Shibusawa Eiichi — Unfortunately, I Haven't Met the Chance Yet

I Want to Quit Being a Farmer

"No, never. It is true that I have often thought of killing someone. But unfortunately, I have not yet met the chance."

Kyoto, the second month of the lunar calendar, 1864. Two young men gave this answer together, in one voice. Years later, one of them told the story himself.

The one asking was Hiraoka Enshiro, a retainer of the Hitotsubashi family. The Hitotsubashi were a branch of the shogun's own family.

"Surely you have never killed a man and taken his things? If you have, tell me so."

One of the two who answered was Shibusawa Eiichi. He was twenty-three. He is the man on Japan's 10,000-yen bill today.

The other was Kisaku, who had the same family name. Neither of them was a samurai. They were farmers' sons from a village called Chiarai-jima, in Musashi Province.

Why were the two of them suspected of murder? The story goes back eight years.

The Shibusawa family of Chiarai-jima made and sold indigo balls. Indigo balls were a dye for turning cloth blue. Eiichi said his father was a strict man who did even the smallest thing by the book. The business went well, and the family became known as the second-richest in the village.

The village belonged to a lord, a small daimyo with an office in a place called Okabe. Whenever anything came up, a princess's wedding or a young lord's first public appearance, he ordered the rich villagers to hand over money. It was called a loan, but it was money that never came back.

When Eiichi was seventeen by the old Japanese way of counting age, the Shibusawa house was ordered to pay 500 ryo, the gold coins of that time. Instead of his father, Eiichi went to the office with two men from nearby villages.

At the office, you climbed some stairs to a lattice, and behind it was a room with tatami mats. Eiichi was the youngest, so he sat lower than the other two. He remembered this to the end of his life.

The other two were both heads of their households. They agreed to the money on the spot.

Eiichi had only been told by his father to go and hear what was wanted. So he answered like this:

"I understand the amount. But first I will tell my father, and then I will come back and accept it properly."

The magistrate was a man who looked down on people, they say. Half teasing, he asked Eiichi's age. Then he said:

"'I will tell my father'? Don't talk such nonsense."

He pushed Eiichi to say yes right away. Eiichi did not give in. He said again that he could not accept it here and now.

"You are a worthless man."

Scolded and mocked again and again, Eiichi left the office.

"That time, I shook with anger."

Even in a talk he gave after he turned eighty, he said so. If his parents had not been there, he added, perhaps he would have knocked the man down and run away from home.

On the way home, Eiichi thought. It is natural that wise people are respected and foolish people are looked down on. But here was a magistrate who did not seem wise at all, looking down on everyone. Was it only because he was born into an official's family that held the seat generation after generation? That is how he thought, he said later, looking back.

"Whatever happens, I want to quit being a farmer. It is all too ridiculous."

He asked himself this on the way home from the magistrate's office, and answered himself. He still remembered the words well. He told this in a talk about his memories, about thirty years later.

When he told his father at home, his father said:

"You can't win against a crying child or a lord's steward. It can't be helped. Go and accept it."

It is a saying: you cannot defeat a crying child or a lord's steward. You cannot go against officials. The next day, he remembered, Eiichi took the money to the office.

The indigo business went on after that.

Four times a year he went around Shinshu, Joshu and Chichibu, buying indigo leaves. One year Eiichi invited the people who grew the indigo and made a chart like a sumo ranking list. He ranked them by the quality of their indigo. The one who had grown the best indigo got the top seat, and Eiichi treated him as the guest of honor.

In 1863, twenty-three-year-old Eiichi was buying up swords.

He had worked out a plan with his cousin Odaka Junchu and with Kisaku. First, seize the castle at Takasaki and gather soldiers. Then...

"Burn down Yokohama in one strike, and cut down every foreigner we see."

That was the plan, he said himself. He was full of the idea of driving the foreigners out of Japan, which people then called joi. He gathered about sixty-nine men. Besides the swords, they got jackets to wear under their clothes, lanterns, and even bamboo spears.

The 150 or 160 ryo it cost came out of the indigo business accounts. And he hid it from his father.

The ninth month of the lunar calendar, the night of the later moon, a second moon-viewing. Eiichi invited Junchu and Kisaku to the house and started chatting with his father. His goal was to get his father to disown him, to cut the tie between parent and child.

He could not just ask his father to disown him. So he talked around it. The country will fall into chaos sooner or later. Even farmers cannot feel safe. His father cut in. You were born a farmer, so keep to a farmer's duty to the very end.

The Analects, the book of Confucius's sayings, says this. Mencius, another old Chinese teacher, says that. They argued until the night was gone.

