Title :)
Part 1 of 2:
Oh wow, a Satcho question! Could I wish for anything better? Not much, I tell you.
So, for those following along at home, but not up on the minute details of 19th century Japanese history, Satcho = the coalition between two Japanese domains: Satsuma and Choshu, which brought about the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Another domain, Tosa, was a third important party in the Meiji coalition. Most of the big Meiji era statesmen and military leaders were either from those three domains, or the proteges of men from those domains. The Meiji era was a period of rapid modernization and Westernization in Japan. And yet, Satsuma, Choshu, and to some extent, Tosa, had been leaders in the anti-foreign movement through the 1850s and 60s. Both Satsuma and Choshu actually came to blows with Western powers. Some of these modernizing Meiji leaders in the late 1860s onward were personally trying to murder Westerners in the early 60s. So, what changed?
"If one speaks logically of the things [that happened then] , they are impossible to understand . . . but emotionally, it had to be that way,” said Itou Hirobumi, Choshu samurai and Japan’s first prime-minister, reflecting on this change. (quoted p. 198 Choshu in the Meiji Restoration by Albert M. Craig)
When Perry steamed into Edo Bay in 1853, beginning the process of opening up Japan to Western diplomacy and trade at gunpoint, no one in Japan was in favour of completely opening the country. The Shogunate bowed to necessity in signing unequal treaties with the Western powers, and opening up trading ports for the foreigners. Satsuma and Choshu domains had a long history of opposition to the shogunate. ( I wrote here specifically about Satsuma’s history with the shogunate.) These domains' emergence as big troublemakers in the final years of the shogunate is rooted in that history. This wasn’t just a crisis of foreigners against Japan. It was a chance to push back at the Shogunate and reassert their own positions as independent powerful domains.
Even from the beginning, there was a huge ambivalence about the West among the Choshu and Satsuma shishi (literally, 'men of purpose'), as they called themselves. Their educated leadership knew that Western technology, medicine, geography, tactics etc. were absolutely crucial to Japan’s future. For instance, the man at the centre of the future Choshu Meiji statesman, their Confucian teacher Yoshida Shoin, had been studying everything he could of Western knowledge in the years before Perry came to Japan. Yoshida and a friend actually rowed out to Perry’s ship in secret to plead with him to take them secretly back to America to study. They were sent back to the Japanese authorities and imprisoned for some time for their efforts. Yoshida continued to believe in the importance of Western studies, but also would teach his young students about their duty to expel the Western barbarians from Japan. His involvement in the expulsionist cause led to his plot to assassinate a shogunate official, for which he was was executed in 1859.
This ambivalence is often summed up with a saying by the scholar Sakuma Shozan (Yoshida Shoin’s mentor): “Eastern morals, Western science.” In the eyes of many of the Satsuma/Choshu shishi, it was entirely appropriate to learn how to build a Western boat, how to drill troops etc. but completely wrong for foreigners to have unfettered access to Japan, for Christianity (“the evil religion”) and immoral, Western social structures to be allowed into Japanese society. (The rank-and-file ronin who in the 60s flocked to Edo and Kyoto to intimidate, kill, and rough up their enemies often had a less nuanced view of the situation: and would object to anything Western at all. The more educated shishi leaders used these ronin to kill and intimidate people, but also had to worry about them turning on them.)
Fears of the colonial powers were after all justified. The example of China stared Japan in the face. MIT has a great site: The Opium War in Japanese Eyes, exploring a popular 1849 Japanese illustrated book about the way the Western powers were destroying China. In 1862, future Choshu military leader, Takasugi Shinsaku, was part of Japan’s first diplomatic mission to Shanghai. He reported back to Choshu domain:
One could say that the Chinese are being altogether taken advantage by the foreigners. When an Englishman or a Frenchman walks down the street, the Chinese all scurry out of the way... Although Shanghai is on Chinese soil, is it not an English and French colony?
Nevertheless, during the Bakumatsu (the word for the final years of the shogunate), scholars and politicians across the board came to realize that the worst-case scenario: Japan being treated like China, wasn’t going to happen. Japan was relatively out of the way, and never really tempted full colonization during the golden age of imperial expansion.
And all the different foreign powers had different agendas. Russia, Japan’s northern expansionist neighbour was a much bigger practical concern than America, far across the Pacific and (at the time) not looking for colonies. Foreign powers could be played against each other. Britain and France were vying for influence over Japan, a state of affairs that led to France aiding the Shogunate, while Britain slowly and quietly made friends with the Satsuma-Choshu coalition.
The latter happened in an very strange way. In 1863, Choshu secretly (against the shogunate’s laws) sent five students to Great Britain to study. One of them was Itou Hirobumi, the future first prime-minister of Japan. Just a few months before heading out for Britain, he was part of a plot led by his friend Takasugi Shinsaku to murder foreigners in Kanagawa. When that plot was discovered and stopped by the Choshu lord’s heir, Takasugi and company went and torched the building site of the new British embassy instead. So, Itou left Japan committed to expelling Westerners. Coming to England, he soon realized the whole idea was absolutely ridiculous, that his fellows back home still had no idea how advanced and powerful the West was, and Japan had a lot of catching up to do.
Meanwhile, back home, Choshu in 1863 finally wrangled an order to expel the Barbarians from the Emperor, which no one actually carried out, except Choshu. They began firing on Western ships in the Shimonoseki straits, and the next year, a Western fleet composed of British, French, Dutch, and American ships, showed up to bombard the town of Shimonoseki, occupy and dismantle their gunnery posts, and demonstrate to even the most diehard Choshu patriots how much stronger the West was. Two of the Choshu students in England: Itou Hirobumi and his friend Inoue Kaoru had read about the impending operation in the British newspapers, and rushed back home to Japan just in time to observe their countrymen get demolished by the fleet. Itou and Inoue served as translators and diplomats in the following peace negotiations. The surrender took an odd turn into a Choshu-Great Britain networking opportunity, and from then on, the domain was on the best of terms with the British embassy and very importantly, British arms dealers like Thomas Glover.
The ordinary Choshu militia members still believed in the cause of expelling the foreigners; in fact, Inoue Kaoru was set upon by angry Choshu samurai and cut nearly to pieces for his part in the negotiations. It was a wonder he survived his wounds. Itou Hirobumi and Takasugi Shinsaku, whom the domain had assigned as a negotiator, had to flee for their lives at one point during the negotiations, because of threats from the Choshu militia. But more and more of the Choshu leadership could see that resistance against the foreigners was futile. Meanwhile, the fights they’d picked with the shogunate had escalated to open war, and the shogunate was their number one enemy.
Satsuma had also got into a confrontation with Britain, which also ended with diplomacy and networking. In 1862, Satsuma upper samurai had cut down a British merchant, Charles Lennox Richardson, who tried to ride through the procession of the Satsuma regent, Shimazu Hisamitsu: the father of the Satsuma daimyo. Rumour since has it that Hisamitsu himself gave the order, anyway, he definitely refused to apologize and make amends for the killing, which was completely justified in Japanese tradition. However, according to Japan’s treaty with Great Britain, which Satsuma had full knowledge of, British citizens were completely exempt from Japanese punishments.
Despite the shogunate’s attempts to mediate between Satsuma and Great Britain, Satsuma refused to budge. So, from August 15-17, 1863, the British navy bombarded Satsuma’s capital city of Kagoshima. The city was warned first, and successfully evacuated, so only five people were killed on the Satsuma side, but a sizable portion of the city was burnt down. The peace negotiations followed the same pattern as Choshu’s. Satsuma was impressed by the British strength, and in 1865, sent their own fifteen students to Britain to study.