The Tokyo municipal council had already appointed a committee to organise a big festival for the anticipated fall of Port Arthur. Scaffolding and wires were put up along the streets to hang flags and bunting, the shops had been depleted of their stocks of lanterns in readiness for the victory parade. But still the Russian garrison held out. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were arriving back either dead in coffins or barely alive with ghastly wounds and diseases.
The departing conscripts were given amulets from temples, strips of paper with prayers written upon them, or cloths with knots tied by a thousand women, all said to protect against harm. At Osaka Station, women tore off strips of their clothing to hand to soldiers in passing trains. As women were supposed to be ritually unclean, and metal was said to shun uncleanliness, bullets would therefore avoid the wearer of the cloth.
By August and September 1904, the news seemed a little better. Admiral Togo shattered the Russian fleet from Port Arthur when it made its last foray out into the Yellow Sea in a forlorn effort to run for Vladivostok. Its flagship was sunk by twelve-inch shells. The rest of the fleet either scattered to neutral ports where the warships were interned or put back into Port Arthur, where the guns were dismounted and deployed on shore. Admiral Kamimura finally caught up with Admiral Skrydloff’s squadron, sinking one cruiser and sending the other two, badly damaged, back to their base. On land, the Japanese army captured the city of Liaoyang in Manchuria after a weeklong battle in which both sides suffered heavy losses.
City authorities were ordered to whip up victory parades, and in Kamakura, where Charles went to see Chika at a guesthouse, the local people dragged a wooden model of a battleship through the village from a temple up to the great bronze Buddha statue, amid music and war songs.
Still, it was not the same as the capture of Port Arthur. At the end of September, the war ministry extended the retention age of reservists by five years to 37. At the commerce department in Waseda and around Yokohama, there was speculation how long Japan’s supply of men and money would hold out. The Russian fleet in the Baltic Sea was setting out to sail around the world to join the fight; reports came in of constant movement of troop trains out to the Far East along the trans-Siberian railway. As well as the huge toll of casualties, people talked quietly, away from the police, about the heavier burden of taxes on land and incomes, the new death duty, the higher excises on salt, alcohol and tobacco, the extra charges on tram fares and telegrams.
*
One day at the beginning of November, Charles was roaming Kanda and joined a crowd converging on the YMCA Hall. It turned out to be a meeting of the Heiminsha, or ‘Commoners Society’, the main organisation of Japan’s more radical socialists. The hall was packed, even up to the galleries. The seven speakers walked onto the stage, led by a namesake, Sakai Toshihiko.
As the first speaker rose, a police inspector got up on stage and ordered him to sit down. Then the inspector turned to the audience and declared that the meeting was dissolved under the public order law. The crowd started booing, heckling and stamping their feet. Dozens more policemen crowded into the hall. One started dragging Toshihiko down from the platform. Members of the crowd started attacking the police. ‘Despotism, like the Russian government!’ someone shouted. More police arrived, and after two hours of an angry melée, managed to clear the hall and lock the doors.
Charles hung around in the crowd after being pushed outside with a poke from a baton. He then followed some of the speakers into a small office building in Yurakucho, which turned out to be the home of the newspaper Heimin Shimbun, or Commoners’ Newspaper. Charles had seen the socialist weekly being sold around Tokyo and sometimes lying on the tables of student groups in his favourite tea house at Waseda.
In the ground floor warehouse, printers were bent over trays fitting pieces of metal type into columns. Charles soon found himself in a wide shabby office with several desks, electric lamps and untidy piles of documents, newspapers, books and telegrams. The walls were hung with portraits of bearded Europeans whom he later worked out to have been Marx, Engels, William Morris, Emile Zola, the German social democrat August Bebel and Tolstoy.
The leader of the gathering was a delicately built man with rather fine, widely separated eyes, a moustache over full lips, and soft, well-brushed hair. In repose, his face had an enigmatic, cat-like expression.
‘Ah, at least this satisfies my thirst for confusion!’ he declared to the gathering of exhausted speakers and hangers-on who flopped down on chairs, desks and the floor. Charles leant against a wall taking it all in.
