War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  The foreign ladies of Yokohama often used to pet over Charles in the streets when he went out with Chika, probably taking him for the child of a European merchant in the care of a housekeeper. He had a dread of them, for reasons he could not put into thought, far more than of foreign men.

  It was a bustling town then. Along the Yokohoma Bund, facing the busy harbour with its glittering water, was a row of substantial masonry houses occupied by Jardine Matheson & Co. and other big mercantile firms, ending at the Grand Hotel with its verandahs facing the water. Lesser trading houses occupied the streets behind, and then beyond the park and a ring of canals lay the Japanese town: flimsy houses and shops of dark-stained wood, alive with big-character signs and theatre banners hung on long bamboo poles. Tokyo had a horse-drawn tramway across the city but in Yokohama people walked or took rickshaws pulled by short, muscular men who went nearly naked in summer, loincloths showing off tanned brown skin and ornate body tattoos of dragons and warriors.

  Twenty years earlier, the emperor had abolished the samurai privilege of riding horses, along with the right to carry swords (to the relief of foreigners, constantly fearful of being cut down at any moment by an unreconciled adherent of the old order). But even then, the only Japanese who rode or used horse-drawn carriages were high officials and nobility. Few of the rich merchants starting to emerge in Yokohama – the Haras and Mogis, the Hiranumas and Masudas – thought it becoming for a man of trade to indulge in such extravagance.

  The exceptions were the Japanese wives or, more usually, the o-meikake-san, or mistresses of foreign merchants. They dressed well, usually in kimono, and held their heads high, though the latter were never acknowledged in their paramour’s society and were described as servants in the police register of inhabitants.

  Chika Sakai was even more exceptional for those times. She would wear European clothes, riding her pony side-saddle or taking a gig. She spoke fairly fluent French, it was said, and had many of the upper-class Japanese accomplishments as well, the koto (a traditional Japanese instrument), as well as ikebana, and a fine hand in writing letters.

  ‘O-Chika-san of Number 76’, the first address of his father’s firm Bavier & Co. on the bund, was a respected and familiar sight around Yokohama in those days. Once she had her tortoiseshell comb snatched from her head and the thief taunted her from a short distance accusing her of being a white man’s plaything. Hobbled in her tight kimono but furious, Chika drew from her handbag a small revolver that Edouard had given her and blazed away at the robber. She had no chance of scoring a hit with the short-barrelled gun but the thief dropped the comb and ran. Chika gave the ‘contaminated’ item to her servant.

  How Chika met Edouard de Bavier is unclear, but Charles later assumed that Chika’s own mother had fixed it. His grandmother, which is how he regarded his stepmother’s stepmother, was O-Fuku-san. She lived in a small house with a maidservant, both paid for by Chika, not far from their place by the park. Often O-Fuku-san would bundle Charles away to spend the night with her. Already into her sixties, a rare age for a Japanese then, she was tall with cropped white hair on an elegantly shaped skull, still showing the foundations of the aquiline beauty she had been. Only a few of her teeth remained, enough to stop her lips from falling in.

  Demolishing any food placed before her, O-Fuku-san had a reputation for gulping down sake as fast as it was poured into her cup. She adored male company and made much of Charles as her ‘little warrior’, telling him tales of the ancient heroes of Japanese history and legend. O-Fuku had been a courtesan in the Yoshiwara pleasure district of Tokyo, when the city was the Edo of the shogunate, becoming an oiran, a woman of distinction and accomplishment with some say about whom she bestowed her favours upon. As was often the way she had formed an attachment with a favourite patron, a wealthy carpenter named Matsugoro. He took Fuku to his home in Odaki, on the east side of Edo. They adopted Chika and another unrelated girl, Kame, from somewhere nearby in the Chiba countryside. In the last years of the shogunate (which ruled Japan from 1600 to 1868), Matsugoro won a contract to build coastal fortifications around Yokosuka on the western side of Tokyo Bay, a belated response to the arrival in 1853 of Commodore Perry of the United States navy and his smoke-belching ‘black ships’, which forced a reopening of Japanese trade with the West following over 200 years of self-imposed isolation.

