Shades of the Past

by Harold Williams

  The election of the members of the Foreign Municipal Council is frequently attended with compararatively as much excitement as a contested election at home. Placards, political cries, canvassers, speech-making, and drink, all find a place in the Lilliputian contests. The Foreign Municipal Council has no body to be kicked and no soul to be saved. It is simply a body of individuals engaged in the unusually pleasant occupation of spending their neighbours' money and occasionally making a considerable fuss over the performance. Only that and nothing more.

  By the time the memory of the Tokio Times, Brinkley, and other targets of the past had grown dim, some Japanese-owned English newspapers had made their debut, and the attention that had previously been bestowed on Brinkley's paper and similar enterprises was then diverted by the older established English language press, to what were described as "those near-English newspapers."

  But let us go back in Japan to about the time the country was first opened and let us start high up on the Japanese social ladder, even at which exalted level there is an amusing instance of mud slinging recorded in a Japanese document, signed by various daimyo, answering a charge from the Japanese Government in Yedo that they had slandered the diplomatic corps.

  ... We never spread among our people insulting libels against foreigners. We never called Harrisoo (U.S. Consul, Townsend Harris) a fool, Arookoo (British Minister, Sir Rutherford Alcock) a..., and Berrookoroo (French Minister, Monsieur de Belle-court) a... We never called Consooroo (Consuls) drunkards, and foreign merchants thieves."

  If the daimyo did call the consuls "drunkards" and the foreign merchants "thieves"—and that probably was only half of it—they were not the only ones who had said hard things. The diplomats had called the merchants names—Sir Rutherford Alcock in particular when he dubbed the foreign mercantile community of Yokohama "the scum of the earth"—and the merchants had been even more blunt in saying what they thought of the diplomats.

  Having already recorded what the daimyo may have thought of the consuls and merchants, I shall now avoid all charges of partiality by lifting straight out of the diary of Townsend Harris—the first American envoy to Japan—a few excerpts by way of showing what he thought of the Japanese, although in doing so it is but fair to mention that those were the days of hasty and sweeping generalizations for Townsend Harris, most of which were corrected later.

  9th Sept., 1856 A greater tissue of lies was never heard.

  12th Sept., 1856 It was a rare scene of Japanese deceit, falsehood, flattery, and politeness.

  9th May, 1857 ....I am satisfied that I have been constantly and systematically overcharged.

  4th July, 1857 My letters were very short and very guarded, as I do not doubt the Japanese open them.

  However, on 23rd August, 1856, Harris passed Japan a compliment, for he made in his diary an interesting meteorological observation:

  Weather delightful The air is like that of the United States, full of oxygen.

  Let us now move on a few years to 1860 when Dr. George Smith, Bishop of Victoria (Hongkong) made a two-weeks tour of Japan. On arrival he was advised by some wags in Yokohama to leave his card on the principal of a "young ladies boarding school" nearby. The good bishop gladly complied and was greatly alarmed later to discover that the place was "an infamous public institution containing two hundred female inmates dispersed over a spacious series of apartments."

  The good bishop's reputation was such that no ill effects were suffered from his innocent visit to such an establishment. However, a less reverent gentleman might not have been so fortunate, and looking around the community to-day one suspects that it would be unkind to play such a prank on some married men in these times. Nevertheless before leaving Japan the Bishop was to have a narrower escape, as is told in one of the books of that period:

  In shopping in Japan the greatest care must be exercised to guard against the acquisition of indecencies which are found not only in books and pictures but on porcelains, in ivories and surreptiously conveyed in fans.... I was deeply grieved to learn that even the sacred character of the Bishop of Victoria, who had neglected the precaution of a minute examination, might not have been saved. Had not an acquaintance providentially examined his porcelain cups, they would, in all probability, have been stopped and confiscated at the English Custom House as inadmissible, even as the private property of a bishop.

