Biography of Percival Lowell

by A. Lawrence Lowell

Japan certainly is not in a process of disappearing before the advancing nations of the West; but it may be that this is not because her people have radically changed their nature. The arts of the West, civil and military, they have thoroughly acquired; but Percival Lowell may have been right in his diagnosis and wrong in his forecast. His estimate of their temperament may have been correct, and the conclusion therefrom of their destiny erroneous. The strange identity with which all Japanese explain the recent international events is not inconsistent with his theory of impersonality, and it may be that from a national standpoint this is less a source of weakness than of strength.

CHAPTER VII
SECOND VISIT TO JAPAN

Having got “The Soul of the Far East” off his hands, and into those of the public, in 1888, he sailed in December for Japan, arriving on January the eighth. As usual he took a house in Tokyo and on January 23 he writes to his mother about it. “My garden is a miniature range of hills on one side, a dry pond on the other. One plum tree is blooming now, another comes along shortly, and a cherry tree will peep into my bedroom window all a-blush toward the beginning of April. A palm tree exists with every appearance of comfort in front of the drawing room, a foreground for the hills.

“The fictitious employment by the Japanese has developed into a real one most amusingly—You know by the existing law a foreigner is not allowed to live outside of the foreign reservation unless in the service of some native body, governmental or private. Now Chamberlain got a Mr. Masujima to arrange matters. The plan that occurred to him, Masujima, was to employ me to lecture before the School of Languages of which he, Masujima, is President. It was thought better to make the thing in part real, a suggestion I liked, and the upshot of it is that I am booked to deliver a lecture a week until I see fit to change. Chamberlain and Masujima cooked up between them the idea of translating my initial performance and then inserting it in a reader of lectures, sermons and such in the colloquiae which Chamberlain is preparing—Subject—A homily to the students to become superior Japanese rather than inferior Europeans. Curious if you will in view of the fact that Masujima himself is madly in love with foreigners and as C. says is a sort of universal solvent for their quandaries.”

January 1889 proved a peculiarly fortunate time to arrive, for most interesting events were about to take place, as he soon wrote to his old college chum, Harcourt Amory, on February 21:

“Things have been happening since I arrived. Indeed I could hardly have lit upon a more eventful month—from doings of the Son of Heaven to those of Mother Earth—the transmigration from the old to the new palace, the ceremony of the promulgation of the Constitution, and the earthquake, and the assassination of Mori—and his burial the most huge affair of years. How he was murdered on the morning of the great national event just as he was setting out for the palace by a fanatic in the ante-chamber of his own house because two years ago he trod on the mats at Ise with his boots and poked the curtains aside with his cane—you have probably already heard—For the affair was too dramatic to have escaped European and American newspapers. The to us significant part of the story is the quasi sublatent approval of large numbers of Japanese. The whole procedure of the assassin commends itself in method to their ideas of the way to do it. The long cherished plan, the visit to the temples of Ise for corroboration of facts, the selection of the day, the coolness shown beforehand, the facing of death in return, the very blows à la hari-kiri etc., all tout-a-fait comme il faut. How he went to a joroya (house of prostitution) the night before, saying that he wished to have experienced as many phases of life as possible before leaving it, how the official who received him at Mori’s house (he introduced himself by the story that he had come to warn Mori of a plot to assassinate him) could recall no signs of nervousness in him, except that he lifted his teacup to drink once or twice after he had emptied it.

“The whole affair appeals to their imaginations, showing still a pretty state of society. They also admire the beautiful way the guard killed him, decapitating him in the good old-fashioned way just leaving his head hanging to his neck by a strip—Pleasing details.”

The story of the murder of Mori, and of the public festivities that were going on at the time, he told under the title of “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer” in the Atlantic Monthly for November 1890. It is perhaps the best of his descriptive writings, for the tragedy and its accessories are full of striking contrasts which he brought out with great effect. After a prelude on the danger of attempting changes too rapidly, he gives a brief account of the life of Mori Arinori; how in his youth he was selected to study abroad, how he did so in America, and became enamored of occidental ways, returning in time for the revolution that restored the Mikado. He threw himself into the new movement, rose in office, and, as he did so, strove to carry out his ideas. He was the first to propose disarming the samurai, which against bitter opposition was accomplished. As Minister of Education he excluded religion from all national instruction. He even suggested that the native language should be superseded by a modified English, the American people to adopt the changes also; but the plan obtained no support on either side of the Pacific.

The Japanese reformers felt that like almost all Western nations Japan should have a written constitution, and they set the date for its promulgation at February 11th, 1889. This Percival thought a mistake since it was the festival of Jimmu Tenno, the mythic founder of the imperial house. Nevertheless, the reformers, who had virtual control of the government, determined that the two celebrations should take place on the same day; and he describes the gorgeous decoration of the city as he saw it, the functions attending the grant of the constitution, and processions of comic chariots in honor of Jimmu Tenno. To a foreigner the strange mixture of native and partially imitated European costumes was irresistibly funny; but the populace enjoyed themselves. “The rough element,” he says, “so inevitable elsewhere was conspicuously absent. There is this great gain among a relatively less differentiated people. If you miss with regret the higher brains, you miss with pleasure the lower brutes. Bons enfants the Japanese are to a man. They gather delight as men have learned to extract sugar, from almost anything.... As the twilight settled over the city, a horrible rumor began to creep through the streets. During the day the thing would seem to have shrunk before the mirth of the masses, but under the cover of gloom it spread like night itself over the town. It passed from mouth to mouth with something of the shudder with which a ghost might come and go. Viscount Mori, Minister of State for Education, had been murdered that morning in his own house....

“What had happened was this:—