A New Dynasty of Shoguns—Mendez Pinto’s Visit—Arrival of the Jesuit Missionaries—Kind Reception of Christianity—Quarrels Between the Sects—Beginning of Christian Persecution—Expulsion of the Missionaries—Torture and Martyrdom—The Massacre of Shimabara—Expulsion of all Foreigners—Closing the Door of Japan—History of the Last Shogunate—Arrival of Commodore Perry’s Fleet—The Knock at the Door of Japan—An Era of Treaty Making—Rapid Advance of Western Manners and Ideas in Japan—Attacks on Foreigners—The Abolition of the Shogunate—Japan’s Last Quarter Century.

Hitherto we have seen two readily distinguishable periods in the history of Japan, the period during which the mikados were the actual as well as the nominal rulers of the empire; and the period during which the imperial power more and more passed into the hands of usurping mayors of the palace, and the country was kept in an almost constant ferment with the feuds of rival noble families which coveted this honor. Successively the power, although not always the title, of shogun, had been held by members of the Minamoto, Hojo, Ashikaga, Ota and Toyotomi families. With Iyeyasu we pass into a third period, like the second in that the dual system of feudal government still prevailed, but unlike it in that it was a period of peace. Much strife had accompanied the erection of the fabric of feudalism, but it now stood complete. The mikado in Kioto and the daimios in their different provinces, alike ceased to protest against the dual administration. Within certain limits they had the regulation of their own affairs; the mikado was ever recognized as the source of all authority, and the daimios in their own provinces were petty kings; but it was the shogun in Yeddo who, undisputed, at least in practice, whatever some of the more powerful daimios may have said, swayed the destinies of the empire.

Let us now note the policy which the Shoguns adopted towards the foreigners who as missionaries or merchants had found their way to Japan, and the course of settlement and trade of foreigners.

It seems now certain that when Columbus set sail from Spain to discover a new continent, it was not America he was seeking, but the land of Japan. Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler, had spent seventeen years, 1275-1292, at the court of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, and while in Peking had heard of a land lying to the eastward, called in the language of the Chinese, Zipangu, from which our modern name Japan has been corrupted. Columbus was an ardent student of Polo’s book, which had been published in 1298. He sailed westward across the Atlantic to find this kingdom. He discovered not Japan, but an archipelago in America on whose shores he eagerly inquired concerning Zipangu. Following this voyage, Vasco de Gama and a host of other brave Portuguese navigators sailed into the Orient and came back to tell of densely populated empires enriched with the wealth that makes civilization possible, and of which Europe had scarcely heard. Their accounts fired the hearts of the zealous who longed to convert the heathen, aroused the cupidity of traders who thirsted for gold, and kindled the desire of monarchs to found empires in Asia.

Mendez Pinto, a Portuguese adventurer, seems to have been the first European who landed on Japanese soil. On his return to Europe he told so many wonderful stories that by a pun on his Christian name he was dubbed “the mendacious.” His narrative was, however, as we now know, substantially correct. Pinto while in China had got on board a Chinese junk, commanded by a pirate. They were attacked by another corsair, their pilot was killed, and the vessel was driven off the coast by a storm. They made for the Liu Kiu Islands, but unable to find a harbor, put to sea again. After twenty-three days’ beating about, they sighted the islands of Tanegashima and landed. The name of the island, “island of the seed,” was significant. The arrival of these foreigners was a seed of troubles innumerable. The crop was priestcraft of the worst type, political intrigue, religious persecution, the inquisition, the slave trade, the propagation of Christianity by the sword, sedition, rebellion, and civil war. Its harvest was garnered in the blood of sixty-thousand Japanese.

The native histories recount the first arrival of Europeans in 1542, and note that year as the one in which fire-arms were first introduced. The pirate trader who brought Pinto to Japan cleared twelve hundred per cent. on his cargo, and the three Portuguese returned to China loaded with presents. The new market attracted hundreds of Portuguese adventurers to Japan, who found a ready welcome. The missionary followed the merchant. Already the Portuguese priests and Franciscan friars were numerous in India. Two Jesuits and two Japanese who had been converted at Goa, headed by Xavier, landed at Kagoshima in 1549. Xavier did not have great success, and in a short time left Japan disheartened. He had, however, inspired others who followed him, and their success was amazingly great.

