The silk business was central to the cash arm of the economy. Hachioji, like all the towns of the Kanto plain, was given over to it. From every window along the street came the soft thud of shuttles being rammed down on the loom. Every housewife spent her free time embroidering borders of silk handkerchiefs to sell for a few cents to the foreign buyers in Yokohama, often earning more than a husband working as a clerk in one of the government ministries.
Bunshiro came up from Yokohama one day, combining a call on Chika with a buying expedition, and Charles went out with him by rickshaw to a cocoonery just outside town. In the damp, shady shed the silk worms munched on the mulberry leaves in wide, shallow baskets. There was a sound like a light rain falling in a forest. Charles picked up a worm but dropped it instantly, finding something off-putting in its cool moistness.
In the spinning room, the girls in their kimonos, hair bound in scarves and arms in bag-sleeves tied with red tape, made much of him. For the rest of his life, a snatch of poetry stayed with him and reminded him of this day:
Totsukuni no chigo mezurashimi idaki-age, ho-o-zuri-seshi, kaikone-ware, ware wasureme yamo? (A foreign child, they carried him in their arms liking him so, touching his cheek with theirs / Those country girls, how can I forget them?)
One idle afternoon, Charles discovered in Chika’s baggage a metal toy sword that had been sent from Switzerland and wisely hidden from him. He promptly tested it by hacking the wooden verandah post outside their room. Alarmed by the result, an inch-deep chip exposing the fresh, unweathered pine inside, he attempted to cover it up by rubbing in water and dust.
When, inevitably, Chika discovered the damage, he got a lesson: ‘If this were former days you’d be put to death, either by harakiri or by beheading if your courage failed. You have drawn your sword for no good reason and did harm, if only to wood!’
There was much more of this, reducing him to tears, and he was sent down to apologise to the landlord.
Another day they went to Mount Takao, about eight kilometres out by rickshaw, and then walked for half an hour to the Yakuoin temple. They wandered up the avenue of tall dark cedar trees and passed a famous waterfall under which several people were sitting. Spirit-possessed people, as the mentally ill were often regarded, would come and subject themselves to this supposed cure.
Playfully, one hopes, Chika threatened to turn Charles over to the ‘mad’ people if he continued to be mischievous. As she went on, he became frightened and tightened his grip on her hand. She talked of the winged sky-dog, or tengu, which she said lived in the top of the huge cedars lining the path, creating the breeze with a huge fan. ‘If he sees a boy who tells lies to his mother or disobeys he will sweep down and carry him off.’ Charles looked up at the dark mass of the trees and the blue emptiness beyond and shuddered. ‘But if you are a good boy,’ Chika went on, ‘he will help you grow into a great man, and pass on to you all that he knows.’
Not long afterwards, they moved on to Tokyo, a 50 kilometre train trip along the safe geomantric axis and took a house in Kanda. It was, and still is to some extent, a low-lying, comfortable neighbourhood of small shops, restaurants and tea houses. Many students lived in boarding houses, which were handy to the several universities and vocational schools then springing up on the heights of Ochanomizu. Indeed, it was close to the outer moat of the former shogun’s castle, into which the emperor had moved 20 years earlier from Kyoto in his ‘restoration’ to an active role as head of state. Occasionally the sounds of soldiers at their drill would float across, or the sun would reflect off a bugle being sounded on top of the granite walls.
Property was cheap then. The new government had placed heavy taxes on land. Most of the feudal lords, or daimyo, were only too glad to be released from their former obligation to live in the city under the shogun’s watchful eye and keep their families as hostages. Their barrack-like townhouses had been pulled down and whole blocks of the city were empty. Chika could easily afford to buy a small place.
Charles’ new kindergarten was up on the heights. A rickshaw, kept on permanent retainer, would take him to lessons each day. Sometimes the rickshaw-puller would push him along in one of the presents Charles had received from Switzerland, a tricycle-carriage with a wooden horse over the front wheel, steered by leather reins. On the bridge over the canal, mounted soldiers from the Imperial Guard would sometimes pass by and return his salute.
