Ito Hirobumi — I Am a Samurai, So I Wear Two

The Saw and the Two Sticks

"I thought this would happen, so I brought this tool."

With those words, the man drew something from his waist. It was not a sword. It was a saw.

In front of him stood a fence of logs. Behind it was the British legation, a kind of embassy. It was late on the night of January 31, 1863, at Gotenyama in Shinagawa, a district of Edo (now Tokyo).

The man had more than ten companions. They were young men of the Choshu han, a domain ruled by a lord. They burned with the idea of joi: driving foreigners out of Japan by force. Tonight they had come to set this legation on fire.

But nobody had thought about how to get through the fence. Kusaka Genzui said it was a shame they had not noticed. Then the man took out his saw. He told this story himself, years later.

He had bought the saw ahead of time. The group had waited for the night over drinks at the Dozo Sagami, a brothel in Shinagawa. He had hidden the saw in the rain barrel at its entrance.

The man's name was Ito. Later he would take the name Ito Hirobumi and become the first prime minister of Japan. At this moment, he was twenty-one.

Ito was not born into a samurai family.

As a small boy, he was called Risuke. He loved to push two sticks of wood or bamboo into his sash and swagger along with his shoulders up. A samurai wears two swords at his waist. When people asked why two, Risuke is said to have answered:

"I am a samurai, so I wear two."

In a village called Tsukari, in the province of Suo, his father Juzo held a village post. He was bad with money. Debts piled up. The head of the family paid them once, but refused the second time, and Juzo is said to have left alone for the town of Hagi. His mother and Risuke went to live with her family.

Life did not get easier in Hagi. When he was about ten, he was sent to live at a temple. He slept with paper under his head. Once, he said later, he woke up to find lice crawling on that paper.

Soon Risuke began working as a small servant in a samurai's house.

One evening, everyone in the house went out to watch a festival or something like it, and Risuke was left alone to watch the house. His father worried and came quietly to see him. Risuke was sitting sadly in a small room by the front door. The moment he saw his father's face, it is said, he burst into tears.

His father scolded him hard.

"You were given the great job of guarding the house, and you cry? What kind of man does that?"

Then, it is said, he simply turned and went home.

That boy later joined the lowest rank of soldiers in the han. He also studied at the school of Yoshida Shoin. And tonight he stood here with a saw at his waist.

They sawed through the foot of the fence and went inside. A guard challenged them. According to Ito, this is how it went.

"We are patriots of the whole land. We have come to drive out the evil spirits for our country."

"What are you doing?"

"We are going to burn this place."

"That cannot be. I will not allow it."

What a guard, with such a sense of duty! Ito said so later. Takasugi Shinsaku drew his sword and drove the guard off with the back of the blade, the side that does not cut.

Next came the fire.

A friend, Inoue Monta, had taken the job of preparing the tadon, charcoal balls packed with gunpowder. Of all people, the careless Inoue! Ito had worried about it from the start, he said.

Before the attack, Inoue had pulled a tadon out of his sleeve to show him. It was dangerous to carry on his body, Ito warned. So Inoue hid it behind a picture frame in the room of Osato, a woman he knew at the brothel.

"Bring out the tadon."

"Oh no. I hid it behind the frame in Osato's room, and I forgot to bring it out."

The worry had come true exactly. The men piled up doors and paper screens, set them on fire, and left.

The next night, Ito and Inoue went to the Dozo Sagami and looked behind the frame. The tadon was gone. They asked Osato whether she had found the thing they hid as a joke the night before. According to Ito, she said:

"What a rough joke you played! I'll take it and put it in the brazier."

Osato picked up the tadon with the fire tongs. Inoue grabbed her hand in a panic.

"What are you doing, you fool!"

"What's foolish about putting a tadon in a brazier?"

Osato was calm.

"You boast that you are patriots of the whole land, but you are so timid. You are about to risk your lives for something big, and you forget the one tool that matters. I worry about what is in store for you."

