Inoue Kowashi

Image: From the National Diet Library website

December 1880. Yukichi Fukuzawa received a request from three councilors—Shigenobu Okuma, Hirobumi Ito, and Kaoru Inoue—to publish a government organ. Although Fukuzawa initially showed a stance of refusal, he eventually viewed it positively and was about to take the first step toward realizing his lifelong ambition of "harmony between the government and the people." It could be said that this was the moment when the "government" came closest to Fukuzawa, the representative of the "people." However, only a few months later, the plan was scrapped without Fukuzawa's knowledge. This was the Political Crisis of 1881.

"Once Yukichi Fukuzawa's book is published, the youth of the world follow it blindly; it touches their brains and soaks into their very lungs and hearts, such that a father cannot restrain his son, and an elder brother cannot forbid his younger brother. How could any official decree or order possibly reverse this?" This is a passage from a written opinion authored by Inoue Kowashi, said to be one of the masterminds behind the scenes, one month after the Political Crisis of 1881.

Inoue Kowashi was born in 1843 in the Higo Kumamoto Domain as Takuma, the third son of Gengobei Iida, a low-ranking samurai. He was hailed as a child prodigy from an early age. In 1852, he was discovered by his lord, Nagaoka Korekata, and entered the Nagaoka family's private school, Hiyudo, where he spent five years. Furthermore, on Korekata's recommendation, he studied under the Confucian scholar Kinoshita Saitan in 1857. In 1862, again on Kinoshita's recommendation, he went to study at the domain school, Jishukan. At Jishukan, he sometimes visited Yokoi Shonan, a graduate of the same school, to engage in discussions.

During this time, he was adopted by Inoue Mosaburo and took the surname Inoue. In 1867, he joined the French Language Training Center in Yokohama established by the Edo Shogunate, but returned home early amidst the chaos of the Restoration of Imperial Rule. Nevertheless, he next headed to the French Language Training Center in Nagasaki. However, he had to give up this time as well due to the Kumamoto Domain's participation in the Boshin War. He ended up serving in the military by domain order. In reality, the Kumamoto Domain troops had almost no turn to fight and returned to the domain in no time. After that, he stayed in Nagasaki for about a year on the domain's instructions. In 1870, he attended the Daigaku Nanko (predecessor of the University of Tokyo), and the following year, he entered service at the Ministry of Justice of the Meiji government. In 1872, he changed his name from Takuma to Kowashi.

As a bureaucrat, Kowashi served various influential figures throughout his life. Because he could speak French, he traveled to Europe as a member of the Western mission led by Justice Minister Eto Shinpei. In 1875, utilizing the results of his overseas travel, he translated and published "The Law of the Kingdom's Foundation." After returning to Japan, he was heavily utilized by Okubo Toshimichi. In 1874, he accompanied Okubo to suppress the Saga Rebellion. In 1877, he accompanied Ito during the Satsuma Rebellion. In 1878, after Okubo's assassination, he established his position as a brain for Iwakura Tomomi, and in the same year, he accompanied Ito, who went to negotiate with the Qing dynasty regarding the Ryukyu Disposition. In 1884, he also accompanied Kaoru Inoue, who was dispatched for peace negotiations in response to the Imo Incident and Gapsin Coup that occurred in Korea.

Kowashi was a bureaucrat who was highly valued, as shown by Ito's description of him as "a person of peerless loyalty," and was requested to accompany leaders at various key points. His positions included Senior Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Senior Secretary of the Cabinet, and Senior Secretary of the Grand Council of State. He later served as Director-General of the Legislative Bureau in 1888 and Minister of Education in the second Ito Cabinet in 1893. He was also involved in drafting the Imperial Edict on the Opening of the Diet, the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, the Imperial House Law, the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the draft of the Meiji Constitution. In the process of creating these, he sometimes strongly asserted his own ideas and possessed the forcefulness to incorporate them into the drafts. He was truly a person directly involved in the foundation of the Meiji government's construction. Since the evaluation and process of each achievement are vast, here I would like to touch upon his character through the Political Crisis of 1881, which is most deeply related to Fukuzawa.

The Political Crisis of 1881 was an incident in which Councilor Shigenobu Okuma and his faction were purged from the political world. At that time, the movement for petitions to open a national diet was gaining momentum among the public. Although the government had solidified its intention to open a diet and establish a constitution, there was internal conflict regarding the timing. Okuma, who wanted an immediate opening, submitted an "Opinion on Constitutional Government" in March 1881 in the form of a secret report to the Minister of the Left, Prince Arisugawa, without consulting other councilors or the Minister of the Right, Iwakura Tomomi. Ito, who later learned of this, was furious, and Iwakura had Inoue Kowashi provide a counter-constitutional proposal. Around the same time, the government's decision to sell off government-owned property of the Hokkaido Development Commission at a low price was exposed by a scoop in the "Tokyo Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun."

Criticism of the government reached its peak, combined with petitions for the opening of the diet. Among the anti-Okuma faction, the dominant view was that this government criticism movement was a conspiracy initiated by Fukuzawa in collusion with Okuma, inciting students and using Yataro Iwasaki as a source of funding. Thus, the background of the political crisis was the dismissal of Okuma and bureaucrats of the Mita faction under Fukuzawa's influence in October. Simultaneously with the purge, the government announced the cancellation of the sale of government property to calm public opinion and promised to open the diet ten years later in 1890.

In political history, this crisis is positioned as the catalyst for the establishment of Satsuma-Choshu clan politics and the catalyst for a major shift toward the enactment of a Prussian-style constitution. In other words, it was a political crisis that could be called a major turning point in directing the Meiji state system.

