Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
TOKIO PALACES AND COURT
Thirty different places have been the capital and home of the Emperors of Japan, and Omi, Settsu, and Yamashiro were imperial provinces before the Tokugawa’s city of Yeddo (bay’s gate) became Tokio, the eastern capital and seat of imperial power. The Shogun’s old castle, the Honmaru, or the Shiro, was the imperial palace until destroyed by fire in May, 1873, and its interior is said to have been far more splendid than the Nijo castle in Kioto. The yashiki of the Tokugawa daimio of Kiushiu, on the high ground of the Akasaka quarter, next sheltered the imperial household, though ill adapted to its changing and growing needs.
At the end of 1888 the Emperor took possession of the new imperial palace, which had been six years in building, and which stands upon the ruins of the Shogun’s castle, protected by all the rings of moats. Two drawbridges and two ponderous old towered gate ways defend the entrance to the front wing of the building, a long yellow brick edifice, with the conical towers and steep roof of a French château. The offices of the Imperial Household Department are assigned to this foreign wing, except for which the new structure is such a labyrinthine collection of temple-like buildings, as the old palace at Kioto. Built on sloping and uneven ground, there is a constant change of level in the innumerable roofs and floors. Before it was completed a tour of the palace occupied a full hour, and attendants and workmen were often lost in the maze. Combining Japanese and European architecture, decorations, furnishings, and ideas, the palace is a jumble of unsatisfactory incongruities, nobody being found to admire thatched roofs and electric lights, partition walls of sliding paper screens and steam-heating apparatus, a modern ball-room, and a No dance pavilion all side by side.
Each lofty state apartment is a building by itself, the outer galleries on the four sides being the corridors that touch other corridors at their angles. Plate-glass doors in maroon lacquer frames, with superb metal mountings, take the place of the usual paper shoji; but with the low eaves and the light entering from the level of the floor, the rooms need all their Edison lamps. Unfortunately, the best examples of national decorative art are not preserved in this national palace. Only the richly panelled ceilings are at all Japanese or worthy their place. The famous embroidered ceiling and embroidered wainscoting in the great drawing-room, and some makimonos in the private rooms, exhibit the best Kioto needle-work. This wonderful ceiling, costing ten thousand dollars, is panelled with yard-squares of gold-thread tapestry, upon which are embroidered crest-like circles of various flowers. The wainscoting is green damask wrought with fruits, and the walls of the drawing-room are hung with a neutral-tinted damask.
The beautiful Japanese woods and the marvellous Japanese carvers were set aside, that the steam factories of Hamburg might supply the cheap and ugly oak furniture of the banquet-hall. The state table, seating one hundred people, surrounds three sides of a square. The imperial arm-chairs are at the middle of the board, facing elaborate buffets, framing painted tapestry-panels of the most tawdry German design. The ball-room has a costly inlaid floor, and is decorated in white and gold. The throne-room has nothing Japanese but the crests in the panelled ceiling. A large gilded arm-chair stands on a red-carpeted dais, with canopy and curtains of red plush, the sacred sword and seal resting on lacquer tables beside it. At court functions the Empress stands on a dais below and to the right of the throne, with the imperial princes and princesses grouped about her. The members of the diplomatic corps are placed at the Emperor's left, the ministers and higher officials fill the space facing the throne, and the imperial guard line the gallery corridors that surround the throne-room.
In the private apartments of the Emperor and Empress moquette carpets, plush furniture, and easy-chairs confess foreign influence and etiquette. The old rules of the simplicity of a Shinto shrine in the sovereign’s dwelling are observed in leaving all the wood-work unpainted, while wax-candles and open grates replace the electric bulbs and gilded radiators of the official parts of the palace. Some of the private rooms display exquisite panelled and coffered ceilings of pure white pine, or the beautiful gray bog-wood. Each suite has one room in pure Japanese style, and a tiny box for celebrating the rites of cha no yu with a favored four. The Emperor's sleeping-room is the same unlighted, unventilated dark closet which his ancestors used. This sleeping-room is E in the accompanying diagram, surrounded by rooms occupied at night by his attendants and guards.
Above this floor is a suite of studies, libraries, and secretaries’ rooms, all finished in the same exquisite woods, that show their natural grain and color. There is a separate suite of rooms for the Emperor’s toilet and wardrobe, a robing and disrobing room, and an exquisite Japanese bath-room with inlaid floor and walls. The sovereign uses the regular oval wooden tub of his people, which is filled from a well in the adjoining court by means of the primitive bucket and rope. The screens in these private rooms are undecorated, or at the most only flecked with gold-leaf. From time to time, by special command, artists will decorate these, and squares of colored paper put here and there upon them invite the autograph poems of the tea-drinking improvisators.
