The Meiji Guillotine Murders

The Chief Inspectorate of the Imperial Prosecuting Office
 
 
1.
 
As great wars and great revolutions reach their end, most nations seem to enter a fallow period lasting several years.
After such tremendous bloodshed, troubles arising from the victor’s arrogance and lust for retribution, as well as from the loser’s sense of disgrace and resentment, will flare up and prevail over the hour of peace, yet still the vantage of history will somehow lend the impression that these years were empty. The period after the Second World War is a case in point. And the early years of the Meiji era, too, were much the same.
Never has there been so nation-wide a sense of collapse as there was when the war was lost, but then nor has there ever been so profound a sense of heart-felt relief at the dawning of peace. It seemed, however, that both sides then fell hopelessly into a state of total confusion, with neither one having any idea where to begin or what to do. For the people living then, those years must have seemed anything but fallow; rather, it must have been a time of great turmoil, of life-or-death struggle. It was a time when new government offices sprouted up like bamboo shoots, when new administrative orders came down from on high like rain, and when new customs and ideas came flooding in like a deluge from a harbour that has been prised open. By the same stroke, however, it was also a time when even stranger offices, laws, and notions from the old days were revived like the souls of the departed and mixed together like the seven colours of the rainbow—who could say whether for better or worse—with the result a chaos of ash-grey.
Another period of chaos-cum-fallowness seems to have lasted until around 1873, the sixth year of the emperor Meiji’s rein, when the famed Iwakura Mission returned from its embassy in the United States and Europe. From the observations made by this group of high-ranking officials—Tomomi Iwakura, Toshimichi Ōkubo, Takayoshi Kido and Hirobumi Itō—a blueprint was drawn up, one that sought to refashion Japan in Europe’s likeness, one that would set her on course not only to catch up with, but to overtake the West, and one whose consequences would be felt not only in the Meiji era, but right up to the Second World War and even afterwards.
In his autobiography, the writer Yukichi Fukuzawa observes: “The years on either side of the Meiji Restoration, from the second or third year of Bunkyū to the sixth or seventh of Meiji, were the most dangerous. During those twelve or thirteen years, I never ventured out of my house in Tokyo at night.” Lines such as these make clear the extent to which these supposedly fallow years were fallow also in terms of public order.
This does not mean, however, that there was no law enforcement in Tokyo whatsoever. In the first year of Meiji, 1868, while the loyalist army was stationed in old Edo, the magistrate’s office was reformed as a municipal court. Later, the soldiers loyal to the various ruling clans took control of the city and, in the sixth lunar month of the second year, after the so-called “return of lands and people to the Emperor” had taken place, a hired militia was appointed to the role. Finally, by the eleventh lunar month of the fourth year, the rasotsu system was implemented.
Officially speaking, this is how the rasotsu were established, but even before that, when the so-called “militiamen” were employed, the officers were still generally called “the rasotsu”, although in places like Yokohama people already spoke of “the police”, using the foreign term. At any rate, whatever the name or the system, law enforcement itself was, to borrow a phrase from the Kojiki, a tale of “when the world was yet young and like unto floating oil, drifting medusa-like”.
Let us, then, go back to the autumn of the second year of Meiji.
There were once five rasotsu in Tokyo…
 
 
2.
 
