Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  Shortly after Tōgō was appointed to the Amagi, Korea concluded its first trade agreements with the United States of America. When the news reached Britain’s minister in Japan, a British ship was sent to secure similar protocols. The Germans and the French soon secured access of their own. Just as in Japan a generation earlier, Korean court circles were preoccupied with the best course of action to take – what would be most loyal, to stand up to the new arrivals, to learn from them and turn on them, or to seek help from elsewhere? Some in Korea might have expected help from the Chinese Emperor, but China had problems of its own with external pressures and internal revolts. Instead, one faction in Korea turned to the Japanese, who were all too ready to offer advice and assistance in dealing with the challenges of the age. Supposedly at Korean invitation, the Japanese soldier Horimoto Reizō arrived in Seoul to train and drill a new, modernised fighting force. However, the employment of Japanese officers to train Korean troops was regarded by Korean conservatives as yet another foreign imposition on an order that had lasted for centuries.

  1882 was also a very warm year. In Tōgō’s native Kagoshima, and in his new anchorage at Shimonoseki, the heat bordered on the tropical. Conditions were similar across the strait in Korea, where an early summer threatened to dry up the rice paddies. The unseasonal warmth killed the Korean rice crop, piling a risk of famine onto the local government’s concerns. Since Korea was a Confucian country with conspicuous strife at court, it was soon suggested by conservatives that the country’s troubles were divine punishment for the government’s failure to keep out unwelcome foreign influences.

  As the summer dragged on, and no clouds could be seen in the sky, the Korean king was sent to renew his efforts to intercede with the gods and bring rain. This was his sovereign duty, but also presented the ideal opportunity for his opponents to fight back. A force of starving soldiers, secretly loyal to the King’s father, attacked the royal procession in the midst of the rain-bringing ceremonies on 23 July. The attack escalated into a city-wide battle in Seoul between the supporters of the King and Queen, and ‘dissident’ factions with allegiances to arch-conservatives, most particularly the former regent.

  Leaving a suicidally loyal lady-in-waiting in her stead to delay the mob, Queen Min fled her palace. Some of her relatives were not so lucky, and were lynched by the mob. Lieutenant Horimoto, whose appointment had been one of the catalysts for the protests, died in the palace fighting along with seven of his Japanese officers, his notorious modern weapons and training overwhelmed by the vastly greater numbers of his adversaries.

  From the palace, the mob turned on the Japanese legation, rumoured to be Queen Min’s refuge.7 The Japanese officials present seized guns and fought their way out of Seoul (against what appears to have been an angry but largely unarmed crowd) to the nearby port of Chemulpo (modern Incheon). In this manner, the Japanese Minister in Korea, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, was able to clamber aboard a tiny Korean boat, which got him and his men as far as a small offshore island, where they were later picked up by the British survey vessel HMS Flying Fish. In an unpleasant irony that must have caused great elation among the victorious conservatives, the retreat of the Japanese was accompanied by a powerful summer storm, bringing the long-awaited rain. The bedraggled Minister Hanabusa barely had time to disembark in Japan before he was sent back with reinforcements. ‘The insult,’ commented the captain of the Amagi, ‘is intolerable. We can expect a punitive expedition to start at once.’ ‘As far as we are concerned,’ replied Tōgō, ‘the ship is ready.’8

  However, it was several days before the rest of the ships of the expedition were as ready for action as the Amagi was. Tōgō was aboard the Amagi on 10 August when she sailed as one of eight ships, with orders to restore the Japanese Minister’s affronted honour, by force if necessary.9 The Japanese flotilla was led by Rear Admiral Nire Kagenori – like Tōgō, a former Satsuma man and a survivor of the British bombardment of Kagoshima. His flotilla reached Korean waters without incident, but was temporarily troubled by the lack of reliable charts for the treacherous coastal waters of Chemulpo Bay. Korea’s isolation had served at least one defensive purpose, by preventing foreign shipping from surveying the shoals and reefs of the area. From his flagship, Nire ordered his flotilla to wait for further instructions and weighed the chances of feeling a path through the waters, one oar-length at a time.

