A Diplomat in Japan. Ernest Mason Satow

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ but a few years. The other merits more extended notice, on account both of his character and public services of every kind. I mean my life-long friend, William Willis. Perhaps no other man ever exhibited in a greater measure the quality which we are wont to call conscientiousness, whether in his private relations or in the discharge of his duties. Those who have had the fortune to profit by his medical or surgical aid, feel that no man could be more tender or sympathetic towards a patient. He was devoted to his profession, and lost no opportunity of extending his experience. In those days a doctor had frequently to encounter personal risks such as fall to the lot of few civilians; he exposed himself freely, in order to succour the wounded. In the chancery his services were indispensable. He it was who "swept the 'Aegean stable,'" arranged the archives in order, and brought the register up to date. Always on the spot when he was wanted, an indefatigable worker, and unswervingly loyal to his chief. After nine years service he was promoted to be a vice-consul, but by this time the Japanese had become so impressed with his value as a surgeon and physician that they begged him to accept a salary more than four times what he received from the Foreign Office, and he went where his great qualities were likely to be of more use than in trying petty police cases and drawing up trade reports of a city which never had any foreign commerce. His gigantic stature made him conspicuous among all the Europeans who have resided in Japan since the ports were opened, and when I first knew him he was hardly five and twenty years of age. A man endowed with an untiring power of application, accurate memory for words and things, and brimful of good stories from the three kingdoms. Big men are big-hearted, and he was no exception. We shall come across him again repeatedly in the course of these reminiscences, and for the present these few words must suffice.

      Besides these, the legation staff included Russell Brooke Robertson and myself, as student-interpreters.

      Last, but not least, were the officers of the mounted escort and infantry guard. The latter was commanded by Lieut. Price of the 67th Regiment, and was soon replaced by fifty marines under the command of a man widely known in the service to which he belonged as "Public-spirited" Smith. I shall say more of him later on. The cavalry escort consisted of a dozen men from the Military Train, a corps which went by the honorary title of "Pig-drivers," and at their head was a lieutenant, a good, harmless sort of fellow, whose only weakness was for fine uniforms and showy horses. Not being learned in the extremely complicated subject of military costume, full dress, half dress, and undress, I cannot say what it was that he had adopted for himself, but it was whispered about that he had been audacious enough to assume the insignia of a field-officer, which is undoubtedly a serious offence against discipline. However that may be, the blaze of gold which decorated his person was wonderful to behold, and on at least one occasion, when we were going in solemn procession to an audience of the Tycoon, caused him to be mistaken for the Envoy by the Japanese officials, who gave him the salutes that rightfully belonged to his less conspicuously adorned diplomatic chief. To determine whether the pleasure derived from this confusion of persons by the one outweighed the mortification which might not unnaturally have been felt by the other would have required a delicate moral balance, which was not available at the moment; but judging from the relative scale of the two men in other points of character, I am inclined to infer that the good preponderated largely over the evil, and that applying consequently the criterion so unfairly attributed to the utilitarians by their opponents, we must arrive at the provisional conclusion that the lieutenant's uniform was highly virtuous and worthy of the applause of mankind.

      But it is time to quit this gossiping tone and speak of more serious matters.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN JAPAN

      At this period the movement had already commenced that finally culminated in what may fitly be called the Revolution of 1868, by which the feudal system was destroyed and the old monarchical government revived. The tendency of the times was as yet scarcely perceived by foreigners, with but one or two exceptions. They generally supposed that political strife had broken out between the sovereign and a few unruly vassals dissatisfied with the treaties that permitted the sacred soil of Japan to be defiled by the footsteps of "barbarians," and secured all the profits of trade to the head of the State, the vassals being enabled to defy their suzerain owing to his own feebleness and the incapacity of his Ministers. It was still believed that the potentate in whose name the Treaties had been concluded was the Temporal Sovereign, and that the Mikado was little more than the head of the priesthood, or Spiritual Emperor. This theory of the Japanese Constitution was almost as old as the earliest knowledge of the country possessed by Europeans. Marco Polo, indeed, says nothing of its system of government in the two short chapters which he devotes to Zipangu, but the Jesuit missionaries who laboured in Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries uniformly held the Mikado to be a spiritual dignitary, and spoke of the Shôgun as the real ruler of the country, the temporal king, and even Emperor. Kaempfer, the best known and most often quoted of the authorities on Japan, writing at the beginning of the 18th century, calls the two potentates Ecclesiastical and Secular Emperors, and his example had, up to the time I am writing of, been followed by all his successors without exception. The truth is that the polity of the Japanese State had assumed already in the 12th century the form which it was still displaying at the beginning of the latter half of the 19th, and institutions which could boast of such a highly respectable antiquity might well be supposed to have taken a deep enough hold to be part and parcel of the national life.

      The history of Japan has still to be written. Native chronicles of the Mikados and annals of leading families exist in abundance, but the Japanese mind is only just now beginning to emancipate itself from the thraldom of Chinese literary forms, while no European has yet attempted a task which requires a training different from that of most men who pursue an Eastern career. Until within the last two decades, the literature of Japan was almost entirely unknown to Europeans, and the existing keys to the language were ridiculously inadequate. The only historical works accessible to foreigners were the scanty Annales des Dairi, translated by Titsingh with the aid of native Dutch interpreters and edited by Klaproth with a degree of bold confidence that nothing but the position of a one-eyed man amongst the blind can give; and a set of chronological tables, translated by Hoffman for Siebold's Nippon. It is no wonder, therefore, if at the outset of Treaty relations, the foreign representatives were at a loss to appreciate the exact nature of the political questions that confronted them, and were unable to diagnose the condition of the patient whose previous history was unknown to them.

      To trace in detail the development of the Japanese monarchy, from its beginnings as a pure theocracy of foreign invaders, attracting to itself the allegiance of a number of small tribal chieftains, the fusion of these tribes with their conquerors into one seemingly homogeneous race, the remodelling of the administration which followed upon the introduction of Chinese laws and philosophy, the supplanting of the native hero and native worship by the creed of Gautama, the rise of a military caste brought about by the constant warfare with the barbarous tribes in the east and north of the country, the rivalry of the Taira and Minamoto clans, both sprung from base-born younger sons of the Mikados, and the final suppression of the civil administration in the provinces by the distribution of the country amongst the followers of the Minamoto and their allies, would require a profound study of documents which no one has yet undertaken. With the appointment of Yoritomo to be Commander-in-Chief the feudal system was fully established. The ancient official hierarchy still existed at Kiôto, but in name only, exercising no influence whatever over the conduct of affairs, and in the 14th century its functions were already so far forgotten as to become the subject of antiquarian research. The civil and penal codes borrowed from the great Empire of Eastern Asia fell into disuse, and in part even the very traces of them perished. Martial law reigned throughout the land, half the people were converted into a huge garrison, which the other half toiled to feed and clothe. Reading and writing were the exclusive accomplishments of the Buddhist priesthood and of the impoverished nobles who formed the court of a Mikado shorn of all the usual attributes of a sovereign, and a deep sleep СКАЧАТЬ