A popular entertainment and instruction came through panoramas, which in those days were exhibited inside special buildings. One panorama display at Asakusa, showed the Franco–Prussian War of 1870 – oil-painted backdrops showed villages burning, women and children fleeing, blood on iron weapons, while in the foreground lay waxwork soldiers with gruesome wounds. It may have been just imagination or an ingenious device, but to the boy, their chests appeared to heave with dying gasps. The panorama also showed Napoleon III signing the capitulation. Charles felt sorry for him and the French. But the scene brought Chika out in indignation and scorn. ‘If he were Japanese he would end his life by harakiri,’ she declared. ‘What a shame for an emperor to surrender.’ If only she knew what was coming in the boy’s lifetime.
Not far away at Kudan was the Shinto shrine for the war dead, later renamed the Yasukuni Jinja, or ‘Guard the Nation Shrine’. On the shrine’s feast days in April and October, Fusa the maid would take Charles to see the cavalrymen racing their horses. There were acrobats, dwarves and peepshows of giant serpents and the like, most of which turned out to be stuffed or replica specimens. Impoverished former samurai would put on fencing bouts and a quack doctor sold a panacea said to be extracted from a giant toad by surrounding it with mirrors, thus making it sweat its magical fat. The quack would then perform a trick of drawing a lengthy sword from the other side of a screen with his hands tied.
At that time only 10,000 souls were ‘deified’ within the shrine, mostly from the civil wars that erupted at the end of the shogunate. Regardless of which side they were on, all were deemed to have sacrificed themselves for the new Japan and to be reconciled to it. Neither Chika nor the young Charles could have conceived how many more millions would end up joining them by 1945.
One night, during their second winter at Kanda, Charles was woken, hastily dressed and then strapped in a quilt on Fusa’s back. The chilly air outside woke him completely and he saw the sky was golden in colour, glowing red in one direction, with sparks and occasional flames shooting up. Fusa hurried to an open space near the moat. There they watched the spectacle of Tokyo burning, one of the smaller ‘Edo flowers’ that periodically destroyed swathes of the city. This time it included Kanda. Their little house and all their possessions went up in flames.
Chika was one of the few people to be insured, collecting her payment in cash from the president of the insurance company at an open meeting. She rented a house close to Ochanomizu bridge, in more bohemian surrounds. The new house was gloomy. It had sword-cuts on the pillars and blood splashes on the ceiling. It was said to be two centuries old, formerly occupied by vassals of the Kuwayama’s.
Almost certainly on instructions from his remote father, Charles was sent to a Sunday school, though at the Lutheran church at Hongo rather than a Catholic one. He would be taken by the maid, since Chika detested and feared the ‘Yaso’ or Christian religion (she would say Christians cut a cross on the brow of the deceased before burial, a common belief in Japan then). A German missionary baptised Charles, holding a dove on one wrist and dripping water from a silver font held by his wife. A young Japanese ‘Bible woman’ occasionally called on Chika, who heard her out courteously. Once Chika took Charles to a German missionary’s house where the lady gave him a banana fritter (his first taste of banana). Though baptised, Charles still bowed and prayed at the little household shrine and also when he was taken to Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines.
Despite her prejudices, Chika would sometimes take Charles to the Nikolai Cathedral, the big Russian Orthod
ox church on the hilltop near Ochanomizu. Once she even took communion from Bishop Nikolai himself, who was wearing his gold-embroidered robes. The bishop placed his hand on the head of Charles and looked at him with such a friendly expression that Charles was not alarmed by the Russian’s huge beard and pink face.
Somehow this bishop, Nikolai Kasatkin, managed to build a flock of many thousands, despite the hostility that grew towards Russia year by year. Even as early as 1893, only two years after abject apologies for an attack on the visiting Tsarevich (the son of the Tsar) near Kyoto, Japan’s rivalry with Russia was building. The sense of it was part of Charles’ childhood. Dashing young officers were making journeys of reconnaissance into the Asian mainland and the Arctic islands to Japan’s north where this rivalry for open lands and resources would be played out. Among other well-known reports at the time, there was the popular acclaim for the retired naval lieutenant Naritada Gunji who had set off with a schooner to settle the northernmost Kuril island, Shumshu. He had disappeared from sight in a rowing boat from the Sumida River in Tokyo as he was trying to get out to his ship and the city’s printmakers had him rowing all the way north, fighting off sea monsters with his pistol and boat-hook.
