemony was acute and there were

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guerilla bands that arose that attacked symbolic institutions of occupation and engaged in armed attacks on Japanese forces. Insurgents who were arrested were quickly tried and publicly executed, with the details of these severely repressive measures reported to the home audience in Japan.26 A potentially highly embarrassing episode occurred in June of 1907 when US President Theodore Roosevelt called for a second international conference at the Hague in the Netherlands. The first Hague Convention of 1899 had in fact been convocated in 1899 at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II and aimed to formalize matters such as the rules of war on sea and land as well as conventions for the appropriate treatment of prisoners and the circumscription of certain weapons such as poison gas. The second Hague Convention of 1907 entailed expanding articles dealing with combat at sea as well as establishing a process for international arbitration among combatant nations, although this would only be submitted to voluntarily. It was, in any case, an important forerunner of the League of Nations and the United Nations. The Korean Emperor Gojong secretly sent three emissaries to the Convention to create public debate about the legality of the Japanese Protectorate. They were denied the floor and in desperation one of the delegates committed suicide at the Convention. The Japanese government’s response was to force Emperor Gojung to abdicate on the 17th of July in favour of an heir chosen by the Japanese, Sunjong. On the 24th of July, a second Japan–Korea Protectorate Treaty was concluded that gave the Japanese Resident-General, Itō Hirobumi, the authority to conduct the affairs of state, including the appointment and removal of high-ranking officials.27 The mood within the Japanese Imperial Army was to move towards full annexation—something that in fact Itō did not agree with. Even so, he formally approved plans to annex Korea on the 10th of April 1909, but was then forced to resign by the army on the 14th of July. Itō remained active in the region and on the 26th of October he was assassinated in Harbin by a Korean activist who shot him six times as he was boarding a train at the station. He was not killed outright but succumbed to his wounds soon afterwards. The following year, on the 22nd August, the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910 was signed by the Korean Prime Minister, Ye Wanyong, and the Japanese Minister for the Army, Terauchi Masatake who became the first Governor-General of Korea. The expansion and consolidation of empire abroad was accompanied by a slow and unrelenting drift towards repression at home as well. Miyatake Gaikotsu, who was no stranger to official oversight and

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restrictions found himself once again the target of legal prosecution, this time with the threat of imprisonment. At the beginning of 1904, just before the Russo-Japanese War was about to break out, Miyatake produced an article in the 65th issue of Kokkei Shinbun that outlined the details of a bribery scandal that involved a local police official, Ogi Kinsabu, who allegedly took a bribe to cancel the permit of one transportation company and issue it to another. The article suggested that the Osaka District Prosecutor knew the details but had not acted on the information. The response was immediate—Miyatake was charged under the criminal code with the offence of impugning the honour of a public official. The judgement in the ensuing court case found Miyatake guilty and sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment. Miyatake appealed and while still out on bail continued to fuel the controversy in print. This led to a further charge and, given that it was a repeat offence, he was sentenced to an additional three month’s imprisonment on the 23rd of March. The appeal over the first charge was rejected on the 22nd of April and Miyatake was clearly bound for another stint in prison. By all accounts Miyatake was resigned to the likelihood of this outcome and even held a going-away party two days before he was scheduled to enter the Horikawa Prison in Kyoto, which he referred to as his ‘holiday residence’.28 By this stage, Miyatake had a solid team of editorial assistants and writers who ensured that the Kokkei Shinbun continued to be published and to enjoy, if anything, an increased popularity. One of the assets of the magazine was that it also possessed a coterie of highly skilled illustrators such as Yamamoto Yasujirō who trained within the Kanō school of traditional Japanese painting and Maeno Kazuhiro who was trained in the nishikie lineage of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Their illustrations often graced the front cover of the magazine and they were often ingenious in the concept as much as they were skilfully wrought. The other staple of the magazine’s cover was photographs of attractive young women.29 Following his release on the 5th of August, 1905, Miyatake came up with the idea of finding instances of other publications that had done what he had done but hadn’t been prosecuted for. This was an act of goading officialdom but not committing any legal offence. When the war with Russia finally concluded the Kokkei Shinbun joined almost all other publications in condemning the Portsmouth Treaty and characterizing the provisions as deeply insulting. The 103rd edition of 5th September containing a particularly scathing and sarcastic depiction of the outcome of the deliberations was in turn officially suppressed and withdrawn from sale. On this

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occasion, several other publications, including the Yorozu Cho ̄hō and the Ho ̄chi Shinbun had their production circumscribed from that date. The outpouring of support for these publications was so great that by November the bans had been rescinded and publication could recommence. This was a major victory for the Kokkei Shinbun and other publications, but it was almost certainly not going to be the final word or act from the government in attempting to suppress criticism through the press.30 From March of 1906, Miyatake changed gear somewhat, disbanding the directly owned Tokyo-based operation and giving it over to another publisher, Tōkyōdō. In November he joined a Socialist ‘research group’ which contained a number of local Socialist thinkers and even one of his closest lawyer friends, Hino Kuniaki. The following March, the group became involved in the failed attempt to set up a magazine sponsored between the research group and the Heiminsha, briefly known as Kassatsu (『活殺』).31 On the first of June 1907, Miyatake invested 5000 yen of his personal fortune into a new publication Osaka Heimin Shinbun and from that time the Kokkei Shinbun published the editorial of the new publication’s editor, Morichika Unpei, in its own pages. Going into 1908, Miyatake was clearly developing interests elsewhere and was also tiring of having to continually put out legal fires to keep the publication afloat. The edition published on the 10th of October, No. 173, was labelled the “Suicide Number”, and announced the end of the Kokkei Shinbun. It garnered huge public interest and by the end of the print run had sold above 60,000 copies. As it turned out, it was not the complete end of the Kokkei Shinbun legacy as publication under a new editorship commenced ̄ in early November under the title Osaka Kokkei Shinbun and it would continue to run for approximately two more years.32 Miyatake was a remarkable figure in that he managed to negotiate the whirlpools and shallows of publishing at the time while ostensibly enjoying himself immensely and giving a lot of public figures who deserved it considerable grief. He also embraced what people were thinking and feeling on the street—he knew that ordinary people needed humour as a release and that there was always an audience for the witty and subtly erotic content. The Kokkei Shinbun frequently acknowledged that people had sexual interests, commentating on the new concept of relations based in the Western concept of rabu (ラブ, i.e. “love”) and daring to depict women as being interested in sex, including one front cover illustration

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that featured photographic vignettes of young women with thought bubbles containing photos of athletic young men.33 One of Miyatake’s final literary sorties in the late Meiji period was to publish “A History of Obscene Customs” (Waisetsu Fūzokushi, 『猥褻風 俗史』) in April of 1911. It was in fact a relatively serious overview of differing conceptions of obscenity and sex through different stages of history and across various cultures culminating of course in a comparison of the West and Japan. It was in one sense innocuous and merely pointed out what moral conservatives did not wish to acknowledge—that all people have an interest in sex and sexuality and it is ludicrous to attempt to circumvent this by official dictates. Miyatake particularly laments that the traditional words for male and female genitalia, dankon (男根) and inmon (陰門) were being discouraged from being used with the more neutral seishokki (生殖器) preferred in public communication—one government official advocating the use of the Sanskrit terms in katakana. Miyatake highlights how sexual themes and icons were an integral part of Japan’s pre-Meiji culture, with copious instances of where they appeared in Shinto shrines and featured in festivals.34 Waisetsu Fūzokushi also signaled a burgeoning interest of Miyatake in more academic pursuits, and indeed it is from the end of the Meiji period that he became more active as something of an amateur archivist, eventually becoming noted for traversing the country in search of increasingly rare published materials, including newspapers and magazines, that had fallen out of circulation or were being discarded. He would eventually become a founding member of the Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai which included Yoshino Sakuzō, Osatake Takeki and Ishii Kendō.35 Even so, the tide of resentment from conservative cultural forces was mounting and it would be concerted responses from various quarters, the police, the Ministry of Education, the Home Ministry and various legal institutions, that would target more vigorously the political movements of Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism. They were targeted, on the one hand, because they drew adherents who were increasingly prepared to counter the government through violence. They were also targeted because they all shared strong links in terms of promoting individual freedom and the right to personal pleasure—this was a challenge to the narrative that a citizen’s greatest obligation was to subsume their personal life in the service of the Emperor and nation. Anything inimical to that would become the focus of concerted official action to forcibly suppress and destroy it.36

