War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  Once a teacher asked him what he wanted to be.

  ‘Emperor of South America,’ he replied. ‘I would start with a few men in Argentina and then take all the rest.’

  The teacher seemed taken aback, and thought for a while before replying: ‘Of course, you would then have to hand over your lands to our own emperor.’

  The school cadet corps became Charles’ passion. On a winter route march along the Tama River, he would hold his rifle in the regulation manner, palm grasping the steel shod at the butt despite its icy chill while all the other boys held the wooden part. One of his biggest disappointments was not being named a platoon commander. He felt sick as the names of the other boys were called, having expected his martinet performance at ‘Swedish drill’ would have made him a natural choice. All the boys chosen were sons of notable people in Yokohama, though he had to admit that as cadet officers they did do well.

  Instead, Charles became a non-commissioned officer. When his platoon commander was ill he would take the squad for weekly manoeuvres, wearing his belt and sabre. Once, for want of a better target, Charles ordered the platoon into an attack on the playground latrine. This reduced the teachers to laughter and shaking of their heads.

  When the extra-territorial rights were lifted in 1899, and foreigners were free to live anywhere in Japan, subject to Japanese law, Mr Mishima assembled all the schools 2000 pupils into the hall and admonished them to behave in public so that foreigners would have a good impression of the Japanese. Even throwing a stone was dangerous, as it might hit the carriage of a Russian envoy and cause an incident. The memory of the sword attack on the Tsarevich in Kyoto in 1891, for which the emperor himself went to apologise and a samurai lady committed harakiri in atonement at the Kyoto city hall, was still vivid.

  Discipline was strict at his new school. On his first or second day Charles was caught talking in singing practice. Before he knew the teacher was close he felt a hard slap on his face. Later, it was common to hear Japanese say that to make a Chinese or Russian comply you had to beat them at the first encounter. On the other hand, in the morals class the teacher had said that a leader who never showed mercy would not be able to lead. Charles would reflect on his treatment and was puzzled.

  Literalism could get Charles into trouble. Once, the pupils were told the story of an American boy who stood on a railway track to flag down a train approaching a washed-away bridge. A few days later Charles stood on the long straight stretch of track near their house, arms outstretched as a train approached. The black object got larger and larger, the locomotive starting to give off blasts of its whistle. Heads appeared out windows. It slowed to a walking pace about a hundred metres away. One of the engine-drivers started climbing down. Charles bolted, fortunately having the presence of mind to run in the opposite direction of Mr Mishima’s house. He heard shouts behind him and a lump of coal whizzed past his cheek. For some days later, mealtimes were an agony of suspense as he waited to see if he had been reported.

  At school the children were also told about the virtues of brevity. Charles’ marks in history and geography tests plunged as he put this into practice. When a teacher asked him to shift his desk silently he remained still until asked why. ‘No noise, no movement,’ he replied, quoting the physics teacher.

  A boy called Aboshi led a gang of bullies who used to waylay Charles after school and beat him up. It was no use complaining to Chika, as she would suggest it could only be from his own provocation. Taking it to Mr Mishima would bring down untoward punishment on his classmates and decisively cut him off from them. He endured and dodged Aboshi as best he could.

  His European appearance was not the cause. The half-Japanese boys at school, sons of foreign merchants, had no trouble. Rather, it was his assertiveness. Once in the gymnasium, when Mr Maeda’s back was turned, Charles felt a rain of fists pummelling his back. Looking round he was dismayed to find even his friends joining in.

  An Englishman taught the class his language, and Charles began to overcome his fear of Europeans. Mr Hooper had been a jockey at the Yokohama Race Club as a teenage boy. About 35 when he taught at the school, he had become proficient at Japanese fencing and with the bamboo flute, the shakuhachi, which he would play at concerts sitting on his insteps in approved fashion and dressed in Japanese clothes. Mr Hooper willingly gave Charles reading lessons in the only English-language book he possessed, Aesop’s Fables.

  More Japanese were proficient in foreign languages then than until very late in his lifetime, as few textbooks were translated into Japanese. Progressive Japanese sought English for commerce, German for science and French for diplomacy. Later, the Japanese felt less respect for foreign learning. Even study of the Chinese classics fell away.

  As Charles got older and bigger, he began to feel new urges. Once O-Ito, the teenage girl who joined Chika’s household as arrangements started for O-Koto to get married, was leaning out of the upstairs window. Her buxom form excited him. He embraced her from behind, rubbing himself against her hip, sending a very flustered O-Ito running to Chika, who was outraged. She tied Charles to a pillar between the sliding screens. Holding his now limp little penis in one hand and a large pair of scissors in the other, she asked him if he would submit to losing the troublesome organ. He resigned himself to his fate. The maids broke down in tears and shrieks.

  Chika made a show of relenting with great reluctance, and contented herself with another long lecture about the samurai spirit of self-denial. At one point soon after, Charles even shot his unpredictably erect member with his airgun, unloaded of course, to keep it down.

  Charles formed his first pubescent attachment with a high- schoolgirl who came to stay with Mr Mishima while she recovered from ‘wasting disease’. She took creosote pills in increasing doses. Shizuko was tall and pretty with kind words and smiles for Charles. He tried to be close to her, but she never allowed it.

