THE IMPERIAL FAMILY
European sovereigns and reigning families are parvenus compared to the
ruler and the imperial house of Japan, which shows an unbroken line from
the accession of Jimmu Tenno, the first Emperor in 660 B.C., down to the
present son of Heaven, Mutsu Hito, one hundred and twenty-first Emperor
of his line.
During the feudal period, the Emperors, virtually prisoners of their
vassals, the Shoguns, lived and died within the yellow palace walls of
Kioto, knowing nothing of their subjects, and unknown by them. After
death, each was deified under a posthumous appellation, and there his
history ceased. Too sacred a being to be spoken of by his personal name,
at the mention of his title all Japanese make an unconscious reverence
even now. When his patronymic was written, it was purposely left
incomplete by the omission of one stroke of the writing-brush. In the
spoken language, the ruler is the Shujo, the Heika, or the Tenno, while
in the written language he is the Tenno, the Kotei, or the Mikado. The
Empress is the Kogo in both the spoken and the written language, and the
honorific _sama_ follows all of these imperial appellations.
Mutsu Hito, the most significant figure in Japanese history, was born in
the Kioto palace, November 3, 1852, and, taught and trained as imperial
princes had been before him, succeeded to the throne after the death of
his father, February 13, 1867. In the following autumn the Shogun sent
in his formal resignation, gave back the supreme power to the rightful
ruler, and retired to Osaka. In February, 1868, the Emperor, not yet
sixteen years of age, received the foreign envoys in the Kioto palace
with uncovered face; then, defeating the rebellious Shogun at Osaka,
removed his capital to Yeddo, and chose the name Meiji (enlightenment),
to designate the era of his reign.
As seen at the rare court functions, at military reviews, and races,
the Emperor is easily the central figure. Taller than the average of
his race, and possessing great dignity and majesty, his slow, military
step and trailing sword effectually conceal the unequal gait rheumatism
sometimes obliges. He wears a trimmed beard, and his features, more
decided and strongly marked than is usual with the aristocratic type of
Japanese countenance, wear a calm and composure as truly Oriental as
imperial. In public he wears the uniform of generalissimo of the army, a
heavily-frogged and braided one of dark-blue broad-cloth in winter, and
of white duck in summer, with a gold-mounted sword and many decorations.
In recognition of the honors and orders conferred upon him by other
royalties, the Emperor bestows the cordon and jewel of the princely Order
of the Chrysanthemum. The Order of the Rising Sun is given for merit and
distinguished services, and its red button is worn by many foreigners as
well as natives.
Of late, the Emperor has abandoned his attempts to learn English and
German, and relies upon interpreters, but he reads translations of
foreign literature with great interest. When he passes through the
streets, he is received with silent reverence, an advance guard of police
and a body-guard of lancers escorting him. While his own people never
shout or cheer, he accepts very graciously the foreign custom, and bows
an acknowledgment to the hurrahs that sometimes greet him at Yokohama.
While the Emperor has been absorbed in the changing affairs of state
during the two decades of his reign, he still seems, in comparison with
European sovereigns, to dwell in absolute quiet and seclusion. Often,
for weeks together, he remains within the palace grounds, where he has
riding courts, archery, and rifle ranges, well-stocked fish-ponds, and
every means of amusing himself. Disliking the sea, he has no yacht, a
chartered mail-steamer or man-of-war carrying him to naval stations or
new fortifications, when the railroad is impracticable. His mountain
palaces and remote game preserves he never visits.
Immediately after establishing his court at Yeddo, the boy-Emperor
returned to Kioto to wed Haruko, daughter of Ichijo Takada, a _kugé_,
or court noble of the highest rank. The marriage was solemnized by some
Shinto ceremony within the temple of the palace, a ceremony so sacred and
private that no Japanese even conjectures its form.
The Empress Haruko, born May 29, 1850, was educated in the strictest
conventions of old Japan, and taught only the Chinese classics, her own
literature and poetic composition, the use of the koto, the forms of cha
no yu, needle-work, and the arrangement of flowers—a broad and most
liberal education for a maiden even of high degree.
Upon her marriage, an extraordinary life opened before the little
Empress, demanding a very unusual activity and study, courage,
adaptiveness, and comprehension. She is poetic as well as practical,
and her poems are not only traced on imperial screens and kakemono in
autograph characters, but several of them have been set to music as well.
