Takahashi was a 20th Prime Minister of Japan and President of the 7th Bank of Japan. Because of his opposition to the increase in financial expenditure for the expansion of the army, he was assassinated by Japanese army soldiers in the 226 Incident. (Infographic/Figure)
In July 1859, the port of Yokohama was opened in Japan, which was less than thirty kilometers away from Tokyo, which was like the Qing Dynasty opening a treaty port directly in Tongzhou, rather than in Tianjin. So many "ugly" and "ghost animals" frequently appeared in the outskirts of the capital, and "the sword is difficult to stain the blood of the foreign" (Taguchi Tsuyoshi's "A Brief History of Japanese Civilization"), which became a song of the heroes whose self-esteem was seriously insulted, and they also carried out a vigorous "anti-invasion struggle" and assassinated foreigners everywhere. By 1863, the shogunate had to declare Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakodate closed again, expelling all foreigners, and the Choshu Domain bombarded foreign ships indiscriminately in Shimonoseki, resulting in the Successful British garrison in Yokohama in the name of protecting the diaspora, and the following year, Choshu was defeated by Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States, after which the Four Nations Fleet sailed into the Seto Inland Sea, forcing the Kyoto Imperial Court to finally ratify the Treaty of Commerce in 1865, and the opening of the port was irreversible.
It was in this context that Nobuta, the then "head of the Sendai Domain's Beijing Office," sent two children from the Sendai Clan's family hospital to Yokohama to learn English, one of which was Takahashi Nosei.
Takahashi's path to life may also be a portrayal of Japan's path to restoration: there are many mentors and few teachers; there are neither door valves nor Olympic aid. As the second generation of Japanese who "opened their eyes to see the world", Takahashi Washi was "informal" from the beginning to learn English: the first generation of academic elites in the past had a complete "Orchid Studies" teacher, had zhuzi studies, Yang Ming studies, Mito studies, Shunshui studies, and other Confucian education backgrounds, could translate books and newspapers, had good writing ability, but was "dumb", and thanks to the existence of Yokohama, Takahashi was the starting point of Qing's language education: the enlightenment teacher who taught him the alphabet was James Hepburn's wife. James was the inventor of The Roman alphabet in Japanese. By chance, the later Minister of Education, Culture, And Tourism, proposed to completely abolish Chinese characters and Romanize Japanese, and became Takahashi's savior, lord and protector of the Qing Dynasty, writing him into his own household register and arranging for him to serve as a teacher at the newly established University South Campus, and at this time Takahashi was not yet 14 years old, and as a result, Takahashi was marked with a strong Satsuma domain label on his body, in my opinion, this is also the fundamental source of his later contradictions with the army system led by the Choshu Domain adhering to the concept of "Shoyi". As a "translation bureaucrat" from a lower class with no academic, family or clan background, he has always been an "outlier" and "outsider" in the background structure of Japan's high-level political system.
The author of this book believes that Takahashi's achievements in the later Qing Dynasty have already had a foundation during this period, and he summarizes this into eight elements, which can be roughly summarized as five aspects: outstanding language ability, deep network resources, lifelong self-education, internationalist vision, and bravery, rationality and pragmatism. But before officially entering politics to play his strengths, Takahashi is a teenager who still has to go through some tossing and turning. At that time, the Meiji era came to an end, and the era of "Taisho Democrusi" was about to begin.
"Holding the thigh" to achieve fundraising ability
The three major policies of the Meiji Restoration, "rich countries and strong soldiers", "colonization and rejuvenation", and "civilization and civilization", correspond to political and military issues, economic and financial problems, and social and cultural system problems respectively, leaving aside the problem of "civilization and civilization" that has gone very far in genealogy, Takahashi is a life experience after the Qing Dynasty, all of which are related to "rich countries and strong soldiers" and "breeding and rejuvenating industry".
