THE CAPITAL OF THE TYCOON.* Tax Capital of the Tycoon
has but one fault—intolerable verbosity. Sir Rutherford. Alcock, British Minister in Japan for five years, probably knows both the country and its capital better than any living European, and he has poured out his stores of knowledge with unreserved profusion. All things small and great, native feudalism and European discomforts, the tricks of the Tycoon's Government and the drift of English diplomacy, Japanese women's immodesty and European merchants' aggressiveness, the system of agriculture and Japanese toilettes, the policy of the oligarchy and native caricature, all are described with a fulness which leaves on the reader's mind the impression of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. The author's style is clear and simple, his mind has few prejudices, and he has a pictorial power, not perhaps great in degree, but easily and incessantly applied. His book will be read with almost excited interest by all men who have time, and they will concur with us in annoyance at the diffusive garrulity by which its permanent value has been so greatly reduced. Sir Rutherford Alcoa has caught the oriental official disease. Everything is related at length, nobody is supposed to know anything, and there is as total a want of perspeotive as in a Chinese picture. The book almost begins with two pages about his furniture,
• The Capital of the Tycoon: a Narrative of Three Years' Residence in Japan. By Rutherford Alcock, ERB. Two Vols. London : Longman, Green, and Co.
and the Japanese habit of dispensing with chairs and tables is alluded to some twenty or thirty times in the volumes, always in lengthy and carefully worded para- graphs. Then the man's mind is full of bottled ideas. He has been thinking for twenty years with no better opportunity for getting rid of his thoughts than consular and vice-consular despatches might afford, and he has sprung at his opportunity with an eagerness almost comical. From page 23 to page 29 we have, for example, instead of words on Japan, two capital leading articles on the expediency of supplying English officials to direct all Chinese efforts at reform. Whole essays on civilization and Government might be pieced together out of these volumes, and might, for aught we know, be exceedingly valuable to mankind. Sir Rutherford has lived many years among many and very strange races of men, and thoroughly understands the oldest social polity now existing on earth. His views on civilization, therefore, are entitled to a respectful hear- ing, but somehow, scattered through a work on Japan, they seem to stand between us and the subject, to suggest only thoughts which distract attention, and resemble too closely those insuffer- able speeches in which the chorus of the old Greek drama tries to educate the spectator's eyes.
This, however, is our single objection to the work, which is by far the best yet produced on Japan, in many departments exhausts existing knowledge of the subject, and in all creates the strongest impression of authenticity and trustworthiness. It is, too, in almost all readable, for the author's garrulous diffusiveness, his wholly colloquial tone, however wearisome on many subjects, on others rather increases than diminishes the ordinary reader's enjoyment. It is " nice " to be told minutely what one may buy in a Japanese bazaar, and if the " reflections" are tiresome, why the reader, unlike the critic, is under no law which compels him to abstain from skipping.
It is, of course, hopeless to give in the compass of a review an idea of the different subjects touched or discussed in a work so desultory and so exhaustive. Articles might be written on Sir R. Alcock's adventures, on his narrative of official massacres, on his theory of Japanese government, on his account of Japanese civilization, and-each, if it borrowed freely. from him, would be a contribution to our existing knowledge. But we must perforce rest content with a less complete analysis, and confine ourselves, one " reflection' excepted, exclusively to results. The entire book will leave, we think, on the mind of the careful reader just two distinct impressions.
1. Japan is the seat of an old civilization, highly organized, and very successful, but of the Pagan type. The people are fairly well off, hunger and want being apparently unknown-in Japan. They are governed by laws pretty fairly administered; which ensure steady obedience, and reduce the relations of man to man to a complex but endurable form. They have made great progress in some arts, architecture and painting, agricul- ture and mechanics, erect magnificent buildings, sketch any scene in a satirical or a pathetic spirit, farm on the principle of using all the manure we waste, and have actually built a working steamer from the sight of Dutch drawings alone. Sir R. Alcock vouches for that fact, absolutely unique in the history of progress, on the evidence of his eyes. They have built mighty cities, and govern them rigidly; have constructed grand roads, and kept them in order, and have covered the country with splendid though too often fortified chateaus ; have made their populace a law- abiding people, and have perfected a system of government which, in its searching despotism and minute kindliness surpasses that of Venice—the only European form to which it presents even a partial analogy. On the other hand, they have, like the Chinese, stereotyped their system, and like all Pagans have suc- ceeded in destroying the instinctive reverence for life, the savage regard for truth, and the desire for female purity. If a.common man kills a common man, even by accident, he is executed, Japan not desiring murder; but Yeddo is crowded with bravoes who, for anything Sir R. Alcock could detect, take hunian life at will.
