Britain and Japan

Biographical Portraits, Vol. IV

Hugh Cortazzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136641473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia asiática

The continuing success of this series, highly regarded by scholars and the general reader alike, has prompted The Japan Society to commission this fourth volume, devoted as before to the lives of key people, both British and Japanese, who have made significant contributions to the development of Anglo-Japanese relations. The appearance of this volume brings the number of portraits published to over one hundred.The portraits cover diplomats (from Mori Arinori to Sir Francis Lindley), businessmen (from William Keswick to Lasenby Liberty), engineers and teachers (from W. E. Ayrton to Henry Spencer Palmer), scholars and writers (from Sir Edwin Arnold to Ivan Morris), as well as journalists, judo masters and the aviator Lord Semphill. In all, there are a total of 34 contributions.

PART 1

Diplomats

1

Mori Arinori, 1847–89: from Diplomat to Statesman

ANDREW COBBING

Mori Arinori

IN JANUARY 1880, Mori Arinori arrived in London as the third resident minister from Japan to be appointed to the Court of St James. Still only 32 years of age, he brought with him a reputation as an outspoken champion of radical social reform. Enlisted by the new government after the Meiji Restoration, he had quickly gained notoriety in 1869 for his infamous proposal to remove the samurai’s traditional right to bear his swords. Then, in his time as Japan’s first minister to the United States from 1870 to 1873, he had advocated religious freedom and even suggested adopting English as the official language. On his return from Washington he had gone on to found the Meirokusha, Japan’s first modern intellectual society, which spread progressive ideas through the distribution of its Meiroku Journal. This was the man whom the indefatigable Victorian traveller Isabella Bird described as an ‘advanced liberal’ when she met him on a visit to Tokyo in 1878.¹

Once likened to a ‘lone pine atop a winter mountain’, the young Mori frequently cut an isolated figure in the world of Meiji politics.² Four years of diplomatic service in London, however, were to effect a profound change in his outlook and bring him closer to the mainstream of government affairs. He returned in 1884 as a statesman in the making, and went on to impose such a centralized and elitist structure on Japan’s education system that he was even suspected of forsaking his radical past. Ironically, perhaps, the catalyst in Mori’s apparent transition from liberal to conservative was none other than Herbert Spencer, the celebrated Victorian pioneer of social science. It was under his guidance that Mori would consciously set about diagnosing the prevailing maladies in the body politic of Japan and devise his own prescriptions to revitalize the Meiji State.

On their arrival early in 1880, Mori, his wife and their two young sons moved into the Japanese legation building at No. 9 Kensington Gardens in Notting Hill. Clara Whitney, an American friend of the family passing through, observed: ‘We found them luxuriously situated and very well pleased with London.’ Equipped with an ‘elegant barouch [sic]’, Mori, it seems, felt quite at home, as he escorted his guests to city sights from the Tower of London to St Paul’s. Some weeks later, Clara recorded how, on one occasion at dinner, ‘Mr Mori regaled us with tales of his boyhood and what a savage he was when he first came to London some fourteen years ago.’³

Mori’s appointment as minister to Britain thus marked something of a nostalgic return. Born in 1847 in Satsuma, Japan’s southernmost domain, he received a traditional Confucian education in his early years under the strict supervision of his parents – he told Clara over dinner they were ‘real ancient Samurai’.⁴ He was sixteen years old when the Royal Navy bombarded his home-town of Kagoshima in 1863, an experience that prompted Satsuma to try and learn from Britain rather than challenge the military supremacy of the Treaty Powers. Two years later, he was one of the nineteen young Satsuma officers who were sent abroad to study as a result, smuggled out of the country in defiance of the Tokugawa regime’s ban on overseas travel. He spent two years at University College, London, including trips to Russia and France. Increasingly short of funds, however, he and his five remaining companions were persuaded by their mentor, Laurence Oliphant, to cross the Atlantic for a further year abroad at a Utopian Christian colony in New York State. There, in the company of the eccentric Thomas Lake Harris’ ‘Brotherhood of the New Life’, he pursued his studies on life in the West to the extent that, when he returned to Japan in 1868, he brought with him not just polished English skills but also a passionate belief in the powers of rationalism and an almost Western-style persona that set him apart from other young leaders in the new Meiji government.