  On his return to Hongkong the Bishop wrote a book entitled Ten weeks in Japan wherein he castigated Yokohama, and not without ample reason, as a "deplorable scene of demoralisation and profligate life" where "a considerable portion of the foreign community live in a state of dissoluteness exceeded in no part of the East" and a place where "the native officials contribute every facility for the perpetration of domestic vice and impurity" and negotiate for young men "the terms of payment and the selection of a partner in a dissolute mode of life."

  Among the many young men who shared his bread and bed with a Japanese girl was a studious young Englishman, who later became one of the greatest foreign scholars of the Japanese language. Then after an absence of nearly thirty years, when he returned to Japan in the highest position that an Englishman can occupy in the country, he sought out the lady and, because of the religious convictions which he had formed since his association with her, he insisted upon marrying her solely to rectify the irregularity of his earlier connections—such was the strength of the religious convictions of that remarkable man.

  The commercial community was frequently divided, but not so, however, in their relations with the missionaries. Both sides stood apart and flung mud at one another fore and aft. There were so many ignorant and discreditable beings among the mercantile community, and so much intolerance among the missionaries, that even at this late date neither side can laugh off all the hard things that were said.

  Dr. W.E. Griffis, the American missionary and historian, on arrival in Japan in 1870, had a poor opinion of everybody except his fellow missionaries. Wrote he:

  The first foreigners were not specially noted for good morals, sensitive consciousness or sweetness of temper, and the underhand cunning and disregard of truth which seems a part of official nature in Japan were matched by the cold-blooded villainy and trickery of the unprincipled foreigners of all creeds and nationalities.

  The morals of the merchants were likewise noted by his confrere, Dr. Verbeck, who went on record about the same time as saying that "the temptations in this country are fearful....In fact very few indeed, outside of ministers and missionaries, have not fallen." It has never been clear whether the good doctor lumped the foreign women in that indictment, or just how he knew that the missionaries resisted temptation while practically all non-mission-aries fell by the wayside. Anyhow it is certain there was an element of truth in the statement and so it is satisfying to look around now and note how much we have improved!

  The merchants thought equally harsh but different things about the missionaries. Fortunately as it was not customary for them to do much writing—except in ledgers—their thoughts have largely been lost to posterity.

  There were almost daily tea parties at the stately houses on the Bluff in Yokohama, and later in Kitano-cho in Kobe, where Mrs. Brown-Brown and her friends loudly criticised the missionaries at one extreme and whispered about the eligible young men at the other, who had set up housekeeping on their own (more or less) in places far removed for safety from the Bluff and from Kitano-cho.

  Cocktail parties had not at that time been invented, but dinner parties were held with great frequency. Considering that the community lived in a confined area of little more than half a square mile, was largely cut off from the outside world, and for some years the nearest telegraph office was at Colombo, and that most of those early arrivals knew little of Japan and cared less, it is not surprising to read in a missionary's account that the dinner parties of the merchants were characterised by "the great number of brilliant flashes of silence and that meditations on the crockery were common"

  The criticis
m was probably unkind. Actually there is reason to believe that a good deal was said and drunk at those dinner parties. The Japanese authorities and the embassy and consular folk were all lumped together and dismissed without ceremony and then the conversation seems to have been mainly about the good old China days of thirty years before that period!

  However it was a globe-trotter's book which dealt the foreign communities the worst blow beneath the belt. The authoress dismissed the Japanese as "disgusting creatures" and then wrote off the foreign community in the following terms:

  It will be well understood that the life of the European in Japan is after all a wretched one.... The sensual life led there has reduced many of them to a state bordering on imbecility....The eyes of such men are dull and they have a kind of idiotic stare.

