Chapter 639 The arrival of the black ship (Part 1)

Chapter 639 The arrival of the black ship (Part 1)

1845, Edo Castle.

In a magnificent Japanese-style palace, the breeze blew through the wind chimes, making a crisp sound, and beautiful cherry blossoms fell with it.

The person sitting cross-legged on the tatami is Masahiro Abe, the chief minister of the shogunate and one of the most powerful people in this country.

He became the chief laozhong at the age of only twenty-seven, which was unique in the history of the Edo shogunate.

It's just that at this time, Masahiro Abe didn't have the high spirits of a "young boy" at all, and he was not in the mood to listen to the sweet sound of wind chimes. The falling cherry blossoms made him feel an inexplicable sadness.

Inside the shogunate, Abe Masahiro was called "Lao Pan Catfish", which shows that people have high expectations for him.

Legend has it that a giant catfish carried the Japanese islands on its back and would cause earthquakes whenever it moved, so Ebisu God used a gourd to hold the catfish down.

In addition to the meaning of destruction, catfish also means revival and transformation. It is called "the catfish that transforms society".

In Izumo, the gourd itself means that there will be no illness or disaster, so the gourd catfish has the meaning of turning bad luck into good luck and eliminating disasters.

However, as the chief veteran, Masahiro Abe knew better than anyone else that the shogunate was declining at this time, and the tax and corvee had reached an unbearable level, but he still could not pay off the debts owed to the merchants.

The weakness of the central government has caused the entire Japan to be in turmoil, and careerists continue to gain greater power through smuggling trade and further squeezing the people.

Once, keeping the peasants half dead was the secret of domination.

However, at this time, the peasants could no longer survive, and riots broke out frequently. Even some low-level warriors and businessmen joined the ranks of the rebels.

The shogunate could only continue to borrow money from businessmen to cope with the immediate crisis. At this time, the actual status of many big businessmen was much higher than that of the samurai class.

What Abe Masahiro didn't know was that the root cause of this strange circle was the development of the market economy. The market share of rice and the price of rice fell simultaneously, which meant that the wealth owned by the Tokugawa lords dropped sharply.

At that time, Japan's taxes were mainly paid on corn, so this caused widespread financial difficulties for the daimyo, and it also meant that the actual value of rumi for retainers and samurai dropped.

As the saying goes, a person with a solid nature knows etiquette. Now these warriors can't even eat enough, so how can they show loyalty, filial piety, integrity, and righteousness?

(The Japanese value loyalty and filial piety as one, or one book of loyalty and filial piety, so they don’t use a comma to separate them.)

At the same time, the cash-strapped samurai class became increasingly dissatisfied with the current status of society. After all, according to their traditional concepts and what they had learned, businessmen should be the last ones.

But at this time, they were sitting on top of them and dominating them. What was even more despicable was that the samurai who had sworn allegiance to the daimyo actually colluded with the merchants. This was simply intolerable.

Some warriors began to try to change this situation, but the most capable and intelligent warriors usually chose to be loyal to the merchants.

In fact, it was not easy to be loyal to businessmen at that time. After all, there were more monks than meat, but this was not a problem for this nation who was familiar with "Three Kingdoms".

Many samurai chose to "recognize thieves as their fathers" and become the adopted sons of merchants. At the same time, businessmen also began to covet higher power and become the adopted sons of the daimyo and the Chinese.

It's just that these adopted sons don't intend to "fulfill their filial piety", but to seize power. The culture of adopted children in Japanese history is very complex, so I won’t go into details in this book.

As long as you remember that an adopted son has the right to inherit, he can also inherit the position of family governor (patriarch), and because he brings his own power, he usually has an advantage in the succession battle.

In the middle and late Edo period, there was even a saying that "when a merchant is angry, the world is afraid." (The original version was "Osaka merchants were angry, and the princes of the world were frightened", but I changed it because I felt it didn't have much momentum.)

In fact, the ruling class of the shogunate was not unaware of this chaos, and at the same time they also took a lot of reform and self-rescue measures.

I won’t talk about the conventional methods, but will only talk about the most outrageous method, which is to use "rude demands" against people who want debts.

(Being disrespectful is the samurai’s privilege to kill at will. However, in fact, after many revisions, the scope of application of this right has become extremely narrow.)

That's right, you can openly default on your debts and kill those businessmen who force you to pay. However, the power of money soon outweighed the power of force, and the situation of forced debt was no longer tried without politeness.

Generally speaking, these reforms of the shogunate did not have much effect. After all, with the development of productivity and commodity economy, the decline of feudal landlords was almost inevitable.

At the same time, the emergence of wealthy farmers and wealthy businessmen was essentially an early product of the development of capitalist economy.

