The Japanese were reprimanded in the Siberian Intervention of the early 1920s, when Allied action in support of the White Russians risked turning into a new Japanese conquest on mainland Asia. By the 1930s, changes in policies and constitution had turned the military from the servants of the Japanese government into its masters. With the power of veto and the ability to topple Cabinets, the ministries of the Army and Navy began to drive foreign policy. And if that failed, they looked the other way while younger, lower-ranking officers took unilateral action in the Emperor’s name, daring their superiors to chastise them for ‘loyalty’.
Tōgō paid close attention to the newspapers, but never allowed the discussion of political matters in his house. He remained true to the ideal of the dutiful sailor – in Tōgō’s world, the navy followed orders, it did not give them. Pointedly, he never made any show of seeking the post of Navy Minister, nor did he entertain any thoughts about running for office, despite his ever-popular status. ‘I am a military man,’ he protested to his son, ‘and know nothing about politics.’10
This, too, singled Tōgō out as an anachronism, in an age when Japanese military men were politicians and came to dominate every issue of the day. In Tōgō’s last years, Japan was falling into what later historians would call the ‘Dark Valley’, a spiral into militarism that turned the entire country into an engine of conquest and would end in the cataclysms of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War and Japanese defeat. The old Admiral had been one of the standard-bearers of the Meiji Restoration and the modern navy, fighting to assert the Emperor’s rule, and spearheading many of Japan’s early conquests. Tōgō had been instrumental in winning Taiwan for Japan; the fruits of his victories included the handover of Port Arthur, southern Sakhalin and, to a certain extent, Korea. Two years before Tōgō’s death, his successors manufactured a crisis in Manchuria and marched to its ‘aid’ from bases in Korea and strongholds along the railway. Whether or not Tōgō approved of the new Japanese puppet state of Manchu-kuo, it was built on foundations that he himself had laid.
On 23 December 1933, Japan gained a new Crown Prince – Hirohito’s son Akihito, destined to be the future Heisei Emperor. As was his wont, Tōgō celebrated the occasion with a dash of calligraphy, muttering happily ‘How splendid!’ His son recalled that Tōgō’s brush daubed out two impressive characters, but whereas a younger Tōgō might have plumped for a respectful naval Hōga, the spirit of the times had got to him, too. He wrote Banzai, the same word that was on the lips of Japanese everywhere, at every celebration, at every homecoming, and every dispatch of troops to new postings.
Tōgō’s gallstones continued to trouble him, and he had had a second operation in 1927. In August 1933, he complained of a constant ache in his throat, which was found to be cancer. This news was largely kept from the public, but became impossible to keep secret after 27 May 1934, when Tōgō failed to make his customary appearance at the anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Tsushima. His eldest son, Hyo, instead sent his father’s apologies, giving in the process a stark view of the 88-year-old Admiral’s decline:
He has been suffering from stones in the bladder since the latter days of Meiji. The pain was intermittent, and he used to suffer at intervals of a few months. When the pain begins, he is not able either to lie down or lean against anything. The best way seems to be standing up. He sometimes has to spend the whole night in that posture.11
Hyo noted that Tōgō had suffered three stone-related attacks that year, but also revealed that Tōgō had been complaining of a ‘pain in the throat’ since contracting a cold the preceding summer. An onset of neuralgia had also kept the Admiral confined to bed for the past two months, attended constantly by a nurse, refusing visitors and somewhat hurt by the continued barrage of requests for him to mail strangers an autograph or sample of his calligraphy. Tōgō no longer kept his false teeth in, and had subsisted on a diet of soup and gruel for several months. However, even that news was somewhat out of date – the press release that same evening noted that Tōgō was coughing so much that he was unable to swallow his food, and that he was being kept alive by glucose injections.
A rushed palace meeting on 28 May conferred a final honour on the Admiral, promoting him to the rank of Marquis. Tōgō’s son was given the news the following day, and returned to his father’s bedside to announce the Imperial edict. True to courtly etiquette, the dying Admiral insisted on first putting on ceremonial dress before hearing his son’s report of the words of the Emperor. ‘I desire only to rest until the end,’ Tōgō replied. ‘My thoughts turn to my Emperor.’ Tōgō let out a long sigh. ‘And to roses,’ he added, never to speak again.12 By 11 p.m. that night, Tōgō’s doctor reported a ‘mind not clear’. He died in the small hours of the morning, and his passing was officially reported to the Emperor at 7 a.m. on 30 May 1934.
