The Chinese student community was also becoming troublesome. With the support of its donations, the revolutionaries began publishing their own journal, Min Pao, in Tokyo. Students backing the Tongmenghui invaded meetings convened by the Chinese constitutional reformers. When the Japanese education ministry issued new regulations that required students to attend only approved colleges and stay in designated places, the young Chinese staged a strike from their studies and held mass meetings outside the offices of newspapers that had run disparaging comments about them.
At Miyazaki’s home, where his family had moved up from Arao, and at his home-away-from-home at the Taiyokan, they became aware of surveillance by agents of the police and the Gaimusho, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ronin continued to get funding from the foreign office, and from semi-official benefactors like Inukai, but the strings were becoming more apparent. Not that Miyazaki or Sun Yat-sen seemed to pay much attention. Sun and Huang disappeared for long stretches, into Indochina and China, on clandestine missions to instigate rebellion.
Meanwhile, Russian revolutionaries were gathering in Nagasaki. Initially there was an escaped political prisoner named Nikolai Sudzilovski who had changed his surname to Russel and managed to get an American passport in Hawaii. He began spreading the anti-Tsarist message among the Russian prisoners of war who were billeted in houses around the city and allowed to move about quite freely. He was joined by others fleeing the failed uprising in Saint Petersburg who had made their way to Japan across Siberia.
Drawn particularly by their expertise in bomb-making, Miyazaki arranged for Sun and Kayano Chochi, another prominent China ronin, to meet them for long talks. With Miyazaki, Charles followed on a tour of radical elements in Tokyo. At the Kinkikan hall in Kanda they heard Kotoku, the anarchist, speak on his return from San Francisco. They were stunned by his frank dismissal of parliamentary and electoral politics, and by his call for direct action through general strikes and boycotts of taxes and military service. His transition from Marxism and socialism was now complete. Later Miyazaki took Charles along with him to a meeting with Kotoku, to bring the latter up to date on the situation among China’s revolutionaries. Charles found him as engaging and interested in all around as he had been at the office of his former newspaper.
Of a different stripe altogether was an activist called Kita Ikki, eventually to become a leading exponent of fascism in Japan, who had just written a scathing attack on parliamentarism in which he said the Japanese proletariat were ‘sleeping like unconscious slaves’. Miyazaki’s group, who like most of the Japanese shishi were inspired by action rather than thought, invited him to join. Together with this divergent crew, Miyazaki launched a journal, the Kakumei Hyoron or Revolutionary Review.
By the beginning of 1907, the government was preparing to join the Concert of Powers in their arrangements for access to China. It had had enough of Sun Yat-sen, whose latest speech had proposed excising Manchuria from China and thereby drawn another protest from China. Uchida Ryohei was called in by the Gaimusho and consulted about expelling Sun. The Black Dragon leader convinced the foreign ministry that a better plan was to hedge Japan’s bets and secure Sun’s voluntary withdrawal. A large sum of money was handed to Uchida to pass on to Sun, from which Uchida deducted a lump to cover a lavish farewell banquet which they all attended. Sun departed for Indochina.
Soon afterwards, the police shut down Miyazaki’s journal. This began another long period of frustration and irrelevance for the ronin remaining in Japan. Uchida went off to work in Korea, building up a group of collaborators under the name of the Unity and Progress Society to press for the country’s merger into Japan, and taking most of the secret government funding and attention with him. For Miyazaki there were more idle days spent drinking and running up bills in geisha houses, with frequent resort again to the Sixteenth Bank.
Almost an adult, Charles was being tested in more personal ways. Masataro’s father suggested the two students take the owner’s cabin on a small ship he was sending down to Formosa to load sugar. The university was persuaded that this would be a practical addition to their studies of commerce, and the friends set off to join the ship at Wakayama, a port near Osaka.
When the ship arrived late they were put up at the house of the ship’s captain, also home to his young wife, his mother-in-law and several servants. Then, to collect some documentation from his father’s branch office, Masataro had to go into Osaka for a day or two. Charles stayed alone at the captain’s house. The mother-in-law was a plump woman in young middle age, with a feline expression of which she was evidently aware. When she caught him looking at her, she would wrinkle her nose and say the word for cat: ‘Neko.’ He felt uneasy and fascinated. A stirring gripped his stomach.
