Rare days in Japan

by George Trumbull Ladd

However we may regard the unreasonableness of either of these two extreme views of Naosuké’s character, one thing seems clear. In respect to the laying of foundations for friendly relations between the United States and Japan, we owe more to this man than to any other single Japanese. No one can tell what further delays and resulting irritation, and even accession of blood-shed, might have taken place in his time had it not been for his courageous and firm position toward the difficult problem of admitting foreigners to trade and to reside within selected treaty-ports of Japan. This position cost him his life. For a generation, or more, it also cost him what every true Japanese values far more highly than life; it cost the reputation of being loyal to his sovereign and faithful to his country’s cause. Yet not five Americans in a million, it is likely, ever heard the name of Baron Ii Kamon-no-Kami, who as Tairō, or military dictator, shared the responsibility and should share the fame of our now celebrated citizen, then Consul General at Shimoda, Townsend Harris. My purpose, therefore, is two-fold: I would gladly “have the honour to introduce” Ii Naosuké to a larger audience of my own countrymen; and by telling the story of an exceedingly interesting visit to Hikoné, I would equally gladly introduce to the same audience certain ones of the great multitude of Japanese who still retain the knightly courtesy, intelligence and high standards of living—though in their own way—which characterised the feudal towns of the “Old Japan,” now so rapidly passing away.

Baron Ii Naosuké, better known in foreign annals as Ii Kamon-no-Kami, was his father’s fourteenth son. He was born November 30, 1815. The father was the thirteenth feudal lord from that Naomasa who received his fief from the great Iyéyasu. Since the law of primogeniture—the only exceptions being cases of insanity or bodily defect—was enforced throughout the Empire, the early chances that Naosuké would ever become the head of the family and lord of Hikoné, seemed small indeed. But according to the usage of the Ii clan, all the sons except the eldest were either given as adopted sons to other barons, or were made pensioned retainers of their older brother. All his brothers, except the eldest, had by adoption become the lords of their respective clans. But from the age of seventeen onward, Naosuké was given a modest pension and placed in a private residence. He thus enjoyed years of opportunity for training in arms, literature, and reflective study, apart from the corrupting influences of court life and the misleading temptations to the exercise of unrestricted authority—both of which are so injurious to the character of youth. Moreover, he became acquainted with the common people. That was also true of him, which has been true of so many of the great men of Japan down to the present time. He made his friend and counsellor of a man proficient in the military and literary education of the day. And, indeed, it has been the great teachers who, more than any other class, through the shaping of character in their pupils, have influenced mankind to their good. It was Nakagawa Rokurō who showed to Naosuké, when a young man, the impossibility of the further exclusion of Japan from foreign intercourse. It was he also who “influenced the future Tairō to make a bold departure from the old traditions” of the country.

On the death, without male issue, of his oldest brother, Naosuké was declared heir-apparent of the Hikoné Baronetcy. And on Christmas day of 1850 he was publicly authorised by the Shōgunate to assume the lordly title of Kamon-no-Kami. It is chiefly through the conduct of the man when, less than a decade later, he came to the position which was at the same time the most responsible, difficult and honourable but dangerous of all possible appointments in “Old Japan,” that the character of Baron Ii must be judged. On the side of sentiment—and only when approached from this side can one properly appreciate the typical knightly character of Japanese feudalism—we may judge his patriotism by this poem from his own hand:

Omi no mi kishi utsu nami no iku tabimo,

Miyo ni kokoro wo kudaki nuru kana;

or as freely translated by Dr. Griffis:—

“As beats the ceaseless wave on Omi’s strand

So breaks my heart for our beloved land.”

(Omi is the poetical appellation of Lake Biwa, on which the feudal castle of the lords of Hikoné has already been said to be situated.) How the sincerity of this sentiment may be reconciled with the act which for an entire generation caused the baron to be stigmatised a traitor is made clear through the following story told by the great Ōkubo. In the troubled year of 1858, the Viscount, just before starting on an official errand to the Imperial Court at Kyoto, called on Baron Ii, who was then chief in command under the Shōgun, to inform him of his expected departure on the morrow. He had embodied his own views regarding the vexed question of foreign affairs, on his “pocket paper,” in the form of a poem. This paper the Viscount handed to the Baron and asked him whether his views were the same as those of the poem. Having carefully read it Ii approved and instructed Ōkubo to act up to the spirit of the poem, which reads:

“However numerous and diversified the nations of the earth may be, the God who binds them together can never be more than one.”