Shades of the Past

by Harold Williams

  The sea approach to Osaka being treacherous, it was decided that the foreign men-of-war and the several vessels bringing the merchants to Osaka and Hyogo should anchor off the port of Hyogo, where the merchants for both Kobe and Osaka disembarked on New Year's morning, the historic occasion being marked by no ceremony other than the firing of a salute from the foreign men-of-war.

  From Kobe the merchants who were bound for Osaka made their way either overland or by sea in small sailing craft as opportunity arose. In this manner the first foreign merchants set up business in Osaka. Their stay was short but exciting.

  The opposition to the Shogunate Government for having opened Hyogo and Osaka to foreign trade, had been growing in strength and violence. Fighting was taking place in Kyoto and elsewhere. The Shogun had resigned, but before quitting the Castle at Osaka he had notified the foreign ministers that he could no longer protect the foreigners. On 30th January, only thirty days after the opening of the port, Osaka Castle was pillaged and set on fire by the Imperialists and thus Osaka lost a fine old castle.

  (In 1931 a replica, but in re-inforced concrete, was built on the original foundations, and so in the 1945 air-raids when the Osaka Arsenal, which stood in the immediate rear of the Castle, was showered with bombs the Arsenal was obliterated but the re-inforced concrete and fire-proof replica of the feudal castle fortunately withstood the raids. It thus continues to be the finest show place in Osaka to-day.)

  The state of disorder that prevailed in Osaka following the sacking of the old castle was deemed to be so serious that a few days later, after about one month's stay, all the foreign legations, the military escorts, and the merchants withdrew to Kobe. Most of the merchants never returned to Osaka. They preferred to remain in the more attractive Kobe Concession.

  Two weeks later a party representing the various legations re-visited Osaka to ascertain conditions. The Imperialists were of course in control. All was quiet, but the British and French Legations were found to have been burnt and all the other legations looted.

  Some few of the merchants later returned to Osaka, but those violent happenings coupled with the dangerous sea approach to Osaka harbour caused the British Minister and some others to abandon the idea of establishing a legation at Osaka. Kobe thus became the foreign diplomatic headquarters in the Kansai area and the centre for overseas trade, a position of importance that it would most probably have continued to hold but for the advent of air mail. But first let us trace out the history of the Osaka Foreign Concession.

  On 13th April of the same year, Emperor Meiji demonstrated his intention to govern the country as well as to reign, by leaving Kyoto and making an official visit to Osaka, formerly the stronghold of the Tokugawa Shogunate. He entered the city on 15th April, and as the castle had been destroyed, he stayed at the Nishi-Honganji Temple. Three days later he passed in his Imperial barge in front of the Foreign Concession on the way to Temposan to review the Imperial Navy which then comprised six vessels: the flagship "Tenriyo Maru," "Cosmopolite" belonging to the Daimyo of Higo, the "Chusan" (originally a P. & 0. vessel) the "Otentosama" of Choshiu, the "Gerard" of Satsuma, and the "Coquette" of Kuru-me. These vessels had all been purchased from foreign owners and some, it will be noted, retained their original names.

  In September, 1868, a young American merchant named Watts, who had established himself in the Osaka Concession, loaded his merchandise on a boat and journeyed up the Yodogawa for the imperial and forbidden city of Kyoto. There he quickly sold his entire stock to the Kyoto merchants, but before delivery could be taken and payment made he was arrested by Japanese soldiers and returned to his consul in Osaka together with his merchandise. The record does not mention what punishment was imposed by the consul.

  In this manner the first American salesman set out from Osaka to sell his wares in Kyoto.

  A few years later when it was possible for foreigners to obtain a permit to visit Kyoto, the journey there was generally made from Osaka by jinrikisha, the return trip being by boat down the Yodogawa.

  The journey from Osaka to Kobe was made overland by jinrikisha in six hours or by sea in two hours, weather permitting.

