Shades of the Past

by Harold Williams

  The dawn of day and the rising sun as seen from the summit of Fuji is one of the sights of the world. As the first rays of sunlight touch the peak and then illuminate the whole mountain the entire eastern side sparkles with the glitter of myriads of diamonds, but personally I would prefer Fuji in her pristine glory. Being unable as I am to admire the beauty of garbage, I was mentally disturbed at the hazards to public safety represented by those scintillating empty food cans and the glittering fragments of broken beer and cider bottles.

  Fuji-san and the National Park area of which it is the centre, stands as a challenge to some of the best brains of this country. Let us hope that this place of beauty, possibly the most precious thing that Japan possesses, this sacred mountain about which has been woven that delicate web of Japanese culture, thought, and art will be perpetuated for posterity in the most fitting manner. The task is so immense that it calls for some of the best brains of the nation. The heritage at stake is too great to leave to fifth-rate, albeit conscientious, officials lacking the breadth of knowledge for such a task. Even the present sanitary arrangements, so resembling those of a hoboes' camp, and the present neglect of Fuji and all its approaches would be preferable rather than that some Coney Island type of architecture should find its way to this peerless mountain.

  It is to be hoped that when this great task is undertaken there will be planners big enough to seek information on the methods employed by other countries with similar problems. America has examples to offer of the best and worst in planning. Australia, in a great experiment of planning a capital city on a virgin site set in an open countryside, is displaying at Canberra a breadth of vision that might well be looked into. Every detail must pass the city planners. Even the wording, the colour, the shape and design of shop signs in Canberra must be approved. Under similar regulations there would be no opportunity for uneducated Japanese who have learnt the little they know of English whilst employed as menials in some American army organization to imprint their ideas and their "Lucky Seven" culture on this holy mountain.

  Such visions as I have may require the spending of much money, but some sacrifice is called for if Japan's great Fuji-san is to be presented in a worthy form.

  Having climbed Fuji twice—what a fool I must be—and at an interval of twenty years between each visit, I was disappointed to find how little had been done to make this thing of beauty accessible to the people of Japan and how much is being done to cheapen and defile it. The impression gained is that this national asset is being exploited by bus companies and many other local monopolists.

  Japan possesses in Fuji-san a tourist attraction that cannot be measured in terms of money and yet it is so surrounded by obstructions that few sensible foreign tourists ever attempt to look upon it from closer range than about ten miles.

  At present it stands as a confession of neglect on the part of those whose duty it should be to safeguard the national assets. It is a bad advertisement for Japan who strives so hard to sell her natural attractions to the tourists of the world. For the present at least, by all means keep the tourists at a distance of ten miles, so that they may not be able to see this venerated mountain at close range—this colossal heap of garbage and ashes.

  WE BURIED

  OUR DEAD

  HERE

  We went and measured a buriall place and had 13 tattamies square allowed us.

  RICHARD COCK'S Diary, 1620

  In the early days of sail, when trading vessels from the West began to put into Japanese harbours, the stay in port, whilst waiting for the favourable winds on which to sail south, often extended to several months. Deaths among the crews from violence and disease were more frequent then than now, and the problem of a burial place for the dead soon arose.

  Capt. John Saris, in command of the "Clove," arrived in Hirado on 12th June, 1613, to set up a trading post for the English East India Company. The first mention of death was in September when Saris relates in his diary that the steward of the "Clove" died as the result of a fight with another crew member. It had previously been arranged that, when the "Clove" should leave Hirado on her return voyage, some Japanese sailors would be engaged to ship as crew to make up deficiencies caused by desertions and other losses en route. Fearing that those Japanese would be unwilling to serve if they knew the steward had died on board, Saris ordered that the quartermaster should.

  bury him on an Iland as secretly as might be, in respect we were about to get some Japans to goe along in our ship, which it might be hearing of the death of any one, would make them the more unwilling.

