บทที่ บทที่ 6 · AFTER THE WAR

. AFTER THE WAR

I

Hyogo, May 5, 1895.

Hyogo, this morning, lies bathed in a limpid magnificence of

light indescribable,--spring light, which is vapory, and lends a

sort of apparitional charm to far things seen through it. Forms

remain sharply outlined, but are almost idealized by faint colors

not belonging to them; and the great hills behind the town aspire

into a cloudless splendor of tint that seems the ghost of azure

rather than azure itself.

Over the blue-gray slope of tiled roofs there is a vast quivering

and fluttering of extraordinary shapes,--a spectacle not indeed

new to me, but always delicious. Everywhere are floating--tied to

very tall bamboo poles--immense brightly colored paper fish,

which look and move as if alive. The greater number vary from

five to fifteen feet in length; but here and there I see a baby

scarcely a foot long, hooked to the tail of a larger one. Some

poles have four or five fish attached to them at heights

proportioned to the dimensions of the fish, the largest always at

the top. So cunningly shaped and colored these things are that

the first sight of them is always startling to a stranger. The

lines holding them are fastened within the head; and the wind,

entering the open mouth, not only inflates the body to perfect

form, but keeps it undulating,--rising and descending, turning

and twisting, precisely like a real fish, while the tail plays

and the fins wave irreproachably. In the garden of my next-door

neighbor there are two very fine specimens. One has an orange

belly and a bluish-gray back; the other is all a silvery tint;

and both have big weird eyes. The rustling of their motion as

they swim against the sky is like the sound of wind in a

cane-field. A little farther off I see another very big fish,

with a little red boy clinging to its back. That red boy

represents Kintoki, strongest of all children ever born in Japan,

who, while still a baby, wrestled with bears and set traps for

goblin-birds.

Everybody knows that these paper carp, or koi, are hoisted only

during the period of the great birth festival of boys, in the

fifth month; that their presence above a house signifies the

birth of a son; and that they symbolize the hope of the parents

that their lad will be able to win his way through the world

against all obstacles,--even as the real koi, the great Japanese

carp, ascends swift rivers against the stream. In many parts of

southern and western Japan you rarely see these koi. You see,

instead, very long narrow flags of cotton cloth, called nobori,

which are fastened perpendicularly, like sails, with little spars

and rings to poles of bamboo, and bear designs in various colors

of the koi in an eddy,--or of Shoki, conqueror of demons,--or of

pines,--or of tortoises,--or other fortunate symbols.

II

But in this radiant spring of the Japanese year 2555, the koi

might be taken to symbolize something larger than parental hope,

--the great trust of a nation regenerated through war. The

military revival of the Empire--the real birthday of New

Japan--began with the conquest of China. The war is ended; the

future, though clouded, seems big with promise; and, however grim

the obstacles to loftier and more enduring achievements, Japan

has neither fears nor doubts.

Perhaps the future danger is just in this immense self-confidence.

