It was a sign of the public mood at the time, with expectations whipped up only to be dashed, that an imperial rescript had to be rushed out telling people to remain calm. Military expenditure was ramped up, a reputation-boosting alliance with Britain forged in 1902, and negotiations opened with Russia. One possible solution to dangerously overlapping spheres of interest in East Asia was that the Russians should recognize Japanese dominance on the Korean peninsula while the Japanese accepted Russian dominance of Manchuria, to the north. But neither side was fully committed to the idea, while at home in Japan there were calls to settle the issue in battle. In February 1904, the Japanese navy provided the moment that many had been waiting for since the humiliations of nearly a decade before: a surprise attack on the Russians.
The ensuing conflict – with its machine-gun nests, trench fortifications and barbed wire – earned itself a place on a grim list of small modern wars in the early 1900s that were later regarded as foreshadowing the extraordinary carnage of 1914 to 1918. But it made heroes out of General Nogi Maresuke and Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō. The latter’s ships rewarded the Russian Baltic Fleet for an epic 10,000-mile mobilization – from the Baltic, around Western Europe and Africa and across the Indian Ocean – with destruction almost down to the last vessel. There were Japanese victories on land too, including a successful siege of Port Arthur, on the Liaotung Peninsula. By May 1905, both sides had suffered heavy losses – running to more than 100,000 soldiers killed – and both were struggling to keep the conflict going. Japan’s leaders appealed in secret to President Theodore Roosevelt to help end it. Following negotiations in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a peace treaty was signed in September 1905. Roosevelt was later awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize ever granted to a statesman.
There had been no outright victory for Japan, in the end. But the Russo-Japanese War was a sensation nonetheless: an upstart Asian nation had seriously embarrassed a grand old global power. In the racialized rhetoric of the age, yellow had given white what-for. Writing in his diary, India’s future prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described a ‘great pick-me-up for Asia’. Nationalists from Vietnam to Indonesia to Iran also spotted a turning point in world history. For Japan, the conflict achieved two things. It completed what the alliance with Britain had set in motion: the emergence of Japan as a top-tier nation. And it solidified in the minds and in the public rhetoric of Japan’s leaders the triumph of their national story. This really was an exceptional place and people, whose values and spirit continued to drive and shape a process of rapid modernization the like of which existed nowhere else in the world.
Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922) But at home, the pressures of the war had quickly begun to tell. As media rhetoric snowballed – Japan in peril; with us or against us – Buddhists, Christians and pacifists all came under attack. Buddhist and Christian organizations did what they could to fend off public hostility by buying government bonds and sending money and gifts to the troops. For pacifists, on the other hand, inflaming public opinion was largely the point. When her brother applied to join a special squad, the poet Yosano Akiko wrote a piece urging him, and the country, to step back from a conflict for which there was no pressing need, and to return instead to the concerns of an older era:
Oh, my brother, I weep for you.
Do not give your life.
Last-born among us,
You are the most beloved of our parents.
Did they make you grasp the sword
And teach you to kill?
Did they raise you to the age of twenty-four,
Telling you to kill and die?
Heir to our family name,
You will be master of this store, old and honoured, in Sakai.
Brother, do not give your life.
For you, what does it matter
Whether Port Arthur fortress falls or not?
The code of merchant houses says nothing about this
Brother, do not give your life.
His Majesty the Emperor
Goes not himself into the battle.
Could he, with such deeply noble heart,
Think it an honour for men
To spill one another’s blood
And die like beasts?
Much the worst thing to be during these years was a pacifist and a Christian. This was thanks in large part to scepticism that had been building up over the last twenty years in Japan about the compatibility of Christianity with commitment to the nation. The Christian leader Uchimura Kanzō had caused a national sensation back in 1891 when a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education was unveiled at a Tokyo school where he was teaching. Staff and students alike were expected to bow deeply, but when his turn came, Uchimura first hesitated and then offered a slight nod of the head. Amidst the furious reaction that followed – including accusations of lèse-majesté – Uchimura was forced to resign.
