Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  The final order for Tōgō and his fellow students was a round-the-world cruise in 1875, aboard the training vessel Hampshire. The Hampshire sailed out of the Thames in February and rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 19 April. The object of the mission was to put the cadets’ training fully to the test, but also to inure them to life on a long sea voyage – the Hampshire did not put ashore until ten weeks after she left London, when she reached Melbourne, Australia. There, Tōgō and the other cadets had two months of relative freedom, sightseeing and travel, before the Hampshire weighed anchor again for the long journey home via Cape Horn.

  It was while Tōgō was in Australia that news arrived of Japan’s latest great naval undertaking, a punitive expedition against Taiwan. For a Satsuma man like Tōgō, it would have been the worst of missed opportunities, an extension of Satsuma’s sphere of influence deep into the southern seas and an early test of Japan’s young navy.

  The first Japanese ambassador to China began his assignment by protesting about the massacre of some shipwrecked Okinawan fishermen by Taiwanese aboriginal tribesmen. The protest had two powerful implications, the first being that Okinawa and, by association, the entire chain of the Ryūkyū Islands, was Japanese territory and had no business claiming to be a Chinese tributary any more. Moreover, the eastern coast of Taiwan was notoriously lawless, and the Chinese would eventually admit to being unable to exercise much control over it. Some interest groups within Japan thought that this was the ideal opportunity for Japan to seize eastern Taiwan, with the tacit assumption that since the Chinese could not control it, they could not lay claim to it.

  Amid Chinese protestations that eastern Taiwan, albeit dangerous, was still under their jurisdiction, 3,600 Japanese troops landed on the Taiwanese coast for a punitive expedition in 1874. The soldiers were largely from southern Japan, particularly Saga (the Nagasaki area) and Tōgō’s home domain of Satsuma. The expedition was led by Saigō Takamori’s younger brother Tsugumichi and had Tōgō’s former vessel, the Ryūjō, as its flagship. Tempting fate, the younger Saigō sent word to the Chinese that his mission was underway, hoping to establish that he was not ‘invading’ Chinese territory at all, but helping the Chinese deal with unruly elements on their own borders.

  The Chinese begged to differ, and sent two warships across the Taiwan Strait. Busy shooting at aborigines, Saigō met with the Chinese envoys, and assured them that matters of jurisdiction were not his concern, but that a Japanese envoy was sure to be sorting matters out with the Chinese even as they spoke. In fact, diplomatic wrangles stretched out for more than six months. Saigō’s men killed a couple of dozen Taiwanese on arrival, and spent the rest of the long, hot summer succumbing to a variety of tropical diseases. By the time the Chinese unhappily paid out an indemnity to make the Japanese leave, Saigō had lost over 500 men. The Japanese withdrew from Taiwan, satisfied that, in paying damages to the murdered fishermen’s families, the Chinese had inadvertently conceded that the Ryūkyū Islands were part of Japan and not part of China. While the ‘Taiwan’ Expedition achieved nothing in Taiwan itself, its indirect outcome was the annexation of a lengthy strip of islands and their attendant seas, the whole Ryūkyū chain, stretching from the edge of Satsuma for 400 miles to the south-west.14

  A similar incident threatened to unfold in Korea, where a Japanese navy survey vessel was fired upon by Korean shore batteries. The incident led to the dispatch of several hundred Japanese marines; and by 1876, Korea had been forced to sign a treaty of friendship with Japan. In a single generation, the Japanese had transformed themselves from the victims of imperialism to its agents – the ‘Opening of Korea’ seemed almost designed as a re-enactment of the way that the American ‘Black Ships’ had first opened Japan.

  Throughout these machinations, Tōgō was stuck in Australia or aboard the Hampshire, while news drifted in of his elders’ successes – Saigō Tsugumichi was only a few years his senior. However, the after-effects of the Taiwan Expedition and the Korean treaty of friendship would continue to affect Tōgō, even upon his return to distant England.