  Like other commoners under the three centuries of the shogunate, Matsugoro had grown up without a family name. On the emancipation of 1871, he had taken the name and family crest of a distant relative, a low-ranking samurai called Sakai. This samurai might have objected, had he been alive, as he had been a diehard defender of the levelling reforms made in the emperor’s name. But he had fallen in the last stand of the shogunate’s defenders at what is now Ueno Park, on the northern side of the city.

  Matsugoro died in the great cholera epidemic that swept Japan in 1886, after unwisely eating watermelon. But by then both adopted daughters had been placed with men of substance.

  Edouard de Bavier had arrived in Japan in 1862 as an attaché in the Swiss Legation, aged about 20. A couple of years later he moved to Jardine Matheson to gain experience in commerce, before setting up his own firm. By then the treaty port of Yokohama – excised from Japanese jurisdiction and its foreign inhabitants ruled by the consuls of their home governments – was a busy and unruly trading town, full of carousing Western sailors, drifters and adventurers.

  It was a time of insecurity for the first foreign residents. Within the treaty boundaries near Kamakura, it was reported that a group of English people had unwittingly ridden their horses across the path of an entourage of the feudal lord of Satsuma, and had been attacked by angry samurai for failing to dismount and respectfully wait for the retinue to pass. For similar reasons many foreign merchants would wait for Japanese traders to bring their silk yarn to Yokohama. Despite the risks, Edouard would venture to inland villages to buy silk and silk waste directly from the cocooneries and spinning workshops. It was at one small cocoonery, about 80 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, that he met a tall, broad-shouldered, pockmarked yet handsome fellow named Naganuma Bunshiro, whom he hired as his banto, or local manager.

  Edouard was an aggressive, unpopular, though grudgingly respected businessman. Years later, Bunshiro told Charles of a clash between Edouard and the ancient trading firm of Mitsui over some silk shipments. A Mitsui manager had insisted on payment immediately on shipping the goods, Edouard on payment after safe arrival in Europe. The Mitsui man came waving a sword, followed by a band of Yokohama riffraff, with the aim of stopping the shipment. Edouard took shelter in his godown as the watchmen for the foreign community battled them off. Foreigners didn’t like him much either, since he insisted on paying taxes to the Japanese government while others sheltered behind their extraterritorial rights.

  The premises of Bavier & Co. at No. 76 soon grew into a collection of two-storey stone offices and godowns. The cobbled courtyard in the middle was often packed with handcarts laden with bales of silk yarn and throngs of porters with top-knots and indigo-dyed topcoats waiting for Bunshiro to assay their offerings. In the centre of the yard rose a high white flagstaff, cross-treed and guyed like a ship’s mast, with the Danish flag flying; Edouard had become Denmark’s consul-general in 1868, and later of Portugal as well.

  Who first came across the Sakai girls Charles was never told. Bunshiro married Chika’s adoptive sister O-Kame, who had been working as a servant in the household of the Satsuma daimyo in Edo. Aged about 17, Chika became the consort of Edouard. She moved into the fine house of hybrid Japanese–European style Edouard had built for himself in the Europeans’ residential quarter, on the bluff overlooking the town. The house and outbuildings stood on an estate he named ‘Bavierville’. Looking southwards, the waters of Mississipi Bay were framed by tall pines and stone lanterns. Just to the north was the racecourse at Negishi where Edouard raced his own horses. To the west, in clear weather, rose the
cone of Mount Fuji.

  Bunshiro and Kame did not have their two children, Charles’ cousins in effect, until much later, in the mid-1880s. So probably it was Edouard who discovered Chika first and then introduced them. Chika had a child by Edouard in about 1867, soon after they met, but the boy died three years later. Though they shared a bed for nearly 20 more years they bore no other children together.

