16. Tikovara, Before Port Arthur in a Destroyer, p 83. In the light of later successes and Tōgō’s ultimate victory over the Russians, early criticism such as Tikovara’s has been largely swamped or forgotten by posterity.
17. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 223; ATAM, p 199.
18. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 231. Falk, Tōgō and the Rise of Japanese Sea Power, p 307.
19. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, pp 235–6, recounts the demise of the Russian destroyer Steresgutchi, although he does not mention any resistance on board. Falk, Tōgō and the Rise of Japanese Sea Power, p 309, recounts the resistance and scuttling, but does not name the ship.
20. ATAM, p 117.
21. ATAM, p 118.
22. Jentschura et al., Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, p 204. Tikovara, Before Port Arthur in a Destroyer, p 119, notes that the navy had been waiting for the Koryo for weeks. ‘At last,’ he writes, ‘we possess a craft which we ought to have had since the beginning of the war.’
23. ATAM, p 120.
24. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 277. Characteristically, it was another five months before the Baltic Fleet got underway. Had it left for the Far East in May and not October 1904, it might have conceivably reached the Yellow Sea before the fall of Port Arthur.
25. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 270.
11: The Battle of the Yellow Sea
1. ATAM, p 124.
2. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 274.
3. F Unger, The Authentic History of the War Between Russia and Japan (Bible Publishing House, Philadelphia: 1905) pp 312–13.
4. C G E Mannerheim, Päiväkirja Japanin Sodasta 1904–1905 sekä Rintamakirjeitä Omaisille [Diary from the Japanese War 1904–1905 with Letters to His Family] (Otava, Helsinki: 1982) pp 38–9. Ying Kou was the original home of Miss Maud’s Complete Nursing, a brothel chain that soon franchised itself all along the Siberian railways.
5. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 288.
6. F Villiers, Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, a Diurnal of Occurrents (Longmans, Green and Co., London: 1905) p 66.
7. Villiers, Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, p 67.
8. Villiers, Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, p 68.
9. H Wright, With Tōgō: The Story of Seven Months Active Service Under His Command (Hurst and Blackett, London: 1905) p 57.
10. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 290.
11. Many years later, Tōgō would comment to an interviewer that his ‘crossed T’ had not quite gone according to plan. He was determined to try it again before he retired and this desire would find its final fruition at Tsushima in 1905. ATAM, p 13.
12. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 297; for Prince Fushimi’s account of his wounds, see ATAM, p 132.
13. Tikovara, Before Port Arthur in a Destroyer, p 180.
14. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 303.
15. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 307.
16. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 311.
17. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 322.
18. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 317.
12: Tsushima
1. R Deacon, History of the Japanese Secret Service (Frederick Muller Limited, London: 1982) p 55.
2. G Regan, Great Naval Blunders (Carlton, London: 2001) pp 1–3.
3. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 326.
4. E Selle, Donald of China (Harper and Brothers, New York: 1948) p 24. The phrase ‘Go find it’ seems curiously American for the Daily Telegraph, but perhaps brevity won out.
5. Selle, Donald of China, p 29.
6. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, pp 328–9.
7. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 337.
8. Testimony of the Mikasa’s chief gunnery officer, ATAM, p 178.
9. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 349.
10. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 345.
11. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 362. Tokutomi Iichiro, ‘Admiral Tōgō from a Historical Point of View’, in ATAM pp 9–16, suggests that Tōgō had another reason, which was that he was all too aware of the seasonal rough seas at the Tsugaru and La Pérouse straits, and hence thought that any reasonable commander would take Tsushima as the safest route. But such an explanation appears to credit the Russians with considerably better knowledge of Japanese waters than they may have had.
12. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 385.
13. Vladimir Semenov, Russian prisoner of war, quoted in D Wells (ed), Russian Views of Japan 1792–1913: An Anthology of Travel Writing (Routledge/Curzon, London: 2004) p 188.
14. Wells, Russian Views of Japan, p 200.
15. Clements, Prince Saionji, p 90.
13: Tōgō on Tour
1. Vladimir Semenov offers greater detail: ‘A fire broke out on the Mikasa, and … this fine cruiser [sic] had been blown up and sunk.’ Wells, Russian Views of Japan, p 194.
2. Stafford, History of the Worcester, p 206.
3. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, pp 398–9.
4. Bodley, Admiral Tōgō, pp 222–3.
5. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 401.
6. ATAM, p 231.
7. ATAM, p 279, includes several examples of Tōgō’s well-meaning but charmless versifications, which seem to have been more useful to him as a hook on which to hang his more accomplished calligraphy. The best he could manage at his homecoming after Tsushima, for example, was the leaden: Even by sinking the vessels attacking us /Let us set forth Imperial virtues / Oh, sons of the Empire.