The two men were deeply impressed, it is said, by this woman's nerve and wit.

On the night of the attack, another companion dropped a love letter from a woman of the brothel at the foot of Gotenyama. The woman was called in by the officials. She insisted she had no memory of any such letter. It is said that no one was punished.

Nine days later.

Ito and Yamao Yozo killed a scholar named Hanawa Jiro.

He was said to be studying old cases of emperors being driven from the throne.

Treated Like Children

"I did not bring money. I only got three hundred ryo each (a ryo was a gold coin). I came because I thought you would find a way to get the money."

Inoue Monta had come from Kyoto to see Ito in Yokohama. This is what he said, Ito told people later. He wanted them to go to England together. This was the same Inoue who had forgotten the tadon.

Ito had come to Yokohama on orders from the han, to buy weapons. He could not find any, and some of the money he had been given was left over.

That same year, 1863, the han had given Ito a special favor. It allowed him to use a family name for his lifetime and took him in with a rank close to a samurai. He had finally gained a place.

But the shogunate, the government that ruled Japan, forbade anyone to leave the country without permission. If Ito went, having been sent on orders, it would be like running away from his han.

Ito decided to go. He sent the han a letter explaining. He borrowed a large sum for study abroad from a merchant in Yokohama. To his father, he wrote a letter apologizing for not asking first.

To board the ship, he bought a set of old Western clothes, the kind sailors wear, and a pair of shoes. The shoes were so big that both of his feet could fit in one. His hair was still tied in a topknot. The way he looked in Western clothes and shoes was "truly strange," Ito remembered.

In the middle of the night, as they waited in the corner of a garden at a British trading house, all five of them had cut off their topknots and ended up with short hair, it is said.

Then Garu, the Englishman at the trading house, said he could not promise to take people the shogunate had forbidden to leave. The five answered back, Ito said:

"Our hair is already cut and we look like this. If we go outside without being taken along, we will surely be hunted down. In that case we will cut open our bellies. If we are going to be tied up and killed anyway, we would rather cut open our bellies here."

Garu was shocked and said, wait a moment, and went into the back. The five were allowed to go.

Around two in the morning. On the way to the dock, they had to pass the customs house, where Japanese officials were. Garu told them, I will talk in English so the Japanese can't understand, and you must talk loudly too.

The five did as they were told. They shouted something that made no sense at all and walked past the customs house, it is said.

On the ship, they were put next to the steam boiler and stayed crouched there until it left port. The sea was stormy all the way to Shanghai, and they could hardly eat. On the ship they took from Shanghai, the food was bread and leftovers from the Western meals.

The English treated the five like children.

Ito said later:

"In Japan we were far past being children. But there, someone who had been causing a great uproar was treated just like a small child."

A young man who had set fire to a legation was, on board a ship, a child eating leftover bread.

Then came London, and a rented room.

The people of the house were reading a newspaper. One asked Ito where in Japan he was from. When he said Choshu, they told him: you are the ones who fired on foreign ships at Shimonoseki, aren't you?

The newspaper even reported talk in the British Parliament that Choshu should be attacked.

If this went on, there would be no way back. That is what Ito said he thought.

"For Choshu and the others to carry out joi so recklessly is utterly wrong."

"Even if we study here and learn something, what use is it if the country we were born in is destroyed?"

Looking back on that time, Ito later said:

"Thinking about it, it was a case of 'yesterday's wrong, today's right.' Only a year before, I had tried to start joi myself, and had burned down the foreign legation at Gotenyama."

The saying sakuhi konze means that yesterday's self was wrong, and today's self is right.

Ito and Inoue decided to go back to Japan. They told the other three to carry on their goals and finish their studies, and they promised each other firmly, and parted. In 1864 the two returned home.

The next year, on the night of January 12, 1865, it was snowing.

Takasugi Shinsaku was about to raise an army against the han government. A messenger came from Takasugi: we rise tonight, come back at once.

