Shades of the Past

by Harold Williams

  Sir Ernest Satow the veteran British diplomat in Japan was not so confident of the wisdom of such clemency. He wrote in his memoirs:

  Twenty were condemned to death, and one can only regret that the French Commander judged it necessary to stop the execution when eleven had suffered, for the twenty were all equally guilty, and requiring a life for a life of the eleven Frenchmen looked more like revenge than justice.

  In 1952, the Ono Foreign Cemetery, where the eleven Frenchmen were buried, was moved to Shuhogahara in the hills behind Futatabi. There in the new cemetary the old gravestones of those eleven men—the eldest was only twenty-nine years and the youngest twenty-one—may be seen. The large granite cross bears the inscription.

  À LA MÉMOIRE

  des

  Onze Marins

  du

  Dupleix

  MASSACRES A SAKAI

  Le 8 Mars 1868

  Requiescant in Pace

  The Myokokuji temple in Sakai, where the eleven Japanese died with imprecations of vengeance on their lips, was mostly destroyed in the air raids of 1945, but the stone monument marking the spot where the execution was carried out is still standing among the ruins in the temple ground. Also there can still be seen an elaborate stone memorial. The central stone is carved deeply with a Buddhist prayer and is flanked with two other stones. One is to the memory of the eleven French sailors who were slaughtered—the English portion of the inscription reads "In Memory of the French Martyrs"—and the other stone is to the eleven Tosa men who were executed there that bleak day of ninety years ago.

  A few grisly relics of the event are still preserved in one of the buildings that escaped destruction. There are two wooden trays upon which the severed heads of two of the Japanese were placed, and which are still stained with their blood. There is the hair that was cropped from the heads of all the twenty men who had been sentenced to execution and which was to remain in the temple to their memory. There are two helmets, one being that of the first officer to be executed. It is related in the booklet, which is sold at the temple, that when he committed hara-kiri he inserted his short sword into his abdomen, made a downward cut of three inches and one across of the same length, and then, before his assistant could cut off his head, he attempted to tear out his intestines and fling them at the French commander. However that may have been, it is known that the first sword stroke that was aimed at his neck, went wide of the mark and that it required a second, and yet a third blow, before the neck was hacked through.

  Finally among the relics there is a torn piece of blue and white bunting, which is labelled as being a French flag captured as a trophy from the launch. It has several holes which are represented as bullet holes. The authenticity of this relic seems open to doubt, and not unlikely it was added at a much later date. Had the Tricolor flag been taken from the launch, the first of the demands made by the French Minister would almost certainly have been for its return.

  The graves of the eleven Tosa men are in Hojuji, a smaller temple which stood just at the rear of Myokokuji. All of the temple buildings, except the front gate, were wiped out in the air raids. A kindergarten school now occupies the site. Fortunately the eleven graves are still there in a single row, within a well-maintained enclosure. Perhaps not many people these days step into the kindergarten playground to read the inscription on those old graves, but somebody carefully tends them, because when I visited the place I saw a freshly-cut piece of pine branch before each to keep alive the memory of those Shades of the Past.

  A

  FORGOTTEN

  ROAD

  Ozechya is the most famous Castle...it is of an extraordinaire bignese. —Letter by Rev. ARTHUR HATCH, 1623

  In several parts of the world there are roads down which men have walked and have never been seen again. Some people suggest they were fleeing from nagging wives; some think that they were escaping debts; but some believe, and some profess to know, that at a certain point along the road they just walked right out of this world.

  There are roads that have neither beginning nor end. There are roads down which only the foolhardy would walk at night, and there are paths along which some country folk in some countries do not normally walk even in daytime, because it is said that the shades of the past linger in the shadows. There are roads that lead to happiness but many that lead to misery. There are roads that were carefully planned but lead to nowhere. There are even roads whose existence has been forgotten.

  There is a road in Japan that has, in some measure at least, all these strange characteristics.

