“His Excellency” (!) the buniō was shown the varnish and key hole of the magnificent caskets containing the letters from the great ruler of the United States. Eve did not eye the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil with more consuming curiosity, than did that son of an inquisitive race ogle the glittering mysterious box. It was not for him to know the contents. He was moved to offer food and water. With torturing politeness, the “hairy faces” declined. They had enough of everything. The ugly barbarians even demanded that the same term of respect should be applied to their President as that given to the great and mighty figure-head at Yedo. This came near being a genuine comedy of Much Ado about Nothing, since one of the Tycoon’s titles expressed, in English print was “O.”
In spite of the rising gorge and other choking sensations, the republican president was dubbed Dairi. The buniō of Uraga was told that further discussion was unnecessary, until an answer was received. No number of silent volleys of “naru hodo” (indeed) “tai-hen” (hey yo) or “dekinai” (cannot) could possibly soothe the internal storm in the breast of the snubbed buniō. He gathered himself up, and with bows profound enough to make a right angle of legs and body, and much sucking in of the breath ad profundis, said his “sayonara” (farewell) and went ashore.
The third day dawned, again to usher in fresh anomaly. The Americans would transact no business on this day! Why? It was the Sabbath, for rest and worship, honored by the “Admiral” from childhood in public as well as private life. “Dōntaku” (Sunday,) the interpreter told the buniō. With the aid of glasses from the bluffs on shore, they saw the Mississippi’s capstan wreathed with a flag, a big book laid thereon, and smaller books handed round. One, in a gown, lowered his head; all listening did likewise. Then all sang, the band lending its instrumental aid to swell the volume of sound. The strains floated shoreward and were heard. The music was “Old Hundred.” The hymn was “Before Jehovah’s awful throne, Ye nations bow with sacred joy.” The open book on the capstan was the Bible. In the afternoon, a visiting party of minor dignitaries was denied admittance to the decks of the vessels; nor was this a mere freak of Perry’s, but according to a habit and principle.
This was the American rest-day, and Almighty God was here worshiped in sight of His most glorious works. The Commodore was but carrying out a habit formed at his mother’s knee, and never slighted at home or abroad. To read daily the Bible, receiving it as the word of God, and to honor Him by prayer and praise was the chief part of the “provision sufficient to sustain the mind” so often recommended by him to officers and men. “This was the only notable demonstration which he made before landing.”
“Remarkable was this Sabbath morning salutation, in which an American fleet, with such music as those hillsides never re-echoed before, chanted the glories of Jehovah before the gates of a heathen nation. It was a strange summons to the Japanese.” Its echoes are now heard in a thousand glens and in the cities of the Mikado’s empire. The waters of Yedo Bay have since become a baptismal flood. Where cannon was cast to resist Perry now stands the Imperial Female Normal College. On the treaty grounds rises the spire of a Christian church.
Meanwhile, the erection of earth-works along the strand and on the bluffs progressed. The farm laborers, the fishermen, palanquin-bearers, pack-horse leaders, women and children were impressed into the work. With hoe and spade, and baskets of rope matting slung from a pole borne on the shoulders of two men, or each with divided load depending scale-wise from one shoulder, receiving an iron cash at each passing of the paymaster, they toiled day and night. Rude parapets of earth knit together with grass were made and pierced with embrasures. These were twice too wide for unwieldly, long, and ponderously heavy brass cannon able to throw a three or six pound ball. The troops were clad in mail of silk, iron and paper, a kind of war corset, for which rifle balls have little respect. Their weapons were match-locks and spears. Their evolutions were those of Taikō’s time, both on drill and parade. Curtained camps sprung up, around which stretched impressive walls of cotton cloth etched by the dyer’s mordant with colossal crests. These were not to represent “sham forts, of striped canvas,” and thus to frighten the invaders, as the latter supposed; but, according to immemorial custom, to denote military business, and to display either the insignia of the great Shō-gun or the particular clan to which a certain garrison or detachment belonged. The political system headed by the Tycoon, had to the Japanese mind nothing amusing in its name of Bakafu or Curtain Government, though to the foreigner, suggestive of Mrs. Caudle. It had, however, a certain hostile savor. It was a mild protest against the camp over-awing the throne. It implied criticism of the Shō-gun, and reverence to the Mikado.