It is not a new feeling created by victory. It is a race feeling,

which repeated triumphs have served only to strengthen. From the

instant of the declaration of war there was never the least doubt of

ultimate victory. There was universal and profound enthusiasm, but

no outward signs of emotional excitement. Men at once set to writing

histories of the triumphs of Japan, and these histories--issued to

subscribers in weekly or monthly parts, and illustrated with

photo-lithographs or drawings on wood--were selling all over the country

long before any foreign observers could have ventured to predict the

final results of the campaign. From first to last the nation felt

sure of its own strength, and of the impotence of China. The

toy-makers put suddenly into the market legions of ingenious mechanisms,

representing Chinese soldiers in flight, or being cut down by

Japanese troopers, or tied together as prisoners by their queues, or

kowtowing for mercy to illustrious generals. The old-fashioned

military playthings, representing samurai in armor, were superseded

by figures--in clay, wood, paper, or silk--of Japanese cavalry,

infantry, and artillery; by models of forts and batteries; and

models of men-of-war. The storming of the defenses of Port Arthur by

the Kumamoto Brigade was the subject of one ingenious mechanical

toy; another, equally clever, repeated the fight of the Matsushima

Kan with the Chinese iron-clads. There were sold likewise myriads of

toy-guns discharging corks by compressed air with a loud pop, and

myriads of toy-swords, and countless tiny bugles, the constant

blowing of which recalled to me the tin-horn tumult of a certain New

Year's Eve in New Orleans. The announcement of each victory resulted

in an enormous manufacture and sale of colored prints, rudely and

cheaply executed, and mostly depicting the fancy of the artist

only,--but well fitted to stimulate the popular love of glory. Wonderful

sets of chessmen also appeared, each piece representing a Chinese or

Japanese officer or soldier.

Meanwhile, the theatres were celebrating the war after a much

more complete fashion. It is no exaggeration to say that almost

every episode of the campaign was repeated upon the stage. Actors

even visited the battlefields to study scenes and backgrounds,

and fit themselves to portray realistically, with the aid of

artificial snowstorms, the hardships of the army in Manchuria.

Every gallant deed was dramatized almost as soon as reported. The

death of the bugler Shirakami Genjiro(1); the triumphant courage

of Harada Jiukichi, who scaled a rampart and opened a fortress

gate to his comrades; the heroism of the fourteen troopers who

held their own against three hundred infantry; the successful

charge of unarmed coolies upon a Chinese battalion,--all these

and many other incidents were reproduced in a thousand theatres.

Immense illuminations of paper lanterns, lettered with phrases of

loyalty or patriotic cheer, celebrated the success of the

imperial arms, or gladdened the eyes of soldiers going by train

to the field. In Kobe,--constantly traversed by troop-trains,--such

illuminations continued night after night for weeks

together; and the residents of each street further subscribed for

flags and triumphal arches.

But the glories of the war were celebrated also in ways more

durable by the various great industries of the country. Victories

and incidents of sacrificial heroism were commemorated in

porcelain, in metal-work, and in costly textures, not less than

in new designs for envelopes and note-paper. They were portrayed

on the silk linings of haori(2), on women's kerchiefs of

chirimen(3), in the embroidery of girdles, in the designs of silk

shirts and of children's holiday robes,--not to speak of cheaper

printed goods, such as calicoes and toweling. They were

represented in lacquer-ware of many kinds, on the sides and

covers of carven boxes, on tobacco-pouches, on sleeve-buttons, in

designs for hairpins, on women's combs, even on chopsticks.

Bundles of toothpicks in tiny cases were offered for sale, each

toothpick having engraved upon it, in microscopic text, a

different poem about the war. And up to the time of peace, or at

least up to the time of the insane attempt by a soshi(4) to kill

the Chinese plenipotentiary during negotiations, all things

happened as the people had wished and expected.

But as soon as the terms of peace had been announced, Russia

interfered, securing the help of France and Germany to bully

Japan. The combination met with no opposition; the government

played jiujutsu, and foiled expectations by unlooked-for

yielding. Japan had long ceased to feel uneasy about her own

military power. Her reserve strength is probably much greater

than has ever been acknowledged, and her educational system, with

its twenty-six thousand schools, is an enormous drilling-machine.

On her own soil she could face any foreign power. Her

navy was her weak point, and of this she was fully aware. It was

a splendid fleet of small, light cruisers, and splendidly

handled. Its admiral, without the loss of a single vessel, had

annihilated the Chinese fleet in two engagements, but it was not

yet sufficiently heavy to face the combined navies of three

European powers; and the flower of the Japanese army was beyond

the sea. The most opportune moment for interference had been

cunningly chosen, and probably more than interference was

intended. The heavy Russian battle-ships were stripped for

fighting; and these alone could possibly have overpowered the

Japanese fleet, though the victory would have been a costly one.

But Russian action was suddenly checked by the sinister

declaration of English sympathy for Japan. Within a few weeks

England could bring into Asiatic waters a fleet capable of

crushing, in one short battle, all the iron-clads assembled by

the combination. And a single shot from a Russian cruiser might

have plunged the whole world into war.