  Tōgō graduated second in his class on the Worcester, a fine achievement, although he was appreciably older than most of his classmates and had significantly more experience than many of them. With the end of their studies, the boys scattered to their homes or to their first postings aboard merchant ships. But while his fellow students were now only beginning their careers, Tōgō was returned to the middle of his; the Japanese legation ordered him to a new posting in London, caused, at least in part, by the way that the distant Taiwan Expedition had played out.

  The Taiwan Expedition had succeeded, in part, because of the sluggish Chinese response. While Saigō and his men had been succumbing to malaria and dysentery on the east coast, the Chinese commander Shen Baochen slowly shipped 10,000 Chinese soldiers across the strait, ready to fight for Taiwan if necessary. With the Japanese departure, he had then shipped them all back again. The Japanese invasion ‘fleet’ had only had three ships, and the Ryūjō was a museum piece. Had Shen been able to rustle up enough of the Chinese Navy’s twenty-one available steam ships, he might have been able to sink the invasion force before it could even reach Taiwan. With a bit of luck, he might even have been able to manage it with just the two vessels whose impotent late arrival led to little more than unreliable assurances from Saigō.15

  Even if this had not occurred to the Chinese, it certainly occurred to the Japanese. The Admiralty in Tokyo ordered three new warships for the navy – the Hiei, Fusō and Kongō – to be built in Britain to even the odds in the future. The instructions reached London as Tōgō neared the end of his studies, and he found himself reassigned by the Legation to the role of ‘inspector’. Tōgō was charged with observing the construction of the Fusō at the Samuda Brothers shipyard among the docks of the Isle of Dogs on the River Thames.16

  Tōgō found lodgings at the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, just across the river from the docks. Each day, he made the short ferry crossing to see the armoured, steel-hulled frigate Fusō taking shape at the Samuda shipyard. Tōgō and eight of his fellow trainees were now expected to remain in Britain until the ships were completed, and to then make their way home on board. This simple delay may have saved Tōgō’s life. In the years he had been away, some of his fellow Satsuma men had embraced the new order, particularly in naval service – there were many Satsuma men in the Japanese navy. However, many others considered themselves to have been betrayed by the Meiji Restoration. They had overthrown the Shōgun because he had failed in his duty to preserve the purity of Japan and expected the new order would be different. There remained considerable debate over precisely what ‘different’ meant. For Saigō Takamori, alongside whom Tōgō had fought during the Meiji Restoration, the new order was supposed to represent a return to old values, a resurgence of the prominence of the samurai spirit. And that, inevitably, would mean war.

  Since resigning from office in 1873, Saigō Takamori had set up a series of schools in the old Satsuma domain. Although the curriculum included the Chinese classics, Saigō’s academies were samurai training grounds in all but name, concentrating on the martial arts and military drills. The schools reflected a general anti-government attitude among the former samurai families of Satsuma, whose position had been gradually undermined and, as of 1877, would no longer receive their rice stipends from the former feudal lord. Government agents sent into Satsuma to spy on the schools were captured, tortured, and made to ‘confess’ that they were assassins sent to kill Saigō. A steamship sent to confiscate arms in Kagoshima was approached by seven or eight hostile boats, and forced to cut her anchor cable and run for safer waters. In February 1877, while Tōgō was still supervising the construction of the Fusō, the Satsuma Rebellion broke out in earnest, with Saigō’s army marching on Kumamoto Castle.

  Saigō’s bid to reassert the old samurai ways was doomed to failure. Kumamoto Castle held out until Government forces came to its rescue in April. Saigō’s army fell back in a s
eries of defeats, until by September, it had been reduced to its leader and fifty diehard rebels. Severely wounded, Saigō either committed suicide or bled to death (modern myth prefers the former) on Shiroyama, a hill outside Kagoshima, close to the original location of his first academy. One of the men to die with him was Tōgō’s brother Sokuro, who had once been duped in childhood into drinking a draught of peppered water. Another of Tōgō’s surviving brothers had joined the rebellion, but had escaped with serious wounds.

