CHAPTER XVIII

1866

JAPAN

Although in one shape or another I have written a good deal about the Land of the Gods, I have hitherto refrained from saying much about my own personal experience in that country, or about the part which was played by Europeans, and more especially by the English Legation, during the great upheaval which resulted in the uniting as a solid nation of that Japan which for centuries had been an agglomeration of more or less independent principalities. I felt that there was much that could hardly be written without indiscretion until a considerable time should have elapsed. Now practically half a century has gone by since the curtain was rung down upon a unique and most interesting drama, and the Japanese themselves speak of the times of which I am writing as “Mukashi”—“in the days of old.” One after another the actors, Japanese and Europeans alike, have disappeared, and I think that the day has come when so much as we know about what took place in a revolution which has had such far-reaching consequences ought to be recorded, if only as _matière pour servir à l’histoire_.

Moreover, lest those who travel in Japan of to-day should set me down as a second Baron von Münchhausen, I am anxious to say my say while there is yet at least one man alive who can corroborate it, or scourge me if I depart from the truth. That man is Sir Ernest Satow, my old friend and colleague, to whom it was largely due that the sun shone so brightly on my days in Japan, and that the adventurous episodes through which we lived together—troublous as they often were at the time—have remained with us only as joyous and picturesque memories for a garrulous old age.

Those who have the patience to struggle through these stories of a dead past will understand what the great Field-Marshal Prince Oyama meant when, in 1906 at an exhibition of Jujutsu at Tokio by a Japanese young lady, he turned round to me and said: “Some of that girl’s tricks would have been pretty useful to you in the old days that you and I remember!”

The voyage from Shanghai to Yokohama in October, 1866, was a true harbinger of the stormy times through which I was to live for the next three or four years. We left Shanghai in the early days of October with a falling barometer, and when we got out to sea we found a typhoon in full blast. There was a fierce sea running, but the force of the wind was so great that it blew the foam like a carpet spread over the waves, so that had it not been for the tossing of the ship, we might have fancied ourselves travelling over a smooth surface. It was a wild experience, and right thankful we were, passengers and ship’s crew alike, when we finally came to an anchor outside Yokohama.

My first landing in Japan was a gloomy disappointment. Could this be the fairy land of whose beauties we had heard from Sherard Osborn, Oliphant, and the earlier travellers? The sky was grey, sad, and unfriendly; gusts of wind turned umbrellas inside out and defied waterproofs. Where was Mount Fuji the peerless, the mountain of the Gods? Veiled, curtained and invisible, like the charms of an odalisque at the Sweet Waters of Europe. The low eaves of what seemed to be a custom house were mere runlets of water. Drip, drip, drip! In front of the building a number of _yakunin_, small government employés, bristling with sword and dirk, clad in sad-coloured robes with quaint lacquer hats, a mob of coolies with rain-coats made of straw, looking like animated haycocks sodden in an unpropitious season; a woman or two clattering and splashing in high wooden pattens, carrying babies sorely afflicted with skin diseases slung behind their backs—a melancholy arrival, in all truth, and sufficiently depressing. All but half a century ago!

But of such a crowd as this—bowmen, spearmen and swordsmen, for they were little more—was made up the brotherhood which in some four hundred and eighty months was to win its place in the sun, tearing to tatters China’s boasted supremacy in the Far East, sweeping a great European navy off the face of the seas, taking, not once but twice, by sheer dogged valour and patriotism, scorn of life and scorn of death, the famous citadel which men said could set at nought the science and heroism of the civilized world.

