Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/250

 passed out of the nation's sight for a time after that fiasco, had it not been ardently taken up by Itagaki Taisuke. This politician has already been spoken of as the Rousseau of Japan. A Tosa samurai he had figured prominently in the Restoration movement, and though his views about parliaments, personal liberty, and popular representation indicated a visionary and unpractical mind, his unmistakable earnestness, his integrity, and his unselfish devotion to any cause he espoused, gave him much influence. When the question of Korea's contumacy came up for discussion in 1873, Itagaki was among the advocates of recourse to strong measures, and his failure to carry his point, supplemented by a belief that a large section of public opinion would have supported him had there been any machinery for appealing to it, gave fresh impetus to his faith in constitutional government. Leaving the Cabinet on account of the Korean question, he became the nucleus of agitation in favour of a parliamentary system, and under his banner were enrolled not only discontented samurai, but also many young men who, returning from direct observation of the working of constitutional systems in Europe or America, and failing to obtain official posts in Japan, attributed their failure to the oligarchical form of their country's polity. Thus in the interval between 1873 and 1877 there were two centres of disturbance in Japan,—one in Satsuma, where Saigo figured as leader;