By the end of 1909, Charles had saved a fair bit of his salary from Satoh & Co. and also put his inheritance into a traveller’s draft from the Yokohama bank. Sprawling on the mats in third class, he took the railway down to Shimonoseki, where the ferries left for Korea.
On the way, the train was halted at a station while a special train came up the line carrying the coffin of the statesman Ito Hirobumi and his funeral cortege. People on the platform removed their hats and bowed. Ito had been resident-general in Korea since the end of 1905, taking Uchida Ryohei with him. He had actually tried to slow the push for Korea’s annexation by the Japanese army commanders in the country, causing the Black Dragon Society agents like Uchida to resign from his staff. Nonetheless, when Ito had gone up into Manchuria for a meeting with a Russian official, the young Korean nationalist Ahn Jung-geun had confronted him at the railway station in Harbin and blazed away with a revolver.
It was with this ironic gift to the Japanese expansionists overhanging the Korean situation and filling the newspapers at the railway stalls that Charles arrived in Shimonoseki and bought his ticket on the ferry Sakura Maru to Pusan. On board he met a staff officer to General Okubo, and heard a bit about the counter-insurgency operations by the two Japanese army divisions in Korea. Small bands of Korean insurgents were resisting the protectorate declared at the end of the Russian war and the efforts of Uchida and others to drum up support for outright annexation.
In the morning, the ship nosed towards the mountainous shore of Korea, around the craggy granite island of Yeong-do, and into the harbour of Pusan where a few modern buildings and cranes fronted a town of low houses with thatched roofs. Charles walked down the gangplank and found a porter who spoke some Japanese and who then led him to a Japanese inn and then to the railway station to buy a ticket. As they walked through the streets, crowded with Japanese officials and soldiers and Koreans in white gowns and black horsehair hats, General Okubo’s carriage came sweeping past, his mounted outriders forcing bystanders aside. One Korean man, stooped under a back-frame packed with coal bricks, didn’t move fast enough. A push sent him stumbling and falling to the ground.
The train took most of the next day to reach Seoul, the line weaving through mountain valleys, guarded by Japanese sentries. The city was low lying then, spreading out between the surrounding grey peaks. The curved roof-lines of the royal palace, the official pavilions and the city gates were the most prominent features standing out from the low houses of the commoners. But there were tramways, electric lines and telephone wires along the wide main roads, and a new Western-style hotel run by a Frenchman and his Japanese wife where Charles put up for a couple of weeks.
He saw a lot of Uchida’s colleagues and their local partners in the Il-sin-hoe, the ‘unity and progress association’. Occasionally he saw General Yamagata, who had been installed as resident-general after Ito and was openly arguing for an outright Japanese takeover of the country. An elderly Buddhist priest from Japan named Hanshi Takeda was also around, boasting of having collected 10,000 signatures on a petition for annexation. Charles gathered there was money flowing to these activists from several industrialists, including Sugiyama Shigemura, a big financier of the Russian war loans and now active in the Mantetsu, the new Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway Company that had been taken from the Russians. The Japanese guests at the hotel were dismissive of the ‘national character’ of the Koreans and hostile to the Western missionaries who were active among them. Around the city, posters exhorted the Koreans to work hard, save money in post offices and pay their taxes to the government revenue offices, both institutions that had Japanese officials in charge.
Charles caught the train down to the port of Chemulpo on the Yellow Sea, where he took a room at an inn while waiting for a steamer to Dairen. Two Japanese plain-clothes agents came to talk to him, chatting for a long time and asking probing questions into his background. He persuaded them that he was interested in business opportunities, using jargon picked up at the Waseda commerce department. The inn was a low place, with the guests getting drunk most nights and the maids frequently grabbed and taken off to the rooms by the guests.
An old steamship pulled into Chemulpo and took the few passengers on board for Dairen, chugging slowly across a calm sea in clear cold air. On the second morning Charles saw the grim hills of the Liaodong Peninsula, with the smoke of the Port Arthur naval base rising to the left, as they entered the commercial harbour of Dairen. He went ashore to a former Russian hotel renamed the Yamato, which like many big businesses in the city was run by the Mantetsu.