The wealthy farmers are the agricultural bourgeoisie through land annexation, and the wealthy merchants are analogous to European financial capitalists.

After the initial primitive accumulation, these people want to develop further, but that will inevitably further weaken the power of the original ruling class (shogunate, daimyo).

This situation will be repeated as the powerful farmers and wealthy merchants become stronger and the shogunate declines, until the status of both parties changes.

However, the budding capitalism in Japan was still very weak at that time, and it did not have the tradition of merchant autonomy and sufficient social status to support their revolution, so it seemed unusual.

Masahiro Abe's predecessor, Tadakuni Mizuno, was a very interesting person. On the one hand, he held high the banner of anti-corruption, but on the other hand, he secretly accepted bribes crazily.

But the war in Asia shocked the shogunate so much that even its senior officials could not accept this fact.

The strong sense of crisis led a senior shogunate bureaucrat named Shiotani Dangan to disclose a large amount of information about the war to the public, regardless of his own life.

At that time, Japanese Tang-style story-telling (Qing Dynasty) and Orchid-style story-telling (Netherlands) were both top secret, and only a small number of senior shogunate bureaucrats had the right to know.

Shiotani Dangyin's behavior immediately caused an uproar in Japan, especially for the samurai class, which was like the earth was falling apart.

Because their faith collapsed, then there was the traditional performing arts of the Yamato people - suicide by disembowelling.

"Whoops, the cannons shook the sky and destroyed the city, and the barbarian ships entered the harbor and the Han army fled. Alas! We made a peace with millions of dollars, and bought the barbarian chief Yichao!"

This is a poem written by a poet who lived during the Tenpo period, which to a certain extent reflects the shock that this war brought to the Japanese.

So the shogunate began a reform under the auspices of Mizuno Tadakuni. The two biggest problems facing Japan at that time were insufficient food production and the ruling class's lack of money.

At this time, Japan was experiencing constant natural disasters, and even the richest area of ​​Osaka was experiencing famine, not to mention other areas with barren land.

If the fields cannot produce food, people cannot stay where they are and starve to death. As a result, a large number of Mizuton and Kozen (the lowest class of poor farmers in Japan) began to flee to the city in search of a chance to survive.

In a sense, this provides a large amount of cheap labor for Japan's industry and commerce, but as farmers run more jobs, grain output is naturally lower, grain prices continue to rise, and more people go bankrupt.

In order to break this cycle, Mizuno Tadakuni issued the "Return Order" to allow those farmers to return wherever they came from.

This approach offended not only farmers, but also businessmen.

The former thinks that he can make money in the city but can only wait to die in the countryside. Why should he continue to be a cow and a horse?

The latter feels that after finally getting so much cheap labor, the smuggling trade has finally improved. Now that they are gone, what else can they do to compete with foreign countries?

Then Tadakuni Mizuno regarded merchants as the biggest enemies of his reforms. He knew that the cause of famine was not only natural disasters, but also the hoarding of merchants, so he issued a "Price Limit Order" to break this situation.

However, the merchants united and refused to sell food, and the shogunate did not have enough food to provide relief to the victims. Rich businessmen can tolerate this situation, but disaster victims cannot.

As a result, the "price limit order" failed.

Mizuno Tadakuni wanted to improve coastal defense and build new warships, but the problem came again, no money. The above plans can only become empty talk.

In the end, he retreated to the next best thing and promulgated the "Fuel and Fresh Water Supply Order". The actual content of this order is similar to Cixi's routine. As long as foreign ships have needs for fuel, food, fresh water, etc., the local government must immediately meet them and do not use them. Friends are resentful.

Later, Meiji Restoration patriot Sakamoto Ryoma angrily called it the "comfort order."

Mizuno Tadakuni's reforms finally led to an assassination incident, and his reforms also failed.

In fact, Japan at this time is a bit like Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Japan's currency devalued 21 times from 1819 to 1845, which relieved the economic pressure on the shogunate, but passed it on to the samurai class.

The skyrocketing prices and the fact that there was no war and the salary of samurai had not increased for several years made their lives extremely difficult. Many of them need to borrow money to survive, or even become artisanal producers.

At that time, the daughters of wealthy merchants were the objects of pursuit by many samurai. Similarly, the daughters of the samurai family were also willing to marry those merchants whom they looked down on in the past as wives, or even as concubines.

Social status is also reversed

In short, Tadakuni Mizuno's reforms will not succeed and cannot succeed.

The failure of the Tianbao reform dealt another heavy blow to the already declining shogunate.

At this time, Masahiro Abe is facing the same dilemma as his senior, and he has to face more challenges than Tadakuni Mizuno.