After taking a bath and returning to his room, he heard her splashing in the bathroom below. He blew out the lamp and a few minutes later, heard the sliding door gently open. He recognised the mother-in-law from the heavily scented powder she used. She slid herself under the quilt. ‘You must be lonely,’ she whispered, and wrapped her arms around him. He felt her body, hot from the bath, under her loose gown. Her hands began moving over him, pulling his own hands onto her breasts and belly through the gaping front of the gown. He tensed up and went cold. After some minutes she got up angrily and hissed, ‘Suezen kuwanu wa, otoko no haji.’ (‘If you don’t eat what’s on the tray before you, it’s shameful for a man.’)
When Charles awoke the next morning there were sounds of household bustle from below. At breakfast, the mother-in-law behaved as if nothing had happened. The young men boarded the ship and set sail early the next morning. They might have heard stories from the sailors, as the steamship chugged by the Ryuku islands, of how the women were the priests of the little villages, conducting mysterious rituals in forest clearings that served as the temples.
On their return from Taiwan, Masataro and Charles left the ship at Osaka and set off to see the Ise shrine before going back to Tokyo. They walked along an old pilgrims’ trail across the spine of the Wakayama peninsula towards the east, sleeping in small inns along the way. At Ise, they toured the outer shrine with a junior priest, who gave an elaborate explanation about how the emperor becomes a divinity through communion with the sun-goddess Amaterasu in the Daijosai ceremony at the beginning of his reign. Masataro and Charles pestered him with questions. What happened in the sacred bed, the shinza, when the new emperor got in and pulled down the coverlet? Did Amaterasu join him? What then happened? Charles thought of the captain’s mother-in-law getting onto the futon with him. The priest got quite flustered. ‘All this is not for commoners like you or low-ranking people like me to know,’ he said. Innocently, Charles said he was sorry that the Tokyo house of Mr Makino, the chief priest of Ise, had been destroyed in the Hibiya riots of the previous September. The priest looked at him sharply, no doubt to detect any smirk. ‘Yes, it was regrettable that the lower orders let their baser instincts show,’ he said eventually. They walked out after paying for offerings to the Imperial spirits.
They stayed at an inn by the Bay of Ise. In the morning Charles walked out along a spit of rocks projecting into the calm sea. All around, women-divers were coming up to the surface from Mr Mikimoto’s pearl beds. Their heads burst through the water and the whistle of their intaken breath came floating across to him. As they swam ashore with their baskets of oyster shells, and climbed out showing their naked limbs and slight bodies wrapped in soaking white garments, Charles wondered at the strength in these women to withstand the cold and pressure of the depths, and ignore the lurking sea creatures.
He thought of the steadfastness of Chika; about the spiritual power of the women shamans he had heard of in the Ryuku islands. He began to sense what he realised much later in life, about the female source of Japan’s resilience and how the male impulse for conquest and grandeur had led blindly to destruction.
It is not clear how or why Charles decided to break away on his o
wn, but some months later he used his savings to book a steerage passage on a Swire ship to Shanghai, leaving a note for Chika that he would return a great man, although his escape was short-lived. His vague idea was to travel onwards to German South-West Africa to begin his conquests from that corner of the world. He found himself hungry and miserable in Shanghai and was grateful to be offered a job as assistant to a busy photographic studio run by a Japanese man. The photographer was absent a lot of the time. Though seven years older, his wife Kiku became friendly to Charles. One night he got up and went to her bedroom. She opened her arms to him.
Soon after, the photographer told Charles his mother was missing him greatly, and bought him a steamer ticket back to Yokohama. The other assistants at the shop had been talking. On the return voyage to Japan Charles pondered his experience, trying to work it into the moral code he had received from Chika and the reading of dozens of samurai legends and translated romances. He decided that destiny had made him a knight errant of this woman, a kind of Sir Galahad to Guinevere, to whom he now owed his loyalty and chastity.