The success of the Jesuit missionaries soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Organtin, a Jesuit missionary in Kioto, writing of his experiences, says that he was asked his name and why he had come to Japan. He replied that he was the Padre Organtin and had come to spread religion. He was told that he could not be allowed at once to spread his religion, but would be informed later on. Nobunaga accordingly took counsel with his retainers as to whether he would allow Christianity to be preached or not. One of these strongly advised not to do so, on the ground that there were already enough religions in the country, but Nobunaga replied that Buddhism had been introduced from abroad and had done good in the country, and he therefore did not see why Christianity should not be granted a trial. Organtin was consequently allowed to erect a church and to send for others of his order, who, when they came, were found to be like him in appearance. Their plan of action was to care for the sick, and so prepare the way for the reception of Christianity, and then to convert every one and make the thirty-six provinces of Japan subject to Portugal. In this last clause we have an explanation of the policy which the Japanese government ultimately adopted towards Christianity and all foreign innovations. Within five years after Xavier visited Kioto, seven churches were established in the vicinity of the city itself, while scores of Christian communities had sprung up in the south-west. In 1581 there were two hundred churches and one hundred and fifty thousand native Christians.

In 1583 an embassy of four young noblemen was dispatched by the Christian daimios to the pope to declare themselves vassals of the Holy See. They returned after eight years, having had audience of Phillip II. of Spain, and kissed the feet of the pope at Rome. They brought with them seventeen Jesuit missionaries, an important addition to the list of religious instructors. Spanish mendicant friars from the Philippine Islands, with Dominicans and Augustinians, also flocked into the country, teaching and zealously proselyting. The number of “Christians” at the time of the highest success of the missionaries in Japan was, according to their own figures six hundred thousand, a number that seems to be no exaggeration if quantity and not quality are considered. The Japanese less accurately set down a total of two million nominal adherents to the Christian sects. Among the converts were several princes, large numbers of lords, and gentlemen in high official positions, and beside generals of the army and admirals of the navy. Churches and chapels were numbered by the thousand, and in some provinces crosses and Christian shrines were as numerous as the kindred evidences of Buddhism had been before. The methods of the Jesuits appealed to the Japanese, as did the forms and symbols of the faith, but the Jesuits began to attack most violently the character of the native priests, and to incite their converts to insult their gods, burn the idols and desecrate the old shrines.

As the different orders, Jesuits, Franciscans and Augustinians increased, they began to clash. Political and religious war was almost universal in Europe at the same time, and the quarrels of the various nationalities followed the buccaneers, pirates, traders and missionaries to the distant seas of Japan. All the foreigners, but especially Portuguese, then were slave traders, and thousands of Japanese were bought and sold and shipped to China and the Philippines. The sea ports of Hirado and Nagasaki were the resorts of the lowest class of adventurers of all European nations, and the result was a continuous series of uproars, broils and murders among the foreigners. Such a picture of foreign influence and of Christianity as the Japanese saw it was not calculated to make a permanently favorable impression on the Japanese mind.

Latterly Nobunaga had somewhat repented of the favor he had shown to the new religion, though his death occurred before his dissatisfaction had manifested itself in any active repression. Hideyoshi had never been well disposed to Christianity, but other matters prevented him from at once meddling with the policy of his predecessors. In 1588 he ventured to issue an edict commanding the missionaries to assemble at Hirado, an island off the west coast of Kiushiu and prepared to leave Japan, and the missionaries obeyed, but as the edict was not enforced they again returned to the work of evangelization in private as vigorously as ever, averaging ten thousand converts a year. The Spanish mendicant friars pouring in from the Philippines, openly defied Japanese laws. This aroused Hideyoshi’s attention and his decree of expulsion was renewed. Some of the churches were burned. In 1596 six Franciscan and three Jesuit priests with seventeen Japanese converts were taken to Nagasaki and there burned.

When Hideyoshi died, affairs seemed to take a more favorable turn, but only for a few years. Iyeyasu was as much opposed to Christianity as Hideyoshi, and his hatred of the new religion was intensified by his partiality for Buddhism. The new daimios, carrying the policy of their predecessors as taught them by the Jesuits, but reversing its direction, began to persecute their Christian subjects, and to compel them to renounce their faith. The native converts resisted, even to blood and the taking up of arms. The idea of armed rebellion among the farmers was something so wholly new that Iyeyasu suspected foreign instigation. He became more vigilant as his suspicions increased, and resolving to crush this spirit of independence and intimidate the foreign emissaries, met every outbreak with bloody reprisals.

Iyeyasu issued a decree of expulsion against the missionaries in 1600, but the decree was not at once carried into effect. The date of the first arrival in Japan of Dutch merchants was also 1600. They settled in the island of Hirado. In 1606 an edict from Yeddo forbade the exercise of the Christian religion, but an outward show of obedience warded off active persecution. Four years later the Spanish friars again aroused the wrath of the government by defying its commands and exhorting the native converts to do likewise. In 1611 Iyeyasu obtained documentary proof of what he had long suspected, the existence of a plot on the part of the native converts and the foreign emissaries to reduce Japan to the position of a subject state. Fresh edicts were issued, and in 1614 twenty-two Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars, one hundred and seventeen Jesuits and hundreds of native priests were embarked by force on board junks and sent out of the country. The next year the shogun pushed matters to an extreme with Hideyori, who was entertaining some Jesuit priests, and laid siege to the castle of Ozaka. A battle of unusual ferocity and bloody slaughter raged, ending in the burning of the citadel and the total defeat and death of Hideyori and thousands of his followers. The Jesuit fathers say that one hundred thousand men perished in this brief war.

