by Anthony Grey
‘Fuji! . . . Fuji-san!’
As though answering his unspoken question, a voice close beside him in the darkness spoke in an urgent whisper. Higher-pitched in contrast to the slow-drawling speech patterns of the Susquehanna’s American crew, the voice was sibilant and unfamiliar. Turning, Eden saw a diminutive Asian had stolen up beside him, and he recognized the man instantly as Sentaro, a Japanese castaway whom the Susquehanna was carrying homeward for repatriation. Rescued from a sinking fishing junk in mid-Pacific, he had been carried to San Francisco by an American merchant ship, and spent almost four years there working as a port stevedore. Eden was about to remonstrate with him for slipping unseen onto the quarterdeck, but the scrawny Japanese had already fallen to his knees, his face turned towards the shimmering triangle of light. As Eden watched, he bent his thin body double in an elaborate self-abasing bow, until his face was pressed against the planks of the deck. He held this reverent posture for some moments and when at last he sat up and turned his head to glance at Eden, the American saw that his broad cheeks were agleam with tears.
‘Many times since my shipwreck I dream of this sight of Mount Fuji,’ Sentaro whispered in Japanese. ‘When it catches the moonlight, it becomes a silver spirit floating in the night. I am very happy to see it again - but I am frightened too.’
Finding himself moved by the simple fisherman’s tears, Eden decided to offer no reprimand. Before the US Navy squadron’s departure from its home base, and during the long voyage, he had befriended the castaway who slept and lived in a cramped and uncomfortable storage space under the fo’c’s’le deck. He had visited him there frequently and on occasions had invited him discreetly to his own cabin as part of his effort to master the rudiments of the Japanese language. Sentaro had already confided to him that he was approaching his homeland with a mixture of exhilaration and fear; after long years away he yearned to see his family and native country again - but, knowing how fiercely laws banning all travel outside Japan were enforced, he was deeply fearful for his personal safety once he landed.
‘Everything will be all right, Sentaro,’ said Eden soothingly in Japanese, gazing out over the rail again. ‘I am sure this first beautiful sight of Mount Fuji is a good omen. .
The Japanese stared up at him doubtfully, his expression anxious. ‘I hope so, master.’ He bowed his head for another long moment, then turned and crept silently into the darkness, heading for the ladder that led down to the spar deck. Eden watched him go, then peered once more towards the ethereal image of Japan’s sacred volcano. The moonlight was strengthening, and he was able to make out for the first time the shadowy outline of the entire mountain, which rose from the inky darkness beneath it in the shape of a perfect cone. The newly risen moon, he could see now, had illuminated the snow- flanked summit suddenly to create the illusion that it was drifting free in space like a disembodied wraith. He had been searching previously much lower in the sky to catch his first glimpse of the spectacular mountain, and its first appearance high in the nighttime heavens only added to the aura of mystery which seemed to surround it.
Eden remembered suddenly the passage describing Fuji in the history book translated from Dutch which he had flung down on his cabin bunk before coming up on deck to begin his spell as second officer of the middle watch. The book had described how the fiery mountain had been hurled aloft from the flat eastern plains during a ferocious night of earthquakes some two thousand years before - at the same period that Japan’s first emperor was said to have become the nation’s ruler. Ever since, both emperors and the mountain alike had been worshipped as sacred divinities, and as Eden continued staring towards its snow-covered summit, another shudder of awe moved up his spine.
‘That must be the most beautiful mountain in the world he murmured to himself. ‘It hardly seems real.’