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Accordingly, the High Treason Incident of 1910 was the apogee of suppression of ‘dissident’ activities within the country. While there were indeed figures involved who were following a Socialist or Anarchist programme, and that programme included recourse to violence against the monarchy, the aims and impact of the arrest, prosecution and execution of the twelve was very much an emphatic blow in the service of a culture war. In the period prior to the rounding up and arrest of the suspects, there were commentators in the leading newspapers and influential magazines such as Taiyō that sounded alarm at the nefarious influence of Western thought and the need to return to a nation-focused morality. After the conviction and execution of the twelve ‘traitors’, these expressions of concern became at once more shrill and intense. Inoue Tetsujirō, famous for his treatise on the Imperial Rescript on Education published in 1891, which advocated reverence for the Emperor and devotion to the nation, had already been vocal in his condemnation of foreign influences that undermined respect for the traditional familial system and reverence for ancestors. In the November issue of Taiyō he argued, referring explicitly to Kōtoku Shūsui, that adopting Socialist thought was a betrayal of one’s country. He even went so far as to state that Naturalism, as expressed in contemporary literature, was just as bad even though it might seem innocuous on the surface. In this way, Inoue had in a sense established the basis for identifying ‘thought crimes’.37 The other “ism” singled out for opprobrium was “individualism”. Figures such as Ō tsuka Yasuji, a Professor specializing in aesthetics at the Tokyo Imperial University, and Toda Kaiichi who taught economics at Kyoto Imperial University, published opinion pieces in Taiyo ̄ that placed individualism and Socialism on the same level as being noxious to Japanese society. In January of 1912 Kawakami Hajime, at that time merely an Assistant Professor at Kyoto Imperial University, summed up the mood of the times as one where the majority of Japanese citizens saw service to the Japanese nation as trumping all other priorities, necessitating that any other credo, from Socialism to Anarchism to Individualism, could in no way be tolerated. In the same month, the Minister for Education stated in the January 26th edition of the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun that he was “overwhelmed with concern” and felt an urgent need to restore “health to the people’s thinking” by promoting the Imperial Rescript on Education. There were increasingly strident calls to penalize persons who continued to advocate pernicious foreign schools of thought and to root out offending publications from within libraries.38

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Overall, then, the effect of the High Treason Incident was to put fear into the community of writers, performers, publishers and artists. Kōtoku Shūsui was known personally and regarded as a friend by many in the literary world, including Nagai Kafū, who watched in horror as their friends and acquaintances were subjected to the ultimate penalty, death. Literature was increasingly becoming the focal point for contestation between personal experience and life as a citizen. By the end of the century, ‘Zola fever’ had swept through the literati and some predictably free and frank treatments of human passion were being depicted. There were critics, as Poch covers in detail, who lamented the obsession with the “small” matter of individual romantic associations, where the “great” matters of personal responsibility and duty to the country were apparently ‘crying out’ to be addressed in literature. Few serious writers saw this as a problem but there were certainly critics such as Takayama Chogyū who would not hesitate to rail against the best writers of the day.39 A further dynamic to the literature at this juncture was the interplay, if not contradiction, between sentiments of attachment to pre-Restoration locales—particularly Edo as opposed to Tokyo—and a recognition of how this was being obliterated before everyone’s eyes. In her exceptionally insightful article Kawakami Chiyoko takes the distinction between the dualcharacter of Edo—the distinction between Yamanote and the lower-­class Shitamachi—and traces how this finds expression correlated in the literary output of the late nineteenth century. Izumi Kyōka again figures as one of the most emphatically contrarian exponents of short stories and narratives that completely embrace a continuity of Edo tropes—the ghost figure in particular. Yamanote is the Other, and she rather ingeniously demonstrates how  typically  Izumi in  the short stories that begin to emerge from this period gradually refined the tension between a ‘new model’ Yamanote scion with a supernatural figure who represents emphatically the rejected parties of the Restoration—beggars, masseurs, prostitutes and entertainers.40 Nagai Kafū also presents as an intriguing challenge to the new Japan based on his status as an inveterate flaneur and extoller of the Edo legacy. Recent research has indeed gone quite some way to rectify a perception that Nagai was just a person ‘living in the past’. As Rachael Hutchinson argues, Nagai used his extended period of habituation in Europe and the United States not only to refine his criticism of the way that the Meiji government was attempting to define contemporary society (in terms of a series of blind and misinformed adaptations of Western norms) but also strive to define or suggest what a more genuinely Japanese response might

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be.41 Literature had become the nexus of contestation between an aesthetic that served empire versus an aesthetic that could accept the validity of personal experience and emotion. Certainly as Poch suggests, emotion, and romantic emotion in particular, had ceased to be “licentious” as such by the early twentieth century. But it only be characterized ‘decadent’ by those who could be satisfied by the twentieth century correlate to kanzen choaku (“reward good and punish evil) —love of Emperor and service to the nation, anything else is treachery.42 There were some who tried to fight back. In March of 1915, Natsume Sōseki had an article entitled “My Individualism” (「私の個人主義」) published in a special volume with contributions from eighty-one writers which aimed to raise funds in support of the electoral campaign of Baba Kochō (Kochō Baba Katsuya Shi Rikko ̄ho Kōen Gendai Bunshu ̄, 『孤蝶馬 場勝弥氏立候補後援現代文集』) in the upcoming elections. It was actually originally the text of a speech that had been made to the students of Gakushūin University, as already alluded to, the bastion of privilege and elite connections. With an extraordinary frankness he disagreed with the assertion that individualism by definition was a threat to the nation. He suggested it was not inimical to national well-being and was in fact essential to human happiness. He raises the example of Britain, a society where individualism is highly prized, as demonstrating that such was the case. He further argues that it is only when individualism is promoted without a sense of one’s responsibilities or obligations that the kinds of ill-effects imagined by “certain persons” (a dig at the likes of Inoue Tetsujirō) arise. He even specifically rejected the position of the Principal of the Tokyo Normal High School, Kanō Jigorō, who had been stridently criticizing the impact of individualism in education and advocating the importance of the Imperial Rescript. As a former teacher, Sōseki was somewhat qualified to comment on the matter. As a writer, within an increasingly hostile cultural climate, it was extraordinarily well-reasoned and brave.43 As these internal contradictions continued to intensify during the period under consideration, there were of course other developments in technology and daily life that would be transformative and iconic of Japan’s ‘modernity’. The Singer Sewing Machine Company set up shop in Japan and transformed both the availability and uptake of their machines.44 Ajinomoto, the seasoning that became as ubiquitous as salt and pepper, was first marketed and sold from July of 1909, with Mitsuya Cider also being promoted as a more “fashionable” alternative to Japan’s take on lemonade, Ramune (ラムネ) from July 1907. Advertising, of the

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wall-to-­wall character that has typified the modern period, was intensified with the introduction of commercial material inside city trains.45 As concerns industrial and military technology, Japan was attempting to keep abreast of the latest advances internationally. The progress in the development of the Zeppelin airship was closely monitored and a research group was established in Japan in August of 1909. Submarine technology was adopted in the military, with a tragic accident capturing national attention in April of 1910. And of course the achievements of the Wright brothers in developing self-powered aircraft ignited the public imagination, with each advance and improvement in distances flown and speed being achieved reported. Naturally, there was a drive to create a domestic development programme and this bore fruit in December of 1910 when two Japanese aviators, Hino Komazu (1878–1946) and Tokugawa Yoshitoshi (1884–1963), who had trained in France, succeeded in staging flights at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, with Tokugawa making the first powered flight on 19th December, 1910.46 Consequently, the end of the Meiji period, when it came with the passing of the Meiji Emperor on the 30th of July 1912, saw Japan at the peak of its empire building and ongoing significant achievements in commerce and industry despite significant intensification of internal contradiction within the domestic sphere of culture and letters. As a history of the ensuing Taishō period would demonstrate, there was a successful movement to reassert the rights of the citizenry and the validity of culture within civil society that was not purely devoted to the service of nation. But a dynamic of internal cultural contradiction and antagonism was never fully resolved, and it would indeed remain an issue to deal with in time to come. An account of the end of the Meiji period would not be complete without reference to the final act of General Nogi Maresuke who, at the time of the Emperor’s death, was still the President of Gakushūin University. General Nogi had devoted himself to public service well after retiring from the Imperial Japanese Army, particularly assisting in the raising of funds and establishment of facilities for returned servicemen or the widowed families of servicemen who died during the recent wars. He even campaigned to have a monument erected at Port Arthur to commemorate the Russian dead. Following the death of the Emperor Meiji, Nogi wound up his affairs and prepared to make one of the most emphatic statements of loyalty he could make, ritual suicide, or junshi (殉死). On the 13th of September Nogi, along with his wife Shizuko, took their own lives according to the traditional protocols, Nogi performing seppuku after ‘assisting’