  Even in pre-war days, it was still possible, for those who cared to allow their imagination to wander, to sense the spirit of the early days in some of the side alleyways of old Kawaguchi. One could picture Mile. Reymond's genteel Boarding & Day School of eighty years ago—the address was No. 2 Concession—and the lots further down where several of the local grog shops did business. The Osaka Hotel was at No. 6 Concession and presumably was then owned by the father of the school ma'am because the local directory of that time gives his name as Baptiste Reymond.

  Another colourful personality was a German named Friebe who undertook the delivery of mail within the Concession. Mounted on a horse he rode from house to house announcing his coming by blowing a bugle.

  A visitor to Osaka in 1873 described the Foreign Concession

  as appearing to consist chiefly of new roads and vacant lots. The houses that were then in existence showing all their back premises in front and no fronts anywhere.

  Except for those houses built on the Bund, most foreign houses both in the Kobe and Osaka Settlements were built with their front verandahs facing the inside of the compounds, presumably so that the occupants would not be disturbed by the curious gaze of those in the streets outside. Many such old buildings were still to be seen in Kobe Settlement before the wartime air raids wiped them out.

  1875 was a bad year for trade in Japan, and almost all the mercantile offices and branches that had opened in Osaka were closed. Trade fell to such a low figure that the Kobe Foreign Chamber of Commerce Circular that had hitherto reported the volume of trade in the sister port ceased to mention the business done in Osaka. By 1878 there were only about five or six foreign firms nominally represented in Osaka. Business continued to decline and finally drifted away to nothing. Kawaguchi became more of a missionary colony than a business community.

  In 1880 E. H. Hunter of Hunter & Co., realising the great advantages likely to accrue from setting up a foundry and ship-repairing yard at Osaka, as compared with Kobe where all such work had hitherto been done, acquired an excellent site for a shipbuilding yard on a tongue of land between Ajikawa and Nakatsugawa, there being a water frontage on both sides. A small village occupied the site and the houses had to be transferred elsewhere. This enterprise became the Osaka Iron Works, later to grow into the immense Hitachi Dockyard.

  (Elsewhere an engineer named Kirby started the Onohama Dockyard which was later bought by the Japanese Government and incorporated into the Kure Naval Station.)

  On 17th July, 1899, when extra-territoriality came to an end, the Osaka Concession at Kawaguchi and the Kobe Concession were handed over to the Japanese authorities and were thereafter administered by the Japanese city authorities.

  Today practically nothing but a few old bricks remain in Kawaguchi to remind one that it was once the abode of foreigners.

  After the first World War the number of foreign firms in Osaka steadily increased, mainly import houses, and one foreign bank. The export firms, the old hongs, the banks and the shipping companies remained in Kobe.

  Possibly not many people in postwar Japan have calculated the loss in property values and in other directions that Kobe has suffered and that Osaka has correspondingly gained as the indirect result of air mail. In the export trade it is of course essential that shipping documents arrive at destination not later than the merchandise, which generally meant that they had to go by the vessel carrying the merchandise. The prewar procedure covering the export of goods was streamlined to make that possible, MITI regulations did not exist in those days. Had they existed Japan's export trade would have been strangled and would have withered away. It was thus possible, and necessary, in those days to complete the entire procedure of an export shipment within the space of a day or so, and in fact to do then in about twenty-four hours what now requires up to several weeks. As most overseas ves
sels departed from Kobe, not Osaka, Kobe developed as the logical and most convenient centre for the export trade. The banks, the shipping companies, the merchants, the suppliers, and all facilities necessary to the conduct of the export trade, including the foreign residences and institutions, were thus centered in Kobe.

  Following the cessation of hostilities and the birth of MITI with the multitudinous and complex regulations governing the conduct of trade, a new method of doing business developed and it became more convenient for the foreign merchants, and exporters in particular to be located in Osaka. Air mail had made it possible to despatch shipping documents a week or more after a steamer's departure and yet still arrive at destination before the goods. Air mail had opened up a new method of handling the export trade. Air mail was responsible for the exodus of a large section of the mercantile community of Kobe to Osaka.