8. ATAM, p 297.
9. ATAM, p 293.
10. ATAM, p 272. H Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 (Stone Bridge Press, San Francisco: 1999) pp 66–7.
11. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 404. Now in Chinese hands, the monument was officially renamed the Baiyushan Tower in 1985. Although it is entirely possible that the Japanese used forced labour in the construction of the tower, the alleged number of Chinese deaths seems curiously close to the number of Japanese dead commemorated on the tower itself.
12. Daily Express, quoted in Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 413.
13. Or so claims ATAM, p 153. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, p 418, thinks that Tōgō and the rest of the party arrived at Victoria Station, which implies that they landed not at Tilbury on the north side of the Thames, but at Gravesend on the south. ATAM, however, has Tōgō arriving in London at St Pancras, a remarkably roundabout route for someone supposedly arriving from the Thames Estuary. Both authorities, however, seem to confuse several ‘arrivals’ in London by Tōgō – he would have arrived back at Victoria from the naval review at Spithead and would have left from St Pancras for his trip to Newcastle. One part of ATAM puts Tōgō at Claridge’s Hotel after the Coronation, but elsewhere, p 335, Admiral Taniguchi Naomi remembered it as the Hyde Park Hotel.
14. ATAM, p 295.
15. ATAM, p 335.
16. Times, 1 July 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 244; and in Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, pp 424–5. Tōgō’s letter refusing the first invitation, dated 13 February 1906, is included in Stafford, History of the Worcester, p 41. Reading between the lines, many had expected Tōgō to accompany the earlier tour of Britain by the Japanese Prince Fushimi in 1907, hence the initial invitation and Tōgō’s heartfelt demurral. Tōgō’s use of the term ‘Captain Smith’ to refer to Captain Henderson-Smith seems to have been commonplace – the index in the Worcester’s school history files him under S.
17. Ogasawara, Life of Admiral Tōgō, pp 103–4.
18. Testimony of Taniguchi Naomi, in ATAM, p 335; ATAM, p 157, replaces ‘silver’ with ‘iron’.
19. Falk, Tōgō and the Rise of Japanese Sea Power, p 144.
20. Glasgow Herald, 13 July 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 246. The Aquitania, launched in 1913, subsequently became the only liner to serve in both world wars, before being s
crapped in 1950.
21. Liverpool Post, 31 July 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 249.
22. New York World, 5 August 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 258.
23. New York Truth, 5 August 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 250.
24. ATAM, p 260.
25. ATAM, p 337.
26. ATAM, pp 167–8.
27. ATAM, p 169.
28. E Hubbard, The Elect: Elbert Hubbard’s Selected Writings, Part 5 (Roycrofters, East Aurora, NY: 1928) p 114.
29. ATAM, p 337.
30. New York Tribune, 4 August 1911, quoted in ATAM, p 252.
14: The Treasure of Japan
1. Keene, Emperor of Japan, p 320.
2. Chūō Kōron, 2 November 1916, quoted in ATAM, p 172.
3. See Clements, Prince Saionji, p 151.
4. ATAM, pp 193, 303.
5. ATAM, pp 228–9.
6. ATAM, p 278.
7. ATAM, p 305.
8. ATAM, p 274. The Mikasa herself continued to suffer bad luck. During the Second World War, she looked as much like a battleship from above as any other and was hit several times by Allied air raids. After the Japanese defeat, the Soviet ambassador demanded that this symbol of Russian humiliation be taken out to sea and sunk, but was talked round by the Americans by being shown the sorry state of the hulk of the Mikasa at the dockside. The ship was eventually repaired once more in the 1960s.
9. Clements, Prince Saionji, pp 137–44.
10. ATAM, p 195.
11. ATAM, p 177.
12. Blond, Admiral Tōgō, p 252.
13. Song of Condolence, in ATAM, p 187.
14. Radio broadcast of Kobayashi Seizō, 5 June 1934, in ATAM, p 346.
15. ATAM, p 277.
Sources and Further Reading
Tōgō is a difficult subject. The famously Silent Admiral made little effort to help his biographers place him in events that are otherwise only broadly described in naval reports. Non-Japanese writers persist in padding their accounts of Tōgō with little bits of incidental mariners’ business, ascribing orders or actions to Tōgō that actually issued from his superiors or subordinates. Meanwhile, Japanese authors eternally flail in search of numinous portent or Imperial approval, or tiptoe around contentious issues – one modern account manages to whisk through the period 1878–93 in less than a page, thereby avoiding all mention of Japan’s predatory behaviour towards Korea.