Journalists took up the story, and Japan’s first full professor of philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, Inoue Tetsujirō, weighed in. Where in the Bible, Inoue asked, may one find Jesus Christ extolling the nation state, or showing anything but ‘cold indifference’ towards his own parents? How can an ideal of indiscriminate love be compatible with Japanese values like loyalty to family and nation? Will the Sermon on the Mount produce effective soldiers? And why should we let Christians teach in our schools when their connections with Western missionaries may mean that they secretly prefer England or America to Japan? Christians either couldn’t or wouldn’t assimilate. Instead they clung to the spectacular folly, as another critic put it, of a worldwide religion accidentally kicked off by a young girl trying to explain away an illegitimate pregnancy.
Woodblock print (artist unknown; 1904). The caption in Japanese at the top reads: ‘Japanese Suicide Squad Fight Bravely in a Naval Battle at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War’ Serious historical and theological arguments were marshalled against all of this, but more influential in the long run was a race to the bottom in religiously inflected militarist rhetoric and tokenism during the Russo-Japanese War. Urban Christian leaders like Ebina Danjō tried to rally parishioners to a vision of war as an opportunity to do God’s work. Christian publications eulogized soldiers who supposedly quoted scripture to one another in the thick of the action, or who were seen – in the words of one piece – ‘Dying in Battle While Longing for the Bible’.
Despite such efforts, the perception remained about Japan’s Christians that ‘they’ – as though a single, sinister bloc – were ambiguous in their patriotism and lukewarm about war. Inoue Enryō was only too happy to see such sentiments on the rise. For him, the war with Russia was just the kind of national emergency that could help him to put flesh on the bones of his claims about Buddhism and the state naturally supporting one another. The conflict doubled for him, rather conveniently, as a timely crusade against a contemptible Christianity – both at home and abroad, where the blessing of Russian soldiers with Orthodox icons before battle had clearly been to no avail. One of the most grief-inducing signs of the old Buddhism’s betrayal of the Japanese people, Inoue believed, was that promising young men were left desperate enough to embrace a view of the world that boasted neither scientific credibility nor the capacity to inspire true selflessness. In such circumstances, the defeat of the Russians and their religion would be a win for modernity, for compassion and for common sense.
*
In the end, the big religious winner of the Russo-Japanese War was in fact Japan’s civil religion, of faith in the state, which Japanese leaders had done so much over the last three decades to instil. For all his enthusiastic preaching around the country, and his undoubted influence on generations to come – across the sciences, religion and philosophy – Inoue Enryō’s claims of ultimate authority for even a radically reformed Buddhism were badly out of date. That much-cherished power had passed away, if ever it had been truly possessed. And it was not coming back.
Religion could, and did, however, inspire creativity and resistance at th
e level of individuals and small, committed groups. The Christian minister Kashiwagi Gien was outspoken in blaming the Russo-Japanese War on the evils of capitalism, and in denouncing the use of religion to justify violent conflict. The Buddhist priests Takagi Kemmyō (Shin) and Uchiyama Gudō (Sōtō Zen) were later caught up in the 1910 plot to assassinate the Emperor. But the idea that either Christianity or Buddhism could provide a binding force for broad-based social or political organization, to the point where either became a cultural threat to the state, now looked rather unlikely.
And yet Japan’s leaders found that their successful war against Russia bestowed mixed blessings on the domestic front. In September 1905, violence suddenly erupted across Tokyo, and rioters began to head towards the Imperial Palace. The cosmos could, it seemed, be brought to heel. Urban Japan would be another matter.
6
Haunting the Orient
Yoru fukete
nemuri shinamu to
seshi kimi no
kokoro wa tsui ni
kōri no gotoshi.
As the night grew late,
And you thought that you would go
To sleep and death,
At the end your heart
Must have been like ice.
