Part 11
Beyond relegating art to its proper and inferior position, I do not think that Western influence has altered Japanese character to any great extent. A Japanese naval officer of some note, in relating to me his experiences during the war against China, referred to a combined naval and military operation in which he was engaged. Cholera killed them off like rats. “It was one of the funniest sights I have ever seen,” he said, “to see the soldiers all doubled up and rolling about by the side of the road as we marched.” This frame of mind is distinctly Oriental; it is also distinctly useful for a fighting-man. A British bluejacket might have contrived to see the humour of the situation also,[34] but no other Westerner is so blest—for it is a case of blest; the toughest warrior is the one that wins. Japan is not going to collapse in a war while this sort of sentiment can obtain. Modern warfare is becoming more and more a matter of acting on the _morale_ of the _personnel_; it is on nerves rather than on bodies that shell-fire is intended to have its most powerful effect, and it will take a good deal of it, and a very deadly deal, to affect those who can see the humorous side of what is primarily a very terrible thing. Probably the root of the “war-instinct” lies somewhere hereabouts, and we should think many times ere we endeavour to “humanise” such ideas out of our own Mark Tapleys.
[34] The following I can vouch for, as I heard it myself:—A certain warrant man in one of our destroyers came off leave one morning a little late, and thus explained himself to his skipper: “I was waiting for the train all right, sir, when some silly fool walking across the line got run over by a train coming the other way. It took both his legs off, and there was he and the legs lying on the line. _I stood there laughing so that I clean forgot my train._” This is not exactly typical, but we have a good many such Mark Tapleys in the R.N.
The Japanese also retains his old native dignity; European uniform has not abated one jot of that dignity which we have all read about as having been beneath the Kimino. Mostly, though not invariably, they are the descendants of the old fighting men, the Samaurai.[35] In the midst of the new order all the best of the old traditions live, just as, in a few cases in our new social order, pauper members of old families scorn the wealthy mushroom aristocracy around them. Whatever he may do, in whatever position he may be placed, the Japanese officer never forgets his dignity, and, further, is always a _gentleman_. I believe this is the first impression that he creates; it is also the last.
[35] These Samaurai, or officer class—there were three classes in Japan: (1) the nobles, descendants of rulers of provinces; (2) the officer class; (3) the common people—for generation after generation lived very uncertain lives; they were liable to be killed at any moment once they left their homes. In addition, they were used to killing, having the right to do so at pleasure. If they unsheathed their swords, they could not replace them until they had killed some one. Possessing this power, it is little wonder that a strong sense of dignity was acquired with it.
On the whole, though their politeness generally hides it completely, the Japanese are a very “touchy” and sensitive people. Quite unwittingly one is apt to tread on tender corns, without in the least realising it, until one gets to know them a good deal more than casually. They are sensitive about any infraction of the extended laws of etiquette, which they themselves observe most punctilliously. There are numbers of little things to be learnt and observed by one who would come to be on friendly terms with them, and I doubt if any Westerner can acquire all. Still, if he offends through ignorance he will never learn his fault from his hosts.
They carry this sensitiveness a considerable distance, and into a variety of things. For instance, to see themselves represented in print in broken English and queer pronunciation annoys them intensely. An Englishman, seeing his rendering of a foreign language guyed, would laugh at it; but not so the Japanese. I remember well the indignation of a Japanese at reading in a Portsmouth local paper that his countrymen had talked about their vessel as a fine “_sipp_.” He did not like it at all. Incidentally, I may mention that “sipp” was phonetically inaccurate; the majority say the word “ship” just as we do, while the rest would merely give the “i” the same phonetic value that it has in French, Italian, or Russian. On their part, I have known Japanese deliberately pronounce many of their own ship-names wrongly, so as not to offend English ears by emphasising an English error.
It is a legend in our navy that the first English word learnt by a Japanese is always _Damn!_ but I have only once heard a Japanese use it. His own language is singularly defective in swear words. Japanese learn English very rapidly, and soon grow to speak it remarkably well. After a year, or less, in England they acquire not merely a mastery of the English, but also a far more difficult thing for a foreigner—a mastery of our _slang_. Ability to pick this up argues a singularly quick brain, as dictionaries are of no avail here. It is characteristic of them, too, to set about it with a serious thoroughness, essentially Japanese. Recently a sub-lieutenant, not long from the Far East, who had learnt school English out there, took to studying a novel of mine, “The Port Guard Ship,” a book that deals solely with social naval life, and so is loaded to the muzzle with current naval slang and phraseology. Every time I met this sub. he used to haul a notebook from his pocket, and reel off a list of slang and, possibly, now and again, profanities culled from its pages, the exact import of each of which I had to explain! In consequence that sub. is now able to join in any conversation without difficulty, or without the talk having to be suited for him. The Frenchman’s dilemmas over such expressions as “Look out!” do not bother him at all. In fine, he knows “English as she is spoke,” by virtue of adopting a method.