The exiled foreign friars kept secretly returning, and the shogun pronounced sentence of death against any foreign priest found in the country. Iyemitsu, the next shogun, restricted all foreign commerce in Nagasaki and Hirado; all Japanese were forbidden to leave the country on pain of death. Any European vessel approaching the coast was at once to be referred to Nagasaki, whence it was to be sent home; the whole crew of any junk in which a missionary should reach Japanese shores were to be put to death; and the better to remove all temptation to go abroad, it was decreed that no ships should be constructed above a certain size and with other than the open sterns of coasting vessels.

Fire and sword were used to extirpate Christianity and to paganize the same people who in their youth were Christianized by the same means. Thousands of the native converts fled to China, Formosa and the Philippines. The Christians suffered all sorts of persecutions and tortures that savage ingenuity could devise. Yet few of the natives quailed or renounced their faith. They calmly let the fire of wood, cleft from the crosses before which they once prayed, consumeprayed, consume them. Mothers carried their babes to the fire or the edge of the precipice rather than leave them behind to be educated in pagan faith. If any one doubt the sincerity and fervor of the Christian converts of to-day, or the ability of the Japanese to accept a higher form of faith, or their willingness to suffer for what they believe, he has but to read the accounts of various witnesses to the fortitude of the Japanese Christians of the seventeenth century.

The persecution reached its climax in the tragedy of Shimabara in 1637. The Christians arose in arms by tens of thousands, seized an old castle, repaired it and fortified it, and raised the flag of rebellion. The armies of veterans sent to besiege it expected an easy victory, and sneered at the idea of having any difficulty in subduing these farmers and peasants. It took two months by land and water, however, of constant attack before the fort was reduced, and the victory was finally gained only with the aid of Dutch cannon furnished under compulsion by the traders of Deshima. After great slaughter the intrepid garrison surrendered, and then began the massacre of thirty-seven thousand Christians. Many of them were hurled into the sea from the top of the island rock of Takaboko-shima, by the Dutch named Pappenberg, in the harbor of Nagasaki.

The result of this series of events was that the favorable policy adopted by Iyeyasu in regard to foreign trade was completely reversed. No foreigners were allowed to set foot on the soil of Japan, except Chinese and a few Dutch merchants. The Dutch gained the privilege of residing in confinement on the little island of Deshima, a piece of made land in the harbor of Nagasaki. Here under degrading restrictions and constant surveillance lived less than a score of Hollanders, who were required every year to send a representative to Yeddo to do homage to the shogun. They were allowed one ship per annum to come from the Dutch East Indies for the exchange of the commodities of Japan for those of Holland.

Says Doctor Griffis in his study of this era of Japanese history, “After nearly a hundred years of Christianity and foreign intercourse, the only apparent results of this contact with another religion and civilization were the adoption of gunpowder and fire-arms as weapons, the use of tobacco and the habit of smoking, the making of sponge cake, the naturalization into the language of a few foreign words, the introduction of new and strange forms of disease, among which the Japanese count the scourge of the venereal virus, and the permanent addition to that catalogue of terrors which priest and magistrate in Asiatic countries ever hold as welcome, to overawe the herd. For centuries the mention of that name would bate the breath, blanch the cheek and smite with fear as with an earthquake shock. It was the synonymsynonym of sorcery, sedition, and all that was hostile to the purity of the home and the peace of society. All over the empire, in every city, town, village and hamlet; by the roadside, ferry or mountain pass; at every entrance to the capitol, stood the public notice boards on which with prohibitions against the great crimes that disturbed the relations of society’s government was one tablet written with a deeper brand of guilt, with a more hideous memory of blood, with a more awful terror of torture, than when the like superscription was affixed at the top of a cross that stood between two thieves on a little hill outside Jerusalem. Its daily and familiar sight startled ever and anon the peasants who clasped hands and uttered a fresh prayer; the Bonze, or Buddhist priest, to add new venom to his maledictions; the magistrate to shake his head; and to the mother a ready word to hush the crying of her fretful babe. That name was Christ. So thoroughly was Christianity or the “corrupt sect” supposedsupposed to be eradicated before the end of the seventeenth century, that its existence was historical, remembered only as an awful scar on the national memory. No vestiges were supposed to be left of it, and no knowledge of its tenets was held save by a very few scholars in Yeddo, trained experts who were kept as a sort of spiritual blood hounds to scent out the adherents of the accursed creed. It was left to our day since the recent opening of Japan, for them to discover that a mighty fire had been smoldering for over two centuries beneath the ashes of persecutions. As late as 1829 seven persons, six men and an old woman, were crucified in Ozaka on suspicion of being Christians and communicating with foreigners. When the French brethren of the Mission Apostolique of Paris came to Nagasaki in 1860, they found in the villages around them over ten thousand people who held the faith of their fathers of the seventeenth century.”century.”