At that time Ito was leading the Rikishi Unit, a group of sumo wrestlers. He decided to follow Takasugi and ordered the unit to prepare food for the march.

In the middle of the night, Ito went with Takasugi and the others to the temple where the nobleman Sanjo Sanetomi, who was staying in Choshu, was lodged, to say goodbye. A man who looked like a senior retainer came out and, it is said, spoke:

"Mr. Sanjo is asleep. We'll wake him. While we do, let us give you a cup of sake."

What came out was a leftover of boiled beans from a corner of a stacked lunch box.

When he got back to his unit, a message was waiting.

"It's terrible. Mr. Mihori has taken all the guns and everything, and says he will cut down anyone who goes out the gate, even one man. You must not go back."

Ito answered:

"I see. But I, at least, am going."

Ito walked out into the snowy night.

Everything Was Strangely Cheap

Killing people is bad, so they fired empty guns.

That is how Ito described taking the magistrate's office at Bakan (now Shimonoseki) before dawn. At the sound of guns with no bullets, all the officials jumped over the back fence and ran away.

This was the man who had cut down a scholar two years before. And this was how he told it.

After that, Ito lived in Bakan for a while.

He and his wife Umeko rented a small house. They had one male servant and one female servant. Umeko did the cleaning and cooking herself. They spent about five ryo a month. From Yamaguchi, Inoue Monta sent a bag of rice now and then, it is said.

In those days Ito sent his mother a little money. His letter says:

"I am sending a little more than one ryo. It is not much, but please use it for pocket money."

Once, after entertaining guests in Bakan, Ito came down with a fever and fell seriously ill. Umeko was pregnant and could not nurse him. For a time she was sent to stay somewhere else.

The one who rushed from Yamaguchi to take care of him was Inoue.

He did things a nurse would do today. Ito did not forget that kindness even when he was old, and talked about it to his family, it is said.

Soon their daughter Sadako was born. Umeko left the baby with a maid and was busy with housework herself. It is said she even heated the bath.

One day, Ito brought a man home. He announced that a Westerner he had made friends with abroad would be staying for a while.

It was Endo Kinsuke, who had come back from England. He was one of the three who had stayed behind in London.

Umeko and Endo exchanged greetings without a word. Later, Umeko said to Ito in a serious voice, it is said:

"He has a low nose, for a foreigner."

They both burst out laughing, it is said.

Years later, when the couple sat drinking their bedtime sake together, they often remembered their poor life in Bakan and said to each other:

"Back then, everything was strangely cheap."

When the Meiji era began, Ito joined the new government and worked in Kobe and in Tokyo. There was always a guest living in the Tokyo house. He liked living with old friends and seeing them every day.

Despite how he looked, he was always a man who missed people, wrote his son-in-law Suematsu Kencho.

In 1869, news reached Ito. In Kobe, a daughter had died.

The older girl, Sadako, was healthy and strong. Her younger sister Ikuko was very weak.

The story goes that when Ito got the message, he said:

"It must be Ikuko who died."

But the one who had died was Sadako, the healthy one.

More than twenty years passed.

Ito became the first prime minister of Japan. In November 1892, while serving his second term, he had an accident. The rickshaw he was riding hit the carriage of the wife of a member of the imperial family. A wheel scraped his face. He cut his forehead deeply and broke six or seven of his upper front teeth.

There was talk of closing the Diet, Japan's parliament, but Ito refused, it is said. If the Diet closed for the sake of one man's injury, he said, it would hurt the government's standing. The man who took the prime minister's place was Inoue Kaoru. The same Inoue Monta.

Near the end of that year, as his wound was healing, a messenger brought a package to Ito with a letter attached, his son-in-law Suematsu wrote.

A five-layered lacquer box, said to hold "famous foods from five provinces," held a riddle in food: sweet potatoes and something like Hagi rice cakes. A wicker trunk labeled "winter bedding" held fresh firewood, wrapped in something like a floor cushion, it is said.