Curiously enough, Japanese never learn to write English so well as they speak it—thus reversing the condition of all other foreigners. Their caligraphy is fine and bold always, but the phraseology as invariably formal. Possibly it is due to the etiquette of letter-writing in their own country that their letters here almost always begin with a “Thank you for your kind letter,” and continue formal all through.
Mentally, the Japanese is adaptive, not originative. If one is explaining anything to a Japanese, he will have seized on the idea and absorbed it while a European is still struggling with the externals of it. Japanese invention has extended to a small quickfirer and a water-tube boiler, but in both cases the invention is merely a change of some existing mechanism. Even so, neither is of great moment; their abilities do not lie in that direction at all. If an entirely new system of naval tactics is ever evolved, it will not be by a Japanese; like their British _confrères_, they shine better at practical work than in the regions of theory.
They are not, however, devoid of views. Every Japanese gives time to thinking of the future, and were any lieutenant suddenly made into an admiral, I fancy that he would acquit himself quite as well as if he had reached his rank by orthodox gradations. He is apt to fail now and again at his present task from this trait, which is in many ways his chief defect, and one that may lead to trouble in war. It is sometimes dangerous to reason before proceeding to obey. A Japanese tends to do this. It is details that they think about. For instance, I once got a Japanese officer to give me his views on the conduct of a naval war. They are worth quoting _in extenso_, because naval opinions invariably run more or less in grooves.
His primary detail was strategical, and referred to the Press. “I shall have no correspondents with my fleet when I am an admiral in war,” said he. “If they insist on coming, directly we get out to sea I shall set them all adrift in a boat. If they do their duty to their papers they are a hindrance to me; if they do not they are no good at all.”
Detail number two referred to his fleet. “I shall hoist the signal, ’No ship is to surrender; if beaten, it must sink.‘ If any ship hoists the white flag, the rest of my ships will open fire on it till it sinks.”
I shall watch this officer’s career with interest if ever he commands a war fleet in the future, for he will go far; every detail was similarly thought out. I fancy every Japanese who stands any prospect of being an admiral in the future does the same, though the matter is not one upon which they talk at all readily to a stranger.
It is also, however, their weakest point, this fondness for thinking of the future. Too often they think of it unduly, and to the detriment of the present. Not invariably, of course, still there is, I fancy, a fair sprinkling of lieutenants who devote as much or more thought to an admiral’s duty twenty years hence than to lieutenant work of to-day. It is not, primarily, a bad thing so much as a good thing overdone; but that is a Japanese naval characteristic all through. They are always in more danger of overdoing a good thing than anything else. Curiously enough, this tendency to think for the admiral does not lead to any great evil in the way of an undue corresponding tendency to be critical.
On the other hand, a Japanese naval officer never underrates his own abilities. Every junior officer feels in his inmost soul that he is fully as capable and as fully able to do anything as his senior. None of them suffer from false modesty. On the whole, this, within due bounds, is by no means a defect; self-confidence is a fine thing for begetting ability; but, as before stated, they are prone to overdo many good things. Some of them, doubtless, overdo the confidence in their own abilities.
They are, in a way, a discontented lot of men as a whole, despite all their fatalism, their enthusiasm, and their joviality. Every civilian officer fumes over to himself that he is not an executive; every lieutenant curses the time that must pass before he is a lieutenant-commander, and so on all through. Wherever they are in the professions, they want to be better and higher. Sometimes this is a defect, sometimes not. When it is a defect, it is again a case of the good thing overdone.
With all this, however, they are not ambitious in the exact way that we define the word. A friend of mine was appointed skipper of a destroyer, to take her out to Japan. He had worried everything and everybody for the post. Now, he could have gone back to Japan as a passenger in a steamer, drawing more pay, and without the risks and heavy responsibilities of being a destroyer captain; but, having got his wished-for ship, there the matter ended. There was no “another rung in the ladder” about it; it was simply “a good opportunity to get experience.”