Even now, her Majesty is more delicately pretty than her younger sisters,
although for years an invalid. She is short in stature, slender, and
small, with the long, oval face and refined features of the ideal
aristocratic type of Japanese beauty. At her marriage, she shaved
her eyebrows, painted two shadowy suggestions of them high up on her
forehead, and blackened her teeth, in accordance with Japanese custom;
but after a few years, she ceased to disfigure herself in this way. It
was an event, in 1873, when she gave her first audience to the envoys’
wives. It cost the court chamberlains months of study to arrange for
the appearance of the Emperor and Empress together, to reconcile the
pretensions of their suites as to rank and precedence, and to harmonize
the Occidental, chivalrous ideas of deference to women with the
unflattering estimate of the Orient. When, on the day of the declaration
of the new constitution (February 11, 1890), the Emperor and Empress rode
side by side in the same state carriage through the streets of Tokio, and
when, that night, he offered his arm to lead her to a twin arm-chair in
the state dining-hall, a new era was begun in Japanese history.
The Empress has her secretaries and readers, and gives a part of each day
to informal audiences. She visits her schools and hospitals, and makes
liberal purchases at charity bazaars. She exercises in the saddle within
the palace grounds, and drives in a brougham with half-drawn curtains,
her men on the box wearing a dark-blue livery with red cords and facings,
silver buttons, and cocked hats.
[Illustration: IN THE PALACE GARDENS]
One of the two annual imperial garden-parties is given when the
chrysanthemums are in bloom, and the other at the time of the cherry
blossoms. The etiquette of these is quite simple, although an appearance
at one is still equivalent to a presentation at court. A few days before
the festivity each guest receives a large chrysanthemum-bordered card:
_November —, ⸺._
By order of their Majesties, the Emperor and Empress, the
Minister of State for the Household Department presents his
compliments to ⸺, and asks their company at the “Chrysanthemum
Party” at the garden of the Imperial Temporary Palace on the
8th inst., at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
On an accompanying slip are these instructions:
Frock-coat required.
To alight at the “Kurumayose” after entering the palace gate.
This card to be shown to officers in attendance on arrival.
No party to be held if the day happens rainy.
The guests having assembled in the gardens at the hour indicated, the
Kimigayo, or national anthem, announces the approach of the imperial
personages. The Emperor, the Empress, and their suite, passing between
the rows of guests and the flower-tents, lead the way to marquees on
the lawn, where a collation is served, the Emperor addressing a few
remarks to the ministers and envoys as he greets them. Sometimes special
presentations are made to him and the Empress, and often the Empress
summons an envoy’s wife or a peeress to her, while she sits at table.
After another tour of the flower-tents, the company, following the
imperial lead, desert the gardens. Calls of ceremony must be made upon
the wife of the premier within one week after these parties.
When the Empress and her ladies wore the old dress the garden-parties
at the palace were wonderfully picturesque and distinctly Japanese. It
was my good fortune to attend the chrysanthemum fête of 1885, when the
Empress and her suite made their last appearance in the red _hakama_
and loose brocade kimonos of the old regime. The day was warm, with the
brilliant autumnal tints peculiar to Japan, clear and sunny. There were
rows of chrysanthemum beds in the Asakasa gardens, shielded from sun and
wind by matted awnings, screens, and silk hangings, and all the myriad
flowers were at one even and perfect period of unfolding. Under silk
tents by themselves stood single plants bearing from two hundred to four
hundred blossoms each, every blossom full and symmetrical.
[Illustration: IN THE PALACE GARDENS]
The peeresses waiting in that sunny garden were most brilliant figures,
rivalling the glow of the flowers in their splendid old brocade robes.
At last came the Empress and the whole gorgeous train of her attendants,
following the shore of the mirror-like lake, past camellia hedges to the
esplanade of the upper garden of the great Asakasa park. As the Emperor
was housed by illness, the Empress, for the first time, conducted a
general court ceremony alone. Her costume consisted of the loose hakama,
or divided skirt, of the heaviest scarlet silk, under a long loose kimono
of dull heliotrope, brocaded with conventional wistarias and the imperial
crests in white. No outer obi, or sash, was worn, and the neck was closed
high with surplice folds of rainbow-tinted silks. Many under-kimonos
of fine white and scarlet silk showed beneath the long, square sleeves
of the heavy brocade kimono. The imperial hair was stiffened into a
thin halo behind the face, falling thence to the waist, but tied here
and there with bits of silky white rice-paper, like that of a Shinto
priestess. Above her forehead shone a little golden ornament in the shape
of the _ho-o_, or phœnix, and she carried a parasol and an old court
fan of painted sticks of wood, wound with long cords of many-colored
silks. The dignity and majesty of the little woman were most impressive.
Every head bowed low, and when she had passed eyes were lifted to her
reverently and admiringly. All the princesses and peeresses following her
wore a similar costume, many of their brocade kimonos being stiffened
with embroidery and gold thread, and making dazzling effects of color.
When, in the brilliant sunset flush, the imperial train retraced its
steps, its kaleidoscopic flashes of white and gold and color reflected in
the still lake, and showing vividly as the ladies formed in a semicircle
on the lawn, while the Empress withdrew to her apartments, there ended
a series of pictures so beautiful that they seemed an illusion of the
imagination.
