Okuma Shigenobu — The Man Who Said He Didn't Mind Losing It

The Leg That Jumped the Ditch

"The leg I should have cut off decades ago, and I managed to keep it until that day. When I think of it that way, it is no great loss."

A man said this about his own right leg. It comes from his memoirs, which were published as a book in 1895.

That right leg had been wounded by a thrown bomb six years before the book came out, and it had been cut off.

He should have cut it off decades ago? What on earth had happened?

The story goes back to when he was a boy.

Once he raced his schoolmates to jump over a ditch. The ditch was a little more than one ken (about 1.8 meters) wide. He missed his footing and hurt his right leg badly.

The wound became a sore as big as the palm of a hand. The flesh fell away and the bone showed, he said himself.

A doctor today would have cut the leg off at once, and it would have healed faster. But back then there was no doctor used to that kind of operation. There was nothing else to try, so it had to be left alone.

The pain went on for a while. He also felt that his right leg stayed a little thinner than the left for years afterward.

The boy's name was Okuma Shigenobu. He was born in 1838 in the Saga han. A han was something like a small country ruled by a lord. The lord of Saga was the Nabeshima family.

He lost his father when he was small, and his mother raised him.

The leg injury was partly his own fault. Okuma admits this. And he was a boy who never learned.

As soon as he felt a little better, he went back to school and competed with the other students for top marks. He held back from nothing, not food and not drink. Sometimes he and his friends walked for miles outside town, just wasting their strength.

Piling on strain like that, his weak body grew weaker. At twenty-four or twenty-five, people said, he looked over forty.

Once an illness lasted nearly four months. The school rules allowed only three days off. He was treated as if he had already quit, and he was close to having to start the year over. A man named Soejima and others worked hard for him, and, they say, he managed to stay in the same year.

That same recklessness showed in his fights with the school.

At the Saga han school, the Kodokan, they taught only Zhu Xi learning, a school of Chinese thought. A student who failed to finish his studies by a certain age had his family's stipend (the pay a han gave a samurai family) cut by eighty percent.

The han also had a book called Hagakure, about how a samurai should think. Okuma quotes a line from it. Buddha, Confucius, Kusunoki Masashige and Takeda Shingen never served the Nabeshima family, so they are not worth respecting.

It pressed everyone in the han into the same mold, he criticized later, and took away the free spirit that no one should be bound by.

At sixteen, a movement began inside the school against teaching nothing but Zhu Xi. Okuma helped it eagerly and fanned it. The student dormitory was two buildings, south and north, facing each other across a corridor. The south and the north quarreled, it grew worse and worse, and finally it became a brawl.

The han punished those involved. As one of the ringleaders of the opposing side, Okuma was thrown out of school.

Many of the friends punished with him were counseled by their fathers and brothers and warned by their relatives. They said they had changed their minds and went back to school.

Okuma did not go back. More than that, he said later:

"When I was thrown out, my spirit rose even higher, and I made up my mind even harder. So I fanned the flames of my opposition even more."

His mother decided household matters quickly, but she did not say much about what her children did.

The house was a gathering place for his friends. They drank, sang loudly, argued, and sometimes broke up only at dawn. His mother never made an unhappy face. She seemed to enjoy looking after them, Okuma remembered.

His uncle, his aunt, and his sister's husband all lectured him again and again, politely. In the end, some even pressed his mother hard.

Seeing that her son had made up his mind, his mother did not force him to go back to school.

"That was a great piece of luck for me."

So Okuma said. If she had scolded him harshly then, she might even have spoiled the happiness of the house, he added.

Looking back on being thrown out, Okuma said, "This one moment of misfortune became my happiness later on."

But in the same breath he says something else. He does not claim he had a clear idea in mind back then. He did it as his feelings carried him.

He lost many friends. He lost his relatives' goodwill and the han's trust. Almost no one placed any hopes on him anymore, he says.

The boy who was thrown out turned next to Dutch learning, called rangaku.

With much effort he read the law that set up the country of the Netherlands, and he marveled, he recalls:

"Even a barbarian country has such a good system!"

That word means barbarian, a name used to look down on foreigners.

