Sonnō jōi

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Samurai under the banner "Sonnō jōi" (right) during the Mito rebellion ( Tsukuba , June 17, 1864)

Sonnō jōi ( Japanese 尊 皇 攘夷 or 尊王攘夷 ) was the slogan of a neo-Confucian Japanese political philosophy . At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, when Japan was in transition from a feudal society to a modern state during the Bakumatsu period, it became the political slogan of a social movement supported by lower samurai and non-noble segments of the population . The aim of the movement was to eliminate the ruling Tokugawa shogunate .

Sonnō jōi can be translated as "Adore the emperor, drive out the barbarians." Or with "Respect the emperor, drive out the barbarians."

Development of a political philosophy

The slogan Sonnō jōi had been around since the 7th century BC. Known in China. Duke Qí Huán Gōng used the slogan ( Chinese  尊王攘夷 , Pinyin Zunwáng rǎngyí ) in the time of the spring and autumn annals . During this period, the Chinese kings of the Zhou dynasty lost control of the other feudal states of the Chinese empire. Duke Huan used the slogan to convince the other feudal states to respect the Zhou court. Thanks to perks that Qí Huán Gōng then received from King Zhou Xiangwang, he actually became the first of the Five Hegemons over other feudal states. The slogan was a simple slogan at that time, but it was only given a deeper meaning much later in Japan.

The origin of a philosophy based on Qí Huán Gōng's slogan can be traced back to the works of the Japanese neo-Confucian scholars Yamazaki Ansai and Yamaga Sokō , who dealt with the inviolability of the Japanese imperial family and its superiority over the rulers of other states. These ideas, which arose in the 17th century, were further developed by the Kokugaku scholars Motoori Norinaga and Takenouchi Shikibu in the second half of the 18th century into the "theory of absolute obedience to the Tennō " ( 尊 皇 論 , Sonnōron ). The two scholars implied that the ruling Tokugawa shogunate should be shown less loyalty than the emperor.

The Mitogaku scholar Aizawa Seishisai ( 会 沢 正 志 斎 ) popularized sonnō jōi in 1825 with his polemical work Shinron ( 新 論 , "New Theses"). According to Aizawa, Sonnō meant the worship of the emperor by the Tokugawa shōgunate and jōi meant the elimination of barbaric (i.e. Western) cultural influences in Japan, which included Christianity in particular . A nationalist movement based on the teachings of Aizawa first emerged in the 1830s in the Han Mito at the time of the daimyo Tokugawa Nariaki .

"Sonnō jōi" movements in the time of Bakumatsu

With the appearance of a US fleet under the command of Matthew Calbraith Perry on July 8, 1853 and the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanagawa by the Shogunate on March 31, 1854, the closure of the country was completely called into question. The policy of almost completely isolating the country from trade and exchange with other nations had been pursued by the Tokugawa since 1633, but could not be sustained in view of the military power of the Americans. Jōi concretized the counter-reaction to the coercion of Japan by the western powers, perceived by the majority of samurai as humiliation. Outside of Mito, strong independent movements formed in Chōshū , Satsuma and Tosa , whose motto was Sonnō jōi . Its members were called Shishi .

The fact that the shogunate did not offer any significant resistance to the foreigners despite the advocacy of countermeasures by the imperial court was seen by Yoshida Shōin and other leaders of the anti-Tokugawa movement as evidence that the shogunate had to be replaced by a government that could better enforce the will of the emperor.

Radicalization and repression of Bakufu

The Sakuradamon Incident on March 24, 1860

But only with the signing of the unequal American-Japanese friendship and trade treaty on July 29, 1858, the "Sonnō jōi" movements radicalized . If Yoshida Shōin in Satsuma had rejected any armed resistance against the shogunate until then, he advocated a violent overthrow to restore the power of the Japanese emperor. The slogan became the battle cry of the Han Chōshū, Satsuma, Mito and Tosa, who rebelled against the power of the shogunate. As a result, samurai began to carry out attacks on high Bakufu dignitaries and foreigners from these Han. The most famous bombers were in Japanese history as " the four Hitokiri Bakumatsu " ( 幕末四大人斬り , Bakumatsu Shidai Hitokiri ) known Samurai Kawakami Gensai ( 河上彦斎 ), Kirino Toshiaki ( 桐野利秋 ), Tanaka Shimbe ( 田中新兵衛 ) and Okada Izō ( 岡田 以 蔵 ), but also the later Japanese Prime Ministers Itō Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo participated, for example, in assassination attempts.

