CHAPTER XXIV

JAPAN. SENSATION DIPLOMACY

So I was left on my lonely job, which lasted from the last days of March till the beginning of August. I was the only European in the great city (for the Consulate, under Mr. Russell Robertson, was far away down the river); there were no foreign residents, and I was often for a week at a time without seeing a European face, or hearing any language but Japanese. I managed to secure a lodging not far from the office where Prince Daté and Higashi Kuzé were conducting foreign affairs and I lived in Japanese fashion on rice and fish, with which I was served from a neighbouring cook-shop.

It was the hardest-worked time of my life. Parkes, at the request of the Japanese, had chosen me for the task because he was in that way able to dispense with depriving himself of one of his interpreters; my orders were to communicate not only with him, but also directly with the Foreign Office at home, whenever an opportunity should offer by a passing man-of-war. I had therefore to copy every one of my drafts in duplicate, and my communications with the Japanese Ministers in triplicate, as according to treaty I was obliged to send my despatches in English as well as in Japanese, and of course the translation into Japanese was an immense addition to my labours. There was, moreover, rarely a day when the Ministers did not expect to have an interview, often very lengthy, upon some subject or other, and visitors from the various clans often came to discuss politics and air their views. In this way I was at work from early dawn till night, and kept two Japanese secretaries constantly employed. Neither of them knew a word of English, so they were only of use as amanuenses for their own language. I may say here in passing that when the Foreign Office asked the Treasury to reimburse me the money that I had paid for their salaries the answer was that I seemed to have made good use of my opportunities, and if I had earned any reward I must seek for it in my own profession. That is the return which I got for work which was no part of my business as secretary, and which actually cost me money. In addition to my written work I had to have interminable interviews with Prince Daté and Higashi Kuzé at the Foreign Office, or to receive them and many of the leading Japanese in my own house. Often I worked from twelve to fourteen hours. “Bob” Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, was Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Foreign Office sent in the claim on my behalf. He was always a very good friend to me, and told me that he refused because he thought he would be doing me a good turn, which, he said, I thoroughly deserved. So between two friendly stools I fell to the ground!

Captain du Petit Thouars in the _Dupleix_ was left to watch over French interests. He was one of the most charming of men, an ornament to the French Navy. He died in 1890 (?) as Vice-Admiral at Brest, having rendered brilliant service on shore during the war of 1870. As soon as our respective ministers’ backs were turned I went to him and pointed out how absurd and harmful were the jealousies and intrigues which had gone on between the two Legations. I told him that I would keep him accurately informed as to anything that might happen on shore, and hoped that he, being in the roadstead on board his ship, would let me know of any maritime movement that might take place. I said that we still had to deal with a crisis which was far from settled, and that I could not conceive that our interests should not be identical. He quite agreed, and so we determined to work together in the common cause. He was as loyal as his own sword, and we became fast friends. During those critical months neither of us could often leave his post, so we seldom met; when we did it was a privilege to be the friend of such a man.

It was, as I have said, a solitary life that I led—the life of a recluse. How my London friends would have stared at my surroundings! I rigged up a table at which to write, and a chair—those were indispensable; otherwise my long, narrow room was innocent of furniture other than two handsome screens, still in my possession, which shut off my bedless sleeping-place, where I lay like a Japanese gentleman on a quilt, and slept the sleep of the man that is mentally and physically tired out. My verandah opened on to a slip of garden not much larger than a good-sized dining-table—a little gem in its way, with a miniature Mount Fuji, a shrine to Inari sama, a forest, a waterfall plashing into a lake, in which were several fan-tailed gold-fish.

I hardly expect to be believed when I write that one day, as I was sitting at work, I saw a huge otter come sneaking into my little paradise. I cocked my Spencer rifle—the friend that I always kept at hand, for there were plenty of scowling Jō-i about—but the enemy heard the click and bolted before I could get a shot at him. It was a strange invasion in a city of some half million of souls!

Apart from the ordinary work of our relations with the Foreign Office there were two matters which Sir Harry had specially entrusted to me. The one was to insist upon the publication, without delay, of the new law with regard to attacks upon foreigners, and the second was to watch over the case of the Urakami Christians. Neither of these was an easy matter to deal with.

It will be seen from my translation of the law that it was an edict which must have needed great courage on the part of the new Government to draw up and still greater courage to publish, as they had promised to do, throughout the Empire. It said:

“Now that the Imperial Government has been newly established, in obedience to the principles of the Court it has been commanded that friendly relations shall exist with foreign countries, and that all matters should be treated directly by the Imperial Court. The treaties will be observed according to international law, and the people of the whole country, receiving with gratitude the expression of the Imperial Will, are hereby ordered to rest assured upon this point. From henceforth those persons who by violently slaying foreigners or otherwise insulting them would rebel against the Imperial commands and brew trouble in the country, and all other persons whatsoever, are hereby ordered to behave in a friendly manner. Those who do not uphold the majesty and good faith of their country in the eyes of the world, being guilty of most audacious crime, will, in accordance with the heinousness of their offence, even should they belong to the Samurai class, be stripped of their rank and will meet with a suitable punishment. Let all men receive these Imperial commands by which riotous conduct, however slight, is strictly forbidden.