For the first two or three days, until a lair of my own could be made ready for me, Sir Harry Parkes took me in and lodged me at the Legation, a rather rickety but comfortable bungalow on the bund. The first night at dinner, perhaps owing to the dismal weather, the conversation turned upon lugubrious subjects—the anti-foreign feeling in the country; the murders of Richardson, and more recently of Baldwin and Bird; the bloodthirsty attacks upon the Legation by Rônins in the time of Sir Rutherford Alcock and Colonel Neale. After all this raw-head and bloody-bones sort of talk we went off a little dolefully to bed. In the dead of the night I was awakened by the clatter of wooden sliding doors, the rattling of glass, and the shaking of the whole bungalow—it was the din of the infernal regions. I jumped up and seizing my revolver, rushed out into the passage, quite expecting to see it full of Rônins with blades reeking gore. Full indeed the passages were—but not of Rônins; for every soul was on the alert, revolver in hand, ready for deeds of derring-do. But it was no mortal foe that was attacking us. It was an earthquake. The devils that stoke the fires of the infernal regions were at work, and we could hardly fight them with revolvers! For a few minutes it seemed as if the building must collapse like a house of cards; but it managed to hold together, and all was quiet; so we went to bed again, and when we awoke next morning the sun was shining, the mist had all faded away, the air was crisp and sharp, and the day was full of glory.

Walking out that afternoon and suddenly coming in full view of Mount Fuji, snow-capped, rearing its matchless cone heavenward in one gracefully curving slope from the sea level, I too was caught by the fever of intoxication which the day before had seemed quite inexplicable—a fever which burns to this day, and will continue to burn in my veins to the end of my life.

It so happened that during the next few days there was little work to do, and so, under the kindly guidance of my old friend Satow, I was able to wander about the neighbourhood of Yokohama, making short excursions in the country, now in all the bravery of its autumn beauty; and what can be more lovely than those valleys with the rich cultivation below, and the hillsides covered with “the scarlet and golden tissue of the maples” fringed by graceful bamboos, standing out against the dark green pines and sombre cryptomerias? Very picturesque and attractive are the Shintō shrines, and the eaves of the little Buddhist temples peeping from among the rocks, half hidden by the varied foliage which embowers the choicest spots. It is a farmers’ country, and Inari Sama, their patron god, with his attendant foxes, has his full meed of worship.

When I arrived in Japan the country was politically in a state of fever; it was on the eve of an earthquake which has upset the whole balance of the world and of which the full effects have perhaps not yet been felt. In that upheaval the European influence was a factor of which hitherto little notice has been taken, for obvious reasons; but it nevertheless played a very real and important part. In 1866 that influence resolved itself into the struggle for dominance between two men—Sir Harry Parkes and M. Léon Roches, the French Minister.

Sir Harry Parkes was certainly a very remarkable person. He was a small, wiry, fair-haired man with a great head and broad brow, almost out of proportion to his body; his energy was stupendous, he was absolutely fearless and tireless, very excitable and quick to anger. Having been sent out to China as a boy of thirteen in 1841, he learnt the language with almost superhuman industry, and was doing important work as interpreter, often in most dangerous expeditions, at an age when other boys are yet wondering whether they will ever get into the school eleven. His career in China is too well known for me to refer to it here. When he was only thirty-eight years old he was appointed Minister to Japan, and there later in the year I joined him.

He often expressed to me his regret that his education had been so early broken off. The loss weighed heavily upon him. Yet no man would have suspected him of want of literary culture. He must have created time, for busy as his life was, he had read greedily, and he often took me by surprise in unexpected ways; his great shortcoming as a diplomatist was want of knowledge of French.

M. Léon Roches, the French Minister, was a handsome swashbuckler, who had been an interpreter in the French army in Algeria. He was far more a picturesque Spahi than a diplomatist.

The ministers of the other Treaty Powers were mere cyphers. Herr von Brandt, the Prussian Minister, a man of great ability, was away at home, taking advantage of his leave to render signal service to his country during the war of 1866, for which he received the thanks of the great Bismarck. When he returned to Japan later in the revolution he too played a conspicuous part.

