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Shades of the Past

Page 20

by Harold Williams


  The fact is that the Kimigayo is not the creation of any one man. While many contributed in effort towards a national anthem, the main credit for the Kimigayo in its present dignified form must go to a German, Franz Eckert, a musical director of considerable accomplishments.

  While it would be an obvious over-estimation of Franz Eckert's achievements to place him in the leading ranks of that illustrious band of scholars and specialists who during the latter part of the last century interpreted little-known Japan to the Western world, nevertheless he earned a place in that company of men. To those foreigners, along with so many of the great Japanese statesmen and the liberals of the Meiji era, must go much of the credit for Japan having been able so quickly to take a place among the nations of the world.

  As early as the 16th century the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries sent home long letters interpreting Japan from their points of view, but the world had to await the arrival in Japan in 1690 of Engelbert Kaempfer, the remarkable German doctor attached to the Dutch East India Company, for the first fairly accurate account of the history, geography, resources, manners and customs of the country which he recorded in several celebrated books, written after a brief stay of only twenty-six months.

  However, as late as one hundred years ago when Japan was striving to emerge from seclusion and to take her place among the nations of the world, it was still a country regarding which relatively little was known abroad. It was the brilliant European scholars and the enthusiastic and industrious specialists of the following decades who interpreted Japan to the West. Every phase of life and culture in Japan and all the arts and sciences were studied by those scholars and recorded in learned treatises and publications.

  Franz Eckert contributed his share in the field of music.

  In 1860 when the first Japanese embassy visited the United States, the lack of a national anthem presented a difficulty on the occasion of the arrival of the Japanese party at a grand ball given in their honour at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York. The band, presumably under an Irish bandmaster, did their best by striking up the tuneful melody "Kathleen Mavourneen."

  Eight years later in 1868 the Mikado, the term by which the Japanese sovereign was then known, passed along the Tokaido near Hodogaya to make his first entry into Tokyo, which thereafter was to be his imperial capital. On that occasion the English regimental band from Yokohama, under Bandmaster John William Fenton, in the absence of a national anthem, saluted him en route with the lively tune of The British Grenadiers.

  Upon Tokyo becoming the Imperial city and the Emperor ceasing to be a personage cooped up in a palace, hidden from and unknown to his subjects, the needs of a national anthem soon became felt. Bandmaster Fenton thereupon composed the music for a national anthem, but the authorities did not feel that his composition was entirely suitable and a select committee was set up to consider the whole matter. A poem from an ancient anthology in the form of a Japanese musical composition by Hiromori Hayashi, a Court musician, was selected and harmonised by Franz Eckert, at that time director of the Marine Band of Japan. In an early issue of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Herr Eckert's own modest statement can be found, of which the following is a translation:

  Sometime ago I was asked by the Ministry of Marine to compose a national anthem, as one did not exist at that time. Having asked for them, I received several Japanese melodies from which I selected the following. I harmonized it and arranged it for European instruments.... The poem is from the famous Kokinshu and is about a thousand years old.

  The Kimigayo was played at Court in the presence of Emperor Meiji on the occasion of his birthday in 1881.

  Although Eckert is not entitled to be called the composer of the national anthem, he accomplished his task with distinction and presented in final form a national hymn permeated with the calm and dignity of a bygone age. Many translations of the anthem have been made, but the following free translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain is probably the best:

  A thousand years of happy reign be thine.

  Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now,

  By age united to mighty rocks shall grow,

  Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.

  It has a distinct characteristic of its own which places it among the most dignified national anthems in the world, but unfortunately it is so often played in Japan from old and scratched gramophone records that it frequently sounds more like the groans of some barbaric funeral dirge. In 1955 when the N.B.C. Symphony of the Air played the Japanese National Anthem most people who heard it had a new concept of the Kimigayo.

  It is of passing interest to note that in Scribners Magazine of July, 1891, there was an article on the strides being made in Japan in modernising a nation, in which brief reference was made to her having acquired this national anthem.

