December 22, 2006

On this day in 1885, Ito Hirobumi, a central figure in Japan’s Meiji era modernization and a noted womanizer, began the first of his four terms as Prime Minister after reorganizing the government along European lines to establish a cabinet.

Ito was the adopted son of Hayashi Juzo, a minor samurai in the perpetually rebellious Choshu domain, whose leaders had an annual tradition of meeting to decide the Shogunate was still too strong to be overthrown. Not being born into a position the would normally bring political power wound up serving Ito quite well as the eventual success of Choshu’s side, despite a disastrous attempt at uprising, put him at the forefront of loyalists to the Meiji emperor.

Ito’s life was a study in contrasts, so a brief look at his background and early life is in order. Choshu (present-day Yamaguchi prefecture, the home of current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo) harbored deep resentment against the Tokugawa shogunate from the early days of the era for having been forced off over two-thirds of their land. Two and half centuries later, when US Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships arrived in the harbor at Shimoda, Yoshida Shoin, a samurai from Choshu who had been teaching at a military college in the domain since the age of nine and who, being wary of foreign influence, thought the best way to resist the foreigners was to learn their ways, entered the history books by attempting to board one of Perry’s ships. He and four accomplices were caught and imprisoned.

Upon his release, Yoshida returned to Choshu and took over his uncle’s Shoka Sonjuku - a military tactics and political school, where Ito Hirobumi became one of his students.

Ito also joined Yoshida’s Sonno joi, which revered the emperor and sought to “expel the barbarians.” This is ironic considering that Ito spent a large portion of his later professional life overseas and was a leading advocate of adopting Western ways, a view he adopted after being chosen as one of the “Choshu five” who were sent to University College London in 1863.

Shortly after Ito’s return to Japan, convinced of Western technological superiority, he tried to warn the leaders of Choshu against taking on the UK, Netherlands, France, and US in the domain’s campaign to expel foreigners as part of its rebellion against the Tokugawas, whose 1854 treaty with Perry was resented. Just over three years later, the Boshin War turned Japan’s government on its head, with the Shogunate’s unsucessful attempt at subduing Choshu becoming the major turning point that led to the Meiji Restoration, which gave Mutsuhito, the Meiji Emperor real power, and a new government, in which leaders from Hizen (modern-day Saga and Nagasaki), Tosa (Kochi), Satsuma (Kagoshima), and Choshu, all in Western Japan, ruled the country as part of an oligarchic body known as the Dajo-kan.

As the early Meiji Government occupied itself with centralizing control of the country and ending the Han system, Ito was appointed Governor of Hyogo, junior councilor for foreign affairs, and was sent to the United States, where he studied currency and taxation systems. In 1871, he set up the Meiji Government’s taxation system and was then dispatced as one of three Government ministers acting as assistants to Iwakura Tomomi (whose daughter will enter our story a bit later on) on the two-year Iwakura Mission.

The Iwakura Mission was unsuccessful in its primary goal of renegotiating the unequal treaties into which Japan had entered with Western powers in the waning days of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which strengthened the resolve of Ito and others to succeed in their secondary goal of gleaning as much technological and administrative knowledge from their trip as possible in order to effect the modernization of Japan, thus avoiding the fate of other, colonized and subjugated nations in East Asia.

After the Iwakura Mission returned to Japan, which had abolished the Han system and made remarkable progress in centralizing political authority, considering the animosity that existed between the various factions involved and the bitterness left over from the Boshin War and the events that had led up to it, and narrowly averted following through on a foolhardy scheme to invade Korea, Ito moved steadily up through the ranks of the Government, first being made a full councilor as Minister of Public Works, then being promoted to chairman of the first Assembly of Prefectural Governors two years later.

With the 1881 assassination of Home Minister Okubo Toshimichi as a result of his having led the Meiji Government’s conscript army in the quashing of his former companion Saigo Takamori’s Satsuma Rebellion in their mutual home province in 1877, Ito was promoted to succeed Okubo, thus securing a central position in the Meiji Government.

In his new position, Ito quickly forced the resignation of Finance Minister Okuma Shigenobu, who had disagreed with Ito over the securing of foreign loans to aid with Japan’s development, the establishment of a constitution, and the exposure of the illicit property dealings of the Choshu and Satsuma cliques, whom Ito had sought to protect. Ito was then sent abroad once again, this time to Europe to study constitutions. Having rejected the American Constitution as “too liberal,” the British system as too restrictive of the monarchy, and the French ans Spanish constitutions as too easily leading to despotism, Ito spent most of his eighteen months abroad in Germany, upon whose Constitution Japan’s was eventually based.

After returning home, he worked on what would eventually become the Meiji Constitution and, in his free time, developed the kazoku, or five-tiered peerage system, explicitly based on the British system, and wrote the first Imperial Household Law. He then moved on to sign the Convention of Tientsin with Qing Dynasty stateman Li Hongzhang, which normalized relations with the Qing Dynasty by agreeing that both Japan and China would withdraw from Korea and that neither would send troops to the peninsula without first notifying the other.

Later that same year comes the climax of our story. Ito abolished the Dajo-kan and instituted a European-style cabinet, of which he became Prime Minister on December 22, 1885. He held the position for two years, four months, and nine days before resigning, but returned to office as Japan’s fifth and seventh Prime Minister and also became the first genro, or elder statesman-cum-Imperial advisor. What he did in office, though, is a story for another time.

In his rise to power, Ito established precedents, positive and negative, in the personal and private spheres, that remain extant.

First, most remembered, and perhaps most important, Ito Hirobumi established a strong precedent of progress through being open to foreign ideas and innovations - no small feat in the early years of the Meiji era, which led to Japan’s rapid and unparalleled modernization. He also realized early on that autocracy was not the way forward and, although he supported the kazoku and himself became a genro, he established modern Japan as a democracy valuing competence, education, and achievement as much as loyalty. While later Japanese governments suffered a bit of backsliding in the first and third of those pillars, the idea is in the minds of all, if only receiving lip service, at least in part because of Ito’s efforts. His most important contribution in this regard was writing a Constitution that vested all power in organs of the state, even in the early Showa governments argued otherwise, and subjected everyone save the Emperor himself, regardless of rank or status, to the rule of law.

Second, though, he failed to show progress in other areas, especially areas of personal conduct, and created scandals for himself that are not unlike the scandals created by the politicians of more recent years. He attacked, discredited, and forced out of office capable, talented leaders - over issues of political disagreement and to cover up the crimes of his cronies and himself - at a time when the country could ill-afford the loss of progressive, talented input into its nascent ascendancy.

It is this abuse of power that remains the biggest problem facing Japan’s government today. In addition to seeing that the law did not apply to his Satsuma and Choshu cronies who were abusing the frailties of the very authority they were meant to be building to enrich themselves at the expense of the state and the ordinary people of Japan, he was an inveterate womanizer, widely ridiculed for his adventures, which resulted in a number of illegitimate children. When he raped his own colleague Iwakura’s daughter, the wife of Count Toda Ujikata, after a dance at the Rokumeikan, his power and influence came to his aid in seeing charges dismissed. His behavior and crime almost ended his political career. Had that happened, it is possible that Japan would have missed out on some of his later accomplishments. However, it is also possible that others of his generation and background had similar ideas and that his deserved disgrace would have set the precedent of no one being above the law on paper being carried out in practice and, to extrapolate, the concept of the law on paper being the law in reality - a concept the rulers of this nation have yet to learn, whatever good ideas they may have inherited from Ito.