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his wife to end her life. The reports in the newspapers expressed profound shock and many commentators were aghast. Some speculated that it was in part a protest at the increasing degeneracy of the Japanese populace. As it turned out, it was an extraordinary instance of following the pre-­modern tenets of Bushidō that, as we saw in the foregoing, was becoming the lynch pin of nationalist ideology. At the same time, however, it was also in part understandable on a very human level given the course of his military career and personal circumstances. Nogi had witnessed thousands go forth to their deaths at his orders, and he had also lost two sons in the previous war. In the letter that he left behind, he explicitly indicated that he was indeed in part expiating failures in his career, the loss of the Emperor’s flag during the Seinan War being one of them, but also the enormous loss of life that had occurred during his tenure at High Command. He was widely mourned and regained the greater respect of the people who had already held him in high esteem. The impact of Nogi’s suicide can also be related to the world of letters as both Mori Ō gai and Natsume Sōseki were profoundly influenced by the event. In Bargen’s research, which has explored the relevance of Nogi’s suicide to both authors, she suggests that in the case of Ō gai he penned a series of works that deal with thematics that can be traced to the death of Nogi. Okitsu Yagoemon no isho (The Last Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon, 1912 & 1913) and Sahashi Jingoro ̄ (1913) both use historical settings to explore the nature of how performing seppuku following a major indiscretion can be something that can be held in abeyance, either unwillingly in the case of the former and with somewhat ambivalence in the case of the latter. Sakai Jiken (The Incident at Sakai 1914) deals directly with the episode just prior to the Meiji Restoration where samurai who had attacked French sailors near Sakai killing eleven in all were in turn commanded to publicly perform seppuku—which occurred with horrified French observers in attendance. Sōseki’s Kokoro (1914), released in the same year as the speech on individualism to the Gakushūin students, very explicitly refers to Nogi’s suicide and contains two characters, husband and wife, who would seem very much to be correlates to General Nogi and his wife Shizuko (the wife’s name in the novel is “Shizu”).47 As Jay Rubin’s analysis of Sōseki’s emerging views on life and death, and indeed junshi, indicates, there was no simple endorsement of suicide as the last recourse of a reflective life—Sōseki clearly believed that individual existence should be pursued, and that life had intrinsic worth despite the struggle it might entail. Ō gai was also not advocating junshi as such. It would seem that

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both authors found Nogi’s precedent as something profoundly unsettling and in need of processing and responding to. Death, in this case, was not so much a biological proposition as an aesthetic one, with serious moral questions thrown in to boot. The response to Nogi’s suicide in the press had predictably been almost uniformly one of surprise combined with awe, but there was one intellectual who dared to speak quite unambiguously in critical terms of the appropriateness of junshi in the modern age. Tanimoto Tomeri, a professor specializing in education at Kyoto Imperial University, published a lengthy commentary in the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun on the 17th of September. His tone in places could be characterized as quite derisive—he refers to Nogi as “Nogi-san” —and he made no bones about the fact that, although he could fail to be impressed by the act itself, he did not think of Nogi as a particularly admirable person and regarded the gesture of seppuku essentially meaningless. To be fair, there had been some cautious discussion in critical terms regarding junshi in earlier reportage. Soon after the passing of the Emperor the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun on the 10th of August ran a comment on the sporadic incidents of junshi occurring in various parts of the country, describing it as a ‘retrograde custom” (弊風) that shouldn’t be emulated. After the suicide of Nogi, the same publication continued to make some comment revealing ambivalence but Nogi’s act was described as “the flower of loyalty to the Emperor and love of country”.48 Tanimoto argued that historically junshi had been outlawed alongside acts of revenge and “scarcely something to be esteemed”. But to these comments were added disparaging comments about Nogi’s lack of education and other faults. It came as no surprise that Tanimoto was dismissed from his post at Kyoto University and he had to make a living thereafter as an occasional lecturer at Ryūkoku University and journalistic work for the Osaka Mainichi. In contrast to Tanimoto, Niitobe Inazō, the eminent educator and author of Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, spoke of General Nogi’s excellent character and achievements, and concludes that he was an exemplar of both a profound devotion to duty and a deep concern for the people who had followed him in war and died.49 But certainly this degree of unqualified praise was not reflective of the genuine complexity of the issues in play and it was perhaps even a surprise that Niitobe, a baptized Christian, did not display a particularly strong sense of ambiguity about the merits of junshi. As seen above, Ō gai and Sōseki found it necessary to devote substantial energy to coming to terms with the implications of this level of

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self-sacrifice. On a broader social level, it would have profound implications for the vision of the Japanese people as “heimin”—commoners, but also citizens in common—as opposed to “kokumin” whose identity as citizens would be defined primarily in terms of duty to the nation and empire.

Notes 1. One of the most thorough reviews of the High Treason Incident and its diverse facets can be found in Gavin and Middleton (eds.), Japan and the High Treason Incident, Routledge, 2013. For contemporary reportage on the fate of Kōtoku Shūsui see Nakayama (1982, Vol. 14, 106 & 109). 2. Yorozu Chōho ̄, March 27, 1908. 3. Jiji Shinpō, 15 September, 1907. 4. Jiji Shinpō, 1908, 29 March. In a further irony, Hiroko married the son of Field Marshall Nozu Michitsura and General Nogi was the official intermediary. In the international event, she came in at sixth place (Suzuki (ed.), 1995, 259. 5. For a comprehensive review of female Anarchist and Socialist activists see Seto (2016, 30–49). 6. Jiji Shinpō, 23 June, 1908, original reportage is in Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 228–234); see also Seto (2016, 32–33). 7. Seto (op. cit., 33–34). 8. See reports from the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 8 March & 16 March; also reportage of the Jiji Shinpo ̄ dated 12 March, 1906, as per Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 157–160). 9. The amalgamation of the three companies was announced in the Chugai Sho ̄gyo ̄ Newspaper on 2 August, 1906. The major demonstration and Matsumoto’s central role in it was covered in detail in the Jiji Shinpō, 6 September 1906. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 160–162). 10. Graphic descriptions of the violence and police response were reported in the Jiji Shinpō and Tokyo Asahi Shinbun on 6 September, 1906. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 162–164). 11. One of the most thorough reviews of the demographics of those involved in social unrest during this period can be found in Andrew Gordon’s “The Crowd and Politics in Imperial Japan 1905–1918” in Past and Present, Oxford University Press, 1988, Vol. 121, 141–170. 12. Nimura and Gordon (1997, 21–24). 13. Ibid., 69–70, and 78–80. 14. Ibid., 108–109. 15. Ibid., 99–108.

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16. See Huffman, Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan, University of Hawaii Press, 2018, particularly the concluding chapter. 17. The transition from indirect to direct management of the workplace entailed some rather idiosyncratic measures by the management that fore-­ shadow, directly at least, some of these later practices. See Gordon (1985, 38–69). 18. Nimura and Gordon (op. cit., 145–148). 19. The course of events and the details of the crime were followed closely. particularly in the Jiji Shinpo ̄ and the Tōkyō Asahi Shinbun. See Jiji Shinpo ̄ reports on the 3rd and 7th of July, 1905, also Tok̄ yō Asahi Shinbun commentary on the 4th and 6th of July 1905, and the 20th of March, 1906, as per Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 284–288). 20. For coverage of the breaking story see Tok̄ yō Nichinichi Shinbun, 24th of March, 1908 and regarding the record of previous attacks on women see To ̄kyō Asahi Shinbun, 25th of March 1908. The Kokumin Shinbun in its 16th of April edition claimed that Ikeda was in fact innocent. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 294–299). 21. One of the most comprehensive accounts of the experience of the common citizen on public transport can be found in Alisa Freedman’s Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road, Stanford University Press, 2011. The problem of sexual harassment continued unabated. On 28 January, 1912, the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun reported the advent of “flower trains” (花電車), which were reserved exclusively for women. For original newspaper commentary see Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 158 & 243–250). 22. Meguro (2014, 21–24). 23. Nihon, October 31, 1907. 24. Kurata (1980, 110–115). 25. Ibid., 165–177. 26. These incidents began to intensify soon after the end of the Russo-­Japanese War with Japanese nationals being attacked and guerilla activities becoming more common. See Kokumin Shinbun, 16 and 18 February, 18 March 18, 1906. 27. See Osaka Mainichi Shinbun, 17 July, 1907, about the impact on the Japanese delegation and Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, 18 July, 1907, regarding the emissaries’ suicide. 28. Yoshino (2012, 168–178). 29. Ibid., 166–168. 30. Ibid., 183–192. 31. The publication was finally relaunched by another publisher, Kassatsu Dōjinsha from May of 1907. 32. Yoshino (op. cit., 202–204).