  Franz Eckert, born in Silesia in 1852, studied at several schools of music in Germany. On coming to Japan he was appointed director of the Marine Band of Japan from 1879-98. He founded the Toyama Military Band in Tokyo, and also the military band of the Imperial Guards. After eighteen years service his connection with the Ministry of Marine terminated in 1900 and he returned to Germany where he directed a Prussian military band in Berlin. In 1901 he came back to the East and became director of the Imperial Band in the Kingdom of Korea, and there composed the national anthem of Korea, thus achieving the distinction, and probably a unique one, of being responsible for the national anthems of two countries. Following the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, the Korean anthem was suppressed and the Kimigayo was then substituted for it.

  In addition Eckert harmonized a great number of Japanese airs, which works were popular in Japan and were generally played without acknowledgement even during his lifetime and long after his death. Eckert died in Seoul in 1916.

  Should it become the will of the Japanese people to outlaw the Kimigayo, a hazardous gamble would then have to be taken of discarding a sonorous national hymn of great dignity that verily breathes the spirit of Old Japan in favour of something new—possibly something modern but not great. Fortunately the danger that once existed now seems to have passed.

  The preceding article first appeared in The Mainichi on 18th July, 1954, at a time when some Japanese were expressing the view that the national anthem, having been discredited by the warmongers, should be discarded in favour of a new and modern anthem.

  A TRAITOR

  WAS

  EXECUTED

  I remember, I remember

  The fir-trees dark and high.

  THOMAS HOOD

  In December, 1940, a young man was drowsing fitfully on a cot in Pentonville Prison in England. Within the short space of a few hours his life, which had commenced in the Kansai district in Japan, would come to a close.

  During those final hours of his last night upon this earth his thoughts jumped from person to person, from place to place, but always wandered back to the years of childhood and youth which had been spent in the suburb of Sumiyoshi and in the cities of Osaka and Kobe.

  He recalled his European father who had met with business reverses in Osaka and had subsequently died a broken and disappointed man. He recalled his Japanese mother. He remembered more clearly the following years of his early youth spent among kind friends and he remembered well his playmates at the foreign school in Kobe.

  He remembered vividly his frequent wanderings through the Kobe Hills which he generally approached through Hunter's Gap, or up the Ice Road at Sumiyoshi, a path so named by the early foreigners in Kobe Settlement because it was down that path were brought the first supplies of ice cut from the ponds on Rokko-san. The ponds froze to a greater depth then than they do now. He remembered clambering along Castle Ridge, swimming in the deeper pools around Twenty Crossings and paddling in the rippling waters of Cascade Valley. He remembered netting cicadas and dragon flies in the summer time, and in the autumn hunting for fallen chestnuts along the cool Mill Road to Futatabi.

  He remembered how he
attempted to ring the bell at the Futatabi Temple on every occasion that he visited it, which became easier as he grew taller.

  He remembered the two grand old pine trees—Gog and Magog—which stood astride the narrow path to Futatabi, before there was any motor road. All that remains to-day of those giants is a portion of the trunk of one, gaunt and decaying.

  He remembered camping on the sandy waste which surrounded the reedy pond on Shiogahara behind Futatabi, a spot then so bleak that it was known to foreigners as Aden, the same place that has since been transformed by Kobe City into a picturesque lake and play ground bordered with fine maple trees and red pines.

  He recalled with a grin the day when he and his playmates caught two salamanders in the pond at Aden and wandered along Panoramic Ridge, over Kettle Hill and clambered down to the Arima Road by Goblin Rock. Then while resting at the Nikenchaya tea-house, and discovering the salamanders had died, they quickly dropped them into the teakettle while the obasan was not looking.

  He remembered climbing to the top of Inscription Rock in Karasuwara Valley around the source of some of Kobe City's water supply, and wondering what might be the meaning of the six enormous characters carved on the rock and representing the sacred ideographs of Namu Amida Butsu—Hail to Amida the Buddha.