Tōgō’s finest hour was in 1904–5, when he achieved international renown and the cover of the London Illustrated News, although a decade too late for the edification of his former English teacher, the paper’s former Japan correspondent Charles Wirgman (1832–91). Nevertheless, even without Wirgman’s help, the British press seemed keen to regard Tōgō as an honorary Englishman. Tōgō received considerable coverage in the foreign press at the time, and became the subject of a hastily written book by Arthur Lloyd. Detailed appraisal of Tōgō’s career did not appear in English until after his death. In 1934, the Tōgō Society published a large-format book called Admiral Tōgō: A Memoir (listed as ATAM in my references; only the cover adds the subtitle Hero of the World), which collates a series of articles, reminiscences, poems and other Tōgōbilia, including Tōgō’s own military dispatches from the Russo-Japanese war (pp 196–228) and some pointless paintings of mountains and trees by well-meaning admirers. ATAM is a wonderful source for Japanese local colour, but haphazardly translated and an unreliable source when it comes to many facts, often confusing foreign names and places. Like a surprising number of modern history books in Japan, it also fails to take into account the use of the lunar calendar during the early Meiji period, and consequently misdates every event that occurred before Japan adopted the Western calendar in 1873, including Tōgō’s date of birth.
The prime source for both ATAM and all subsequent accounts is Vice Admiral Ogasawara Naganari’s Life of Admiral Tōgō, a hefty 1920s biography that was itself translated (and translated well) into English in 1934. Ogasawara not only knew Tōgō personally, but was at his side on many occasions. It is, therefore, something of a surprise that with these publications preceding him, Ronald Bodley would begin his 1935 ‘authorised’ biography with the words ‘I was faced with the problem of writing the story of a man about whom nothing had been written before.’ One is tempted to assume that Bodley arrived back in England from a four-year sojourn in the Far East, clutching a freshly-published copy of Ogasawara and hoping to rush his own derivation into print before any others reached Europe. Although Bodley possesses a few bonus insights on naval matters, he is easily surpassed by Edwin Falk’s superb 1936 Tōgō and the Rise of Japanese Sea Power, which is packed with detail and meticulously referenced.
Although Tōgō was the subject of many hagiographies in the early 20th century, from a European establishment that regarded the Japanese as the plucky underdogs in a war against the Russian bear, his reputation suffered in later years as the status of Japan itself plummeted before and during the Second World War. Although he was dead before the outbreak of the war, he was often assumed to have been directly involved in it, either for being the ‘tutor’ of Hirohito or through the simple confusion of many members of the public, some of whom still assume that he and the executed war criminal Tōjō Hideki are the same person.
By the mid-1930s, the world was already concerned with how the Japanese military would behave after Tōgō, and discussion of him disappears from the English language for a generation bracketing the Second World War. George Blond’s readable Admiral Tōgō (1961) summarises much of Ogasawara and presents a good run-through of Tōgō’s glory days, but concentrates on reports of naval battles in which Tōgō fought outside Japan. Hence, Blond’s account leaps from Tōgō joining the Satsuma navy in 1866 to his arrival in Europe in 1871, neglecting the entire Boshin War. Strangely, Blond ignores the Battles of Awa, Miyako Bay and Hakodate, despite the presence of great detail in Ogasawara and even a French eyewitness account: Collache’s ‘Aventure au Japon.’
There are other glimpses of important events in Tōgō’s life in the accounts of others. A young Ernest Satow was present at the bombardment of Kagoshima and gave a detailed account in his memoirs. The Reverend Capel, whose son once mistook Tōgō for a juggler, wrote a priceless portrait of his former lodger for The Strand Magazine, which remains one of the most human accounts of this famous military man. James Allan, a sailor smuggling arms to the Chinese, left a detailed eyewitness account of the Battle of the Yalu in Under the Dragon Flag. Last but not least, Nishida Hiroshi’s Imperial Japanese Navy website contains detailed career breakdowns of the ships and leading officers who served during the Meiji period, and has proved invaluable in solving old questions and scotching old myths.
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Allan, J, Under the Dragon Flag: My Experiences in the Chino- Japanese War (Frederick A Stokes, New York: 1898) [Dodo Press POD reprint, not dated]
Allen, H, The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii 1838–1917 (Mutual Publishing, Honolulu: 1982)
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Chuang, F, et al. (eds), Historical Sites of the First Rank in Taiwan and Kinmen (Council for Cultural Planning and Development, Executive Yuan, Taipei: 1987)
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Collache, E, ‘Une Aventure au Japon’, in Le Tour du Monde: Nouveau Journal des Voyages, no. 77 (1874) pp 49–64
Connaughton, R, The War of the Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: A Military History of the Russo-Japanese War 1904–5 (Routledge, London: 1988)
Cortazzi, H, Victorians in Japan in and around the Treaty Ports (Athlone Press, London: 1987)
Croizier, R, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: 1977)
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Dodd, J, Journal of a Blockaded Resident in North Formosa During the Franco-Chinese War 1884–5 (Daily Press Office, Hong Kong: 1888)
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