The Portuguese were not the only race to attempt to open a permanent trade with Japan. Captain John Saris, with three ships, left England in April, 1611, with letters from King James I. to the “Emperor” (shogun) of Japan. Landing at Hirado he was well received, and established a factory in charge of Richard Cocks. The captain and a number of the party visited Yeddo and other cities and obtained from the shogun a treaty defining the privileges of trade, and signed Minamoto Iyeyasu. After a tour of three months Saris arrived at Hirado again, having visited Kioto, where he saw the splendid Christian churches and Jesuit palaces. After discouraging attempts to open a trade with Siam, Corea and China, and hostilities having broken out between them and the Dutch, the English abandoned the project of permanent trade with Japan, and all subsequent attempts to reopen it failed.

Will Adams, who was an English pilot, and the first of his nation in Japan, arrived in 1607 and lived in Yeddo till he died thirteen years later. He rose into favor with the shoguns and the people by the sheer force of a manly, honest character. His knowledge of shipbuilding, mathematics, and foreign affairs made him a very useful man. Although treated with kindness and honor, he was not allowed to leave Japan. He had a wife and daughter in England. Adams had a son and daughter born to him in Japan, and there are still living Japanese who claim descent from him. One of the streets of Yeddo was named after him, and the people of that street still hold an annual celebration on the fifteenth of June in his honor.

The history of the two centuries and a half that followed the triumphs of Iyeyasu is that of profound peace and stern isolation. We must pass rapidly in review of them. This great shogun took pains to arrange the empire after the appointment to the office, in such a way that the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, the dynasty which he founded, should have strictest power and most certain descent. His sons and daughters were married where they would be most powerful in influence with the great families of daimios. It must not be forgotten that Iyeyasu and his successor were both in theory and in reality vassals of the emperor, though they assumed protection of the imperial person. Neither the shogun nor the daimios were acknowledged at Kioto as nobles of the empire. The lowest kuge, or noble, was above the shogun in rank. The shogun could obtain his appointment only from the mikado. He was simply the most powerful among the daimios, who had won that pre-eminence by the sword, and who by wealth and power and a skillfully wrought plan of division of land among the other daimios was able to rule.

In 1600 and the years following, Iyeyasu employed an army of three hundred thousand laborers in Yeddo improving and building the city. Before the end of the century, Yeddo had a population of more than half a million, but it never did have, as the Hollanders guessed and the old text books told us, two million five hundred thousand souls. Outside of Yeddo the strength of the great unifier was spent on public roads and highways, post stations, bridges, castles and mines. He spent the last years of his life engaged in erasing the scars of war by his policy of conciliation, securing the triumphs of peace, perfecting his plans for fixing in stability a system of government, and in collecting books and manuscripts. He bequeathed his code of laws to his chief retainers, and advised his sons to govern in the spirit of kindness. He died on the eighth of March, 1616.

The grandson of Iyeyasu, Iyemitsu, was another great shogun, and it was he who established the rule that all the daimios should visit and reside in Yeddo during half the year. Gradually these rules became more and more restrictive, until the guests became mere vassals. Their wives and children were kept as hostages in Yeddo. During his rule the Christian insurrection and massacre at Shimabara took place. Yeddo was vastly improved, with aqueducts, fire watch towers, the establishment of mints, weights and measures. A general survey of the empire was executed; maps of various provinces and plans of the daimios’ castles were made; the councils called Hiojo-sho (discussion and decision), and Wakadoshiyori (assembly of elders), were established and Corean envoys received. The height of pride and ambition which this shogun had already reached, is seen in the fact that in a letter of reply to Corea he is referred to as Tai Kun, (“Tycoon”), a title never conferred by the mikado on any one, nor had Iyemitsu any legal right to it. It was assumed in a sense honorary or meaningless to any Japanese, unless highly jealous of the mikado’s sovereignty, and was intended to overawe the Coreans. The approximate interpretation of it is “great ruler.”