  He remembered the days when the keeping of fancy birds became a great craze in Japan and when canaries and Java sparrows were imported in such quantities that although the supply quickly overtook the demand, the voracious appetites of the birds did not diminish and the dealers had to release the less costly varieties in order to save themselves from bankruptcy. He remembered how he and his school friends had then caught many Java sparrows with birdlime in the trees around Futatabi, only however to release them again as they and their progency also ate themselves out of home.

  He drifted off into sleep and dreamed that he was again camping on the sandy waste at Aden. The chill of morning woke him and he thought he saw the dawn breaking behind the ranges of mountains to the east of Kobe. Then with a shudder he realized that it was the first glimmer of morning light which silhouetted the ledge of the window high up in his prison cell. A short while later he was executed and his memory was no more.

  It was 1940. The Battle of Britain had opened. The days when "so many owed so much to so few" had dawned. The conquering Germans held all the coast line facing England, and Churchill offered the people nothing but "blood, toil, tears and sweat." The whole country was alerted to repel invasion.

  On 2nd September, 1940, four men including young van Kieboom were put on board a fishing cutter which made along the coast towards Boulogne. Later they pushed off in two dinghies and headed for the English coast. Van Kieboom and one other landed early on the morning of 3rd September on the edge of Romney Marsh. They had a suitcase of clothing, provisions and a radio set all of which they hid in deep grass and then separated. Van Kieboom was carrying an ingenious secret code made of linen. Their object was to settle down in England posing as refugees from Holland, and then to transmit back to the Germans by radio all the information they could obtain.

  An hour or so later at about 5 a.m. van Kieboom was challenged by a sentry and being unable to give satisfactory replies was taken before the officer of the guard. On being searched he was found to be in possession of a loaded revolver. The suitcase of clothing, the provisions and the radio set were soon discovered, but he succeeded in disposing of the linen code in a lavatory. His assistant, and the two occupants of the other dinghy, were also soon picked up.

  The most extraordinary feature of the case was that a Eurasian such as Charlie van Kieboom should have been selected for a mission of this nature. His English was poor and his appearance was such that wherever he went he was certain to attract attention. His only qualification appears to have been his skill with radio sets, which had been his hobby as far back as his school days in Kobe.

  Van Kieboom owed much to the friends and fellow-countrymen of his father. It was they who, in part at least, had arranged for his journey to Holland where he completed his schooling and grew to manhood. He owed more to the country of his father, whose nationality he possessed, than to any other. Why therefore he should have gone over to the enemy when his country was invaded may never be known. At his trial Van Kieboom alleged that the Germans had threatened to expose and punish him for smuggling currencies and for trafficking in German paper marks, but at no point did his defence fit the facts nor explain his anxiety to destroy the secret code.

  After a secret trial at Old Bailey he and two of his companions were sentenced to death under the Treachery Act, and the fourth was given a long prison term.

  THEY CAME

  TO

  OSAKA

  We arrived at Osaca: heere we

  found the people very rude.

  Capt. SARIS' Diary, 1613

  Three hundred and fifty-three years ago, at the same time that Shakespeare was writing and acting his plays in far-off England, the first Englishman arrived in Osaka and was promptly imprisoned.

  On 19th April, 1600, the Dutch ship "de Liefde" (Charity) wallowed into Beppu bay in Kyushu—the one vessel remaining out of a fleet of five that had set out from Holland about twenty-three months earlier. She had crossed the Atlantic, sailed down the coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan and across the Pacific. And what a journey of prodigious dangers, of death and disaster!

  Most of the crew had died of starvation or disease. Of the original 120 only twenty-four remained and of those only the English pilot, William Adams, and six others could stand on their feet. Three died the day after arrival in Japan and three more shortly afterwards. The captain was too ill to move.