So, was Fukuzawa actually plotting a conspiracy? As noted at the beginning of this article, during this period, far from criticizing the government, Fukuzawa had solidified his intention to be involved in the publication of a government organ. Initially, immediately after receiving the request from the three councilors—Okuma, Ito, and Kaoru Inoue—Fukuzawa intended to decline. However, later, he heard from both Ito and Kaoru Inoue that they would never betray him and definitely wanted his cooperation, along with their intention to open a diet and their intention to consider a party cabinet system. During this period, as shown in his book Transition of People's Way of Thinking, Fukuzawa was envisioning the realization of a British-style parliamentary cabinet system and a two-party system. He was deeply impressed by the intentions of both men, calling it "the happiness of the Meiji government" and "a blessing for Japan," and decided to cooperate.

However, this political crisis occurred only a few months later. It is true that several of Fukuzawa's students were giving public speaking engagements criticizing the government across the country. However, letters from that time prove that Fukuzawa himself took a negative attitude toward those actions. For Fukuzawa, being recognized as a political enemy was a bolt from the blue for which he had no recollection. Following the political crisis, the friendly relations with Kaoru Inoue and Hirobumi Ito were unilaterally severed, and the promise to publish the newspaper was also reneged upon.

Fukuzawa, who should have been unrelated to the government's power struggle, was turned into a political enemy. The key to that process was held by Inoue Kowashi. During this period, Kowashi persistently mentioned the names of Fukuzawa and the Kojunsha, emphasized their connection with Okuma, and added criticisms of their thought and influence one by one.

When asked for his opinion on Okuma's constitutional proposal by Iwakura Tomomi, he went out of his way to include Fukuzawa's book Transition of People's Way of Thinking along with a letter, hinting at the relationship between Okuma and Fukuzawa. In subsequent letters, he again pointed out the commonalities between Okuma's proposal and the Kojunsha's private draft constitution. Just before the political crisis, when government criticism across the country was reaching its peak, he sent a manifesto regarding the threat of Fukuzawa, stating, "Fukuzawa is vigorously advocating radicalism, his faction has reached three to four thousand, traveling widely across the country, already reaching the interior of the five islands, and other regions have been in a state of rising up in union for the past twenty or thirty days; we cannot let this pass as it is."

In a letter to Ito titled "Internal Statement," he wrote that the constitutional research by those petitioning for a diet among the public was rooted in Fukuzawa's private constitution, stating, "Therefore, Fukuzawa's Kojunsha is the greatest machine for ensnaring the majority of the nation and promising a political party," as if Fukuzawa were behind the activities of the civil rights activists. He continued, "Its power is exercised in invisible ways, causing the brains of people to ferment in the darkness," and "Its advocate is like leading a hundred thousand elite troops into an uninhabited field," sounding the alarm about Fukuzawa's influence.

This vigilance continued after the political crisis, and as shown at the beginning, in the "Opinion on Guiding the People's Hearts" one month later, he appealed to the threat of Fukuzawa, saying, "Once Yukichi Fukuzawa's book is published... how could it be reversed?" In the "Opinion on the Kibun Gakkai" written around the same time, he denied the "theory of harmony between government and people" and there are parts where he even mentions editorials in the Jiji Shinpo such as On Armament. He appealed to the danger of Fukuzawa and entrapped him with extraordinary obsession.

Among various studies, some suggest that the information about the sale of government property obtained by the "Tokyo Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun" might have been leaked by Kowashi himself to trigger the political crisis.

Then, what kind of thought led him to avoid Fukuzawa? As later researchers have described him as a "national polity educationist," Kowashi had a strong obsession with his own view of the national polity (kokutai). That view of the national polity, to quote from "The Great Harm of Party Cabinets," was that "sovereignty is always that which the Holy Emperor holds in total control," and the idea that the continuation of the Emperor's rule since Emperor Jimmu is the national polity. Therefore, "if the ruler and the people govern together, the national polity of over 2,500 years will perish." Fukuzawa's idea, as written in An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, that the validity of the relationship between lord and subject should be judged by whether it is "convenient for civilization" or "inconvenient," and that it is possible to "change the politics of the monarch," was a dangerous thought.

Furthermore, to maintain the national polity, he considered the Prussian-style constitution, where the monarch holds strong power—which he witnessed during his time studying abroad—to be the ideal. For Kowashi, the British-style ideas shown in Transition of People's Way of Thinking, such as "reigning but not ruling," the "theory of alternating party cabinets," and "making the cabinet administration hold collective responsibility," were an unforgivable constitution that "cannot coexist with an Imperial House cabinet or a parliamentary cabinet" and would "unintentionally let the parliament grasp half of Japan's sovereignty." Furthermore, Kowashi, who also valued Confucian thought and order, viewed "Confucius and Mencius as the icons of restraint," and the thought in Gakumon no susume (An Encouragement of Learning), which "cannot possibly harmonize with Chinese studies," was also a target of his criticism.

In historical documents, it is unlikely that Fukuzawa was aware of Inoue Kowashi's existence. Fukuzawa was politically excluded in the darkness, and both the British-style constitutional system and the theory of harmony between government and people were rejected.

On the other hand, it was the Jiji Shinpo, which advocated "impartiality and non-partisanship," that was created using the funds and human resources gathered for the preparation of the government organ.

It can also be said that the invisible conflict between the two continued after the political crisis through the "Imperial Rescript on Education" and Shūshin Yōryō: Fukuzawa's Moral Code.

If there had been no political crisis and the British-style parliamentary cabinet system and the moral outlook of Shūshin Yōryō: Fukuzawa's Moral Code advocated by Fukuzawa had been adopted, and if the ideal stance of harmony between government and people had taken root, what kind of fate would Japan have followed thereafter?