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The Restoration Movement in Chōshū

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Albert Craig
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Extract

Until recent times, and to a certain extent, even at the present, most historians have spoken of the movements which led to the Meiji Restoration as lower samurai movements. It is my aim in this article to show that they were not. First, negatively, I hope to show by a consideration of what is meant by the term “lower samurai” and by the application of this to the Chōshū scene that the early Restoration movement or sonō jōi (Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian) movement cannot be described as a lower samurai movement. Second, positively, I will attempt an alternate characterization in terms of the different groups participating in this movement in Chōshū from its inception in 1858 until its culmination in the Chōshū Civil War in 1865.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , February 1959 , pp. 187 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1959

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References

1 It is well to distinguish between sonnō and jōi as ideas and sonnō jōi as the name of a movement. Both sonnō and, to a lesser extent jōi, continued down to, and even after 1868. The sonnō jōi movement, on the other hand, ended early in 1865; or, alternatively, one might say in 1865 it underwent a metamorphosis emerging as the tōbaku (Overthrow the Bakufu) movement.

2 Kikiji, Shimmi, Kakyū shizoku no kenkyū [A Study of Lower Samurai] (Tokyo, 1953), p. 2Google Scholar.

3 Tanaka Akira, “Chōshū-han no Tempō kaikaku” [“The Tempō Reform in Chōshū”], Historia, No. 18 (i957). pp. 28-29.

4 It should be noted that there is a difference between shi and sotsu when they are used as general terms roughly equivalent in their denotation to shikaku and keihai, and shi (or shizoku) and sotsu (or sotsuzoku) as names given to administrative categories after the Meiji Restoration. Shizoku as an administrative category was first established in 1869 (Meiji 2.6). It was set up as a new national class beneath the kazokum (nobles and former daimyo) and above the commoners at the same time that the daimyo gave up their fiefs and vassals to the Emperor (hanseki hōkan n). Six months later the Meiji government set up the distinction between shizoku and sotsu; originally this was to apply only to the former retainers of the Shogun. Actually, however, this distinction was picked up and used by almost all of the han. In fact, in most cases, the han went on to make many finer distinctions within these two major categories, mirroring the many fine distinctions of rank of the Tokugawa period. As a consequence, in 1870 (Meiji 3.9), the government issued an order legitimizing the han’s usage of these two categories but prohibiting the various finer distinctions. The difficulty with this order was that the decision as to who should be placed in the shizoku and who in the sotsu, was left to the various han. As a result, groups that in one han were made shizoku were in another, made sotsu. Some, for example, put the stratum of kachi in the shizoku and others put them in the class of sotsu. Some such as Mita-han said that samurai living outside of the castle town (chishi°, literally, “country samurai”) should be sotsu; others such as Takamatsu-han said they should be shizoku. Some han included baishin among the sotsu, while others made up an entirely new category, baisotsup, for the rear vassals. (See Shimmi, pp. 1-8.) Because of these many irregularities, an order was issued by the Meiji government in 1872 (Meiji 5.1) abolishing the category of sotsu. The han were instructed to include all sotsu who had been hereditary retainers in the class of shizoku and to register all others, such as commoners who had been permitted to wear swords and to bear a name, single generation samurai, peasant officials, and the like, as commoners (heimin). This immediately gave rise to protests from those newly registered as commoners and a “Restore Rank Movement” (tukuzoku undōq) began which continued until 1887. Moreover, the older distinctions were unofficially continued: the old class or shi applied the pejorative “upstart shizoku” (nari agari shizoku’) to those newly elevated from the sotsu to the shizoku, in much the same way that the former nobles of the Court (kuge kazoku’) looked down on the newly ennobled daimyo as “upstart nobles” (shin kazoku’, literally, “new nobles”). Consequently, it must be kept in mind that shi or shikaku in the Tokugawa sense is not strictly the same as shi or shizoku in the 1869-72 administrative sense, and that sotsu or keihai in the Tokugawa sense is not exactly the same as sotsu or sotsuzoku in the early Meiji sense. Yet, in spite of the lack of perfect congruence, the Meiji administrative categories were obviously intended to mirror the Tokugawa classes and were substantially the same except for borderline cases, and therefore I felt justified in treating them together under one definition.

5 In English the use of “samurai” is both broader and narrower than in Japanese: broader in that it designates the entire bushi class and not just its upper levels, and narrower in that it fails to include Court or temple samurai who were not bushi.

