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Updated: May 15, 2025
The Mikado, after having been for centuries in the keeping of the Tokugawa Shoguns, was captured by the clans of Satsuma and Choshu, and has been in their keeping ever since. They were represented politically by five men, the Genro or Elder Statesmen, who are sometimes miscalled the Privy Council. Only two still survive.
In this case, there is no doubt that the decision of the Genro to make peace was the right one from every point of view; there is also very little doubt that a peace advantageous to Japan could not have been made without trickery. Foreigners unacquainted with Japan, knowing that there is a Diet in which the Lower House is elected, imagine that Japan is at least as democratic as pre-war Germany.
In Russia there was revolution; in Japan there were riots, furious diatribes in the Press, and a change of Government of the nominal Government, that is to say, for the Genro continued to be the real power throughout.
They do not themselves take office; they select the Prime Minister and the Ministers of War and Marine, and allow them to bear the blame if anything goes wrong. The Genro are the real Government of Japan, and will presumably remain so until the Mikado is captured by some other clique. From a patriotic point of view, the Genro have shown very great wisdom in the conduct of affairs.
The Genro have no constitutional existence; they are merely the people who have the ear of the Mikado. They can make him say whatever they wish; therefore they are omnipotent.
The Restoration, however, did not put an end to the practice of a real Government behind the nominal one. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet are presented to the world as the Japanese Government, but the real Government is the Genro, or Elder Statesmen, and their successors, of whom I shall have more to say in the next chapter.
Indeed there have been occasions when the Genro, in spite of popular fury, has saved the nation from mistakes which it would certainly have committed if the Government had been democratic. One of the most interesting of these occasions was the conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth, after the Sino-Japanese war, which deserves to be told as illustrative of Japanese politics.
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