Richard Storry - Collected Writings

Richard Storry, Ian Nish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781903350119
• eBook ISBN: 9781134280650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume of the Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan series, published under the Japan Library imprint, collects the work of Richard Storry on contempory issues and the history of Japan.

Part I

Biography – The Otaru Years

First published in the Midorigaoka Shimbun, Otaru, Hokkaido, autumn 1937

1

Extracts from Richard Storry’s Writings in Midorigaoka Shimbun

Some Remarks upon the Prevailing Trends of Thought among University Students in England

(In two parts)

15 September 1937

I MUST CONFESS that I have chosen a very difficult topic for the subject of this article. It is never easy to follow the working of the individual mind, let alone the group-mind. Yet I shall presume to discuss the movements of thought among that very large and loosely organized community, the body of English university students.

My remarks, then, must not be received with an open ear; but rather regarded cautiously, accepted warily, and noted as the purely personal conclusions that arise from a strictly limited experience. For we must try to keep in mind – Oxford is not the only university in the British Isles. Can an Oxford man, but slightly acquainted with Cambridge, claim to speak on behalf of the students of universities in London and the great provincial cities? I am not sure that he can.

A well-known Oxford professor, now dead, walking down High Street with an Australian, was asked to point out a typical student of the university. ‘There’, he replied, as a student passed, ‘they are all typical.’ For, if students conform in some respects, each one remains an individual, different from any other.

Great diversity, indeed, is one of the characteristics of the English University. At first sight a highly confusing state of affairs. Quite apart from the widely different academic studies, there is a diversity of interests which becomes very apparent as soon as you look at the notice-board inside a college gate in Oxford, London, Cambridge or Manchester. Clustering on the wall are printed notices of a hundred clubs and societies. The number of them is truly remarkable. Associations abound for the study of foreign languages. There are French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish and Indian Societies. In Oxford we had a Japanese Club, as well as an organization devoted to the study and practice of Judo. Groups of students meet for the investigation of literary and artistic subjects; and every college has its debating society. The list of sporting and scientific interests is beyond count: it includes everything from fencing to ornithology.

How then is all this scattered energy unified in a common purpose? and why do English students with their separate enthusiasms and pursuits, yet conform broadly to one type, with a trend of thought that must influence, for good or ill, the life and character of the English nation?

There are, I think, two links which bind together the component parts into one whole. These, speaking crudely, are the influence of a common tradition, and the power of a common intellectual curiosity. The one reacts upon the other.

The tone of a university changes with each decade. Mr Gladstone, as a venerable Prime Minister, visited his old university [Oxford] and was distressed at what he regarded as an atmosphere of frivolity and idleness. A great deterioration, he feared, had taken place since his time.

Later events, the evidence of great lives, have proved him to have been gloriously wrong.

And because the students of today become the teachers, businessmen, rulers and ruled, saints and sinners of tomorrow, it is important to notice what the universities are thinking about at the present moment. And if, as I have said, I cannot speak on this subject with knowledge that is complete, I can refer to an experience that is at least recent.

It would be folly to deny that what we call ‘current history’ as it is being written all over the world today, plays a large part in the interests of the modern English student. More so, I am sure, than ten years ago.

At that time perhaps sport held first place. After the long trial of the Great European War there was a reaction which lasted for several years. It found expression not only in social life but also in art and literature. A kind of restless flippancy prevailed; and many intellectual experiments were made. Some of these were ridiculous; some debased. There was Peace and yet there was no peace. To read university student magazines of that period is to be shown a world of careless, unhappy uncertainty, in which few things were taken seriously.

25 December 1937

This period reached its climax some six years ago, with the financial crisis in the City of London, and the production of a very striking play, Cavalcade. This, as a social document presented theatrically, is of the utmost significance. After showing in succeeding acts the history of an English family against the background of national events since 1900, the drama closes on a note of wild chaos, intended to expose the typical unrest of the time.

Since then the tone of life, in universities as elsewhere in England, has become, once again, intensely serious. Good evidence of this is to be seen in the rather spectacular growth of a religious movement, much advertised, that has taken its name from the university of Oxford, in which it first developed on a large scale. Social historians of tomorrow will not fail to note the rapid rise, among the present-day universities of England, of what is called colloquially the ‘Group Movement’.