  It is often asserted that most roads in Japan have the appearance of having been forgotten and abandoned soon after having been constructed. Actually there is a road over twenty miles in length that was constructed near Kobe under orders from the highest power in the land, but once constructed it was used on a few occasions only, then abandoned and soon forgotten. Comparatively few people now know that it ever existed, and fewer still have any idea where it started or where it ended. With the passing of eighty-six years it has been almost obliterated and little remains of it to-day. For the ordinary person there is nothing to be seen now except a narrow road, or rather a path or trail, and not even that for most of its length. But for the person who knows something of the past, a fascinating story unfolds as he wanders quietly among its shadows.

  When the Mikado was kept cooped up in Kyoto and the Tokugawa family ruled Japan, the latter required that the feudal lords or governors should make periodical visits to Tokyo and leave their womenfolk and others behind as hostages when they departed. Such journeyings, or daimyo processions, involved the feudal lords in great expense and were just one of the many schemes devised by the astute Tokugawa family to compel them to spend their wealth, so that they would have less with which to finance a rebellion.

  For several hundred years such processions from southwestern Japan had passed through the old city of Hyogo and then along the dusty or muddy road that ran by Sannomiya Shrine, right in front of where the Daimaru Department Store stands to-day.

  Such processions sometimes comprised up to a thousand persons including porters, servants and two-sworded samurai attendants. Many of the latter were swaggering men quick to take offence and ever anxious to try their swords on an opponent.

  A number of foreigners had been murdered in and around the Yokohama Settlement by two-sworded men. Consequently shortly before Kobe was opened to foreign trade, which was nine years after Yokohama, the Tokugawa Shogunate, which was then beset with increasing difficulties and opposition on all sides, was anxious to avoid becoming involved in further trouble with the Foreign Powers by reason of disturbances that might arise out of the passage of daimyo processions along the border of the Foreign Concession in Kobe. To that end the Shogunate ordered that a new road should be constructed which would go inland near Akashi and rejoin the Hyogo Osaka road near Sumiyoshi. In that way daimyo processions would be able to by-pass Kobe. The total length of the road was to be nine ri or a little over twenty miles and the width two ken or twelve feet, which would be sufficiently broad for the palanquins in the daimyo processions.

  The work was commenced in the autumn of 1867, about three or four months before the port of Kobe was due to be opened. Two armies of coolies commenced work simultaneously from Akashi in the west and Ishiyagawa in the east, much to the surprise of the large groups of monkeys which up to that time had lived comparatively undisturbed in the deep valleys to the east of Maya-san.

  Between Akashi and Maiko near the Okuradani Bridge, the road proceeded northwards along the stream toward Urushi-yama (Daisanji was on the left, and in fact excursionists who each spring and autumn travel now by tourist bus to Daisanji more often for the purpose of getting drunk than to view that delightful temple, do in spots travel over the old Tokugawa road).

  The road then proceeded towards the villages of Shirakawa, Aina, and West and East Obu of Yamada. It then crossed over what is to-day the Kobe-Arima road. Then over the top of Horse Back and
passing the Nagatani Pond on the left it proceeded along the base of Green Hill, commonly called Nakuto, to the twentieth crossing of the Twenty Crossings over the stream behind Futatabi. Gradually ascending eastwards until the top of Cascade Valley was reached it descended the valley southwards to Gomo passing what were then the villages of Shinohara, Yawata, and Takaha. It then followed the river bank of the Ishiyagawa and ultimately rejoined the main highway.

  The road was completed in January, 1868, about a fortnight after the port of Kobe was opened. Before the contractor had received payment however, rumours reached Hyogo that the Imperialists were gathering in strength to attack Osaka Castle which was the stronghold of the Tokugawa clan in southwestern Japan. The contractor thereupon rushed to Osaka in the hope of collecting payment from the Tokugawa treasury before the Tokugawa government could be driven from power.