Reading the American Declaration of Independence, he says, he also learned what freedom and rights mean.

He learned from the people he had looked down on. Of all the friends punished with him, he was the only one who took that road.

I Won't Talk with Okuma

Before long, the han lord, Nabeshima Kanso, told Okuma to study navigation.

Okuma refused.

Navigation seemed to him a lowly sailor's job, he said himself. He wanted to follow his father instead, as commander of the gun batteries at Nagasaki. His father had held that post, and Okuma had grown up hearing stories about cannons.

He had seen the worth of foreign books, but perhaps he had not yet seen the worth of foreign ships.

Soon the han picked about thirty students, Okuma among them, and sent them to Nagasaki. There it opened an English school called the Chienkan.

Even so, he later declared this about his own learning:

"To tell the truth, to this day I have never mastered any special subject. I have only picked up a little of all kinds of mixed knowledge, and not one bit of it is worth anything."

In 1867, Okuma took a big gamble.

Together with Soejima Taneomi, he slipped out of the han. This was called datsuhan: leaving a han without its permission.

They were aiming for Kyoto and Osaka. They meant to meet the shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, and urge him in person to give power back to the emperor's court.

They ran around for two or three months. But they could not meet Yoshinobu. Soon han officials caught them and took them back to Saga.

Okuma was ordered to stay indoors and was placed in a relative's house.

In the same year, 1867, the shogun gave power back to the court. This was the Taisei Hokan, the Return of Power. What Okuma had set out to urge happened without him.

"To let a great chance slip away to someone else: looking back, I was in a sad position."

Okuma said this later.

When his confinement ended, an illness struck him on the way to Nagasaki.

He took a boat despite the chills, then went from Isahaya to Nagasaki in a kago, a carrying chair. Inside it he fainted many times. It was scarlet fever, a disease said to kill nearly everyone who caught it.

He was unconscious for about a week, he says, and the people around him gave up hope. Western and Japanese doctors took turns doing all they could, and somehow his life was saved. But he spent three or four important months on his sickbed.

Looking back on this illness, Okuma said:

"If nothing between heaven and earth is unnecessary, then illness is not unnecessary either."

And right afterward, he added:

"Of course, we know it is a mistake to go looking for illness on purpose."

In 1868, the new Meiji government called Okuma. His post was an official in charge of dealings with foreign countries. He was thirty.

In the village of Urakami in Nagasaki, there was the question of how to treat people who believed in Christianity. Over this, he had to negotiate with the British minister, Parkes. A minister is an official sent to a foreign country to represent his own. The talks were held at a branch temple of the Honganji in Osaka.

As soon as they sat down, Parkes said, Okuma later told people:

"I will not negotiate with Okuma. A man of such low rank has no responsibility."

It was a somewhat surprising thing to say. But he thought it was Parkes's usual trick and did not mind much, he recalls.

The senior officials who were present stepped in and said Okuma was recognized by the Japanese government, and at last the talks began.

Okuma argued back. Japan punishes Japanese people by Japanese law, he said, and would take no meddling from abroad. He even argued that the history of Christianity was a history of wars.

Parkes waved his hand and banged the desk in anger, they say.

"This is nonsense. You go too far."

"You are cowards."

"Try lifting the ban on your country, and forgive a few hundred believers. All your worries will turn out to be needless. If you don't, I tell you for certain, I say it clearly: Japan will surely be destroyed."

Okuma answered with a smile, he says:

"The day we follow foreigners' orders for no reason will be the day our country is destroyed. When it comes to our own country's affairs, we know them better than you do."

The talks began around ten in the morning and went on until evening, with no lunch. In the end, they parted in a quarrel.

Later Okuma called in the interpreter, Siebold, and asked how Parkes had seemed that day. Siebold answered that Parkes had been surprised by the talks, and passed on Parkes's words:

"I have never negotiated with anyone like Okuma in Japan before."

The man who was told he was too low in rank to deal with had gone home having surprised the other side.

Twenty-one years later, in the middle of work to renegotiate treaties with foreign countries, a bomb was thrown at him.

It was that right leg that was wounded.