“How soon such changes may come it is impossible to say, seeing what marvellous progress has marked the last seven years. Notwithstanding their long and resolutely-maintained isolation and exclusivism, carried even into their political economy, and cherished in the national mind as their ark of safety and the shibboleth of their independence, the day has arrived when a British Minister can take up his residence in the capital, and is received by the Tycoon, not as were the chiefs of the Dutch factory at Decima—long the only representatives of Europe—in days now long passed, and never, it is to be hoped, to return.”
In another place—
“They are a well-to-do, flourishing, and advancing people, and for generations and centuries have maintained a respectable level of intellectual cultivation and social virtues.”
Sir Rutherford, in his desponding mood, cites, as an instance of the obstructive and unprogressive policy of the Government, that they refused to accept an offer made by Europeans to run monthly a steamer for them between their own ports; but he writes more sanguinely when he gives us an account of a visit he paid to the Government steam-factory at Nagasaki:—
“I could not but admire the progress made under every possible difficulty, by the Japanese and Dutch combined, in their endeavours to create in this remote corner of the earth all the complicated means and appliances for the repair and manufacture ultimately of steam machinery.”
There he found them making moderator lamps, and farther on there was a forge-factory in complete working order, with a Nasmyth’s hammer.
“And here we saw one of the most extraordinary and crowning testimonies of Japanese enterprise and ingenuity, which leaves all the Chinese have ever attempted far behind. I allude to a steam-engine with tubular boilers, made by themselves before a steam vessel or engine had ever been seen by Japanese—made solely, therefore, from the plans in a Dutch work.”
After this we do not think that the idea which our author ridicules, of the possibility of railways and steam communication in Japan, is so very absurd; considering all that he has undergone, it is not to be wondered at that he should occasionally take a gloomy view of the people and the country. Generally he is sanguine and complimentary, and nobody has had better opportunities of judging. He has visited the northern island, ascended Fusama, spent some weeks at a Japanese watering-place, where he found “peace, plenty, apparent content, and a country more perfectly and carefully cultivated, and kept with more ornamental timber everywhere, than can be matched even in England.” He made an overland journey from Nagasaki to Yedo, which lasted thirty-three days, and the incidents of which form one of the most interesting features of the book. There is an admirable description of a Japanese play, which, judged by the light of the future, seemed to be a rehearsal of the tragedy about to be perpetrated a fortnight later on Sir Rutherford himself. Occasionally the party traversed the territory of a hostile daimio; on these occasions the inhabitants shut themselves up. Thus, at Nieno, a daimio’s capital—
“As we advanced through the streets we found every house and every side-street hermetically closed, not a whisper was to be heard, nor the face of a living being to be seen. The side streets were all barricaded and shut out of view by curtains spread on high poles. His own house, which we passed, was similarly masked by curtains. Even in the adjoining villages no women or children were to be seen.”
These daimios are always followed by large bodies of armed retainers in their journeys through the country, and, as the last murder of our countryman proves, are not to be met without danger. On one occasion, says our author,