  It was Tōgō who offered a new and original solution. One did not, he observed, even need a telescope to see the tall masts and dragon flags in Chemulpo harbour that indicated a number of Chinese vessels were already in port. Tōgō suggested that the Japanese simply bided their time until one of the Chinese ships came out.10 They did not have long to wait. Tōgō and his fellow officers watched the Chinese ship intently, marking every one of her course corrections as she zigzagged slowly past unseen underwater hazards. Entirely oblivious as to the service she was performing, the Chinese vessel continued on her way, while the Japanese flotilla carefully steamed in single-file back along the same precise course.

  There were three Chinese warships in Chemulpo harbour, and their commander, Commodore Ding Ruchang, wasted no time in sending across a dispatch boat to explain that he was in Korea to ‘restore order’. This was precisely what the Japanese did not want, as it was the pro-Chinese conservatives who hated the Japanese presence in the first place. Ignoring the protests of Commodore Ding, the Japanese put ashore a force of marines and marched the short distance upriver to Seoul itself. As the second in command of the Amagi, it was Tōgō’s duty to lead his own vessel’s shore party.

  Tōgō’s first sight of the legendary ‘Hermit Kingdom’ was a shock. The road from Chemulpo to Seoul was little more than a dusty track, passing by ruined and deserted farmsteads. Those few Koreans that Tōgō saw on his journey were emaciated and listless.

  In Seoul itself, Hanabusa delivered a stern ultimatum to King Gojong, who had been restored to ‘power’, but had suffered just as much as the Japanese at the hands of the mob. Regardless, Hanabusa demanded reparations from Gojong for insults against the representative of the Japanese throne. Along with a punitive fine, Hanabusa demanded the right to keep an armed force at the Japanese legation in case of any future uprisings. It was the thin end of a wedge that was sure to lead to extraterritoriality and unequal treaties, much as had been imposed on China by the West, and also on Japan.

  While Hanabusa argued with representatives of the King, including the wily Daewongun himself, the Chinese landed their own cargo: a group of dignitaries including the influential military officer Yuan Shikai. Yuan and his party secretly enticed the Daewongun aboard their ship at Chemulpo and promptly set sail for China. The former regent was kept locked in his own palanquin until the ships reached China, where he was confined under house arrest for three years.11

  Ironically, the removal of the Daewongun’s influence removed much of the opposition to the Japanese, and Hanabusa was able to ram through his demand for reparations and the quartering of Japanese troops in Seoul. The parties signed the Treaty of Chemulpo, while the crew of the Amagi busied themselves with a mission of crucial importance: sounding the Taedong River 70 miles inland as far as Pyongyang. We should assume that at least one of the other boats in Nire’s flotilla performed a similar task on the Han River that connected Seoul to the sea – next time the Japanese arrived uninvited, they would not need to spy on Chinese vessels to navigate their way inland.

  It was in the days following the signing of the Treaty of Chemulpo that Tōgō had the occasion to meet the 23-year-old Yuan Shikai, a young military officer who was fated to become the mouthpiece for the Chinese Emperor in Korea. Yuan agreed to meet with Tōgō and the Japanese military attaché in Seoul, and proceeded to harangue them both with his views on the political future of East Asia and the unwelcome presence of ‘foreigners’, including the Japanese, in the territory of a Chinese vassal state.

  While Yuan blustered and harrumphed about the political situation, Tōgō remained impassive and expre
ssionless. His legendary reticence was unknown to Yuan, who came to believe that he enjoyed a captive audience and continued to hold forth with a well-rehearsed speech about what needed to be done in Korea, and how the Chinese and the Japanese needed to conclude a mutually beneficial and respectful alliance. At long last, Yuan’s speech ended with a flourish, followed a few moments later by the final utterances of the Japanese interpreter. In the silence that followed, Tōgō rose to his feet. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I do not understand. Goodbye.’12 Presuming that Tōgō merely wanted clarification, Yuan launched back into his pontificating on politics. Tōgō, however, shook his head, bowed, and left the room while Yuan was still talking.