Under the strong rule of the Tokugawa shoguns, therefore, the long distracted Japanese empire at length enjoyed two-and-a-half centuries of peace and prosperity. The innate love of art, literature, and education, which almost constant warfare had prevented from duly developing among the people, had now an opportunity of producing fruit. And as it had shown itself in former intervals of rest, so was it now. Under the patronage of Iyeyasu was composed the Dai Nihon Shi, the first detailed history of Japan. Tsunayoshi, his successor, 1681 to 1709, founded at Seido a Confucian university, and was such an enthusiast for literature that he used to assemble the princes and high officials about him and expound to them passages from the Chinese classics. Yoshimune, another shogun, was much interested in astronomy and other branches of science, beside doing much to improve agriculture. Legal matters also engaged his attention; he altered Iyeyasu’s policy so far as to publish a revised criminal code, and improved the administration of the law, forbidding the use of torture except in cases where there was flagrant proof of guilt. He built an astronomical observatory at Kanda and established at his court a professorship of Chinese literature.

Iyenori, shogun from 1787 to 1838, threw the classes of the Confucian university open to the public. Every body from the nobility down to the masses of the people began to appreciate literary studies. Maritime commerce within the limits of the four seas was encouraged by the shogun’s government, regular service of junks being established between the principal ports. Nor must it be forgotten that to the Tokugawas is due the foundation of the great modern city of Yeddo with its vast fortifications and its triumphs of art in the shrines of Shiba and Uyeno. It was at this period too that the matchless shrines of Nikko were reared in memory of the greatness of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu. The successors of the former, the shoguns of the Tokugawa dynasty, fourteen in all, were with one exception buried alternately in the cemeteries of Zozoji and Toyeizan, in the city districts of Shiba and Uyeno.

But throughout all this period of peace and progress the light of the outer world was excluded. The people made the best use of the light they had, but after all it was but dim. The learning by rote of thousands of Chinese characters, and the acquisition of skill in the composition of Chinese and Japanese verse, were little worthy to be the highest literary attainments possible to the most aspiring of the youth of Japan. In the domain of art there was more that was inviting, but scientific knowledge was tantalizingly meagre and that little was overlaid with Chinese absurdities. When we consider that the isolation of the country was due to no spirit of exclusiveness in the national character, that indeed it was the result of a policy that actually went against the grain of the people, how many restless spirits must there have been during these long years, who kept longing for more light. Fortunately there was one little chink at Deshima, in the harbor at Nagasaki, and of this some of the more earnest were able to take advantage. Many instances are recorded and there must be many more of which we can know nothing, of Japanese students displaying the truest heroism in surmounting the difficulties that lay in the way of their acquiring foreign knowledge. Let us now see how there came at length an unsettled dawn, and after the clouds of this had cleared, a dazzling inpouring of the light.

It was the American Union which opened the door of Japan to western civilization. It had been desired by all of the European nations, as well as by the United States, to obtain access to Japanese ports. Supplies were frequently needed, particularly water and coal, but no distress was ever considered a sufficient excuse for the Japanese to permit the landing of a foreign vessel’s crew. Shipwrecked sailors frequently passed through seasons of great trial and danger, before they were restored to their own people. Even Japanese sailors who were shipwrecked on other shores, or carried out to sea, were refused re-admission to their own country when rescued by foreigners.

Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry of the American navy, urged upon President Millard Fillmore the necessity and possibility of making some sort of a treaty with the exclusive empire. It was decided that the most effective way to advance this desire was to sail into the bay of Yeddo with a squadron sufficient to command respect. A fleet was assigned to the undertaking, under the command of Perry, and the American vessels sailed away to the Orient to rendezvous at the chief city of the Liu Kiu islands, Napha. From Napha the fleet sailed for Japan, the Susquehanna, the flagship, the advance of the line of the ships of seventeen nations.

It was on the seventh day of July, 1853, under a sky and over a sea of perfect calm, that the four American warships appeared off Uraga in the Bay of Yeddo. Without delay the officials of Uraga emphatically notified the “barbarian” envoy that he must go to Nagasaki, where all business with foreigners had to be done. The barbarian refused to go. He informed the messengers that he was the bearer of a letter from the President of the United States to the Emperor of Japan; that he had sailed as near as possible to the destination of the letter and would now deliver it and continue it on its way by land, but he would not retrace his path until the letter was delivered. The shogun Iyeyoshi on receiving information of such decision, was exceedingly troubled and called his officials to a council. Alarm was wide spread, and it was ordered that strict watch should be kept along the shore to prevent the barbarian vessels from committing acts of violence. During the eight days while Commodore Perry’s fleet was waiting in the Bay of Yeddo, the boats of his ships were busily engaged in taking soundings and surveying the shores and the anchorage. No sailors were permitted to land, and no natives were molested. Every effort was made to indicate to the Japanese the desire for a peaceful friendship.