When it grew light, his father said nothing more.

"Very well. You are not my son. Do as you like."

And then he went on, Eiichi says:

"I will grow wheat and live as a farmer. Even if the government is unreasonable, even if the officials act without law, I intend to go along with it and not complain."

That voice stayed in his ears for more than twenty years, he said. Every time he told the story, tears came. He was in his forties when he said it.

Eiichi had not told his father what the plan was.

Nor that the money for the swords and jackets had come out of his father's accounts.

Even If We Stab Each Other

The attack was set for the eleventh month of the lunar calendar.

At the end of the tenth month, just before that, Odaka Choshichiro came home from Kyoto. He was Junchu's younger brother and the older brother of Eiichi's wife, Chiyo. He was a man who taught swordsmanship.

Nearly two years earlier, Choshichiro had been about to become a wanted man, and it was Eiichi who ran through the night to stop him. A high official of the shogunate had been attacked outside the Sakashita Gate of Edo Castle, and Choshichiro was suspected of being involved. Eiichi heard that he had set off for Edo without knowing this. He rushed out of the house at about ten at night and chased him all the way to the post town of Kumagaya, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) away.

This time, it was Choshichiro's turn to stop Eiichi.

One night at the end of the tenth month, five men gathered on the second floor of Junchu's house in the village of Tebaka.

Choshichiro said it plainly. This plan is a huge mistake. With a ragtag band of seventy or a hundred men, you might take a castle, but you will never get as far as Yokohama. The shogunate and the soldiers of nearby domains will crush you at once.

"In other words, we will simply be treated the same as a farmers' revolt."

Eiichi shot back. Even if we lose, the patriots of the whole country will see it and rise up in many places. We only need to be the first blood offered up for them.

It turned into an argument that lasted all night.

"Choshichiro said he would stop me even if he had to kill me, and I said I would do it even if I had to stab Choshichiro."

If you're going to kill me, kill me. I will stab you and die with you. They went at each other with bloodshot eyes, all the way to that point, Eiichi says.

Even so, Choshichiro did not give way.

Eiichi took one step back and thought again. If they were treated as a mere uprising and had their heads cut off, no one would follow after them. People might say it was a children's game, and they would have died like dogs for nothing.

The plan was called off.

"In truth, you could say Choshichiro saved the lives of many of us."

Eiichi said this later.

In the eleventh month, Eiichi and Kisaku left the village, saying they were going on a pilgrimage to Ise. The travel money from his father was 100 ryo. But while they amused themselves in Edo, they even went to Yoshiwara, and spent money on useless things, and in no time 24 or 25 ryo were gone. Yoshiwara was the biggest pleasure district in Edo. This too is in his own memories.

They reached Kyoto at the end of the eleventh month.

In the second month of the new year, 1864, a letter came from Choshichiro in Edo.

He wrote it from inside a prison. Because of some mix-up, he had been arrested. And he still had on him the letter that the two in Kyoto had sent. It was a letter that said: come to Kyoto, the shogunate is sure to fall.

The two looked at each other, and for a while not a word came out. If only they had carried out the plan, they would have been spared the shame of being tied up with ropes. They even said things like that, and they were pushed so far that they thought there was nothing left but to cut their bellies, Eiichi says.

Kisaku stormed that he would go back to Edo the very next day. Eiichi thought. Two men making noise cannot do anything against the shogunate and its eight million koku of rice, its huge wealth. Maybe like this? No, that is dangerous. Then like this? No, that won't do either.

"Telling it now, here at this table, it is a funny story, but the struggle we went through then sank deep into me."

It was a world apart from the energy they had when they talked of seizing a castle. The two spent that night thinking and thinking and finding no way out.

The next morning, a letter came from Hiraoka, calling them in.

They were shown into another room and told to hold nothing back about what they had planned in Edo. The shogunate had sent a question about the two of them. The two admitted they had written in a letter that the shogunate should be overthrown. And then came that question, and that answer.

Hiraoka's reply was short.

"If that is so, then fine."

And then Hiraoka suggested something unexpected. Why not bend your goals and become retainers of the Hitotsubashi family?

Two men who had left their village to overthrow the shogunate would now serve the shogun's own family. Back at the inn, Kisaku was against it. If we serve now, people will say we gave up our principles because we couldn't eat. Eiichi answered back. Even if we hang ourselves, it will do nothing at all for the world.

The two decided to serve. But they did not bow their heads for nothing. Before that, they said, let us meet our lord once. If not, we refuse this service.

"What a stubborn thing to say, and what trouble it is for me."

Hiraoka grumbled this, Eiichi says.