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33. Re women dreaming see Kokkei Shinbun for (5th September, 1903, no. 56) in Akasegawa Genpei & Yoshino Takao (eds.), 1989, Vol. 2, 317. 34. Miyatake, in the 1911 edition, pages 1–29. Reproduced in the Miyatake Gaikotsu Chosakushū (5), 1985. 35. He would eventually become a founding member of the Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai which included Yoshino Sakuzō, Osatake Takeki and Ishii Kendo as well as the curator of the Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunkō collection housed at Tokyo Imperial University. 36. Tsukamoto (2021, 1–10). 37. Ibid., 3–4. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. Poch (2020, 187–189). 40. Kawakami (1999, 559–583). 41. Hutchinson (2001, 195–213). See also Stephen Snyder’s Introduction to Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafu ̄. 2000, 1–7. 42. Poch (op. cit., 179–191). 43. Tsukamoto (op. cit., 5–10). 44. See Kokumin Shinbun, March 15, 1902, regarding set up of the Singer shop in Ginza and Jiji Shinpo ̄ April 5, 1907 regarding the introduction of a monthly payment system  as per  Suzuki (1995, Vol. 8, 240). Andrew Gordon has covered the history of the sewing machine in Japan in Fabricating Consumers : the Sewing Machine in Modern Japan, University of California Press, 2012. 45. Re Ajinomoto, see Chu ̄gai Sho ̄gyo ̄ 22 July, 1909, for Mitsuya Cider see Chūgai Shōgyo ̄ 14 July, 1907. Advertising inside city trains was for the time a novel innovation—see Jiji Shinpō, 9 October, 1909. See Suzuki (1995, Vol. 9, 61 & 64). 46. See Ho ̄chi Shinbun, 22 August, 1909 regarding the establishment of the research group. The submarine accident was covered in extensive detail in the Jiji Shinpō, 17 April, 1910. The Wright’s new speed record was covered in the Jiji Shinpō, 1 August, 1909, Regarding Hino and Tokugawa’s flights see Yorozu Chohō, 15 December, 1910, and Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun 20 December, 1910.  Original articles in  Suzuki (1995, Vol. 9, 129–136). 47. Regarding Ō gai’s junshi stories see Bargen, 2006, 85–121, re Sakai Jiken, 122–159, and regarding Soseki’s Kokoro 159–188. 48. Tokyo Asahi Shinbun published on the 16th of September, 1912. 49. See the To ̄kyō Asahi Shinbun, 18th of September, 1912. For original text of  the various opinions expressed  at the time see  Suzuki (1995, Vol. 9, 297–304).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

The period covered in this volume extends merely twenty-two years, and yet what a great deal was attained during that time, and what a bewildering array of transformations occurred at so many levels. As stated at the outset, it was the leap from plucky underdog to member of the Great Power club that presents the most striking achievement of Japan as an aspiring nation amongst nations in an avowedly imperialist epoch. Not even commentators from Europe and North America knew quite what to make of this development. But as we have also seen in the foregoing, every stage of this advance came with a cost, a cost to the Japanese citizenry and a cost to the peoples neighbouring the Japanese Empire. If there is one salient observation to make regarding Japan during this period from the point of view of cultural history, it is that every stage of ‘progress’, every stage of further advancing the Empire seemed to bring greater and greater tensions and contradictions. Ameliorating those tensions and contradictions was imperative, but as the deeply entrenched resentments that burst forth at the riots in Tokyo in 1905 and 1906, as well as the tumult unleashed at the Ashio mine in 1907 reveal, the government was presented with intractable resistance and seemed incapable of mollifying it without resorting to force. The High Treason Incident of 1910, in certain regards, indicated rather poignantly a desperation and brutality in response to the intensification of that resistance. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8_7

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To be sure, the sense of service to the realm and indeed a devotion to the betterment of Japanese society was evident in many instances of public service. Nogi’s following the Meiji Emperor in death through suicide accords with a perception that duty was something worn heavily by many who devoted their energies to Empire, but it also highlighted the gap between what every healthy body politic needs—a means to escape Empire when its demands become too great. Cultural elites, spanning from academia and government ministries, especially the Ministry of Education, to the Meiji Bundan, argued for an elevated social mission for culture and the arts and yet seemed rather clueless about how to harness the emotions and energy of ordinary people. Their exhortations were, overall, humourless and austere, in some cases perhaps unwittingly ludicrous. One factor that induced this moribund response was the persistent denigration of the popular traditions of arts and entertainment that were the life blood of people’s everyday experience of culture and understanding of who they were. As hopefully amply illustrated in this volume, it was the persistence of these traditions, albeit in evolved forms, that formed the bedrock of a new national culture and civil identity—often despite official discouragement or circumscription. The serialized novels of the 1880s to the 1890s were profoundly infused with conventions or late Edo novel writing and intertwined with performative practices such as kōdan and rakugo, richly complemented in turn by sashie that grew out of the mastery of line, form and contrast developed by nishikie artists. It was the amalgam of these new cultural forms that contributed to the vitality of printed commentaries and illustrated accounts that were co-opted into the service of fanning patriotic fervour during the Sino-Japanese War. And certainly there were new energies that were unleashed by the likes of Kawakami Otojirō in theatre before and during that conflict which, as we saw with Kawakami’s adaptation of Izumi Kyōka’s works, promised new vital connections between literature and theatre. The post Sino-Japanese War period  saw further invigoration of popular performance and entertainments, as exemplified by the stellar rise of female gidayū performers. As already suggested, this was the flowering of the first purely Meiji generation—born either after the Restoration or too soon before it to have any meaningful sense of a pre-Meiji society. Theirs was at times a culture expressed through recklessness and abandon, but it was an energy that arguably could have been harnessed more positively in time. One further factor for the curtailing of a healthier accommodation of the vigour of youth and embracing of the human need for humour and

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release was the persistent discourse of needing to ‘emulate the West’. This was of course a very loaded concept. It entailed at various turns an intense disparaging of the very traditions that were most likely to provide the impetus for an organically formed and emotionally meaningful culture shared in the public realm amongst the citizenry. But as the early escapades of the Rokumeikan and the later rather shambolic attempts of exponents of kabuki to transform it into a form of ‘modern theatre’ rather sharply indicate, you could not present rather facile replications of Western social and cultural norms nor promote rather bowdlerized versions of the traditional arts and hope to gain the hearts and minds of the people. And this, as we saw, was not a tendency that receded at all throughout the Meiji period. The establishment of a rotunda in Hibiya park for the performance of military band music and Western opera in 1905, along with the attempts to replicate ‘serious drama’ through productions at the Teikoku Gekijō in 1911 reveal an internal disjunct and tension that never quite gave way, even amongst those who intended to be quite innovative. It was this constant scourge of having to cloak innovation in ‘improvement’, or the promotion of ‘civilization’, that led to such missteps. The relative effusiveness of popular culture in the late 1890s was to encounter a rather sombre pall as the (apparently) inevitable showdown with Russia increasingly became a distinct practical prospect. As was illustrated by the increasingly sombre tone and presentation of the Yamato Shinbun even in 1903 indicates, there was foreboding, and it wasn’t so much just the foreboding of expecting another national struggle through armed conflict, but a gnawing suspicion that political and military elites expected the people to simply pay the high price, to sacrifice unflinchingly in a way that was ‘worthy of empire’, without any indication of a realization of what such sacrifices actually entail, especially for the people who would end up bearing the brunt of the consequences of such military adventures. In the Russo-Japanese War, the youth of Japan did sally forth valiantly into the path of almost certain death, but the only consolation that the grim-faced generals could offer was an exhortation to go forth yet again and almost certainly die albeit as true sons of the Empire, adherents to the ethos of Bushidō, loyal servants of the Emperor. It was indeed World War Zero in that, in a very Japanese sense, and without often putting it into so many words, the Japanese people realized their leaders were in fundamental regards clueless about how to conduct a modern war beyond cloaking it in a pre-modern ethos and, practically speaking, indifferent to the consequences of conducting war that very way. It could be

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suggested that Yosano Akiko in her poem “Brother, Do Not Give Your Life” got away with her utterly front-on rebuttal of the imperative to die meekly for the Emperor precisely for these reasons. The response to the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 was indicative of how flammable popular sentiments were—it didn’t take much, despite the fact that Japan had gained much both in terms of international prestige and in terms of expansion of a recognized sphere of influence and resources in Korea and Manchuria. But anything less than a repeat of the spectacular gains of the Sino-Japanese War was regarded as an affront and things would never quite be the same again. The emergence of Tōchūgen Kumoemon’s enormous popularity as a naniwa-bushi performer—a performer with great charisma and a fanatical popular following—was nonetheless couched in such a slavish concentration on classical bushi themes, the tale of the 47 rōnin in particular, that it is hard not to feel a certain disappointment in the degree to which popular performance had become subservient to the very themes that people should have been suspicious of and resisted. Part of the success of course lay in the public buying into the official account that victory over the Russians had been a spiritual victory, rooted most fundamentally in distinct Japanese values and Bushidō. As we saw with Miyatake Gaikotsu, there were those who saw the ironies, the idiocy of pretending that humans were other than what they generally are—not perpetually teeth-gritting devotees of empire but creatures seeking a peaceful life and a modicum of sensual pleasure. Given the very real injuries he suffered for the cause of keeping such realities front and centre in his publications, we may rather marvel that he managed to keep doing it for so long. Clearly there was popular support—signs of recognition and affirmation from the readership that would have reassured him that he was on the right track and perhaps made him persevere despite so much official harassment for so long. But even Miyatake, from around the time of the High Treason Incident, along with so many other publishers and writers, had to step back and take stock of the kinds of sacrifices they were prepared to make in order to maintain that stance. The impetus for change beyond this point of impasse was ironically in fact partly technological. Media such as photographs, sound recording devices and cinematic recordings revealed, in an embryonic form at first, the possibility of private consumption of images, sounds and performances. There would still be censorship—but ironically it was of less interest to the censor if a recording either audial or visual was being consumed