A learned Chinese scholar was sent by the shogun to Uraga, who acted as an official and eminent interpreter in an interview with the American envoy. Continued councils were called by the shogun, not only of his chief officers but of the daimios, the nobles, and the retired nobles of Yeddo. The citizens of Yeddo and the surrounding villages were in great tumult, fearing that there would be a war, for which the country was totally unprepared. Meanwhile the envoy was impatiently demanding an answer. At last, after eight days, the patience and the impatience, combined with the demonstrations made by the vessels of the fleet, which were highly impressive to the Japanese who had never seen a steamboat, won success for Commodore Perry’s message. A high Japanese commissioner came to Uraga, prepared a magnificent pavilion for the ceremonies, and announced himself ready to receive the letter to the emperor. With great pomp and ceremony the Americans landed and in this pavilion with proper formalities, delivered the letter and presents from the president. Then having, for the first time in history, gained several important points of etiquette in a country where etiquette was more than law or morals, the splendid diplomat and warrior Perry sailed away with his fleet July 17, 1853.

It was in response to a temporizing policy on the part of Japan, and to the good judgment and careful decision of Commodore Perry, that the fleet sailed away without demanding an immediate reply to his letter. The American envoy was informed that in a matter of so much importance a decision could not be at once reached, and that if he now left, he would on his return get a definite answer. No wonder there was commotion. The nineteenth century had come suddenly into contact with the fourteenth. The spirit of commerce and the spirit of feudalism, two great but conflicting forces, met in their full development, and the result was necessarily a convulsion. We are hardly surprised to hear that the shogun died before Commodore Perry’s return, or that during the next few years the land was harassed by earthquakes and pestilences.

Perry’s second appearance was in February, 1854, this time with a much larger fleet. A hot debate took place in the shogun’s council as to the answer that should be given. The old daimio of Mito, the head of one of the three families, which, forming the Tokugawa clan, furnished the occupants of the shogunate, wanted to fight and settle the question once for all. “At first,” he said, “they will give us philosophical instruments, machinery and other curiosities; will take ignorant people in; and trade being their chief object they will manage to impoverish the country, after which they will treat us just as they like, perhaps behave with the greatest rudeness and insult us, and end by swallowing up Japan. If we do not drive them away now we shall never have another opportunity.”

Others gave contrary advice, saying, “If we try to drive them away they will immediately commence hostilities, and then we shall be obliged to fight. If we once get into a dispute we shall have an enemy to fight who will not be easily disposed of. He does not care how long he will have to spend over it, but he will come with myriads of men-of-war and surround our shores completely; however large a number of ships we might destroy, he is so accustomed to that sort of thing that he would not care in the least. In time the country would be put to an immense expense and the people plunged into misery. Rather than allow this, as we are not the equals of foreigners in the mechanical arts, let us have intercourse with foreign countries, learn their drill and tactics, and when we have made the nation as united as one family, we shall be able to go abroad and give lands in foreign countries to those who have distinguished themselves in battle.”

The latter view carried and a treaty with the United States was signed on the thirty-first of March, 1854. Now be it observed that the shogun did this without the sanction of the mikado, whom indeed he had never yet consulted on the matter, and that he subscribed himself Tai Kun, (“Tycoon,”) or great ruler, a title to which he had no right and which if it meant anything at all involved an assumption of the authority of supreme ruler in the empire. This was the view naturally taken by Perry and by the ambassadors from European countries who a few years later obtained treaties with Japan. They were under the impression that they were dealing with the emperor; and hearing of the existence of another potentate living in an inland city, surrounded with a halo of national veneration, they conceived the plausible but erroneous theory that the tycoon was the temporal sovereign, and this mysterious mikado the spiritual sovereign of the country. They little dreamed that the so-called tycoon was no sovereign at all, and that consequently the treaties which he signed had no legal validity.

The shogun could ill afford thus to lay himself open to the charge of treason. From the first there had been a certain class of daimios who had never heartily submitted to the Tokugawa administration. The principal clans which thus submitted to the regime under protest against what they considered a usurpation, an encroachment on the authority of the mikado, whom alone they recognized as the divinely appointed ruler of Japan, were those of Satsuma, Choshiu, and Tosa. As the years of peace cast their spell over the nation, making the people forgetful of war and transforming the descendants of Iyeyasu into luxurious idlers, much more like impotent mikados than successors of the energetic soldier and law-giver, their hopes more and more arose that an opportunity would be given them to overthrow the shogunate and bring about the unification of the empire at the hands of the mikado. Their time had now come. The shogun was enervated and he had so far forgotten himself as to open the country to foreign trade, without the sanction of the “Son of Heaven.” It was this illegal act of the shogun that precipitated the confusion, violence and disaster of the next few years, reaching ultimately in 1868 to the complete overthrow of his own power and the restoration of the mikado to his rightful position as actual as well as nominal ruler of the empire.

