TOKYO, Sept. 10, 2020―It was during the Meiji Restoration Period, well over a century ago, that the last samurai fought and died by sacrificing their lives for the people burdened by high taxes and heavy debt. Since then to date, hardly any souls like them have emerged and stood up against the Japanese establishment, and probably won’t appear for a long time.
Those samurai were not like the dapper, mucho-looking, sword-swinging warriors, the images of Toshiro Mifune in the Seven Samurai and Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai in screenplays. Senior warriors of the last samurai bunch carried swords and rifles but the rank and file were armed with bamboo lances and still others carried hoes.Their uniforms, if they were lucky to be wearing, looked like those of the Chinese red army.
Whatever they were, the peasant samurai were highly motivated about fighting against the Meiji government seeing it as the reincarnated bureaucracy establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate feudal period. The samurai were resolved to toppling the establishment to capturing political power for the poor farmers devastated by tumbling silk prices. They were aware that their forces were no match to the Meiji government firepower and that they would be easily defeated, but they hoped that their acts would spread to the rest of the country.
Most of those thousands of peasant samurai were shot and stabbed and killed, captured and imprisoned, hanged, and fined, in an uprising crushed in barely a week’s time between October 31 and November 9, 1884. The Meiji government, fearing the farmer uprising’s rippling impact nationwide, labeled the incident as ‘brutal acts of violence committed by an army of thugs.’ As ordered by local officials, Chichibu village folks kept the incident almost secret for almost a century, especially about the cadre of the incident’s planners, many of them sons of fairly well-to-do farming houses, and the leader, Eisuke Tashiro, who was a self-proclaimed Yakuza gangster leader who was widely known as warm-hearted, caring ‘big man.’
Fast-forward to the present time, there’s not a single person who can tell stories of the Chichibu Incident, and most descendants of the peasant samurai also had passed away, carrying with them records, manuscripts and photos of the first Japanese civil rights movement into oblivion. It’s a perfect scenario written by the Meiji government for the current Japanese government to prolong the prosperity of the bureaucracy at the cost of the public.
Japan’s first civil rights movement
In the late 1870s to the early 1880s, farmers across Japan were suffering badly, barely being able to feed their families as they were saddled by income taxes as high as 60 percent and high interest rates on repayments on loans they were encouraged to borrow by the Meiji government for increasing mulberry and silk cocoon production. Silk yarn and silk fabric were Japan’s first main export goods to Europe and the United States so the government set the policy of raising production and exports for accumulating much-needed foreign currency to finance military buildup.
The accommodative yet high interest rate monetary policy first seemed to work in enriching the business and people for a year years but it sparked serious inflation eventually, so the Meiji government tightened the money spigot later,causing farm goods prices, including mulberry and silk cocoon, tumbling and small farmers to sell their farm lands as well as their daughters to brothels.
During this tumultuous period, what became Japan’s first civil rights movement erupted in several localities, including Fukushima and Niigata, in which the Meiji government committed cruel repressive acts against liberal-minded people. Chichibu was one of those hot spots.
In 1883, three Chichibu farmers representing smaller farmers filed grievances with a local office for loan repayment relief but they were stone-walled. Hearing that, a few young, flamboyant farmers joined a new political party, the Liberal Party founded in 1881 with the hope of submitting bills to amend laws to parliament.
The last samurai
Soon afterwards, Eisuke Tashiro, who was known as a self-proclaimed Yakuza head and for his warm treatment of even strangers, together with other farmers founded a political party, Konminto (rescuring troubled farmers party), to rescue debt-plagued farmers, and the two party members began collaborating and they ultimately made Tashiro the head of Konminto.
Konminto’s credo was, for rescuing farmers, that loan companies agree to give a moratorium to farmers and lower repayment interest rates, and they will burn down properties of those that refuse to agree. Konminto executed its policy with its army that under Tashiro as commander-in-chief had a rudimentary military-like structure. Its Five Codes of Conduct: The Soldier shall be executed when he: 1. looted; 2. raped women; 3. engaged in excessive alcohol consumption; 4. committed arson in personal vengeance, and; 5. engaged in personal matters by disobeying commander orders.
On November 1, 1884,, Tashiro and his commanders formerly formed the Konminto army in Shimo-Yoshida village in Chichibu with some 3,000 peasant militia under its command. The soldiers in platoon formation trotted in neat lines with each platoon carrying different weapons – rifles, bamboo lances and hoes, Japanese swords, messengers, and sother functions modeled after the French army. To the blare of the horn, they walked to Omiya, not farm from the present Chichibu rail station, seizing police headquarters, and thrashing and burning loan companies and procuring 2,980 yen in cash for Kominto’s war chest by issuing ‘receipts’.
But it was a short-lived victory march. The Meiji government dispatched troops and by November 8, Konminto solders were overwhelmed and on November 9, many were shot and killed and those survived fled.
Tashiro fled and had been in hiding for a few months but was caught and sentenced to capital punishment on Feb. 19, 1885. Tashiro removed a straw hat given him by the court exposing his serene, dignified face to the judge, when sentence was read, according to old newspaper accounts. His execution took place at Urawa prison in the morning of May 30, 1885. He refused to be blindfolded giving a serene grin to eyewitnesses and then walked and stood on the board, his final link to this world, as the prison warden tied a rope around his neck. He did not change his composure when the board was kicked, his body hanging by the rope.
Within a few minutes, he was dead but not what he taught the people of Chichibu: Stand up for human rights and against injustices and evils of society. Tashiro and his fellow Konminto members were the reason why the people of Chichibu had been keeping Chichibu Incident memorials clean. But in the current gen-x and gen-z era, few people talk about it or offer flowers to those that died in dignity.
Meiji Restoration for the bureacracy
Lacking follow-up movements of the uprising, the Chichibu Incident arbitrarily catapulted the Meiji government to accelerate its military buildup policy helping accumulate vast quantities of naval forces and fire power in a run-up to the 1894 war against China and 1904 war against Russia, and further military buildup in the 20th century. To enrich the war chest, the government ignored what the Chichibu farmers pleaded and continued taxing heavily and banks and financial companies ruthlessly collected high interest on loans to silk cocoon and rice farmers. It was not uncommon that borrowing rates were 20 to 30 percent a year.
The Meiji period is punctuated in Japan as a revolutionary period for the topping of the 260 year reign of the Tokugawa shogunate to a new government purportedly made up of lay people. It is actually ‘a restoration’ period for the samurai class that suffered a downfall of wealth and in societal status during the 260 year peace time. The Meiji Restoration movement was engineered by the Satsuma (Kyushu) and Choshu (now Yamaguchi) samurai clans. They were briefly engaged in a battle but in the early Meiji period, formed an alliance with the oath to the emperor and eventually established the Meiji government while annihilating other samurai clans that backed the Tokugawa shogunate.
Either way, civil wars and battles fought during the Meiji period amounted to the infightings between and among different samurai clans, not necessarily for the wellbeing of farmers and the public. Over time, the Satsuma and Choshu clans morphed into a solid bureaucracy stronghold that is carried over to the present period. It’s a reason why the absence of follow-up uprisings to the Chichibu Incident contributed to strengthening the bureaucracy hold of the government.
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