‘The Presentation of Her Majesty’s Yacht Emperor to the Emperor of Japan at Yeddo [Tokyo], on the 26th of August 1858.’ The ship, built in London, was presented to Emperor Komei as part of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce signed on July 11th, 1859. When Longford landed at Tokyo in 1869, he saw another English ship in the harbour, HMS Rodney, presenting a similar scene of unhurried old-world grace. Yet in that short time, the British had helped Emperor Meiji to throw off centuries of domination by the Tokugawa Shogunate, and a new era of rapid industrialisation beckoned. Deeply involved in all of it was Longford’s friend Thomas Glover. See Japan’s First Railway.
Part 1 of 2
WHEN I arrived there it was the land of romance. Feudalism was still alive, still unconscious of its coming doom. Silk-clad and sword-girt samurai still paced the streets with solemn dignity, and the great feudal lords, still vested with their fiefs,* still haughty in the consciousness of their dignity and power as the lords of domains in which their will was almost the sole law, passed through the same streets in gorgeous palanquins of lacquer inlaid with gold, shrouded from the vulgar gaze, and surrounded by long retinues of armed retainers, while passing commoners bowed their heads to the ground in humble reverence. No wheeled traffic disturbed the silent decorum of the great city. Everything was solemn, stately, dignified.
* That is, still in possession of their estates.
Précis
When Joseph Longford first went to Japan, in 1869, he found a land of romance, a feudal society unchanged for centuries. Unhurried dignity ruled in Tokyo’s streets, through which the aristocracy (who still held their lands, and ruled them as they pleased) were carried upon litters while their serfs made way, bowing low before them. (54 / 60 words)
Part Two
Mikasa (1902), a pre-dreadnought Japanese battleship shown here at Kure in 1905. Longford’s last memory of Japan was of just such a ship. “Her dull grey hull was unbroken by one single patch of relieving colour,” he recalled, “and her mighty funnels were pouring out masses of dense black smoke that seemed to cloud the skies to the very horizon; her ugly, stunted, tripod masts were without a trace of even a furled sail, and her decks were encumbered with all the machinery that is necessary to the full equipment of a battleship of these days.” It represented to him the bewildering transformation of Japan in little more than thirty years, but boded well for the Great War.
IT was a land of romance, in which one was transported, not in thought but in actual life, back to the days of Richard Coeur de Lion, a fairyland in the picturesqueness of its people and in its own natural beauties. When I left it, the romance had gone. The samurai and the lords had become undistinguishable by outward signs from the common herd, and elbowed their way through the streets unnoticed and uncared-for. The din of electric cars never ceased and steam factories added to their noise. Japan had become a land of materialism, a great military and commercial Power. But the spirit of the people is unchanged. It is still to-day what it was when the great Mongol was triumphantly driven from the shores of the Island Empire.
* After subjecting the Korean kingdom of Goryeo, Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty tried and failed to conquer the Japanese archipelago. Invasions in 1274 and 1281 were repelled by the Kamakura shogunate. Longford noted that the Japanese had been helped by a ‘divine wind’ (kamikaze), and drew several parallels with the failed invasion of England by The Spanish Armada.
Précis
When Longford left in 1902, everything in Japan had changed. From a society akin to mediaeval England, it had become a modern industrial society of noisy trams and factories. Yet Japanese character was not greatly changed from the ancient days when invaders had been put to flight: a welcome omen in the early years of the Great War. (57 / 60 words)