Takahashi is a life of ups and downs, and people jokingly call him "the man who walks the mountain road". Perhaps because of his family background, Takahashi was obsessed with speculation in his youth, haunted by sound and color venues, and had nothing to do with the image of a "decent civil servant", but due to his excellent oral ability, the 19-year-old became a personal translator for David Murray, an education adviser to the Meiji government, under the introduction of Mori Youli, and thus had close contacts with Saigo Congdao, Ito Hirobumi, Kato Hiroyuki, Katsukaizhou and others, which was also the biggest reason for his ups and downs but frequent Jedi reversals. Takahashi has lost money in the milk business, silver futures and stockbroking trading, which has also accumulated valuable experience for his later financial career: no one is more suitable to be in charge of the country's financial work than a speculator who has gone bankrupt N times, and he has an absolutely rich understanding of the loss-making business.
In 1892, at the age of 39, Takahashi lost money again, and under the arrangement of Maeda Masana, the president of the Bank of Japan, Koichiro Kawada, made him the director of the construction of the new project of the Bank of Japan's main store, and he had a stable job. In 1893 he became the manager of the Western (Maguan) branch of the Bank of Japan, in 1895 he became the manager of the Yokohama Shokin Bank, and in 1899 he became the vice president of the Bank of Japan.
"Now that Japan has proven its military might, it has the capital to impose similar unequal treaties on China." A lesson learned from Perry eventually bears black fruit", as Ian Bruma pointed out in his book "Creating Japan", the purpose of the restoration is not only to "enrich the country", but also to "strengthen the army", and the success of the Sino-Japanese War gambling suddenly made Japan a large windfall, and also made the Japanese financial authorities realize the importance of joining the gold standard system. By depositing war reparations into the Bank of England as a local currency reserve, while purchasing armaments in Britain and successfully issuing treasury bonds in London, Japan was able to join the gold standard and established the Japan-Britain Alliance in 1902. According to the author, this move also meant that Japan officially joined the "Pax Britannica", that is, the world order dominated by Britain, japan officially entered the international financial market centered on London, allowing it to raise foreign funds for its own economic, colonial and armament programs, and then Japan regained tariff autonomy through the revision of previous unequal treaties, which further stimulated the firmness of the militarist line.
The author devotes two chapters to a detailed description of the "central event" of Takahashi's life: his appointment as a financial officer in Britain. He did a very good job, won high praise, became a member of the House of Lords, and was made a baron. Since then, he has successively served as President of the Bank of Japan and Minister of Finance. In 1903, Japan's total budget was only 360 million yen, which was less than the optimistic estimate of military spending, so Takahashi was given the task of selling at least 450 million yen of treasury bonds in London. In New York, Americans say "compassion and purse are two different things," while in the two months after the war began, the price of Japanese government bonds fell 25 percent in the London market. In the end, Takahashi sold £82 million (800.566 million yen) of treasuries in eight months, accounting for 47 percent of Japan's military spending in the Russo-Japanese War, and his main underwriter was Jacob Schiff, the son-in-law of the Kuhn Loeb family (Kuhn Loeb Securities was finally acquired by Lehman Brothers in 1977 and is now extant, but was on a par with Morgan that year). Schiff's enthusiasm for Takahashi's help was largely due to his anti-Romanov stance, which originated in the Romanov dynasty's anti-Semitic policies. As soon as the Russo-Japanese War broke out, Schiff had organized a Jewish consortium to prepare loans to Japan, and Takahashi did not arrive in London until three months later. Another lead underwriter is HSBC. By issuing this treasury bond, financial cooperation between the two sides of the Atlantic has become closer.
During the period from 1904 to 1905, Takahashi was a success in issuing five government bonds, and the success of gambling again made a new generation of soldiers who were not willing to "hold their legs" lose their rationality, and they no longer had the profound understanding of the first generation: Japan's military and economic achievements were based on the Anglo-American order, technology, raw materials, and capital imports, and Japan could not deviate from this order. At this point, the unprecedented success of Takahashi's fundraising has sown the seeds of his own tragic ending.