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in the privacy of the home; this was the province of the wealthy in any case and clearly that automatically implied, in the initial stages at least, the ‘better bred’. But as we saw with Matsui Sumako, the persons providing content and the media production companies they worked for, generated commodities and communities of consumers that were even harder to regulate than more traditional pictorial or print media. All this suggests yet another expansion of the gap between government and the people, as popular culture through new media developed new audiences, and the government continued to devote itself to the practice of attempting to manufacture mass compliance through the interventions of the Ministry of Education and repressive edicts from the Home Ministry. It has already been suggested that the years following the end of the Meiji period actually attenuated some of the contradictions and disjunctures that had come to a head towards the end of that reign. Under the Home Minister, Hara Kei, some fairly draconian and indifferent responses to civil disquiet were carried out, especially in the case of the public resistance to the raising of train fares in Tokyo in 1906. But Hara was in fact insightful and became a force for improvement in public administration as he rooted out nepotistic appointments and sought to populate the civil service with competent personnel. In certain ways, his crowning achievement of becoming the first Prime Minister that also was the head of the most dominant party in the Diet in 1918 was extraordinary indeed. The Japanese polity had evolved and matured. Nevertheless, the event that seems to have  unequivocally punctured that achievement was the Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. Something more profoundly subterranean in the national psyche seems to have been activated out of that particular disaster. For example, the utterly inexplicable and indefensible murder of the anarchist Ō sugi Sakae and the Feminist Itō Noe when they were in detention. Apparently a spontaneous act at the hands of the police, it revealed in certain ways the depth of the late Meiji legacy. The ensuing ultra-nationalism was in fact a re-activating of a maniacal devotion to nation and Emperor—a rejection of dissent that was already well and truly apparent at the end of the Meiji period in the High Treason trials. In a sense, the shadow of the legacy of the Russo-Japanese War was long indeed. It was also rooted in two ‘traditions’ that contained inherent contradictions. First, the universalization of bushidō for all military servicemen, indeed by extension the populace as a whole, clashed with the fact

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that bushido was originally an ethos and moral code that only applied to samurai and was never intended to apply to other castes. Second, the Confucianism that was promoted through the Imperial Rescript on Education, and thereafter expanded upon as a code of conduct for all loyal subjects, was in fact a departure from the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy that had been current up until the Meiji Restoration. And there was also a degree of contradiction in the sense that the intellectual tradition regarded as most appropriate to create the model for popular instruction was classically Chinese despite the fact the Restoration had ostensibly been very precisely about reinvesting the Imperial Household in the Nativist tradition of Shinto. The conservative ideologues and associations that sprang up from the 1890s through the early 1900s did not disappear during the Taishō period but in fact consolidated and bided their time. Their opportunity would be found in national calamity, the rise of threats within and without, which would seem to justify the subjugation of the individual citizen to the State. But as Natsume Sōseki so eloquently argued in his address to the Gakushuin University students, Japan needed to find a way to preserve individual dignity and promote mutual respect, to leave space for individual happiness alongside the promotion of the interests of the nation. This was not a capitulation to “decadence”. In the foregoing, we have seen a vast array of artistic practices and modes of dissemination that revealed a remarkable vitality. In each case, these were instances of endorsing the happiness and amusement of ordinary people—the life actually lived rather than the life that one was supposed to be living. That vitality was never entirely extinguished even at the height of the militarism that led to the Pacific War, and be it the persistence of distinctively Japanese stylistic tropes in modern literature, the preservation of traditional pre-modern theatrical traditions such as kabuki or even the continued appeal of popular comedy as evidenced by Yoshimoto Shinkigeki (established in 1912) or Manzai,—these all have origins that can be traced to the late Meiji period where the ‘business end’ of refurbishing pre-Meiji cultural traditions took place, and it was pursued with remarkable adaptability and inventiveness.

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Index1

A Acting, female actresses, 175 Adolphe D’Ennery Michel Strogoff co-written with Jules Verne, The Capture of Peking (La Prise da Peking), 81, 82 Advertising, introduction of commercial material inside city trains, 183, 184 Aikokushin (愛国心), 127, 129, 131 Ajinomoto, 183 Akiyama Teisuke, 115, 125 Anarchism, 22, 165, 180, 181 Arthur Diosy, the Japan Society, 119 Asahi Shinbun, 84 Asakusa-Za, 82, 83 Ashio copper mine, 23, 122 Ashio mine hanba (飯場), 168 “brotherhood” system, 169 Ashio Revolt of 1907 Minami Teizō, 171 Ashio Riot, 161, 171

B Baseball, 87, 151 Battle of Tsushima, 148–149 Baudelaire, Charles, 5 Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), 5 Beardsley, Aubrey, John the Baptist in his Salome series, 5, 15 Beerboem, Max, 120 Beiyang Fleet, 75, 79 Bernhardt, Sarah, 118, 120 Besshi mine in Ehime, 172 Bicycle, 86, 87, 93n45 Bigot’s, Georges, 89, 93n48 Bitō Itchō (1847 - 1928), 22, 129–131 Hokushin Jihen Dan (北清事変談), 129, 130 Nisshin Sensō Dan (日清戦争 談』), 129 Blue Stockings, 161 Boshin War, 7, 8, 62 Boxer Rebellion, 104, 127–130, 132

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Swale, A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43646-8

207

208 

INDEX

Bubonic plague, 88 Bundan Shōmakyō (「文壇照魔 鏡」), 101 Bungei Kurabu (『文芸倶楽部』), 35 Bungei Kyōkai「文芸協会」, 174 Bungei Kyōshinkai (『文芸共 進会』), 35 Bunmei kaika, Akire Gaeru (Frog Fed Up with Modernity), 7 Bunmei Zasshi Bimyō Zasshi, 47 Dōtoku Zasshi, 47 Shinri Zasshi, 47 Tonchi Zasshi, 47 Bushidō, 127, 142, 144, 151, 152, 185, 186, 193–196 C Censorship Newspaper Ordinances, 165 Chikushō (蓄妾), 116 Chingaku, Awashima, 9 Cholera, 88, 89 Chōya Shinbun, 3, 10, 46 Christianity “brotherhood”, 169 Chūo ̄ Shinbun, 81, 82 Chūshingura (the tale of the loyal forty-seven rōnin), 22 Conan-Doyle, Arthur, 36 Conder, Josiah, 10, 80 Convention of Tientsin, 66 D Dan-Kiku Kairiku Renshō Asahi no Mihata (『海陸連勝日 章旗』), 83 Debakame Incident Ikeda Kametarō, debaru (出歯る), 173 Defoe, Daniel, 111 Robinson Crusoe, 111

“Degeneracy” (daraku, 堕落), 174 Department stores Daimaru, 152 Mitsukoshi, 151 Shirokiya, 151 Detective novels, 36, 38, 46, 57n17 Dickens, Charles, 6 Ding Ru-chang (Beiyang Fleet), Admiral, 79 Dodoitsu (versified limericks), 29 Dokufumono, 39 E Eiri Chōya Shinbun, 3, 4, 10, 53 Eiri Jiyū Shinbun, 3, 10, 13–15, 42, 53 Emancipation Edict of 1872, 113 Enomoto Takeaki Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, 122 Third Mine Pollution Order, 122 Environmental pollution, 124 Etō Shinpei, 18, 62 Exposition Universelle, 119 “Extracurricular reading” (kagai yomimono, 課外読み物), 35 F Factories and factory conditions, 171 Feminism, 21, 161, 180 Fenellosa, Ernest, 89 Fin de Siècle, 6, 21, 95–125 Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), 5 Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 1871, 81 Fujin Shinpō (『婦人新報』), 99 Fujo Zasshi (『婦女雑誌』), 34 Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, Ō chi (桜痴), (『 海陸連勝日章旗』), 40, 52, 83 Fukushima Yasumasa’s, Major, 88