  In 1883 the time came for Sir Harry Parkes, who was the second British Minister to Japan, and one of the most accomplished, to retire after eighteen years of distinguished service in that appointment. When he first arrived, Japan's administrative system in many departments was in its infancy, and Sir Harry's energy and aggressiveness did not make him popular in government circles where most action took place to slow-motion time. Apparently there were some people who were not sorry when he retired, for the valedictory notices in the Japanese Press were, like Sir Harry's mode of speech, quite frank and to the point. The only difference was that they were either exaggerated or not fully accurate.

  A year or so earlier in 1879 when he left Japan on a short visit to England the Tokio Times, the English language newspaper operating with Japanese Government support, published, among other valedictory messages, the following translation of the Fuso Shinshi newspaper's farewell to Sir Harry:

  He pursued with the eagerness of a hungry wolf, rather than the methods or habits of a human being, his watchfulness for the promotion of British interests....He advanced the interest of his nation by humiliating and oppressing other states with utter disregard for the lasting hatred and ill-will such action caused.

  His conduct, however, has not as a rule been distinguished by high politeness; on the contrary it has been marked by most disgraceful violence and brutality. Smashing of glasses at our prime minister's table; physically assaulting at Hiogo an individual now of elevated rank; insulting the ex-minister for foreign affairs, Terashima, by the use of abusive language, and many like acts of extreme indecency.... Such being the case what could be more natural than for him to find no Japanese grieving at his departure.

  Despite the Press reports Sir Harry Parkes was highly respected in many Japanese circles for his outstanding talents, and remembered as being one of the most powerful supporters of the Japanese Imperial House, at a time when so many of the Foreign Powers were inclined to support the Shogunate as being the more stabilising influence in the country.

  Emperor Meiji was not unmindful of the contributions which this famous envoy of Queen Victoria had made to the shaping of New Japan. Said the Emperor:

  I am especially happy to acknowledge that in the early years of Meiji, your Excellency not only showed great sympathy in our reform measures but also gave us many useful suggestions regarding the material progress and advancement of our Empire. I am deeply sensible of the service you have thus rendered.

  Those were the days too when the Japanese, in referring to foreigners in a derogatory sense, used the words keto (hairy foreigner) or akahige (red whiskers). It is interesting to note that while the former word is still in use, the latter has fallen into disuse, for the reason that a change of fashion has resulted in bewhiskered foreigners becoming quite a rarity. In 1898 the Tokyo Jiji newspaper wrote with apprehension of the growing anti-foreign spirit and criticised some school teachers for using those words when addressing their pupils. It concluded its article with the fear that the "anti-foreign spirit is apt to endanger the existence of the Empire of Japan "

  But maybe foreigners should not feel too badly about the aforementioned expressions. When the Greeks first met the Romans they called them barbarians; when the Romans came to England they called the English barbarians; the English for a long time thought the Welsh to be.... But there is no end to such mud slinging!

  With the passing of years the foreign community began to extend outside the narrow confines of the Foreign Concessions, and so in course of time, as the various elements in the community were able to go their own ways without having to rub shoulders too closely with those whom they did not like, or did not choose to know, tempers improved, and feuds were to some extent forgotten. There is still a tang of the earlier days in the following extract from a letter written from Tokyo in 1894 by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain to Lafcadio Hearn:

  I care little for the Europeans here.... They seem to me to be deteriorated by their surroundings. Brinkley and all that lot disgust me by their sycophancy to the Japanese. Besides them there are the diplomats, but they look down on common folk. Then there are the teachers of the lesser sort and the missionaries... but the atmosphere of 'an open port'—at any rate of Yokohama and of Kobe—is infinitely more congenial to my taste. I will grant you that the men there know comparatively little,... but they are men, and genuine... each man being taken for exactly what he is worth.

  I bring this chapter to a close with an observation by the Bishop of Homoco, the famous dialectologist—famous at least in certain circles in Japan. His magnum opus, "Yokohama Dialect" was printed by the Japan Gazette, Yokohama, in 1879, and the original edition is now a very rare book. Said the Bishop:

  When we're rich, we ride in 'rickshaws'

  But when we're poor they call us 'chickshaws'.*

  Footnote

  * Chikushō a Japanese swear word.