The district of Akashi-chō, where the Tsukiji Foreign Settlement is located, is bound to the east by the mouth of the Great Sumida River but surrounded on all other sides by canals and waterways. Each of the many bridges there has a guardhouse, and that is where the rasotsu are stationed.
The settlement had been built for the protection of foreign residents, but though guardhouses had been erected, very few foreigners actually made use of them. And so, while in the early days there had been multiple guards stationed in them, now they had just one lone sentry.
At his post one afternoon, Sergeant Jiromasa Saruki was having some sport with a drunk man.
Actually, it would be more apt to say that the man was sobering up. The foreign settlement, you see, also contained a pleasure quarter: Shin-Shimabara. Itwas open to foreigners, with traders brought in from the more famous Yoshiwara, but, as with the guardhouses, it was rarely frequented by its intended patrons, and on the whole its clientele was Japanese. The man seemed to be a regular of these establishments. For some reason, though, he had got so drunk that morning that he had been staggering about like a somnambulist. Saruki had brought him in “for his own good”.
It had been about eleven o’clock in the morning when the man collapsed onto the floor of the guardhouse and fell asleep, snoring dreadfully. He had awoken only moments ago, a little before four o’clock that afternoon.
As he looked around in confusion, the drunk, who was dressed like a merchant, noticed the rasotsu’s monkey-like face with its upward-pointing moustache glaring at him from the desk, and sat up in astonishment.
“You’re in the Karuko Bridge guardhouse, in the foreign settlement. You were so drunk that, as you were coming over the bridge, you looked as though you might fall over the railing at any moment, so I brought you here.”
“Oh… Thank you…”
“What were you doing drinking at such an ungodly hour?”
“Well, you see… I quarrelled with one of the working girls and she ran off in the middle of the night. I was so angry that I had one of the young serving lads fetch me some sake, and before I knew it, it was dawn… That’s about as much as I can remember. Was I really that drunk?…”
As he bowed and scraped in embarrassment, the man searched furiously inside the breast of his kimono and the in the pockets of sleeves.
“Look at me!” the sergeant barked. “Who are you? I need your name, age, address, occupation…”
Wearing another look of astonishment, the man lifted his head.
“My name is Shimbei. Shimbei Takaya,” he replied, still groping all over his body. “I’m thirty-eight, and I run a lamp shop in Kotobuki-chō, in Asakusa…”
“Looking for something?”
“It’s just, my money… No matter how much I drank, there should still be a fair amount left.”
“It’s here.”
Sergeant Saruki tossed the man’s coin purse onto the desk.
“I’ve been keeping it safe for you.”
“Ah, that’s awfully kind of you. Thank you, Sergeant.”
With a show of gratitude, the man picked up his coin purse and set about inspecting its contents.
“One ryō, two ryō… two bu… and one shu,” he said, counting it all out. Then, having satisfied himself, he nodded and prostrated himself in gratitude on the floor. “All present and correct. You’ve been a real help to me, Sergeant. Well, if that’s all…” he said, getting to his feet.
“Just one minute,” said Saruki, stopping him in his tracks.
“If you’d collapsed like that in the middle of the street, any passer-by could have come along and robbed you, taking the whole lot. I saved you from that injustice. Don’t you think you ought to show a bit more gratitude?”
“Oh, but I already… What I mean to say is… Thank you. I really am most awfully grateful to you…”
“Come on, do you really think this is the sort of thing that can be repaid with words alone? Hmm?”
The lamp-seller blinked as he beheld the sergeant’s face, his jaw thrust out over the desk. Suddenly, the man’s face creased into an awkward smile.
“I hadn’t realized… Of course, I must thank you properly,” he said, fumbling around in his coin purse. He extracted a two-bu gold coin and offered it to the rasotsu.
“Kindly accept this token of my gratitude, sir. Now, if that’s all…”
“It is not…” Saruki replied, thrusting his chin out farther still, his words seeming to creep across the desk. “Think about it. Why, if I hadn’t rescued you, you’d have fallen off the bridge before you knew it. Is saving your life really worth only two bu?”
The lamp-seller panicked.
“Ah, well… When you put it like that… You can’t really put a price on —”
“Don’t you think that three, even four coin purses like this would still be nothing compared to a man’s life? Hmm?”
The lamp-seller took a deep breath and looked at the man across from him. But the rasotsu’s face was deadly serious, and suddenly a look of irritation flashed in his eyes. A few seconds later, the lamp-seller bowed again, so low this time that his forehead practically hit the floor.
“I really do apologize. It’s just as you say, sir… Here, please, take the purse and its contents,” he said, holding it out in desperation.
Saruki snatched it from his hands. Then, as the lamp-seller made his way out of the guardhouse, stumbling as he went, as though his drunkenness had suddenly returned to him, the rasotsu called after him in an ingratiating tone:
“It’s a relief, in any case, to know that everything was ‘all present and correct’.”
The sergeant then tipped out the coins and spread them across the desk.
There were gold coins worth two bu and silver coins worth one bu or one shu all mixed together. Just as he had said: two ryō, two bu and one shu in total.
While there was all manner of chaos in those first years of Meiji, this was never truer than where money was concerned. In the previous year, the new government had immediately set about issuing banknotes, but these were hardly in common use. On the other hand, the coins from the old days of the shogunate were still in circulation, but both the values and the denominations of those coins were really quite negligible, and, to make matters worse, there were also a prodigious number of counterfeits mixed in. From the vantage of history, it seems miraculous that society didn’t just fall apart in those days.
One by one, Saruki picked up each of the coins and dropped them onto the desk, checking whether or not they were counterfeit.
Despite the chaos, this was over two and half ryō in an era when you could by a whole sack of rice for five ryō and still have change left over. He was thankful not to find a single worthless government bill. Better yet, each of the coins appeared to be the genuine article. As he listened carefully to the sound of each falling coin, Sergeant Jiromasa Saruki was in a world of his own, his face ecstatic. But suddenly he noticed a figure standing in front of the guardhouse, and so he gathered up the scattered coins in a fluster.