 INDEX 

Fukuzawa Yukichi, 28, 73, 86, 113 Furukawa Ichibei, 122 Furukawas, 170 Futabatei Shimei, 36 G Gahō, Hashimoto (1835 - 1908), 89 Gakusei fūki mondai (学生風紀 問題), 110 Gakusei Hitsusenjō (『学生筆 戦場』), 35 Gakushūin University, 164, 183, 184, 196 Ganghwa Treaty, 62 Garakuta Bunkō, 19, 28–31, 56n5 Gashin shōtan (臥薪嘗胆), 86 Gazoku setchū (雅俗折衷), 5 Geisha, 54, 59n48, 88, 117–119, 150 Genbun itchi (言文一致), 5 Genyōsha, 18, 153 Gesaku literary traditions, 4 Gidayū Ayanosuke, 108, 109 Deden-kai, 108 Dō Suru Ren, 109 Kyōshi, 106 Mutsumi-ha (睦派), 109 Sei-ha (正派), 108 Tōgyoku, 106 Toyotake Shōnosuke and her sister Shōgiku, 109 Giga (戯画) cartoons, 61 Ginkō, Adachi (1853 – 1902), 72 Godai Tomoatsu, 2 Gojong, King, 62, 63 Gōtō Shojirō, 62 Grant, Ulysses S, 52 The Graphic, 141 Greater Japan Society of Devotion to Japanese Labour (Dai Nippon

209

Rōdō Shiseikai or Shiseikai 至誠会 for short), 169 Greater Japan Workers’ Association, (Dai Nihon Rōdo ̄ Dōshikai or Dōshikai 同志会), 169 Gundan (軍談) Nisshin Sensō Dan (『 日清戦争談』), 129 Gunshin (軍神), 136 H Hague Conventions Emperor Gojong, abdication in favour of Sunjong, 177 Hague Convention of 1899, 177 Hague Convention of 1907, 177 Haishi shōsetsu (稗史小説), 5, 110 Hakubunkan (博文館), 33–35, 57n15, 64, 69, 112, 139 Eisai Shinshi (『穎才新誌』), 64 Gunkoku Gahō, 139 Nihon no Shōnen (『日本之少 年』), 35, 64 Nihon Taika Ronshū, 33, 34 Nisshin Sensō Jikki (『日清戦争 実記』), 69 Senji Gahō Nichiro Sensō Jikki Nichiro Senso ̄ Shashin Gaho,̄ 139 Shō Kokumin (『小国民』), 64 Shōnen Sekai (『少年世 界』), 35, 64 Yon̄ en Tamatebako (『幼年玉手 箱』), 35, 64 Hanada Nakanosuke (1860 – 1945), Captain, 130–132 Hōtokukai, 131 Hanba (飯場) “Nanking rice”, 168 Hankenhō (版権法), 34 Hara Kei, 167, 195 Hearn, Lafcadio, 73, 145 Heimin (平民), 129, 187

210 

INDEX

Heiminsha Hino Kuniaki Kassatsu (『活殺』), 179 Osaka Heimin Shinbun and from Kokkei Shinbun “Suicide Number”, 179 ̄ Osaka Kokkei Shinbun, 179 Heimin Shinbun, 105, 165, 169, 170 Hibiya Park, 23, 145, 146, 149, 150, 155, 166, 193 Hibiya riots, 23, 157n46, 161, 166, 172 High Court Judge Takano Takenori, 90 High Treason Incident, 160, 165, 181, 182, 187n1, 191, 194 Higuchi Ichiyo, 2 Hiratsuka Raichō, 161, 162, 164, 175 Hōchi Shinbun, 105, 157n41, 179 Hokkaido Colonization Office, 2 Home Ministry, 153, 167, 180, 195 Horimoto Reizō, Lieutenant, who they killed, 63 House of Peers, 45, 61, 123 House of Representatives, 45, 61 I Ibsen, Henrik, 162, 175 particularly A Doll’s House (1879), 162, 175 Ichikawa Danjūrō, 3, 52 and Ogata Kikugorō (“Dan-­ Kiku”), 81 Ichikawa Sadanji, 3 Ihara Saikaku, 19, 104 The Man Who Loved Love (『好色一 代男』), 19, 104 Illustrated London News, 141 Imperial Constitution, 46 Imperial Rescript on Education, 181, 196 Individualism

Kanō Jigorō (Tokyo Normal High School), 183 Ō tsuka Yasuji, 181 at that time merely an Individualism Minister for Education, 181 Toda Kaiichi Kawakami Hajime, 181 Inoue Kaoru, 52, 147 Inoue Tetsujirō, 181, 183 Ishibashi Shian (1867 – 1927), 28 Ishii Kendo, 180, 189n35 Ishikawa Kin’ichirō, 147 Ishikawa Sanshirō, 165 Itagaki Taisuke, 3, 73, 123 Ito assassination on the 26th of October 1909, 159 Itō Hirobumi, assassinated at the Harbin train station, 24 Itsuwa Bunko (『逸話文庫』), 35 Iwakura Mission in 1871, 62 Izumi Kyōka, 12, 20, 25n24, 31, 84, 182, 192 Giketsu Kyōketsu, (『義血 侠血』), 84 Loyal Blood, 84 Valiant Blood, 84 Izumi Kyōka Taki no Shiraito, 84 J Japanalia, 118 Japan Christian Women’s Association ( 日本キリスト教婦人矯風会), 99 Japan Korea relations annexation assassination of Itō Hirobumi, 159 First Japan- Korea Protectorate Treaty, 176 Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910 Prime Minister Ye Wanyong, Japan Korea relations Japanese Minister for War, Terauchi Masatake, 177

 INDEX 

Second Japan- Korea Protectorate Treaty, 177 Japan-Korea Treaty 22nd of August 1910, 177 Japan Women’s University (日本女子 大学), 162 Jiji Shinpō, 73, 78, 93n45, 93n50, 128, 162–164, 167, 187n4, 187n9, 187n10, 188n19, 189n46 national beauty contest, 163 Jitsugyō no Nihonsha Seiro Shashin Gachō Shōnen, 139 Jiyū haigyō (自由廃業), 115 Jiyū no Tomoshibi, 42, 53 Jiyū Shinbun, 3 Jo Byeonggap in the province of Gobu, 66 Jōno Saigiku, 15, 28, 32, 38, 40 Jōno Saigiku Sannin Musume (『三人 令攘』), 38–40 K Kabuki-za was opened, Ichikawa became it’s inaugural Director, 52 Kaburagi Kiyokata, 140 Kafka, Franz, 6 Kaishin Shinbun, 3 Kajin no kigū (Unexpected Encounters with Beauties), 4 Kamimura of the Japanese Legation, General, 119 Kanagaki, Robun, 7, 15, 28, 32, 43, 58n29 Agura Nabe (Tales Heard Around a Pot of Beef), 7 Kanbun, 52, 98 Kaneko Kentarō, 55, 135 Kanno Suga, 160, 161, 165 Kanno Sugako, 23, 164 Kano Hōgai (1828 – 88), 89 Kanzen chōaku (“reward good, punish evil”), 8, 183

211

Kapsin coup d’etat 1884, 63, 65 Katayama Sen, 164, 170 Katsudō shashin, 93n47, 95, 146 Katsura Tarō, 105, 150, 165 Katsureki (活暦), 52 Kawagami Otojirō Itagaki-kun Sōnan Jikki, 55 Jiyū Dōshi (自由童子, literally “child of freedom”) Oppokepe, 53 national academy of theatre, Teikoku Gekijō (帝国劇場), 175 Nisshin Sensō, 82, 84, 90, 95, 117 Shingeki, 174 Kawakami Igai (意外, Unexpected) based on D’Ennery work, Mère at Martyre, 82 Kawakami Sōroku, 130 Kawakami-Za, 117, 118 Kawanabe Kyōsai “illustrated diary” (暁斎絵日記) pornographic content, 10 Keene, Donald (“The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 – 95...”), 68, 71, 92n20, 92n21 Keikoku Bidan (Illustrious Tales of Statesmanship), 4 Keiō Gijuku, 17, 151 Keisatsu Shinpō, 15 Kenpeitai, 167 Kensei Hontō, 124 Kenseitō, 124 Ken’yōsha society, 19 Ken’yūsha Gisoku (硯友社戯則), 29 Kibi Dango, 41 Kikuchi Dairoku, Minister for Education, 105 Kim Ok-gyun, 65 Kinkikan Incident, see Red Flag Incident Kinkikan theatre, 23 Kinmochi, Saionji, 23, 164, 175

