Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

The Itos are the Smiths of Japan. There is one President of the Privy Council, one the chief naval authority and head of the naval board. There are two generals named Ito and statistics alone know how many private soldiers are thus made still more common. The Asahi to-day told of an Ito hanged for a triple murder. In the adjoining column account was made of another Ito decorated by the Portuguese government. The reason, not stated, was that the king of that decrepit monarchy, wishing to assimilate some stray rays of good fortune from this rising sun, chose three men in Japan on whom to bestow his ribbons of mark. These were the Emperor, the Emperor’s son and an old man by the universal name of Ito.

A strange circumstance permitted me to ride for an hour one morning in a railway coach with this other Ito—the only Ito. Ambitious of that smartness which can save where any simpleton can spend I procured a second-class ticket from Yokohama to Tokyo, a run that covers some twenty-eight miles in twice as many minutes. The ticket cost fifty-three sen, and as the rate of exchange for American gold here now is 213 you will see that the ride cost less than a quarter. I could have gone first class for seventy-four sen, or ten more American cents—hardly worth the saving. Still, it is more interesting second class. Only foreigners, and Japanese who ape foreigners, ride first class.

Japanese railway coaches are of three classes. It is not necessary to experience the third to know it. A look is enough. Red, like the emperor’s, they are the antithesis of imperial. Only in an imperial land, dyed in the ancient belief that certain men are by birth superior to other men, could these third-class coaches exist. They are for the common people. Small as the dummy cars of an intramural railway they are boxed off in sections similar to continental compartments. These are loaded with as many of the riffraff as the station guards can crowd in. Hard seats and plain company with transportation at the mere cost of hauling is the rule there. The fare is thirty sen (fifteen cents). The government, which owns the railway, conducts its business on the theory employed by Japanese merchants—sell to the poor at cost and let the rich pay the profits.

The difference between the first and second class is twofold. One is the color—white for the first class, blue for the second. The accommodation is just the same—leather and plush upholstering of seats plenty large enough, with washstand, toilet and drinking water handy and clean midway of the car. The chief difference is sociologic, tinged with political, economic and moral degrees. First class is for the nobility, second for the bourgeoisie. Though the first-class carriage is lawfully open to anyone possessing seventy-four sen, no second-class Jap ever dares aspire to it. So secure are the officials in the morale of the people that tickets are never examined. You show your pasteboard at the gate as you enter the platform at the beginning of the journey, again as you leave the platform at the end, but not on the train. A third-class fare could easily ride in a first-class coach. No one but a foreigner would ever think of this. I tried it one day and succeeded, getting seventy-four sen worth of nobility for thirty sen. It is an axiom that all foreigners are noble; hence all foreigners should travel first class. Some day Japan will really be civilized.

This morning the first-class coach was filled with London tiles and Paris frocks, all silked and diamonded. It was the day of the imperial garden party and all foreigners of note in Yokohama were on their way to the palace in Tokyo. There was a crush of German, French and English. I detected one pair Castilian in suavity of accent. All were agog with gossipy gayety. The men, sleek on Oriental dining as fresh pork packers, plumped seats unusually commodious quite full of broadclothed avoirdupois. The women were agush with scents, mowed from the four quarters. Feminine with suggested lingerie, they left the men to the papers, for the London mail was just in, and toasted some stale diplomatic scandal whose drift I vainly strove to get. Between silk tiles and be-birded bonnets there was not a vacant seat left in the first-class coach.

I found a seat in the rear of the second-class coach, which was but half filled. The occupants were Japanese, evidently business and professional men of note, perhaps fifteen all told. Except for the complexions, the upward slant of the eyes and the uniform small stature they might have passed for the occupants of the nine o’clock car downtown any American morning. The dress was the same, the average of intelligence the same. Before I began my paper I studied each face. The Japanese countenance is inscrutable. From coolie to Mikado exists the same placid, patient, nearly always alert expression of canny indifference. Before such uniformity, such hidden power, purpose and weird beginning toothed in the husk of time the most expert western physiognomist is baffled. The geography alone of these humanists of hardy strife can be sketched. Of their history, legends, poesy, knowledge and aspiration little may be said at the outward glance.

In the far corner sat a man whose personality attracted with an unmistakable potency. Sensitive to what psychologists call the aura, I instinctively felt that he was a person of distinction, a distinction genuine in that it must be inherent, for nothing obvious indicated his difference from the other Japanese. He wore a frock coat which had seen use and a beaver hat, apparently of English make, as it had a Piccadilly smugness found nowhere else. None of his countrymen in the car wore cuffs like his, which were links. The others were old-fashioned in plain roundness. His tie was ample and of heavy silk, four-in-hand with a certain regality of flourish. His shoes were wide, short, homely, well-furnished. Only two items of his apparel were unlike those of anyone else. One was the pendant from his watchchain, a superb head of polished onyx on which I could make out the square and compass of the Masonic regalia. The other was a button the size of an American copper cent which he wore in his left lapel. It looked like the button of the Legion of Honor. Later I learned that it was the insignia of the first-class order of the Rising Sun. Only twenty-two men in the world have the right to wear that. I also noticed that his left leg was slightly bent. He appeared to be bow-legged.

The unknown held a newspaper in front of his face. When the train had been two minutes out of Yokohama he put the paper down and looked out upon the landscape. Then I recognized the Marquis Ito, who was born a poor boy of ordinary family in an imperial land, and who is now known before the world as the father of the New Japan.

Some historian has written that the Nineteenth Century produced four constructive statesmen of the first rank; two—Bismarck and Cavour—in the west, and two—Li Hung Chang and Ito—in the east. Another puts him down as the greatest of the four because he is the most humble.