Since the first Russian ship appeared on Japan's northernmost Shimo-Ezo Island (Hokkaido) in 1778, the Russians have been constantly trying to trade with Japan.

The Russians have always been a group of guys who do whatever it takes to achieve their goals. After several unsuccessful requests for trade, they started to think crookedly.

The Russians began to disguise themselves as pirates and harass the northern part of Ezo Island, even directly plundering the population and setting up schools to teach Russian.

By 1821, Tsar Alexander suddenly got tired of this sneaky game, so he announced:

"The entire coast of the North Pacific Ocean from the south of the Bering Strait to the 51st latitude north and its affiliated islands belong to the Russian Empire."

Despite protests from many countries, Alexander I still went his own way. It was not until Nicholas I came to power that the aggression in the Far East and North Pacific region eased.

After the War of 1840, Russia was worried that British expansion would affect its interests in the Far East and the North Pacific.

So Tsar Nicholas I formulated the infamous East Russia Plan. Its first step was to establish trade relations with Japan and use its abundant furs, whale oil, and torpedoes in exchange for food and coal to establish permanent settlements. Waiting for daily necessities.

Then try to gain access to Japanese ports to prepare for further march south.

In 1845, the Russian envoy came to Japan again with an autograph letter from Nicholas I, but was still rejected by the shogunate.

The governor of East Siberia, Muravyov, threatened to retaliate, but this plan fell through due to a major rebellion in Chechnya.

After all, the Caucasus threatens the southern Russian steppes and poses a far greater threat to Russia than the Far East.

However, the shogunate had no way of knowing this, and they could only live under the cloud of war.

In 1808, a British warship disguised as a Dutch merchant ship broke into Nagasaki Port. During the process, it kidnapped hostages and extorted fuel and fresh water. The Nagasaki leader was so ashamed that he committed suicide.

Around 1820, a large number of British and American whaling ships entered the North Pacific and began to continuously harass coastal areas, and even direct armed conflicts broke out.

Among them, the Americans were most interested in Japan. In 1837, they even brought a group of Southeast Asian Japanese to try to enter Edo Bay, but were expelled by Uragasho artillery.

In fact, the Americans are planning a brand-new contact. As the most powerful president in American history, Poker is ready to knock on Japan's door with force. To this end, he is preparing to use two of the latest American frigates.

(In fact, Perry later brought only four ships.)

However, what troubled Masahiro Abe the most at this time was the letter from the King of the Netherlands. The "Merchant King" Wilhelm II suggested that the shogunate should either abolish the policy of isolation from the country because it was out of touch with this era.

Either establish a relationship with a more powerful dynasty, and by the way, it was also revealed that an Austrian Empire fleet was heading to Japan at this time.

The Netherlands was the only Western country that received permission from the shogunate to trade during the Edo period, and the relationship between the two parties was maintained fairly well.

Lanfeng Storytelling and Tangfeng Storytelling have always been important tools for the shogunate to understand the world. When the shogunate tried to understand what kind of country the Austrian Empire was from Dutch merchants, the answers they got were all that it was a terrifyingly powerful diplomatic power.

Yes, this country seems to be bad at land warfare, naval warfare, and economic development, but it can still stand in the West for hundreds of years.

The Dutch have a much higher evaluation of the Austrian Empire than the British and Russians. After all, Austria helped the Netherlands regain the Flemish region and improved its economic strength to a certain extent.

Britain is the feud of the Netherlands, and it is unrealistic for the latter to say good things about the former. As for Russia, they are regarded as barbarians at all, and their practices are indeed worthy of the word barbarian.

When asked about the relationship between the Netherlands and Austria, the Dutch businessman said that the latter was the chairman of the German Confederation, of which the Netherlands was a member.

If you have to use words that Japanese people can understand, then it can be understood as the relationship between the daimyo and the general.

This answer shocked the senior officials of the shogunate, including Abe Masahiro, because in their minds the Netherlands was already very powerful, especially the fourth-class battleship responsible for delivering messages to William II, which simply refreshed their view of warships. cognition.

You must know that the largest maritime warship in Japan at this time, the Tenchi Maru, was only 500 tons (600 tons).

The total weight of the Dutch Navy's fourth-class battleship exceeds 1,500 tons, and the two sides are not on the same level at all.

At this moment, a war horse neighed from the direction of the palace entrance, and Abe Masahiro tightened his grip on the bone paper fan in his hand.

There were chaotic and urgent footsteps on the corridor, and he knew that this day would come sooner or later.

"My Lord! Something bad has happened!! Something bad has happened!! The Austrian Empire's fleet has sailed into Edo Bay."