212 

INDEX

Kipling, Rudyard, 111 Jungle Book, 111 Kitahara Hakushū, 101 Kitasato Shibasaburō (1853 – 1931), 88 Kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa, Imperial Prince, 90 Kiyochika, Kobayashi, 8, 13, 71–73, 75, 76, 79, 137, 140, 141, 147 Klimt, Gustav, 6 Kōdan, vii, 15, 22, 30, 50, 51, 95, 96, 129–131, 152, 155, 192 Kokka Gakkai (国家学会) Kokka Gakkai Zasshi, 34 Kokkei Shinbun rabu (ラブ, i.e. “love”) front pages, 179–180 eroticism, 179 Kokkei Shinbun Yamamoto Yasujirō and Maeno Kazuhiro, 178 Kokusuishugi, 4, 33, 55 Konnichi Shinbun, 15, 43 Kōno Michiyoshi, Lieutenant, Nichiro Sensō Shashin Gahō Koyama Shōtarō “Patrolling the Banks of the Yalu River”(「鴨緑江畔偵察 の図」), 147 Korea became a Protectorate of Japan, 159 Korea Chōsen no Chisō (「朝鮮の馳 走」), Kisaeng, 64 Korea (or Chōsen) annexation, 24 Kornicki, Peter, 28, 30 Meiji Japan: Political, Economic and Social History, a four-volume Maeda Ai, 16 Political, Economic and Social History, a four-volume Maeda Ai, 16 Ko-shinbun, vii, 3 Kosugi Misei, 139 Kōtoku Shusui, 97, 105, 159, 164, 181, 182

Kowshing, an English merchantman under lease to the Chinese government sank, 67 Kubota Kinsen, 147 Kuchie by Shimazaki Ryūu, 70 Kuga Katsunan, 4 Kunikida Doppo, 22, 68, 137–139, 150 Kuroda Kiyotaka, 2 Kuroda Seiki (1866 – 1924) exhibited Chōjō (朝妝 or “Morning Toilette”), 89 Kuroiwa, 38, 46, 50, 117, 125 Kuroiwa “viper” (mamushi), 117 Kuropatkin, Alexei General, 148 Kushibiki Yumindo, 118 Kwaidan (怪談) A True Tale from Kasanegafuchi (『眞景累 ヶ淵』), 37 Kyōfūkai (矯風会), 99, 114 Kyoto University, ix, 186 Kyūha, the “old school,” 84 L Le Théâtre du Châtelet, 81 Li Hongzhang, 63, 67, 82 L’illustration in France, 141 “Love-suicide” (shinjū, 心中), 162 Lüshun (later known as Port Arthur), 75, 79, 90 M Madame Butterfly, 120 Madame Chrysanthème, 120 Mainichi Shinbun, 105 Mantei Ō ga Akire Gaeru (Frog Fed Up with Modernity), 7 Manzai, 196 Marumaru Chinbun, 41–43, 45, 58n28

 INDEX 

Maruoka Kyūka (1865 – 1927), 28 Masaoka Shiki, 2, 68 Mata Igai (又意外, Unexpected Again) and even Mata-mata Igai (又々意 外, Kawakami (Unexpected Yet Again) adaptation of King Oedipus, 82 Matsubara Iwagorō, 168 Matsui Sumako, 175, 195 Matsukata deflation, 17 Matsumoto Chiwaki, 166, 167 Matsuzaki Nao’omi, Captain, 77 Meiji Bundan, 2, 11, 35, 96, 192 Meiji Bunko (『明治文庫』), 35 Meiji Emperor, 23, 24, 90, 100, 134, 184, 192 Meiji-za, 52 Meirinkan, 97 Mekake, 112 Migita Toshihide, 12, 69, 72, 76, 140 Minami Sukematsu, 169–171 Ministry of Education, 110, 174, 180, 192, 195 Ministry of Education (Meguro), 35 Mitsuya Cider, 183 Miura Gorō, Lieutenant General, assassination of Queen Min, 89 Miyake Katsumi, 147 Miyake Setsurei, 4, 111 Miyako Shinbun, 15, 32, 36, 38, 46, 50, 61, 84, 97, 108, 145, 157n28 Miyatake Gaikotsu, viii, 19, 21, 24, 28, 40, 41, 43–50, 56, 56n2, 85, 99–103, 105, 106, 117, 118, 124, 125, 160, 177–180, 194 Bunmei Zasshi, 47, 49; Bimyō Zasshi Dōtoku Zasshi, 47, 48; Kottō Zasshi (「骨董雑誌」), 99; Shinri Zasshi, 47; Tonchi Zasshi, 47, 48, 85 child with his partner Yayo, a boy Tenmin ( 天民), 85

213

death of Tenmin, 85 early life, 40–41 Hichamucha Sha, 41 “A History of Obscene Customs” (Waisetsu Fūzokushi), 180 imprisonment, 44, 178 Karyū Suishi, (『花柳粋誌』), 100 Kokkei Shinbun (『滑稽新聞』), 19, 21, 100–106, 178, 179 Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai, 180 Ogi Kinsabu scandal, 178 “Shunga Monogatari” (「春画物 語」), 100 Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi (『頓知協会雑 誌』), 41–44, 47 Tonchi to Kokkei (『頓知と 滑稽』), 85 Miyoshi Yonekichi, 103 Moral panic, 21, 173 Mori Arinori, 1, 112, 147 Mori Ō gai, 2, 22, 68, 116, 137, 185 ̄ Okitsu Yagoemon no isho Mori Ogai and Sahashi Jingorō (1913) Sakai Jiken, 185 Morita Kanya, the Shintomi-za, 52 Morita Sōhei, 162, 163 Myōjō (「明星」), 101, 102 N Nagai Kafū, 161, 182 Nagaoka Tsuruzō, 169 Naniwa-bushi, 96, 152, 153, 155 Narushima Ryūhoku Bokujō inshi den (Biography of a Recluse on the Sumida River), 8 Nativism, 4 Naturalism, 181 Neo-Confucianism, 196 Neo-Romanticism, 101 Nichiro Sensō Gaikoku Gahō (Kinji Gahōsha), 139

214 

INDEX

Nietzsche, Friedrich Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), 6 Nihilism, 6 Nihon, 55, 93n47, 128, 151 Nihon and Nihonjin, 4 Nihonjin, 111 Nihon Nōgyō Zasshi (『日本農業 雑誌』), 34 Nihon no Hōritsu (『日本之 法律』), 34 Nihon no Shōnen (『日本之少 年』), 35, 64 Nihon Shōgyō Zasshi (『日本商業 雑誌』), 34 Niitobe Inazō Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, 186 Nikolai Cathedral (formally known as the Holy Resurrection Cathedral), 134 Ninjō-banashi, 4 Niroku Shinpō (『二六新報』), 21, 115–117, 153 Nishikawa Kōjirō, 169, 170 Nishikie, vii, 3, 8, 9, 11–16, 19, 51, 69–73, 75, 77, 81, 92n21, 139, 140, 147, 178, 192 Nishimura Shigeki, 111 Nihon Kōdōkai (日本弘道会) Nihon Dōtokuron, 111 Nisshin Sensō Zue, (『日清戦争図 会』), 70–72 Nogi Maresuke, General, 22, 24, 127, 137, 143, 144, 164, 184–186, 187n4, 192 junshi (殉死), Nogi Shizuko, 184, 186 responses, Tanimoto Tomeri, Niitobe Inazō, 186 suicide note Mori Ō gai and Natsume Sōseki, 185 Seinan War, loss of sons in Russo-­ Japanese War, 185

Noguchi Itaru, to send an expedition to climb Mt Fuji, 88 Noguchi Osaburō murder of Tsuzuki Tomogorō, Noguchi Neisai, Kawai Sosuke, 172 Noguchi Shigehira, 103–104 Normanton, 3, 51 O Ochiai Yoshiiku, 9, 51 Ogata Gekkō (1859 - 1920), 72, 73, 75 Ohara Koson, 141 Ō hashi Sahei (1836 – 1901), 33 Ō hashi Shintarō (1863 – 1944), 33 Okakura Tenshin, 89 Oki Teisuke, 136 Ō kubo Toshimichi, 62 Ō kuma Shigenobu, 2, 3, 124 Ō kura Kihachirō, 175 Osatake Takeki, 180, 189n35 ̄ O-shinbun, 3 Oskar Gripenberg, General, 148 Ō sugi Sakai, 165 Ozaki Koyō, 19, 20, 28, 31, 84 akkō zōgen (悪口雑言), 30 The Golden Demon (『金色夜, 20 a Miscellany of Bad-mouthing, 30 P Patriotic Womens Association or Aikoku Fujinkai (愛国婦 人会), 132 Peace Preservation Ordinance, 27, 41 Peoples’ Rights Movement, 2, 4, 11, 45 Photography artists (gakō, 画工) photographers (shashinshi, 写真師), 71 Piccasso, Pablo, 120 Pierre Loti, 120

