Christian convents an6 social protest in merji japan 4- "t X TS£ lh -y A, 7 * •] ft, * y *• x" ? A I t t t ~ ,u ^ « t!» =5 T * 2 >L r % 1" T T r ^ A 1 ? JE. * * & Christian converts and sociaL protest in meiji japan IRWIN SCHEINER CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 2002 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1970 by the University of California Press Reprinted in 2002 with the permission of the author by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 202 S. Thayer St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 MICHIGAN CLASSICS IN JAPANESE STUDIES NUMBER 24 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scheiner, Irwin. Christian converts and social protest in Meiji Japan / Irwin Scheiner. p.cm. — (Michigan classics in Japanese studies ; no. 24) Originally published: Berkeley : University of California Press, 1970. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-929280-20-3 (paper: alk. paper) 1. Christian converts from Confucianism—Japan. 2. Samurai— Religious life. 3. Japan—History—Restoration, 1853-1870. I. Title. II. Series. BV2628.C65 S35 2002 305.6—dc21 2002031291 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Standard Z39.44-1992 (Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives). Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-929280-20-9 (paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12797-9 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-472-90193-7 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Dedicated to the Memory of My Dear Friend Joseph R. Levenson And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sor- rows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, "Yes, the stars always make me laugh!" And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Protestant Evangelists and Christian Samurai 7 3 Alienation and Conversion 41 4 Westernization and Conversion 67 5 Toward Social Criticism 100 6 Niijima Jo: The Conscience of a Christian 127 7 The Founding of a School and the Cultivation of a Nation 156 8 Loyalty and Criticism 188 Bibliographic Essay 248 Bibliography 256 Index 263 acknowledgments SINCE beginning research on this book as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, I have received generous financial support from the Ford Foundation as a Foreign Area Fellow, the University of Michigan as a Pre-doctoral Fellow, and the various institutes, particularly the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies, and administrative units of the University of California at Berkeley. I am deeply indebted to them all and would like to express my thanks at this time. My debts to individuals are numerous. Friends at other universities, Paul Cohen, Peter Duus, Harry Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita have critically ex- amined my manuscript and offered me their advice. I am particularly indebted to my friends at the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley. I, like all of my col- leagues in the history department, have been constant- ly heartened by the intellectual stimulation within the department and by its warm and concerned criticism. In particular, I would like to thank Richard M. Abrams, Robert Bellah, Delmer M. Brown, Gene A. Brucker, Gerald D. Feldman, Samuel Haber, Ira M. Lapidus, Lawrence W. Levine, George W. Stocking, Jr., and Frederic E. Wakeman. Robert M. Middlekauff and Sheldon Rothblatt IX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS taught me more about the craft of the historian than I can ever hope to absorb, and I have been warmed by their friendship. John W. Hall and Roger Hackett guided my dis- sertation and taught me much about Japanese history, as well as the task of the teacher. My wife's aid can never be registered in any tangi- ble terms. I can only thank her for the pleasure and joy our marriage has offered me. Tokyo, 1969 I. S. 1 intRO&uction THE modern English social historian Noel Annan has suggested that for the present-day historian Ranke's call for history "wie es eigentlich gewesen" should not be rendered as "what actually happened/' but "what it was really like." The two translations are not differ- entiated by fact but by a distance in social-psychologi- cal feeling. Lord Annan's reinterpretation of the classic canon on nineteenth-century historiography may also indicate that major lines of interpretation of European political, economic, and social development have been settled and that contemporary historians of the West may now give their time to the analysis of the psychological impact of the changes that have already been brilliantly described. Historians of Japan, like those of most of East Asia, have only begun to examine the political and social history of the classic past, and only recently have described the men and institutions engaged in Japan's attempt to deal with moderniza- tion. The excitement of what "happened" in the Meiji era, 1868-1912, the successes of economic develop- ment, and the enormity of the institutional changes have absorbed most present-day students of Japan in 1 INTRODUCTION the story of development. As yet, Japanese history is mostly a tale of economic and social progress, and even when it is a study of unsuccessful political parties and arrested social movements, it amounts to a description of the amazing virtuosity of Japan's adaptation to the necessities of a modern world. Nowhere has there been a discussion of the confusion necessarily generated by the rapidity of the change or of the agony created in the lives of many whose attitudes, expectations, and even successes depended on the continuance of now abolished institutions. Historians have ignored the settled conditions of most samurai and instead concen- trated on the study of the minority of activist samurai leaders who, with the backing of only a few han (feudal domains) sought to overthrow the old order and whose success in doing so has made the study of the modernization of Japan the prime concern of his- torians. The history of the Meiji period may have been an over-all political and industrial success story, but for a fuller understanding of the conditions of that success it is also necessary to understand "what it was really like" for the members of the old elite to be estranged from the proponents of revolution and what many members did to assure their own social and psy- chological position in a world they had not expected. For a long time, historians have recognized that the Restoration was not only a political but a pro- found social upheaval and that many attempts were made to adjust to it. The samurai-led Popular Rights movement was rooted in a combination of samurai dissatisfaction with their new role under the Meiji government and the conviction that Western liberal ideas should be used to guide the further develop- ment of modern Japan. There were leaders of the Restoration, too, who were dissatisfied with the direc- tion of reform and appalled at the fate of the samurai INTRODUCTION because of new class-leveling legislation. Some, like Saigo Takamori, the most eminent samurai leader of the Restoration movement from Satsuma domain and a leading member of the oligarchy that ruled Japan in early Meiji, left the government and rose in rebellion. Within a decade of the Restoration, groups of former samurai had joined together to foment rebellion while others, seeking a more peaceful and modern way to show their opposition, had formed political associa- tions based on Western ideas. Historians and sociologists have demonstrated that a study of the Restoration must begin with an analysis of the social structure and values that enclosed and guided the samurai world. Not only did these values, as Robert Bellah has shown in his study of Tokugawa elite morality,1 provide the victors with the will to remake Japan. They also must have pro- vided all samurai with a notion of what to expect if they performed their duties properly. Not only, as Albert Craig has indicated, in his analysis of Choshu domain,2 one of the two most important domains in the Restoration movement, did Choshu samurai live in a "structured field" which defined their horizontal and vertical relationships, their loyalties and associa- tions, their friendships and ambitions. Most samurai also lived in domains where their highest loyalty was to their lord and where their ambitions were seen in terms of success in their domains. To know what the Restoration was "like" for a samurai, it is necessary to understand his assumptions about social hierarchy, authority, and individual achievement. From them 1 Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957). 2 Albert M. Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1964). INTRODUCTION the samurai derived his expectations and a sense of his identity. Yet, no formal explanation of the structure and values of Tokugawa society could evoke the com- plexity of emotional and intellectual choices faced by many samurai who felt no quick allegiance to the Meiji government, but knew that past loyalties, ac- cepted ideas, and old achievements no longer wTere rewarded or even sanctioned.