Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  3

  Johnny Chinaman

  In the wake of the Meiji Restoration, Japan sought even stronger ties abroad. Students were sent to learn from the major powers of the era, regardless of the sides they may or may not have taken in the Boshin War. France, still the pre-eminent military nation in the world, was a major destination for servants of the new order, as were Prussia and the United States. In an age when one in every four ships on the sea flew the British flag, however, the United Kingdom was the favoured destination of the navally-minded men of Satsuma.

  Tōgō returned to Kagoshima for the summer, but by the autumn of 1869 he was sent by the Shimazu clan to Yokohama to study English. His lessons began with Shibata Daisuke, a native of Nagasaki who was supposedly an expert in barbarian tongues. Before long, he was taking extra tuition with the Englishman Charles Wirgman, the Yokohama-based expatriate better remembered as the correspondent of the Illustrated London News and publisher of the satirical magazine Japan Punch.1 After lessons with his English tutor, Tōgō moved on to a language institute where the 21-year-old military man was obliged to sit at desks with boys half his age. Learning from the West was the new craze and Tōgō was determined not to let it pass him by.

  ‘Several of us,’ Tōgō recounted, ‘who were anxious to get selected for study in England met one day and exchanged views regarding our chances of selection. One of the party proposed that we should go to Sekiryushi, a noted fortune-teller who lived in Shiba district in Tokyo. Then we went at once and consulted him. He told all but one of us that our wish would be fulfilled, but to the one excepted he said that he would be left out and advised him to give up all hope. Upon hearing this, the unlucky student became angry and went away in a huff. And, strange to say, he was the only one of us who was not selected.’2

  Tōgō’s return to school paid off in late 1870. He was ordered to report for duty aboard the corvette Ryūjō,3 then at anchor in Yokohama harbour. Until that day, Tōgō had been an employee of the fief of Satsuma and its ruling Shimazu clan. But with his admission aboard the Ryūjō he was now a sailor in the direct employ of the Emperor rather than aboard clan ships on loan.

  In 1871, Tōgō was one of twelve young officers selected to study abroad, in Britain itself. With both hair and clothes cut in Western style, Tōgō was put aboard a British steamer in Hong Kong, which took him and his fellow students across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Although the Suez Canal was open by this time, Tōgō and the other Japanese crossed into the Mediterranean by a land route, riding on camels across the isthmus and boarding another British steamer at Alexandria. On 24 May, he left instructions that he was to be woken when the passenger ship on which he was travelling came within sight of Cape Trafalgar. He was paged in the grey dawn of the 25th and eagerly ran on deck with his fellow travellers to see the famous cape in the distance.

  Once the Japanese students reached Portsmouth, they were taken on a trip to London by members of the Japanese Legation. They were taken to see the guards on parade at St James’s Palace, and treated to a trip to the theatre to see an unknown play. Kitted out in English fashions, the Japanese students were then sent their separate ways, in order to prevent them from leaning on their countrymen instead of learning English. Tōgō was quartered with a British family, in a homestay that was hoped to teach him the rudiments of British etiquette, and to hone his language skills still further. He was packed off to Cambridge to stay with the Reverend A D Capel, a kindly Methodist minister who was both Togo’s land-lord and instructor in higher mathematics.

  The Capel family had been excitedly awaiting Tōgō’s arrival, largely because one of the young sons had become convinced that all Japanese people were accomplished acrobats. He seems to have picked up this assumption after witnessing a performance by the Imperial Japanese Troupe a couple of years previously: a group of ‘jugglers’, one of whom went by the name ‘All Right’. Young Master Capel eagerly questioned the new arrival as to whether he knew them. A baffled Tōgō stoically explained that ‘jugglers and public entertainers belonged to a different class of society, and that therefore he knew nothing about little “All Right” or any of his companions’.4

  Despite this crushing blow to the young Capels’ expectations, Tōgō soon proved to be a hit with the minister’s children. He caused a great stir with the minister’s daughter Ella, by taking a hair from her head and knotting it carefully to a captured fly. He then tied the other end of the hair to a piece of paper identifying the fly as Ella Capel’s property, perplexing the near-sighted father of the house with the sight of what appeared to be a piece of paper floating around the drawing room in mid-air.