The Bakufu initially reacted with harshness to the renegade samurai. The Ansei purges initiated by Tairō Ii Naosuke from 1858 to 1859 fell victim to Yoshida Shōin and about 100 other leaders of the "Sonnō jōi" movement. Since the shogunate in the rebellious Han de facto no longer had any influence, the repression measures ultimately remained ineffective and were set after Ii Naosuke's murder on March 24, 1860.

Xenophobia of the rebelling samurai

Assassination of Charles Lennox Richardson during the Namamugi Incident

At the same time, the rebellious Han sent individual samurai on reconnaissance missions to China and the western states. The samurai Takasugi Shinsaku ( 高杉 晋 作 ) wrote in his diary during his stay in Shanghai in May 1862:

“[In Shanghai] most of the Chinese have become servants of the strangers. […] Although the city is formally under Chinese rule, in reality it has become a colony of England and France. […] In the morning I visited the English missionary with Godai. [...] In the missions, doctors heal people who are weakened by illness and then convert them to Christianity. We have to be prepared for such things in Japan as well. "

The expansion of European trading establishments as a result of the treaties concluded by Bakufu fueled the samurai's fears of an imminent colonization of Japan by the Europeans. The Samurai Maki Yasuomi ( 真 木 保 臣 , court name: Maki Izumi) from Mito wrote to his wife in 1861:

“The foreigners have [...] asked the government for the privilege of building fortifications in Osaka, Sakai and Hyōgo. […] If it happens as they say, Japan will be split in half […] and the imperial court will be pushed under their feet. […] If this land falls under the rule of foreigners, there is no longer any reason to live and for my whole family there is no other way than to die. "

The xenophobia of the rebelling samurai resulting from the fear of colonization reached its first climax with the Namamugi incident , when the British trader Charles Lennox Richardson was killed by the samurai of the daimyo of Satsuma Shimazu Hisamitsu .

Interference by the Japanese emperor

Not surprisingly, the Imperial Court in Kyoto sympathized with the renegade samurai. Emperor Kōmei personally supported the movements, breaking with the centuries-old imperial tradition of not playing an active role in state affairs. He sharply criticized the contracts concluded by the Shogunate and tried to influence politics by marrying Princess Kazunomiya Chikako. His work culminated in the "Imperial Order for the Expulsion of the Barbarians" ( 攘夷 勅命 , jōi chokumei ) issued in March 1863 .

The shogunate ignored this imperial order, but not the rebelling Han. In Chōshū, foreign ships were shot at at Shimonoseki . Samurai murdered shogunate officials and other foreigners more and more frequently, to which the shogunate responded with the establishment of the samurai militia Shinsengumi . The western states responded with horrific demands for reparations, the shelling of Kagoshima and the bombardment of Shimonoseki . In May 1864 an open rebellion against the Bakufu broke out in the Han Mito , which was suppressed by troops of the shogunate by January 1865. The rebellion caused by Samurai from Chōshu on August 20, 1864 at the Hamaguri Gate in Kyōto remained only an episode, but the Bakufu responded with a punitive expedition to the Han. The expedition ended without a fight with the formal submission of Chōshu.

Military modernization and preparation for the Meiji restoration

Keiheitai.jpg TokugawaYoshinobu.jpg
Left: The Kiheitai militia, organized in Chōshū according to the western pattern, was militarily superior to the troops of the shōgunate.
Right: Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu in a French military uniform (1867)

The military conflicts made the inferiority of the "Sonnō jōi" rebels against the western powers and the Bakufu clear. Therefore, the rebelling Han began to move away from their xenophobic position and to cooperate with the foreign powers.

From 1864 Sonnō jōi became the sole catchphrase for the replacement of Bakufu. Satsuma, Chōshū and Tosa established extensive trade contacts with England. The newly established relationships were used to build powerful militias based on the Western model. Their organization was fundamentally different from the traditional Japanese military hierarchy, as it was the first time that non-aristocratic Japanese were allowed to carry weapons. The best-known militia was the Kiheitai that originated in Chōshū and was built up by Takasugi Shinsaku. With the help of the militias, the rebellious Han triumphed over the Bakufu troops. This was shown for the first time in 1866 during another punitive expedition by Bakufu to the Han Chōshū.

