A Life Transformed: the 1910S

TWO A Life Transformed: The 1910s Not the least significant element of modem political history is contained in the constant growth of individual personality accompanied by the limitation of the State.! Georg Jellinek, 1892 FIRST TRIP TO CHINA AND THE JAPANESE COMMUNITY IN PEKING When Nakae grew bored with working for the South Manchurian Rail way Company, once again his benefactors came to his rescue and found something else for him. Around October 1914, his mother's former boarder, Ts'ao Ju-lin, managed to land him an offer. Ts'ao summoned Nakae to Peking with a one-year contract to work as secretary to Ariga Nagao (1860-1921). Ariga was a professor of international law at Waseda University and had been a friend of Ushikichi's father, although thei; political views diverged sharply. Apparently, years before, Mrs. Nakae out of concern for her wayward son's future had prevailed on the ever grateful Ts'ao to intercede on behalf of Ushikichi if necessary. Nakae received the handsome monthly salary of one hundred yuan for responsibilities neither especially demanding nor explicit. One suspects that he held this sinecure, which might otherwise not have existed, because of his mother's earlier appeal. We know, however, that Nakae spent a great deal of his time in China that year leading what he himself would later refer to as the life of a "profligate villain" (hi5ti5 burai).2 In 1914 Ariga accepted an invitation to serve as an advisor to the gov- "'-------------------- -- 28 A Life Transformed ernment of Yuan Shih-k'ai (1859-1916), which had taken power several years earlier in the young Republic of China. Yuan's advisor Ts'ao Ju-lin, who had been a student in Tokyo a decade earlier, may have engineered the invitation to Nakae by using his own political clout. Along with Yuan's other foreign advisors, Frank J. Goodnow (1859-1939) and George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920), Ariga had been hired in the capac ity of a legal scholar to help draft a constitution for Yuan's regime. Ariga doubted that China was adequately prepared for a "liberal democ racy," and he encouraged Yuan to seek a balance between a monarchy and a republic. He feared the wide extension of the franchise for several reasons: It insured rule by the poor; it blindly followed a Western model of government; and it ignored China's glorious political traditions. In general he advised "conservative centralization," highly restricted suffrage, and permission for the convening of a national assembly only if the political situation demanded it. As Ernest Young has argued: "It might not be unfair to say that Ariga's main influence on Yuan Shih-k'ai was to reinforce his scepticism about the value of vigorous representa tive institutions."3 No sooner had Ariga (and Nakae) come to Japan than in January of 1915 the Japanese government laid its infamous Twenty-One Demands before the Yuan regime. Although Yuan was cleverly able to leak news of these secret demands to the press and claim no choice but to reject them, an ultimatum by Japan forced his acceptance of all but the last of them, the heinous fifth group, which virtually ceded to Japan powers of military and police intervention into Chinese affairs. Ariga may have been no radical democrat, but he was outraged by the excessive expan sionist zeal of Foreign Minister Kato Komei (1869-1926). Taking Yuan's side in the negotiations, he informed Japan's elder statesmen (the genro) of Katos actions and the gravity of the demands foisted upon the Chi nese. Kato was vigorously chastised by the genro for his insensitivity, just as Ariga was criticized by Japanese ultranationalists for insufficient expansionist desires. The actual signing of the demands, on 25 May 1915, devolved upon Chinese Foreign Minister Lu Cheng-hsiang, although responsibility for Chinese policy actually lay with Yuan and Ts'ao Ju-lin, then the Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs. 4 Ts'ao, who had already played a part in Nakae Ushikichi's life and .

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