  It became a familiar enough story. After a quarter century in Japan, Edouard was drawn back to Switzerland and the heritage of his family, listed as one of the country’s grand lineages in its almanacs. Edouard’s considerable fortune had allowed him to buy an impressive château, a mixture of gothic and renaissance styles in yellow stucco, overlooking Lake Geneva from its western shore at the village of Dully. The wrought-iron gates were adorned with cross-keys, the Vatican emblem, referring to the de Bavier family tradition of sending their young men to become soldiers of the Swiss Guard protecting the Pope.

  Edouard made longer trips home, away from Chika. At some point he had an affair with a European woman. This was Charles’ real mother, though out of deference to Chika’s memory he always mentioned her as his ‘other mother’. He was born on 30 January 1888, and named Charles Souza Bavier.

  For the rest of his life, Charles put down his birthplace as Dully, Switzerland. He was told, or assumed, he had been born in the château. But was this so? Or would it be more reasonable to assume he was born in Yokohama? And from where did his possibly Portuguese middle name come? There is no record of his birth in the de Bavier commune d’origin at Coire on the other side of Switzerland, or of any earlier marriage than the later one which yielded three sons for Edouard. Had this other woman perhaps been a Portuguese girl encountered by Edouard in his consular role, her unworldliness resulting in a pregnancy he had the wealth and means to conceal?

  Whichever it was, Charles had no memory of his mother or of Switzerland. He often speculated that she must have died either in labour or while he was a baby. She floated in his mind as a nameless soul, like a stillborn sibling.

  Charles’ first memories started after he was given into the care of Chika, who by then had moved from the grand Bavierville at Negishi to her own small house down by the park.

  Edouard had left Japan again, reappearing with a European wife. They brought Charles a present: carved and painted wooden soldiers about a foot high with a pair of wooden bowling balls to roll at them. A week later Chika dressed him in his best European clothes and took him in the horse-gig up to Bavierville.

  The sea sparkled down below. Chika pointed out into the distance towards the entrance of Tokyo Bay, the lighthouses gleaming white on Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu. A long gravel driveway led through turf embankments and artfully trained pine trees. In the sunlight on the porch was a large perambulator with a sturdy Chinese amah watching over it. The baby’s name was André. Charles remembered fetching some pine cones and laying them on the baby’s quilt as a present. Perhaps he was brought to be inspected by the new wife, to see if she would take to him. Perhaps it was just Edouard squaring off his accounts in Japan and easing his conscience.

  A month or so later, Charles was taken to see Edouard and his wife again, this time at the Grand Hotel on the bund. He remembered spending some time in a room upstairs with baby André and the Chinese amah. He saw a steam launch with a glittering brass funnel coming into the quay right under the window. André was bundled off in the arms of the Chinese nurse. Later, as he was being held by Chika down on the bund, he saw the tall figure of his father, dressed and hatted, stepping along a gangplank to the launch. His wife, the amah and the baby were already sitting on its benches under an awning. A huge black-hulled steamer, heavy smoke pouring from its funnels, was lying out in the harbour.

  Edouard halted halfway, turned, lifted his hat and bowed a little. The small crowd of Japanese, Chika and Bunshiro included, were sobbing. Then the gangplank was pulled onto the quay and the launch hissed its way out into the harbour. It was the last time Charles would see his father.

  Chapter 2

  BECOMING HACHISABURO

  The scene is almost set for spring to come:

  A hazy moon and blossoms on the plum …

  — ‘The Entrance of Spring’, by Bashō

  Yokohama–Tokyo 1891–95

  From time to time, elaborate toys arrived for Charles from Dully, brought over to the house by his uncle, Bunshiro, when the Messageries Maritimes steamer called in at Yokohama. One was a rocking horse, painted dapple-grey. It came with a small wooden sword, in the style of a European sabre. By then, most of the foreign soldiers had been withdrawn from Yokohama, but sometimes there were parades of marines from warships visiting the port, and increasingly of soldiers of the new Japanese army. Charles would return from watching the ceremonies, mount his wooden horse and swish the sabre.