It is not easy to say how closely the New Seriousness is affecting the courses which English students are following. But many more than formerly study scientific subjects such as medicine, chemical research and engineering. Fewer devote themselves to courses of classical literature or philosophy. Particularly at London University the study of commercial matters and economics is receiving far greater attention. The interpretation of these facts would seem to be this: that the pressure of competition in the employment market of university graduates is casting its shadow on the curriculum of the universities themselves. For the moment the irresponsibilities of a few years ago have died a very natural death.

Poetry, too, appears to have deserted the fields of Arcady for the walls of Troy. Lawrence and the Sitwells, the gods of yesterday, are no longer so widely read and discussed among English students. Bridges, Blunden and other pastoral writers are almost forgotten. Even T.S. Eliot is being neglected, in the attentions that are being paid to younger and more aggressive poets.

In the vogue for satirical novels there is a marked decline. And the satirists themselves, forgetting caricature, are beginning to emphasize a moral, to preach with a purpose: as Huxley has done in his latest work. Among student-novelists the same influence is to be seen. Three years ago light novels by students were often published; and the interest they aroused was lively, if short-lived. They tended to be exercises in style, essays in wit, of a highly effervescent nature. Those days are past. Student-novels are less common, and their style and subject matter are more intense.

There is still, of course, the keen interest in Sport that has always been pronounced in English universities. Rowing, for a time faintly unpopular, is now reviving under the stimulus, at long last, of an Oxford victory. If the crowds on the river bank, as the boats go by, are not so great as in former days, it is probably because more students now are playing other games, that are held in almost as high esteem as the traditional university sport, rowing. If students have become more earnest in their work, they still take their games as seriously as ever.

From many points of view, all tolerated, new opinions shape themselves, and conservative truths are reaffirmed in new guise. Out of this melting pot of individual lives, we can still pick out the average intelligent English student. He is perplexed, amused, depressed and stimulated by different thoughts from those which helped to educate his father; and his son, in turn, will argue fresh opinions. But that is of small importance: for the critical spirit of English Universities savoured by tradition is an unofficial but nonetheless recognized part of their curriculum.

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25 April 1940

News Item

Instructor Storry, much loved by us all, who spent four years at Midorigaoka, has come to the end of his appointment and departed for Britain by way of the United States on 10 April. Large numbers of students gave him a send-off at Otaru Station and sang Auld Lang Syne. Storry, his glasses clouding up, called ‘I shall come again. Sayonara, Sayonara’ and set off for the south.

It is said that he is going to get married. Plans from now on are not clear but there may be an intention of returning to Japan if he marries.

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16 November 1949

Richard Storry’s letter from Motor vessel Cyclops, Kobe Harbour

To return to Japan after an absence of nine years is both a sad and an interesting experience; sad, because one realizes again – as in Europe – the moral and material havoc caused by the War and all that led up to it; interesting because one has the opportunity of meeting old friends and acquaintances once more and of seeing again familiar places which have many associations with one’s recollection of days before the war. However, very much to my regret, I have not been able to visit Hokkaido, to see Midorigaoka where, from 1937 to early 1940, 1 lived and worked, finding much interest and tranquillity in the sound of the ‘semi’ among the trees in summer, the sight of the skiers in the snowy slopes in winter, and the spectacle of the spring blossom gracing the long hill, ‘Jigokuzaka’, from the city up to the College. It is a pity that I was unable to revisit the scene of these pleasant memories. Nevertheless, I shall certainly make the journey some day. When that will be I cannot exactly predict. But the happy day will surely come. I should like to send my warmest greetings to ‘Midorigaoka’.

The College, I understand, is now a University. As the leading College of Commerce in Japan (or so I believe) this change of status is very well merited. In my own days in Otaru I often thought that the round caps of the students could well be exchanged for the square caps of university students. For a cosmopolitan atmosphere certainly existed in the Kosho before the war, and there was an intellectual curiosity, as well as an attention to learning, which was not unsuitable to the style and dignity of a university.