Tōgō was awarded a state funeral. His body was kept at his home in a humble coffin until 3 June, when amid ‘rain as fine as smoke’, state representatives delivered a more ornate coffin suitable for Imperial honours. Condolences arrived from foreign powers and foreign navies, and an honour guard of British, American, French and Italian marines marched in Tōgō’s funeral procession.
The poet Doi Bansui sent a seven-stanza Song of Condolence, with the traditional Japanese metre struggling to encompass foreign nouns. But such a hybrid form was necessary for Doi’s aims of drawing, one final time, the parallels between Tōgō and Nelson, with the words ‘greater than the hero of Trafalgar’:
You are the treasure of Japan
The glory of the world
The embodiment of bushidō
And the flower of the Far East.13
True to the prevailing martial nature of the times, Doi’s elegy pondered the report that the spirit of Tōgō might offer in Heaven to the Meiji Emperor, now that the Far East faced a ‘pressing peril’. In a more playful homage, Doi also reversed the traditional sobriquet applied to the Admiral, noting that Tōgō, ‘the Nelson of Japan’, had lived a long and fruitful life, dying at eighty-eight years of age, whereas Nelson, ‘the Tōgō of England’, had died aboard his flagship.
Tōgō’s final journey began with a tour of his home – Mrs Tōgō was herself bedridden, and could barely raise herself up enough to offer a final gesture of farewell. Tōgō’s coffin was placed on a gun carriage and taken through the silent streets, past crowds that mirrored in silence the enthusiastic welcome of his 1905 homecoming. His procession included his relatives, surviving former adjutants, veterans of the Mikasa and a scattering of politicians. The foreign dignitaries present comprised many ambassadors, but also an ominous reminder of the uses to which Tōgō’s victories had been put.
Korea, where Tōgō had fought in two wars, was now a Japanese colony, and members of the Korean royal family walked in the procession. The rightful ruler of Korea, King Gojong’s son Uimin, instead marched in the procession as an officer in the Japanese military. The Last Emperor of China, Puyi, was now the ruler of a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, unrecognised by most other countries. Puyi did not attend in person, but sent a ‘sacred tree’ as a gift of condolence.
On the radio that night, in a long reminiscence about Tōgō, Admiral Kobayashi Seizō noted that there was another presence in the procession that he was proud to see. From the dockside at Greenhithe, the boys of the Worcester had sent a memorial wreath.14
The breathless excitement of Tōgō’s era, caught up with the idea of Japan as an Asian Britain, served to mask many intimations of trouble to come. Even Tōgō’s own life contains ominous presentiments of the Japan of the 1930s and 1940s. His monument to the fallen of Port Arthur, which still stands on White Jade Hill overlooking the harbour, is now thought to have been built with forced labour. The disguised young Prince Takeda, to whom Tōgō bowed devoutly at a crowded Shinbashi station, was probably Takeda Tsunayoshi, who was later accused of supervising germ-warfare experiments in wartime Manchuria. Hirohito himself, the figurehead of the Japanese in the Second World War, w
as the product of the old Tōgō’s mentoring, although who is to say whether his actions, whatever they may have been, were taken in spite of his tutor, or because of him?
Changes in attitude and fortune present tantalising what-ifs, not concerning historical events, but their reception. In 1904, Tōgō’s attack on Port Arthur met with widespread British acclaim. ‘The Japanese navy,’ wrote the London Times, ‘has opened the war by an act of daring which is destined to take a place of honour in naval annals.’ The same tactics, executed some thirty-seven years later at Pearl Harbor, were decried by the United States of America on a ‘date which will live in infamy’. And yet, were they even Tōgō’s tactics? The Japanese of the time certainly thought so, although Tōgō’s own actions in 1904 suggest that it was he who was surprised by the lack of Russian preparation – the grumbles of his own underlings, that he had failed to truly make good on the incredible advantage of surprise, have been silenced only in hindsight. The Tōgō myth – that he was infallible, unstoppable – has been allowed, even among the Japanese, to obscure the more prosaic reality, that Tōgō prevailed by diligence, practice and preparation. A large part of his achievement in the Russo-Japanese war lay in conserving his resources, eking out his available ships, bottling the overwhelming Russian tonnage in places where its full firepower could not be brought to bear, despite the urgings of his junior officers to take greater risks. Tsushima might have been Tōgō’s crowning glory, but it is his plodding ascent to that height that makes him so compelling.
