Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville

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СКАЧАТЬ military wizardry of the age, precipitated the rapid collapse of the China-centered traditional international order of East Asia. Western powers were soon dictating at the point of gunboats the terms by which China was to open its doors to a whole range of Western activities—commercial, political, religious, and scientific. It was a reality that soon led by the mid-nineteenth century to China’s de facto entrance onto the modern geopolitical and diplomatic stage.

      The same reality was forced upon Japan with the arrival of the American “black ships” of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in Tokyo Bay in 1858. In stark contrast to China, however, Japan soon recognized the need to embrace the brave new world that was greeting them. Soon doing away with the thousand-year-old social and political system of the samurai, Japan began to outwardly remold its society and institutions along more Western lines. The result was that, by 1890, the year of the country’s Western-inspired Meiji Constitution, Japan could boast the highest industrial output in Asia, a modern army and respectable navy, a working political system, and a largely independent and thriving press.

      From as early as 1874 Japan had even begun to acquire colonies, first Okinawa and then Taiwan, which Japan seized from a virtually helpless China in 1895, in the flush of victory from the Sino-Japanese War. Thus the Sino-Japanese War was also the result of a Japanese desire to ensure the continuation of its own national development by acquiring sources of raw material beyond its own borders. From early in its drive towards national modernization Japan had begun to take an increasing commercial and political interest in Korea.

      Even by the 1890s Korea remained an anomaly, neither fully integrated into the new international order (few Western powers were interested in her), nor completely absolving its traditional tributary relationship with China, a relationship that had ceased to have any meaning outside the ceremonial. As Japan began to industrialize and China seemed only to grow weaker, and as Russia with its Trans-Siberian Railway began to dream bigger dreams of a Russian Far East, in international eyes Korea increasingly seemed less a nation than a geopolitical conundrum: “the Korean question” or “the Korean problem” took hold of policymakers, military strategists, and pundits everywhere. The question was this: could Korea modernize on its own? If not, then in the Social Darwinian international order, where survival was a privilege of the fittest, who would ultimately control Korea?

      By the end of the nineteenth century Japan had succeeded remarkably well in modernizing itself within the context of its traditional culture. The singular will that the Japanese applied to simply doing away with outmoded institutions still astounds the modern observer. To Japan’s senior policymakers, who through the late nineteenth century watched as Western powers came to control an ever larger share of the world, it became clear that Korea’s integrity (to mean its independence from Western control) must be maintained, and that doing so would mean that country’s modernization, by whatever means necessary. But China, which itself had set off on a belated attempt at industrialization and modernization as the nineteenth century closed, was no longer willing to sit aside and watch another of its former vassals be taken away. One could say that China attempted to transfer into the power-driven reality of the new international order notions of vassalship that only properly worked in the more symbolic and ceremonial traditional order. Through the late nineteenth century, China stubbornly resisted, and at times openly obstructed, any attempts to give Korea an independent international political identity.

      A series of Chinese-Japanese squabbles over Korean politics in the 1880s led to a tense truce over Korea, by the terms of which China and Japan both pledged not to interfere in Korea’s internal affairs and agreed to quotas on their respective troop numbers there. Japan, however, was merely biding its time. It was still too weak to confront China over hegemony in Korea. But not for long.

      In 1894, an armed peasant uprising called the Tonghak Revolt upset again the delicate domestic tranquility of Korea, and even threatened the dynasty. Some rumors circulated that Japan was behind the revolt, just as they had been behind an aborted coup attempt in 1884. Though such rumors proved false, China reacted by sending in its troops. Now better prepared for its long anticipated confrontation with China, Japan recognized the opportunity and immediately dispatched troops of its own. The momentum towards war had begun.

      Most historians agree that Japan made only token attempts to stop the coming conflict at a time when China would have done virtually anything to avoid open war. China even agreed to a joint and temporary troop presence until order could be restored. But Japan had moved beyond compromise. The reasons are simple enough. Japan would only be satisfied with the full independence of Korea. More cynical reasons may be inferred from this desire, such as a Japanese design, once Korea was unleashed, to snatch the now-isolated country up for herself (certainly, once the war began Japan was had no interest in seeing it stop until it had carved itself a comfortable sphere of control in Korea and Northeast China). Here is not the place, however, to renew those debates. The facts are simply that no agreement was reached and on August 1, 1894, war was declared on China by Japan’s Meiji emperor speaking before a solemn gathering of the new National Diet. Here was Japan’s first modern war.44

      It must be said that Au Japon provides us somewhat snapshot and scattered images of de Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War experience. Rather than Au Japon, it is de Guerville’s period writings—for Leslie’s Weekly, Munsey’s, the New York Herald, and the Japan Weekly Mail—that best preserve his impressions of and reactions to the war he covered. This need not be surprising, even if it is a little disappointing. De Guerville was writing in 1904, and there was little need to rehash to his reading public the details of a war that had practically been forgotten, to the extent that it was ever even familiar to a European audience.45 It is also likely that writing from France, with little documentary residue of his time in the Far East at hand (much, if not most, had been destroyed in the fire at de Guerville’s Illustrated American in 1898), de Guerville was forced to rely upon a mixture of memory and sentiment.

      Secondly, Au Japon is meant first and foremost as the author’s reflections on a country, people, and culture he greatly admired and the memory of which he cherished, and not primarily as a war memoir. In this respect Au Japon is perhaps best seen as a series of anecdotal essays from his time traveling in the Far East. Each chapter is more or less self-contained and self-revealing, rather than forming part of a larger unfurling storyline.

      However, as the Japan Weekly Mail noted soon upon Au Japon’s publication, Port Arthur was one of the few incidents of the war that de Guerville felt it essential, even after a decade, to revisit. It is worthwhile asking why this was so.

      De Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War Experience

      Within weeks of the formal outbreak of hostilities, foreign correspondents were arriving in Yokohama, much as foreign naval vessels crowded into Japanese and Korean ports eager for a view of this historical inter-Asian conflict. Yet even before he had departed Europe for America and then Japan, de Guerville was already penning editorials on the looming conflict, which had yet to break into open fighting. It is fair to say that at this early date most observers in the West anticipated a Chinese victory, despite the fact that Japan had clearly done more in terms of modernization. China’s sheer size and numbers seemed enough to ensure it would prevail. De Guerville, however, placed his bets on Japan, with its superior navy and better organized and better equipped army, realities he had witnessed on his trip there in 1892. He also strikes a moral tone that was generally echoed in the Western press and popular opinion of the time: “Japan is fighting in Asia the battle of civilization and it is sincerely to be hoped that she will be victorious, though she will undoubtedly remain in Corea [sic], as the English in Egypt, should she be allowed to gain there a foothold.”46 Indeed, though it does not survive, de Guerville authored a small pamphlet published in Japan in the aftermath of Port Arthur entitled Civilization and Barbarism that no doubt dealt with this same theme on a larger scale.47

      In late August, 1894, de Guerville departed New York City for San Francisco, where he caught passage to Japan aboard the sail-assisted steamer City of Peking. From Chicago he shared his journey with his rival correspondent СКАЧАТЬ