He got it. He left the Thames in a blizzard. Down Channel he had a gale, a head sea, and a thermometer well below freezing-point. Not having been to sea for some time, he was seasick continually, and the weather gave him neuralgia and bronchitis in addition. Having a crew new to the ship, he had to spend nearly the whole trip from the Thames to Portsmouth on deck, and when he snatched a brief watch below a defective cowl gave him shower-baths in his bunk. Yet, when he put into Portsmouth Harbour to coal, I found him sitting in the wardroom, expatiating to his officers on his good luck in having thus early been favoured with some bad weather experience.
“Duty,” in the sense in which one finds it in the British or Russian navies, is not much of a motive-power to Japanese officers. The religion of war, the interest of their profession, the longing to put theories to a fuller practical test—here lie the springs of their motive-power. To quote one of them, they “like being killed.” I believe they do.
Personal glory is, again, discouraged rather than otherwise; a solidarity of glory is rather aimed at. In the torpedo attacks at Wei-hai-wei some boats “got in,” some failed. No Japanese officer who participated will tell you his share. I once asked one of these, whom I met, about the famous action. “Oh yes,” said he, “I was there. It was a very cold night.”
Subsequently I learnt from another officer that this particular one had commanded the boat that sank the Ting Yuen. “But,” added my informant, “he would not tell you, and you should not ask. All did well; some were lucky, some not; since all did well, they agreed not to speak of it after and say who did this or did that, _for all were equally worthy of praise_.”
Ethically our socialists theorise on this sort of thing, but only the Japanese have actually practised it. Such are Japanese naval officers. To sum up, they have little ambition, little thirst for personal glory, but a good deal of thirst for the thunder of battle. The only religion that they wot of is the worship of their fleet; their only heaven, that fleet in action. They cannot originate, but they are peerless at practising the things that they have learnt. And there is only one possible way of beating a Japanese fleet—by sinking it.
In many of these things the trail of Samaurai may be visible. The Samaurai were trained to kill and to be killed; it was the thing they lived for. Take the case of the old Japanese duelling laws, which ceased to exist quite recently comparatively. No French _affaire_ about these duels. To a Japanese serious European duels are as comic as French duels are to us. With the Japs the vanquished had to die, only death or a mortal wound stopped the duel, and the victor had then to commit suicide.
_Hari-kari_, though now illegal, is not yet entirely dead. It is not very many years ago that a Japanese sub-lieutenant disembowelled himself because of the disgrace of some affront that he felt had been put on him; in the war with China there were one or two cases. _Hari-kari_ is not a nice thing to describe, and has been described in detail often enough before to-day. It has altered somewhat from the orthodox manner. The torpedo-gunner who, after his frozen-in torpedo failed to leave the tube at Wei-hai-wei, committed _hari-kari_, slit his stomach across with a knife, and then fired a pistol at his throat—according to the captain of his boat, who told me about it. This was not quite after the orthodox manner, but it was a singular painful means of death for a man to choose of his own accord. The ancestors of Japanese officers, near and remote, lived for centuries under the _hari-kari régime_. In other ways human life was cheap, and torture was common. Their descendants reap the results in an age when war has become so much a matter of “moral effect.” And this is one great reason why a Japanese fleet will have to be sunk _en masse_ for it to be defeated.
I will close this chapter with one anecdote, a trifle shocking to our convictions possibly, but so eminently characteristic that I must give it. One Japanese I know was studying naval history, noting the most effective dying words of great commanders (the distant future in his mind’s eye very probably). “They are pretty, some of them,” he said, “but I do not think them very useful. Now, if I get killed, I think I shall say, ‘I die a good Christian, and shall soon be an angel with very pretty wings.’”
I can quite imagine him saying it, and his comrades finding the jest useful.
XX PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
MEN.
I sometimes wonder who it was first coined that well-known phrase, “little Japanese sailors.” As phrases go it is very “catchy,” but in the matter of accuracy it is very general only. Save for Russians and Italians, some of the biggest sailors going are Japanese. Beside their own officers they look giants, while actually they average nearly an inch higher than British bluejackets, and in breadth fully equal them. One and all, they are fine men physically, able to hold their own in size with almost any other nation’s bluejackets, except Russians and Italians. They are almost invariably stout and well set up, and they are always smiling; they take to their profession much as their officers do.
As previously stated, they are recruited chiefly from the northern islands, and chiefly from the lowest classes. These make the bravest sailors, and they have been educated from early youth upward into a disregard for death. Till quite recently, most Japanese villages had feuds with neighbouring hamlets, and these resulted in a good many broken heads and a fair amount of blood-letting, all of which the Government, if it did not actually encourage, at least viewed with a very lenient eye on account of its practical utility in rearing fighters.