  In this manner the export merchants, the foreign banks, the shipping and insurance companies came to Osaka.

  BEYOND

  THE

  REEF

  O look with pity on the scene

  Of sadness and of dread....

  And let the plague be stayed.

  Hymns Ancient and Modern

  When Japan was opened to foreign trade the first to enter were the genuine merchants, soon followed by the carpet-baggers, the adventurers, and some of the dregs of the Eastern ports. Then came the beachcombers and some years later the tourists.

  The beachcomers had long been a plague throughout the Pacific. As each group of islands was discovered, those spots were soon the prey of human derelicts who at one time or another had deserted their ships, or had escaped from the convict settlements of Australia and other places. The wrongs which those creatures did to the simple natives on the Pacific islands cannot be measured in any known terms.

  In 1789 the American whaler "Hunter" discovered a small coral island, about three and a half miles long and two and a half miles wide, situated only twenty-five miles from the Equator. It was similar in general appearance to many other coral islands of the Pacific, with a lagoon, a reef, and beyond the reef the wide Pacific Ocean. So favourable was the impression which this small island and the natives made upon the men of the whaler that it was called Pleasant Island. It is thought by some to be the island described by Tennyson—

  Rich, but the loneliest in a lonely sea and where Enoch Arden

  Set in this Eden of all plenteousness

  Dwelt with eternal summer, ill content.

  Soon, however, it became plagued by the lowest dregs of humanity, the human driftwood then cast about the Pacific. The beachcombers on that remote island were beyond the law but fortunately murder and violence among themselves generally kept them to less than ten. Severe outbreaks of dysentery further reduced their numbers, and the inconvenience of occasional droughts which robbed them of even enough water to dilute their liquor, caused some of them to leave in search of other isles.

  In 1881 the HMS "Bacchante" made the island and found that an escaped convict had assumed the position of king, and that he and a coterie of equally undesirable characters were preying upon the natives and were almost constantly drunk from drinking a liquor which they distilled from fermented palm juice. For food they lived mainly on pigs and coconuts. The island offered nothing else in the way of fruits or vegetables, and even water was short. It seemed to lack riches, but underneath the soil, and indeed protruding through the soil was untold wealth, the nature of which was not then known. It was not until 1899 when a chemist in Sydney decided to analyse a piece of rock, which for nearly three years had served as a door-stopper in his laboratory, was the wealth of the island discovered. It was found to be phosphate rock of the highest quality.

  In 1881 the island had become German territory and the name had then been changed from Pleasant Island to Nauru, which was the native name. The British Company which desired to work those newly discovered phosphate deposits, therefore, had to enter into an arrangement with the German interests controlling the island. An immense tonnage of phosphate rock was shifted in the ensuing years. Then in November, 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, the British flag was hoisted over Nauru, and in 1919 the entire interests of the British company, known as the Pacific Phosphate Company, were taken over jointly by the United Kingdom, Australian, and New Zealand Governments. The enterprise was thereafter operated under the name of the British Phosphate Commissioners.

  Much wealth was taken out of Nauru, but much money, effort, and care was expended to improve the lot of the natives. In 1920 leprosy was found to be spreading among the natives, whereupon the latest treatment and techniques were introduced. A segregation village was created and the disease thereafter was confined to a mild though obstinate form.

  For two decades until December, 1941, shortly after the outbreak of war in the Pacific, the natives passed through a period of progress and enlightenment. They forgot the wrongs that had been done them by white men of the past. Then suddenly a Japanese naval landing party occupied the island, and once again murder and violence were law on that pleasant island.

  The object of this article is not to recount the discreditable deeds and atrocities perpetrated by that Japanese naval landing party both against the British resident civilian officials and against the natives, but rather to tell the story of a party of simple natives who passed beyond the reef, farewelled by their friends singing Christian hymns.

