My personal inclination is toward the latter view, yet not without
some modification. Certainly the newfound affluence of the Satsuma
government held serious implications for the bakuhan taisei. In the
diplomatic crisis of the Tempo era, wealth was already equated with the acquisition of military power: new weapons, new ships, new training.
All were necessary, but because all were expensive, few could
afford them. If Satsuma could and the bakufu could not, then the
balance of power that had kept Japan at peace for more than two
hundred years was at risk. Yet there was a far more serious and far
more general threat. Satsuma's success with its Tempo reforms was
exceptional. Other domains, Mito and Choshu among them, had tried
and failed, their aspirations to wealth and power blocked by a central
government that, too weak to offer them any protection, was at the
same time too strong to allow them to prepare for their own. It is clear
that such domains chafed at their economic impotence and at the
military incapacity that inevitably accompanied it. The Tempo crisis
had shown them all that the traditional balance of power was no longer
workable, that one way or the other it would have to be changed; it
had provided them with thesis and antithesis but, with the reforms so
inconclusive, had suggested no synthesis. The dilemma was a real one.
Obviously Japan needed to do something about its defenses, but nobody
could decide what, because the subject was surrounded by too
many uncomfortable issues. Who was to pay for the ships, the cannon
and the small arms that Japan so desperately needed? Who would
command them? How would they be used? Was there any guarantee
that such weapons in bakufu hands would not be turned on the
daimyo themselves, to complete by force the process that Mizuno had
begun by edict? Conversely, if the daimyo acquired such weapons,
might they not once again plunge the nation into turmoil? These were
serious matters for a country in which regional autonomy had always
been so prized, too serious for the Tempo era to produce a solution.