  News of the arrival of the vessel was rushed by couriers to Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa then in residence at Osaka Castle. Orders were hurriedly carried back ordering the captain to be brought to Osaka, but as he was far too ill to travel, the English pilot, as next in line, accompanied by one of the crew as a servant, went instead. They travelled by junk through the Inland Sea and up the Yodogawa to Osaka. In those days, long before the vast reclamation scheme at Chikko, it was customary for the Inland Sea craft to travel well up the river and canals into the city of Osaka and for travellers to land not far from Osaka Castle.

  Will Adams in his quaint style described the visit:

  I was carried in one of the King's gallies to the court at Ozaca....we found Ozaca to be a very great towne as great as London within the watts....Some faire houses we found there, but not many....

  In this manner the first Englishman came to Osaka. He was not however the first European to see that great city, great even then and great for many centuries earlier since the time the district was first named Naniwa. The Portuguese and Spaniards had probably been there off and on over the previous fifty years, and Portuguese priests had been making converts there for some years.

  On the strength of false evidence given against the Dutch vessel by the Portuguese, who were fearful of the entry of competitors into their territory of trade, Will Adams and his servant were imprisoned on suspicion of piracy. After forty-one days imprisonment, during which time Adams was on several occasions questioned by Shogun Ieyasu, the peaceful intentions of the Dutch ship were recognised and he and his servant were released.

  In the meantime the "de Liefde" had been ordered to Osaka, where she lay anchored off Sakai.

  In this manner the first Dutch ship came to Osaka.

  There were no Customs in those days, as we know the term, but even had there been, the examination of the new arrivals would have presented no difficulties, because the ship had been well stripped, the crew robbed of their possessions and Adams of his navigational instruments. When those happenings came to the knowledge of Ieyasu, some restitution was subsequently made.

  Thereafter in course of time Will Adams became the protege of the Shogun and a person of some importance in the land. He used his influence to obtain a permit for his Dutch employers to trade in Japan. During the next 250 year
s the foreign merchant houses were restricted at first to Hirado and later to Nagasaki. In the early stages Dutch merchants from Hirado and English merchants from the English East India Company's house, also at Hirado, were frequent visitors to Osaka to transact business with their agents.

  The English East India Company withdrew after a stay of ten years of unprofitable trading. Then for about 240 years the Dutch merchants were the only foreign merchants in the field, but were confined under humiliating conditions to the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour. Once every four years a Dutch Embassy set out from Deshima and passed through Osaka en route to Tokyo, or Yedo as it was then known, on a compulsory visit to pay respects and tribute in the form of presents to the Shogun and his Court.

  This state of affairs came to an end about one hundred years ago, and in 1859 Yokohama was opened to trade, but it was not until 1868 that European traders were permitted to establish themselves in Osaka.

  Preparatory to the opening of Osaka and Hyogo to foreign trade, which was fixed for 1st January 1868, Sir Harry Parkes, the British Minister to Japan, landed at Osaka from H.M.S. "Adventure" on 23rd December, 1867. On the following day a detachment of British soldiers of the 9th Regiment landed as an escort. Sir Harry Parkes found accommodation in a yashiki—a superior Japanese residence—near the Osaka Castle and there established the British Legation. Preparations for the opening of the port were well under way.

  The locality chosen for the Osaka Foreign Settlement, or the Concession as it was generally known, was an area called Kawaguchi, outside of what was then the city of Osaka. It was almost an island in that it was bounded by water on three sides, by the Tosabori-gawa, the Aji-kawa and the Kizu-gawa. Like the Settlement at Kobe it was originally a waste land that had to be raised and drained to make it fit for occupation. A British Vice-Consulate was established nearby on Christmas Day in readiness for the formal opening and arrival of merchants on New Year's Day, 1868. At both Osaka and Kobe, the Japanese Government had arranged for a number of houses and land lots to be ready for occupation. At Kobe there were insufficient houses to meet the number of applicants, but at Osaka for thirty-nine houses there were only twelve applicants. It is evident that from the beginning foreigners showed little desire to live in Osaka.

 

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