But in the Japanese navy there was a furious desire to battle

with the three hostile powers at once. It would have been a great

fight, for no Japanese commander would have dreamed of yielding,

no Japanese ship would have struck her colors. The army was

equally desirous of war. It needed all the firmness of the

government to hold the nation back. Free speech was gagged; the

press was severely silenced; and by the return to China of the

Liao-Tung peninsula, in exchange for a compensatory increase of

the war indemnity previously exacted, peace was secured. The

government really acted with faultless wisdom. At this period of

Japanese development a costly war with Russia could not fail to

have consequences the most disastrous to industry, commerce, and

finance. But the national pride has been deeply wounded, and the

country can still scarcely forgive its rulers.

(1) At the battle of Song-Hwan, a Japanese bugler named

Shirakami Genjiro was ordered to sound the charge (suzume). He

had sounded it once when a bullet passed through his lungs,

throwing him down.. His comrades tried to take the bugle away,

seeing the wound was fatal. He wrested it from them, lifted it

again to his lips, sounded the charge once more with all his

strength, and fell back dead. I venture to offer this rough

translation of a song now sung about him by every soldier and

schoolboy in Japan:--

SHIRAKAMI GENJIRO

(After the Japanese military ballad, Rappa-no-hibiki.)

Easy in other times than this

Were Anjo's stream to cross;

But now, beneath the storm of shot,

Its waters seethe and toss.

In other time to pass that stream

Were sport for boys at play;

But every man through blood must wade

Who fords Anjo to-day.

The bugle sounds;--through flood and flame

Charges the line of steel;--

Above the crash of battle rings

The bugle's stern appeal.

Why has that bugle ceased to call?

Why does it call once more?

Why sounds the stirring signal now

More faintly than before?

What time the bugle ceased to sound,

The breast was smitten through;--

What time the blast rang faintly, blood

Gushed from the lips that blew.

Death-stricken, still the bugler stands!

He leans upon his gun,--

Once more to sound the bugle-call

Before his life be done.

What though the shattered body fall?

The spirit rushes free

Through Heaven and Earth to sound anew

That call to Victory!

Far, far beyond our shore, the spot

Now honored by his fall;--

But forty million brethren

Have heard that bugle-call.

Comrade!--beyond the peaks and seas

Your bugle sounds to-day

In forty million loyal hearts

A thousand miles away!

(2) Haori, a sort of upper dress, worn by men as well as women.

The linings are often of designs beautiful beyond praise.

(3) Chirimen is crape-silk, of which there are many qualities;

some very costly and durable.

(4) Soshi form one of the modern curses of Japan. They are mostly

ex-students who earn a living by hiring themselves out as rowdy

terrorists. Politicians employ them either against the soshi of

opponents, or as bullies in election time. Private persons

sometimes employ them as defenders. They have figured in most of

the election rows which have taken place of late years in Japan,

also in a number of assaults made on distinguished personages.

The causes which produced nihilism in Russia have several points

of resemblance with the causes which developed the modern soshi

class in Japan.

III

Hyogo, May 15.

The Matsushima Kan, returned from China, is anchored before the

Garden of the Pleasure of Peace. She is not a colossus, though

she has done grand things; but she certainly looks quite

formidable as she lies there in the clear light,--a stone-gray

fortress of steel rising out of the smooth blue. Permission to

visit her has been given to the delighted people, who don their

best for the occasion, as for a temple festival, and I am

suffered to accompany some of them. All the boats in the port

would seem to have been hired for the visitors, so huge is the

shoal hovering about the ironclad as we arrive. It is not

possible for such a number of sightseers to go on board at once,

and we have to wait while hundreds are being alternately admitted

and dismissed. But the waiting in the cool sea air is not

unpleasant; and the spectacle of the popular joy is worth

watching. What eager rushing when the turn comes! what swarming

and squeezing and clinging! Two women fall into the sea, and are

pulled out by blue-jackets, and say they are not sorry to have

fallen in, because they can now boast of owing their lives to the

men of the Matsushima Kan! As a matter of fact, they could not

very well have been drowned; there were legions of common boatmen

to look after them.