The three Han Satsuma, Chōshū and Tosa united at the instigation of Sakamoto Ryōma in a permanent alliance against Bakufu under the new Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu , the son of Tokugawa Nariaki. The shogunate received extensive military aid from France from 1867 through a mission led by Jules Chanoine , but could only hold on to power until the outbreak of the Boshin War .

Emperor Kōmei was poisoned by Iwakura Tomomi because he had responded to advances by the shogunate in 1866. His successor was Mutsuhito, who was firmly behind the "Sonnō jōi" movement and whose reign ushered in the imperialist era in Japanese history.

After the Meiji Restoration

After Emperor Mutsuhito's power was restored in the Meiji Restoration , the slogan was quietly dropped and replaced with another. Fukoku kyōhei ( 富国強兵 , dt. "Rich country, strong military") became the slogan of the Meiji period and was an expression of Japan's imperialist expansion policy, which began with the occupation of the Ryūkyū Islands in 1879. Later, the expression wakon yōsai ( 和 魂 洋 才 , dt. "Japanese spirit and western technology"), coined by Sakuma Shōzan , was added as a catchphrase for the rapid industrialization of the country.

literature

Scientific literature

  • Paul Akamatsu : Meiji 1868 - Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Japan. Harper & Row, New York 1972. (Original: Meiji 1868 - Révolution et contre-révolution au Japon Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1968)
  • WG Beasley: The Meiji Restoration. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1972.
  • David Bergamini: Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. Heinemann Publishing, London 1971.
  • Albert M. Craig: Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration. Lexington Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7391-0193-5 (originally published by Harvard University Press in 1961)
  • John M. Hall, Marius B. Jansen, Madoka Kanai, Denis Twitchett: The Cambridge History of Japan - Volume 5: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-22356-3 .
  • Peter Kleinen: A Buddha in death: Buddhist national identity formation in Japan using the example of Gesshô's treatises. LIT Verlag, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-5827-8 .
  • Victor Koschmann: The Mito Ideology: Discourse, Reform and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Japan. University of California Press, Berkeley 1987, ISBN 0-520-05768-6 .
  • Marius B. Jansen, Gilbert Rozman (Eds.): Japan in Transition - From Tokugawa to Meiji. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1986, ISBN 0-691-05459-2 .
  • Marius B. Jansen: The Making of Modern Japan. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2000, ISBN 0-674-00334-9 .
  • Jon Livingston, Joe Moore, Felicia Oldfather: Imperial Japan, 1800-1945. Pantheon Books, New York, ISBN 0-394-70668-4 .
  • EH Norman: Soldier and Peasant in Japan. Institute of Pacific Relations, New York 1943.
  • Franklin Ng (Ed.): The Asian American encyclopedia. Volume 5, Marshall Cavendish Publisher, New York 1995, ISBN 1-85435-684-4 .
  • Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi: Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825. Harvard University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-674-04037-6 .
  • Conrad Totman: The Collapse of Tokugawa Bakufu 1862–1868. Honolulu 1980, ISBN 0-8248-0614-X .

Novels

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Little ones: A Buddha in death. P. 60.
  2. ^ Ng: The Asian American encyclopedia. Volume 5, p. 1362.
  3. ↑ Craig: Chōshū in the Meiji restoration. P. 144.
  4. ↑ Wakabayashi: Anti-foreignism and Western learning in early-modern Japan. P. 3.
  5. ↑ Wakabayashi: Anti-foreignism and Western learning in early-modern Japan. P. 21.
  6. ↑ Craig: Chōshū in the Meiji restoration. P. 153.
  7. ↑ Livingston et al .: Imperial Japan. P. 84.
  8. ↑ Livingston et al .: Imperial Japan. P. 85.
  9. ↑ 宮 沢 真 一: 「幕末」 に 殺 さ れ た 男: 生 麦 事件 の リ チ ャ ー ド ソ ン (=  新潮 選 書 ). 新潮社, 1997, ISBN 4-10-600525-5 , pp. 135-155 (Japanese).
  10. ^ Hall, Jansen, Kanai, Twitchett: The Cambridge history of Japan. Volume 5, p. 343.
  11. ↑ Wakabayashi: Anti-foreignism and Western learning in early-modern Japan. P. 4.
  12. ^ Norman: Soldier and Peasant in Japan. Pp. 27-35.
  13. ↑ Bergamini: Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. P. 433.
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Yamazaki is the family name, Anzai the first name.