People came in with sake bottles; cups were brought out of a cupboard above a sink stacked with dirty pots and dishes, and passed around. Charles asked the man who came over with a sake bottle who was present. ‘Don’t you know?’ he asked. ‘That’s Shusui Kotoku, the founder of this newspaper. And that over there, is Toshihiko, our other editor, just out of jail and tempting fate again.’
Charles had read about Kotoku, as he was commonly known. He and Toshihiko had quit the Yorozu Choho when that newspaper had abruptly dropped its anti-war editorial line the previous autumn and gone with the flow of war clamour. They had then started the Heimin Shimbun. After the start of hostilities and the wartime election in March, they had greeted the onerous budget of the new government with a headline: ‘Ah woe, the rising taxes!’ Their article went on to predict the heavy burden that the war would bring down on ordinary people. For this, Toshihiko had been arrested and jailed for two months.
Some of the American teachers at Waseda, the Protestant missionaries, had introduced their students to the writings of American authors about socialism in the United States and Europe. The teachers seemed to sympathise with the workers thrown into poverty by the frequent economic crashes that followed stock market booms and speculative railway developments, or those workers who were attacked by hired hoodlums and detectives when they went on strike. They talked about an American writer called Jack London, who had just been barred by the Japanese government from entering the country to report on the war.
Kotoku spoke for hours that evening, attacking as insufficient Tolstoy’s recent polemic against the war, ‘Bethink Yourselves’, which called on individuals to take a moral stance and distance themselves by refusing to enlist or pay taxes. Then he moved on to the Communist Manifesto, which the Heimin Shimbun was then translating and preparing to publish.
‘God is not the answer, but dialectical materialism!’ he shouted, raising his sake cup. ‘To the revolution! I am and always will be a shishi!’
His co-editor leant over to him and whispered in his ear, casting an eye around the room. It was clear he was telling him to tone down his words, that there were many strangers in the room. It was already late. Some of those in the room had fallen asleep. Charles decided not to try to go back to Waseda that night and curled up in a corner, wrapping his hakama around himself.
The next morning he went out, got some soup from a stall under the railway viaduct and hung around to watch the emperor’s birthday parade in front of the palace. This time, instead of the usual frogged uniforms and plumed caps, the soldiers were wearing drab battle dress. Nearly all were new recruits, reservists and support militiamen. The only colour came from the braided tunics of the senior Japanese statesmen and the foreign ambassadors and military attachés. The emperor looked tired, sitting in his carriage, and the crown prince slightly seedy and uneasy on his horse.
The riotous Kanda meeting, followed by the publication of the Engels tract ten days later, was to be the last straw for a government worried about rising discontent. The issue was seized. Kotoku and another editor were brought before a court and found guilty of violating the press law. Kotoku was given a prison term of five months, the other man eight months, and their newspaper ordered to close. Early in 1905 an appeal would fail, the Heimin Shimbun was shut down and Kotoku and his colleague would present themselves at Sugamo Prison to begin their senten
ces.
Charles was not to see Kotoku again for a couple of years. After finishing his jail term, Kotoku left for America for a lengthy stay in San Francisco to meet the city’s small but thriving community of American and Russian radicals. They turned him towards the radical anarchism that marked the rest of his short life.
Meanwhile, across Tokyo, there was a determined effort by authorities to keep up the war spirit. Masataro and Charles went up to the annual display of chrysanthemums at Dongasaka, hoping more to enjoy the sight of Tokyo’s young ladies out walking than the flowers. This year it featured tableaux of war scenes, including Russians with villainous faces, yellow petals making up their hair and beards, all getting the worst of the fighting as Japanese soldiers stormed up to fortresses. Makaroff’s ship was illustrated being blown up.
Finally at the end of the year, the Japanese forces closed on their objective, despite the desperate Russian counterattacks. They captured the vital 203-Metre Hill overlooking Port Arthur, and on New Year’s Day the Russian commander capitulated. The Japanese army had lost nearly 58,000 soldiers in battle, including both the sons of its commander, General Nogi; another 40,000 were disabled by beri-beri, dysentery and typhoid.