*
As the steam frigate and its three sister ships drew nearer to the coast, the pyramid of light appeared to glimmer ever more intensely. Eden wondered melodramatically whether it had emerged suddenly from the darkness to act as a timely guiding beacon, to show the way to this host of strangers now approaching silently from the outside world. For more than two hundred years foreigners of every race had been resolutely barred from these mysterious islands - and it was this fact, which he had uncovered in the library of the new US Naval Academy at Annapolis during his last cadet year, which had prompted him later to volunteer for the voyage. Now, he reflected, that long period of Japan’s seclusion was about to end, and he would play a small role himself in its ending. On the silvered sea around the Susquehanna he could see the dark silhouettes of the other three slow- moving US Navy ships: two high-masted sailing vessels, the Plymouth and the Saratoga, and a second barque-rigged wooden side-wheeler, the Mississippi, were forging slowly northwards through Japan’s coastal waters, under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry:
In the grandest cabin of the Susquehanna, which he had made his flagship, the commodore was carrying strict orders from the President of the United States. His mission was to break down the barred gates of this tantalizing oriental land and open it to American ships and trade. Perry was carrying a formal request to the present Emperor from President Millard Fillmore, inscribed on parchment and secured in a polished rosewood box. But he also possessed a well-armed body of US marines and enough heavy guns to do the job by force, if necessary Robert Eden remembered this as he watched the moonlight shimmer on the far-off mountaintop, and for the first time his feelings of exhilaration were tempered by a stab of unease.
Might the brilliant white peak of Mount Fuji, he wondered, be flashing a warning to the approaching American naval squadron instead of acting as a beacon? Could this be interpreted as a last firm warning to retreat? Or at least to draw near to an ancient and mysterious land only with the greatest caution?
From the same Dutch history book that he had devoured avidly during the long voyage from the United States, Eden had learned that fierce hordes of warriors equipped with metal and leather armour still loyally served their feudal lords in medieval crag- top castles. In mountain temples, warriors and peasants alike worshipped the sun goddess, their divine emperor, and a host of mysterious spirits. These same warriors rode and fought beneath multicoloured heraldic banners; in victory they beheaded their enemies without mercy, but if defeated they slashed open their own bowels before shame could demean them.
Their divine emperor, the book explained, was believed to live in mysterious seclusion. Rural towns were often ablaze with street processions and theatres.
The earth of the islands was green and fertile, the trees were famous for their dazzling spring blossoms, and the graceful, delicate-limbed women of the land traditionally cultivated the arts of music and singing to a striking degree. Some, the book added archly, were trained to perform the duties of love with a grace matched by no other nation.
Coloured sketches, which had imprinted themselves in his mind, depicted these Japanese females as diminutive, doll-like creatures. Swathed in bright- coloured silken gowns, they wore their dark hair piled high in elaborate styles bristling with ornaments. The male warriors, narrow-eyed and fierce of expression, also dressed their hair strangely - in topknots and pigtails - and garbed themselves in silks that were loose-sleeved and exotically baggy As Eden continued to peer towards Fuji’s moonlit outline, the keen sense of curiosity and excitement which these words and images had generated at first reading intensified. How, he wondered, would cold reality compare, once they set foot on land?
He pondered the question endlessly as he paced the deck during the rest of his watch, glancing frequently towards the shadowy land. On returning to his cabin after being relieved, he stretched out on his bunk without undressing. Taking up the discarded history book, he thumbed through it until he found the same section on Mount Fuji. A verse written in praise of the volcano by a Japanese poet of the ninth century caught his eye and he read it through several times, until the last vivid stanzas were instilled in his memory
Great Fuji-yama towering to the sky,
A treasure art thou, given to mortal man,
A god protector watching o‘er Japan
On thee forever let me feast mine eye.
After he’d laid the book aside and closed his eyes Eden found that the haunting image of the shining mountain still filled his mind. For a long time he could not sleep, but lay listening restlessly to the thump of the Susquehanna’s paddle-wheels driving them nearer to landfall. Twice he rose and peered out through the port scuttle, searching the darkness to landward. To his disappointment, however, the mountain was no longer visible. Taking a leather- bound private journal from his cabin trunk he wrote in it avidly for several minutes, still glancing occasionally towards the shore.
