Mastery of the language was the key with which to open Thornrose Castle. The futile visits in 1845 and 1846 of Commodores James Biddle and James Glynn, with battle-ships and brigs, appear smaller in perspective than the work of Ranald MacDonald, first teacher of English in Japan. In 1848, this educational zealot had himself put ashore from an American ship. In shutting out undesirable aliens the bigoted hermit Japanese of the nineteenth century were quite equal to the glorious Americans of the twentieth. Though MacDonald was promptly imprisoned and sent to Nagasaki, about his cage cell eager young men gathered in classes to learn English and become interpreters. The Yedo Government, thus enabled to meet Perry openly, had also, concealed in the after pavilion, Manjiro (“John Munn”), who had been educated at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and who likewise had been voluntarily put ashore from an American vessel which had carried him to Japan. “John,” though young, was white-haired, the capillary bleaching having resulted from translating into Japanese, by command of his Yedo superiors, Bowditch’s “The New American Practical Navigator,” when dictionaries were unknown.
In Perry’s fleet, a marine named Jonathan Goble had enlisted, hoping to Christianize the natives. Goble began with a waif picked up at sea, whose Japanese name emerged from the alembic of sailor lingo as “Sam Patch.” Later, in a land where horse traction was unknown, Goble, in order to give his sick wife outdoor air, invented the man-power carriage. By his drawing of a rough design, and showing a native mechanic the picture of a baby-carriage in Godey’s “Lady’s Book,” the result in 1871 was the jinrikisha, the wheel that rolled round the world.
Before 1860, Japanese time was valueless, a drug in the market. There was no word in common use for anything less than an hour. Railways, introduced in 1872, made minutes and seconds intelligible quantities. For the first train scheduled, the prime minister of the empire was late and was left behind. The simultaneous advent of the cheap American watch and the Yankee’s jinrikisha made ordinary people realize that an hour had sixty minutes. Some Japanese have since learned to split seconds.
FIRST CLASS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIO, 1872, TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS FOR TWO YEARS. MANY OF THESE ARE NOW LEADING MEN IN JAPAN
In 1850 no English-speaking person could read correctly a Japanese book. Eugene Van Reed, an American, made a phrase-book in the katakana script, beginning the work which was continued by John Liggins, the two Browns, Samuel and Nathan, and William Imbrie—all Americans. James Curtis Hepburn, linguistic pioneer and translator of the Bible, made the initial dictionary, on which all subsequent lexicons are based. The first series of American books done into Japanese was Peter Parley’s histories, the style of which for a whole generation flavored “English as she was written” in Japan. It showed the Japanese islanders that they were as “frogs in a well, that know not the great ocean.” More than anything else, the reading of English turned Japan’s head away from China’s world of thought to that of the Occident. Not a few masterpieces of American literature done into Japanese have passed through many editions. The answer of one of our sailors, in 1847, to the question, “Who is the ruler of America?” “The people,” was then unfathomable. It is now quite plain. Prince Ito, who knew the Constitution of the United States almost by heart, read “The Federalist,” finding it more fascinating than a novel. Thus it was by Alexander Hamilton, quite as much as by Bismarck, that he was confirmed in his unionist and centralizing theories. On the other hand, none so well as Americans has mastered the psychology of the Japanese, opened their hearts, and read their souls. Despite its limitations, Percival Lowell’s work, “Occult Japan” (1894), is a masterpiece, Sidney L. Gulick’s “Evolution of the Japanese” (1903) is excellent, and Alice Bacon’s writings on Japan are superb.
TOWNSEND HARRIS, THE FIRST UNITED STATES MINISTER TO JAPAN AND FOUNDER OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Except that by Perry’s treaty two doors were set ajar for doling out food, fuel, and water to sailors, Japan through this alone might still be a hermit nation. Yet in 1913 we see a world power, wherein trade and labor are honored, population is doubled, wealth octupled, fifty millions of people are physically made over, and are actually taller by a half-inch than their ancestors, armed with the external forces of civilization, with social life and education, including music and law, changed and with ideals vastly modified. How did it come about?
