Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  14

  The Treasure of Japan

  The Meiji Emperor passed away in 1912, throwing Tōgō into a round of funereal duties, praying at the Imperial shrine and following the coffin in its final procession to the funeral service in Aoyama and to Meiji’s final resting place in Momoyama. Less than two weeks after the death of Meiji, Tōgō returned from the funeral to hear of another death. His old friend General Nogi had never forgiven himself for the thousands of lives lost in the taking of Port Arthur. He had previously asked for permission to take his own life in atonement, but had been refused by the Meiji Emperor. While Meiji lived, Nogi had obeyed the command not to punish himself for his supposed failures in the Russo-Japanese war. With Meiji now gone, Nogi and his wife had committed ritual suicide, leaving a note that listed Nogi’s reasons. As well as his supposed disgrace at Port Arthur, Nogi also cited a long-forgotten incident in the Satsuma Rebellion, when a young Lieutenant Nogi had lost the regimental banner to the enemy – Tōgō’s own kinsmen. The double suicide was a sharp shock to Japan and the Japanese, not the least to Tōgō, who was obliged to attend another funeral.

  Tōgō and Mrs Tōgō were flung into each other’s company for the first prolonged period in many years. All three of their surviving children had left home – the eldest, Hyo, was studying agriculture in England, their second son, Mitsuru, was at sea as a naval cadet, and their daughter, Yachiyo, had married a naval lieutenant. Tōgō busied himself with his bonsai trees and other garden plants, and began the slow recovery from a gallstone operation.

  The new Emperor, son of Meiji, was given the reign title of Taishō. He was in his mid-thirties, but had never quite recovered from a childhood outbreak of cerebral meningitis.1 This, or perhaps some other unspecified ailment, had caused the Imperial household to keep him out of the public eye as much as possible. He had been a sickly and feeble child, and his studies at the prestigious Gakushūin Academy had been cut short. He was mainly reared by private tutors, at least on those occasions when his spells of illness allowed.

  It is difficult to say what was ‘wrong’ with the Taishō Emperor. As a young man, he did not seem to have had any trouble greeting foreign dignitaries; he had an avowed interest in other cultures and was even said to have irritated his Imperial father with his ability to drop French words into his conversations. Tōgō had accompanied him a decade earlier in an Imperial tour of Korea, after which the Prince had even began a truncated study of the Korean language. Whatever the reason, the Prince did not seem to have paid any attention to his lessons in court protocol. Tōgō had experienced the Taishō’s weird behaviour first hand when travelling to the launch of the Tsukuba. Then a mere Crown Prince, Taishō had behaved in a manner befitting one of the pushy American women from whom Tōgō had fled in New York. But while such intimacy and boldness might seem perfectly normal outside Japan, to the Imperial family, they were the first signs of madness.

  In 1913, at the state opening of the Japanese parliament, the new Emperor scandalised onlookers by rolling up his speech and staring through it as if it were a telescope. The next few years saw increasing incidents of strange behaviour, until he was carefully excluded from many Imperial duties. There is little discussion in Japanese sources of what the Imperial household made of all this, but he was gradually edged away from public functions throughout the second decade of the 20th century, until he was hardly seen at all after the end of the First World War. It is telling that Taishō’s son, Prince Hirohito, would be made regent as soon as he reached the age of eighteen.

  Admiral Tōgō, who had believed that his service to Japan was over, soon discovered that he was part of this programme of Imperial preservation. In 1914, when Hirohito was eleven years old, Tōgō was summoned to the palace to be given his new mission – he was to take charge of the education of Hirohito, in order to ensure that Japan’s next Emperor was fully prepared for the job. He was informed of his new role by Prince Fushimi, who had clearly been assessing the Admiral’s potential during their long days en route to England aboard the Kamo Maru. Unlike the brash, naive Taishō Emperor, Admiral Tōgō had somehow kept his reserve and demeanour aboard a crowded ocean liner for two whole months – here was an ideal man to put in charge of the education of Japan’s Crown Prince.

  Tōgō disagreed, thinking the task to be too much for him to handle. Prince Fushimi replied that he had been afraid that the Admiral might think so, and that was the reason that he had called this meeting. He wanted, he explained, to obtain the Admiral’s informal consent, so that when the official command issued from the Taishō Emperor himself, everyone would know that Tōgō would say yes.