Saitō Mokichi was a waka poet and an admirer of Japan’s great Man’yōshū anthology. He was also a psychiatrist, who encountered so many suicides in his time that he diagnosed himself with ‘phobia telephonica’: a fear of being wakened in the night to hear of yet another person who had taken their life. He eventually developed a special short button-up kimono sash to replace the traditional seven- or eight-foot long obi that too many people in extreme distress found irresistible as a means of hanging themselves.
But the man who died on 24 July 1927, and for whom Saitō wrote this poem, had been a friend as well as a patient. Saitō had helped him open up to poetry. The man, in turn, had shared with Saitō his troubling visions: translucent cogwheels, in constant motion, through which he was forced to look out onto the world around. Saitō supplied him with Veronal, a barbiturate, to help him sleep through the unusually hot nights that summer. It may have been this prescription that he used to end his life.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was just thirty-five years of age when he died, and already a celebrated writer. He had first made his name producing beautifully crafted historical fiction, but in recent years had turned more and more towards modern Japanese literature’s dominant form: the ‘I-novel’. Classical zuihitsu – fragmented personal reflections along the lines of Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (completed in the year 1002) – met European Romanticism and Naturalism to produce a powerfully influential style of closely autobiographical fiction. Stories tended to be structured around moment-by-moment reactions to life, with an unforgiving focus on the author’s own feelings and failings.
In Akutagawa’s hands, the I-novel became a devastatingly effective means of tracking what critics felt urban Japan was becoming in the 1910s and 1920s. One of his final pieces was Haguruma (‘Spinning Gears’), whose narrator ‘Mr A’ tries with mounting desperation to put together a combination of distractions – writing, rifling through the shelves in bookshops (‘like a compulsive gambler’), riding Tokyo trains and taxis – to try to make life livable a little while longer.
At one point, Mr A goes to confide in an old man who lives in the attic of a Bible publishing house, working as a handyman by day and spending the rest of his time in prayer and reading. ‘Drugs are not going to help you,’ counsels the man. ‘Wouldn’t you like to become a believer?’ ‘If only I could,’ replies Mr A. He can readily believe in the devil and in sin, but not so easily in God or in miracles. Nor does he share the handyman’s happy conviction that darkness in the world is a matter of shadows cast by supreme light.
Akutagawa’s death was national news. Thanks in part to the ‘vague anxiety’ about the future that he famously described in his suicide note, his passing was interpreted by intellectuals around the country as a final defeat for the internationalism and open, cultured life for which Akutagawa had seemed to stand. Something had happened to Japan, between the end of the Russo-Japanese War and the loss of this star author in 1927, which seemed to justify Mr A’s view of life over the old man’s. This was not a world of light, throwing a few unavoidable shadows. There was a deep, creeping darkness here, which simply overtook the likes of Mr A a little earlier than others.
This era of uncertainty was born amidst unprecedented violence, as large-scale protests in Tokyo in the summer of 1905 revealed the pain of a country that had pushed itself to the absolute brink against Russia. Japan had achieved the hoped-for international respect that it turned out ballroom dancing didn’t bring. And peace terms seemed passable: Japan took over the Russian lease of the all-important Liaotung Peninsula (acquiring in the process the Russian-built South Manchuria Railway), and received acknowledgement of its legitimate interest in Korea. But this conflict had cost more than six times Japan’s ordinary yearly income. Taxes had skyrocketed, enormous foreign loans had been taken out, families had seen brothers and sons sent far away, and almost every vessel in Japan’s merchant marine fleet had been requisitioned and thrown into the fight. So where, protestors wanted to know, were the permanent territorial gains – beyond the southern portion of chilly Sakhalin? The Sino-Japanese peace ten years before had brought Japan a hefty indemnity in silver – where was the money this time around?
