Mitford's Japan

Memories and Recollections, 1866-1906

Hugh Cortazzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781903350072
• eBook ISBN: 9781134279531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

As the preface to this new edition points out, Mitford (Algernon Bertram, the first Lord Redesdale) was a gifted writer whose descriptions of Japan, during the critical time of transition from a feudal to a modern state in the late nineteenth century, are a testimony to his narrative skills, accuracy and objective reporting - qualities which are sometimes overshadowed by the higher profile given to his contemporary Ernest Satow. Accordingly, this new paperback edition, which makes the Mitford memoirs available to a much wider audience, includes a wide selection of extracts from Mitford's bestselling Tales of Old Japan (1871) - what Mitford, according to Carmen Blacker, perceived as the essence of the Japanese spirit: 'heroic, ruthless, devotedly loyal, bloody and chivalrous'.

From Memories

1866–7

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 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 employees, 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.

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 Parkes¹ 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 Richardson², and more recently of Baldwin and Bird³; the bloodthirsty attacks upon the Legation by Ronin⁴ 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 Ronin with blades reeking gore. Full indeed the passages were – but not of Ronin; 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 Satow⁵, 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 tissues of the maples’ fringed by graceful bamboos, standing out against the dark green pines and sombre cryptomerias? Very picturesque and attractive are the Shinto 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 Sama⁶, 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 diplomat was want of knowledge of French.

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 1866⁷, 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 Daimyo and the Shogun 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 Shogun, 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 Glover⁸, 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 Daimyo, while Roches persisted in the vain endeavour to bolster up the Shogun, 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 Shogun’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. Brunet was the artilleryman; he afterwards got into a scrape by taking command in the Shogun’s army, when it made its last stand at Wakamatsu in the northern province of Aizu. 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 Shogun’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 Shoguns 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 Iemitsu, the third Shogun of the dynasty – the grandson of its founder, Ieyasu. Iemitsu 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.

Kingdoms and governments and systems wear out like old clothes, and the once glorious, trefoil-crested jimbaori (war surcoat) of the Tokugawa Shogun 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.

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 Willis⁹ – 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 onself 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 geisha 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.

Our little colony was fated to have but a short span of life. On 26 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 passes 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 Edo 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 [a brothel] 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 Edo, 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 Ronin of the buildings which were in course of erection at Gotenyama¹⁰, a hill above the ill-famed borough of Shinagawa, a very pretty spot, which the Shogun had assigned as a site for the foreign Legations. It was a matter of common talk that Prince Ito¹¹ in his salad days was one of that body of Ronin; 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 Edo 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 Sengakuji¹² – where the forty-seven Ronin are buried. At the gate was an out-building occupied by a guard of the 9th Regiment, now the Norfolks, from Yokohama.

In addition to the English soldiers we had a large guard of Bettegumi, a corps of samurai of a rather humble class specially raised f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Sources
• Preface to the new edition
• Introduction
• Historical note
• ‘Old and new Japan’
• ‘Feudalism in Japan’
• From Memories
• ‘A holiday in Japan’
• The Garter Mission, 1906
• Gardens in Japan
• Tales of Old Japan
• Notes
• Editor’s Notes
• Index