  Tōgō, who had already said no, soon realised that he would have trouble disobeying a direct command, and so agreed to it. Aged sixty-eight, Admiral Tōgō became the chief tutor of the Crown Prince Hirohito, the superintendant of an entire squad of educators, charged with ensuring that Hirohito was ready to rule in record time. His appointment may have also masked some factional in-fighting at court. Even though fifty years had passed, the vestiges of Satsuma and Chōshū lived on in political parties and court factions. The old samurai domains may have been long gone, but many of their descendants continued to join forces along family lines. Tōgō, it was true, was a famous Satsuma man, but he was also a national icon, and his appointment seemed to please all parties equally.

  ‘In general,’ explained the Chūō Kōron newspaper, ‘public men have their enemies, however perfect their characters may seem. Admiral Tōgō is an exception. He has no enemies, whether open or insidious, and few men are possessed of such an all-round personality as his … True, we have a few admirals and generals who are great as such. But these men are either aspiring for power or wishing for fame; they cannot free themselves from such self-consciousness.’2 Not content with singing Tōgō’s praises at the expense of other military men, the purple prose went on to compare him to radium, which looked like a humble metal, but glowed with uncanny, invisible power.

  For the next six years, Tōgō oversaw Hirohito’s education in subjects including the literature of China and Japan, French, fine art, physics, biology, geography, history, ethics, law, calligraphy and the four military necessities: horsemanship, drills, and army and navy affairs. Tōgō was also expected to travel with Hirohito on his study trips around old Japanese battlefields, usually by train, but occasionally by ship. The period of Hirohito’s education coincided roughly with that of the First World War, in which the Anglo-Japanese Alliance obliged Japan to enter the conflict against Germany. It was thus a time of great expectations for the Japanese people, who regarded themselves as welcomed in the international community, equal partners of the Allies.

  Hirohito came of age in a period when Japan was winning new victories in Asia, this time against Germany, whose colonies Japan seized in the name of the Allies, and expected to hold onto when the war was over. It was only afterwards, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, that Japan’s position was questioned. The nation was edged out of many proceedings, deprived of the chance to put forward a bill for racial equality, and even forced to agree, however reluctantly, to pull out of the Shandong Peninsula.

  Tōgō’s last appointment came to an end in the spring of 1921, when Hirohito was packed off for a six-month tour of Europe.3 With the Crown Prince’s departure on his Grand Tour, Tōgō and the other tutors were officially relieved of their duties, and the Admiral, now in his seventies, returned home to play with his grandchildren.

  Tōgō remained single-minded and self-sufficient, and as an old man, even arguably eccentric. The Tōgō residence eventually gained an extra wing, but the old Admiral refused to agree to remodelling the original house. He had, he complained, built it himself when he was young, and he did not want to see any changes. Tōgō pottered in his garden, played Go with friends and spoiled his grandchildren. Formerly a heavy sake drinker whenever the occasion allowed, he gave up alcohol on doctor’s orders in 1914 – Hirohito’s mentor was a born-again teetotaller, who occa
sionally railed against the idiocy of drink, despite a lifetime spent learning to appreciate it. He kept Imperial gifts and honours in pride of place, but one of his favourite possessions was an ‘eight-stroke’ clock, presented to him by an unnamed Englishman during his active service. The clock was designed for use aboard ship, keeping time not by hours and minutes, but by the eight ‘bells’ of a traditional ship’s watch. Tōgō refused to part with the clock, and kept it by his side until his dying day.

  After a lifetime at sea, he still insisted on sewing on his own buttons and darning his own socks, running his own baths, and was even occasionally caught doing his own laundry – washing his socks and handkerchiefs in the sink. His son Hyo recalled that the aging Admiral even once set about a basket of fruit given to him as a present by a well-wisher. The basket had been tarted up with a few pink ribbons, which Tōgō diligently snipped off with scissors and proceeded to sew onto some old cushions. When asked by a bemused Hyo what he was doing, Tōgō replied that he thought the ribbons would help outline the cushions more distinctly. Hyo then suggested that Tōgō might want to get the maid to do his embroidery, but ‘he replied that he was used to doing the work himself in the Navy, and kept on sewing pink-coloured ribbons with his old hands’.4 This may have been the bullish self-reliance of a career sailor, but it may also have helped to hide something else – as was only revealed by Tōgō’s eldest son after his death, Mrs Tōgō had been in failing health for many years.