  THE YOSHIWARA LADIES

  AND

  PINUP GIRLS

  The old King brought with him divers women to be frollicke.

  Capt. SARIS' Diary, 1613.

  In the latter part of the last century when Ronald O'Rorke stepped ashore in Kobe from a sampan at the Meriken Hatoba—so-called by the Japanese because the United States Consular Agency was then located right opposite on the present site of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha—nobody would have imagined that such a mild looking individual would shortly be responsible for the local sales of Japanese woodblock prints slumping and then later spiralling into a boom, or that the effect of his visit would be written, so to speak, on the walls of many foreign houses in Kobe for over four decades to come.

  O'Rorke was not his real name but it will suffice. The fact that he was not wearing a one-inch-thick cork topee marked him as unorthodox, yet it was noted that in one hand he was carrying a tin of flea powder, so evidently he had carefully read the Murray's Handbook for Japan which he carried in the other. The news soon spread around the Foreign Settlement that he was an internationally recognized authority on Japanese woodblock prints. Whether or not that was actually the case is not now known; but the vigilant committee of the Women's Club quickly tracked him down for a lecture. That was the start of a reaction that did not stop reacting for over forty years.

  He was invited to meet the committee at tea to work out preliminary details for the lecture. Long before the tea was in the tea cups, Mr. O'Rorke had launched upon a learned dissertation on the subject so near to his heart. He explained how the measure of a great Japanese artist had orginally been the ability to suggest with a few strokes of the brush something vivid or living,—a rainstorm, a toad, bamboo. Then along came unknown artists, without patrons, drawn from the common people of Yedo. who painted and drew with bold strokes and clear outline the ukiyoe, or pictures of the fleeting world of transient pleasures. Fortunately for posterity, they painted the Tokugawa period as it really was. The gay quarters and the primrose paths, the green rooms, the bath-rooms, the highways and the byways are recorded forever in the genius of their works.

  Generally they were poor men. Their pictures were engraved on woodblocks and then printed in many colours, the final sheets being sold on the streets to the masses often for a few coppers a print.
Kunisada was originally a ferryboat man, Hokusai a fish-hawker. Utamaro, among the greatest of them all, and the most dissolute, passed much of his time in the licensed quarters; but it can be said that at least some of it was spent in painting.

  Genuine woodblock prints of their pictures, originally priced to meet the pockets of the working classes, are now costly rarities. It was not until the Japanese art critics realised that many of the best of the ukiyoe had become concentrated in famous museums abroad, that this new medium of Japanese art came to be properly appreciated in Japan.

  Females having been banned from the stage in Japan and their place taken by males—a situation that led to many other situations—and there being no cabarets in those days or professional models or mannequins, it must not be held against those ukiyoe artists that they went to the Yoshiwara to study the human form. That they painted life in the licensed quarters with such restraint and good taste that their pictures could be hung today on the walls of the manse, without giving offence to the parishioners, is surely some indication that their interest in the gay quarters, in part at least, was art for art's sake. If further evidence for the defence is required it might be mentioned the supremely proper Boston Museum of Art has amassed one of the most notable collections of ukiyoe without inciting a blue stocking riot and without any apparent deleterious effects on the morals of that great city.

  Mr. O'Rorke told the ladies all these things. He explained that quite contrary to what they might read in some literature on the subject of woodblock prints "a beauty" is not the correct translation of oiran. And then with erudite delicacy he began to explain that while this new school of artists drew every object with clear bold lines—everything being, so to speak, above board—nevertheless the art of suggestion did enter into many pictures. An immaculately neat coiffure, the entrancing curve of the back of a neck, a carelessly tied sash, a wisp of hair slightly out of place, a neat roll of paper tucked in the kimono or lying on the tataoni—they all told a story.