Fearing the consequences of the illegal act into which he had been driven, the shogun lost no time in sending messengers to Kioto to inform the mikado of what had happened and seek his sanction to the policy adopted. It was plead in excuse for the course of conduct, that affairs had reached such a condition that the shogun was driven to sign the treaty. The emperor in great agitation summoned a council. The decision was unanimous against the shogun’s action, and the messengers were informed that no sanction could be given to the treaty. The next important step was not taken until July, 1858, when Lord Elgin arrived with propositions on the part of Great Britain for a treaty of amity and commerce. He was unaccompanied by any armed force, and brought a steam yacht as a present from Queen Victoria to the tycoon of Japan.

A few months later treaties were entered into with all the leading powers of Europe, but if there was a political lull between 1854 and 1858, the poor Japanese had distractions of a very different kind. From a violent earthquake and consequent conflagration, one hundred and four thousand of the inhabitants of Yeddo lost their lives. A terrific storm swept away one hundred thousand more, and in a visitation of cholera thirty thousand persons perished in Yeddo alone. Moreover, just when the treaties were being signed, the shogun Iyesada died, “as if,” says Sir R. Alcock, “a further victim was required for immolation on the altar of the outraged gods of Japan.”

The political tempest that had been gathering now swept over the nation. For the next ten years there was so much disorder, intrigue, and bloodshed, that Japan became among the western nations a byword for treachery and assassination. Defenseless foreigners were cut down in the streets of Yeddo and Yokohama and even in the legations. Twice was the British legation attacked, on one of the occasions being taken by storm and held for a time by a band of free-lances. No foreigner’s life was safe. Even when out on the most trivial errand, every foreign resident was accompanied by an armed escort furnished by the shogun’s government. It is needless to give an account of all the different assassinations, successful or attempted, which darkened the period. The secretary to the American legation was cut down near Shiba, Yeddo, when returning from the Prussian legation with an armed escort; a Japanese interpreter attached to the British legation was fatally stabbed in broad daylight while standing at the legation flagstaff; one of the guard at the same legation murdered two Englishmen in the garden and then committed suicide; an Englishman was cut down on the highway between Yokohama and Yeddo by certain retainers of the daimio of Satsuma, whose procession he had unwittingly crossed on horseback; and these were not all.

It is not a satisfactory answer to say that hatred of foreigners was the leading motive that inspired all these acts of violence. This was no doubt more or less involved, but the true explanation is to be found in the hostility of the mikado’s partisans to the shogun’s government. All possible means were taken to thwart the shogun and bring him into complications with the ambassadors at his court. Every attack on a foreigner brought fresh trouble upon the Yeddo government and hastened its collapse. Long before foreigners arrived, the seeds of revolution had sprouted and their growth was showing above the soil. It is to the state of political parties and of feudalism at this epoch in Japanese history, and not to mere ill will against foreigners, that this policy of intrigue and assassination must be ascribed.

It would take too long to discuss all the complications of this period and to inquire, for instance, how far when the Japanese government failed to arrest and execute the murderer of Mr. Richardson, the British were justified in demanding an indemnity of $500,000 from the shogun and $125,000 from the daimio of Satsuma, or in enforcing their demands with a threatened bombardment of Yeddo and an actual bombardment of Kagoshima. It is out of our scope here to inquire into the shelling of the batteries of the daimio of Choshiu, at Shimonoseki, in turn by the Americans, British, French and Dutch, the men of Choshiu having fired upon some Dutch, American, and French vessels that had entered the straits against the prohibition of the Japanese. An indemnity of $3,000,000 was also exacted and distributed among these nations.

Such stern measures doubtless appeared to the foreign ambassadors necessary to prevent the expulsion or even the utter extermination of foreigners. Whether their policy was mistaken or not, certain it is that they can have had no adequate conception of the difficulties with which the shogun had to contend. The position of that ruler was one of such distraction as might well evoke for him the pity of every disinterested onlooker. Do as he would, he could not escape trouble; on the one side were the mikado’s partisans ever growing in power and in determination to crush him, and on the other were the equally irresistible foreigners with their impatient demands and their alarming threats. He was as helpless as a man between a wall of rock and an advancing tide.