  When the "Clove" sailed, Richard Cocks was left in charge of the English House at Hirado, and in the years that followed he makes mention in his diary of a number of deaths at the English House. The first seems to have been "a Masters mate, having been sicke of consumption." Cocks thereupon requested of the Japanese authorities "a buriall place for him among the Christians, which he granted me. So we put the dead corps into a winding sheet and coffind it up." A difficulty then arose because the Japanese priests at the nearby temple would not permit the coffin to be conveyed along the street in front of the temple. Cocks decided to transport the coffin to the other side of the town by sea, but there were further difficulties:

  We had much adoe to get any one of these countrey people to make the grave, that a Christian was to be buried in. Neither would they suffer the dead corps to be conveyed by water in any of their boats.

  All obstacles were finally overcome "and after the corps was enterred we returned all to the English House and there made collation."

  Thereafter that cemetery is often referred to by Cocks as the "ordenary buriall place." It was on the hill side behind the town and open to all foreigners. The site is still marked by a stone to the unknown dead.

  Later Cocks relates that Davis, the English carpenter "died this morning at break of day of the small pox, he being choked with them." Eight days later his mate Heath "dyed of a lingaring disease which began with a bloody flux " On coming to bury Heath they found that the grave of Davis, who had been buried a week earlier, had been desecrated:

  ....som villanous people had diged up the coffin and stolne the winding sheet and his shert and left the carcasse naked upon the grown—a villanous act So they soonk the other coffin into the sea.

  Cocks refers in his diary to other deaths also. There was one "whome was coffind and carid to the Christian buriall place with a hearse of blak bayes carid over him," and another "having byn sick of a consumption a long time departed out of this world this night past and was buried this day in our ordenary buriall place.... many other accompanied the corps to grave.... the preacher made a speech out of the Capter read in the buriall."

  Apparently the "ordenary buriall place" was soon full, for in later years there is reference to another cemetery; but when the Christian persecutions were at their height all those Christian cemeteries were swept away:

  Now by order of the Emperour all the Churches and Monasteries are pulled down, and all Graves and Sepulterres opened, and dead mens bones taken out.

  There is a record that in September, 1619, Will Adams the English pilot was "sickly and minded to take physic." In May of the following year he died. Cocks wrote in his diary "I cannot but be soroful for the loss of such a man as Capt. William Adams " but because of a gap of nearly one year in Cocks' diary, history does not record where Adams died. An early English resident of Yokohama discovered on the summit of one of the hills at Hemimura, near Yoko-suka, two monuments purporting to mark the graves of Will Adams and his wife. Historians are, however, satisfied that Adams died at Hirado in Kyushu, and was buried there, despite the monuments near Yokosuka and the other memorials erected during recent years that would indicate otherwise. Not unlikely his grave at Hirado was one of those that was destroyed when the Christian persecutions broke out a year or so later, and his bones were among those "scatterred to the winds" It is considered unlikely that an English Protestant, such as Will Adams, would have been cremated in thos
e days, or that his Protestant friend, Richard Cocks, would have permitted cremation. As the Japanese did not practice embalming, the body could hardly have been conveyed over the long journey from Kyushu to Yokohama. More than likely a lock of hair or some other relic was carried to his widow and was subsequently buried beside her, under the monument which may still be seen there.

  In the early days of the Dutch settlement at Nagasaki the Japanese would not permit a Christian to be buried on land; the bodies had to be taken out to sea. Later, a burial plot was given to the Dutch.

  Christopher Fryke, an Englishman, who made a voyage to Japan in some unexplained way in 1683, wrote

  In this Port dyed three of our Men and a Carpenters Boy. Some Japanese carried them out of the Harbour in a small boat, into open Sea, where they threw them over: for they are so far from suffering any Foreigners to be Buried among them, that they will not permit them to be thrown so much as in in the water that is near them.

  In 1795, H. M. Sloop "Providence" under the command of Capt. Broughton was on a voyage of exploration in the Kuriles and along the coasts of Sakhalin and Hokkaido. A landing was made in Muroran Bay to bury a sailor who had died. Thus it was that H.M.S. "Providence" became, it is said, the first British warship to visit Japan. Japanese officers were sent to look after the visitors, and to restrict as far as possible their movements and their contacts with the populace. The British were treated with all civility, which is understandable considering that they had a warship behind them, but they were speeded on their way as fast as the Japanese could arrange. An account of the happening survives, but not the grave. It disappeared, as did so many others. Only the record now remains.