Before they could meet him, their lord, Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, had to see their faces, even from far away. On the day Yoshinobu rode out on his horse, they were told to run along with his party. Eiichi was already stout then, and short. Even so, from around Shimogamo to Yamahana, more than a kilometer, he ran all the way, as hard as he could, they say.

And so the two became retainers of the Hitotsubashi family.

Not even a few months later, this happened.

On Hiraoka's orders, Eiichi became a pupil of Orita Yozo, of the Satsuma domain, in Osaka. The real purpose was to spy. On the night before he went back to Kyoto, two men from the same domain, Kawamura and Mishima, held a farewell party for him.

When he got back to the inn at about eleven at night, Orita's room was full of broken cups and plates, smashed to pieces. Mishima had gone back first and made a mess.

Orita had anger all over his face. You too, at the farewell party, joined Mishima and spoke ill of me, didn't you? I count you as one of Mishima's friends.

Eiichi got angry. He had been drinking too.

"I will bring Mishima here and stab him to death."

He threw out the words, grabbed his sword, and ran to the house next door. Mishima, he was told, was asleep upstairs.

Eiichi ran up the stairs.

What a Wife Is Worth

He was about to burst into the bedroom, when a man held Eiichi back in his arms. It was Kawamura.

"Wait. What are you doing?"

I have a grudge against Mishima, I'm taking him out to cut him down. As they pushed against each other, a messenger came from Orita, asking him to come back, just for now. Kawamura did not let go at all.

All that time, Mishima was asleep, drunk, and did not notice the uproar. Eiichi says so.

Back at the inn, Orita apologized as if his anger had never been. That was my mistake. Mishima never said anything like that.

"Then it's all right."

That was the end of it.

Life in Kyoto was poor.

He lived with Kisaku in a row house of two eight-mat rooms. The 100 ryo of travel money from his father had been used up long ago, in Edo, on the road, on the Ise pilgrimage, and on the inn bills in Kyoto. He owed about 25 ryo to people he knew. He would never, even if it killed him, send for money from home. He swore that, and paid it back out of his allowance of four ryo and one bu a month. Ryo and bu were the money of the time.

They cooked their own rice. It came out as porridge, or too hard, and they learned as they went. They went out to buy side dishes themselves. Wrapping beef in a bamboo sheath and carrying it home was their biggest luxury. They rented three futons, and the two of them slept back to back in them, they say.

They finished paying back the debt in four or five months.

In the tenth month of that year, Eiichi wrote several letters to Chiyo back home.

Their first son, Ichitaro, had died about two years earlier, when he was only about six months old. Their daughter Utako had been born less than three months before Eiichi left the village.

In the postscript of the letter at the start of the month, he wrote:

"Since we parted, I have not once gone to the pleasure quarters or the like, and I have worried only about the country."

Twelve days later, he wrote in another letter:

"It is truly a pity that we have no son. In everything, being alone is hard, and I have come to understand fully how much a wife is worth."

Utako did not know her father's face from the time she could remember, her biography later says.

In 1866, Yoshinobu was to go to war against the Choshu domain, and Eiichi was ordered to follow. In a letter to Chiyo, he wrote that war is the usual lot of a samurai and nothing to worry much about. And then he went on:

"If I should die, after that you will surely have much to think about."

A small parcel was sent with the letter.

"The other parcel is a dagger meant as a keepsake for you, so please take good care of it."

The next year, Eiichi was to go to France with Yoshinobu's younger brother, Tokugawa Akitake. The party was going from Japan to the World's Fair in Paris.

His preparations were quite careless, he laughs. He bought shoes that even a poor coachman would not wear, and got a single secondhand tailcoat, probably worn by a hotel waiter, with no trousers and no vest.

"Thinking of it now, it is truly funny."

Two days before leaving, he sent a letter to Chiyo.

"It will take about three years, so please look after everything at home with great care."

On February 15, 1867, the ship left Yokohama.

On the way, from Suez to Alexandria in Egypt, he rode a train for the first time in his life. The party did not know what glass was. They could see right through the window, so one man thought there was nothing there and threw tangerine peels out through it, again and again. A European in the next seat got angry, and with no common language it nearly came to blows. When they understood that the man had never heard of glass, both sides ended up laughing, it is said.

It was hardly worth telling, he said, but in his old age he added this story.

A photo of Eiichi with his topknot cut off reached his home village.

Chiyo wrote a letter.

"What kind of hairstyle do you have now? When I asked my brother in Tebaka, he told me this and that, but truly I cannot stop worrying about this one thing."

In the twelfth month of the lunar calendar, Eiichi wrote from Paris. I will be away for four or five years. Please look after father and mother. Why have you not written for such a long time?

