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As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
Forty thousand men, women and children, the last survivors of Japans’s persecuted Christian population, took refuge without earthly hope in a seaside castle.
In 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Regent of Japan, had vowed to stamp out Christianity after a Spanish sea-captain boasted that, to the Pope and the King of Spain, its spread was a step towards European conquest. The repression grew in savagery until, on December 17th, 1637, forty thousand Christians huddled together in the seaside fortress of Hara Castle, on the southern tip of the Shimabara Peninsula.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Chancellor of the Realm and Imperial Regent of Japan, was inclined to encourage Christianity until he found out why European Powers were so keen on it.
Within fifty years of Fr Francis Xavier’s mission to Japan in 1549, there were a million Japanese Christians. Even Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), Chancellor of the Realm and Imperial Regent of Japan, was intrigued, and he received further missionaries from Portugal and Spain, and even Papal ambassador Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), most courteously — until a bluff ship’s captain let the cat out of the bag.
In the Great War, the Japanese were among Britain’s allies, and the Japanese cherry was a symbol of the courage demanded by the times.
In 1915, Britain entered the second year of what later proved to have been the most appalling and wasteful war in human history. Joseph Longford, former Consul in Nagasaki and from 1903 the first Professor of Japanese at King’s College in London, contributed an essay to a series on ‘The Spirit of the Allied Nations’ in which he spoke of the Japanese cherry tree as a symbol of sacrifice.
Joseph Longford described how Japan had changed from the day he first joined the Japan Consular Service to the day he retired as Consul in Nagasaki.
From 1869 to 1902, Joseph Longford served in the Japan Consular Service, and retired after six years as Consul in Nagasaki to become the first Professor of Japanese at King’s College in London. During that time he witnessed the transformation of Japan from feudal backwater to bustling industrial society, but as the Great War moved into its second year he was glad that the nation’s fighting spirit was as strong as ever.
Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java, urged London to bypass our European partners and trade directly with Japan.
On February 13, 1814, Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) in Java wrote to Lord Minto, former Governor-General of India, urging London to pursue a more vigorous trade policy with Japan. Previous trade links had employed Dutch agents, but Raffles believed that Britain would do better by trading directly rather than through European partners.
Japan’s first Shogun owed his life and his rise to power to a spider and two harmless doves.
This tale from Japanese history tells how Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), a contemporary of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, rose to power and became the first of the Shoguns, military dictators who sidelined the Emperors and wielded supreme authority in Japan until 1868.