One is tempted to ask, if ‘crossing the T’ is such a devastating manouevre, concentrating broadside fire on an enemy head-on, why did it not happen more often in the days before telegraphy and turrets? This is because the crosser is invariably dangerously exposed on his approach. Tōgō, like Nelson before him, was able to risk the manouevre because he had the strongest possible confidence in the accuracy of his own gunners and in the poorer aim of his opponents. Gunnery practice does not make for heroic narratives or stirring stories, but like many of Tōgō’s other great successes, the groundwork for wartime success was laid in peacetime efforts. Readers of naval history usually focus on the guns and the torpedoes, the epic conflicts and derring-do, but many of Tōgō’s victories were won on paper, or with flags and signals. The Silent Admiral was already fighting the Chinese when he was clambering over a Taiwanese fort as an observer. He was already fighting the Russians when he was surveying Japanese coastal waters. He was a man who was able to look at laundry on a washing line and extrapolate it into the way a crew would behave under fire.
It surprises me, even now, that many Japanese still do not realise that no enemy ships were sunk during the famous Battle of the Yellow Sea. Tōgō did not have to sink them; he merely needed to stop them reaching Vladivostok, a mission in which he was entirely succesful. Although it is the tales of suicidal valour that endure among the Japanese, their heroic Admiral Tōgō largely reined in the trigger-happy young lieutenants and captains, preventing them from squandering their resources in the kind of attack that today we would call kamikaze. After the Battle of the Yellow Sea, Tōgō’s work was done for him by German port officials at Jiaozhou, French customs men in Indochina, and dockside police in Shanghai, who impounded Vitgeft’s vessels when they had fled as far as their fuel would carry them. Such mundane details contributed to Tsushima, leaving Tōgō with the manpower and preparations to fight the Baltic Fleet and win.
Tōgō’s funeral was accompanied by speech after speech by admirals and ministers, many of whom struggled for something to say after they had remembered his service at Tsushima. Few, it seems, knew him well. Most comments about Tōgō were bland statements of approval or praise, while others meekly recounted his shyness and introversion, and left it at that. Only one, Admiral Nawa Matahachirō, offered a glimpse of Tōgō that alluded to his dual position as both a quiet, unassuming man and an invincible admiral:
The personality of Admiral Tōgō is like the great sky. It is an inch in size if looked at through an inch-wide tube. It appears as large as one foot, if you peep through a one-foot tube. If you go out into the ocean and look at it, it will be an illimitable expanse.15
Notes
Introduction
1.Hansard, HC Deb 15 October 1996 vol 282 cc669.
2.‘Sea Noon’, Time (8 November 1926).
1: The Last Samurai
1. Tōgō was born on the 22nd day of the 12th lunar month, which many sources have misread as 22 December 1847. In fact, his birthday was 27 January 1848, eight days before what we would now call Chinese New Year.
2. G Blond, Admiral Tōgō (Jarrolds, London: 1961) p 20.
3. N Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō (Seito Shorin Press, Tokyo: 1934) pp 13–14.
4. Blond, Admiral Tōgō, p 24.
5. Tōgō Gensui Hensankai, Admiral Tōgō: A Memoir (Tōgō Gensui Hensankai, Tokyo: 1934) p 58, hereafter ATAM. See also E Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (Stone Bridge Press, San Francisco: 2006) p 41; Hansard, HC Deb 15 June 1863 vol 171 cc897–8.
