A popular account of the beginnings of the Meiji Period (1868-1912) has it that the incompetent Tokugawa government was overthrown and the system of administration reorganized through the efforts of several forward-looking clan leaders. These were, notably, those of Satsuma (Kagoshima), Choshu (Yamaguchi), Tosa (Kochi) and Hizen (Saga). Despite later quarrels among themselves, it was these disaffiliated daimyo who put the country on the road to prosperity.
Popular though this account remains, it is but one of many. Indeed, in general, there is rarely a true history of anything. At the most there are a number of histories, from among which the historian may choose. An alternative interpretation of the beginnings of Meiji may be seen in the fall of the Aizu domain.
The destruction of this northern province was observed by a child, son of a ranking Aizu samurai, who many years later, despairing of the ways of political history, decided to record what he had himself witnessed. This was Shiba Goro (1859-1945), later to make a name for himself during the Boxer Rebellion.
Satsuma and Choshu needed a number of pretexts for what was, in fact, an insurrection. Aizu was noted for its fidelity. In 1867 (when Shiba was 9 years old), Saigo Takamori, among others, secretly obtained an Imperial edict ordering Satsuma and Choshu to "punish" Aizu for its devotion to the shogunate.
"Some historians who have written about the war have portrayed Aizu as the ringleader of those who wanted to preserve order at any cost," wrote Shiba. "These historians," he continues, "have seen Satsuma and Choshu as the forces of liberation and maintained that the Aizu townsmen and peasants welcomed the invaders.
"This is a gross distortion of facts. There are countless documents that attest to the atrocities the enemy perpetrated on these very people. . . . To my deep regret, these accounts have all been deliberately suppressed."
In his own account, Shiba sought redress. He had seen what the Satsuma soldiery did. Many (townspeople and peasants among them) were killed, the great Aizu-Wakamatsu castle was destroyed, and among his own large family only Shiba escaped. He was so young that his mother sent him away before she committed suicide in the flaming city, along with the boy's grandmother and sisters.
This was just the beginning of the survivors' misery. The grace and benevolence of his new Imperial majesty seemingly pardoned the clan, "but I was completely baffled. What did they mean by [this]? The villains from Satsuma and Choshu were the ones to blame. What was all this talk about Aizu being wrong and being forgiven?"
In this event, this "pardoning" merely meant that the Aizu clan name was kept. Its remaining members were given worthless land in the inhospitable far north, allowed to have a daimyo who was only 3 years old, and given no means at all of self-support. "This was exile, pure and simple, and at no time in our nation's history had an entire domain been subjected to such cruel punishment."
This whole harrowing story is told simply and unemotionally. It is a single voice describing what really happened. In so doing, Shiba also preserves a feeling of what these years of early Meiji were really like: Despite all the slogans and all the optimism, the Meiji "reform" was thoroughly messy.
"It was a new era, and life was pitiless. . . . People were being thrown out on the streets and left to fend for themselves. True, they had been liberated from the fetters of feudalism and in a sense were free to choose, but no industries had been established, and as for government jobs, they were monopolized by men from Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and Hizen."
This important account was apparently written in Shiba's old age. He showed it to Mahito Ishimitsu, who edited it later, in 1942, when the author was in his 80s (Shiba went on to kill himself upon Japan's defeat in the Pacific War). It was published in 1971, as "Aru Meiji-jin no Kiroku: Aizu-jin Shiba Goro no Issho," and is just now appearing in English.
Teruko Craig's translation is appropriately straightforward and lucid. She has already given us two invaluable period memoirs: "Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai" (1991) and "The Autobiography of Shibusawa Eiichi: From Peasant to Entrepreneur" (1994), and has here given us an important third.
Memoirs bring history alive. Written during the period they describe, they lend us the vision of a single person and spare us the compromises of the partisan historian. From Shiba's account, we learn more of the actualities of early Meiji than from many history books.
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