  Tōgō Sokuro had fallen in the chaotic last stand on Shiroyama. He had been hurriedly buried in a mass grave by his comrades-in-arms, and would have remained there were it not for his mother, Masuko. After government forces restored peace to Satsuma and proclaimed the reign of the samurai truly over, Masuko walked up to the burial site on Shiroyama and dug up her son’s body. Out of a superstitious desire not to allow any metal object to touch Sokuro’s corpse, Masuko used her bare hands, dragging Sokuro up from the ground and then arranging for his remains to be carried downhill to the Tōgō family cemetery. The news of the grim journey only reached Tōgō himself second-hand, long after his brother’s remains had been re-interred. ‘Had I not been in England,’ Tōgō commented, ‘I would have expired as the smoke on Shiroyama, sharing the fate of Saigō Takamori.’17

  By serving as a naval officer thousands of miles from home, Tōgō had inadvertently avoided the pressures that doubtless would have been brought to bear on him as a loyal son of the Satsuma regime. Almost everything that he had once stood for had now been wiped out by the new order; nothing remained for Tōgō but to stay on the path that had been chosen for him ever since he boarded a ship. There was no such thing as a Satsuma man any more, only Navy men.

  4

  Delicate Diplomacies

  ‘A ship’s commander,’ Tōgō commented to younger officers in later life, ‘is not infrequently placed in such a position that he must make important decisions unconnected with tactics or strategy. If, therefore, he has allowed his mind to concentrate only on naval problems, he will be apt to commit some gross error when he suddenly comes face to face with a delicate diplomatic situation, and his action will be detrimental to his country. I do not, of course, suggest that you should neglect your study of matters appertaining to your profession, but to diplomacy also you must give a great deal of attention. The man untrained in these questions will often be deceived by apparently insignificant details behind which lie motives which may lead to serious consequences. The naval officer who can detect such things will be of the utmost value to his country.’1

  For sixteen years, Tōgō would learn this maxim the hard way, when placed in several situations where he was obliged to think less as a naval officer and more as a diplomat. For a generation, Tōgō’s battles were fought with flags and signals, his victories won by lateral thinking and careful planning, his potential foes often dissuaded from fighting at all.

  Tōgō returned to Japan in 1878, as one of only three Japanese officers among the largely British shakedown crew of the Hiei. The Hiei returned along the course Tōgō had followed many years before, stopping off for coal in Malta and Port Said, sailing through the Suez Canal, and putting ashore at Aden and Singapore on the long cruise home. For the next sixteen years, Tōgō made a continued, steady progress through the ranks of the Japanese navy, rising in rank, often transferred between vessels, as he embarked upon the standard practises of a navy in peacetime – cruises and inspections designed to familiarise officers with the waters and harbours of any area likely to become the scene of conflict. But although Tōgō spent a generation without any full-scale wars, his experiences were anything but uneventful. In the behaviour of Tōgō the junior officer, we see much of the making of the man who would find international fame in the early days of the 20th century.

  Tōgō remained on the Hiei for several months, before being transferred to the Fusō, that same vessel he had watched take shape in London’s Docklands. Now Lieutenant Tōgō, he experienced a curious reversal of the taunting he had endured in England, as younger officers trained in the Japanese home islands reacted with barely suppressed amusement to Tōgō’s curious use of foreign terminology. Less than two years after returning to Japan, now promoted to Lieutenant Commander, Tōgō was transferred again for two years of service on Jingei, the Imperial yacht and the last paddle-steamer built for the Japanese navy.2

  The Jingei had taken almost as long as her new Executive Officer to get into service. Locally built at Yokosuka, her active service had been repeatedly delayed by design considerations and the march of progress. Although officially ‘launched’ in 1873, the Jingei was still undergoing refits and fine-tuning when Tōgō arrived onboard in early 1880, and was barely pronounced complete by the time Tōgō left her in December 1881. While the Jingei looked impressive when under full sail, her armament was light, and her propulsion system was an outmoded paddle wheel – the last time such a one was used in the Japanese navy.