  With the development of the whaling industry in which a great deal of American capital was invested, whalers were sailing into all the oceans, but all who died at sea near Japan were buried at sea, for Japan would not permit any to land on her shores. Even the Loochoo islanders were more hospitable. A number of graves of seamen are to be found on the Loochoo Islands—Ryukyu or Okinawa as they are known today. The whalers were forbidden to land in Japan, to bury their dead or to pick up supplies of fresh water and vegetables, because of the Japanese interdicts against the people having any intercourse with the world outside. It could be argued that in some measure it was fortunate for Japan that such prohibitions existed. Certainly it is a fact that some whalers were manned by crews so lawless, and so devoid of all the finer instincts, that, had they been permitted unrestricted entry, the disgrace which the few could have brought upon the Western world might have proved a hindrance to the subsequent development of good relations with Japan. Those good relations began to grow once Perry had pointed his guns and forced Japan to open her doors to trade.

  When Commodore Perry came to Japan to negotiate a treaty with the Japanese the problem of a place for the burial of the dead again arose. Perry offered to purchase a piece of ground from the Japanese for the burial of a marine then lying dead and for other Americans who might die, but the Japanese demurred and wished to arrange for the body to be conveyed to far-off Nagasaki for burial there in the place reserved for foreigners. Finally they agreed to the body being buried near Yokohama. Later a site at Shimoda was selected. It was the knowledge of the desecration of earlier Christian graves that caused Perry to insert a clause into the agreement with the Japanese that "near the temple of Yokushen at Kakizaki a burial ground is to be set apart for Americans where the graves and tombs shall not be molested"

  There are four graves in that little graveyard, in-cluding an assistant surgeon, a sailor and a marine, in addition to the one who was first buried in Yokohama. All are marked with tombstones in Japanese form. Little did those Americans who are buried there know, as they lay on board their ships desperately ill, and possibly looking with regret at their fate ahead, of dying in a far away part of the globe, and of being buried in a strange and little known land, that immortality was ahead for them. They will be remembered probably for centuries, and certainly long after many great men have been forgotten. Their graves have always been well cared for and have since become a place where the international bonds of friendship are cemented more firmly, because that little cemetery at Shimoda is one of the places where an international ceremony takes place each year on the occasion of the anniversary of the arrival at Shimoda of Commodore Perry and his black ships.

  In 1855 the Russian frigate "Diana" was anchored in Shimoda when that port was wrecked by an earthquake and a following tidal wave. The sea bed in Shimoda port offers little grip for ships' anchors. The "Diana" dragged her anchor and was driven ashore and wrecked. Three Russian seamen who were drowned are buried in the same temple ground as the Americans, but on the opposite side.

  About a year later Townsend Harris, the first American consul-general to Japan, shortly after arrival at Shimoda wrote in his diary:

  Visited the village of Kakizaki (Oyster Point) opposite Shimoda. The temple of this place, is set apart for the accommodation of Americans. The rooms are spacious and very neat and clean and a person might stay here for a few weeks in tolerable comfort. Near the temple is the American cemetery which contains four neat tombs prettily fenced in. It is very small only about 15X10 feet.

  Later there is the entry:

  27th April, 1857: The Rhododendron Althea is now in beautiful flower-colours chiefly pink. I have planted some of them in the cemetery where the four Americans are buried.

  Decoration Day, which Harris thus inaugurated in Japan during his lonely stay at Shimoda, later came to be regularly observed with formal and grander ceremonies.

  With the opening of the Treaty Ports a space was set aside in each port for a foreign cemetery. In Yokohama the cemetery was located on that high ground overlooking the port—the high ground which in course of time came to be known as the Bluff. Therein are to be found the graves of many of the foreigners who fell victims to the swords of the assassins around 90 years ago, some of which cases are described elsewhere in this book. In the great earthquake of 1st September, 1923, a part of the cemetery slipped down the hillside and many of the old graves were destroyed. The effects of that and other earthquakes in Yokohama are to be seen in the many cracked and broken tombstones in that old cemetery.