“Published at Kiōto, March 28th (1868).”

This decree naturally aroused great susceptibilities. To strip a Samurai of his rank deprived him of the right of execution by _hara-kiri_; he would have to die by the sword of the common executioner, his head would be exposed on the pillory, and his property would be forfeited; he would be reduced to the level of the lowest scum of the earth, and his family would be ruined and wiped out. Only think of what that must mean to these proud and chivalrous heirs of the centuries! The privilege of self-immolation was one of the dearest and most precious rights of the very class which had brought about the revolution, the class, indeed, to which the members of the Government themselves belonged. However anxious the Government might be to issue such an edict all over the country—and it was impossible to doubt their sincerity in the matter—they were in great difficulties. They were obviously wishful to do everything that they could to conciliate foreign Powers and to enable their country to take an honourable place among the nations; their own interests were at stake, as well as ours, and this they felt.

They tried hard to persuade me to let them defer the publication of the edict until it could be incorporated in a new code of laws which, they said, was about to be drawn up. To this I had resolutely to refuse assent. At the same time I could not but see that they had to consider old prejudices, old jealousies, old hatreds; “rust cannot be cleared off an old blade with one rubbing;” they had to go forward warily. However, to cut short a long story and the record of many an hour of debate, every minute of which increased my respect for Prince Daté and Higashi Kuzé, I succeeded in getting the government to post the famous edict in every town, village and hamlet throughout the land. My chief was greatly pleased. It was a triumph for which he received great kudos.

The case of the Urakami Christians furnished me with a still more difficult task.

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In no country did these words, with the terrible forecasts that follow them, prove more true than in Japan. When St. Francis Xavier, under the guidance of a gentleman of the Satsuma clan, reached the land of Sunrise, the great missionary met with many troubles, but was rewarded by great successes.

I do not propose to tell the story of the first efforts to Christianize Japan—suffice it to say here, that all went well until the heavy-footed, clumsy Franciscans in Japan, as in China, trampled to death the seed of religion which had been sown and diligently watered by the more delicate Jesuits. Interference with the laws and internal affairs of the country were meat and drink to the Franciscans, so that the great Kido was historically justified when, on one occasion, he said: “It seems to me that missionaries are men who are sent here to teach the people to disobey the laws of their country.” Those who are curious in such matters will find the history of the persecutions—sometimes, it must be admitted, retaliations—admirably told in Mr. Longford’s “Story of Old Japan.”[11]

The persecutions of Hidéyoshi and Iyéyasu failed entirely to outroot Christianity; it simply disappeared out of sight. There were in many parts of the country small scattered colonies of Christians, faithful men who, without the teaching of a priest or the ministrations of a pastor, clung to the creed for which more than two centuries before their forefathers had been tortured and perished. It must have been a very simple form of faith without much dogma about it, but they believed in God and worshipped the Saviour who had died for their sins, and that was enough. One such colony existed at Urakami, a village not far from Nagasaki, the chief scene of the old persecutions, a community entirely composed of Christians, numbering some four thousand souls. The reactionaries at the Court of Kiōto had determined that these people must be put to the sword and extirpated.

It is perhaps not surprising that the resumption of power by the Mikado should have led to a revival of Shintō, the religion of the Gods, from whom he claimed descent. The more bigoted of the men by whom the Emperor was surrounded, new to government and little suspecting the troubles which, in the altered condition of things, religious intolerance could not fail to bring upon their country, were fired by zeal for the old worship, and they demanded the extirpation of the religion in which they saw its chief enemies. Urakami was a prominent and notorious centre of that faith, and its people must be the first victims.

If we put ourselves for a moment in the place of the new ministers, it is not difficult to realize the anxious thought which this movement, even more than the question of the new edict mentioned above, must have caused them. Bigotry and fanaticism are terrible foes to fight, and, in this particular instance, the trouble must have been increased by the knowledge that any disinclination to proceed to extremities would be set down as something akin to disloyalty to the Emperor and a denial of his divine rights. The ministers with whom I had to deal were large-minded men with liberal views, but they, on their side, had to reckon with important personages, who, after being immured, as their forbears had been for centuries, in the mystic darkness of a prehistoric cloister, were no more fit to face the sunlight of the nineteenth century than those perhaps fabulous batrachians which have whitened for aeons untold, encased in the crevices of the limestone rock. In a little time they were to face it, and they did so gloriously; but the day had not come yet, and they were still purblind.