In 1907, the world of his childhood in Yokohama began to vanish. A telegram arrived at his Shanghai boarding house from his uncle Bunshiro urging him to come down to Yokohama immediately. He got down that evening to find Chika lying in a coma. A German doctor whom Bunshiro and Herr Gielen had called down from the Bluff was coming out of the little house. ‘She has had a very bad apoplectic seizure,’ he said. ‘I find her paralysed down one side and only time will tell if she makes a recovery.’
Charles settled down to a vigil along with O-Haru, a former courtesan from No. 9 whom Chika had helped in a time of trouble and had since become Chika’s grateful assistant. Chika woke for brief periods, but couldn’t speak or move her hand to write. Her eyes seemed full of a message that she couldn’t get out and Charles couldn’t interpret. He bowed down on the tatami beside her. ‘Mother, I have disappointed you so much,’ he pleaded. ‘Please get better. I will strive to make myself a better, more disciplined person.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she moved her mouth slightly.
O-Haru managed to get Chika to swallow a few mouthfuls of soup, but she weakened steadily. Chika, who had been so formidable a person, whose body had been so big and rounded to Charles as a child, was now shrinking and becoming an old woman before his eyes. Charles went to the Iseyama shrine. He bowed three times, clapped twice to summon the help of the gods and tied his paper prayers to the trees. He went to the Fudoh temple and lit incense before the Buddha. He even went up to the church on the Bluff and got down on his knees to pray to the god of his baptism.
A week later, in the early morning, O-Haru shook Charles awake. Chika’s breath was coming in short gasps. Then there was one shudder and she lay still. O-Haru moistened Chika’s lips with water, then closed the doors of the little household shrine and stuck white paper across them as a seal. They lit sticks of incense and knelt silently by the bed.
When morning came, Charles went out to tell Bunshiro and sent a message up to Herr Gielen. At the temple, he spoke to the priest and arranged for a coffin to be sent down to the house. O-Haru wept as she gently washed the wasted body of Chika with water from a bowl, dried her down, dressed her in her best petticoat and kimono, and laid her in the coffin. A priest arrived and began chanting a sutra. The callers began, putting their hands together and bowing over Chika’s open coffin: Uncle Bunshiro and Aunt Kame, Rintaro and Naka, Mr and Mrs Mishima, Herr Gielen and his French wife, and a procession of people who’d known and respected O-Chika-san of No. 76.
Uncle Bunshiro helped Charles with the duties of the eldest son, making sure that the envelopes of money were collected with the correct appreciation as the guests arrived, ensuring refreshments were ready downstairs and small gifts were on hand to give out as the guests departed. Bunshiro and Kame stayed for the vigil through the next night, and in the morning men came to close Chika’s coffin and shoulder it for the walk to the crematorium. Later, they took Chika’s ashes up to the temple at Ueno to be placed with those of her adoptive parents – the carpenter Matsugoro and the ex-courtesan Fuku.
In coming days, Bunshiro and Charles settled Chika’s affairs, paying bills to shops and tradespeople. He found there was an inheritance of 1000 yen, which was transferred to his name at the Yokohama Specie Bank. Herr Gielen told him that an allowance would continue until he turned 20, the age of adulthood in Japan, which was only a few months away.
There was never a word for Charles from Edouard, though he must have been informed about Chika’s death by Gielen. In Chika’s tansu he found her correspondence with Edouard, via an intermediary, in which she’d begged him to take Charles back and had been so curtly refused. Wrapped in a green cloth, there was also a dagger in a black lacquer sheath, the kind of weapon given to the daughter of a samurai to defend her honour or to take her own life if she were dishonoured.
Chapter 7
YELLOW REVOLUTION
All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.
— On War by Carl von Clausewitz
China 1908–12
The termination of the allowance from Bavier & Co. came soon enough. It was clear Charles had to make his own way in the world. He had to withdraw from Waseda with a junior diploma, although he was not too sorry about it. His studies had been more of an interruption to his participation in the heady world of Tokyo’s radical elements than the other way round.