  The political brinkmanship of the Korean intervention had clearly rubbed off on Tōgō. He had only been back in Japan for a few days in February 1883 when he became the centre of an embarrassing incident that threatened his future career. The Amagi’s captain had gone ashore on business, leaving Tōgō in command. During Tōgō’s watch, a British warship arrived in the Shimonoseki Straits, a matter that demanded Tōgō’s attention. According to naval protocol – a rulebook largely written by the British themselves – it was considered seemly for the commanders of other vessels to acknowledge the presence of the new arrival by firing a salute. The guns were to be loaded with blank charges, which were then discharged out to sea, a relic from the days of slow-loading cannon, when the firing of a ship’s guns at nothing would effectively render it unable to repel an assault for several minutes and hence a sign of respect and trust towards an ally or non-combatant. The number of guns required in a salute varied with the rank of the arriving officer. Through his spyglass, Tōgō read the flags on the British ship and determined that a 13-gun salute would be appropriate. The guns on the Amagi duly made a satisfactorily large series of bangs in the February air, only for the British commander to complain.

  The precise nature of the complaint is unclear – many sources on Tōgō, written years later in the days of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, refuse to even reveal that the plaintiff was British, in order to save the Royal Navy’s blushes. However, it appears, through a technicality concerned with the leadership of not one ship, but several, the British captain believed himself to rate a larger salute. Apologising for the oversight, Tōgō ordered his men to let off two more shots, an oddly facetious decision that was sure to annoy the plaintiff. Sure enough, a message soon arrived from the captain demanding the reason for Tōgō’s piffling two-shot postscript. ‘If you will add both salutes together,’ Tōgō replied, ‘you will find the total correct.’13

  Unused to such insubordination from the Japanese, the British commander protested again. Tōgō, however, proved implacable, displaying every sign of the impish Kagoshima boy who had once stolen his mother’s sweets and spiked his brother’s drink. The British captain had the greeting that he had demanded, but merely with a very long gap between the opening salvo and the conclusion. This reply was not good enough for the British, who complained through official channels, sending a telegraph message all the way to Tōgō’s superior at the Japanese Admiralty. Before long, an order arrived from Tokyo ordering Tōgō to fire the correct number of shots, with a reasonable gap between them. Fuming, Tōgō did as he was told.

  It was perhaps no surprise when a second order arrived on 24 February, removing Tōgō from the Amagi and commanding him to sail immediately for Tokyo aboard the corvette Nisshin. It was less of a revelation for anyone familiar with Japanese etiquette. To any foreign observers at Shimonoseki, the rude Lieutenant Commander Tōgō was being ordered off his ship and packed off to headquarters for a dressing-down. To the Japanese, however, it was nothing of the sort. Instead, Tōgō was called away to a banquet – quite possibly a banquet that had been in the offing for some time, as it seemed intended to honour his activities in Seoul. There, he was presented with a gift from the Meiji Emperor himself and informed that he would be receiving a command of his own.

  It seems likely that the decision to reassign Tōgō had been made before any reports reached the Japanese Admiralty of his behaviour at Shimonoseki. Since Tōgō was not officially reprimanded, and indeed, was effectively promoted by being given his own ship, it seemed at first like good news all round. However, his commission was hardly what he might have called active service. His new ship was an ageing wooden gunboat, the Teibō II, one of a pair that had been built in Britain for the Chōshū clan, had transported Imperial supporters during the Boshin War, and had been donated to the Imperial Navy in the aftermath. She was at the very end of her service life and only seemed to have survived to reach Tōgō’s hands because the Admiralty had a special use for both him and the Teibō II.14

  Tōgō had performed admirably in his sounding of the River Taedong. Now the Admiralty wanted Tōgō to perform a similar task closer to home, surveying the coastal waters near the harbours of Kure and Sasebo. It was work that seemed ideally suited to the plodding, stubborn Lieutenant Commander Tōgō – Kure was a harbour near to Hiroshima, on Japan’s Inland Sea, far out of the way of any possible run-ins with short-tempered Britons. Sasebo was out on the western edge of Kyūshū, a fine harbour protected by a fiendish maze of shoals, which the Imperial Navy needed to map precisely, and at greater depths than before, in order to ensure that there was a reasonable approach available to ships of the future with deeper draft. Both ports were earmarked for massive expansion as part of a reform of Japanese waters into five naval districts, and Tōgō’s work was hence important, albeit little more than surveys. In years to come, the two ports would indeed become major parts of the Japanese naval machine, with Sasebo functioning as Japan’s main staging post for attacks beyond its shores, and the impregnable Kure becoming the nerve centre of Japan’s defence, both at sea and, in the 20th century, for the navy’s aircraft.