The internal difficulties of the country were increased by dissensions which broke out in the imperial court. The clans of Satsuma and Choshiu had been summoned to Kioto to preserve order. For some reason the former were relieved of this duty, or rather privilege, and it therefore devolved exclusively upon the Choshiu men. Taking advantage of their position, the Choshiu men persuaded the mikado to undertake a progress to the province of Yamato, there to proclaim his intention of taking the field against foreigners; but this proposal roused the jealousy of the other clans at the imperial court, as they feared that the men of Choshiu were planning to obtain possession of the mikado’s person and thus acquire pre-eminence. The intended expedition was abandoned, and the men of Choshiu, accompanied by Sanjo, afterward prime minister of the reformed government, and six other nobles who had supported them, were banished from Kioto.

The ill feeling thus occasioned between Choshiu and Satsuma, was fomented by an unfortunate incident which occurred at Shimonoseki early in 1864. The former clan recklessly fired upon a vessel, which being of European build they mistook for a foreign one, but which really belonged to Satsuma. Thus Choshiu was in disfavor both with the shogun and with the mikado, and in this year we have the strange spectacle of these two rulers leaguing their forces together for its punishment. August 20, 1864, the Choshiu men advanced upon Kioto, but were repulsed with much slaughter, only however after the greater part of the city had been destroyed by fire. The rebellion was not at once quelled; indeed the Choshiu samurai were proving themselves more than a match for the troops which the shogun had sent against them, when at length the imperial court ordered the fighting to be abandoned. Simultaneously with the Choshiu rebellion the shogun had to meet an insurrection by the daimio of Mito, in the east. His troubles no doubt hastened his death, which took place at Osaka in September, 1866, shortly before the war against Choshiu terminated. Then there succeeded Keiki, the last of the shoguns.

It should be noted, however, that before this the mikado’s sanction had been obtained to the foreign treaties. In November, 1865, British, French, and Dutch squadrons came to anchor off Hiogo, of which the foreign settlement of Kobe is now a suburb, and sent letters to Kioto demanding the imperial consent. The nearness of such an armed force was too great an argument to be withstood, and the demand was granted. Little more than a year after his accession to the shogunate Keiki resigned. In doing so he proved himself capable of duly appreciating the national situation. Now that foreigners had been admitted, it was more necessary than ever that the government should be strong, and this, it was seen, was impossible without the abolition of the old dual system. He had secured the mikado’s consent to the treaties, on the condition that they should be revised, and that Hiogo should never be opened as a port of foreign commerce.

But the end had not yet come. On the same day when the shogunate was abolished, January 3, 1868, the forces friendly to the Tokagawas were dismissed from Kioto, and the guardianship of the imperial palace was committed to the clans of Satsuma, Tosa, and Geishiu. This measure gave Keiki great offense, and availing himself of a former order of the court which directed him to continue the conduct of affairs, he marched with his retainers and friends to Ozaka and sent a request to the mikado that all Satsuma men who had any share in the government should be dismissed. To this the court would not consent, and Keiki marched against Kioto with a force of thirty thousand men, his declared object being to remove from the mikado his bad counselors. A desperate engagement took place at Fushimi, in which the victory was with the loyalists. But this was only the beginning of a short but sharp civil war, of which the principal fighting was in the regions between Yeddo and Nikko.

The restoration was at last complete. Proclamation was made “to sovereigns of all foreign nations and their subjects, that permission had been granted to the shogun Yoshinobu, or Keiki, to return the governing power in accordance with his own request;” and the manifesto continued: “henceforward we shall exercise supreme authority both in the internal and external affairs of the country. Consequently the title of emperor should be substituted for that of tycoon which had been hitherto employed in the treaties.” Appended were the seal of Dai Nippon, and the signature of Mutsuhito, this being the first occasion in Japanese history on which the name of an emperor had appeared during his lifetime.

With the triumph of the imperial party one might have expected a return to the old policy of isolation. There can be no doubt that when the Satsuma, Choshiu, and other southern clans commenced their agitation for the abolition of the shogunate, their ideas with regard to foreign intercourse were decidedly retrogressive. But after all, the leading motive which inspired them was dissatisfaction with the semi-imperial position occupied by the upstart Tokugawas; to this their opposition to foreigners was quite secondary. It so happened that the Tokugawa shoguns got involved with foreigners, and it was so much the worse for the foreigners. To go deeper, what was at the bottom of this desire was the overthrow of the shogunate. Doubtless their patriotism, what they had at heart, was the highest welfare of their country, and this they believed impossible without its unification. Their primary motive then, being patriotism, we need not be surprised that they were willing to entertain the notion that perhaps after all the prosperity of their country might best be insured by the adoption of a policy of free foreign intercourse. This idea more and more commended itself, until it became a conviction; and when they got into power they astonished the world by the thoroughness with which they broke loose from the old traditions and entered upon a policy of enlightened reformation. To the political and social revolution which accompanied the restoration of the mikado in 1868, there has been no parallel in the history of mankind.