Japan's great modernising emperor was a teenage poetry student when it began
The reign that turned feudal Japan into a world power started with a fourteen-year-old boy studying verse in a Kyoto palace. Mutsuhito, remembered as Emperor Meiji, took the throne in 1867 while rebel samurai and a weakening shogun fought over the country, and the rebels restored power in his name, not his hands.
For over two centuries emperors had been ornaments. A code issued in 1605 by the first Tokugawa shogun and his son confined them to scholarship and the arts, and they rarely left their palace compound in Kyoto while the shogun ruled through roughly 180 lords. Health was fragile too: all five of Mutsuhito's siblings died in infancy, and of his own 15 children just five grew up. Born on 3 November 1852 to a concubine of Emperor Kōmei, he arrived just before Commodore Matthew Perry's Black Ships sailed into Edo harbour in July 1853.
Perry's cannons forced the shogunate to accept trade on humiliating terms, and for the first time in at least 250 years it consulted the imperial court. Young samurai calling themselves men of high purpose rallied around the throne against the shogunate. Accounts of the prince in these years contradict one another, his biographer Donald Keene notes: one describes a sturdy boy gifted at sumo, another a sickly child. He admitted later in poems that he had been a lazy student of writing.
Kōmei died on 30 January 1867, and his son was enthroned that February. By November the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had resigned; in January 1868 the boy emperor read out a proclamation restoring imperial rule, and the era was renamed Meiji, meaning enlightened rule. Holdouts were beaten in the Boshin War by late 1869, largely by samurai from the Chōshū and Satsuma domains.
Guided by a circle of elder statesmen, the reign produced the Charter Oath of 1868, a cabinet in 1885, a constitution in 1889 and a parliament, the Imperial Diet, in 1890. Japan defeated China and then Russia in war and annexed Taiwan and Korea. When he died at 59 in 1912, the country was an industrial empire.
Source: Emperor Meiji