  Mr Mishima’s mother noticed this and called him into the parlour one day. ‘Hatsan, Confucius said none older than the age of six shall sit with the opposite sex. You are male, are you not? It’s a sign of weak character to be always hankering after the other sex. Aren’t you ashamed?’

  He left in tears, Shizuko was standing outside, blushing to the roots of her hair, her eyes brimming. Soon afterwards she caught a chill and died within a month. Her ashes were put in an urn and placed in an alcove with incense and flowers. Charles sat in an attitude of prayer before it, but could not think of anything to wish for.

  Mr Mishima took Charles with him on his occasional trips to visit friends in nearby places, and kept him up while they played go and talked about big events and historical incidents. As a consequence, from being the audience and then chatting to Mr Mishima on long walks and train journeys, he picked up an esoteric range of knowledge.

  On shorter Sunday excursions, they sometimes would fish in nearby streams. They caught nothing more than small guppies, which Mrs Mishima would grill and add as a kind of relish to their rice. Charles looked forward most of all to hunting birds in the open country outside Yokohama. They would spend Saturday night filling cartridges with percussion caps, gunpowder and shot. In the morning they would take out Rover the setter, Mr Mishima carrying his double-barrelled gun, Charles his air rifle. They got a few small birds to grill in sweet soy sauce.

  They came home in darkness one winter evening. Mr Mishima sensed the boy was nervous and taught him a Sanskrit incantation to allay his fears: Gyatte gyatte hara gyatte haraso gyatte Bodiso waka (Buddha will keep from harm all who invoke his name). Charles found it worked and used it often throughout his life.

  Eventually, Mr Mishima and many colleagues felt obliged to resign in the great school textbook scandal of 1902, which ushered in the uniform textbook system that contributed to the rise of extreme nationalism. The publishers of textbooks had been found engaging in widespread bribery of school principals to secure sales. Mr Mishima had enjoyed the hospitality of
a publisher named Tanuma at his seaside villa in Tomioka. He never regained the standing he enjoyed while headmaster at Honcho.

  Anti-foreign sentiment grew in Japan, despite the ending of extra-territorial rights, and an edict was issued from the emperor urging polite behaviour to foreign guests. The more nationalistic newspapers expressed satisfaction about the death sentence awarded to an American sailor for murdering a waitress in Yokohama, though they saw nothing strange in the authorities sending in expensive Western food to him while he waited to be hanged. With foreigners now allowed to settle anywhere in Japan, the newspapers had cartoons about ‘inland mixed households’ showing bizarre-looking babies born of marriages between Japanese and foreigners, and comical incidents resulting from misunderstandings.

  The ‘triple intervention’ by Russia, France and Germany at the end of Japan’s war on China in 1895, was seen as robbing Japan of her rightful spoils from victory, though the indemnities paid by Peking had been profitable enough. Not only had Russia kept Japan out of the strategic Liaotung Peninsula, jutting out of Manchuria into the head of the Yellow Sea, France and Germany had forced new treaty ports out of China, and even the friendly British had jumped in to secure a lease of the New Territories adjacent to Hong Kong and Kowloon.

  The Boxer Rebellion in Peking between 1899 and 1901 caused another upsurge of pride as Japanese troops comprised over half the combined foreign force sent to relieve the besieged legations. The name of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Lieutenant Shiraishi was on everyone’s lips, for leading an attack on the Peiho river-mouth forts. Later, while an instructor at Yokosuka, Shiraishi was suspended over a beating that killed a recruit. He was reinstated and recovered his glory in the blockading of the Russian fleet inside Port Arthur in 1904.

  At school Charles was taught a marching song: As summer time began, dark clouds spread over North China … therefore now we must restore order, together with other nations … Soon the sky will be clear. The serene moon will ride over North China once more …

  After three years with Mr Mishima, Charles moved back to live with Chika. Her health had improved though she was now visibly aged. She rented a small house in Iseyama on a hill overlooking the town and the harbour.

  Charles became a fanatic for physical development. Mr Hooper, his English teacher, was a devotee of the Sandow system of exercising with dumbbells. Charles would rise at five every morning, do ten minutes of exercise in the yard, then douse himself with cold water from a pail filled by the maid the previous night, even when the temperature went below freezing. He would then read or study for two hours before breakfast.

  Once back with Chika, he began reading widely: the newspaper Hochi, and later the Mancho (both long since defunct), and stories by Iwaya Sazanami about Western heroes of exploration and conquest such as Drake, Columbus and Cook. He joined the All-Japan Athletic Club and often went there on Sunday afternoons for croquet, tennis, rowing or kendo.

  With some friends he would take a rowing boat out into the bay. Out by the breakwater several four-masted barques were anchored for the summer. As they waited for favourable winds back to Europe, Charles conceived the idea of stowing away on one of the ships or asking the captain to be taken on as a cabin boy.

  He asked his teacher Mr Hooper how he would go about explaining this, and without asking him questions as Charles had feared, Hooper taught him the right phrases. He wrote a letter of farewell to Chika, saying she was not to worry as he would return as a great man before long. But the two friends who were to row him out to the ship never turned up. Charles threw the letter into the river and went home.

