Part 26

In Japan the law is that all citizens are under the obligation of military service for a certain term of years, and therefore the necessity of complying with its provisions is as great as that of the payment of taxes. In practice the duty is accepted as just as much a matter of course as any other feature of citizenship. It was adopted at the outset and no one seriously offers an objection to it. He would be deemed a most unpatriotic man who did not revel in the thought that he might be chosen to serve his country, and every man in Japan rejoices to think that he knows how to handle a weapon and take his share of the task which may some day be that of the Emperor’s loyal subjects to defend the island empire against a foe. Mere drilling and parades are not so much valued as rifle practice, fencing, the bayonet exercise, skirmishing, and gymnastics. Work begins at 6 A.M. and with little appreciable interval, never more than five minutes, goes on until the midday meal is served. Afterwards it is resumed for four hours, then bath, supper, recreation, and bed betimes. The officers share in all the exercises of the men, very little being left to non-commissioned officers, sergeants, and corporals. The officers are always on duty. It is in this way that complete harmony has been established between all ranks and the dread of a martinet sergeant is unknown among the men in Japanese barracks. Promotion from the ranks, however, is not possible as no one is eligible for a commission who has not entered himself in the first place as a candidate, and to do so he must be either a graduate of the Cadet school, or have graduated from a middle school licensed or recognised by the Government, public or private, or be able to show that his education has brought him up to the standard needed in order to obtain the certificate granted on leaving a middle School. And in either of the two latter cases the candidate must have a letter from the Commanding officer of the regiment he wishes to join, signifying that officer’s willingness to accept him eventually as an officer in that regiment.

As soon as he is accepted as a candidate he joins his regiment _as a private_, spending one year in the ranks as an “officer candidate,” thus gaining a practical acquaintance with all the duties of a common soldier, and then he is sent for one year more of study to the Military College in Tokio. Next he returns to his regiment as an aspirant, to learn the duties of a subaltern, and at last, when about two years and a half have elapsed from the time when he first entered as a candidate, he is, if approved of at a meeting of the officers of the regiment, accepted and commissioned as a sub-lieutenant. He can choose whichever arm he prefers, when he goes to the Military College, as there are departments for infantry, cavalry, field artillery, fortress artillery, Engineers, and military train. He may select his own regiment, subject to the consent of the commanding officer of that regiment, and should the number of candidates exceed the number of vacancies the choice falls on those who have won most marks, in rotation. Every year on the 1st of December the batches of candidate officers are distributed to the regiments, as privates. They receive their uniforms, food, arms, etc., from the State but no money allowance. They must drill and go through their exercises just like other men in their company, but they enjoy certain privileges, for example, they have special rooms in barracks, and mess with the officers, this association with their superiors in rank being regarded as part of their education. During the year they may be promoted to lance-corporal or non-commissioned officer grade, and they receive lessons in military science from the regimental instructors.

The Military College stands on a wide plateau in Tokio, at Ichigaya, where there is excellent air, and abundance of space. The students are divided into three companies each under the command of a captain of infantry. Each company is in six sections, of twenty-five to thirty students each, a lieutenant of infantry in charge of each section. The studies prescribed are the same for all arms—viz. Tactics, Artillery, Science, Fortification, Topography, Military administration, Field hygiene and farriery, Foreign languages, Surveying, and Practical work. For exercise the students have drill (distinct for each arm), gymnastics, fencing, sabre exercise, riding, and shooting. Study and exercise together keep the youths at work the whole day, save for half-an-hour after supper, when they unbend. The school year begins on the 1st of December, to agree with conscription arrangements, and the first examination is in April or May, the second in September or October. At the end of October there are annual manœuvres, and the graduation ceremony is in November, when the Emperor makes a point of being present. There is a Military staff college, designed to give further instruction in the higher branches of military science to junior officers of promise. Its students are lieutenants and sub-lieutenants of all arms who have been at least two years with their regiments or battalions, and whose physical health, intellectual qualifications, morals, diligence, and general conduct have shown them to be suitable recipients of the higher training. Here the course is for three years, and for about ten weeks the students are with regiments different from their own arm, participating in the annual manœuvres. Graduates receive diplomas, and a badge which they wear like a medal, and one year after graduation they are eligible for staff appointments, instructorships, and other more or less coveted posts. Artillery and Engineer Lieutenants are eligible for the College of Artillery and Engineering, wherein special instruction is given on subjects required in these two arms, the course including strategy, equitation, mathematics, chemistry, drawing, and foreign languages. At the gunnery school for fortress artillery, and for field artillery, practical instruction is given for periods of two or three months to students who comprise captains and lieutenants from each of the field artillery regiments, or of fortress artillery, or they are lieutenants or sub-lieutenants who have just graduated from the College. At the cavalry training school the course lasts eleven months, and includes practical testing of all sorts of riding material and harness. It may, in fact, be claimed that the system of military instruction in the army of Japan is as complete as that of the armies of Europe, but the government still sends annually some dozens of promising young officers abroad to perfect themselves in their studies in the Occident.