It is not too much to say that Parkes and Roches hated one another and were as jealous as a couple of women. In the struggle between the Daimios and the Shōgun the _beau sabreur_ backed the wrong horse. Parkes had at his elbow a man of extraordinary ability in the person of Mr. Satow. He it was who swept away all the cobwebs of the old Dutch diplomacy, and by an accurate study of Japanese history and of Japanese customs and traditions, realized and gave true value to the position of the Shōgun, showing that the Mikado alone was the sovereign of Japan. Nor was this all. His really intimate knowledge of the language, combined with great tact and transparent honesty, had enabled him to establish friendly relations with most of the leading men in the country; thus, young as he was, achieving a position which was of incalculable advantage to his chief.

There was another man, Mr. Thomas Glover, a merchant at Nagasaki, who also rendered good, though hitherto unacknowledged, service in the same sense. Parkes had the wit to see the wisdom of Satow’s policy and the value of his advice, and, having recognized it, he had the courage and determination to carry it into effect, giving the whole of his moral support to the Daimios, while Roches persisted in the vain endeavour to bolster up the Shōgun, whose power had dwindled away to vanishing-point.

One day Parkes came into my room like a whirlwind, his fair, reddish hair almost standing on end, as was its way when he was excited. “What is the matter, Sir Harry?” I asked. “Matter!” was the answer. “What do you think that fellow Roches has just told me? He is going to have a _mission militaire_ out from France to drill the Shōgun’s army! Never mind! I’ll be even with him. I’ll have a _mission navale_!”—and he did. Three months later out came the _mission militaire_, with Captain Chanoine at its head—Chanoine who afterwards became famous when, as general, he was for three days War Minister, and resigned owing to the Dreyfus affair. My old friend, General Descharmes, then a captain, was the cavalry officer, and arrived with a grand piano and a whole repertoire of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, etc. He was a really great musician, which did not hinder him from being a first-rate soldier.[61] Brunet was the artilleryman; he afterwards got into a scrape by taking command in the Shōgun’s army, when it made its last stand at Wakamatsu in the northern province of Aidzu. Du Bousquet represented the infantry, and became a competent Japanese scholar; Caseneuve was the fifth officer.

Not very long afterwards Captain Tracy and the _mission navale_ appeared upon the scene as Parkes’ counterblast.

Who could have foretold that the foundation of the marvellously successful Japanese army and navy should have had its origin in the jealousy of the English and French Ministers? It was indeed a pregnant episode, of which, so far as I know, no notice has been taken. No doubt the effect of the two missions only hurried on and brought to a head what must ultimately have taken place, although the change would have been slower, retarded perhaps for many years; for anyone who is acquainted with the Japanese character must see that once the seclusion of centuries was broken into, and the country entered into the comity of nations, the ambitious aspirations of a people so deeply moved by national sentiment would never have been satisfied with an inferior position.

Monsieur Roches had a whole network of schemes for the establishment of French monopolies—docks, harbours, arsenals and what not. But all these depended upon the permanence of the Shōgun’s power. And even if that had been effected by his support, there would have been diplomatic wigs upon the green before he would have been able even to initiate his ambitious designs. Our chief was far too wide awake for him.

Political changes or upheavals are probably seldom or never due to one cause only. They are rather brought about by combinations in which several, or perhaps many, factors play a part. In any case, in Japan the psychological moment had arrived. The usurped rule of the Tokugawa Shōguns had wrought no little good in the country; two hundred years of peace—after centuries of internecine civil wars—were something to their credit, something for which men might well be thankful. The natural evanescence of gratitude, however, was hurried on by the despotic laws laid down by Iyémitsu, the third Shōgun of the dynasty—the grandson of its founder, Iyéyasu. Iyémitsu had been dead for a hundred and sixty years and more, and his successors, far from inheriting his masterful spirit, had lapsed into sloth and political impotence. It took some time even in those circumstances for the end to come—but it came.

