The school was the first step towards an elite education. Even so, Chika was increasingly melancholy. Charles felt more and more that he was a disappointment to her. One winter day he came home by rickshaw and found her on the verandah of their room, the sliding walls open to the snow-covered garden. She was playing the koto, the Japanese 13-string harp. It was a slow sad tune that years later he recognised as a piece by a third century Chinese mandarin, titled ‘Thinking of the Lotus’, which by word-sound also had the meaning of ‘Pining for the Spouse’.
Chika would disparage Westerners more frequently, saying that Europeans and Americans, though big in appearance, lacked fortitude. She said they were clumsy, scheming and cowardly compared to the Japanese.
She took Charles several times to pray and sip consecrated sake at the shrine of Tenjin, a 10th century minister who rejected deference to Chinese culture and had thus become a symbol of the ‘essence’ of Japan for centuries afterwards.
Once Charles was taken before the white-bearded abbot of the Denzuin temple, a renowned physiognomist who studied the boy through an enormous magnifying glass while jotting down his findings with a fine writing brush. Charles was sent out of the room while Chika heard the abbot’s diagnosis of his character.
On two occasions that Charles became aware of, Chika chipped tiny fragments off the tombstones of Japanese heroes – one the celebrated Edo burglar, Jirokichi, who at his execution had vowed to return as a spirit to stop children thieving, the other the more recent assassin of an education minister deemed to have shown disrespect at the Imperial shrine in Ise – and fed them to him with his dinner.
Many years later Charles found among her belongings some correspondence from this time. Through a prominent figure in Yokohama silk circles, she had written to Edouard, begging him to take the child back and bring him up among people of his own race.
She must have thought of the long investment in her life with Edouard and the sacrifices she had made: the child who died aged three and whose ashes were buried in a temple above Yokohama; the time when insolvency threatened the existence of Bavier & Co.; her jewellery and fine kimonos that had to be sold along with Edouard’s racehorses and other disposable property; her readiness to take in pupils in music and ikebana to support Edouard.
There was a cold reply, saying that a particular orphanage would never reject a destitute child if her health failed.
Chapter 3
A MEIJI EDUCATION
Eleven horsemen riding through a night
Of swirling snow: none looks to left or right.
— ‘Urgent’, by Shiki
Yokohama 1895–1903
Within several months, Chika announced that her health required her to live in a warmer place with sea air. Chika and Charles moved again, leaving Tokyo, and taking the train down to Yokohama. After calling on Uncle Bunshiro, they boarded a small steamship bound for Kamimiyada. The passengers sat in the open hold which reeked of fish, paint, hot engine oil and coal smoke, Chika and Koto sat up primly to avoid contact with the sprawling male passengers. Charles must have fallen asleep across their knees.
He woke to dim daylight. The throb and clatter of the engine had stopped. A sampan was coming out from a sandy beach. Fishing boats were pulled up on the shore and sheltered from the rain with straw covers. Several thatched roofs and one tiled roof showed above the treeline on flat ground, with low wooded hills behind.
The house with the tiled roof belonged to Mr Niikura, the local shopkeeper and their new landlord. The top floor, which had only two rooms, became their living quarters, while the ground floor was stocked with the staples of village life: bottles of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, salt, rice, barley, millet and soybeans, kippers, Eagle-brand tinned milk from America, pots and pans, hardware and farming implements. From time to time the steamer would arrive and toot its whistle in the morning mist with fresh supplies from Yokohama.
The local school was a far cry from what Charles was used to. The Asahi Junior School, an old Japanese house and a raw-looking, two-storey Western-style building, stood amid sand and straggly pine trees. Instead of smart Prussian uniforms the village children came in ragged kimonos. The teachers included older men educated in traditional Chinese scholarship and some recent graduates, all male, as well as the Shinto priest from the little shrine just below the school. Many of them had strong provincial accents. Charles was put in a class of about 30 pupils, with girls and boys sitting on separate sides of the room.