Twelve years later, back in London, the Mori family spent the first few months of their stay in England entertaining guests, attending diplomatic functions, and travelling abroad on short holidays to Holland and Switzerland. By now they were accustomed to the social side of diplomatic life, as Isabella Bird had noted when remarking that ‘his wife dresses tastefully in English style, and receives his guests along with himself’.⁵ Perhaps the most singular development in these early months was on 1 June, with the removal of the Japanese Legation to a new location at No. 9 Cavendish Square. Costing more than double the rent of their former residence, Ernest Satow thought it ‘a fine house’ when he called on Mori for lunch some time later. He found ‘his wife as bashful as ever’, and commented that the boys were now speaking English ‘quite naturally’, having ‘entirely forgotten their Japanese’.⁶

MORI AS MEIJI DIPLOMAT

Mori’s new surroundings were in keeping with his keen awareness of outward appearances. In practice, his everyday duties consisted largely of correspondence relating to the Imperial Navy, from purchasing and refitting cruisers to training Japanese cadets and preparing visits to dockyards. As one attaché at the legation later recalled, the diplomatic staff also spent much of their time polishing their social skills and refining their knowledge of current affairs so as ‘to show what a fine impression the Japanese could make on foreign soil’.⁷ This was all part of the Foreign Ministry’s new initiative to try and raise Japan’s profile in the eyes of the Treaty Powers. Ultimately, the objective was to win support for a fundamental revision of the ‘unequal’ Ansei commercial treaties of 1858, which the Meiji government had inherited from the Tokugawa regime. Now the strategy was to attain recognition for Japan as a ‘civilized’ state by conforming to Western standards in institutional development and the trimmings of diplomatic protocol. As an imposing house at a central location in London, No. 9 Cavendish Square was eminently suited to the task.

Japanese hopes of revising these treaties had initially foundered in 1872 during the Iwakura Mission’s visit to Washington, when Mori himself was there as minister. The issue had then pursued him in successive diplomatic posts, as minister to China from 1875 to 1877 and subsequently as assistant to the Foreign Minister, Terashima Munenori. There were some encouraging signs, particularly when Yoshida Kiyonari obtained a promise of support from the Americans in 1877. This was conditional on the blessing of the other Treaty Powers, however, and came to nothing when Britain insisted that it endangered free trade, prompting the resignation of both Terashima and Mori the following year.

When Mori was next dispatched to London by Terashima’s successor, Inoue Kaoru, his assigned mission was to solicit British approval for a Tokyo conference on treaty revision. Convinced that justice was on his side, he arrived full of confidence and impatient for success, but unprepared for the blithe indifference of the Foreign Office. As Hall has pointed out, ‘Britain, with the greatest vested interest in her treaty rights, was least responsive to Japanese hopes for revision’.⁸ Now in the grip of a major economic slump, the British were guarding their overseas interests with jealous care. Moreover, in the mind of the ageing Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, Japan’s affairs paled in significance in comparison with more pressing matters like the Afghan War, French expansion in Africa and the Khedive’s appeal for British protection in Egypt. Mori’s overtures also met with suspicion from Sir Harry Parkes, his counterpart in Japan, who was now back in Britain on leave. In recent years, in fact, Parkes had frequently been at loggerheads with Mori in Tokyo over the growing menace of cholera, for he saw his efforts to impose quarantine controls in the treaty ports as an underhand attempt to reassert Japanese jurisdiction and undermine the commercial treaties.⁹

The response of the Foreign Office was to seize the initiative by sending circulars to other Treaty Powers behind Mori’s back calling for a conference to be held in London instead.¹⁰ Mori reacted by confronting Granville with Japan’s demands for some fundamental changes to the treaties. In April 1881, he called on him at his Walmer Castle home with Parkes also in attendance, only to be told that Japan should concentrate on nothing more than partial amendments.¹¹ Granville then rejected Japan’s agenda altogether and proposed a summit in Tokyo to address the limited issue of tariff reform alone. Convinced that the European Powers were orchestrating a campaign to dictate their own terms to Japan, a furious Mori complained to Itō Hirobumi in October that Britain, now in league with Bismarck, was simply trying to protect her reputation and commercial power. His efforts were to no avail, however, as the following month Inoue accepted the Europeans’ plan and a Tokyo summit was opened in January 1882. The talks lasted for several months with little tangible result, in spite of Inoue’s attempts to impress his guests with lavish Western-style receptions. It was to be another decade before the British, prompted by fears of Russian expansion in the East, showed genuine receptivity to the Meiji government’s crusade against the unequal treaties.