Ito laughed out loud, and wrote back right away, it is said.

"Thank you very much for your year-end gift. I added it all up, and I believe its worth is about twenty-five sen, so I will send a gift of about that value in return."

The sender was his second daughter, Ikuko.

Twenty-three years earlier, she was the very girl of whom her father was said to have said that it must be she who had died.

If I Say I Ordered It

"If you say so, then I will go to Korea myself."

It was 1905, the year the war with Russia ended. Hayashi Gonsuke, Japan's minister to Korea, and Foreign Minister Komura Jutaro came to ask Ito to go to Korea as the emperor's envoy. This was Ito's answer, Hayashi wrote.

When Ito arrived in Korea, officials and ordinary people alike welcomed him all the way from the port to the capital. So the Korean newspaper Hwangseong Sinmun wrote. People were saying to each other:

"The Marquis has always taken it on himself to work for the three countries of the East to stand side by side in peace. His visit today will surely bring us a plan to root our independence firmly."

What he put on the table was a draft treaty of five articles. Korea's dealings with other countries would be handled by Japan's foreign ministry. In Korea's capital, Japan would place one Resident-General.

November 17, 1905. Hayashi, who was Japan's minister at the time, later wrote about that day.

In Hayashi's memoir, he had gathered the Korean ministers at the Japanese legation since morning. He asked General Hasegawa of the Japanese army to keep watch so that no minister could slip out. The reason given was protection. The official who kept the state seal was watched too.

The Korean emperor said he was ill and did not come out. The talks did not settle. As the sun was going down, the chief Korean minister kicked back his seat and walked toward the room where the emperor was. On the way, by mistake, he went into the room of the emperor's consort and collapsed, losing consciousness.

To change the wording of the treaty, Japan's Privy Council, its top advisory body, would normally have to agree. When Hayashi said there was no time for that, Ito is said to have answered:

"If I say I ordered it, that settles it."

Ito listened to what the Korean side wanted and said, why not make it read like this. At last the Korean side agreed, Hayashi wrote. The treaty carried the names of Korea's foreign minister and Japan's minister, Hayashi Gonsuke.

The same day appears in the Korean court's record, the Gojong Sillok. It records the text of the treaty and the emperor's order removing the prime minister, Han Gyu-seol, from his post, among other entries. It does not describe what happened in the negotiating room. The reason it gives for his dismissal reads:

"His conduct near the palace was not proper."

From the next day, Korean ministers and officials sent one petition after another to the emperor.

One wrote that a hurried meeting had been held in the palace in the middle of the night, and people had been afraid of being found out. Another wrote, as something he had heard, that the Japanese minister came to the government and used every kind of threat, and that the prime minister was held in another place and told nothing. One petition named Ito.

"The five articles that Ito Hirobumi demanded are nothing other than a plan to take away everything from our country."

The emperor answered an old minister who asked him to cancel the treaty:

"The other day, things really were rushed. How could there not have been a calm and gentle way?"

An editorial in the Hwangseong Sinmun asked where the Marquis's real intentions had been. Its harshest words were aimed at the Korean ministers who had let the treaty through. Near the end, it wrote:

"Twenty million of us, now slaves to another. Are you alive, or are you dead?"

Ito himself spoke about Korea, according to a biography the novelist Kume Masao wrote later:

"Japan has no need to annex Korea. Annexation is a great trouble. Korea must govern itself. But without Japanese guidance and supervision, it cannot achieve healthy self-government."

In 1907, according to Japanese records, the Korean emperor secretly sent envoys to an international conference at The Hague in the Netherlands. A Japanese chronology says he did this to escape Japan's hold, the rope that tied Korea to Japan. Kume's biography says Ito was furious when the news came.

That July, the emperor issued an edict handing the great matters of state over to the crown prince. Japanese records call this an abdication. They say Korea's ministers begged the emperor all night to step down.