  Reverend Capel noticed that Tōgō demonstrated extreme patience with childish ways. Apart from the acrobat interrogation, the closest he came to losing his temper during the months he lodged with Capel was another prank. One of Capel’s other pupils, a young boy, had found some text which he presumed to be Japanese and had carefully copied it out onto a postcard. Tōgō was entirely flummoxed, either by the amateurish calligraphy or by the appearance of words from an unknown context on a postcard addressed to him, and puzzled over the note for some time before he realised that he was being strung along. He then threw away the card with the curt dismissal ‘Silly!’

  Capel was deeply impressed by Tōgō. ‘He … came to learn Western manners,’ noted the minister, ‘[but] whilst he was in my house I was constantly urging my pupils and others to learn Eastern manners. He had, I thought … more consideration for the feelings of his fellows than anyone I have ever had much to do with.’

  Tōgō’s education with the Capels comprised total immersion. He eagerly accompanied Capel to the church, where he followed the services in a prayer book, although he made sure to state that he was no Christian – Christianity was still illegal in Japan, and Tōgō was a loyal subject of the Emperor. He spent much of his time accompanied by two huge quarto dictionaries, which he even kept by his side at mealtimes, so as to better understand the things that the Capels said. Curiously, considering Tōgō’s future career and his biographers’ habit of presenting him as a driven, dedicated seaman, Capel noted that his lodger seemed lukewarm at best about the prospect of a naval career.

  ‘When he was with me,’ wrote Capel, ‘he had, so far as I could understand, no intention of becoming a sailor. One day I asked him what he was thinking of being, when he said he was going to be a sailor on dry land, which after many questionings, to say nothing of references to the big dictionaries, we discovered to mean that he hoped to go into the office which would correspond with our Admiralty.’

  Tōgō lived at Capel’s house for several months as his studies continued, but began to suffer from a worrying deterioration of his eyesight. Although no contemporary account of Tōgō is able to explain his condition, he came to believe that he was genuinely going blind. Consultations with a number of Cambridge specialists led him to try several painful courses of treatment. For some time, Tōgō kept his difficulties secret from his tutor, hoping to deal with the problem before it attracted the notice of the Japanese legation – his very real fear would have been that his many years of study would prove to be for nothing if he was unfit for military service. Eventually, however, Tōgō informed Capel, who forced him to tell the legation. This act may have saved Tōgō’s sight, as the young officer was swiftly put on a train to London’s Harley Street, where Tōgō finally received the treatment he required for the mysterious and unspecified condition.

  Many years later, at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, Capel was asked for his views on the character of his former lodger. He observed: ‘His patience and quiet endurance of all this suffering were quite a revelation to us. Had I not had this personal acquaintance with the way in which Japanese can endure and bear, I should have almost doubted the truth of many of the stories told of them during this present war, whereas with the remembrance of Tōgō so indelibly printed on my memory I could believe them all.’

  Tōgō also attended classes at a p
reparatory school for naval service, and had plainly hoped to study at the Royal Naval College.5 However, the British government informed the Japanese that the Royal Naval College was apparently (and suspiciously) ‘full’. Consequently, after some time spent in Portsmouth, and after possibly attending a handful of classes without actually gaining entry, Tōgō was forced to enrol elsewhere. Eventually, Tōgō was accepted to the Thames Nautical Training School, not quite the highbrow institution he might have hoped for. In years to come, both the Japanese and British press would refer to Tōgō’s ‘training’ in England, but both would conveniently forget that his studies were almost entirely undertaken in a school for merchant mariners.

  The Nautical Training School was based on an antiquated Royal Navy vessel, the Worcester, which had spent several years moored off the shore of Southend-on-Sea in the Thames Estuary. The Worcester, later incorporated within the Thames Nautical Training College, seemed happy to take Tōgō, quite possibly because enrolment numbers were down – the school’s Southend mooring had proved deeply unpopular with the students, who were often cut off from supply by the estuary’s rolling waters and rendered seasick by the pitching waves. In an effort to keep things calmer, the Worcester had recently been moved upriver to Greenhithe, near Dartford in Kent, where Tōgō came aboard.