Taking an introduction from Miyazaki, Charles met a man named Wasuke, another China revolutionary. Wasuke had once worked undercover as a judo instructor to Russian officers; now he was with the Dairen city government and took time to show Charles the city. They went down to the wharf and saw swarms of Chinese coolies. ‘We have imported about 5000 of them from Shandong, and put them under Japanese supervisors who are all former samurai,’ Wasuke said. He expressed great satisfaction with the rapid pace of progress under the port’s new ownership. ‘The Chinese say the Russians are like flies – big, smelly and noisy, yet harmless – but the Japanese are like mosquitoes, clean and quiet but dangerous!’ Wasuke said with a loud laugh.
Wasuke invited Charles along to a Christmas party at his home, and there he was fussed over and fed well by Wasuke’s wife, a former geisha. Over the new year period, Charles managed to separate himself occasionally from Wasuke on the pretext of taking long hikes, and met up with several of the Tokyo ronin whose arrival had been telegraphed in guarded terms. The new arrivals went into the Manchurian hinterland with the intention of recruiting local bandits for robberies of rich landlords to raise finance for revolutionary activities. They returned empty-handed after a week, not having met any bandits. Naively, Charles had mentioned his bequest from Chika and was now persuaded to cash his draft and hand over his 1000 yen. He called on the American consul with the aim of seeing if any secret funding might be forthcoming for stirring unrest, which might be to the benefit of America. ‘That’s an attaché’s job,’ the consul said. ‘Go and see Captain Reed at the legation in Peking.’
So with the consent of his ronin comrades, Charles took the Mantetsu railway up to Mukden, and transferred to the train to Peking. He took one of the cheaper rooms at the Hotel de Peking, and went to the American legation to try to meet Captain Reed but was told he was away. He never did get to see him.
An encounter with Ueno Iwatero, the editor of the newspaper Shuntien Shi Pao, run by the Japanese foreign ministry, led to an invitation to stay with him in his compound, which Charles accepted thankfully as his funds were now quite limited. This in turn led to further introductions to the Japanese journalists in Peking, and work writing a weekly news round-up for a Japanese newspaper in Dairen. He sent his dispatches by the telegraph, running the words together as much as possible to save costs. Charles also taught English to several wealthy Chinese, even though this outraged some of the Japanese community: that the Chinese chose this language to learn over that of Japan. And Charles explored Peking, once walking the 24 kilometres around the city wall, encountering the American marine sentries posted on top, and watching the Manchu bannermen of the Imperial Guard parading with their white, vermilion and indigo flags.
The Japanese newspapers and occasional postcards and letters from Miyazaki in Tokyo kept Charles informed about the doings of his comrades. He even had a card from Kotoku in Yumoto, a hot spring resort on the way up to Hakone, saying he was ‘employed as a bath attendant’. There was ominous news, though, that a young Buddhist priest at the nearby Risen temple at Hakone had been arrested after police found a secret printing press, anarchist leaflets and bomb-making chemicals and canisters. Charles had seen this priest at the Heiminsha meetings, and knew that his connections would include Kotoku.
Getting impatient with the static situation in China, Charles decided to push on with his jour
ney towards Europe. He took the train to Hankow, the treaty settlement in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, and then boarded a Sino-Japanese Navigation Company river steamer. A well-dressed Chinese couple were in the cabin next to his. They spent much of their time smoking opium. At Nanking, Charles looked around the South Sea Exhibition for a day or two. Though it was a grand affair with national pavilions in a variety of architectural styles, mostly underwritten by wealthy Chinese merchants in the Southeast Asian colonies, it had a desperate air about it. Charles took a Messageries Maritimes boat down to Shanghai, and then a steamer to Hong Kong.
Charles stayed at a hotel owned by a Russian, until he became friendly with a young Japanese named Mihara, who was working with Mitsui & Co. as a cargo superintendent. Mihara got Charles a berth in the Mitsui staff mess. Charles took a job for a while as a barman at a hotel in Kowloon, a three-storey place that had a swarm of Japanese ‘geisha’ hanging around, then began teaching Japanese to officers in the British garrison, including Lieutenant-Colonel Stackpole of the Paymaster Corps and Captain Anderson of the Royal Engineers. For his own improvement he began taking English lessons from a Canadian lady of about 60, Miss Alexander.