The Gojong Sillok for that year mentions neither The Hague nor the envoys. What remains is the emperor's own edict:

"My strength is limited, and I cannot meet the weight of governing. My illness has gone on, and has kept me from rest for a long time."

According to Kume's biography, the day after the new emperor took the throne, Ito tried to go to the palace to offer congratulations, and people around him stopped him because it was dangerous. Ito is said to have answered:

"Today's visit to the palace is not an ordinary one. I go as the representative of the ruling state, to recognize the new ruler of a protectorate."

"Good. I am going, whatever happens."

On a snowy night, he had said that he, at least, would go. Forty-two years had passed.

Even If You Become a Beggar

"My daughter sent these to me."

It was early 1909, in Keijo (now Seoul), the capital of Korea. Ito gathered close friends and said this, and it is said they ate bamboo shoots together, a little for each person, as a snack with their bedtime drinks.

His daughter Ikuko had sent them. Five or six shoots, none yet 12 to 15 centimeters (about 5 or 6 inches) long. She was the second daughter who had once made her father laugh with her riddle of a gift. Bamboo shoots were Ito's favorite food.

Ito was still in Korea as Resident-General. The emperor's edicts of this time call Ito "my Grand Tutor of the Crown Prince." It was a post as the teacher of Korea's crown prince. The year before, he had also taken that prince, Yi Un, on a trip around western Japan.

On January 25, Ito wrote to his wife Umeko. He had had a slight cold for about a week, and his stomach was not well. His fever had gone as high as 37.8 degrees, but now it was gone. The day after tomorrow, he would travel north in the same car as the Korean emperor.

"Koyama will go with us, so you need not worry."

Koyama Zen was the doctor who stayed with Ito.

In May, in Tokyo, a party was held to celebrate Inoue Kaoru's recovery from a serious illness. This was the same Inoue who had left the tadon in Osato's room.

Ito was asked to say a few words. When he spoke of the time Inoue had almost lost all hope, Ito suddenly began to cry and could not go on. The guests all cried with him, it is said.

In June, Ito stepped down as Resident-General.

On the evening of July 4, he left Shimonoseki on a warship to say goodbye to the Korean imperial family.

Standing on deck looking at the view, Ito pointed at Hikoshima island as it came into sight and began to talk to his secretary Furuya Hisatsuna and the others, Furuya recorded.

Forty-five years earlier, after Choshu lost to the foreign fleets, he and Takasugi Shinsaku had boarded the British flagship to negotiate peace. The British had asked, as one of their terms, to lease this island. To lease land for a set time and use it as their own country. He said that he and Takasugi had opposed it strongly and made them drop it from the terms.

Then Ito went on, it is said:

"At the time, I did not fully understand what leasing would do to our rights. I opposed it only because I felt, somehow, that it would harm the country."

"Hikoshima would have become like Hong Kong today, and Bakan would have been no different from Kowloon. When I think of that, it chills me."

The warship was heading for Korea.

On September 29, while talking at an acquaintance's house, Ito felt faint from a lack of blood to the brain. People asked him to stay, but he said he must not let the world spread false rumors, and he went back to his own house that same night, it is said.

About a week later, on the night of October 5,

his second son Bunkichi, who was to leave for study in England on the 4th of the next month, was called to the house in Oiso. Umeko was in the same room. Ito spoke to his son at length, it is said. What he said was printed in the newspapers, and goes like this:

"Each person has his own gift from birth. I do not force you to follow my path. If it is your gift from birth, I will not be sad even if you become a beggar. I will not be happy even if you become rich."

"If you try to finish even one thing, there will always be times when you risk your life. That I am still alive is a wonder even to me."

"Do not depend on others. Do it by your own strength."

Nine days later, Ito left Oiso. It was a trip to see Manchuria. Fewer than ten people went with him, including his doctor Koyama and his secretary Furuya.