And then he went on:

"That I, in a moment's whim, have ended up going so long against the way of a decent man, is entirely my own mistake, and now there is nothing to be done."

He answered about the photo in a letter from the second month of the new year. It is quite reasonable for you to say I look pitiful and should change. I will change when I come home. But for now, the prince and everyone else are living in the West, so it is natural that I copy them.

The four or five years he had written about did not last that long.

In the eleventh month of the lunar calendar in 1868, Eiichi landed at Yokohama. The shogunate he had served was already gone.

One of the Eight Million Gods

A retainer of the shogunate arriving at Yokohama was like a dog that had lost its owner, Eiichi says. Officials questioned him, and everything he saw and heard was unpleasant.

The next day, he heard news of Kisaku from a friend in Yokohama.

Kisaku was in Hakodate in the north, with Enomoto and the soldiers of the old shogunate. It seemed they planned to attack the mainland after they had enough soldiers and food.

They can't win like that, Eiichi thought. A ragtag army waiting behind its defenses was like a weak sumo wrestler hanging on at the edge of the ring.

He at once wrote a letter to Kisaku in Hakodate and gave it to a friend in Yokohama.

"Given how things stand today, we can no longer hope to meet again while we live. Now, die bravely in battle."

He wrote it with all his heart, Eiichi says.

It was the man he had slept back to back with in Kyoto.

When he got back to Tokyo, news came one after another.

Choshichiro had been let out of prison that year. But he had died before Eiichi reached Japan.

He was the man who had said he would stop Eiichi even if it meant killing him. Eiichi had lived on, thanks to being stopped by him, and gone to Paris and come back.

Choshichiro's younger brother Heikuro had become Eiichi's adopted son. There was a rule that a man going abroad should choose an heir in case he died there, so before leaving, he had adopted Heikuro, who was Chiyo's brother.

That Heikuro had gone into battle following his older brother Junchu and Kisaku, and had been killed at a place called Kuroyama, near Hanno.

"Truly, everything I saw and heard was a source of heartbreak. That was how it was."

He had gone around the countries across the sea, but he had learned nothing and come home with his purpose lost. He, who had tried to overthrow the shogunate, was now a retainer of a shogunate that had fallen. Looking back like this, Eiichi also says: even this is hard to call my own mistake. I could only give up and accept it as the way of the world.

In the twelfth month of the lunar calendar, his father came to Tokyo to see him. They met at the house of Umeda, an old acquaintance who sold swordsmanship gear, in Yanagiwara.

His father was glad his son had come back safely. But seeing how far he had fallen, there was something sad mixed in with his joy, Eiichi remembers.

After a while, his father changed his way of speaking.

"You are no longer my son, so I need not give you orders."

With that opening, he asked. What do you plan to do from now on?

Eiichi swallowed his tears and answered. I do not plan to join the soldiers in Hakodate. I do not want to flatter the new government and look for a post as an official. I want to move to Suruga, be near the former shogun, and make my own living.

His father said he had brought a little money.

Eiichi refused. Since his Kyoto days he had saved, and he had a small amount put away. He was not in trouble now, he said.

In 1869, in Shizuoka, Eiichi was handed an order of appointment as deputy chief of accounts for the domain.

He could not accept it. Annoyed, he pushed the order back and complained at length to his superiors. But when he asked around through someone else, he learned that the order had come from Yoshinobu's own thinking. Eiichi was deeply ashamed of his rashness and his careless words, they say.

Even so, in Shizuoka he started a job called the Commerce Office. It bought fertilizer and lent it to farmers, and bought cheap rice from Osaka and sold it to rice dealers. Farmers and merchants were both very pleased, he says.

Then, suddenly, a summons came from the new government. He was ordered to become head of the tax office, the office that handled the nation's taxes.

If he refused, the Tokugawa might be suspected of plotting something. Reluctantly, Eiichi went to Tokyo.

But once there, he did not know where to start. In that case, he thought, it would be better to go back to the office in Shizuoka. Meaning to ask to be let go, Eiichi went to see Okuma Shigenobu of the Ministry of Finance.

He had heard that Okuma was good with words. I won't be talked around. I will say exactly what I think, without holding back. He went in with that attitude, Eiichi says.

But when Okuma had heard him out, what he brought up was an unexpected question.

"Do you know the phrase 'Let the eight million gods gather and take counsel together'?"

It is a line from a Shinto prayer, about the gods gathering to talk things over. I know it, Eiichi answered.

"You are not the only one who does not know where to start. Everyone does not know."

The shogunate has fallen, and everyone is now talking over what shape the country should take. Those called to the new government are the gods who have gathered for that talk. That is what Okuma explained, they say.