It was not to be supposed that proud nobles like Satsuma, Chōshiu, Tosa, and the fabulously wealthy Kaga should remain for ever in almost servile subjection to an effete despotism under conditions which it is difficult now to realize. Why should they do homage to a ruler—at most the self-appointed vicar of their real sovereign? Why should they submit to enforced residence in his capital, leaving behind them, if they went home to their own provinces, wives and children as hostages for their return? Why should they be deprived of all voice in the affairs of their country? The thing was unthinkable.

One main cause of the fall of the Tokugawra power came from within. When Iyéyasu established his dynasty he made provision for its continuance in case the direct line of his son Hidétada should fail. He directed that in that case the Shōgun should be chosen from the descendants of his sons, the Lords of Ki, Owari, and Mito. The second of the Lords of Mito, Tokugawa Mitsukuni, who has been called the Mæcenas of Japan on account of his own scholarship and his encouragement of learning in others,[62] employed a number of the best scholars of the Empire to produce the Dai Nihon Shi, the history of Japan from the days of the fabulous Jimmu Tennō down to the abdication in A.D. 1413 of the Emperor Go Komatsu. (Mr. Longford reckons him as the 99th Mikado; but the Ō Dai Ichi Ran makes him to have been the 101st.)

The book was not printed until 1857, but it was largely circulated in MSS. and so it came about that the grandson of Iyéyasu was largely responsible for the scattering broadcast of a book which, as it was written to prove the sole supremacy of the Mikado, was one of the earliest blows struck at the Shōgun’s power. Nay more. By one of those coincidences in which the irony of fate reveals itself, it was upon his own descendant, Tokugawa Kéiki, the third son of a later Lord of Mito, that the final blow fell. In 1827 appeared the Nihon Gwai Shi,[63] “the foreign history of Japan,” which is a history of the Shōgunate from its first foundation by Yoritomo in the 12th century. These books had created a ferment in the country—at least among the lettered classes—which nothing could allay, and the great nobles were ready and eager for a revolt.

Kingdoms and governments and systems wear out like old clothes, and the once glorious, trefoil-crested Jim-Baori (war surcoat) of the Tokugawa Shōgun was beginning to show many signs of wear and tear, when the arrival of Commodore Perry with four little American ships caused the beginning of the last fatal rent in its silken tissue. The Bakufu, the Government of the Shōgun, were paralysed with fear; they were at their wits’ end, and when the United States commander proposed a treaty—a very modest agreement, asking nothing more than access to three harbours of refuge—they referred to Kiōto for instructions—they who were supposed to rule Kiōto—and they appealed for advice to the Daimios whom they claimed as feudal subjects. In the meantime, as a protective measure against the foreigner they called out the fire brigade of Yedo—some fifty miles away from where the western ships were lying! The ringing of those fire-bells tolled the knell of the Shōgun’s power. Commodore Perry quickly sailed away, saying that he would come back in a year for an answer; when he returned his modest little treaty was at his command. In 1858 Lord Elgin and Baron Gros concluded the first substantial treaties opening the country to foreign trade.

These few lines seem indispensable for an understanding of what was to take place in 1867 and 1868. Those who wish for details must be referred to the histories of Sir F. O. Adams and Professor Longford.

To return to my own story. A week had hardly passed away from my first landing in Yokohama when I was installed in what seemed to me the daintiest little cottage in the world. It was built of fair white wood and paper, not much bigger than a doll’s house, and quite as flimsy; it had a tiny verandah, decked out with half a dozen dwarf trees, looking on to a miniature garden about the size of an Arab’s prayer carpet, and was one of a group of three such dwellings, the other two being occupied by Mr. Satow and Dr. Willis—so we formed a small Legation colony on the outskirts of the native town. It was all on so miniature a scale that it seemed as if one must have shrunken and shrivelled up in order to fit oneself to it. As for Willis who, dear man, was a giant, how he got into his house and how, once in, he ever got out again remained as big a mystery as that of the apple in the dumpling.