  Tōgō’s service on the Jingei was not characterised by any moments of naval brilliance. The vessel performed its Imperial duties and ferried Japanese attachés in local waters; but its Executive Officer was remembered by his shipmates only for his dependability and his reticence. ‘In the Jingei,’ one remembered many years later, ‘he was always quiet and never talked very much.’3

  Despite the Jingei’s apparent unsuitability for full and proper service for much of his time aboard, Tōgō still kept her crew busy. True to his duty, he was found every morning supervising the scrubbing of the decks, his feet bare and his trousers rolled up, whatever the weather. Tōgō was also reported to be a stickler for the correct protocols, which, for a man in his position, required him to supervise every action by the seamen. It became something of a respectful joke on the Jingei that Tōgō could be found on deck in all weathers, all but anonymous underneath a tent-like raincoat if necessary, waiting for his men to gather the sails.

  In February 1881,4 partway through his service on the Imperial yacht, Tōgō got married. His bride, whom he had not seen before the day of the ceremony, was the 19-year-old Kaieda Tetsu, the daughter of a prominent Kagoshima man, agreed by both Kaieda and Tōgō family elders to be a reasonable match for a naval officer in his thirties. Mrs Tōgō was doomed to a life without her husband’s presence. Shortly after their perfunctory marriage ceremony, she moved in with her mother-in-law Masuko and spent a year at the Tōgō family’s Kagoshima home, where she occupied herself with a small but lucrative home business making decorative matchboxes. Tetsu brought with her a substantial dowry, likely to be of great use to an impoverished widow’s son with little to his name but his uniform. Tōgō wasted little time putting his wife’s wealth to use, purchasing a modest house on a hill in Tokyo, which would remain the family home for the rest of his days.

  Mrs Tōgō was a traditional Japanese wife, given complete authority in the home. Her husband appeared to pay her little heed, and maintained his notorious silences even when off-duty in his own house. He busied himself, if he busied himself at all, in his garden, and left all household matters to his wife, except one. In matters of wall decorations, Tōgō asked and was granted permission to put up pictures of naval subjects. He seemed oblivious to the effect the pictures had, as they only served to remind Tetsu of the distances and dangers between herself and her often absent spouse.5

  Three days before the end of 1881, Lieutenant Commander Tōgō was made the Vice Captain of the Amagi, a small wooden despatch vessel that might be better described as a gunboat.6 Like the Jingei, the Amagi was locally built and hence a little behind the times. Unlike the Imperial yacht, which was for show only, the Amagi was expected to participate in naval actions, both in Japanese waters and beyond.

  It was not long before Lieutenant Commander Tōgō had his chance. Ironically, considering his recent move to Tokyo, his ship was sent back down south, dispatched with several other vessels to the port of Shimonoseki to await further instructions. The Japanese authorities already assumed that trouble
was brewing in the country’s closest neighbour. It was, after all, but a short hop to the north-west to the offshore Japanese island of Tsushima. From Tsushima, it was only another sixty miles or so to the coast of Korea.

  Like Japan in decades past, Korea had attempted to block out the outside world. Nominally, the peninsula was a tributary state to the Chinese Empire. Abroad, Korea had gained the sobriquet of ‘the Hermit Kingdom’, and continued to fend off foreign incursions by force. In 1866, the refusal of the trading vessel General Sherman to leave when commanded led to the burning of the ship and the slaughter of her crew by Korean forces. The Koreans similarly scared away two French warships in the same year. Soon after, a group of European opportunists hired a crew of Chinese outlaws and sailed into Korean waters. Their mind-boggling plot was to raid the tomb of the infant Korean king’s late grandfather, steal the corpse and hold it to ransom pending the signature of foreign trade agreements. Although their plan failed, they were not the last to attempt to force the Koreans to trade with the outside world. American warships arrived looking for evidence of the fate of the lost General Sherman, and vessels from other powers were soon sniffing around.

  Japan had learned its lesson well from the foreign powers. A mere generation after the humiliations enforced by the Black Ships, and by foreign attacks on Shimonoseki and Kagoshima, the Japanese now tried to force similar ignominies on their Korean neighbours. The means of access, however, remained resolutely friendly. Japanese agents sought to exploit the factional rivalry within the Korean court between those loyal to the king, those loyal to his father and former regent, and those loyal to his wife, the scion of a powerful noble family.