The ship on which I am travelling to England sails tomorrow. And as I leave the shores of Japan for the second time in nine years I feel once again sad to be leaving friends – many of whom, through my own fault, I have been unable to meet. To them, and indeed to the Midorigaoka, which I remember so well, I must bid not farewell but ‘au revoir’. Best wishes, success, and many generations of useful service to the University on the Green Hill!!

G.R. Storry

First published in Proceedings of the British Association of Japanese Studies (BAJS), History of International Relations Vol. 1

2

Hokkaido in the Late Thirties

THIS VERY BRIEF PAPER is what my Otaru students would have called a mandan – a word fairly translated as ‘gossip; desultory conversation; idle or rambling talk’.

I have to begin by saying that my first-hand experience of Hokkaido in the Thirties was restricted to a period of not quite three years; from June 1937 to April 1940. Moreover, the Hokkaido that I knew was very much the Otaru/Sapporo region of the island.

What I shall try to discuss are my recollections of certain political events and the mood of the Japanese at the time as I observed it. I kept a diary for much of my period in Otaru; and although now embarrassed by the naïve character of the comments I then committed to paper, I console myself with the thought that a young man of twenty-three, arriving in an environment of which he had absolutely no previous knowledge, could not be expected to begin to appreciate, much less interpret, the developments taking place around him.

A diary does at least serve, years later, to stimulate afresh the thoughts associated with the ‘green spring’, seishun, of one’s life.

I had been in Hokkaido just three weeks when the Marco Polo Bridge Affair occurred on 7 July 1937. It will be recalled that during the rest of that month the situation deteriorated, with the Chinese moving troops north in large numbers, and the Japanese for their part reinforcing their North China garrison. Local efforts to secure an armistice failed, and on 29 July the Japanese army occupied Peiping (as it was then called). On that same day there took place one of those violent tragedies that excite public opinion and make a peaceful settlement at a moment of crisis much more difficult to achieve. This was the Tungchow massacre, an event noted, of course, by historians but one which neither at the time, nor later, was properly assessed in terms of its effect on Japanese opinion. At Tungchow, a few miles east of Peking, the local Chinese Peace Preservation Corps suddenly attacked the Japanese garrison – then temporarily reduced to company strength of some 120 men – and slaughtered most of the local Japanese civilians, men, women, and children. I thought at the time that this massacre rendered the chances of peace almost negligible. Needless to say, the Tungchow affair was given sensational coverage by the Japanese press.

Soon enough the fighting in China spread from the north to the Shanghai region. In August I was in Tokyo; and I recall that every shop radio in the hot sunnier evenings blared forth two names – ‘Oyama’ and ‘Saito’. They were the naval lieutenant and petty officer killed by Chinese soldiers near Hungjao airfield on 9 August – an incident that triggered off subsequent hostilities. There ensued the lengthy and savage battle of Shanghai. Part of its opening phase, it will be remembered, was the holocaust created when Chinese planes, intending to attack the Izumo and missing their target, bombed the Palace Hotel in the International Settlement and the Great World amusement centre in the French Concession. Among those killed in the raids was Robert Karl Reischauer, whom his brother – in the dedication in Japan: The Story of a Nation – describes as ‘the first American casualty in World War II’. And indeed after the Shanghai battle began I felt instinctively that the Second World War was in its opening phase.

For Japan was placed on a semi-war footing. As the weeks and months went by the spirit of hijo-ji, ‘the Time of Emergency’, became increasingly pervasive and demanding. The streets and railway stations echoed with the cheers of those who were seeing off a male relative to the colours. Other manifestations were: the ‘austerity’ days (on the 7th of every month) with their hi-no-maru bento; the senninbari (‘healthbands of a thousand stitches’); the air raid exercises; the lantern processions (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Richard Storry and Japanese Studies in Europe
• Part I: Biography – The Otaru Years
• Part II: ‘Double Patriots' – the Pre-war Years
• Part III: War and Peace
• Part IV: ‘Second Country' – The Post-war Years
• Part V: Biographical Writings
• Part VI: General Culture and Japan
• Bibliography
• Index