His ethics examination was conducted by the mayor of the village, a heavily built man with a shrewd, genial expression. When Charles came into the room to be tested, he was asked to show how one passed a knife or sharp object to one’s betters. Charles understood what he meant, and picked up a pencil and handed it over with the point facing away. He passed with full marks in ethics for this.
In Tokyo and Yokohama, half the work of the police was discouraging the casual attitude to nudity among the Japanese. Working men would dress in the barest loincloths in summer or on the way home from the bathhouse. To persuade the Western powers to abandon the extra-territorial rights in the treaty ports like Yokohama (which they eventually did in 1899) the Meiji government banned public nudity, mixed bathing and any other behaviour that they believed might make the Japanese look like ‘South Sea savages’.
At Kamimiyada, the writ was not felt and they scarcely saw a policeman. Mr Niikura’s public bath had a rough wooden partition dividing the space for the two sexes, but only down to water level. Some of the young men would dive under to tease the women. Once a tipsy young man surfaced in front of Chika. At her frosty look, he backed off, bowing his face into the bathwater before submerging again.
Most of the villagers mixed less-expensive barley with their rice, accompanied by bean curd or kippers, except on feast days. The men would row the long boats, six or eight oars in action, out into the bay for days and nights to catch fish, taking balls of rice and water as supplies. But they would unload their fish at bigger ports onto the steamers supplying the markets in Yokohama and Tokyo. Fresh fish only came when villagers set a great net in a circle off the beach and slowly hauled it to shore. Poorer housewives would bring their own line and loop it round the great hawser of the net to help heave it in, earning a few fish for their effort. On feast days, men would dress in white robes and black caps and carry a portable shrine into the shallows to bring divine help with future catches.
Charles would often join the crowd of village children who would gather with great curiosity on the rare occasions when they saw Europeans in their midst. Once, two bearded Westerners in felt hats, loose coats and leather leggings appeared in the hills behind the school, hunting birds with their retrievers and shotguns. Charles followed and watched them shoot, smoke coiling from the barrels. It was the first time he heard a gunshot up close and smelled gunpowder. Another time, down near Yokosuka, two young foreign men came down from a villa to the cove where a group of locals were swimming. They had long floppy fair hair and their black tight-fitting costumes showed off their fine figures. They impressed the onlookers with an elegant and fast breaststroke, backs concave so their hips and shoulders were out of the water.
While Charles and Chika were at Kamimiyada the war with China broke out. The newspapers delivered to Mr Niikura’s shop reported that, out in the Yellow Sea, somewhere off Seoul, Captain Togo Heihachiro had intercepted a chartered British steamer that was taking Chinese troops into Korea to crack down on the assertive Japanese community there. His cruiser sunk the ship, and then sent out its cutters to rescue the ship’s British officers, the Japanese sailors using axes to keep Chinese survivors out of the boats and leaving them to drown.
In Kamimiyada the effects of the first Sino-Japanese War were also being felt. On the road passing the village small groups of dejected young men walked towards the conscription centre in the big town. At that time, few Japanese households possessed or worried about
the national flag or knew the national anthem, nor were there any modern war songs in vogue. Even so, the boys had started playing war games around the schoolyard.
One day, the pupils ate lunch early and the entire school was taken up to the wide Ke-enbo plateau above the village to watch infantry manoeuvres. Two lines of soldiers knelt and fired volleys of blanks at each other across a radish field. An officer rode his skittish horse in front to get it used to gunfire. Bugles ordered a bayonet charge. Afterwards, some of the soldiers picked up radishes and cut them up with pocketknives.
As the sun faded and silhouetted Mount Fuji in the western distance, the soldiers marched off. Charles noticed a stake with a pennant and rushed towards it, intending to chase after the soldiers and hand it back.
‘Sakai, put it back! They’ll be angry with you if you touch it,’ one of his teachers ordered.
That evening, Chika was even more dire. ‘The soldiers would have shot you out of hand for interfering with something of military importance!’ she said. ‘Your head would have rolled in the flash of an officer’s sword!’