The names and titles which now desolated the air and suffered phonetic wreck in collision with the vocal organs to which they were so strange, furnish not only an interesting linguistic study, but were a mirror of native history. The uncouth forms which they took upon the lips of the latest visiting foreigners are hardly worse in the scholar’s eyes, than the deviations which the Japanese themselves made from the Aino aboriginal or imported Chinese forms. In its vocabulary the Japanese is a very mixed language, and the majority of its so called elegant terms of speech is but mispronounced Chinese. To the Americans, the name of one of the interpreters seemed “compounded of two sneezes and a cough,” though when analyzed into its component elements, it reflects the changes in Japanese history as surely as fossils in the rocks reveal the characteristics of bygone geological ages. In the old days of the Mikado’s supremacy, in fact as well as in law, when he led his troops in war, instead of being exiled in a palace; that is, before the thirteenth century, both military and civil titles had a meaning. Names had a reality behind them, and were symbols of a fact. A man with kami (lord) after his name was an actual governor of a province; one with mon terminating his patronymic was a member of the imperial guard, a soldier or sentinel at the Sayé mon (left gate) or Uyé mon (right gate) of the palace; a Hei was a real soldier with a sword or arrow, spear or armor. A suké or a jō a marō or a himé, a kamon or a tono was a real deputy or superior, a prince or princess, a palace functionary or a palace occupant of imperial blood. All this was changed when, in the twelfth century, the authority was divided into civil and military, and two capitals and centers of government, typified by the Throne and the Camp, sprang up. The Mikado kept his seat, the prestige of antiquity and divinity, and the fountain of authority at Kiōto, while the Shō-gun or usurping general held the purse and the sword at Kamakura. Gradually the Shō-gun (army-commander, general) usurped more and more power, claiming it as necessary, and invariably obtaining new leases of power until little was left to the Mikado but the shadow of authority. The title of Tai-kun (“Tycoon”) meaning Great Prince, and the equivalent of a former title of the Mikado was assumed. Next the military rulers at Kamakura, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century and in Yedo from the seventeenth century, controlled the appointments of their nominees to office, and even compelled the Emperor to make certain of them hereditary in elect families. The multitude of imperial titles, once carrying with their conferment actual duties and incomes, and theoretically functional in Kiōto became, as reality decayed, in the higher grades empty honorifics of the Tycoon’s minions, and in the lower were degraded to ordinary personal names of the agricultural gentry or even common people. What was once an actual official title sunk to be a mere final syllable in a name.
The writer, when a resident in the Mikado’s empire, was accustomed to address persons with most lofty, grandiloquent, and high flown names, titles and decorative patronymics, in which the glories of decayed imperialism and medieval history were reflected. His cook was an Imperial Guardsman of the Left, his stable boy was a Regent of the University, while not a few servants, mechanics, field hands and manure carriers, were Lords of the Chamber, Promoters of Learning, Superintendents of the Palace Gardens, or various high functionaries with salary and office. Just as the decayed mythology and far off history of the classic nations furnished names for the slaves in Carolina cotton fields, in the days when Lempriêre was consulted for the christening of newly born negro babies, so, the names borne by thousands of Japanese to-day afford to the foreign analyst of words and to the native scholar both amusement and reflection. To the Americans on Perry’s fleet they furnished endless jest as phonetic and linguistic curiosities.
| [26] | A Japanese poet puts this stanza in the mouth of Perry; “Little did I dream that I should here, after crossing the salty path, gaze upon the snow-capped Fuji of this land.” |