■ Source: “Miyazaki Tōten to Shingai kakumei” 宮崎滔天と辛亥革命 (Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution), Fukuoka Unesco 福岡ユネスコ 48 (October 2012), 1–11.

Miyazaki Tōten and the 1911 Revolution

My name is Joshua Fogel, and I teach East Asian history, in particular the his- tory of Sino-Japanese relations, at York University in Toronto, Canada. Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this symposium for inviting me and allowing me to offer some thoughts at this forum. I have another reason to be thankful for this invitation to Fukuoka which I shall mention at the end of my talk today. Many people, especially those living in warm climates like Fukuoka, believe that because Canada is so far north, it is always freezing cold. In the winter, yes, Canada can be very cold, but Canada is a big place—in fact, it’s the second largest country in the world. East of the Rocky Mountains, Toronto has one of the nicer climates—much milder than nearby Buffalo, New York or even Detroit, Michigan. Please come visit us some time. My topic today concerns the role of several Japanese in the 1911 Revolution in China. This is not an unknown topic. Scholars have actually worked on it a great deal—in Japan, China, North America, and even Europe. In fact, the cen- tral role played by certain Japanese supporters of Sun Yat-sen has provided an important bridge for Chinese and Japanese scholars as well as ordinary citizens to find common ground. My talk today is not aimed at offering a new interpre- tation or revealing some new documents on this topic of Japan’s role in the 1911 Revolution. Instead, I would like to take a close look at one extremely impor- tant Japanese activist and a book by him—well known, I’m sure, to everyone here—Miyazaki Tōten and his autobiography, Sanjūsan nen no yume. Most scholars mine this work for every possible detail they can find about Miyazaki’s work to help set Sun Yat-sen on a course to overthrow the Qing dynasty and establish a new republican government in China. Miyazaki decided early in life to devote himself to finding a hero in China who would perform such heroic deeds. He was a very young man when he made this deci- sion, and it seems in retrospect very much like the decision of a very young man. The amazing thing is that he not that he had such a dream but that he actually accomplished it, although at the time his dream seemed to him to be a complete failure. That was the final message of Sanjūsan nen no yume. It was the early Meiji period when he began his quest, the Tokugawa bakufu had just been overthrown a few years before, and just about anything seemed possible. Miyazaki was born at the end of Meiji 3 (January 1871) in what is now Kumamoto-ken, and already many people in the western domains were

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004285309_004 Miyazaki Tōten And The 1911 Revolution 15 unhappy about the way in which the Meiji Restoration had worked out. The next few years would witness the Saga Uprising and the Satsuma Rebellion. Kyushu people sure seem to be an unruly group! In any event, for a variety of reasons, they were not pleased by the outcome of the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu. Miyazaki Tōten came to the view that a revolutionary move- ment to wipe away the decadent Qing dynasty would usher in an international movement aimed at freedom and righteousness everywhere, including Japan. Sun would be China’s George Washington, and Tōten would be his General Lafayette, the Frenchman who came to Washington’s aid when the fortunes of the young American revolutionary forces were at their lowest. When Tōten published his autobiography, though, in 1902, the Chinese revolutionary movement was in shambles. Sun was in hiding after the failure of an uprising in south China, and the future looked very grim. Sanjūsan nen no yume thus reads like an extremely self-pitying, romantic tale of total cata- clysm. Tōten repeatedly characterizes his life as an utter failure—just a “dream” without substance—despite his purest motives. He is forever blaming him- self for his debilitating weakness for women and alcohol; his self-indulgence is on almost every page of his memoir, and it gets very tiring to read about it over and over again. And, all the time as he writes with an open bottle of sake nearby and a prostitute in his bed, one must remind oneself that he had a wife and child living in absolute poverty far away. Something must be wrong. Miyazaki Tōten can’t both be a great figure in the Chinese revolution, a great friend to Sun, and also a whoring, self-pitying drunk who neglected his family almost completely. Yet, both statements are recog- nized as true. What’s wrong is the way I have framed the question. We can’t use early 21th-century eyes and early 21th-century values to evaluate events that took place over a century ago under altogether different conditions. So, I shall withhold evaluation of Tōten’s behavior until after we have a look at the details of his autobiography. Let us go back to the beginning and place Tōten in his proper place and time. Tōten was born into a low-level samurai family, the youngest of eleven chil- dren. One older brother, Hachirō, died in 1877 during the Satsuma Rebellion. His father died when he was nine years old, and many of his siblings died very young before reaching adulthood. Tōten’s own father possessed a bad combina- tion of an elitist contempt for money and a sincere affection for alcohol. That made life in the Miyazaki household extremely difficult for everyone else. In addition, there was a consciousness bred among the younger family members that sacrifice for a great cause was worth more than living a sedentary, stable life. Growing up, Tōten was often told he should become a hero like his older brother, and his mother was no less stern in this regard than his father. She