Mori felt that Japan had simply caved in to European pressure, but with the centre stage of negotiations moving to Tokyo there was little he could do. Later, when the summit was over he would feel vindicated enough to remind Britain of Japan’s claims to be treated on equal terms with the other Western powers. The Foreign Office, however, either ignored his letters or delayed for weeks or months before sending any reply. When he finally did manage to meet Granville in person, he found it impossible to conceal his frustration. Granville, under fire, considered his tone ‘dictatorial and presumptuous’, and on more than one occasion, Inoue Kaoru in Tokyo was called upon to try and soothe the British by reminding them that Mori was still ‘a very young man,’ or that his language was ‘unauthorized’.¹²

Mori, in truth, was not a natural diplomat. He owed his posts in Washington and London rather to his undoubted intellect, his command of English and his clan affiliation. After all, the Foreign Ministry in these years was filled with Satsuma compatriots such as Terashima, Yoshida and Sameshima Naonobu, all of them veterans of the domain’s expedition to Britain in 1865. Now in 1882, with negotiations out of his hands, he found relief from his ordeals with the Foreign Office in the more relaxing atmosphere of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. His status as minister carried with it the privilege of honorary membership, which not only enabled him to indulge his passion for billiards, his only known hobby, but gave him the opportunity to meet some of the most prominent Victorian intellectuals of the day.¹³ As a somewhat scathing article observed the following year, ‘It cannot be said that Mr Mori has achieved signal success as a diplomatist,’ but it did concede that ‘his reputation as a philosophical disputant is quite formidable,’ even if this was ‘scarcely quite what Japan expects of her Minister in London’.¹⁴

ATHENAEUM DAYS WITH SPENCER

Soon the Athenaeum was ‘the pivot of Mori’s social life’.¹⁵ This allowed him to renew his acquaintance with another member, Herbert Spencer, who spent much of his time there whenever he was in London. Mori had first met him during a brief trip to Britain in 1873, having read his works extensively in his years as minister in Washington. This in itself was not unusual, for Spencer was something of a cult figure among progressive thinkers in Japan, where some of his works were already available in translation. Spencer had set about applying Darwinian theory to the world of human relations in order to chart organic models of social and political evolution. By distinguishing between the Knowable (Science) and the Unknowable (Religion), this offered Japanese readers a refreshingly accessible approach to Western civilization, uncomplicated by the mysteries of the Christian tradition.¹⁶ Moreover, his emphasis on minimal government interference was welcomed by many in the growing campaign for liberal rights in Japan who found their interests effectively marginalized by the authoritarian approach of the Meiji government.

Mori’s visits to the Athenaeum were also of more than passing interest to Spencer, as he frequently cited the case of Japan in support of his own theories and was now seeking a reliable source of information for his new project, Part V (Political Institutions) of his major work, ‘Principles of Sociology’.¹⁷ Usually highly selective in his choice of acquaintances, he actively cultivated Mori’s company, once hosting a dinner party held at the club in his honour. Mori returned the compliment by introducing him to a number of his own contacts including Ernest Satow, Itō Hirobumi and Itagaki Taisuke, founder of the Jiyūtō (Liberal Party), Japan’s first genuine political party.¹⁸

The intellectual climate of the Athenaeum served to reinforce Mori’s general optimism for the future. At the time, prominent thinkers like Samuel Smiles and Spencer, originally doctors and engineers by training rather than men of letters, were expounding ‘an enlightenment of steam locomotives and gas-lit streets’.¹⁹ Now at the height of the age of Jules Verne, they were confident that nothing was beyond the capacity of man and machine, a message that appealed to the radical side of Mori’s nature and his belief in human progress. Impressed by the utility of electric power, for example, he displayed ‘a typical mid-Victorian faith in the unlimited peaceful potentialities of scientific discovery’.²⁰

In the field of political ideas, however, the Athenaeum experience served to temper Mori’s radical spirit. By Spencer’s own admission, in fact, the counsel he gave him was considerably more cautious than the views he espoused in his written works. As his diary record of the very first meeting with Mori back in 1873 reveals, ‘he came to ask my opinion about the reorganization of Japanese institutions. I gave him conservative advice – urging that they would eventually have to return to a form not much in advance of what they had and that they ought not to attempt to diverge widely from it.’²¹ In future years he would recall his talks with Mori in London ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Hugh Cortazzi
• British Personalities and Japan, about whom monographs have been written
• Lists of Biographical Portraits (in earlier volumes)
• Alphabetical List of Contributors to this Volume
• PART 1: DIPLOMATS
• PART 2: BUSINESSMEN
• PART 3: ENGINEERS & TEACHERS IN MEIJI JAPAN
• PART 4: SCHOLARS & WRITERS
• PART 5: PHOTOGRAPHERS, JUDO MASTERS & JOURNALISTS
• PART 6: AN AVIATOR & TWO THEMES
• Notes
• Index