Charles was still intent on preserving his moral purity for Kiku, and too innocent to interpret what he later could see as overtures by the Japanese women at the hotel. In church, a young woman slipped him a note once, which he ignored, and another seemed to eye him keenly, but she lost interest after seeing him once in the street with a sake bottle in a bag from a Japanese shop and a Japanese companion. Despite himself, he was fascinated by a tall young woman of Eurasian appearance and followed her home. He knocked on the door. An older woman, probably her mother, opened the door and Charles made up some pathetic story about wanting shorthand lessons and having heard there was someone here who taught it. She slammed the door in his face.
With a Nagasaki man named Sugiyama who spoke French and had been assisting Sun Yat-sen’s instigation of rebellion from Hanoi, Charles attempted to go into Canton but Sugiyama was on a list of subversives and they were turned back. When Sun came through on his way from the United States to his new base in Penang, they learnt he had been watched closely by both the Chinese and Japanese authorities on a stopover in Yokohama. Chinese agents had come searching for him at Miyazaki’s house. Miyazaki’s wife Tsuchiko hustled Sun and her son Ryusuke out of the back door. While waiting in a nearby shrine for the all-clear, they saw Halley’s Comet in the night sky. ‘This is a sign the revolution will be successful,’ Sun said to the boy.
But the news from Japan was of a much harsher approach by the government. From there came the shocking news of Kotoku’s arrest and a swoop on his anarchist circle. They were all arraigned on a charge of high treason for plotting to assassinate the emperor with a bomb to be thrown at his carriage. Then, the news that a Korean cabinet of collaborators had signed a treaty of annexation at the Japanese residency-general: the ancient kingdom and state of Korea thus ceased to exist. In Japan itself, a political furore blew up when ultra-nationalists discovered passages in a school history textbook referring to the existence of two contending imperial courts in the 14th century, implicitly raising a question mark over the claim of the throne to an unbroken line of succession back to Amaterasu. This prompted more instillation of the Imperial ideology into education.
In the weeks following, Charles read that Kotoku and 23 others had been sentenced to death for the bomb plot against the emperor, in a closed trial. The sentences of 12 of the convicted plotters were commuted to life imprisonment, but Kotoku and 11 others, including his 30-year-old lover and comrade Kanno Sugaku, were hanged at Ichigaya Prison.
Miyazaki wrote saying Kotoku accepted his fate calmly, and had faced the gallows without sign of fear. He sent a newspaper clipping of the speech made at a memorial meeting by a writer, Roka Tokutomi, which remained in Charles’ mind as an epitaph for all the Japanese shishi of that period:
My friends Kotoku and the others have been labelled rebels and executed by the present government. But one should not be afraid of rebellion. One should not fear the rebel. One should not be afraid of becoming a rebel himself. To do something new has always been called rebellion. ‘Do not fear those who destroy the flesh but cannot destroy the spirit.’ The death of flesh is unimportant. What has to be feared is the death of the spirit. To believe only what one is taught to believe, to say only what one is taught to say, to do only what one is asked to do, to lose completely the idea of self-confidence in one’s independence and the belief in self-improvement – this is the death of the spirit. To live is to rebel …
In April 1911 there came the news of another failed uprising in Canton, with dozens of revolutionaries killed by Imperial troops. A few escaped to Hong Kong, including Huang Hsing, the leader of the central China group who had set up the Tongmenghui with Sun Yat-sen in Tokyo nearly four years earlier.
At the beginning of October, a letter came, signed only with a sketch of a face, which Charles recognised as that of Wada Saburo, one of the Tokyo ronin. ‘It seems the year promises us a bumper crop,’ it said. ‘Now a chance to be sent only once in a thousand years has come by the look of things. I hope you will join our branch office South or go up to the main firm at the centre.’
Charles went to consult the editors of Chinese newspapers friendly to Sun Yat-sen, taking his letter of introduction from Miyazaki. They suggested he should go to Canton rather than Hankow. Charles went up to the thieves’ bazaar above the Central police station and bought a thick coat, a pair of hob-nailed boots and a revolver with ammunition.