  Such a journey was a perilous adventure. The enemies of the Tokugawa clan were gathering and beginning to move along the highways that converged on Osaka. Rivers had to be forded or crossed in flat-bottomed ferry boats. Each side would be on the watch for spies and troublemakers. However the contractor arrived safely in Osaka just when the Tokugawa officials were preparing to abandon their stronghold and make their escape. Payment was hastily made without the money bags being opened and the coins counted. The money bags were put into chests which the contractor conveyed on horseback to his home in Hyogo, where on counting the money he found to his amazement that in the excitement he had been given the wrong money bags and had been paid twenty-two thousand ryo, a considerable fortune in those days.

  When the Imperialist troops reached Osaka on 29 January, 1868, they found that the Castle which was the stronghold of the Tokugawa forces in those parts had been abandoned. The ladies of the castle and much treasure had been sent to Yedo by sea, but so anxious were the Tokugawa samurai to escape with their lives that much was left behind. Before leaving they had blown up the magazine, and what was not destroyed in the confusion was sacked and pillaged by the Imperialists, after which they fired the castle. Thus was destroyed one of the most powerful castles in the land. The last of the Tycoons—the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns—had been overthrown. (The present-day castle, a replica of the original, was built of reinforced concrete in 1931 on the old foundation.)

  The forces that had cast in their lot with the Imperialists for the purpose of re-instating the Mikado as the sovereign power in the country, were occupying all the important cities. One corps of the Lord of Choshu had arrived in Hyogo and made its headquarters at the Shofukuji Temple at Okuhirano. News of the road contractor's good fortune soon leaked out, whereupon they made a domiciliary search of his house and discovered four chests, mostly of gold coin, all of which were confiscated.

  So runs the story. But the road, out of whose construction those happenings occurred, was rarely used. The country was passing through exciting times. The military government that had ordered the construction of the road had been overthrown. The Mikado had been rescued from the aimless life that he and his forbears had been forced to live in Kyoto for several centuries. He would thereafter rule as Emperor from the Imperial City of Tokyo. The country was fast emerging from a feudal age. The wearing of swords was forbidden. The samurai, or professional warriors, were with pain endeavouring to find employment as civilians in occupations that they had formerly despised.

  The reason for which the Tokugawa Road had been constructed no longer existed. It was rarely used. It has disintegrated and little now remains. It has neither a beginning nor an end. It leads to nowhere.

  Nothing but the shades of the past now linger in its shadows.

  THE

  LOSS

  OF

  THE

  U.S.S.

  "ONEIDA"

  ... 'tis true, 'tis pity; And pity 'tis, 'tis true.

  SHAKESPEARE—"Hamlet"

  The tragic loss of the U.S.S. "Oneida" was one of the many storms that disturbed the foreign community of the Treaty Ports in the old days.

  Some of those storms divided the community; some set tongues wagging in the tea party circles; some were discussed learnedly but pompously in the clubs, or with less exactitude but possibly with more tolerance in the bars and saloons; some ended up in the consular courts. But almost all in time blew themselves out like the typhoons and were forgotten. One remains engraved in granite and will last as long as the tombstones in the Yokohama Foreign Cemetery.

  The U.S.S. "Oneida" was a wooden-screw steamer, 211 feet long, 1695 tons and eight guns. She had seen war service during the American Civil War when she was employed on blockade duty; then in 1867 she had been despatched to the Asiatic Squadron. Thereafter she was frequently seen in the Treaty Ports of Japan.

  She was stationed off Kobe shortly after the opening of that port, and a month later when Taki Zenzaburo gave the order to the Bizen soldiers to fire on the foreigners, a Japanese ricocheting bullet nicked a flesh wound in one of her marines who happened to be on shore. All the rest of the bullets went wild, and most of them fell splashing into the sea. As has been related elsewhere in this book, she was one of the vessels that then joined in the protection of the Kobe Foreign Concession. Fourteen marines were landed from her with a fieldpiece to guard one of the entrances.

  About two months later the first issue of the Hiogo News, a weekly newspaper published in Kobe and priced at "4 boos per month," carried a notice indicating to the Kobe Foreign Concession, then only four months old, that residents could set their clocks to the correct time by watching the "Oneida," anchored off the port:

  A red pointed flag will be hoistered every day at the mizzen masthead of the U.S. Steamer Oneida in a ball at 5 minutes before noon. At noon precisely the ball will break and the flag fly open.