The sudden awakening of a sovereign and his court from the sleep of eight centuries was a wonder which still, after some fifty years, reads like a fairy tale even to those who witnessed it. Among the men who composed it there was no great wealth, no ostentation to dazzle the eye—and yet everything to fascinate the imagination. These men, dwelling in simple houses, living frugally—even poorly—were surrounded by a halo before which the territorial magnates, lords of great castles, with all their pomp and splendour and martial glitter, had to humble themselves. The Kugé believed, and they could make others believe, that for all their apparent poverty and humility they were in some mysterious way trustees for the glory of the Gods, from whom, like their divine Emperor, they claimed descent.

Naturally enough, amongst men who had lived in the mystery of ancestral seclusion, unbroken by any sign or sound from without, there must be a majority among whom it would be idle to expect an immediate flow of liberal ideas; they thought as their fathers thought, as their forbears had thought in the eleventh century, when the veil was drawn over the holy city and all light shut out till now. Some there were who amazed us by the way in which they met the new situation. Physically, inbreeding had done its work. Many of the nobles were puny, pale and anæmic ghosts, in whom Dr. Willis, a sound observer, found many signs of hereditary degeneration. Others again, equally bearing the stamp of aristocratic descent, were strong and well nurtured. Side by side with Daté, the burly Inkiyō of Uwajima, Higashi Kuzé, the Court noble was not imposing in stature, but his mind was clear and nimble, and indeed, it was wonderful to watch the success with which many of these recluses, whose lives had been spent in the iteration of dull and mentally exhausting ceremonies, threw themselves into the whirlpool of affairs.

Iwakura, for instance, who afterwards went as Ambassador to Europe, was one of the most pliant of the new statesmen with whom we came into contact. The three brothers Saionji, and some others, were born men of the world. But these men of more advanced views were few and far between, and amongst the others there can be no doubt that our friends in preaching toleration had an even more difficult task than that which lay before Disraeli when he started upon educating his party. Had the Emperor been a little older his generous spirit would have lightened their burden. But he was a mere boy, not yet able to make his personal influence felt. It was not long in coming; for among the heroes of the days of the restoration none deserve more admiration and respect than the Emperor Mutsu Hito. Hardly was he freed from the luxurious care and tender coddling of the women’s quarters than he was forced to take up his august inheritance at a moment of storm and stress for which the history of his country—perhaps we might say, of the world—furnishes no parallel. He faced the ordeal manfully from the very first, and he seems at once to have recognized the importance of the fact that the days of Japan’s isolation had come to an end, and that, if the Land of the Gods was to preserve its dignity, it must be by casting off the old slough of tradition and prejudice.

Before many years had elapsed he made himself a real, and not a nominal, power. The full measure of his personal weight will perhaps never be known. What we do know is that he was a most generous monarch, an indefatigable worker, and that he had the art of surrounding himself with the best and wisest advisers. Had he been opposed to a forward policy the prestige which attached to the Son of Heaven would have enabled him to stay the hands of the clock; his power of obstruction would have been almost unlimited. As a matter of fact his action was always in favour of progress, and in nothing did he show this more conspicuously than in the attitude which, from the first, he took up towards foreigners. Doubtless, in the earlier days he, like his ministers, had to be careful not to run too violently against tradition and prejudice.

In order to understand the policy of the new government, in regard to the native Christians, it is essential that these very real difficulties which they had to encounter should be understood. In dealing with them, Daté and Higashi Kuzé evidently knew that they had to conciliate a number of their more retrograde peers who might easily wreck the ship. Their hand was not an easy one to play; they held but one trump card—national ambition, which could not but be frustrated by disregarding the public opinion of the world, and even that card they must persuade others to take at trump value; a little too great precipitancy, a little lack of caution, and they might raise a storm of fanaticism which it would be hard to quell and which might ruin their game. In our discussions I had to minimize dangers which I knew to be no sham, and to lay stress upon advantages of which the government were probably as well aware as I was.

One difficulty with which I had to contend was the danger of appearing to interfere in the internal affairs of the country. No foreigner’s safety or welfare was at stake. There was not a single missionary concerned. The foreign legations then could not do more than offer friendly advice and that, too, in the most discreet fashion. Day after day and week after week we carried on our weary debates; but at any rate I was at last able to obtain the assurance that there would be no massacre, no such persecution, no such wholesale cruelty, as had stained the early days of the seventeenth century. So far it was a triumph, well worth the pains it cost, but I was certain that there must be some temporary sacrifice to the old-world prejudices of the Court, which were still too strong to be altogether ignored. That sacrifice would take the shape of deportation. When in the month of August I returned to Yokohama I found Sir Harry Parkes just about to start for a conference with the colleagues. “What am I to tell them?” he asked. I answered that he might assure them that there was no danger, such as had at one time been dreaded, there would be no executions—no torture—that the utmost that would be done would be a breaking up of the community at Urakami, that the families would be distributed among various clans, and that I did not believe that even that measure of intolerance would be of long duration. Sir Harry was delighted with the result of my negotiations and went off in great glee to reassure the colleagues. It was really a great victory. My forecast was correct; though, in 1870, there was a fresh outburst of fanatical zeal and many families were exiled, in 1872, with the new and generous order of things, the exiles were restored to their homes; missionaries are now free all over the country, and who will may be baptized.