When at last he slept, the glittering peak reappeared immediately in his dreams. His eyes seemed to fill with dazzling light, as he found himself on the mountain, ascending easily and lightly across the snow, heading towards the lip of its volcanic crater. Above, in the deep darkness of the sky, millions of stars were shining brilliantly, and on reaching the very top, instead of looking down into the crater, he found himself reaching up with his arms into the midnight heavens. Without difficulty he began pulling at the sky, and drawing down the dark stuff of the night. It came easily into his hands like glistening silk. The silver stars continued to shine as he wrapped them around his body in a loose and beautiful cloak which trailed across the snow behind him. Pulling this cloak tighter about himself, he felt a sense of wonder and contentment suffuse his mind and body in a way he had never known before.
Turning, he saw a temple had appeared on the mountain peak, its roofs curved and its woodwork red. A giant silver mirror to one side reflected a second image of the temple, and he hurried towards this. Just short of the mirror he halted, afraid suddenly of what he might see in it. Then he caught a glimpse of his marvellous new garment in the mirror, and to his relief the stars still shone dazzlingly in the deep blue darkness of its folds.
Reassured he stepped nearer. But when he studied his reflection, he suffered a sudden deep sense of shock. In place of his own familiar features, he found he was staring into the unsmiling face of a Japanese samurai. The top of the warrior’s head was shaven, and a long oiled pigtail was tied in a topknot across his crown. Dark eyes bore into his unwaveringly, their expression hostile one moment and enigmatically quizzical the next. Then, as Eden watched, this fierce male face dissolved slowly, to be replaced by the softer countenance of a beautiful Japanese girl. This time the almond eyes were downcast and the hair was enchantingly glossy pierced by glittering silver pins. Like the samurai before her, she also inhabited the blue silken gown of stars in his place. After a moment she began to lift her head to look at him but, before their eyes could meet fully, the mountaintop and all the stars above it exploded without warning in a sudden blinding flash of white light - and the dream ended as abruptly as it had begun.
PART I
The Black Ships Arrive
8 July 1853
The necklet of green, mountainous islands known today as Japan was in 1853 the most mysterious major country in the world. An isolated nation of some thirty million people
- who believed themselves and their emperor to be divine descendants of heaven - had deliberately sealed itself off from all other countries for well over two hundred years. Separated from the mainland of Asia by a hundred miles of sea, historically the Japanese had always been fierce defenders of their independence and racial purity. They had traded guardedly during the Middle Ages with near neighbours in India, China and South-East Asia, but otherwise had largely kept themselves apart. Consequently the arrival of European traders on their shores in the sixteenth century had set alarm bells ringing in the minds of the shoguns, the hereditary military dictators who then ruled the nation. Zealous Christian missionaries quickly followed the trail-blazing Portuguese and Spanish traders, and subsequently made hundreds of thousands of Japanese converts. Feeling their authority menaced, the shoguns publicly crucified many foreign priests and, In a bloody climax to a forty-year campaign of persecution, thirty thousand Japanese Christians were finally slaughtered in their castle stronghold. Strict laws were immediately enforced, forbidding all Japanese to travel abroad, and it even became a crime to build any large seaworthy vessel. Simultaneously all foreigners were barred from the country, and an edict was issued instructing, ‘In future as long as the sun shines on the earth, let no one sail towards Japan, not even an ambassador.’ The edict added, even more ominously, ‘This declaration will never be revoked and will be maintained on pain of death.’ During this era foreign sailors unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked on Japan c shores were sometimes exhibited in public in cages like animals.
These draconian laws turned Japan into one of the world’s most isolated nations, and preserved its late medieval society intact until the middle of the nineteenth century. From 1192 onwards the shoguns had relegated the emperors to a role of purely theoretical supremacy. They ruled with the support of regional feudal lords known as daimyo, who sallied grandly forth from mighty castles in this s4f-imposed vacuum and exercised supreme control over the lives of their peasant-farmer vassals. These daimyo maintained large standing armies of loyal samurai warriors to fight their causes, and between 1638 and 1853 the turbulent currents of world history passed Japan by. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the French Revolution rang the death- knell of feudal privilege in Europe, George Washington led Americans into a new era of modern democracy in the United States, and British inventors and engineers fomented the movement destined to change the whole world from ancient to modern - the Industrial Revolution. With steam-driven ships, railways, the telegraph, and superior weapons of war, the trade-hungry Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Americans began exercising an ever-widening influence which led to the colonization of many weaker nations. Treaty ports and foreign concessions were snatched from China by both Americans and Europeans - Britain seizing Hong Kong in the first Opium War - and trade and territorial aggrandizement went hand in hand in Africa, Latin America, India and many other parts of Asia.