  The officers and men were popular and well-known in the foreign communities in Japan, and some had sweethearts in every port. But a time came when, after three years service in Far Eastern waters, her tour of duty was at an end and she was due to return to her home base.

  It was about 6:20 P.M. on 24th January, 1870, the year that Ulysses Simpson Grant was President of the United States of America. About an hour or so earlier the "Oneida" had weighed anchor and pulled slowly out of Yokohama harbour amid farewell cheers from the men of other nations who manned the rigging of various ships of war in the harbour. Ships of all nations dipped their flags as the "Oneida" passed, homeward bound.

  Later it was said that some of her officers were intoxicated, although the U.S. Minister to Japan stated that charge was "false in even its mildest form." Certain it is that she was just out of port and homeward bound, after many farewell toasts and good wishes had been pledged in wine, or something stronger.

  Many of the foreign community were just arriving back in their homes after waving good-bye from the Bund and from the cliffs along the Bluff. The officers and men had been popular, and the leave-takings had been sincere and friendly. Some of the ladies of the port were tying up farewell mementos among their souvenirs. The curio shops in Main Street were restocking their shelves. Some of the saloonkeepers in Blood Town were washing the tobacco juice off their floors, whilst the less particular were just throwing down fresh sawdust to hide the stains. The girls in Dirty Village were beginning to awake from the first decent rest in a week. They were rubbing the sleep from their eyes and beginning to reckon up their takings. The ricksha-men and pimps were calling at the various houses to collect their commissions.

  The ship being homeward bound after three adventuresome years in the Far East, the thoughts of 176 men on board, or at least of those awake, were of friends left behind and of those at home whom they would soon be rejoining.

  The wind was freshening and the sails of the "Oneida" filled taut as she steamed down the bay. It was a fine evening, sharp and wintry, but dark. There was no local pilot on board.

  At the same time the British P. & 0. vessel "Bombay" was steaming up the bay, under the care of a Yokohama foreign pilot, actually a citizen of the United Stat
es, who had been taken on board at the entrance to the bay.

  The two vessels sighted one another at a distance of about four miles, but from that moment the precise sequence of happenings is in doubt, because of the amazing contradictions in the evidence forthcoming from both sides, and the diametrically opposed verdicts of two different courts of inquiry. The tragic facts alone are clear, that the two vessels came into collision and within the matter of about fifteen minutes the "Oneida" sank two miles off shore with the loss of 115 members of her crew, including the captain and all but two of her commissioned officers. Two cutters managed to get away, but the captain remained on the bridge and went down with his ship.

  This tragic happening soon divided the community and as passions arose each side made statements and charges against the other, many giving under oath evidence much of which could not be substantiated and some of which was manifestly untrue.

  The Americans charged that immediately after the collision the master of the "Bombay" boasted that he "had cut the quarter off a Yankee frigate and it served her damn well right" and then after saying that she could beach herself had continued on his way to Yokohama and left her to look after herself. Certainly the British Court of Inquiry, whilst exonerating the "Bombay" from any blame, suspended her master's ticket for six months because:

  he acted hastily and ill-advisedly, in that, instead of waiting and endeavouring to render assistance to the 'Oneida,' he, without having reason to believe that his own vessel was in a perilous position, proceeded on his voyage.

  The findings and decision of that Court of Inquiry were subsequently confirmed by the Board of Trade in London.

  Of the two officers of the "Oneida" who were saved, one became the principal witness for the sunken vessel. As he had been the deck officer at the time of the collision, the blame for the loss would mainly have been his, had the "Oneida" been at fault. The U.S. case was based mainly on his evidence, but as he personally had so much at stake it seems not unreasonable to assume that he would have remembered the happenings that crowded themselves into comparatively few minutes, from the most favourable angle. However that may be, the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry found that "no blame is to be attached to the officers or crew of the 'Oneida' for the collision."