  Tōgō was even found to be occasionally talkative, at least by his standards. In 1922, Joseph Joffre, Marshal of France, was entertained at a state banquet, presided over by two Japanese princes. Joffre’s attitude suggests that he was mildly annoyed at being made to endure such an event, which was necessary in order to even out the protocols – the young Taishō Emperor had called on the French when he was a prince, and the sojourn required a return visit from the French of equal weight. Accordingly, when presented to Admiral Tōgō, also in attendance, Joffre limited his introduction to the merely factual. ‘I am Joffre,’ he said, ‘the French envoy for returning courtesies.’ However, Tōgō pounced on the military leader in an unusually outspoken way. ‘I have heard of your name,’ said Tōgō, ‘and I have the great pleasure of meeting you for the first time. I want to thank you for your visit to this country, I am Count Heihachirō Tōgō, the admiral.’

  Both men suddenly became very animated – Joffre with a desire to hear more about Tōgō’s world-famous victory over the Russians, and Tōgō with an equally great wish to hear Joffre’s personal recollections of the Battle of the Marne. It was only as the old warriors relaxed into their conversation, that both began to suspect that they had met before. Some twenty-eight years earlier, Joffre had been serving with the French navy during the Jilong campaign in northern Taiwan. Tōgō had been there as an observer. Eventually, Tōgō noted that an officer called Joffre had been his guide among the gun emplacements. In turn, Joffre recalled shepherding a short, quiet Japanese captain around the abandoned Chinese fortifications. ‘That was you, sir?’ exclaimed Joffre. ‘That was you, sir!’ Tōgō replied.5

  Tōgō’s air of authority returned at the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Striking at lunchtime on 1 September 1923, the earthquake caught the housewives of Tokyo at their cooking stoves. The damage from the tremors was greatly outweighed by the fires from wrecked kitchens, which soon created a firestorm among the wood and paper houses of the suburbs. Tōgō insisted first on checking on the safety of Hirohito, and only then returned to his home, which was threatened by a wall of flames. Although Mrs Tōgō and the family were dispatched to safety, Tōgō refused to leave his post, calmly directing firecrews in the defence of his burning home. Willing helpers clambered on the roof of his house, drenching the old building with pre-emptive buckets of water. Tōgō stood staring down the flames, which smouldered at the edges of his fence and engulfed his garage, but turned away before reaching the main building. Another catastrophe beset the Japanese the same year – 1923 was also the year in which the Anglo-Japanese Alliance officially came to an end, closing over twenty years of cooperation between the two great naval powers.6

  Also in 1923, Tōgō the former samurai was brought face to face with a development of the new age – the motion picture. La Bataille (in America, Danger Line), directed by E E Violet, was the international star-studded epic of its day: the tale of the Japanese Marquis Yorisaka (Hayakawa Sessue) who suspects his wife of having an affair with the English captain Fergan (Felix Ford). The vengeful Yorisaka has Fergan transferred to his ship, and when wounded in action, orders the neutral Englishman to take charge of the ship. The film was an unabashed weepy, a refashioning of Othello, in which the wounded Marquis later discovers that his wife had been faithful to him and seeks a tearful reconciliation. However, when screened to an audience of Japanese dignitaries by the well-meaning Viscount Ogasawara, the film’s scenes of naval combat had an unexpected effect on Admiral Tōgō. The sobbing Tōgō bolted from the theatre, confessing afterwards to Ogasawara: ‘Many of the men around me died in just that way. Do you think I can keep myself from weeping when I see the sight? It does not matter if it is a moving picture.’ It was a far cry from the unflappable, emotionless Admiral Tōgō of military renown.7

  More in keeping with the Tōgō of old was his appearance as a slight, silent man, clad in an ill-fitting country suit and a flat cap, walking down the steps at Tokyo Shinbashi railway station. Tōgō’s assistants were shocked to see the old man suddenly stop, draw himself up, and bow low towards the ground, heedless of the bustle and crowds of the station at rush-hour. While passers-by whirled out of the dawdler’s way, Tōgō’s aide asked him what he was doing. Tōgō calmly replied that he had seen an Imperial prince incognito in the crowd, and continued on his way.