By then the news was coming out in Hong Kong about a mutiny in the Chinese army at Wuchang, across the river from Hankow. The Japanese consul-general, Mr Funatsu, called Charles in and asked if he’d heard any talk that British troops would be sent to help quell the unrest. He hadn’t.
Then the Imperial viceroy in Canton went over to the rebels. Charles wrote quick notes to Miss Alexander and Colonel Stackpole, then started out for the Yangtze River cities. An American steamer landed him in Shanghai four days later, and he walked along the river to the Chinese quarter. At the gate in the city wall, a sentry stopped him. He wrote a note that he was ‘volunteering for the army of justice’ and a soldier took it inside. After 15 minutes, a man in civilian dress came out and escorted Charles to an open yard where a burly Chinese man in a military uniform sat at a desk in the corner. Some squads of soldiers were drilling in the yard and a man climbed onto the roof of a small shed to address them.
Charles introduced himself as Sakai or ‘Pan Ching’ in Chinese. The officer spoke some Japanese from his time as a student in Tokyo and told him the revolutionary forces were now being pressed back in Wuchang and Hankow.
He wrote out a pass and Charles took a Japanese paddle steamer up the Yangtze. When it pulled into Hankow a couple of days later, Charles noticed the yellow triangular Imperial flag hanging limply from poles around the waterfront. A company of soldiers lay resting on the riverbank, propped up against their packs. Across the river, large oil tanks were burning with bright flames, sending coils of black smoke into the hazy sky. Distant explosions and gunshots came over the water.
Charles went to the liaison office in the Japanese concession to see Suenaga Setsu, a shishi from Fukuoka associated with the Black Dragon Society whom he’d met in Tokyo at Uchida Ryohei’s place. There were large-scale maps on the wall, with Japanese writing. A Japanese navy commander was there too, as an observer.
Charles tried talking to soldiers from the Imperial army who were now in control of Hankow again, having wrestled it back from Yuan Shikkai. (The former general had been sacked in 1908, but was brought back as prime minister and given full executive powers by the enfeebled dynasty.) Charles took a sampan across the river to Wuchang and headed for the revolutionary headquarters where the new flag of revolt, a strange device with a nine-pointed black star picked out in yellow dots on a red field, was hanging from cross
ed poles at the gates. A company of young Chinese in new khaki uniforms, leggings and caps was drilling under an American officer. Soldiers took the revolver and ammunition from Charles and he was led into a European-style building to meet the commander, Huang Hsing.
Huang Hsing looked tired and as always, came straight to the point. ‘Have you spoken to your father yet?’ he asked. Two years earlier in Tokyo, Huang had told Charles that the new government would confer all the mining rights in Yunnan to Edouard de Bavier in return for a donation of 200,000 yen. Charles had heard nothing back from Dully, although unsure if his letter had ever arrived.
In the main hall of the headquarters building Charles was greeted by Kamei, a Buddhist priest he knew from Tokyo. ‘Osoi-zo, osoi-zo!’ he cried. ‘You must have dallied!’ There was also a Japanese army major in uniform, Kaneko Shintaro. Later Kayano Chochi, Miyazaki’s senior-most comrade, also turned up, disguised as a Honganji priest, as well as Ozaki Yukimasa, younger brother of the liberal politician Ozaki Yukio whom Charles had seen at Kamakura during childhood holidays. They told him how the revolt in the new army regiments had been precipitated by the accidental detonation of a bomb in a fake ‘literary institute’ that was cover for the revolutionaries. This had brought the Chinese police to the scene. Lists of active members had been found. Arrests and executions started, so the revolutionaries had begun a desperate attack. Fortunately, key army units had come over to their side and the republicans seized all three areas of the urban area straddling the river. Then telegrams had come in from other Tongmenghui leaders announcing successful seizures of power in Changsha, Xi’an, Jiujiang, Taiyuan, Kunming, Guizhou, Shanghai, Hengzhou, Guangdong and Shandong, putting a wide belt of the south and east into the republican camp.
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