Somewhere in the recesses of the palace is a chapel or Shinto shrine, but the officials are very reticent concerning it. It is known that the mortuary tablets of the Emperor’s ancestors are there, simple ihai, or pieces of pine wood, upon which are written the posthumous names of the deceased rulers. Official bulletins often announce that a newly appointed minister of the cabinet, or a diplomatic officer about departing for his post is “ordered to worship the cenotaphs in the imperial chapel,” before an audience with the Emperor. Presumably, such devotions are a form equivalent to the oath of allegiance in other countries. Upon the anniversaries of the death of certain of his ancestors, on the days of the spring and autumn festival, when the first rice is sown and harvested, as well as before any great ceremonial, it is announced that the Emperor will worship in the imperial chapel. The aged Prince Kuni Asahiko is conductor of divine services to the imperial family; but everything about that simple, formal state religion is baffling and incomprehensible, and no one knows what form the Shinto services in the palace assume.
The Emperor used to give a Japanese banquet on the morning of his birthday to princes, ministers, and envoys. Chopsticks were used, and the imperial health was drunk from saké-cups of fine egg-shell porcelain, decorated with chrysanthemums and broken diaper patterns in gold, which the guests carried away with them as souvenirs. That celebration and the New-year breakfast are now state banquets, 
IMPERIAL SAKÉ-CUP served in foreign fashion, with sovereign and consort seated at the head of the room. Indeed, the entire service of the palace and of the Emperor’s table is European; silver, porcelain, and glass being marked with the imperial crest of the sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum, and the kirimon of the Paulownia imperialis appearing in the decorative design woven in the white silk napery, and traced on the delicate porcelain service. The palace lackeys are uniformed in dress-coats with many cords and aiguillettes, striped vests, knee-breeches, white silk stockings, and buckled shoes. Their costume resembles that of the Vienna palace, colored sketches of which Prince Komatsu sent home during his winter stay on the Danube. The palace tiring-women wear the garb of Kioto days, purple hakama and russet silk kimonos, and are the most fascinating and almost the only Japanese spectacle in the imperial precincts. In all modifications the usages of the Berlin court have been followed, and no Prussian military martinet or court chamberlain could be more punctilious in matters of etiquette than the Japanese court officials.
Of the Empress Dowager’s palace only its gate-way is known. The Hama Rikiu palace is a sea-shore villa, owing its beautiful garden to the Shoguns, but it is occupied only when the ministers of state give balls, or foreign guests of the Emperor are domiciled there, as was General Grant. An imperial garden-party is held in its confines each spring, and, with the Fukiage gardens adjoining the new palace, it is visited upon presentation of special cards of admission issued by the legations.
For the support of these palaces and the expenses of the imperial family the Imperial Household Department’s expenditures were 3,000,000 yens in 1889.
Tokio court circles have, of course, their factions and cliques, their wars and triumphs, and the favor of the sovereign is the object of perpetual scheming and intriguing.
The peerage of Japan numbers ten princes, twenty-five marquises, eighty counts, three hundred and fifty-two viscounts, and ninety-eight barons. All the old kugé families are enrolled in this new peerage, and such daimios of the Shogun’s court as gave aid and allegiance to the Emperor, or made honorable surrender in the conflict of 1868. Rank and title were conferred upon many of the samurai also, the leaders in the work of the Restoration, and the statesmen, who have advised and led in the wonderful progress of these last twenty years; but the old kugés have never brought themselves to accept the pardoned daimios and ennobled samurai of other days. It is the Oriental version of the relations between the Faubourg St. Germain, the aristocracy of the empire, and the bureaucracy of the present French republic.
The imperial princes of the blood, all nearly related to the Emperor, rank above the ten created princes, who head the list of the nobility. Five of these ten princely houses are the old Gosekke, the first five of the one hundred and fifty-five kugé families comprising the old Kioto court. With the Gosekke, which includes the Ichijo, Kujo, Takatsukasa, Nijo, and Konoye families, rank, since 1883, the houses of Sanjo, Iwakura, Shimadzu, Mori, and Tokugawa, sharing with them the privilege of offering the bride to the heir-apparent.