  Three months later, on a grey and blustery day, he looked out from his room across the town and saw tugs pulling the ships out to sea, their sails already starting to spill down from their yardarms. The ships glided away into the haze. He felt miserable, but was glad he was not out on that rough, limitless seascape.

  When his class came to the end of their eight years of primary and middle schooling at Honcho, their master assembled them to announce the ranking of their aggregate examination marks. Chika had impressed on Charles her earnest wish that he should get in the top ten places of the 70 or so graduating students. As the teacher read out the names from the top his heart sank. When he came to the tenth place Charles was in an agony of suspense.

  ‘Sakai, Tanaka and Tomita have tied for tenth place. Any one of the three who wants the tenth place, please raise his hand,’ Mr Kikuchi said

  Not one of the three said anything. Mr Kikuchi wrote numbers on three pieces of paper screwed them up and made the three boys draw from his hand. Charles’ piece of paper said ‘No. 11’.

  Chika was downcast. ‘Hachisaburo, you will never get on in this world, never!’ she said. ‘You will always be the willing horse, but never chosen.’

  Yet she came to the graduation ceremony in her best kimono, watched as Charles got presented with a scroll and a small box of rice cakes, and got misty eyed when everyone sang the Japanese version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’: Light of the fire-fly/Snow at the window/Many a day passed/Reading the book …

  Chapter 4

  WAR AND BUSINESS

  Break the ramparts of Port Arthur

  Tear the walls of Harbin down!

  On the heights of the Ural Mountains

  Float the banner of the sun!

  — War Song of General Fukushima

  Yokohama 1904

  A fever was building in Japan. The signing of a treaty of alliance with Britain in 1902 brought a mood of self-congratulation: Japan was being taken as a serious power by the strongest imperial nation. Up at the Yokohama races in May the next year, where Chika and Charles had been invited by Herr Gielen, there was more than the usual hubbub when the racehorse Ivy, owned by the British minister Sir Charles Macdonald, won two of the events.

  Even at his young age, Charles was starting to become aware of swings in the public mood that could be set off by the sensational headlines in the newspapers, and to be swung by them himself. In September, everyone, even Chika, was plunged into an outpouring of grief over the death of Danjuro, the great kabuki actor and specialist in female roles. A month later, the headlines whipped up indignation over Russia’s failure to stick to its promised deadline for withdrawal from Manchuria, where it had stationed troops since the Boxer Rebellion.

  There was ever more deference to the army and navy. Books like Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido, extolling the spirit of Japan’s warlike ancestors, were given as special presents to boys like Charles. They encouraged the notion that the military were the expression of the national ‘essence’.

  In 1900 it had been laid down that the navy and war ministers would always be drawn from ranks of serving admirals and generals, who would have direct right of access to the emperor and thereby reduced accountability to the cabinet, or Diet. Civilian politicians were held in growing contempt. Any signs of weakness or compromise with foreign powers brought the risk of assassination by bomb, pistol or dagger by young hotheads. These assassins, who would invariably take their own life immediately afterwards, would then be extolled as noble soshin or active spirits, and monuments would be erected to them. Their crime would be justified as a kind of loyalty, aimed at removing the ‘evil advisors’ surrounding the emperor.

  The previous respect given to China as a source of great learning and ancient sages had been replaced by a contempt at its widespread disease, its opium addiction, its corrupt and effete administrators, its use of torture and its inability to shake off the Western territorial concessions. Even the exponents of a ‘continental’ or ‘Asia first’ foreign policy – instead of becoming like a Western power – had swung round by then to the idea of Japan becoming the reforming force in its Asian neighbours, though not to the extent they would become independent powers rivalling Japan itself.

  The rapid development undertaken in Taiwan since 1895 showed off the model that the Japanese around Charles
thought should be applied in Korea. The so-called Hermit Kingdom had an even worse image as a backward state with an ineffectual government. Its weakness would invite other powers like Russia to step in and then be in a strategic position to threaten Japan itself. Far better, the Meiji leaders thought, for Japan to intervene and use Korea as its own pathway into the Asian mainland.

  The Japanese resident-general in Seoul, Goro Miura, organised the murder of the Korean queen, Min, who led the strongest resistance to Japanese tutelage. Some of the Japanese political musclemen, known as sosho, had dressed in Korean clothes and with a few Korean collaborators had invaded the palace, cutting down the poorly armed guards and storming into the pavilion of Queen Min. There she was stabbed to death, along with several of her ladies-in-waiting, and the bodies incinerated in the courtyard. Not long afterwards, the king and crown prince sought asylum in the Russian legation.

  Japanese newspapers started hinting about the exploits of a new breed of soshin, transferring to a wider Asiatic vista their proclaimed dreams of restoring the samurai ways at home and employing their more base techniques as paid intimidators at election time. As this storm was building, the education of Charles had taken a new turn. Chika had gone to see Herr Gielen, who had very firmly stated that there was no place for Charles at Bavier & Co., and that his best avenue would be to prepare for a life as a school teacher.