After half an hour of mourning, many went back to their homes to pass the remaining hours of the night in prayer now for the departed soul of the all-beloved ruler of the nation, loved as a Father, revered as a Teacher, relied upon as our Strength, and the greatest of our Emperors.
The pale arc lights in the palace compound shone upon those who remained with a ghastly effect. The city seemed to have collapsed into a trance of sorrow under the heavy pall of black death, as the bell of Ueno Temple tolled in the far distance the knell for the passing of a great soul.
Early the next morning, Ryūnosuke and his family bought black crepe. Ryūnosuke wrapped it around the golden ball at the end of the flag pole by the gate of their house in Shinjuku.
Across the city, across the country, on every building, on every staff, from every lamp post and from every telegraph pole, national flags flew at half mast. Families did not play music, nor even speak aloud. Music halls and theatres called off performances, shops and department stores remained closed. Sales would slump and the stock markets fall. A crowd stoned the house of the Royal Physician.
It was the beginning of Taishō, it was the end of Meiji. One god dies, another is born: Meiji 45, Taishō 1, 1912; cremation time, coronation time, continual time, contradictory times; between the twilight and the dawn.
*
General Maresuke Nogi, the officially acclaimed and popular national folk hero of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars, the internationally lauded military genius who had twice captured Port Arthur, had appeared at the palace to pay his respects one hundred and thirty times in the fifty-six days between the announcement of the Emperor’s illness and today, September 13, 1912. General Nogi had waited thirty-five years and forty-five days for this day, the day of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji.
The funeral cortège was to depart from the Imperial Palace at Nijūbashi at 8 p.m., to the sound of cannon fire, temple bells and then the plaintive drone of the processional dirge. General Nogi was expected to take his place as one of the most esteemed of the mourners in a mammoth funeral train of over twenty thousand persons; the imperial hearse, drawn by five oxen in single file, would be followed by attendants in court dress with bows and halberds, with their fans and staffs, by imperial princes and palace officials, by the genrō and government ministers, by high-ranking civil servants and the nobility, many in glittering full dress uniform, followed by members of the Diet in their black tailcoats, by members of the Tokyo city government, by its chamber of commerce, by prefectural officials and mayors, and by school principals and religious leaders, along with court musicians, military bands and an honour guard of one thousand. Twenty-four thousand more soldiers would be stationed along a route freshly strewn with gravel. Three hundred thousand citizens would line the hushed and silent streets. Across the nation, sixty million people would be bowed in distant worship as the flickering torch-lit procession followed the imperial hearse on its two-hour journey to the specially constructed hall on the parade grounds at Aoyama. Here, seated in the stands, would be foreign diplomats and special envoys from the courts and governments of the world: the princes of England and Germany, the Secretary of State of the United States, representatives of the Japanese Empire of Korea, Taiwan and Sakhalin; ten thousand people gathered to pay their respects as the trumpet sounded at midnight, when the new Emperor, the son of Meiji, dressed in the uniform of a generalissimo, would deliver a brief eulogy, followed then by Prime Minister Saionji. But General Maresuke Nogi, popular national folk hero and military genius, would not take his place in the procession, General Nogi would not stand on the parade ground, Maresuke would not hear the voice of the new Emperor.
Early that morning, General Nogi dressed in the modern Western-style military uniform of an officer in the Imperial Japanese army. His wife Shizuko was dressed in a many-layered jūnihitoe kimono of sombre colours.
At eight o’clock, the General and his wife posed separately for formal photographs outside their residence. The photographer, Akio Shinroku, persuaded the General and his wife to have one more photograph taken, inside the house, in the upstairs living room, the General seated at the table, reading the morning newspaper, Shizuko standing to his left by the fireplace, staring into the camera. The couple then left for the Imperial Palace.
On each of the past one hundred and thirty occasions he had visited the palace, the General had usually made the journey on horseback. However, the General had already dismissed the stable boy and the only other male servant for the day. And so that morning, and only that morning, an official car had been sent from the palace for the General and his wife.
After worshipping at the palace, the General and his wife returned to their house on Yūrei Zaka, the Hill of Ghosts, which bordered the Aoyama cemetery in Akasaka-chō, and there ate lunch with Shizuko’s elderly sister.
Over lunch, the General and his wife told the sister that they were both feeling unwell. The General telephoned the authorities to say that he was too ill to attend the funeral ceremony for the Emperor Meiji, and so he would be unable to take his place in the procession. His wife informed their staff and servants that the couple would retire to their private quarters, where they were not to be disturbed. The General and his wife then shuttered themselves in their rooms on the second floor for the rest of the day.
A little before eight o’clock that evening, Shizuko came down to the ground floor. She asked for some wine, wine not sake, and then returned with the bottle to their