In the following weeks, trainloads of bearded Russian soldiers in ragged uniforms and shapeless sheepskin hats came through Yokohama and Tokyo on their way to hastily built prisoner-of-war camps, while their officers were allowed to return home on their word that they would not rejoin the war.
In March, General Nogi’s army drove the Russians out of the Manchurian city of Mukden and its important intersection of the railways to Harbin and Peking. The final battle had taken 70,000 Japanese casualties and 85,000 among the Russians. A new war song caught the mood: Ah, the red soil of Manchuria, hundreds of miles from home …
Masataro and Charles kept their heads down for much of this period, trying to catch up on the year’s work, and joining the raucous and sometimes violent supporters for the twice-yearly baseball match between the Waseda and Keio university teams.
At the end of May 1905 came rumours of a great naval battle in the Tsushima Strait between Japan and Korea. On 30 May it was confirmed that Admiral Togo’s ships had shattered the Baltic Fleet as it came up from the south after a long voyage halfway round the world. Japanese correspondents sent reports about the mixed shock and admiration felt everywhere that a new Asian power had humbled a mighty European empire. Behind the victory parades of citizens and workers organised by the Tokyo government – the illuminations around the city, the decked out tramcars – there was a note of anxiety. The fall of Port Arthur had been followed by an outbreak of revolution in St Petersburg, spreading to other cities as far as Sebastopol on the Black Sea. The Japanese press reported this more with dismay than glee. A defeat in battle was one thing, overthrowing the rule of a Tsar quite another.
Just before the battle of Tsushima, a local scandal was revealed when a long-residing Frenchman, a former military attaché named Baugouin who had become an agent for various French companies, was arrested at his beach house in Hayama, and accused of spying for Russia. In retrospect, from what emerged in the histories of the war over several decades, it is clear the government was not worried about what Baugouin might have learnt about the movement of Japanese warships in and out of Yokosuka from his coastal vantage point, or the calibre and range of their guns. Rather, if he was a spy (although he was quietly released eventually), they were worried about informed assessments of Japan’s dwindling resources for a continued war.
The Tsushima victory was to ease the terms of loans being raised in London, Paris and New York, but the war had already cost seven times the normal annual revenue of the Japanese government, munitions were being imported at high cost from Europe to replenish exhausted magazines, and the casualties had impacted nearly every village in the country.
The Japanese had entered the war with every intention of seeking a third party to negotiate a truce, after gaining some early victories. The generals and admirals thought the war a gamble on quick success. Now, behind strident statements about pushing the Russians back beyond Lake Baikal, the cautious senior statesmen around the emperor were desperately worried that the Tsar might keep pushing men along the railway and wear down Japan in a war of attrition across the vast Manchurian landscape.
When President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in with an offer to mediate an end to the war, it seemed a fortuitous and sympathetic intervention, and was presented as such. But in fact the President was responding to Japanese requests, accompanied by promises to give America a free hand in the Philippines where its forces were suppressing a republican revolt following the expulsion of the Spanish seven years earlier.
None of this Charles or the Japanese public knew at the time, of course. In early July, the Japanese peace delegation led by Foreign Minister Komura set off for the peace talks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a cheering crowd of 5000 and numerous dignitaries shouting ‘Banzai!’ as their train left Shimbashi. In Yokohama, thousands more streamed down to the West Pier to see them board the SS Minnesota and sail off towards Seattle.
Charles spent the summer at Kamakura, again in rooms rented by Chika, swimming and taking long walks with Masataro, cousins Rinchan and Na-a-chan, and other friends who came down to join the holidaymakers. By the time the students returned to Waseda, the public mood was angry. The anti-Russian nationalists had been holding meetings all through summer demanding either a punitive peace or continuing the war further into the Asian mainland, regardless of cost.