  At that time the school was run by one Captain John Henderson-Smith, described by one of his class as ‘a most magnificent figure in his Cocked Hat and Epaulettes, usually sported on a prize day or some other equally important occasion; a genial man when the wind was fair, but a fearsome person to go before if you had been guilty of some wicked but boyish prank’.6

  Tōgō remembered Captain Henderson-Smith as ‘the kindest of masters and most generous of captains’, would keep a picture of the Captain in his office for the rest of his life, and corresponded regularly with his former mentor throughout his naval career.7 Smith himself, in later years, would damn the young Tōgō with faint praise.

  ‘Tōgō was an excellent fellow,’ recalled his teacher. ‘He was not what you would call brilliant, but a great plodder, slow to learn, but very sure when he had learnt; and he wanted to learn everything! He was a quiet, good-tempered young fellow, and as brave as a lion … The English boys used to tease him by calling him Johnny Chinaman and when they went too far, he would quietly face them and declare, “I’m not a Chinaman! Say it once more and I’ll break your bones!”’8 Whereas most graduates of the Nautical Training School’s went into civilian shipping, Tōgō’s military career ensured that he would become one of the institution’s most famous alumni, and he was remembered as such in the School’s commemorative history, in an account that similarly emphasised his resistance to taunts:

  The short, strongly-built little Japanese had to fight hard to achieve popularity as a foreigner among British boys, but his alert mind and his physical abilities, together with his unfailing good humour, carried him through. Tōgō endured the chaff without resentment, except when any would-be humorist called him a Chinaman. At that, the young Japanese would turn upon his tormentor with flashing eyes.

  ‘I’m not a Chinaman!’ he would cry. ‘If you call me that, you wait! When I am the admiral I’ll hang you on the yard arm!’9

  For the other cadets, there was no difference between China and Japan. As far as they were concerned Chinese and Japanese were yellow-skinned men with black hair, and that was all that mattered. Tōgō’s fellow cadets were similarly unkind about his unfamiliar name, which they consistently mispronounced. It became something of a joke on the Worcester to refer to him as ‘One-Go, Two-Go, Three-Go’, as demonstrated by an incident when the young Tōgō was confined to the ship for an unspecified minor offence. At the sound of the pipe that signalled shore leave for those who had merited it, someone inevitably turned to the Japanese cadet and asked: ‘Are you to go?’

  ‘No,’ answered Tōgō, sadly.

  Then a dozen or so cadets gathered around him chanting: ‘Don’t tell lies, you are To-go!’ It was all good fun as a rule, and what was meant in jest was always taken in the spirit in which it was offered.10

  Tōgō stoically endured such puerile larks, as well as the return to a school life for two long years of drills and backbreaking exercises – a strange reversal for the veteran of several battles. Tōgō’s shipmate for much of his Worcester term was a boy called Ernest Vanderstegen, who remembered the Japanese cadet as ‘silent and thoughtful, his main desire was to hear, and emulate’. Vanderstegen and Tōgō were both short in stature, and quite possibly the put-upon runts of their squad. They unfailingly drew the short straw for an unwelcome duty, raising the Blue Ensign on the ‘eighth bell’ on Sundays – a responsibility which required them to get an early night on Saturday and clamber from their hammocks in the small hours of the morning. It was thus, perhaps to Tōgō’s great fortune, that he found little to distract him ashore in England.

  As Vanderstegen recalled, Tōgō ‘like Horatio Nelson would prefer a ramble among the country lanes round Greenhithe to walking about the town’. His sole recorded complaint about his time on the Worcester related to the meagre food supply. ‘The English do not seem to eat as much as we Japanese do,’ Tōgō confessed. ‘What I suffered most from on the Worcester was the shortness of rations, which I ate up in a moment. I used then to soak bread in tea and eat it in large quantities, while the English students watched me in great surprise.’11.