Through introductions made by Masataro’s father, Charles got a job with Satoh & Co., a Yokohama importer of iron and steel. After a few weeks’ induction at the head office, he was made a salesman. This allowed him to roam freely around Tokyo and keep in contact with Miyazaki between calls on the firm’s clients. But a scheme was forming in Charles’ mind. He had been inspired by his involvement with reactionaries and his short travel stints and was determined to make a name for himself through great military adventures. He wanted to travel to Europe to meet his father with an impressive record that would meet Edouard’s approval and embrace.
Charles started attending the Union Church, not out of religious devotion but to improve his English. He also began reading whatever books he could find about military strategy, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and Mahan, as well as the biographies of famous conquerors. He formally joined the Tongmenghui, taking the oath ‘before heaven’ to drive out the Manchu, restore China to the Chinese, distribute the land equally, and keep his good faith from beginning to end. In the event of breaking this pledge, he submitted himself to the punishment of other members as they saw fit.
There were rituals borrowed from the Chinese secret societies, including the drinking of pigeon blood mixed with sake, and an obligatory self-confession of his weaknesses. Blushing furiously, Charles confessed to having committed adultery with a married woman seven years older than himself. Somehow Miyazaki, who for long stretches had been kept afloat financially by his favourite geisha and other amorous partners, must have managed to keep a straight face. There was no laughter.
Radicalism in Tokyo had become less of an intellectual fad and talking point for the educated, and more a revolutionary vocation for the committed and a perceived threat to the Imperial realm by the authorities. The police cracked down hard when Kotoku’s followers held a meeting at the Kinkikan and paraded their red banners inscribed with the slogans of anarcho-communism. Those arrested in the resulting brawl were given stiff jail sentences. Orders were given banning public speakers from even mentioning strikes, boycotts, labour unions, socialism or revolution. Then came the so-called Boshin Rescript from the emperor, declaring that ‘the teachings of Our revered Ancestors and the records of Our glorious history are clear beyond all misapprehensions’ and enjoining all his subjects to avoid ‘frivolities’ and to be ‘faithful in your work and frugal in managing your wealth’ in order to ensure ‘the growing prospe
rity of Our empire’. It became the text for greater infusion of the Imperial mystique into schools and communities, and the justification for intensifying police surveillance.
Members of the Tongmenghui became aware of plain clothes agents outside Miyazaki’s house and other meeting places. Police also had a permanent camp in the park opposite Kotoku’s residence. Perhaps due to his declining health and an awareness that his time on earth was limited, Kotoku was more outspoken than ever. ‘Unless the sense of reverence and gratitude towards the emperor is broken, there will be no freedom of thought or liberty in Japan,’ he would declare. ‘The fountain head of this fetish is the emperor himself. Perhaps the only way is to seize the emperor and force him to issue decrees for reform.’
Tough-looking strangers turned up at the meetings in the Heiminsha rooms, at India House or the Unitarian Church where there was a sympathetic American missionary. At Kotoku’s urging, Charles visited a comrade named Yamaguchi in a suburb of Yokohama. On leaving his outer gate, Charles found five or six men warming themselves around a small fire. One of them broke away and confronted Charles. He was a well-spoken man, despite his tough appearance.
‘Young Mr Sakai,’ he said, giving Charles a shock. ‘If you wish to live in Japan safe and comfortable under the protection of the law and the police, it is advisable you desist from associating with socialists.’ Charles thought it best to thank him politely for the advice and was allowed to leave.
Among the trusted, there was furtive talk of bomb-making and assassination. But for the China revolutionaries, all the action was being launched now from Indochina and Malaya, though one after another the distant sparks of revolt failed to flare for more than a few days before being put out by the dynasty’s new Western-model army. Japan was becoming less trusted by the Chinese. The emperor had signed a treaty of amity with the Tsar of Russia. Japanese politicians had been so high-handed when the Chinese navy stopped a Japanese ship, the Tetsu Maru, carrying a cargo of arms near Amoy that a boycott of Japanese goods had started across southern China.
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