But something of larger importance to the nation than the lives

of two young women is really owing to the men of the Matsushima

Kan; and the people are rightly trying to pay them back with

love,--for presents, such as thousands would like to make, are

prohibited by disciplinary rule. Officers and crew must be weary;

but the crowding and the questioning are borne with charming

amiability. Everything is shown and explained in detail:

the huge thirty-centimetre gun, with its loading apparatus and

directing machinery; the quick-firing batteries; the torpedoes,

with their impulse-tubes; the electric lantern, with its

searching mechanism. I myself, though a foreigner, and therefore

requiring a special permit, am guided all about, both below and

above, and am even suffered to take a peep at the portraits of

their Imperial Majesties, in the admiral's cabin; and I am told

the stirring story of the great fight off the Yalu. Meanwhile,

the old bald men and the women and the babies of the port hold

for one golden day command of the Matsushima. Officers, cadets,

blue-jackets, spare no effort to please. Some talk to the

grandfathers; others let the children play with the hilts of

their swords, or teach them how to throw up their little hands

and shout "_Teikoku Banzai!_" And for tired mothers, matting has

been spread, where they can squat down in the shade between

decks.

Those decks, only a few months ago, were covered with the blood

of brave men. Here and there dark stains, which still resist

holy-stoning, are visible; and the people look at them with

tender reverence. The flagship was twice struck by enormous

shells, and her vulnerable parts were pierced by a storm of small

projectiles. She bore the brunt of the engagement, losing nearly

half her crew. Her tonnage is only four thousand two hundred and

eighty; and her immediate antagonists were two Chinese ironclads

of seven thousand four hundred tons each. Outside, her cuirass

shows no deep scars, for the shattered plates have been

replaced;--but my guide points proudly to the numerous patchings

of the decks, the steel masting supporting the fighting-tops, the

smoke-stack,--and to certain terrible dents, with small cracks

radiating from them, in the foot-thick steel of the barbette. He

traces for us, below, the course of the thirty-and-a-half

centimetre shell that pierced the ship. "When it came," he tells

us, "the shock threw men into the air that high" (holding his

hand some two feet above the deck). "At the same moment all

became dark; you could not see your hand. Then we found that one

of the starboard forward guns had been smashed, and the crew all

killed. We had forty men killed instantly, and many more wounded:

no man escaped in that part of the ship. The deck was on fire,

because a lot of ammunition brought up for the guns had exploded;

so we had to fight and to work to put out the fire at the same

time. Even badly wounded men, with the skin blown from their

hands and faces, worked as if they felt no pain; and dying men

helped to pass water. But we silenced the Ting-yuen with one more

shot from our big gun. The Chinese had European gunners helping

them. If we had not had to fight against Western gunners, _our

victory would have been too easy._"

He gives the true note. Nothing, on this splendid spring day,

could so delight the men of the Matsushima Kan as a command to

clear for action, and attack the great belted Russian cruisers

lying off the coast.

IV

Kobe, June 9.

Last year, while traveling from Shimonoseki to the capital, I saw

many regiments on their way to the seat of war, all uniformed in

white, for the hot season was not yet over. Those soldiers looked

so much like students whom I had taught (thousands, indeed, were

really fresh from school) that I could not help feeling it was

cruel to send such youths to battle. The boyish faces were so

frank, so cheerful, so seemingly innocent of the greater sorrows

of life! "Don't fear for them," said an English fellow-traveler,

a man who had passed his life in camps; "they will give a

splendid account of themselves."

"I know it," was my answer; "but I am thinking of fever and frost and

Manchurian winter: these are more to be feared than Chinese rifles(1)."