" These are the classes which furnish suitable types of that extinct species of the race in Europe, still remembered as Swashbueklers,'— swaggering, blustering bullies; many cowardly enough to strike an enemy in the back, or cut down an unarmed and inoffensive man ;—but also supplying numbers ever ready to fling their own lives away in ac- complishing a revenge, or carrying out the behests of their chief. They are all entitled to the privilege of two swords, rank and file, and are saluted by the unprivileged (professional, mercantile, and agricultural) as Sama, or lord. With a rolling straddle in his gait, reminding one of Mr. Kinglake's graphic description of the Janissary, and due to the same cause,—the heavy projecting blades at his waist, and the swaddling- clothes round his body,—the Japanese Samourai or Yaconin moves on in a very ungainly fashion, the hilts of his two swords at least a foot in advance of his person, very handy, to all appearance, for an enemy's grasp. Such a follow is a man to whom all peace-loving subjects and prudent people habitually give as wide a berth as they can ! Often drunk, and always insolent, he is to be met with in the quarters of the town where the tea-houses most abound ; or returning about dusk, from his day's debauch, with a red and bloated face, and not over steady on his legs, the terror of all the unarmed population and street-dogs. nappy lor the former, when he is content with trying the edge of a new sword on the quadrupeds ; and many a poor crippled animal is to be seen limping about slashed over the back, or with more hideous evidences of brutality. But at other times it is some coolie or inoffen- sive shopkeeper, who, coming unadvisedly between the wind and his nobility,' is just as mercilessly cut down at a blow."
The people cannot seize these men, and the police are afraid of the lords whose insignia the bravoes wear, and of the camara- derie which induces them to avenge each other at any cost. Life under such circumstances is not pleasant for the nine parts of society who are not yakonius, the populace, even in Yeddo, for example, always dreading to go abroad after dark. Then every law is enforced by death, and the people are drilled by terror into an abject obedience, of which Sir Rutherford Alcock gives one amusing, and many very shameful examples.
As for purity, the Japanese have adopted the oriental idea that the value of chastity is not moral but social, as preserving the family bond, and have carried out that theory to its logical conclusion. The wife who commits adultery is put to death, but with this single exception licence is unrestricted. Girls are sold by respectable parents for a few years of prostitution, then marry, pass under a strict law of chastity, and are received as modest and excellent members of society. Men seem under no restriction whatever. Prostitution is legalized, the pictures of leading prostitutes are exhibited in the great temple, " to honour them," and the whole land teems with a half-grotesque obscenity. Sir R. Alcock seems to doubt whether, after all, the women are not modest, and no doubt the habit of bathing naked in public does not prove the contrary. The notion that modesty is matter of clothes belongs only to cold climates, and to very recent times, the lower classes of Italians, for instance, till lately sleeping naked, and the Burmese, whose women are, on the whole, perhaps, the purest in Asia, being as careless in the matter of bathing as Japanese dames. But the rule about unmarried girls is fatal to the very existence either of modesty as a habit, or chastity as anything but a social con- venience, and must gradually brutalize society by destroying the possibility at once of real love, of healthy passion, and of instinc- tive respect for womanhood. Society can exist, and repeatedly has done so, without chastity ; but it cannot improve without it, or develop any of the higher and more complex advantages which should belong to high civilization. The extraordinary filth of Japan, too, which so permeates society that children's toys and schoolbooks must be carefully scrutinized before they are sent to England, must tend to keep up the passions at a level very fatal to the physical or mental development, even of orientals. Then as to truth, the Japanese lie habitually, without any sense of shame, officials, for example, when taxed with false- hood, remarking that their business is to obey orders, not to tell truth. To this day it would seem almost certain that the legal sovereign has never even heard of the European treaties, which he is officially held to have ratified, and no statement whatever from a Japanese official can be trusted, unless confirmed by cir- cumstantial or other evidence. A civilization which produces no personal manliness, no respect for truth, no reverence for human life, and no sense of the value of sexual purity, must be held to have failed in most of the objects for which human society exists.
