The War Court and Lap Pillow, Austria's Mandate of Heaven

Chapter 643

In 1845, Edo Castle.

In a majestic Japanese-style palace, the breeze blows through the wind chimes and makes a crisp sound, and the beautiful cherry blossoms fall with it.

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

He became the chief old middle school at only 27 years old, which is unique in the history of the Edo Shogunate.

It's just that Masahiro Abe at this moment doesn't have the spirit of "juvenile ambition" at all, nor is he in the mood to listen to the melodious sound of wind chimes, and the falling cherry blossoms make him feel an inexplicable sadness.

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

According to legend, there is a huge catfish carrying the Japanese islands on its back, and an earthquake will occur when it moves, so God Ebisu pressed the catfish with a gourd.

In addition to the meaning of destruction and destruction, catfish also has the meaning of revival and transformation, so it is called "the catfish of transforming society".

And the gourd itself in Izumo has the meaning of eliminating illness and eliminating disasters, so the pan catfish has the meaning of turning bad luck into good luck and eliminating disasters.

It's just that Masahiro Abe, who is the chief senior middleman, knows better than anyone else that the shogunate at this time is in decline, and the tax and corvee has reached an unbearable level, but it is still unable to pay off the debts owed to the merchants.

The weakness of the central government has caused the whole of Japan to be in turmoil, and ambitious people continue to gain more power through foreign smuggling and further squeezing the people.

Once the peasants were left half alive, that was the secret of domination.

However, at this time, the peasants could no longer survive, and riots occurred frequently, and even some low-level warriors and businessmen joined the ranks of rebellion.

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

What Masahiro Abe didn't know was that the root cause of this vicious circle was the development of the market economy. The market share of tribute rice fell in tandem with the price of rice, which meant that the wealth owned by the shogunate lords dropped sharply.

At that time, Japan's tax payment was mainly corn, so this caused general financial difficulties for the daimyos, and it also meant that the actual value of retainers and samurai Lumi declined.

As the saying goes, you know the etiquette by being honest, and now these warriors can't even eat enough to eat, so how can they have loyalty, filial piety, integrity, and righteousness.

(The Japanese pay attention to the unity of loyalty and filial piety, or one of loyalty and filial piety, so they are not separated by commas.)
At the same time, the cash-strapped samurai class is also increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo of society. After all, according to their traditional concepts and what they have learned, businessmen should be the end of their career.

But at this time, they are riding on top of them and domineering. What's even more hateful is that those samurai swearing allegiance to the daimyo are also colluding with the merchants. This is simply intolerable.

Some samurai began to try to change this situation, but the most capable and wisest samurai usually chose to serve the merchant's allegiance.

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

Many samurai chose to "recognize the thief as their father" and be the adopted son of a merchant.At the same time, businessmen also began to covet higher power, to be the adopted sons of those daimyo and Chinese.

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

Just remember that the adopted son has the right to inherit, and can also inherit the position of family governor (patriarch), and because of 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 the merchants are angry, the world is afraid." (The original version was "Osaka merchants were angry, and the princes of the world were terrified", but I changed it because I felt that it lacked momentum.)
In fact, the ruling class of the shogunate is not unaware of this chaos, and at the same time has adopted a lot of reforms and self-help measures.

I won't talk about the conventional methods, but just talk about the most outrageous move, that is, you can use "disrespectful begging" against those who ask for the account.

(Disrespect is the privilege of samurai to kill casually, but in fact, the scope of application of this right has been extremely narrow after many revisions.)
That's right, you can blatantly renege on your debts and hack to death those businessmen who press for debts.But soon the power of gold overwhelmed the power of martial arts, and no longer tried to force debts if they were rude.

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 is almost inevitable.

At the same time, the emergence of wealthy farmers and merchants is essentially an early product of capitalist economic development.

The big farmers are the agricultural bourgeoisie through land mergers, and the big businessmen are similar to European financial capitalists.

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

This situation will continue to repeat as the powerful farmers and merchants become stronger and the shogunate declines until the status of both parties changes.

However, at that time, the buds of capitalism in Japan were still very weak, and there was no tradition of businessman autonomy and sufficient social status to support their revolution, so it seemed unusual.

Abe Masahiro's predecessor Mizuno Tadamuni is a very interesting person. On the one hand, he holds high the banner of anti-corruption, and on the other hand, he accepts bribes in private.

But the shock of the war in Asia was too great for the shogunate, and even its senior officials could not accept this fact.

A strong sense of crisis led a senior shogunate bureaucrat named Tanyin Shioya to release a large amount of information about that war to the public regardless of his own life.

In Japan at that time, Tang Feng storytelling (Daqing) and Lanfeng storytelling (Netherlands) were top secret, and only a small number of senior bureaucrats of the shogunate had the right to know.

Shioya's behavior immediately caused an uproar in Japan, especially for the samurai class, it was like a catastrophe.

Because their beliefs collapsed, and then there was the traditional performance of the Yamato nation-suicide.

"Whoa, the cannon shook the sky and destroyed the city, and the barbarian boats entered Hong Kong and the Han army left. Alas! Make peace with a million dollars, and go buy barbarian chieftains!"

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

So the shogunate began a reform under the auspices of Mizuno Tadamuni. At that time, the two biggest problems facing Japan were insufficient food production and the lack of money for the ruling class.

At this time, natural disasters continued in Japan, and even the most affluent Osaka area experienced famine, not to mention other areas with poor land.