6. ATAM, p 54, although ATAM claims they were seven ‘warships’, when one, the Havoc, was merely a gunboat. Blond, Admiral Tōgō, p 39, claims that there were ten ships all-told, but presumably means the seven ships previously mentioned, plus the Sir George Grey, the Contest and the England, three merchant ships seized by Lieutenant Colonel Neale as collateral pending the payment of Satsuma’s indemnities. These can hardly be called part of the British forces, as they were stolen from the Japanese and then set on fire! Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, pp 79–90, is an eyewitness account – Satow was aboard the Argus.
7. Illustrated London News, 7 November 1863, has a detailed account of the incident, with a chart.
8. ATAM, p 53, prefers ‘Don’t come back beaten, my sons’. But I have translated the far blunter farewell recorded in Japanese in M Okada, Tōgō Heihachirō: Kindai Nihon o Okoshita Meiji no Kigai [TH: The Revival of Meiji Spirit in Modern Japan] (Tendensha, Tokyo: 1997) p 28.
9. According to Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 19, the mines would have wrought havoc among the British had the British ships not taken evasive manoeuvres to avoid a salvo of cannon fire from the shoreline, which ironically took them out of harm’s way.
10. Blond, Admiral Tōgō, pp 41–2.
11. The tale of Masuko under fire is a staple of Tōgō lore and appears in all accounts. Blond, Admiral Tōgō, p 44, doubts this story is true, but repeats it anyway, as do I. The same story appears in ATAM, p 56. ATAM describes Satsuma-jiru as a ‘bean soup’, but this seems to be a translation error that confuses the miso (bean) soup base with the contents.
12. Although the Japanese were suitably cowed, there was also significant embarrassment back in London about the Kagoshima action. There were questions in Parliament about the validity of a bombardment of a civilian target and a call to admonish Admiral Kuper for over-stepping the boundaries of his mission. Whereas Neale merrily reported ‘In respect of the Prince of Satsuma, after long forbearance, his capital is in ashes’, there was a shocked reaction in some quarters that civilian Kagoshima should have been a target at all, particularly in Holland and in America, where one observer noted: ‘When an outcry is made by England about the inhumanity of other nations, we must stop her mouth by the one word “Kagoshima”.’ Hansard, HC Deb 9 February 1864 vol 173 c335–6. After almost a hundred pages of lengthy debate, a proposal to express Parliament’s regret for the treatment of Kagoshima was rejected.
13. H Jentschura et al., Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869–1945 (Arms and Armour Press, London: 1977) p 89. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 27, notes that the Shoho and the Kaiten had already exchanged fire sometime earlier, with the Shoho struck ten times and only warding off the Kaiten by attempting to ram her. Until 1905, there was no official naming standard for Japanese vessels. After that date, the practise was generally that battleships were named after ancient Japanese provinces (e.g., Yamato), battlecruisers after mountains, 1st and 2nd class cruisers after rivers, gunboats aft
er popular sightseeing spots, torpedo boats after birds, escorts after islands, destroyers after weather phenomena, and so on. For a full list, see Nishida, Imperial Japanese Navy, http://homepage2.nifty.com/nishidah/e/index.htm.
14. ATAM, p 60. Enomoto’s rank in the Tokugawa navy at the time was Kaigun Fukusōsai – roughly equivalent to Vice Admiral.
15. ATAM, p 61, does not specify who fired first, but Jentschura does not list the Kasuga as having a gun larger than a 30-pounder. If a 100-pound ball was fired, it must surely have come from the Kaiyō. Some of the more enthusiastic Japanese accounts claim that Tōgō brought down the Kaiyō’s mast, but the more trustworthy translation in Ogasawara’s Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 32, suggests that he merely shot away a yardarm. Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, p 335, describes an encounter a week earlier between the Kaiten (which he calls by its former name, the Eagle) and a Satsuma steamer, which appears to have been the Shoho on her way to Hyogo. Ogasawara similarly reports that the Shoho tried to ram the Kaiten on her way to Hyōgo – could this have cost the Kaiten her prominent foreyard? Satow agrees that the Kaiten lost her ‘foreyard’ in that encounter, as observed by sailors aboard HMS Rodney. It is possible that both stories are true, but it would be remarkable that two Shōgunate ships with easily confused names should both reportedly lose a yardarm in the same week.
2: The Republic of Ezo
1. ATAM, p 35.
2. Jentschura et al., Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, p 113.
Admiral Togo Page 25