Japanese officers have, on the whole, a preference for sailors of little education. Their view is that such are less hampered by appreciating danger. Apparently some of the better class sailors—artificers and others drawn from a rather better class socially, acquire with their education an inconvenient ability to realise some of the frightful dangers of modern naval warfare. Either from experience or instinct, these more educated men are not looked on with favour. “The less a man knows the better sailor he will make,” is the saying.
A rabid anti-Japanese of my acquaintance, who has spent his life in the Far East, allows the Japanese only one virtue—general and complete bravery. “No Japanese,” said he, “is ever afraid.” It is not easy to reconcile this statement with the Japanese estimate of educated sailors given above; but I am not in a position to deliver a verdict of any value on the question. The officers’ contempt of danger, alluded to some pages back, has little bearing on the point. The fact that “cowardice” exists as an offence in the Japanese naval code of punishments may, perhaps, throw a little light upon the matter; but, even so, we need an exact definition of what the word “cowardice” means to a Japanese. It does not mean cowardice as we should understand it. I incline to fancy that it means the absence of an utter disregard for life; and that what the Japanese call a coward we describe as a waverer—which is by no means the same thing. It is not impossible that their more liberal definition of cowardice would include a man who got unduly excited in action. After Yalu, several men were punished for that.
The general intelligence of Japanese bluejackets is high, they have the national aptitude for “picking things up” with marvellous rapidity—wherein they form a marked contrast to the Russian sailors, who learn very slowly. They—some of them—also forget rapidly; a national defect in Japan.
In many ways they are replicas of their officers. Like their officers, their ideas of dissipation centre round learning something. Parties of fifty or so “do” London and our chief industrial centres when they are in England. On these occasions, and, indeed, always in foreign ports, their behaviour leaves nothing to be desired. At Portsmouth, where public houses are thick as can be, and where leave is given very freely, a hundred or so will roam the town all day in groups, fraternising and being made much of by the populace, but any disorder or trouble with the police in consequence is almost unknown.
On shipboard drinking is said to be on the increase; but it is rarely a cause of trouble, though a drunken Japanese is a nasty customer. Most are temperate.
Stealing is practically unknown. Natural causes operate here. If by any chance a Japanese sailor steals, he is a marked man. His shipmates refuse to have any dealings with him whatever, he is an absolute outcast; and his crime is passed on against him by his comrades should he be sent to another ship. This perpetual ostracism is a most effectual safeguard.
Till recently Japanese sailors were not over and above obedient. A marked change has since sprung up, and they are now, as a rule, very amenable and willing, as well as able. They still, however, need some tact in management; and attempts to knife officers are not unknown.
Cleanliness is a national characteristic. Japanese sailors, like all of the lower class in Japan, bathe more frequently even than the upper classes—twice each day every Japanese sailor has a bath. If from war, or any other cause, they are prevented from bathing for a couple of weeks or so, the lower class Japanese suffer a great deal from skin diseases. Hence they are ill-adapted for lengthy torpedo boat service.
In general neatness their average is high; on whatever work they are engaged—except, of course, coaling ship—they are usually spick and span.
Despite his good qualities, however, the average Japanese bluejacket is not on a par with his officers in value. He lacks stolidity; and, take him all and all, he is inferior to a Chinese sailor. The Chinaman is braver, or, rather, what the Japanese call braver. According to the Japanese, Ah Sin is the finest material for bluejackets in the world, and they are not alone in this opinion.
To return to the Japanese bluejacket. Like his officers, he has little, if any, religion—though, nominally, a certain proportion may be Buddhists or Shinto. They have, however, a species of semi-religious code over some minor matters—for instance, no Japanese sailor will accept a tip for small services, such as showing visitors round a ship, or because he is coxswain of a boat in which you have taken passage. According to their ethics, it is a _crime_ to accept special payment for anything done in the way of duty, and if a man by any chance did accept anything, his shipmates would render his life unbearable by their contemptuous ridicule of him. So, though they will as readily and gladly take any amount of trouble for a stranger, to try and give them a tip annoys them. I once kept a Japanese boat’s crew, which had been sent for me, waiting a long time, on a bitterly cold day, through some misunderstanding as to time. It was a long row to the ship, against a strong tide, in which they were soon wet through. Arrived at the ship, my first attempt to tip the coxswain was greeted by a shake of the head. Thinking he had misunderstood my intention, I repeated the attempt. He at once called out, “No. Go away!” in a most indignant tone, and his whole expression was that of a man on whom I had put a deadly insult.