"Japan's Cairns - Takahashi is a Biography of the Qing Dynasty", by Richard Smytherst, translated by Wang Jing, China Overseas Chinese Publishing House, January 2022 (Data Chart/Photo)
The tragic end of the "brake pad" effort
In 1913, Takahashi became the top political figure in Japan as Minister of Tibet in yamamoto's cabinet, and since then he has served as Minister of Tibet eight times in his life, presiding over state finances for 12 years, and after the assassination of Hara Kei in November 1921, Takahashi was the interim prime minister of Kiyoshi for seven months. Takahashi was here to establish a Sino-Japanese alliance to counter the Anglo-American alliance, and he not only advocated that Japan shift the focus of foreign policy from military expansion to trade competition, but even proposed to abolish the General Staff Headquarters, civilian control of the army and navy, and the abolition of unequal treaties with China, etc. He led the Washington negotiations and the signing of the Nine-Power Pact, which made Japan abandon the Qingdao base and limit its naval armaments. Through his two memorandums, "Opinions on Domestic and Foreign Policy" and "Opinions on Building Economic Power in East Asia," we can have a general understanding of his policy considerations: advocating the reunification of China, establishing a Sino-Japanese economic alliance, and opposing military intervention in China, because this will create a vicious circle: the rise of Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism - Japanese military intervention - Britain and the United States boycott of Japan, which will eventually lead to an increase in military spending. Takahashi was not a "pan-Asianist" who opposed the "liberation of Asia" by imperial Japan and Japan's invasion of China. Some commentators have compared Takahashi to the brake pads of Japanese militarist chariots, but unfortunately, although this brake pad predicted the end, it could not save Japan's fate.
In December 1931, Takahashi, who was again the head of Tibet, was 77 years old and had come out to save the Japanese economy that had been trapped in the abyss of the Great Depression by forcibly restoring the gold standard. He "pursued one of the most successful combinations of monetary, fiscal, and foreign exchange policies in history," and thus became known as the "Keynes of Japan," abandoning the gold standard, banning gold exchanges, and devaluing the yen to promote exports. Readers will involuntarily compare Takahashi Shiki at this time with the contemporary Bundesbank Governor and Economy Minister Yalma Schacht: they also faced the environment of the Great Depression, and also played similar responsibilities and roles in a militaristic country with arms expansion, if Schacht pioneered shadow banking, land finance and foreign trade subsidies, then Takahashi is the one who directly invented "quantitative easing" and let the central bank directly buy low-interest government bonds. The controversy over their historical role in later generations lies in the fact that their success in solving domestic economic problems contributed to the full outbreak of World War II to some extent, and their achievements in the innovative use of the modern national fiscal and financial system are of course beyond reproach.
From 1931 to 1935, The Japanese government's fiscal expenditure soared from about 150 billion yen to 221.5 billion yen, almost entirely from the direct sale of government bonds to Japanese banks. Japanese economist Eigo Fukai commented that the move "provided the funds needed to stimulate the economic recovery, took the money to pay for the military, and lowered interest rates, which is really killing three birds with one stone", while during this period, Japan's CPI rose by less than 3 percentage points per year. However, half of these expenditures went to military spending.
"If obedience to the Divine Emperor is the sole duty of a soldier, then it is only natural that civilian leaders who are considered to act against the Emperor's will are natural." In 1936, when young officers full of fascist "blood" killed cabinet ministers everywhere in order to show their "loyalty", this was what they thought. Takahashi had been fighting against the military department, and the practice of opposing the politics of the first army finally brought himself the disaster of death, and in the face of the assassination threat of the young officers, he left behind the famous saying "I don't know how many lieutenants and lieutenants there are, but if everyone gives me a shot, it would be a waste." After the end of the "226 Incident", Takahashi, who was "cursed by heaven", could not be buried even for a month.
Takahashi is a wise elder of the Qing Dynasty, who was killed by the guns of a young man who worked tirelessly for the welfare of his family and country all his life, which is an excellent portrayal of the absurdity of history. As one of the first Intellectuals and Westerners in the Restoration Era, Takahashi wanted to keep Japan within the Anglo-American order all his life, but he was never able to solve the dilemma that he was actually a heterogeneous member of the traditional cultural order of Japanese society, until he died. His lifelong efforts to "enrich the country" were ultimately defeated by the "strong soldiers". After reading this book, I couldn't help but wonder, if Takahashi and Yama Shacht met in Huangquan Biryasaka, how would they think of today's world when they chatted in English?
Wang Yugang