  HMS Victory herself, flagship of Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, was preserved at Portsmouth, and the Worcester students were given the opportunity to see her for themselves on the 68th anniversary of Trafalgar. The boys were escorted aboard the famous ship, and asked to read the signal flags fluttering from her masts. It did not take Tōgō long to puzzle it out, but the message was one he might have guessed; the ageing Victory was flying her most famous captain’s most famous signal: ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’

  Captain Henderson-Smith addressed the boys on the deck of the Victory with a speech intended for the British, but favourably received by the lone Japanese: ‘The great Nelson is not dead,’ Henderson-Smith said. ‘His glorious spirit defies time. It will ever live to defend this country.’12

  While Tōgō carried on with his studies, Japan’s modernisation continued to cause friction in the Far East. Nor was everyone in Tōgō’s faction entirely happy with the change in affairs. Just as the Republic of Ezo had tried to create an enclave where samurai could continue their old way of life, some of the Satsuma men had begun to wish for somewhere to put their samurai skills to good use. Saigō Takamori, who Tōgō had once ferried to battles in the Boshin War, had even begun agitating for the Japanese to invade somewhere close by in order to put the soldiery to work.

  Japanese territory touched foreign powers at three points. The first, and hardest to define, was in the far north, where both Japanese and Russians had settled on the frozen island of Sakhalin. Negotiations proceeded over the desolate land, part of which was so close to the Russian mainland that it was often possible to walk from one to the other across the winter ice.

  The furthest point of contact was far to the south, where the waters around the Ryūkyū Islands met those off the shore of the Chinese possession of Taiwan. The closest was in the Straits of Tsushima, where Japanese waters met those of Korea. Both were points where Japan’s centuries of isolation had been secretly permeable – the Ryūkyū Islands were supposedly a Chinese tributary, and hence had natives who could pass with relative ease between the shores of China and the ‘Chinese’ enclaves in the Japanese ports of Hirado and Nagasaki. Similarly, the sailors of Tsushima were welcomed as traders in the ‘Japanese’ enclaves of certain south Korean ports, even though Korea itself remained resolutely closed to the outside world.

  The de facto ruler of Korea, the King’s father and regent, known as the Daewongun, protested about the change in the character of Japanese traders. There were, he noted, significantly more of them all of a sudden; and many appeared not to come from Tsushima a
t all, but were merely using Tsushima as a base of convenience to gain access to a closed market. Moreover, to the resolutely conservative Koreans, the new arrivals’ ‘European’ hairstyles and clothes were deeply unwelcome, and indeed offensive to Korea’s centuries-long adherence to old-fashioned Confucian values and costumes.

  A notice in a south-western Korean port unwisely echoed the Daewongun’s protest, but went so far as to describe the new Japan as ‘a country without laws’. What had begun as a discreet point about unlicensed traders soon escalated into a national insult, with some in the Japanese government even contemplating the sending of troops. True enough, this was exactly the sort of foreign campaign that Saigō Takamori was hoping for. However, he surprised many of his colleagues by opposing such a move. Instead, he suggested, it would be much better for Japan to send an envoy to Korea to talk matters over. When the Koreans inevitably offended the envoy, the Japanese would have a much better reason to invade. As if he needed to, Saigō nominated himself as a prime candidate to elicit offence from the Koreans, even if it cost him his own life. The arguments led to the resignation of a Prime Minister, and ended, at least for the time being, with Saigō and many members of his clique resigning from the government in disgust. Japan backed away from invading Korea, at least for now.

  Tōgō continued his studies, unaware of what personal implications such distant developments would have. In the early grey days of March 1874, the boys of the Worcester were drafted in to form an honour guard at the Gravesend docks, ready to welcome Queen Victoria’s second son Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, and his new bride, the Russian Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna. The couple had been married at the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg and escorted to England by a Russian warship. The Worcester boys formed part of the welcoming committee, and Tōgō was reportedly standing at Ernest Vanderstegen’s side when Maria Alexandrovna’s ship arrived at the jetty. Out in the Thames Estuary, the escorting warship let off an artillery salute. It was, believed Vanderstegen, the first time that the young Tōgō had heard a Russian warship fire a gun. The Worcester boys subsequently got a day-trip out of the festivities, under the pretext of presenting a wedding gift at Buckingham Palace.13