Before the following April Paris fashions had set in with great rigor,
and all the soft, pink reflections from the clouds of cherry blossoms in
the Hama Rikiu palace garden could not give the groups of little women in
dark, ugly, close-fitting gowns any likeness to the beautiful assemblages
of other years. Gone were poetry and picturesqueness. Progress and
Philistia were come. Except for the costumes of the Chinese and Korean
legations, and that of the Chinese Minister’s wife, with its cap-like
ornaments of filigree and pearls, and tiny jewelled slippers, nothing
Oriental or Asiatic in aspect remained to that court gathering.
The Empress ordained and defended this change of dress in a famous court
circular, whose chief argument seemed to be that the alteration from the
sitting and kneeling etiquette of the Orient to the standing etiquette
of the Occident required western fashions for women as well as men.
Every lover of the picturesque protested, but it was suspected that
this manifesto was a shrewd political move of Count Ito’s to convince
the treaty powers that the Japanese do not differ from other civilized
people. Should the sacrifice of the old life and the beautiful national
dress help to secure for Japan a revision of the shameful and unjust
treaties forced upon her from 1854 to 1858, and promote the political
liberty and commercial prosperity of the country, the Empress’s patriotic
iconoclasm may be justified.
[Illustration: IN THE PALACE GARDENS]
The sacredness of the imperial person long postponed her Majesty’s change
of fashion, as no ignoble dress-maker could be allowed to touch her.
Countess Ito, the clever wife of the premier, and leader of foreign
fashions at court, was finally chosen as lay figure, to be fitted until
a model could be made. The Empress now wears European dress altogether,
conduct little short of heroic for one accustomed only to the loose,
simple, and comfortable garments of her country. Her gowns are made of
Japanese fabrics, and a lace school under her patronage supplies her with
flounces and trimmings. At in-door state ceremonies, low bodices and
court trains are prescribed, and the Empress wears a tiara, _rivière_,
and innumerable ornaments of diamonds. The court ladies, who formerly
wore no ornaments but the single long hair-pin and the gold balls and
trifles on the obi cord, have been seized by a truly American craze for
diamonds, and greatly covet the new Order with cordon and jewelled star
lately established by the Empress.
In adopting the expensive foreign dress court ladies ruthlessly
sacrificed irreplaceable heirlooms of rich old brocades and embroideries.
For a long time their countenances and mien betrayed the discomfort of
the new dress, but they soon acquired ease with familiarity, and no
Japanese woman, in her first Parisian gown, was ever such a burlesque and
caricature as are the foreign visitors who essay the kimono, and, blind
to the ridiculous, are photographed with its folds and fulness all awry.
Only two foreign women have I ever seen who could wear Japanese dress
gracefully in the Japanese way, with full regard to the meaning which
each color, fold, pucker, and cord implies.
Asahiko, the Empress Dowager, one of the Kujo family of kugés, and of
Fujiwara descent, maintained the old order and etiquette and made few
concessions to the new ways. She never appeared at state functions, but
the ladies of her suite, in beautiful ceremonial dresses, were sometimes
seen at Koyokwan No performances, when given for one of her state
charities. She spent half the year at her summer palace at Hayama, and at
her death in January, 1897, was buried beside the Emperor Komei at the
Senyuji temple in Kioto with a midnight Shinto service. The most rigorous
court mourning was observed for one year, even military bands being
forbidden to play.
The Empress Dowager had nominal charge of the imperial nurseries in the
Nakayama Yashiki, where the children of the Emperor and his inferior
wives remain until their fourth or fifth years. These wives are all of
kugé birth, and have establishments within the palace enclosure. They
are an Oriental survival, of which little is said or definitely known,
although they still have a fixed rank.
The Empress Haruko has no children, and Prince Haru, the Crown Prince, is
the son of the Emperor and Madame Yanagiwara. Five imperial princesses
are living, but ten imperial children have died. Prince Haru was born
September 6, 1879, proclaimed heir apparent August 31, 1887, and elected
Crown Prince November 3, 1889, dispossessing as heir to the throne Prince
Arisugawa Takehito, a young cousin, who had been adopted by the Emperor
in the absence of any direct heirs. Prince Haru attended the Nobles’
school, recited in classes with other boys, and enjoyed a more democratic
life than his ancestors could have dreamed of. He is quick, energetic,
and ambitious, progressive in all his views, enthusiastic and tireless
in his occupations. With a naturally delicate constitution, his good
health has been the unceasing object of the devoted German and Japanese
court physicians, and he has always been exempt from court functions and
the wearisome public duties of the heir apparent in other empires. His
marriage to the Princess Sada, daughter of Prince Kujo, took place at the
Imperial Palace in Tokio in May, 1900, and the birth of Prince Michi in
April, 1901, was cause of rejoicing to the empire.