  In Kobe the need of a cemetery was found, even before the port was opened, to receive the bodies of two naval officers, one a lieutenant on the British flagship H.M.S. "Rodney," who had died of heart disease, and the other an Asst. Surgeon in the U.S. Navy who had died of consumption on board the U.S.S. "Hartford." Both vessels were anchored at the time off Hyogo, awaiting the opening of the port to take place on New Year's Day, 1868.

  A wind-swept sandy plot of ground at Ono-hama near the mouth of the Ikuta River, and outside the area which was to be the Foreign Settlement, was hastily set aside as a burial ground. There it was that on Christmas Day, 1867, the dead preceded the living in the opening of the port of Kobe to foreigners. Within a few months that cemetery also was to become the resting place of victims of assassins.

  The selection of the site at Ono-hama was an unfortunate choice and in the early days was a matter of constant anxiety to the foreign community, because at times of heavy rain it was in danger of being washed out to sea, should the Ikuta River overflow its banks. In addition it was then so close to the sea that water was to be found within a few feet of the surface. That necessitated the digging of shallow graves. Frequently the foxes used to come down from the hills, scrape the earth away from the graves and gnaw at the newly buried coffins.

  Japan was not troubled by body-snatchers seeking cadavers for the dissection tables of medical students—the resurrection men who so disgraced society in England and elsewhere around the early part of the last century. But there were ghouls in Japan also. So close were the coffins to the surface in Ono cemetery, that on one occasion somebody exhumed the body apparently searching for jewelry and treasure which the Japanese then thought were buried with foreigners. No such loot being found, the graves were not further molested by
such marauders. But there were a few occasions in those early days when coffins were opened and an attempt made to cut the liver out of newly buried corpses.

  The superstition existed among some people in Japan that the liver and certain other viscera of a bear were unusually effective in the treatment of leprosy and certain other diseases. From there it was a short step for such people to imagine that the liver of a foreigner would be so much more efficacious.

  Similar beliefs sprang up again among some of Japan's troops during the undeclared war with China from 1937 to 1941, and several cases occurred of such viscera being smuggled into Japan by returning troops. Considering the faith in weird medicines that exists even today, and not only in Japan, it is not surprising that human livers should have been so sought after. Even in these more enlightened days great value is attached by some Japanese to the blood and flesh of freshly killed snakes. A thriving business is done in all the important cities by well-known snake establishments, where desiccated centipedes, charred skulls of monkeys, and live snakes are their regular stock in trade.

  During the Pacific War there were a number of recorded Japanese atrocities committed against Allied dead with the purpose of removing the livers. The most notable perhaps was that which occurred on Kairiru Island, off the northern coast of New Guinea. That small island was occupied in the early stages of the wan and became the headquarters of Japanese naval forces in the area. When the Allied offensive got under way in the form of island hopping, the island was by-passed. The Japanese remained in occupation, but were cut off from their home bases and under constant fear of attack. So much did their morale suffer in the months and years that followed, that few Japanese naval units had so many atrocities chalked up against their senior officers, as did those Kairiru headquarters.

  Amongst those atrocities was that of the beheading of an Australian airman who floated ashore after his plane had crashed in the sea. He was executed with a samurai sword at nighttime, by the light of blazing fires, in a ceremony conducted with a view to bolstering the declining spirits of the men. Afterwards, and in secret, his brains were removed from the skull and part of the flesh of his buttocks cut away by the senior officers' batman, for use by some of the officers in experimental cannabalism. Before the body was buried a warrant officer removed the liver, and then hung it up to dry on a nail in the kitchen. One morning some months later the desiccated liver was missing. Although the warrant officer stormed and threatened his men, nobody would admit to the theft. The next time it turned up was after the war, on the Japanese repatriation ship by which those remaining on Kairiru Island were being repatriated to Japan. It changed hands several times en route in trade deals among the men, and was subsequently smuggled into Japan at the port of entry where the unit was disembarked. All further trace of it was then lost, but no doubt it was disposed of at a profit to those who attach medicinal value to such ghastly relics.