Biography of Percival Lowell

by A. Lawrence Lowell

“While Viscount Mori was dressing, on the morning of the 11th, for the court ceremony of the promulgation of the new Constitution, a man, unknown to the servants, made summons on the big bell hung by custom at the house entrance, and asked to see the Minister on important business. He was told the Minister was dressing, and could see no one. The unknown replied that he must see him about a matter of life and death,—as indeed it was. The apparent gravity of the object induced the servant to admit him to an ante-chamber and report the matter. In consequence, the Minister’s private secretary came down to interview him. The man, who seemed well behaved, informed the secretary that there was a plot to take the Minister’s life, and that he had come to warn the Minister of it. Truly a subtle subterfuge; true to the letter, since the plot was all his own. More he refused to divulge except to the Minister himself. While the secretary was trying to learn something more definite, Mori came down stairs, and entered the room. The unknown approached to speak to him; then, suddenly drawing a knife from his girdle, sprang at him, and crying ‘This for desecrating the shrines of Ise!’ stabbed him twice in the stomach. Mori, taken by surprise, grappled with him, when one of his body guards, hearing the noise, rushed in, and with one blow of his sword almost completely severed the man’s head from his body.

“Meanwhile, Mori had fallen to the floor, bleeding fast. The secretary, with the help of the guard, raised him, carried him to his room, and despatched a messenger for the court surgeon.

“The clothes of the unknown were then searched for some clue to the mystery; for neither Mori nor any of his household had ever seen him before. The search proved more than successful. A paper was found on his person, setting forth in a most circumstantial manner the whole history of his crime, from its inception to its execution, or his own. However reticent he seemed before the deed, he evidently meant nothing should be hid after it, whether he succeeded or not. The paper explained the reason.

“Because, it read, of the act of sacrilege committed by Mori Arinori, who, on a visit to the shrines of Ise, two years before, had desecrated the temple by pushing its curtain back with his cane, and had defiled its floor by treading upon it with his boots, he, Nishino Buntaro, had resolved to kill Mori, and avenge the insult offered to the gods and to the Emperor, whose ancestors they were. To wipe the stain from the national faith and honor, he was ready to lose his life, if necessary. He left this paper as a memorial of his intent.”

In the meantime the messenger sent for the court surgeon failed to find him, for he was at the palace. The same was true of the next in rank, and when at last a surgeon was found Mori had lost so much blood that in the night of the following day he died.

Both by his opinions and his tactless conduct as a minister Mori had made himself unpopular and rumors that his life was in danger had been current for two or three days. “If Mori was thus a very definite sort of person, Nishino was quite as definite in his own way.” At the time of his crime he held a post in the Home Department, where he brooded over the insult to the gods. “He seems to have heard of it accidentally, but it made so much impression upon him that he journeyed to Ise to find out the truth of the tale. He was convinced, and forthwith laid his plans with the singleness of zeal of a fanatic,” as appears from his affectionate farewell letters to his father and his younger brother.

“But the strangest and most significant part of the affair was the attitude of the Japanese public toward it. The first excitement of the news had not passed before it became evident that their sympathy was not with the murdered man, but with his murderer.... Nishino was an unknown.... Yet the sentiment was unmistakable. The details of the murder were scarcely common property before the press proceeded to eulogize the assassin. To praise the act was a little too barefaced, not to say legally dangerous.... But to praise the man became a journalistic epidemic.... Nishino, they said, had contrived and executed his plan with all the old time samurai bravery. He had done it as a samurai should have done it, and he had died as a samurai should have died.... The summary action of the guard in cutting the murderer down was severely censured. As if the guard had not been appointed to this very end!... The papers demanded the guard’s arrest and trial.... Comment of this kind was not confined to the press. Strange as it may appear, the newspapers said what everybody thought.... There was no doubt about it. Beneath the surface of decorous disapproval ran an undercurrent of admiration and sympathy, in spots but ill hid. People talked in the same strain as the journalists wrote. Some did more than talk. The geisha, or professional singing girls of Tokyo, made of Nishino and his heroism a veritable cult.... His grave in the suburbs they kept wreathed with flowers. To it they made periodic pilgrimages, and, bowing there to the gods, prayed that a little of the hero’s spirit might descend on them. The practice was not a specialty of professionals. Persons of all ages and both sexes visited the spot in shoals, for similar purposes. It became a mecca for a month. The thing sounds incredible, but it was a fact. Such honor had been paid nobody for years.”

This in abstract is Percival’s account of a terrible national tragedy, and its amazing treatment by the public at large.

Before he had been long in Japan the old love of travel into regions unknown to foreigners came back. He had already visited some of the less frequented parts of the interior, and now scanning, one evening, the map of the country his eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic mystery, as he said, from the western coast. It made a striking figure with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands. Its name was Noto; and the more he looked the more he longed, until the desire simply carried him off his feet. Nobody seemed to know much about it, for scarcely a foreigner had been there; and, in fact, he set his heart on going to Noto just because it was not known. That is his own account of the motive for the journey he made early in May, 1889; which turned out somewhat of a disappointment, for the place was not, either in its physical features or the customs of its people, very different from the rest of Japan; but for him proved adventurous and highly interesting. Under the title of “Noto” he gave an account of it,—as usual after his return home in the following spring,—first by a series of articles in the Atlantic, and then as a book published in 1891. It is a well-told tale of a journey, quite exciting, where he and his porters, in seeking to scale a mountain pass, found their way lay along precipices where the path had crumbled into the gorge below. The descriptions of people and scenery are vigorous and terse; but the book is not a philosophic study like those on Korea and on Japanese psychology. Yet it is notable in showing his versatility, as is also the fact that he gave the Φ Β Κ poem at Harvard in June of that year.

Hurrying home to deliver that poem, shortly after his return from Noto, he found himself busy for a year and a half, writing, attending to his own affairs, and to business, for he was part of the time, as Treasurer, the manager of the Lowell Bleachery. Meanwhile his hours of leisure were filled with a new and absorbing avocation, that of polo.