He said there was an urgent matter that required him to arrive in Harbin by the 26th, and it is said he hurried the trip. The Chinese poem he wrote on setting out begins:

"On an autumn evening, I leave home and set out on a long road."

On the morning of October 26, in the train before reaching Harbin, Ito lit a cigar, which he never put down, as he always did, and enjoyed its smell for a while, a biography says.

At nine o'clock, the special train pulled into Harbin station.

Two Names

It sounded like firecrackers.

The doctor who was traveling with Ito, Koyama, later described it this way, the verdict of a Japanese court records.

A little earlier, Ito had talked for about twenty-five minutes on the train with the Russian finance minister, who came to greet him. Then he stepped out onto the platform, walked past the lined-up Russian soldiers, shook hands with the foreign representatives, and was walking back.

The one who shot him was a young Korean man named An Jung-geun.

In his autobiography, written in prison, An describes that moment. He saw an old man with a white beard at the front and thought, that must be the old thief Ito. He fired four shots with a pistol. Then he aimed three more at the Japanese behind, and shouted long life to Korea three times.

The verdict says that of the seven shots, three hit Ito and one each hit three other men.

Carried into the train, Ito spoke while being treated, Kume Masao's biography says.

"It seems a lot of bullets went in. Who did it?"

The head of the South Manchuria Railway, Nakamura, answered.

"They say it was a Korean."

On hearing that, Ito said, "Fool." Another book gives his words as "Stupid fellow."

When Koyama offered brandy, Ito nodded, lifted his own head, and drank it all. About five minutes later, when he was offered another glass, he lifted his head again and drank it down in big gulps. That was his last movement in this world, it is said.

The telegram that the secretary Furuya sent to the prime minister in Tokyo begins:

"Prince Ito died at ten."

He was sixty-eight.

The news reached the residence of Korea's crown prince Yi Un, who was in Tokyo, that same day. When his attendant told him that Ito had been killed, Yi Un jumped from his chair and kept asking in rapid Korean who it was, who it was. Then he said in Japanese, it is said:

"Who killed Grandpa?"

"A Korean, sir."

"What? One of our own people?"

Tears were even coming to his eyes, it is said.

The Korean court gave Ito the posthumous name "Munchung" and stopped the work of the court and the markets for three days. In the emperor's letter to the Japanese emperor, he wrote:

"I too have lost a teacher and a friend."

Around the same time, when the prosecutor asked An why he shot Ito, An wrote in his autobiography that he listed fifteen crimes. Forcing the emperor off his throne. Making Korea sign a treaty by force. Breaking the peace of the East.

On November 4, a state funeral was held in Hibiya, Tokyo.

It was the day his second son Bunkichi had been due to leave for England. This was the son to whom his father had said, I will not be sad even if you become a beggar. Bunkichi put off his trip and took his father's place, it is said.

On the same day in Korea's capital, royals, officials and ordinary people gathered for a memorial for Ito. The emperor's edict that day called the men who had shot him "those who harm my nation and its altars of state."

On his trip to Manchuria, Ito had taken along the small Buddha statue he always carried in his bag. In the bag, which came home as a keepsake, there was one copy of "One Hundred Poems of Karuizawa," a little booklet his daughter Ikuko had made, it is said.

In February of the next year, in the court at Port Arthur, An said this, the Japanese record says.

"Ito is called a hero, but he is a treacherous hero."

"I killed him as a lieutenant general of the righteous army. I did not do it as an assassin."

The Japanese court admitted that An's resolve did not come from a private grudge. Even so, it said he had planned deeply and broken through strict guard, and sentenced him to death.

One man was given the name "Munchung" by the court of Korea, and was called "a treacherous hero" by the young man who shot him.

More than sixty years earlier, a small boy named Risuke pushed two sticks of wood or bamboo into his sash and swaggered along with his shoulders up.

When people asked why two, he is said to have answered:

"I am a samurai, so I wear two."