People cannot stay where they are and starve to death if there is no food from farming.As a result, a large number of Mizuton and Omae (the lowest class of poor Japanese farmers) began to flee to the city in order to survive.

In a sense, this has provided a large amount of cheap labor for Japan's industry and commerce, but the farmers have run away more, and the grain output will naturally be lower, the food price will continue to rise, and more people will go bankrupt.

In order to break this cycle, Mizuno Tadamuni promulgated the "People's Return Order" to let those farmers come and go wherever they came from.

This practice not only offended farmers, but also offended 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?
The latter felt that the smuggling trade had finally picked up after getting so many cheap labor forces. Now that they were gone, how could they compete with foreign countries?

Then Mizuno Tadamuni regarded businessmen as the biggest enemy of his reforms. He knew that the cause of the famine was not only natural disasters, but also hoarding by businessmen, so he promulgated the "Price Limit Order" to break this situation.

But the merchants united and did not sell food, and the shogunate did not have enough food to relieve the victims.The rich businessmen can bear this situation, but the disaster victims can't stand it.

So the "price limit order" was declared a failure.
Mizuno Tadamuni wanted to improve coastal defense and build new warships, but the problem came again, he had no money.The above plan can only be empty talk,

In the end, he settled for the next best thing and promulgated the "Fuel and Fresh Water Supply Order". Allies resent.

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

Mizuno Tadamuni's reforms finally led to the assassination, 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 was devalued 1819 times between 1845 and 21, which eased the economic pressure on the shogunate, but passed it on to the samurai class.

The soaring price of goods and the fact that the salaries of warriors without war have not increased for several years have made their life extremely difficult.Many of them went into debt to survive, or even became artisanal producers.

At that time, the daughters of wealthy merchants were the targets of pursuit by many samurai, and the daughters of samurai were also willing to marry merchants who they had never looked down on in the past as wives, or even as concubines.

same social status
In short, Mizuno Tadamuni's reform will not succeed, and it is impossible to succeed.

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

At this time, Masahiro Abe was facing the same predicament as his predecessor, and he had to face more challenges than Tadakuni Mizuno.

From 1778 when the first Russian ship appeared on the northernmost island of Shimo-Ezo (Hokkaido) in Japan, the Russians have been trying to do business with Japan.

And 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 used their brains.

The Russians began to pretend to be pirates to harass the northern area of ​​Ezo Island, and even plundered the population directly, and established schools to teach Russian.

In 1821, Tsar Alexander suddenly got tired of this furtive game, so he declared:
"The coast of the North Pacific Ocean from the south of the Bering Strait to 51 degrees north latitude and its affiliated islands are owned by the Russian Empire."

Although he was protested by many countries, Alexander I still went his own way.It was not until Nicholas I came to power that the aggression against the Far East and the North Pacific region eased.

After the war of 1840, Russia worried that the expansion of the British 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 a trade relationship with Japan, using its rich fur, whale oil, and torpedoes in exchange for food and coal for establishing permanent settlements. And other daily necessities.

Then try to get the port of Japan, in preparation for further southward.

In 1845, the Russian envoy came to Japan again with Nicholas I's personal letter, but was still rejected by the shogunate.

East Siberian governor Muravyov threatened retaliation, but this plan fell through due to the major rebellion in Chechnya.

After all, the Caucasus threatens the southern Russian prairie, and the threat to Russia is far greater than that of the Far East.

But the shogunate has no way of knowing this, they can only live under the cloud of war.

In 1808, a British warship disguised as a Dutch merchant ship broke into Nagasaki Port. During the period, they kidnapped hostages and extorted fuel and fresh water.

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

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

In fact, the Americans are planning a new contact. As the most powerful president in American history, Poker is going to use force to knock on the door of Japan. To this end, he is going to use two of the latest American frigates
(In fact, Perry later took only four ships.)
But at this time, what made Abe Masahiro the most headache was a letter from the King of the Netherlands. The "merchant king" William II suggested that the shogunate should either abolish the policy of closing 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 also revealed that there is a fleet of the Austrian Empire heading to Japan at this time.

The Netherlands was the only Western country that was allowed to do business with the shogunate during the Edo period, and the relationship between the two sides 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 the Dutch businessmen, the answers they got were all a powerful and terrifying diplomatic power.

That's right, this country doesn't seem to be very good at land warfare, naval warfare, or economics, but it can still stand in the West for hundreds of years.

The Dutch's evaluation of the Austrian Empire is much higher than that of Britain and Russia. After all, Austria helped the Netherlands regain the Flemish region before and improved its economic strength to a certain extent.

Britain is a feud with the Netherlands, and it is unrealistic for the latter to speak well of the former.As for Russia, it is regarded as a barbarian at all, and its practices are indeed worthy of the word barbarian.

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

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

This kind of answer shocked the senior officials of the shogunate, including Masahiro Abe, because the Netherlands was already very strong in their hearts, especially the fourth-tier battleship responsible for sending letters to William II, which simply refreshed their perception of warships. cognition.

You must know that the largest naval battleship in Japan at this time, the Tenchi Maru, is only five hundred materials (six hundred tons).

And the total weight of the fourth-tier battleship of the Dutch Navy exceeded [-] tons, and the two sides were not at the same level at all.

At this moment, a war horse neighed from the direction of the palace gate, and Masahiro Abe clenched the white bone paper fan tightly in his hand.

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

"My lord! Something is wrong!! Something is wrong!! The fleet of the Austrian Empire has sailed into Edo Bay."

(End of this chapter)