6 Suematsu Kenchō, Bōchō kaiten shi [A History of Chōshū and the Meiji Restoration] (Tokyo, 1921), I. 36-39.

7 Shimmi, p. 1.

8 Shimmi, p. 1.

9 Umetani Noboru, “Meiji ishin ni okeru kiheitai no mondai” [“The Problem of the Kiheitai in the History of the Meiji Restoration”], Jimbun gakuhō, No. 3 (1953), pp. 17—18. Other records have placed the number of families of rear vassals as high as 6,000.

10 Kimura Motoi of Meiji University has kindly given me figures which he obtained from the Kerai kyūroku chōu of 1870 showing the breakdown of the retainers (rear vassals) of Masuda Uemon, an Elder of Chōshū. Of a total of 538 retainers, 263 were shi and 275 sotsu.

11 Bōchō fatten shi, I, 41.

12 Kimura Motoi, “Hagi-han zaichi kashindan ni tsuite” [“Country Vassal Groups in Chōshū”], SZ, LXII, No. 8 (1953), 34.

13 Bōchō kaiten shi, I, 35, 47. This second definition is implicit when, for example, the mukyūdōrio or kachi are referred to as lower samurai. This may well reflect the early Meiji use of the term. The Bōchō kaiten shi also recognizes the distinction between shi and sotsu as fundamental throughout the Tokugawa period.

14 Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Kiyooka Eiichi (Tokyo, 1948), p. 19. “Children of lower samurai families like ours were obliged to use a respectful manner of address in speaking to the children of high samurai families. . . .”

15 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kyūhanjō, trans. Carmen Blacker, MN, IX (1953), p. 311. Fukuzawa’s distinction between kyūnino, those with fiefs, and kachi, which often refers specifically to those who march in the cortege of their daimyo, but here used in its more general sense as foot soldier, is clearly not the same as our distinction between shi and sotsu. And yet Fukuzawa refers to it as the fundamental cleavage in the samurai class in Nakatsu-han. Therefore, it may be that this should be taken as an illustration of the diversity of samurai class structure during the Tokugawa period. Certainly most han would consider Fukuzawa, a member of the nakakpshōx as a shi and not as a sotsu. When we consider that Fukuzawa’s description of Nakatsu samurai class structure excluded baishin, then the kyūnin class may really have comprised only one-sixth or fourteen per cent of the total class, about the same as the middle and upper samurai in Chōshū by our second definition. It is to be hoped that someone will analyze Fukuzawa’s Kyūhanjō in relation to more universal terms which must appear in the documents of Nakatsu-han.

16 Bōchō kaiten shi, VI, 57-58.

17 By this definition only the highest two and a part of the third stratum of shi were upper samurai. The top two strata contained the eight karō families. The third stratum of shi, the so-called yorigumiu. had sixty-two members with incomes ranging from 5,000 to 250 koku. Of these 62 families, only those with fiefs greater than 1,000 koku were rated as upper samurai by this definition.

18 Most of the materials in the second part of this article have been culled from within the depths of the Bōchō kaiten shi. I did not feel it necessary to footnote materials that are readily available in standard secondary works.

19 yoshida Shōin zenshū [The Collected Worlds of Yoshida Shōin], XII (Tokyo, 1940), 206.

20 Many extremely important questions still remain concerning the relation between Shōin’s school and the later rise of the Chōshū sonnō jōi intellectuals: how many students passed through his school, of these how many later became politically active, how many were inactive, how many who were active were not associated with the school, and so on. The answers to these and other related questions will shed considerable light on the nature of the early movement in Chōshū.

21 Naramoto Tatsuya, Yoshida Shōin (Tokyo, 1955), p. 132.

22 Bōchō kaiten shi, II, 263.

23 E. Herbert Norman, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (New York, 1948), pp. 64-66.

24 Tanaka Akira, “Tōbakuha no keisei katei” [“The Process of Formation of the Anti-Tokugawa Party”], Relkishigaku kenkyū, No. 205 (March 1957), p. 4.

25 Bōchō kaiten shi, I, 42.

26 Tanaka Akira, “Chōshū-han kaikakuha no kiban” [“Foundation of Reformers in the Chōshū Clan”],Shichō, No. 51 (1954), pp. 12-13.

27 Tanaka Akira, “Tōbakuha no keisei katci,” p. 4.