  After just over a year surveying on the Teibō II, Tōgō returned to the Amagi, this time as her captain. He was ordered to proceed to Nagasaki with all haste, as the Amagi was waiting alone for him. The other vessels in the Middle Fleet of Japan had already sailed for Shanghai, where they had been sent to observe the growing tensions between the fleets of France and China. The Japanese were under orders to participate in the observations of a multinational fleet, including ships from Germany, the UK and the USA. This was a great achievement in itself, but secret orders asked for a little more. Tōgō and his fellow captains were urged to pay close attention not only to the posturings of the French and the Chinese, but also to the practises and habits of their fellow ‘neutrals’. We may reasonably assume that the Lieutenant Commander received an enthusiastic send-off from Mrs Tōgō, as the couple’s eldest son, Hyo, was born nine months later on 28 February 1885.

  The Sino-French quarrel was, as ever, concerned with unwelcome incursions by a European power. Humiliated in Europe by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French government had sought possessions further afield, including, among other targets, lucrative potential markets in China. In particular, the French concentrated on ‘Indochina’, the area now known as Vietnam. Like Korea in the north, the region was nominally a tributary state to the Chinese Emperor, leading to Chinese protests at French incursions. Critical to the French plan was the Red River, which stretched up from its seaport of Haiphong through the old local capital of Hanoi. Mastery of the Red River would allow goods to travel deep into the Asian hinterland, and while not as useful a conduit as the Yellow River and Yangtze in China proper, the river would still help French goods gain access to the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

  The politics of the situation were confusing. The French had signed a treaty with a local king that supposedly acknowledged that the region was still part of the Chinese Empire. However, neither the French, the Vietnamese nor the Chinese had any real influence over a powerful group of bandits, the Black Flag Army, who extracted extortionate tolls from Red River traffic. In fact, the Chinese were secretly encouraging the Black Flag Army, hoping to play the Black Flags and the French off against each other by
claiming to each that the other was a local problem that they needed to suppress. Mistakenly believing that the French would have no stomach for war, the Chinese government broke off talks. The French retaliated with a lightning-fast military campaign in Vietnam in late 1883, supposedly against the Black Flags, although much of the military resistance they encountered and crushed was actually Chinese. In the embarrassing aftermath, representatives of China and France concluded a hastily-written treaty in May 1884, the Tianjin Accord, shortly before Tōgō arrived in China.

  Tōgō reached Shanghai and paid his respects to his superior officer aboard the flagship. For the young Lieutenant Commander, perhaps it was a reminder of precisely where he stood in the great scheme of things in the Imperial Navy – the Middle Fleet’s flagship was that same Fusō whose construction Tōgō had witnessed in London, but the vessel was commanded by another, while he was stuck with the ageing Amagi. At first, it might have seemed that Tōgō had arrived late, as the Tianjin Accord had already been agreed. There were, however, already questions about the power of the treaty. The Chinese had already mentioned, in a sheepish aside, that the terms of the agreement might be difficult to enforce. While it had been agreed that Chinese soldiery would pull out of the Tonkin region (i.e. northern Vietnam), the inexperienced negotiators had neglected to put an exact date on the withdrawal. Nor was it all that clear who was ‘Chinese’. The leader of the Black Flag Army, Liu Yongfu, had been born in China, but was technically a stateless bandit – there was no guarantee that he would heed a single word of the Accord.

  Accordingly, the multinational group of neutral observers loitered in Shanghai, waiting for something to go wrong. Tōgō made the best of the situation and struck out on a mission of his own. He turned the little Amagi to the west, and steamed upriver on a mission of exploration and observation that took him 600 miles inland, all the way to Hankou (modern Wuhan). The Amagi was the first Japanese vessel to penetrate so far into the Chinese hinterland, establishing in the process that the Yangtze remained navigable for gunboats for a surprising distance inland.