At New Year 1895, the township was festooned with lurid colour prints of the war, of valiant Japanese soldiers storming Port Arthur amid shot and shell, of the Good Omen Hawk that perched in the mast of a Japanese cruiser, of the ‘daring sapper’ Onoguchi Tokuji dynamiting the gate of a walled Korean city. The villagers began hearing the war songs that spread through Japan at the time: ‘The Persistent Bugler’; ‘March in the Snow’; and ‘The Brave Sailor’.
After several months in Kamimiyada, Chika had had enough of her rustification and decided to return to the city. They left in the steamer, which was now led through new minefields around the Yokosuka naval yards by a pilot ship. Charles initially returned to Hitotsubashi school where his welcome was warm enough, but after some weeks Chika was told he had fallen too far behind and must repeat a year. Not willing to face this humiliation, she moved them back to Yokohama where the model new primary school accepted his village studies.
For a short while after their return to Yokohama, a horse and carriage would come every so often to collect them. Chika would put on a more formal kimono and bundle Charles into European clothes, and they would be driven up to the Bluff to the big house of the German manager of Bavier & Co., Victor Gielen, who had some informal guardianship over the boy. They would sit down to meals with the manager and his French wife, Chika making conversation in a mixture of Japanese and French. But after some time, these invitations ended, and the delivery of toys and San Rafael wine from Dully likewise tapered off.
Foreigners were still living in downtown Yokohama, but regarded with less and less respect. The centre of modern Japan had moved up to Tokyo, where thousands of foreign experts (including not a few charlatans) had spent years training up Japanese in the new professions and trades. The five-year countdown to the ending of treaty-port status had begun in 1894. The merchants of Yokohama continued in their wilful ignorance and contempt of all things Japanese, circulating between the Union Club, the Grand and other hotels, the Cricket and Athletic clubs, and the racecourse. Few of them joined the academics, diplomats and missionaries at the lectures and debates of the Asiatic Society or its German counterpart. Already they were being sent up in the rhyme by Osman Edwards:
When I first came to live in Japan,
My duty was simple and plain,
To dazzle the nation with civilisation,
Implying more money than brain …
The scandals reported in the press intensified the impression of unbridled passions and capricious laws among Westerners. An American naval officer named Hetherington was acquitted of murder after shooting a British man he suspected of seducing his wife. Edith Carew was convicted of murdering her popular husband Walter, the convivial manager of the Union Club, by administering arsenic. Torn-up letters evidencing an affair with a young Hongkong and Shanghai Bank clerk had been retrieved from her wastepaper baskets by her bored governess and pieced together, providing days of spicy reports when produced in court. After a guilty verdict by an all-male jury drawn predominantly from Walter’s circle of friends, the British consul sentenced her to hang, though his ambassador up in Tokyo, Sir Ernest Satow, promptly commuted this to life imprisonment and packed Edith off to jail in Hong Kong.
Throughout his childhood, the schoolmates of Charles referred only rarely to his race, and then in a friendly, matter-of-fact way. But the difference may have been one reason he was frequently showing off to gain their approval. One day on Benten Bridge he spotted a distinguished-looking Chinese man in long Mandarin gown, skullcap and hair-queue and threw a pebble at him. His friends joined in chanting ‘Chan-Chan-Bozu’ – virtually the same as the ‘Ching-Chong Chinaman’ taunt Charles later heard chorused by Australian children at passing Asians. The man took refuge in a police box. His friends scattered, but Charles continued to saunter across the bridge, reddening as the policeman gave him a hard look.
Chika took Charles to the Yokosuka naval base to see the captured Chinese battleship Chen Yuan. The bay was full of dark-painted Japanese warships anchored close to the pine-covered shores, with the Rising Sun ensign drooping at their sterns. Sailors in whites drilled on a parade ground. One of the shipwright’s at the naval yard guided them over the German-built warship of the Chinese. Chalk marks showed where it had been damaged in a battle off the Yalu River but repaired by the Japanese. They all removed their hats before entering the stateroom where the Chinese admiral Ting Ju-ch’ang had killed himself with poison after surrendering.