Anger built as the crowd moved from Hibiya in central Tokyo towards the nearby Imperial Palace – on the site of the old Edo Castle, still with something of the old moats and sloped granite walls remaining. Speech-makers insisted that if the people were to be made to sweat so hard for the empire, they should have their say in how it was run. Some protestors hoped to have the peace agreement rejected altogether, and for their armed forces to fight on in search of real gains.
Bungled crowd control worsened an already tense situation, and soon rioting broke out, spreading across Tokyo and from there into other major cities. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed, including the Home Minister’s private residence and nearly three-quarters of all the kōban (police boxes) in the capital. Trams were targeted and torched – a reflection of anger at recent transport price hikes – while the offices of pro-government newspapers were attacked. In the end, an army that protestors hoped to see return to the Russian front was set on them instead. Order was belatedly restored.
Japan’s modern leaders were well practised at dealing with difficult individuals or publications – they could be imprisoned, fined or shut down. What haunted them now, and into the 1910s and early 1920s, was the spectre of the gunshū, the crowd: the potential for a tide of uncontrollable urban public anger to force them out of power. Japan was on the verge of becoming a mass industrial society, and anyone who had travelled abroad of late knew what that might some day entail: extreme poverty, a snowballing of anti-government feeling and the spread of radical alternative ideologies. Could Japan’s constitutional arrangements, barely a generation old, cope with this emerging world? Or would the Hibiya riots turn out to be just the tiniest of tasters?
*
Paint toys underground. Peddle cotton goods overground. Nanny children. Feed adults their beef and sushi. Type in an office. Trail customers around a shop. Help a pharmacist. Sleep in a toilet. Find a house. Furnish that house, haggling hard and counting every cost: tea serving tray (1 yen), potted plant (35 sen), pickled wasabi (5 sen), tissue paper (20 sen), noodles for the people downstairs (30 sen). Serve in a café. Chat to the men. Avoid the men. Run away from the men. Back to peddling again. ‘If you had slipped me a bomb, I would gladly have thrown it …’
Such was the Tokyo life of Hayashi Fumiko, a young woman whose literary montage of people and places, prose and poetry, songs and shopping receipts –published as Hōrōki (Diary of a Vagabond) at the end of the 1920s – captured the relentlessness of a city that offered endless opportunity but rarely much security. A scruffy university student manning a night-s
tall tries to persuade passers-by to purchase his calculators by chiding them for their stupidity. What’s 89,503 plus 275,460? Don’t know? Need one of these? A shop owner sleeps at night in front of his safe, just in case. Hayashi herself struggles to earn enough to stay alive, though the thrill and variety of life around her keeps her going – as does her search for friends or lovers behind whose subdued façades might lurk an incendiary passion to match her own. ‘I fell in love with the Buddha’, one of her poems begins, ‘when I kissed his faintly cold lips …’
Soon, more than half of Tokyo’s rapidly growing population – which doubled from 2 to 4 million between 1895 and 1923 – would, like Hayashi, be first-generation immigrants from the countryside: strangers to one another, in a city sprawling ever further outwards.
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) (above) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903–51) (below) Part of the pomp of Commodore Perry’s return trip to Japan in 1854, in search of an answer to his off-key overtures of the year before, had been the putting on of a little show. A quarter-sized railroad – steam locomotive, carriage and a circle of track – was laid out and fired up, steam whistle and all. Japanese onlookers were duly impressed. One man hitched himself a 20-mile-an-hour ride, balancing perilously on top of the carriage and gripping its roof as his robes flapped in the wind and his body convulsed with laughter.
Across the 1910s and 1920s, thanks to a mix of private and government money, and using track and rolling stock imported from Britain and elsewhere, railway lines helped to define Japan’s capital city and to guide its expansion. Where new lines were laid, department stores, commuter housing complexes and restaurants followed almost overnight. Towns and villages were consumed one after another as the city rolled on. New neighbourhoods like Shinjuku appeared, home to Hayashi and an eclectic range of other incomers whose lives she wove into her chronicle.
Japan Story Page 12