"You too were taken on as one of those wise people. That is to say, you are one of the eight million gods."

The man who had gone to say he was quitting went home without quitting.

And for the next three and a half years.

Looking So Shabby

In May 1873, Eiichi quit his government job after all. He was thirty-three.

He left together with Inoue Kaoru of the Ministry of Finance. And he entered the world of business that handles money. His friend Tamano Seiri warned him that giving up being an official to become a merchant was a shocking thing to do.

Eiichi answered back with the Analects, he wrote in a book put together from his lectures.

"I will show you that I can live my whole life by the Analects. Why is handling money low? If you look down on money as you do, the nation cannot stand."

He was the young man who, on the way home at seventeen by the old way of counting, had thought, I want to quit being a farmer. He had left the village still carrying that anger, and now he chose, on his own, a job that people called low.

That same year, Eiichi founded the First National Bank and became its general supervisor. He also started a paper company in the same year.

That summer, he sent a man to the village of Ogose to ask for Heikuro's head. In December of the next year, 1874, he found his body in the village of Kuroyama, held a memorial service at Kan'ei-ji temple in Ueno, and buried him again in the Yanaka cemetery.

In 1882, Chiyo died. She was the wife who had written that she truly could not stop worrying about this one thing, on seeing the photo with his topknot cut off. The next year, Eiichi married Kaneko.

His short temper and stubbornness did not change quickly.

Once, Iwasaki Yataro of Mitsubishi invited him, and the two went out in a boat. About fourteen or fifteen geisha had been called too. In the middle of that party, a great argument broke out over how to form a company. Should many people put in money together, or should one man run it? They could not settle it, and Eiichi left with the geisha. Yataro, he heard, had been angry, saying "How terrible!" because he could not persuade him. It was not that they became enemies, Eiichi says. Their ideas simply differed.

In 1900, Ito Hirobumi pressed him to join a political party.

"Actors and spectators are different by nature. I am a spectator, so I will neither be the star nor an actor playing a horse's legs."

Ito got angry, and Inoue stepped in between them and it was settled, it is said.

As a child, he could not stand an open sliding door. When he was two or three and still could not talk well, if a guest went home without closing the door, he would complain in a scolding voice, held in his mother's arms. Each time, his mother felt embarrassed in front of the guest, it is said.

Even after seventy, it did not go away. A paper door or a wooden shutter left half open, and he could not rest. His grandchildren often laughed at him for it, Eiichi said at seventy-three.

One cold day at the end of 1930, a phone call came to Adachi Kenzo, the Minister of Home Affairs. It was from Eiichi, who said he wanted to see him.

Adachi knew Eiichi had been shut in at home with an illness. If you have business, I will come to you. When he said so, the answer was this, Adachi said later in a memorial speech.

"No, it is a favor that I am asking, so I will come to you."

Soon, ninety-year-old Eiichi arrived. He wore his haori jacket and hakama trousers properly. But his beard had grown long. He had come out in spite of his illness, and he looked painful to see, Adachi said.

His business was this. Across the country, 20,000 district welfare commissioners were looking after poor people with no one to depend on, nearly 200,000 of them. The law to save them, the Relief Act, had already been made. But the country had no money, and it was not being put into effect. Today, representatives of the commissioners had come and asked him to lend a hand. I cannot bear to let these people starve to death.

"I am shut in at home, and I am in such shabby clothes, but I came straight here all the same."

As a minister, please put your strength into carrying out the Relief Act, to save 200,000 fellow countrymen from hunger. Eiichi asked him with all his heart, Adachi said.

"I found myself bowing my head."

Adachi said so. The speech was in December 1931. The Relief Act was to take effect the following month.

Eiichi died a month before that speech. He had an operation on his stomach in October, and on November 11 he breathed his last, at ninety-one.

On the day he was seventeen by the old way of counting, at the Okabe office, he had sat lower than the other two.

"You are a worthless man."

The magistrate's way of teasing, looking down on him, made his body shake with anger. He was able to go home without knocking the man down only because his parents were there, he said when he was old.

After that, too, he nearly rushed ahead many times.

Every time, someone stopped him. Choshichiro, who answered Eiichi's vow to stab him if he must with a vow of his own: he would stop him even if it meant being killed. Kawamura, who held him back just before he burst into the bedroom. Okuma, who, when Eiichi came to say he was quitting, asked about a line from a Shinto prayer and made him think again.

"Unfortunately, I have not yet met the chance to kill."

The young man who answered this at twenty-three, in the winter of his ninetieth year, with his beard grown long, went to see a minister on his own.

Because he had a favor to ask.