2. The Government of Japan, apparently one of unparalleled complexity, is really simple, being an oligarchy complicated only by the efforts of the central Government to reduce it to something like civilized order. There was and is but one King, the Mikado., originally a powerful sovereign, but now kept—much like the long- haired Merovingians—a state prisoner in his own palace, yet invested with some legal power and excessive traditionary respect. He has, like those Merovingians, a mayor of the Palace, the Ziogoon, or Tycoon, who has a right apparently to all authority, but who practically passes his life in main- taining a system devised to keep the great nobles in order. These latter are the real rulers of the country, governing their estates with absolute power and by sheer brute force, their revenues from the soil enabling them to keep up small armies of soldiers, through whom they oppress or govern the provinces around them. Tar R. Alcock publishes in an appendix a kind of Japanese peerage; giving the revenues, fortresses, and official posttion.of all the greater peers. There are twenty-three of these Daimioss, whose revenues range from .€1.15,000 a year to £769,728, and of whom seventeen are more or less independent, and some dozens of smaller magnates, ranging from the lower sum down to seven and eight thousand a year. The greater magnates maintain a council around the Tycoon, and it is by the fluctuations of opinion in this council that the haute politique" of Japan is really carried on. There is no party, Sir R. Alcock inclines to think, in favour of the admission of foreigners, but one is afraid of their hostility, and the other is not. The former granted the treaty, as they thought, under menaces, but they, from the day the council discovered that Europe would not go to war without cause, the latter, or Conservative party, has been rapidly gaining ground. It is this party which succeeded in isolating the British settlement at Yokohama, which encouraged the various attempts at assassi- nating foreigners, and which has now broken up Yeddo, and apparently transferred the nominal government to the powerless hands of the Mikado and all real power to their own. Its secret object, thinks the British Minister, is so to disgust Europeans that Japan may return to its old isolation with new guarantees for retaining it in perpetuity. This party will never be favourable to foreign commerce, which they have intelligence enough to perceive would ultimately emancipate their people, unless, indeed, they find it excessively profitable to themselves. Hitherto, they have not found it so, the Tycoon absorbing all the duties, of which part belonged to the nobles, and intriguing to prevent open ports in territories under the immediate government of the peers. It is with this class our Government will ultimately have to deal, and the whole narrative leaves the impression that Japan is only to be opened in one of three ways—the reassertion by force of the Mikado's original power, using him as we used the Mogul ; the conquest of the country ; or alliance with two or three of the greater princes. The latter course would be the easiest, while the first will probably be the one ultimately adopted, if not by us directly, at least by our Anglo-Chinese allies.
We have noticed one " reflection " made by Sir Rutherford Alcock as deserving more than a passing word. We allude to chapter xi., which though devoted to Japanese affairs is really an able essay on the feeling of Asiatics towards Europeans. It would be difficult to find in English a clearer or more satisfactory account of the true relation of Asiatic and European.
" The rapid growth and progress of modern nations in Europe has left Asia so far behind, that the elder race has become as a child in the grasp of the younger, and incapable of any effective resistance in actual conflict. There is a dull consciousness of the fact in the Asiatic mind, and of the giant power wielded by the younger and still despised branches of the great human family. And only thus is the collateral fact to be accounted for, that no people or nation of Asiatic blood ever yield to the superior strength of the European, without a dogged and determined resistance, and a straggle often continued long after all hope of final suc- cess must have died out of their hearts. Like the Greeks of the Byzan- tine empire, and later, the polished but effeminate Italians of the middle ages, the Chinese and Japanese are brought in contact with races surging in upon them from unknown lands beyond the outer limits of their civilization—barbarians, in a word, far superior to themselves in bone, and thew, and sinew, in prowess and military tactics, but still barbarians,. and thus inferiors in all that constitutes superiority in their estimation in knowledge of their language, literature, religion, and philosophy—the only religion or philosophy they recognize as having a real existence or value. As Goths and Vandals could trample down and sweep before them any array the effeminate Byzantine Court could marshal in the field, so can we the hosts of China or Japan, though the latter makes preten- sions to be considered warlike. But the result is still the same. The triumph over their weaker frames and their ignorance of arms does not command any respect, or mental recognition of superiority. They bend their necks to superior force, but harden their hearts and console them- selves under defeat, by hoarding in secret a cumulative and rankling contempt for their conquerors."
There are exceptions to that rule, the Bengalee, for example, never having struggled at all ; but it is only from an overwhelm ing sense of the physical power of the stranger. The very man who crouches and fawns to the Englishman, and borrows his ways and acquires his learning, still holds that the Bengalee and not the European is the really civilized man. " God," said an old pundit to the writer one day, " has enabled you for some mysterious purpose to conquer the world, and sell cotton, and make pen-knives ; but what else can you do ?" In Japan the past and the present are more closely linked than in any country in Asia, except, perhaps, Arabia, and the Japanese, therefore, scorns while he dreads the intrusion of the foreigner,
who with dissonant habits and ways which seem to him savage, wants to teach him as well as control. That is the root of bit-
terness, and the fact that Sir Rutherford Alcock has detected it under all the forms in which Asiatic politeness addresses a great. official, speaks as well for his judgment as the rest of his book for his powers of observation.
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