In spite of the pleasure of having independent and responsible work to do I confess that I was not sorry when my exile at Ōsaka came to an end. It had been a lonely time in the midst of an obviously hostile community. The heat had been intense—the work very laborious, no rest from morning till night, food none too plentiful, though, indeed, there was little temptation to eat. I was, moreover, run down and out of health. So I was delighted when my good friend du Petit Thouars sent to say that he was leaving for Yokohama and would give me a berth, as he heard that I, too, was to rejoin my chief.

Those were halcyon days on board the _Dupleix_. The too often storm-vexed Inland Sea was a dream of beauty, its countless smiles rippling under a cloudless sky. The ship was the perfection of comfort, the cook a genius, and my host—one of the most agreeable companions, a man whose goodness of heart was equalled by his wit and the catholicity of his reading. His men adored him, and no wonder!

I was quickly back in my fairy-tale quarters in the little temple of Monriuin, overlooking the Bay of Yedo—soon to become Tōkiō, in order that the last vestige of the power of the Tokugawa family might be swept away. My little temple home was not much bigger than a doll’s house, but it was very pretty and snug and to a tired and overworked man it was a delight to slip on a bath-gown in the early morning and drink in the refreshing breezes which came blowing into the garden from over the sea.

I had plenty to amuse me, and leisure to go on plodding at my “Tales of Old Japan,” which were growing in bulk. The stories themselves were not such hard work; but the notes and appendices involved much labour in looking up authorities and gathering together odds and ends of information. Parkes used to say that, if ever the book was published, they would be the best part of it.

The civil war was now practically at an end. The Shōgun, shorn of his rank, was easing his scholarly mind in the composition of Chinese poetry in his romantic castle of Shidzuoka, the favourite castle of his great ancestor Iyéyasu, where, leading the life of a country gentleman, he for some forty years devoted himself to agricultural pursuits, especially to improving the cultivation of tea. In this way he found good employment for the vast number of retainers whom he was unable to support as in old days, but whom he would not turn adrift. He was a kind and generous master.

There was still fighting in the north, and the Prince of Aidzu did not capitulate until towards the end of the year. Enomoto, who was in command of the ships of the Tokugawa, had taken his fleet to Hakodaté in the island of Yesso, where he was joined by Captain Brunet and another officer of the _mission militaire_, and by one or two French midshipmen from the _Minerve_. Enomoto’s attempt to proclaim a republic in Yesso was an utter failure; by the month of June, 1869, he was hopelessly defeated; the French officers, who had surrendered to their own naval commander, were shipped off on board the _Coetlogon_ to Yokohama, where M. Outrey, who had succeeded M. Léon Roches as French Minister, would not even allow them to land, but ingloriously packed them off in the _Dupleix_ to Saigon. The departure of these troublesome French gentlemen with their tails between their legs, was a source of infinite joy to Sir Harry Parkes, and of great relief to M. Outrey, who had been much annoyed by their conduct. Enomoto himself, the arch-rebel, was forgiven, and was afterwards Japanese Minister in Peking.

All these things, however, took place months after my arrival in Yedo. The great city through which the furies had been raging so violently, burning temples, setting fire to _yashikis_, fighting, murdering, crucifying,[12] the streets ringing with the fierce war-songs of the clansmen, was now at peace. The days floated by uneventfully in a dull monotone which was a new and, to tell the truth, delicious sensation; it was long since I had enjoyed such a feeling of peace and security. Now and then some visitor would come, eager to be shown the historic beauties of the famous place; now and then I had to ride to Yokohama on Legation business; otherwise the silence of Monriuin was unbroken.

It was a blessed calm after the storm. Still, it would not have been wise as yet to lay aside revolver and sword, for so long as the Samurai were allowed to wear sword and dirk there was always the danger lest some fanatic swashbuckler, perhaps in his cups, might empty his scabbard in our honour. A blow would soon be given, and we had had experience enough of what Captain du Petit Thouars called “le marteau rasoir”—a good definition of the heavily-weighted, keen-edged _katana_. The law depriving the Samurai of the right to carry the _dai-sho_, sword and dirk, was one of the wisest enactments of the new _régime_, but that was not to come for many a long month.

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