Of course we had a house-warming—also on a miniature scale—with an officer or two of the 9th Regiment as guests, and three or four winsome geishas to sing and dance for us. So with _Wein, Weib und Gesang_, and a supper of rice and mysterious dishes of fish and bean curd, sent in by a Japanese cook-shop, we spent a very merry evening. It was midnight when the little maids, with great reverence and many knockings of their pretty heads upon the mats, took their leave, and my first Japanese party came to an end. The whole cost, including music and dancing, came to a little over a dollar a head. I don’t suppose that in these improved days you could do it for four or five times the money.

Our little colony was fated to have but a short span of life. On the 26th of November I was aroused by a violent gale which blew in one of the shutters of my home. I got up, but unfortunately did not dress at once, as I wanted to arrange my furniture, part of which had only been sent in the evening before. As I was shaving my Chinese servant came and told me that there was a fire two-thirds of a mile off. “All right,” I said. “When I am dressed I will go and see it.” Little did I know of the rapidity of flames in a native town. By the time I had shaved I saw that there would be just time to huddle on a pair of trousers and a pea-jacket. The fire, driven by the raging wind, seemed to be all round me. I rushed from the house followed by my dog, who, poor beast! bewildered by the noise and the crowd, bolted back again into the furnace, where I found his charred bones the next day under the ashes of a clothes cupboard, to which he had evidently fled for shelter. In an hour or a little more nothing was left of the Japanese quarter in which we lived. The wind howled and whistled. The flames leapt from roof to roof, the burning wooden shingles, driven, as it seemed, for a couple of hundred yards finding fresh food for their insatiable greed. There was no crashing noise of falling timbers such as one hears in a London fire. The flames passed over the houses and simply devoured them like gun-cotton passed through a burning candle—a wonderful and appalling sight. In a few minutes of what had been teeming human homes nothing remained but a heap of ashes and a few red-hot tiles.

Nothing could cope with the fierceness of the attack. The European quarter was soon under the curse. Stone houses—warehouses supposed to be fireproof—were of no avail. Had not the wind abated towards the afternoon nothing would have remained. As it was, about one third of the foreign buildings was destroyed. It was the swiftness of the blow that was so terrifying; it showed how in a great town like Yedo whole quarters, a mile or two square of houses that are just tinder, may be eaten up by fire in a few hours.

There was much loss of life. The next day close to where my house had stood I saw a piteous row of corpses charred so that their humanity was hardly to be recognized, and was told that this was but one of many such rows. The victims were chiefly women from the Gankiro where the fire broke out. One partially burned body was found in a well into which in her agony a poor girl had leaped.

My possessions consisted of the pea-jacket, singlet, trousers, shoes and socks in which I stood; but those who had been spared were very kind to us. The good English Admiral, Sir George King, sent me six shirts with a letter which I treasure.

In the meantime Sir Harry Parkes had made up his mind that he would once more insist upon taking up his residence in Yedo, which had been abandoned on account of the attacks upon the Legation in Alcock’s time and when Neale was _chargé d’affaires_—attacks culminating in the destruction by Rônin of the buildings which were in course of erection at Goten Yama, a hill above the ill-famed borough of Shinagawa, a very pretty spot, which the Shōgun had assigned as a site for the foreign Legations. It was a matter of common talk that Prince Ito in his salad days was one of that body of Rônin; we often used to chaff him about it in old times before he became such a great man, but when he was already a good friend of ours, and he never denied it—but only laughed.

One morning Parkes sent for me to talk the matter over. He argued, and I quite agreed with him, that it was a most undignified and anomalous position for an English Minister accredited to a so-called friendly country practically to waive the right of residence in what, if not the true capital of that country, was, at any rate, at the moment the seat of Government. And so to Yedo we went, remaining only a few days at first in order to make ready for our permanent abode there. This was in the early part of November, a few days before the great fire at Yokohama.