As the fighting over Korea continued it became more ritualised to present the outgoing conscripts with a flag with their name and regiment written on it, and for localities to welcome returning soldiers with brass bands. The unpopularity of conscription had lifted with the easy victory over the Chinese. Many conscripts found army rations actually better than their daily fare back home in the villages.
Bavier & Co. held a garden party at Edouard’s old house to celebrate jointly the Japanese victory and Edouard’s elevation, in absentia, from the 3rd Class to the 2nd Class of the Order of the Sacred Treasure. Employees and company associates feasted and played lawn games, and the German manager led three ‘Banzai’ cheers for Japan. Misumi, the photographer, took pictures of the occasion to be sent back to Edouard in Dully.
Early in 1897, when Charles was nine, events cut him off from any chance of moving back into his father’s world. For reasons not known to him, possibly renewed problems with her health, Chika began to fret again about his progress at school. Perhaps she was wondering what place he would find for himself at the end of it. Presumably at Edouard’s behest, Charles was told to accompany Herr Gielen to Tokyo. They went up in a first-class compartment and met the headmaster of the Morning Star School for foreign boys, which later shifted to Yokohama and became the St Joseph’s School. He asked Charles some questions in passable Japanese and talked with the manager in a European language.
Chika talked to Charles about the school visit a few days later, ‘You may go to that school, but you will have to board there,’ she said. ‘I must move out to the country again as I would not be able to afford a house like this. I would have to take an upstairs room, and perhaps take in some dress-making. I would have to send Ito back to her village. I don’t mind that if you really want to go.’
The thought of banishing their maid Ito and consigning Chika to penury was more than Charles could bear. If a battle was taking place over him, Chika won hands down. He would be raised as a Japanese, not as a Westerner.
However, Chika decided he now needed a male mentor. So at the start of the new school year he went with his desk, a tansu (chest) to store his few clothes, a reading lamp and his toys to the home of Mishima Toyosaburo, the headmaster of Honcho Primary School, a former samurai of Wakayama and a disciple of the liberal educationist and newspaper publisher Fukuzawa Yukichi. In place of his mother’s discipline, Mishima’s moth
er reigned over the house like a dowager empress, behind the ostensible rule of the headmaster as the male family head.
Charles had a five-mat room next to the front hall. One of his jobs, along with sweeping the yard at five o’clock every morning, was to usher in guests and bring them a cup of tea and a sweet-meat on a piece of paper set on a tray. If the guests stayed to dinner with Mr Mishima, he would bring their food on trays and top up their sake from pottery flasks heated in hot water. He came to hear a lot of their conversations, which he loved.
The newspaper Mr Mishima took was of course the Jiji Shimpo, edited by his mentor Fukuzawa. After dinner he would read aloud selected items to his mother. Charles would marvel at reports of America and Europe, of the extravagance of roads entirely paved and macadamised, of lights that came on at the flick of a switch and water at the turning of a tap in every household. The first serial he remembered was a translation of The Prisoner of Zenda.
Fukuzawa’s readiness to deflate myths surrounding historical characters to prove his political points was a test of Mr Mishima’s liberality. Often as not, the Confucian scholar would show through – particularly when his mother raised objections. ‘Though Mr Fukuzawa means well and wants to correct popular obsessions, he certainly overdoes it at times,’ Mr Mishima would agree with her. ‘Independence and self-esteem are all very well to overcome our feelings of inferiority, but they will undermine loyalty and filiality which are the basis of law and order. Every dose has its proper amount; too much results in poisoning.’
At school, Charles came to shine at Japanese language and history, usually being the first to put his hand up to point out mistakes in pronunciation or factual errors among his classmates. He also keenly took part in the gymnastics drill under Mr Maeda, a former army officer who would order ‘stand at ease’ and tell the class military anecdotes or stories about Napoleon. This only increased Charles’ fantasies of military conquest. Some of the visitors to Mr Mishima used to extol the freedom and adventure of being a merchant, others the path of politics. Charles used to plot invasions and an expansion of his empire.
War of Words Page 4
