ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Rhythms, Rites and Rituals. Dorothy Britton
Читать онлайн.Название Rhythms, Rites and Rituals
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781898823261
Автор произведения Dorothy Britton
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
But as time went on another threat emerged. In the sixteenth century many Jesuit missionaries began coming to Japan, and the Japanese people converted to Christianity in droves. Then came Spanish and Portuguese traders, who were at first well received. Ieyasu, however, noted that Spain and Portugal were in the process of building up for themselves a sizeable empire in the Far East, and it occurred to him that the missionaries and the traders might be the thin edge of the wedge for an eventual conquest of Japan.
This threat may well have been first pointed out to the astute Shogun by a unique member of his court, that Englishman named William Adams – the first Briton ever to set foot on Japanese soil. He was a ship’s navigator who was shipwrecked and stranded in Japan in 1600, and became the trusted confidant of the Shogun, who kept him in Japan and made him a Japanese nobleman. From Adams, the Shogun learned much about Elizabethan England including the arts of navigation and shipbuilding, as well as some contemporary world geography and the state of affairs that existed between the European political powers.
As time went on, the Japanese government came to view Christianity as a subversive force within Japan, just as Communism does to certain democratic Western powers today. Unsurprisingly, some years after the death of Adams and Ieyasu, the Shogun’s son decided to take no chances with the foreigners. All Christians were ruthlessly exterminated (1637–1638) and no one was allowed in or out of Japan. All contact with the outside world was stopped, except for a small amount of business with China and a tiny Dutch trading post on a small, closely-guarded man-made island (Deshima) in Nagasaki harbour. This state of affairs went on for over two hundred years, until 1853 when America sent Commodore Matthew Perry with a fleet of naval vessels to force Japan to admit trade, and allow the refuelling of passing American whaling ships.
This proved a golden opportunity for the anti-Shogunate daimyo, the feudal samurai lords in Japan. Then finally, in 1868, ten years after the Shogun signed a commercial treaty with the United States, the Tokugawa military regime was overthrown by a royalist force which brought the Emperor up to Edo, changed the name of the city to Tokyo, and set up an enlightened government modelled on those of Europe.
Samurais of Satsuma (now called Kagoshima) were the prime movers, led by Takamori Saigo and Toshimichi Okubo, grandfather of my best friend Wakako. Okubo and Saigo went on to strongly advise and influence the new boy emperor Mutsuhito, better known by his reign name Meiji, and in 1871 Okubo joined three others in the major Iwakura diplomatic mission to the USA, Britain and Europe in which they spent a year and a half amassing knowledge of the outside world.
While they were away, Japan experienced very troubled times in its endeavour to marry the old with the new; various rebellions took place, including a tragic one within Okubo’s own Satsuma fief, which was being governed by Saigo, who eventually committed suicide, and Okubo, my friend’s grandfather, on his return from abroad was assassinated. He was not the only member of Wakako’s family to come to a tragic end. Her mother was the daughter of Prime Minister, and later Finance Minister Takahashi, who was murdered in the 26 February 1936, attacked by anti- government junior army officers, when three cabinet ministers were killed. The story of this remarkable man is told in Richard J. Smethurst’s From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes (Harvard University Press, 2007). He had learned to speak fluent English, and was very friendly with American financier Jacob Schiff, who invited Takahashi’s daughter to stay with them while she studied at a US college. That was why she spoke English so well when she met my mother at the railway station soon after the earthquake. Takahashi sent his son to Oxford, who returned with a ravishingly beautiful bride he met during a holiday in Berlin. Anita, my dear friend Wakako’s young German aunt, became a close friend of ours post-war, when she lived in the house next door to us.
In those early days in Japan, mixed marriages were looked at askance and poor Anita’s marriage was forced apart, and she eventually married a German businessman. But she told me that young Takahashi was the true love of her life, in spite of some interesting love affairs she had later with visitors to Tokyo’s Western community, including a famous violinist. She told me she thought of each as a separate cherished drawer in her heart!
Statesman and diplomat Count Munemitsu Mutsu was so opposed to his son marrying an English girl he met while at Cambridge, that they had to wait seventeen anguished years before managing to tie the knot, after which the Countess wrote that classic book entitled Kamakura, Fact and Legend. Similar cases abound in that era. But since the war I am happy to say mixed marriages in Japan are now so frequent that a club called the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese is a splendid ever-growing organization. As a teenager, watching pale-skinned women on various country’s beaches trying to acquire a healthy tan, I used to wish that inter-marriage would go on apace and produce a café-au-lait world, so that there would be no more racism at all anywhere!
CHAPTER 7
Mother Contacts
Her First Japanese Friend
ONE OF THE first things my mother did after marrying and settling in Yokohama, was to get in touch with Suzu Numano, her very first Japanese friend. Mrs Numano was now back in Japan, a widow, with her son and two school-age daughters Sumié and Chié. After moving to Portland, Oregon, from San Francisco, the handsome young Japanese consul-general had tragically died of pneumonia from a germ caught on a consular trip to China. Mrs Numano visited us several times in Hayama, and when we were back in Yokohama, the day she brought her two daughters to tea remains very clearly etched in my memory. That is probably because I disgraced myself. The four of them had tea on a bridge table set up in my nursery, covered with a beautifully embroidered Chinese tablecloth which my mother had bought in China. I was very small, and was underneath the table playing on the floor with a set of wooden letters of the alphabet. All I could see of our guests was the lower part of Mrs Numano’s elegant silk kimono, and the legs of her two girls in their school uniform black stockings. In the midst of their nostalgic conversation about San Francisco days, Mother suddenly discovered that I had cut out an ‘A’ from her precious table-cloth, using scissors and the alphabet letter. All hell broke loose. I even made it worse by blaming the nefarious act on Isabella, my doll.
But in spite of my naughtiness, dear Mrs Numano, bless her, was very taken with me as a child, and was particularly fascinated with my bilinguality, and used to tell people I was really Japanese, and just had a Western skin! Suzu and her family have remained very dear friends. One day in the 1960s she rang my mother to say that her grandson had married a Welsh girl, in Greece, and that the young newly-weds would be living in her Nagashima son-in-law’s handsome beach villa in nearby Zushi, and she hoped we would become friends.
We liked Hayama so much in those post-earthquake years, that in 1925 my father leased a small piece of land – a rock with a fisherman’s shack on it. In place of the shack he had a house built, which he designed combining both Western and Japanese features, a mere biscuit toss, as he used to say, from the sea. Isshiki beach was not crowded like those in Kamakura, Zushi and Morito, for it was too far to walk from Zushi station, and the only transport was a small horse-drawn carriage holding eight passengers, so only people with cars had villas there in those days, and were mostly aristocrats and royalty.
In 1926, when we moved into our new beach house, the Taisho Emperor died, and was succeeded by the Showa Emperor, Hirohito. The ceremony of succession took place in the Imperial Villa Annex, which was just along the road from us, and I remember watching a ceremonial procession go by, past our house, and how impressed I was by the quartet of handsome black oxen drawing a beautiful ancient carriage belonging to the local Shinto shrine.
From our house it was a short walk up a lane to the Oku-bo’s house on the hillside, and I’ll never forget the day I was old enough to walk there to play without my nanny. When I left to walk home, Mrs Okubo said in English, ‘Please give your mother my love’. I worried and worried all the way back,