News of these historical tides sweeping ever nearer to Japan was conveyed to its rulers by a tiny, unique group of foreigners. Although British, Spanish and Portuguese merchants had finally submitted to the xenophobic exclusion laws and departed from Japan in the early seventeenth century, a few tenacious Dutch merchants had hung on determinedly by their fingertips. Because the Japanese believed that their land was exclusively sacred to them - Nippon, or Nihon, the country’s indigenous name, means ‘land begotten by the Sun’ - the Dutch traders were humiliatingly confined throughout two centuries to an artificial, man-made island in the southernmost port of Nagasaki. Closely watched and supervised without let-up, they left this virtual prison only once a year, under escort, to attend an audience granted by the Shogun in his capital, Yedo - now called Tokyo. During their journey, great canvas curtains and screens were often hung along the route in towns and villages, to deny their foreign eyes any genuine glimpse of Japanese life. To retain their exclusive position, these Dutchmen, among other indignities, had to perform like circus bears before the Shogun, demonstrating European dances for his amusement.
But the commercial advantages gained by these traders from Holland were nevertheless considerable, and in return they acted as a channel of information from the outside world. At the Shogun’s command they prepared regular reports describing political developments in Europe, America, and other parts of the Far East. This information made Japan’s rulers uneasy - and greatly increased their determination to maintain the country’s inviolability. During the first half of the nineteenth century a few isolated foreign ships tried without success to put into Japanese ports. One tentative visit to Yedo Bay by American Navy men- of-war in 1846 ended abruptly when guard sampans rowed furiously by brawny samurai attached ropes to the two US sailing ships and dragged them back out to sea. Other foreigners who tried to land were denied entry wit
h similar warnings and threats until, in 1853, a determined United States Navy squadron under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry hove in sight. Because of what had happened to their sailing ships seven years earlier, the Americans arrived this time in more powerful steam-driven warships. They also carried the latest cannon and a strong force of marines to back up their demand for trade and port facilities for all American shipping. During the long centuries of seclusion and ignorance, the Japanese people had been encouraged by their rulers to think of all other races in the world as ‘hideous barbarians’. Therefore many frightening images of foreigners abounded in the uninformed popular mind. En route to Japan, this US Navy squadron had called at the Ryukyus, tributary islands hundreds of miles to the south-west, the largest of which is Okinawa.
As a result, fast courier junks had raced ahead to the southern regions of Japan to warn of the imminent arrival of foreign barbarians travelling in fearsome, smoke-belching machines, the like of which had never been seen before in Japanese waters. As rumours about these approaching newcomers spread northward towards the city known today as Tokyo, the ordinary people of Japan panicked en masse. In their fevered minds they were convinced they were about to be invaded by hordes of ape-like giants as monstrous and terrifying as alien creatures from another planet.
1
MATSUMURA TOKIWA was stepping naked from her bath at the instant when a great commotion began in the city beyond her shoji screens. She was lost in a reverie, gazing reflectively at the tiny pearls of condensation that shimmered on her bare arms and shoulders. In the gentle lantern light, she thought, they glowed like miniature teardrops against her golden skin. Looking absently down at her youthfully pointed breasts, her shadowed flanks and the flattened curve of her belly, she noticed other such beads of tear-like moisture. Could it be, she wondered, that her soul was always silently weeping within her? Was her spirit sobbing soundlessly and invisibly all the time she smiled her bright, professional smiles, recited haiku verses, or played her plangent three- stringed samisen?
