The Last Chrysanthemum- an excerpt

The Samurai and the Chrysanthemum

It’s a long story, how the Chrysanthemum Gods came to rule Japan, and how hubris brought them to their final humiliation. Those pesky Americans had a great deal to do with the creation of the Meiji Dynasty and brought about its downfall, too.

Under the almost three-hundred-year rule of a succession of Tokugawa Shoguns, from 1603 until 1868, the Chrysanthemum emperor, though he lived in stately surrounds, had no power at all and was ruler in name only. For almost three centuries, Japan was completely isolated from the outside world. Both visitors from other realms and citizens attempting to leave the country’s shores found themselves facing immediate execution by beheading. The Tokugawa had forced an uneasy peace on the war-torn, feudal nation by defeating and disarming the country’s powerful daimyos, feudal barons who had ruled, squabbled and fought each other for centuries. Japan had peace at last, but in the end, the price was high.

The Meiji Restoration as it has become known ended all that. Commander Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy was the root cause. Perry, a United States naval captain, was under presidential orders to force the opening of recalcitrant Japanese ports to American trade, using the destructive power of his paddlewheel gunboats and their modern guns as leverage if necessary. The Americans, inspired by their concept of manifest destiny, were driven by their desire to expand western civilisation to what they perceived as backward Asian nations.

Perry twice sailed defiantly into forbidden Japanese ports, first in 1852 then again two years later and demanded the right to trade freely, ignoring Japanese urgings that he leave them to continue in their ignorant seclusion. When he demonstrated his firepower; however, the Japanese prudently decided that negotiation was their best course. Perry sailed away after his second confrontation with an agreement, signed in haste by Emperor Kōmei under considerable duress, to open trade facilities. Perry failed to understand that the real political force at the time was the Tokugawa Shogun in distant Kyoto and that the emperor was a figurehead with little authority.

Though his trade agreement was of questionable validity, Perry’s arrival sent shockwaves through the Japanese political structure as all sides of Japanese politics recognised that they had fallen far behind the technical capability of the dreaded gaijins of the West. Perry had made the risk apparent to them all. At that moment, change became inevitable, and the curtain began to fall on the seclusionist Tokugawa era.

The raucous demands of the progressives that Japan combine modern advances with traditional eastern values under the leadership of Emperor Meiji, son of Kōmei, enraged the shogun and his reaction was swift. But Japanese daimyos have long memories, and their defeat by the Tokugawa forces almost three hundred years previously was not forgotten. The shogun’s key allies quickly defected to the imperial side, and the shogun was forced to bow to the inevitable. His isolationist supporters, however, were ready to defend their traditional rights. Measures to consolidate Imperial power against the privileged remnants of the Edo period government, the shogunate, daimyo, and the samurai class, meant that conflict was inevitable.

In the winter of 1868, under the direction of Ōmura Masujirō, a commoner, the emperor’s armies, reorganised along western lines and employing modern arms and methods, took on the recalcitrant samurais and soundly defeated them. An army of conscripted farmers using Western tactics and weapons had soundly beaten an elite samurai army, and at the moment of Ōmura’s momentous victory, Japan was changed forever.

Over the years that followed, a slow and deliberate process to abolish the privileged samurai class began, driven by a western-style government, modelled loosely on the Westminster system. While the formal title and traditional rights of samurai were abolished, the elitist spirit that had characterised the samurai class lived on and festered with self-righteous indignity.

Under the Meiji, industrialisation accelerated throughout Japan under the slogan of ‘Enrich the country, strengthen the military’. Japan’s inexorable rise as a military power gradually accelerated, unnoticed initially by the west, then viewed with growing alarm. But the country was riven by political animosities, and the military machine, dominated by the samurai spirit and with increasing influence and ruthlessness, operated outside the authority of the parliament.

With little raw material wealth of its own, Japan was inevitably drawn to the potential economic benefits of Korea's coal and iron ore deposits, and of its agricultural potential. The national fixation with military adventurism brought Japan into conflict with China, Russia and the western nations. A burning desire to join the great powers gradually became a national obsession, and dreams of an eastern empire, an Asian one along the lines of the British model, emerged as military successes grew. But the ever-growing need for raw materials and fuel for their military machine made further forays into Asia imperative. The Generals turned their eyes west and Korea and China , both considered backward counties, became the target for Meiji ambition.

In defiance of dire warning from President Theodore Roosevelt, early in the summer of 1941, Japanese forces advanced in a coordinated strike into Indochina. In an effort to restrain Japanese aggression, the United States responded by placing an embargo on vital supplies, including oil, a commodity essential to the Japanese military machine. With the military by now in firm control of the government, months of shadowboxing were climaxing, and the scene was set for the disaster that followed…

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