Chika took Charles to the huge public welcome in Ueno Park for Lieutenant-Colonel Fukushima Yasumasa, who had just crossed Russia by horseback. Why he was so feted when the Tsar had provided him horses and every facility was not clear. But again the printmakers had a field day, showing him fighting off packs of wolves with his pistol, traversing alone a vast plain with the Mountains of Heaven, the Tien Shan range, in the distance.
Chika was adamant that Charles should not attend the theatre until he was past the stormiest times of growing up, as she thought it would either make him effeminate or dissolute. This must have been some sacrifice for her, as the kabuki theatre had been a passion earlier in her life. Once, however, Fusa the maid took the risk of taking Charles into the kabuki-jo while out on an errand, standing among the ‘one-act audience’ in the cheap gallery where shoes need not be removed. They watched an episode of Chushingura, the Forty-seven Ronin story of revenge in which the masterless samurai (ronin) disguise their intentions to avenge their unjustly slain lord by pretending to lapse into bawdy licentiousness. A banqueting scene on the stage grew into a brawl in which one man was thrown over a balcony into fake snow. Charles thought it was all real, crying out and forcing a highly embarrassed Fusa to take him out.
Though he swore secrecy to Fusa, Charles had a nightmare that night about the performance and Chika forced a confession. Perhaps because the Forty-seven Ronin story was deemed so instructional, she let Fusa off lightly.
Around this time grandmother O-Fuku died. The prelude was a very pleasant occasion when she went with Chika and Charles to a restaurant in Jimbocho, the area of Kanda that was to become a lifelong favourite urban haunt for Charles, full of antiquarian bookshops and student cafés.
O-Fuku downed a couple of flasks of hot sake. On the way home browsing at the bookstalls, she tripped and fell, knocking her nose which bled a little. Her behaviour became a little obsessive over the next few days. One night Charles heard Chika praying at the shrine at the end of the room in which they slept. The string of her rosary snapped and the beads scattered over the floor and clattered off a wooden chest. ‘You mustn’t cry,’ Chika told him. ‘You must be a man, because there is no other man in the house besides you.’
The two maids were sent out to fetch the doctor. Preceded by his locum, he eventually arrived and gave O-Fuku camphor injections. She died anyway at dawn, aged 72. Her funeral cortege mostly comprised people from Yokohama, its rickshaws stretching a kilometre as it passed Ueno. The cherry blossoms were out, petals lay in thick drifts on the ground and little knots of people were holding rowdy picnics on mats under the trees. The hedonistic scenes seemed to some mourners more fitting than her posthumous Buddhist title of ‘Mother Earth Virtue Complete’.
Chika took Charles for a check-up with Dr Erwin Baeltz, the German physician who tended the emperor and whose name appeared on a widely used skin tonic for many years. He was a great exponent of sea-bathing. So after the seven-week service for the soul of O-Fuku and the dinner for attendees, at the Yaozen Restaurant above Ueno Station, Chika took rooms at Otsu, just inside the entrance to Tokyo Bay on the eastern side of the Miura Peninsula, close to where she had spent much of her childhood.
During the journey south, Chika observed the farmers bent over the ripening rice crop and launched into a lesson for Charles about how the survival and prosperity of Japan was built on their labour. ‘If you waste one single grain of your daily rice, you will be made blind by the anger of the gods!’ she proclaimed.
On the train Chika reminisced about her childhood at Otsu with O-Fuku. She recalled a scene where one of daimyo Hosokawa’s samurai was ordered to commit harakiri for some failure of nerve. His son was also cut off from inheriting his position and his annual fee in rice. The doomed samurai was given a month to pass on his skills to enable his young brother to succeed him as the clan’s master of archery.
Day by day Chika and others at Otsu would watch as the doomed samurai taught his brother to shoot, firing 500 arrows a day. Then Chika spied through a knothole in a fence as the samurai committed seppuku. She could see him from behind, his right elbow moving as he slit his belly. The friend helping him complete his ritual suicide moved forward: his sword flashed as it came down to sever the head, and Chika heard a yell. The samurai fell forward, blood gushed up. It was a story Charles never forgot.