 INDEX 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 5 Political crisis of 1881, 3 “Political novels”, 11, 46, 55 “Popular disturbances” (minshū sōjōki, 民衆騒擾期), 155 Powered flight Wright brothers Hino Komazu and Tokugawa Yoshitoshi, 184 Private Kiguchi Kohei, 77 Prostitution, 18, 19, 99, 113, 115, 116, 124, 174 Prostitution, emancipation movement, Salvation Army, 115 Protest train fare protests of 1906, 165 Puccini, Giacomo, 120 Pyongyang、Battle of, 75 Q Qing Dynasty, 62 Queen Min, 89 R Rakugo, vii, 12, 15, 29, 30, 48, 50, 51, 95, 96, 147, 152, 192 Ramune (ラムネ), 183 Red Flag Incident, 23, 165 Reparations, 22, 62, 63, 121, 127 Rikken Seiyūkai, 124 Rokumeikan, 52, 80, 147, 193 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 88 Roosevelt, Theodore, 135, 147, 148, 177 Rops, Felicien, 5 Rozhestvensky, Admiral Zinovy, 148 Russian Baltic Fleet the Second Pacific Squadron, 143 Russian Empire, Trans-Siberian, 21 Russian revolts, Bloody Sunday mutiny of the battleship Potemkin coup of 1907, 149

215

Russo-Japanese War, viii, 2, 22, 23, 104, 127–156, 159, 162, 178, 188n26, 193, 195 Ryōunkaku (凌雲閣), 87, 155 S Sada Yacco, 119, 120 Musume Dōjōji, 118 Safety of women problem of sexual harassment, women-only train, 173–174 Saigō Takamori, 18, 62, 69, 129 Saionji Kinmochi, 23, 164, 165, 175 Salvation Army, The Deliverer All the World, War Cry, 114 Sanjō Sanetomi, 89 Sanpu Gokō Utsusu Gendō (三府五 港寫幻燈), 3 Sanriku tsunami, 89 San’yūtei Enchō, 15, 36–38, 43 Sashie illustrations, 11, 15, 24, 47, 51, 78, 96 Satō Kieko, 115 Satsuma and Chōshū oligarchy, 4 Seikanron, (征韓論), 62, 69 Sekai Bunko (『世界文庫』), 35 Seppuku, 184–186 Sexual gratification, seiyoku manzokushugi, (「性欲満足主 義」), 162 Shakespeare, William, 36, 38 Shōnen Shashin Gahō (Ikubunsha), 139 Shibusawa Ei’ichi, 175 Shiga Naoya (1883 – 1971), 110 Shimazaki Tōson, 2, 161 The Broken Commandment, 161 Shinbun nishikie, 8 Shingeki (新劇), The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, Mori Ritsu, 174 Shin Gundan (「新軍談」), 130

216 

INDEX

Shinkigeki (新喜劇), 146 Shin Kōdan (「新講談」), 130 Shinkyōgoku in Kyoto, 54, 106 Shinpa (新派), 55, 84, 96, 106 Shinpotō (‘Progressive Party’), 124 Shinto, 180, 196 Shōchiku Shinkigeki, 146 Shokkō (職工), 17, 18, 95 Shōnen Bungaku (『少年文学』), 35 Shōnen En (『少年園』), 66 Shōnen Sekai (『少年世界』)., 35, 64 Shōrin Hakuen, 15 Shosei Shibai (書生芝居), 53 Shunga (春画), 80, 92n34 Shunka Shūtō (『春夏秋冬』), 35 Sino-Japanese War, 2, 13, 15–17, 19, 22, 61–91, 95, 97, 99, 104, 108, 109, 115, 117, 123, 127, 129, 130, 138, 144, 156n19, 192, 194 Declaration of War, 75 Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshūtō, 社会民衆党), Kōtoku Shūsui, 164 Socialism, 21, 165, 180, 181 Soganoya Brothers Comedy Duo Soganoya Gorō (original name Wada Hisaichi), 146 Soganoya Jūrō, 146 Sōseki, Natsume, ix, 2, 31, 136, 161, 162, 183, 185, 186, 196 Botchan (1906), 31, 161 I Am a Cat (1905), 31, 39, 161 Kokoro (1914), 185 “My Individualism” (「私の個人主 義」) Gakushūin University, 183 Sōshi (壮士), 18, 45, 53 Sōshi Shibai, 19, 53, 81 Sound recording (chikuonki, 蓄音機) Tenshōdō in Ginza, 146 Students, ‘immoral conduct’ “Bible Kiyoko” Ministry of Education response, 174

Submarine accident April of 1910, 189n46 Successive Victories on Land and Sea, Our Glorious Flag of the Rising Sun, 83 Suehiro Hiroko, 163 Suehiro Tetchō, 4 Symbolism, 5 T Taishō, 7, 124, 184, 196 Taiwan, 24, 62, 79, 86, 89, 90, 99, 100, 131 Taiwan expedition Paiwan tribe Ryūkū Islands, 62 Taiyō (『太陽』), 34, 35, 57n15, 111, 112, 181 Takabatake Ransen, 7, 12, 51 Takamatsu Eigi Juku, 40 Takemoto Gidayū (1651 – 1714), 20, 106 Tanaka Shōzō, petition in person to the Emperor directly, 123 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 161 Tayama Katai, 139, 161 Teikoku Gekijō (帝国劇場) A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, 175 The Waltz of the Flowers from Swan Lake, 175 Telephone, 87, 173 Terry, Ellen, 118, 119 Three Article Educational Constitution (Sanjō no Kyōken, 三条の教憲), 51 Tōchūgen Kumoemon (1873 – 1916), 22, 194 Tōgō, Admiral, 148 Tōkai Sanshi, 4 Tokutomi Sohō of the Kokumin no Tomo, 73 Tokyo Eiri Shinbun, vii, 12, 69

 INDEX 

Tokyo Imperial University, 17, 97, 104, 105, 181, 189n35 Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun, 8, 9, 12, 46, 93n50 Tokyo School of Fine Arts, 89 Tok̄ yō Sōjō Gahō (『東京騒擾画報』), 149, 150 Tokyo Tetsudō Kaisha, 166 Tokyo train lines Kaitetsu Line Toden line, 167 Tokyo University of Foreign Languages, 172 Tonchi Kyōkai Zasshi (『頓知協会雑 誌』), 41–44, 47, 58n29 Tonghak Rebellion that broke out in April of 1894, 66 Toshikata, Mizuno, 12, 13, 16, 69, 72, 76–79, 137, 140 Tōten, Miyazaki, 130, 153 Toyama Masakazu, 97, 98 Toyohara Kunichika (1838 – 1912), 72 Treaty of Chemulpo of the 30th of August, 1882, 63 Treaty of Jeonju, was signed on May the 7th., 66 Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation 1882 signed Korean and US, 63 Treaty of Portsmouth, viii, 22, 149, 167, 176, 194 Treaty of Tianjin (31 May), 63 Tsubouchi Shoyō, 19, 30, 31, 36, 43, 57n9, 174, 175 Tsuchiya Reiko, 3, 15 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 3, 43, 53, 69, 72, 178 Tsuruta Teijirō, 144 A Diary of Service in the Russo-­ Japanese War Campaigns, 144 Tsuzukimono, 11 Tuberculosis, 88, 155

217

U Uchimura Kanzō, 68, 91n16, 97, 105 Ueno Park, 90, 150, 155 Ukiyoe, 15, 72, 92n21 W Waseda University, 109, 151 Western opera, 193 Wilde, Oscar, 5 Wirgman, Charles, the founder of Japan Punch, 8 Women’s gidayū. tare gidayū, 20 Workplace practices oyakata, 96, 122 World Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WWCTM), 114 Y Yalu River, Battle of, 70, 75, 78, 90, 136 Yamada Bimyō, 2, 28 Yamaguchi Koken, 23, 165 Yamaji Yakichi (later Aizan), 166 Yamamuro Gunpei, 115 Yamato Shinbun, 15, 32, 36, 38, 46, 50, 83, 97, 115, 145, 157n28, 193 Yano Ryūkei, 4, 5, 55, 138 Yokogawa Shōzō, 136 Yokoyama Gennosuke, 121 Yomiuri Shinbun, 3, 36, 46, 71, 79, 105 Yon̄ en Tamatebako (『幼年玉手 箱』), 35, 64 Yon̄ en Zasshi (『幼年雑誌』), 35 Yorozu Chōho, 19, 21, 38, 46, 50, 78, 97, 105, 109, 113, 115, 162, 175, 179 Yōsai Nobukazu (1872 - 1944), 72, 73 Yosano Akiko, 101, 162, 194

218 

INDEX

Yosano Akiko (cont.) Kimi Tangled Hair (Midaregami, みだれ髪), 162 Yosano Tekkan, 101 Yoshimune, Arai, 12–15, 53 Yoshino Sakuzō, 180, 189n35 Yoshioka Tetsutarō『新著百集』(One Hundred New Works), 30

Yūbari mine in Hokkaido, 169 Yu ̄bin Hōchi Shinbun, 8, 51 Yūzai Muzai (1888), 46 Z Zeppelin airship, 184 Zōshikan, 97, 98