The buildings which we were to occupy were two long, low, ramshackle bungalows, the one for the Minister, the other for the rest of us, in a court below the famous temple of Sengakuji—where the forty-seven Rônin[64] are buried. At the gate was an out-building occupied by a guard of the 9th Regiment, now the Norfolks, from Yokohama. It must seem almost incredible to the Japanese of the present day to think of Yokohama being guarded by a British infantry regiment, quartered in barracks on the bluff above the town! And this a little less than fifty years ago!

In addition to the English soldiers we had a large guard of Bettégumi, a corps of Samurai of a rather humble class specially raised for the protection of foreign officials, but who were far more concerned with spying upon us than fighting for us. Never was espionage carried out in such perfection as it was in Japan, where in the days of the Bakufu it attained the dignity of a fine art. No native official, whatever his rank might be, went forth on his business alone. An _ométsuké_, the “eye in attendance,” stuck to him like his shadow. No man was trusted, and it is not to be wondered at that we also should have been unable to move a step without our “eyes in attendance.”

The bungalow barracks under Sengakuji furnished a miserable lodging—neither doors, windows nor shutters fitted; there were a few stoves, which either got red-hot and smelt of burning iron, or gave no heat at all. The wind whistled unhindered through long passages and chilly rooms, so that it almost seemed as if we should be better off in the open, where, at any rate, there would be no draughts.

On that first evening there was no temptation to sit up late; shivering and shaking, we went to bed very early, but it was long before even a pile of blankets could bring enough warmth to enable me to sleep. While it was yet quite dark, and as it seemed to me the middle of the night, I was awakened by a bugle-call. I jumped up and ran, pistol in hand, formidable, breathing bloody vengeance, as I did at Yokohama when the earth quaked, to the verandah to see what was the terrible danger—hailed the sentry outside. “What is the matter?” “Please, sir, it’s only the rewelly.” Relieved, I crept back into the warmth of my nest.

What with the discomfort of the buildings, the sensation of being closely guarded, and the inquisitive watchfulness of the Bettégumi, we felt as if we were in prison, and so Satow and myself begged Sir Harry to allow us to hire a little temple outside. Our chief jumped at the idea, for he was naturally anxious to do everything that would tend to break the spell of lack of freedom which he rightly felt to be most detrimental to any real intercourse with Japan. So Mr. Satow and I rented Monriuin, a delicious little shrine a few hundred yards from the Legation, on a tiny hill commanding a lovely view over the bay of Yedo; we were the first foreigners to live out of bounds in that great city. From the Bettégumi there was no escape—not even for an afternoon’s walk, or to go across to the Legation. Otherwise we were free, we could hold intercourse with natives, and if we heard the “rewelly” it was softened by distance. Forty years afterwards I went back to Japan, and of course wished to visit the old place. Alas! Evil times had fallen upon the monks: the dainty little dwelling was all rack and ruin, the trim garden a wilderness of unwholesome weeds. It was a piteous sight.

We mounted our little _ménage_ very frugally. In order to save the expense of a cook, a _batterie de cuisine_, knives and forks, etc., we got our dinner sent in from a Japanese cookshop; with rice and fish we did well enough—adding now and then a little dish of chicken or duck. But there came a day when the weather, having been too bad for the fishermen to go out, our restaurateur with many apologies sent us a dinner of bamboo shoots and sea-weed. That was a _jour maigre_ with a vengeance.

From that time forth it will be seen that Satow and I hunted very much in couples. I was nominally the senior and had to draw up the reports of our proceedings, but I may say once for all that his was the brain which was responsible for the work which I recorded. It is difficult to exaggerate the services which he rendered in very critical times, and it is right that this should not be forgotten.

It was well that we had made arrangements for settling the Legation at Yedo, for in the last days of December the Legation house at Yokohama was burnt down. As the Japanese in their letter of condolence to Sir Harry expressed it, “the calamity of the dancing horse” had once more made itself felt.[65]