The calling of the bugles, gathering the men together after dark,

or signaling the hour of rest, had for years been one of the

pleasures of my summer evenings in a Japanese garrison town. But

during the months of war, those long, plaintive notes of the last

call touched me in another way. I do not know that the melody is

peculiar; but it was sometimes played, I used to think, with

peculiar feeling; and when uttered to the starlight by all the

bugles of a division at once, the multitudinously blending tones

had a melancholy sweetness never to be forgotten. And I would

dream of phantom buglers, summoning the youth and strength of

hosts to the shadowy silence of perpetual rest.

Well, to-day I went to see some of the regiments return. Arches

of greenery had been erected over the street they were to pass

through, leading from Kobe station to Nanko-San,--the great

temple dedicated to the hero spirit of Kusunoki Masashige. The

citizens had subscribed six thousand yen for the honor of serving

the soldiers with the first meal after their return; and many

battalions had already received such kindly welcome. The sheds

under which they ate in the court of the temple had been

decorated with flags and festoons; and there were gifts for all

the troops,--sweetmeats, and packages of cigarettes, and little

towels printed with poems in praise of valor. Before the gate of

the temple a really handsome triumphal arch had been erected,

bearing on each of its facades a phrase of welcome in Chinese

text of gold, and on its summit a terrestrial globe surmounted by

a hawk with outspread pinions(2).

I waited first, with Manyemon, before the station, which is very

near the temple. The train arrived; a military sentry ordered all

spectators to quit the platform, and outside, in the street,

police kept back the crowd, and stopped all traffic. After a few

minutes, the battalions came, marching in regular column through

the brick archway,--headed by a gray officer, who limped slightly

as he walked, smoking a cigarette. The crowd thickened about us,

but there was no cheering, not even speaking,--a hush broken only

by the measured tramp of the passing troops. I could scarcely

believe those were the same men I had seen going to the war; only

the numbers on the shoulder-straps assured me of the fact.

Sunburnt and grim the faces were; many had heavy beards. The dark

blue winter uniforms were frayed and torn, the shoes worn into

shapelessness; but the strong, swinging stride was the stride of

the hardened soldier. Lads no longer these, but toughened men,

able to face any troops in the world; men who had slaughtered and

stormed; men who had also suffered many things which never will

be written. The features showed neither joy nor pride; the

quick-searching eyes hardly glanced at the welcoming flags, the

decorations, the arch with its globe-shadowing hawk of battle,

--perhaps because those eyes had seen too often the things which

make men serious. (Only one man smiled as he passed; and I

thought of a smile seen on the face of a Zouave when I was a boy,

watching the return of a regiment from Africa,--a mocking smile,

that stabbed.) Many of the spectators were visibly affected,

feeling the reason of the change. But, for that, the soldiers

were better soldiers now; and they were going to find welcome,

and comforts, and gifts, and the great warm love of the

people,--and repose thereafter, in their old familiar camps.

I said to Manyemon: "This evening they will be in Osaka and

Nagoya. They will hear the bugles calling; and they will think of

comrades who never can return."

The old man answered, with simple earnestness: "Perhaps by

Western people it is thought that the dead never return. But we

cannot so think. There are no Japanese dead who do not return.

There are none who do not know the way. From China and from

Chosen, and out of the bitter sea, all our dead have come

back,--all! They are with us now. In every dusk they gather to

hear the bugles that called them home. And they will hear them

also in that day when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall be

summoned against Russia."

(1) The total number of Japanese actually killed in battle, from

the fight at A-san to the capture of the Pescadores, was only

739. But the deaths resulting from other causes, up to as late a

date as the 8th of June, during the occupation of Formosa, were

3,148. Of these, 1,602 were due to cholera alone. Such, at least,

were the official figures as published in the Kobe Chronicle.

(2) At the close of the great naval engagement of the 17th of

September, 1894, a hawk alighted on the fighting-mast of the

Japanese cruiser Takachiho, and suffered itself to be taken and

fed. After much petting, this bird of good omen was presented to

the Emperor. Falconry was a great feudal sport in Japan, and

hawks were finely trained. The hawk is now likely to become, more

than ever before in Japan, a symbol of victory.

VII.