Perhaps because of Chika’s distraction, they overshot the necessary change of trains at Ofuna. While waiting for a return train at the small country stop of Hiratsuka, Chika left Charles in charge of the bags while she talked with the stationmaster. Meanwhile, a group of village children gathered outside the fence and closely studied Charles. ‘He’s a seiyojin (Westerner),’ one said.
‘No, he’s not in pants and jacket, but a kimono. He must be a hafu (half-Westerner),’ said another.
‘Maybe a to-jin,’ said a third one, using a term that started out meaning a Chinese person and which had come to mean anyone foreign.
‘Or an ai-no-ko (love-child).’
Charles found none of the terms offensive, nor did he think they intended any offence, but were simply reflecting their curiosity. It was only later that wounding words such as ketoh (hairy foreigner) crept into use.
The inn at Otsu quickly became familiar. Several children from the Ochanomizu kindergarten were there. They all dashed around its wide beach and into the shallow, calm water. Some naval officers from the nearby base at Yokosuka had also moved in for the summer, full of merriment and fond of banquets.
To swim, Chika and the other women would wear a straw hat tied under the chin, a chemise, a kind of sarong and Japanese split-toed socks. Chika would use a wooden kickboard. The men would wear their baggy undershorts or the ‘monkey-pants’ loincloth and show off various traditional styles of swimming, which involved keeping the shoulders or even the entire torso free of the water so that weapons could be wielded. After swimming, the mother and boy would hurry along to the big hotel bathhouse to get warm again. At night, Chika would take Charles for a walk along the promenade and buy him some shaved ice flavoured with syrups of pear, peach, grape or loquat.
One afternoon, Charles was among a group of boys subdued by the heat and tired from swimming and boating. As they sat on the cool planks of the upstairs hallway, an older boy, called Yamaji, confronted him.
‘Are you a Christian?’ Yamaji demanded.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘You trod on the picture of the emperor when you were baptised!’
‘Of course not!’
Yamaji grabbed Charles with his powerful arms and started pressing his head down to the tatami. ‘Yes, you did,’ he insisted. ‘I know. All Christians do that. Now apologise. Bow down and say you were wrong.’
&nb
sp; Charles’ rescuer was an older school-fellow Hozumi, son of a famous jurist.
‘Don’t be a bully, Yamaji,’ Hozumi said. ‘My aunt was baptised the other day and I was there. I go to Sunday school and church. Nothing like that happens.’
Yamaji reluctantly let go his grip.
Charles did not tell Chika, because in such cases she would turn the complaint against him, saying no one would take such action without provocation – Charles must have been the boastful or cheeky one. So instead, something which late in life still amazed Charles, he took his complaint to Yamaji’s father, a lieutenant-general in the army. In 1868 Yamaji’s father had been barely restrained from setting fire to the first Tokugawa shogun’s shrine by his colleagues in the pro-restoration army, after they had defeated the shogunate forces at Utsunomiya.
He too asked Charles if he were a Christian. Charles said he was.
‘You are a Japanese, aren’t you?’ the general asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You must be loyal to the emperor.’
Perhaps seeking an evasion, Charles suddenly asked if he could see the general’s helmet. The general smiled and put on an old straw hat without much of a brim left. It made the boy laugh and the general said to come and see him again. Just over a year later General Yamaji Motoharu was to gain worldwide notoriety for ordering a vicious house-to-house ‘search’ of Port Arthur in Manchuria after his men had come under fire from snipers in breach of the surrender by the Chinese garrison. This butchery was a presage of what happened later at Nanking. The incident, or perhaps just the publicity about it in The Times denied Yamaji his promotion to full general, though he was made a viscount some time later.
Charles and Chika returned to Tokyo and Charles joined the primary school at Hitotsubashi, wearing a uniform tunic of dark-blue serge, the collar turned up, with brass buttons. The pointed cap was sewn down to the left, with a different coloured tassel at the point for the various grades and a badge of paulownia leaf and flower above the leather peak. The school bag had to be slung over the right shoulder to the left hip, the net bag with his lunch box left to right. He learnt the kana, the Japanese phonetic syllabary, and started on kanji, the Chinese characters.
War of Words Page 3