  Leprosy has had a home in Japan for many centuries. During the war years, in most of the important prisoner-of-war centres abroad, where large numbers of Japanese prisoners-of-war were being held in Allied hands, there were generally one or two cases of leprosy that manifested themselves among the Japanese prisoners.

  In truth it must be said that in prewar days the attitude of the Japanese Government and of the public towards those unfortunates who suffered from leprosy was not enlightened. Often a family cast out any members unfortunate enough to contract the disease and thenceforth they wandered about the country as waifs, neglected and avoided by all. The attitude of individuals was guided by fear, and if such is any defence for a terrible atrocity we give it here as the only one that can be said in defence of a vice-admiral condoning the slaughter of over sixty lepers.

  Upon arrival in Nauru the Japanese naval landing party learned with fear that on this small island, there were over sixty lepers segregated in one corner. Soon afterwards the Japanese told the islanders that arrangements had been completed to transfer the lepers to Truk where they would be hospitalised and receive the latest medical treatment. And so the lepers were gathered on the beach, under the coconut trees, whilst their families and friends sat on the opposite side of the road under guard of Japanese sentries to farewell them. Fear and doubt were in their hearts, but they attempted to buoy up the spirits of those about to leave by the singing of Christian hymns.

  Whilst the lepers were being embarked on two large sampans, smoke was rising over the coconut palms from their huts, which had been fired. Their last link with their native isle was already being destroyed.

  The sampans were taken in tow by a naval launch. The singing swelled and travelled across the lagoon to those passing beyond the reef. Some knelt in prayer. The lepers in the sampans took up the hymns which travelled back across the lagoon to the Japanese sentries on the shore and to the friends and relatives still singing under the coconut palms. The hymns continued well after the sampans had passed beyond the reach of sight and sound—beyond the reef.

  In the days and months which followed the simple islanders on Nauru continued to hope and pray, although with misgiving in their hearts, for the safety and welfare of their loved ones beyond the reef.

  Of an evening they sang their plaintive native songs, counterparts of which are to be found in all Pacific isles; songs of their beloved who had gone beyond the reef where all is rough and cold; singing that although their dreams may grow old they would shed no tears of regret, but would send a thousand flowers of remembrance on the waves wh
en the trade winds began to blow.

  In truth when the sampans had been towed twenty miles out to sea, and well out of sight of land, the Japanese in the launch cut the towing ropes, set the sampans adrift and then circled them, pouring ma-chine-gun fire into them until they sank with all on board. The natives on Nauru knew nothing of this happening. They continued to sing their plaintive songs of hope.

  The atrocity came to light in Tokyo some four years later.

  ANTICS

  IN

  THE NUDE

  I pray you pardon me for writing

  such fopperies, which I doe to the

  intent to have you laugh a little.

  RICHARD COCKS' Diary, 1620

  In course of time some student may gain a degree by writing a thesis on "strip," as it is known today, and not unlikely he will give credit for the introduction into Japan of that spectacle, to some of the carpet-baggers who came into this country after the war as camp-followers of the Occupation Forces. Certainly to them must go credit for inspiring such extravaganza and nonsense as The Lady was a Stallion and other similar "strip" classics, so widely advertised in the press. Then there were the advertising stunts of four or five years ago, now fortunately a thing of the past, where young ladies dressed in butterflies, bangles, and high-heeled shoes rode down the Ginza in decorated motor vehicles.

  Of course the female form unclothed was known in Japan prior to the Occupation, but entrepreneurs had not presented it quite in the form of "strip." Neither the people nor the government would have tolerated anything quite so vulgar as that. Instead they created restricted quarters where the hostesses were clothed in about as many undergarments as our Victorian great grandmothers, had their teeth blackened and their heads protected with an array of protruding bamboo hairpins much like the armour of a porcupine. Instead of scarlet letters on their sleeves to indicate the corps to which they belonged, they had their obi or sashes tied in front.