  In the aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference, Japan was plunged into a series of arms-limitations negotiations designed to prevent the kind of escalation that Tōgō had predicted in Washington. The result was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the terms of which included a fixed ratio of shipping between the British Empire, the United States and Japan of 5:5:3. Many Japanese regarded this as a further insult from the international community, although the size of each navy’s sphere of interest still gave the Japanese a huge fleet. Japan, after all, restricted its interests to the Pacific, whereas the US patrolled the Pacific and the Atlantic, and the British Empire had the same purview, but also additional interests in the Indian Ocean.

  As part of the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty, several nations were obliged to reduce their naval strength. The Australia, which Tōgō had observed under construction in Scotland, was one of the victims within the British Empire, towed out to sea and scuttled in April 1924. It was not long before the news got out that a Japanese vessel was similarly scheduled for destruction – Tōgō’s old flagship, the Mikasa.

  Refloated after her tragic accident, the Mikasa had suffered the same gradual erosion of status as any warship. At the time of the Russo-Japanese war, she had been the most modern unit in Tōgō’s fleet. She had been downgraded to a coast-defence ship, and in that capacity had run aground near Vladivostok. Refloated again but struck off the naval lists, she was regarded by naval accountants as an ideal candidate for destruction – a prominent vessel with impressive tonnage on paper, but no great loss to Japan’s modern navy.

  Tōgō and his flagship remained such celebrities, however, that a protest was inevitable. The Mikasa Preservation Society came into being in March 1924, formed as a concerted effort by several politicians, some enterprising newspaper reporters and several other interest groups. The Society printed pamphlets in Japanese and English, calling for the preservation of the Mikasa as a national monument and attempted to enlist the support of the British, American, Italian and French ambassadors. All four nations were Japan’s co-signatories to the Washington Naval Treaty, and the decision to include ambassadorial weight shows an artful grasp of diplomacy. Several newspapers ran exposés on the parlous
state of the Mikasa, which sat in a run-down condition at a non-descript Yokosuka dock.

  In June 1925, Tōgō was officially invited to a Society lunch, in his capacity as the honorary president – he does not appear to have been actively involved before, but willingly gave his name as a figurehead for the real organisers. Tōgō was hence present when those present agreed that the best way to support the Mikasa was to raise the funds for her preservation by public subscription. Tōgō fished in his pocket and pulled out a 50-sen coin – half a yen. ‘I second the motion,’ he said. ‘I will constitute myself the first man to subscribe to the fund.’

  With that, he flung his money on the table, where it was soon joined by a clatter of identical coins. Also present was the Navy Minister, Admiral Takarabe Takeshi, who as a young lieutenant in 1900 had nearly killed Tōgō by slapping his horse in Tianjin during the Boxer Uprising. Takarabe dove for Tōgō’s coin and snatched it up, making it possible for the first donation to be preserved as a museum exhibit in its own right. The Mikasa was later officially inaugurated as a floating museum at a ceremony attended by Tōgō and the Prince Regent, his former pupil Hirohito.8

  Times had changed. Once regarded as the plucky ‘British of the East’, the Japanese were now seen as a race possessed by dangerously martial fervour. Tōgō’s victory over the Russians had been the last time that Japanese militarism met with wide approval among other powers. In the generation that followed, Japanese expansion had taken on a sinister pall among her allies, and many victories were won in spite of or against the objections of her fellow nations. Korea had become a full-fledged Japanese colony in 1910 and the Japanese had seized German Pacific possessions in 1914–18. The Shandong Peninsula, too, was a spoil of war, and one which Japan was forced to secede with great reluctance and agonising slowness. Shandong, like Port Arthur, had been Chinese territory under foreign occupation, and the Japanese had rather hoped to keep it for themselves after throwing out the Germans. The Chinese, however, were also inconveniently on the Allied side and preferred that the land was returned to them.9