  For Chika there would be a case of sweet red wine from San Rafael in Spain, the only alcohol to which she was partial. She reported the boy’s progress by letter to Edouard and about once a month she would take Charles to call at the offices of Bavier & Co., edging past the bales of silk in the forecourt. A delicious smell wafted from the nearby tea factory, where green leaves from the inland hills were roasted in iron pots over roaring fires by young women in headscarves and bagged sleeves.

  Bunshiro would come out of his office and discreetly hand Chika an envelope containing her allowance. He would send out for a flavoured drink for Charles and make a fuss. Herr Gielen and the other European managers would pat the boy on the head as they passed by.

  But from that time until he was nearly grown-up he ceased to be Charles Souza Bavier. He lived as Sakai Hachisaburo, his personal name a play on the supposedly lucky ‘triple eight’ year of his birth (‘Hachi’ meaning eight and ‘sa’ a shortened form of the Japanese word for three).

  His few words of nursery French soon disappeared. Chika refused to talk about Edouard or his mother. Already past 40 when she took charge of Charles, she never complained about her abandonment, her relegation from the four-poster bed at Bavierville to the tatami-mat of the rented house down on the edge of the Japanese town, the entrustment to her of a child not her own – this strange reversal of the Madame Butterfly story.

  Charles never saw Chika dress in Western clothes. Once when he was given the opportunity to learn French she surprised him with her abrupt refusal. English became his foreign language. He never spoke to a Westerner until many years later at school. Though his European features undoubtedly were the cause of much of the attention he received as a small child, he never felt anything but Japanese until he was much older.

  His brown hair cropped short to hide its colour, wearing a kimono and fluent in Japanese, he must have passed first glance in those less particular times. Later, Chika made him eat a lot of seaweed, on the not altogether preposterous theory it would darken his hair.

  The feminine world of a Japanese childhood wrapped itself around him, provided by Chika, a succession of maids brought in from country villages, Bunshiro’s wife Aunt O-Kame and Grandmother O-Fuku. He slept on a futon beside Chika for many years. He watched and chattered while she got in and out of her layers of petticoats and kimono, while she stripped and washed before getting into the pinewood tub of steaming water. There was never another man in her life, as far as he saw.

  She was not physically affectionate, however. That was the preserve of O-Kame and the neighbourhood women, like Mrs Ichikura, who could never resist trying to cuddle Charles. When he stayed at her little house, O-Fuku would wrap him in her arms, even producing a wrinkled breast for him to suckle on during restless nights. Her part of town was noisier, with geisha houses all around and consequently many more people out and about at night, including hawkers yelling out their special calls.

  Charles was never hit – not until school, and then a stinging, humiliating slap on his face by an exasperated teacher – but the threat of the withdrawal of his mother
’s love brought him into abjection. Of all the sins he could commit, ingratitude was the worst and every thoughtless act was traced home to that.

  ‘How can you be so clumsy and thoughtless?’ Chika would ask. ‘Your brother would never have behaved like this.’ The long-dead first child was held up as an ideal to which Charles would never compare.

  Sometime after Edouard left, it was decided Charles should attend one of the two kindergartens then operating in Japan. This necessitated a move to Tokyo.

  Chika was an unshakeable believer in geomancy. On the probably expensive advice of a well-known oracle that a north-eastward move for a woman of her zodiac sign and element would be unlucky, the mother and child, plus Koto the maid, diverted to spend a month in Hachioji, a small town on the Kanto plain, before approaching Tokyo from the west.

  It was the boy’s first trip on the railway, which was then being extended across Japan and a source of endless fascination for the popular artists of the time – the concrete example of the ‘civilisation and enlightenment’ that was the slogan of the era under the Emperor Meiji.

  Hachioji was the terminus of a line reaching out from Tokyo. From the wooden hotel’s verandah, Charles watched the railway porters at the station and longed to assist. Several times, an English engineer who boarded at the same inn took him up on his locomotive’s footplate as they drove out to the end of the line. The money for all the machinery of this ‘civilisation’, the railway engines and the navy dreadnoughts that came out from England to much public rejoicing, and the salaries of the foreign experts who taught the Japanese how to use them, came from taxes on the rural landowners and farmers.