Hagané's one son, Sanétomo, a few years older than the boy Emperor, and reared as nearly in friendship with him as reverence would allow, was among the first youths of his class to travel in Europe, and to acquire any European language. Upon his father's death, he was asked by the Emperor to take at once the offices and semi-royal prerogatives of the lamented elder statesman. All the daimyos had received national bonds for the alienation of their fiefs; and thus those who had been most powerful still enjoyed great wealth in their own right.
With the Emperor once firmly established, etiquette and the restrictions of court-life began to prove irksome to Sanétomo. One could have continued to practise fine manners under the Shoguns. Here to-day was something better. A new army was to be formed; after that a new navy. Hagané advised adaptation of tactics from the German military school, its unbending automatonism appearing to him a safe restriction for enthusiastic beginners. From the first, however, his mind had been fixed upon the administrative methods of that marvellous small heart of an enormous empire, England. Japan should be to the Far East what England had become to the West. What one island had accomplished, that also could another do.
The Japanese nation as a whole went reeling drunk with over-potations of foreign ideas. For a while it seemed that everything Japanese was to be swept away. The small opposition party, frenzied by the apparition, took hideous revenge in murder, assassination, and suicide. Hagané's faith did not for a moment waver. After excess comes nausea, reaction. So had his countrymen, in more than one epoch now long past, drunk in the new. In time they would reject the unneedful, and infuse new power in what they had adopted. The thinkers of his empire could afford to wait.
When the new constitution was promulgated in February, 1889, there was rejoicing such as this old earth seldom sees. Hagané was created Minister of War. This position he had continued to hold, with varying intervals. He was now the incumbent. Much of his time was spent, perforce, in the "foreign" official residence, well within sight of the Imperial moats. Most of such edifices in Tokio are depressing. This was particularly cheerless. The house of brick, wood, and plaster, chiefly plaster, stood full two stories high, was of ample dimensions, and had a huge, square, blue-tiled roof. Though planned and built by the most artistic nation now alive, it had not one line of beauty, nor one successful effort after fine proportion. In these early days it seemed an accepted creed among the Japanese that anything to be truly "foreign" must necessarily offend the eye; yet, thought the ingenuous pupils, since ugliness apparently goes in the company of wealth, power, material welfare, and political recognition,--why, by all means, let us be uglier than the foreigners themselves!