By late August, though, the terms of Japanese proposals were starting to emerge. It was clear that there would be no financial indemnity forthcoming from St Petersburg. While Japan would get to keep its domination over Korea uncontested, its occupation of Port Arthur and control of the Russian-built railways in Southern Manchuria, it would cede the top half of Sakhalin island back to the Russians.
The cries of ‘Banzai!’ had turned to jibes of ‘bakayaro’ (‘stupid’) when government ministers drove past. National flags edged with black crepe were hung out of office windows. Newspapers published vicious caricatures of the prime minister, Katsura, and the foreign minister, Komura, away at Portsmouth. Textile manufacturers in Osaka, journalists in Tokyo, and professors from Tokyo University held heated meetings to denounce the terms. The founder at Waseda, the foreign minister and ‘China expert’ Count Okuma, said the deal was worse than just leaving Japan with a massive war bill, it set the foundations of another war with Russia.
The Anti-Russian Comrades called a massive protest on 5 September – the same day the peace treaty was being signed far away in America – to be held in Hibiya Park on the edge of Tokyo close to the Imperial palace. With several other students, Charles went down in the morning to watch. The day was sticky and building up to an extreme heat. They found the park was already cordoned off by hundreds of police. An officer rode around on a horse with a speaking trumpet, announcing that the protest had been banned.
People continued to turn up in the surrounding streets, holding the leaflets handed out by the organisers, and reading the newspapers to each other. The Yorozu Choho, the newspaper that had switched from its anti-war stance so late in 1903, was one of the most virulent: ‘Come, those who have blood. Come, those who have tears. Come, those who have backbones … Come, and altogether raise a voice of opposition to the humiliating and shameful peace. His Majesty will surely appreciate the sincerity of his subjects.’
As the set time of 1pm approached, crowds swelled around the barriers and surged forwards, sweeping the police aside. The demonstrators waved flags overwritten with slogans, let off firecrackers and released balloons. A brass band played a dirge. Speakers got up on stepladders and harangued the cheering, jeering crowd. The band played the national anthem, and all took off their hats. Three cheers of ‘Banzai’ were called for the emperor, the army and the navy. A mob of 2000 people followed several speakers out of the park on
the eastern side and through to Sakuradamon, a ceremonial gateway to the palace. Charles followed in their wake. Would they indeed get through to the chrysanthemum throne? It seemed unreal. The heat pressed down. Patches of sweat marked everyone’s kimono.
The leaders brandished a written memorial they intended to present to the emperor. At the double-bridge across the palace moat, they halted for the brass band to play the national anthem once more and bowed. Swarms of police rushed in from the Marunouchi side and began confiscating the musical instruments and black-trimmed flags. Fights broke out and swords were soon swinging. Bodies and bleeding men lay on the bridge. Wounded policemen were being carried off by their colleagues.
Agitators led the panicked and angry crowd away, towards the Shitomi Theatre on the other side of the commercial district. Charles followed, but all was chaos there too. The police had earlier closed off the theatre. A huge crowd milled in the street outside. Lines of policemen on skittish horses tried to drive the crowd away, but people just slipped through the cordon and ducked the swords. Speakers appeared from the upstairs windows of a tea house and shouted their message about the peace treaty.
By late afternoon, police began a more determined attack on the edges of the crowd, hauling away individuals and placing them under arrest. Groups of people began slipping away, looking for other targets for protest. Charles followed one mob down to the office of the government newspaper, the Kokumin Shimbun, which had been virtually the only one to support the treaty. Its windows soon shattered in a hail of cobblestones, and the front doors gave way. The crowd poured in, smashing what they could of the printing machinery and upsetting trays of type onto the floor. More rioters surged up the stairway, where journalists wielding sticks and even a sword were battling to keep them back.
Charles made his way back to Hibiya, and found a huge and angry mob outside the official residence of the home minister, Viscount Yoshikawa Akimasa, who was responsible for the police and public order decisions. A poster was stuck on the fence, showing the heads of Katsura, Komura and Roosevelt running with red ink and written with the caption ‘The justice of heaven’. A policeman tried to take it down and was hit with a volley of stones.
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