The Emperor visits personally at the houses of these ten princes, and recently the Tokugawas entertained him with a fencing-match and a No dance in old style, the costumes and masks for which had been used at Tokugawa fêtes for centuries. In accordance with other old customs, a sword by a famous maker was presented to the guest of honor, and a commemorative poem offered in a gold lacquer box. Yet the head of the Tokugawa house is a grandson of the Shogun who first refused to treat with Commodore Perry, and son of Keiki, the arch rebel and last of the Shoguns, who for so long lived forgotten as a private citizen on a small estate near Shidzuoka, keeping alive no faction, awaking no interest—attaining, in fact, a political Nirvana.
Under new titles the old fiefs are lost sight of and old associations broken up. The marquises, counts, and barons of to-day are slender, dapper little men, wearing the smartest and most irreproachable London clothes, able to converse in one or two foreign languages on the subjects that interest cosmopolitans of their rank in other empires, and are with difficulty identified with their feudal titles. The Daimio of Kaga has become the Marquis Maeda, his sister married the Emperor’s cousin, and the great yashiki of their ancestors has given way to the buildings of the Imperial University. The Daimio of Satsuma is now Prince Shimadzu. It is not easy to associate these modern men-about-town, who dance at state balls, who play billiards and read the files of foreign newspapers at the Rokumeikwan, who pay afternoon calls, attend teas, garden-parties, dinners, concerts, and races; who have taken up poker and tennis with equal ardor, and are victimized at charity fairs and bazaars, with their pompous, stately, two-sworded, brocade and buckram bound ancestors.
There are great beauties, favorites, and social leaders among the ladies of the court circle, and the change in their social position and personal importance is incredible. Japanese matrons, who, a few years ago, led the most quiet and secluded existence, now preside with ease and grace over large establishments, built and maintained like the official residences of London or Berlin. Their struggles with the difficulties of a new language, dress, and etiquette were heroic. Mothers and daughters studied together with the same English governess, and princesses and diplomats’ wives, returning from abroad, gave new ideas to their friends at home. Two Japanese ladies, now foremost at court, are graduates of Vassar College, and many high officials are happily married to foreign wives; American, English, and German women having assumed Japanese names with their wedding vows. The court has its reigning beauty in the wife of the grand master of ceremonies, the richest peer of his day, and representative of that family which gave its name to the finest porcelain known to the ceramic art of the empire.
Tokio society delights in dancing, and every one at court dances well. Leaders of fashion go through the quadrille d'honneur, with which state balls open, and follow' the changes of the lancers with the exactness of soldiers on drill, every step and movement as precise and finished as the bending of the fingers in cha no yu. The careless foreigner who attempts to dance an unfamiliar figure repents him of his folly. Japanese politeness is incomparable, but the sedateness, the precision, and exactness of the other dancers in the set will reproach the blunderer until he feels himself a criminal. The ball is the more usual form of state entertainments. The prime-minister gives a ball on the night of the Emperor’s birthday, and the governor of Tokio gives a ball each winter. From time to time the imperial princes and the ministers of state offer similar entertainments, and every legation has its ball-room. The members of the diplomatic corps are as much in social unison with the higher Japanese circles as it is possible to be with such subjects at any capital, and the round of tiffins, dinners, garden-parties, and small dances makes Tokio very gay during the greater part of the year.
The first formal visiting of the season begins in October, and by May social life is at an end until hot weather is over. Lent makes little break in the social chain. Great seriousness and exactness in social usage is inherent in this high-bred people. Visits of ceremony are scrupulously paid within the allotted time, and a newly-arrived official in Tokio finds no diminution of the card-leaving and visiting which awaits him in any other capital. At the houses of the imperial princes cards are not left, the visitor inscribing his name in a book in the hall. After each state ball, a guest must call at once upon the princess, or minister’s wife, who presided, and any remissness strikes his name from her list.
Garden-parties are the favorite expression of Tokio hospitality. All official residences in the city have fine grounds, and many ministers of state own suburban villas. A few of the legations are able to entertain in the same way, and many military officers make the garden of the old Mito yashiki, now the Arsenal grounds, the scene of their courtesies.
There is a stately court journal, which is the official bulletin, but Tokio has not yet set up a paper of society gossip and scandal for the rigorous censorship of the Japanese press to expunge; nor are there books of court memoirs. Yet what memoirs could be more interesting than those that might be written by the men and women who were born in feudal times, who have lived through the exciting days of the Restoration, and have watched the birth and growth of New Japan.