The value of the system of military education on which Japan relied for her safety was amply demonstrated in the war with Russia which came to an end in the autumn of 1905, having lasted a year and a half. The negotiations which had been proceeding throughout the year 1903 concerning Korea and Manchuria proved barren of satisfactory result, and being convinced that nothing more could be hoped for in the shape of a pacific settlement of the points in dispute, while on the other hand Russia was protracting the discussion only to gain time for further military preparations, the Tokio Government at last announced through the Japanese Minister at St Petersburg the rupture of diplomatic relations, on the 6th of February 1904, and forthwith commenced hostilities. At the outset the operations were principally of a naval character, designed to cripple the Russian fleet and make the landing of troops on the coast of Korea and Manchuria secure, the first land skirmish taking place at Cheng-ju, in Northern Korea, on the 28th of March. Wiju was occupied on the 6th of April, and a three days’ encounter at the river Yalu ended on the 1st of May in the complete defeat of the Russians under General Sassulitch by General Kuroki, and the capture of Kiu-lien-cheng. Up to this stage the operations in the field had been under the control of General Kuroki, but in May Marshal Oyama arrived from Tokio to take supreme command of the armies in Manchuria, and a series of important engagements then took place, notably the storming of Nanshan near Kinchau, close to Port Arthur, which opened the way to the investment of that fortress, and the occupation of Feng-hwang-cheng and Dalny. The Russian General Kuropatkin sought to relieve the growing pressure on Port Arthur by sending an army southward through the Liao-tung peninsula, but Marshal Oyama sent General Oku to meet it and a desperate battle was fought at Wa-fang-kou and Telissu, adjoining villages to the north of Kinchau, on 14th and 15th June, and ten days later a beginning was made with the attack on the fortress on the Regent’s Sword which nine years before Marshal Oyama had taken from the Chinese. The same month he was personally engaged with the First and Third armies in the mountainous region between Feng-hwang-cheng and Liao-Yang, where severe fighting occurred at the passes in the Mo-tien-ling, Feng-shui-ling and other ranges, on the route to the capital of Manchuria. Kaiping, on the coast of the Gulf of Liao-tung, was captured on the 9th July, and a week afterwards a determined attempt on the Japanese positions at Mo-tien-ling was repulsed, with great slaughter. The second Japanese army forced back the Russians on Ta-shi-chiao, when they again sought to break through to the South, and at Port Arthur itself there was a severe struggle for the possession of Wolf Hill, ending in a complete success for the Japanese forces. Meanwhile General Oku was executing Marshal Oyama’s plan of campaign in the direction of Newchwang, and that port and Haicheng were in Japanese hands by the 3rd of August. Port Arthur’s outer defences fell at about the same date, and for five days, from the 19th to the 24th of that month, a fierce attack was delivered on the fortress, while at the same time the assault of Liao-Yang, which proved to be a ten days’ affair altogether, was begun on the 24th of August and lasted well into September. In that long and terrible contest there were more than 20,000 casualties on both sides, and during its progress the assault on Port Arthur was renewed with tremendous energy, from the 27th to the end of August. A week’s heavy fighting again took place from the 19th to the 26th September at Port Arthur, and meanwhile Marshal Oyama had been developing his advance on Mukden, at that time the headquarters of the Russians, and the ancient seat of the Manchu dynasty. General Kuropatkin announced on the 2nd of October that he was strong enough to attack, and a Russian advance actually began, leading to the series of battles at the Sha-ho or Sand River, in mid-October, and ending in a Russian retreat to the northward with a loss of forty guns. The fighting continued intermittently for many weeks, the Russians losing on an average three to one Japanese. At Port Arthur the assailants took 203-metre Hill on the 30th of November, and fort after fort fell during December, until on the 1st of January 1905 the surrender of the fortress was proposed by General Stoessel and by General Nogi accepted. Severe battles took place subsequently in Manchuria, including that of Hei-kau-tai, from the 25th to the 29th of January, when the Russians under Gripenberg attacked the Japanese left but were hotly repulsed, and Mistchenko’s raid on Newchwang,—the old city,—brought about severe fighting in that vicinity, but in March the operations against Mukden terminated in a clear victory on the 10th, and the Russian forces fell back to the northward. Tieh-ling was taken six days later, and on the 17th General Kuropatkin was superseded by Linievitch. Kai-yuen was next to fall into Oyama’s hands, and though there was fighting on the 18th and 19th to the north of Kai-yuen, nothing serious was afterwards attempted as the peace negotiations had been commenced at Washington.

Marshal Oyama returned to Tokio in December, and resumed his post of Chief of Staff. He holds the Grand Order of Merit and the Golden Kite, and, like Marshal Yamagata and Admiral Togo, received the British Order of Merit in 1906 from King Edward VII., to the great joy of his fellow-countrymen throughout Japan.

XVI

FUKUSAWA YUKICHI

No list purporting to be that of the Makers of Modern Japan would be complete were the name of Fukusawa Yukichi, the pioneer of Western education in his own land, to be omitted. His claims to remembrance are manifold and irrefutable, not the least of them being his right to be esteemed the founder of the leading Japanese journal, the _Jiji Shimpo_, of Tokio. But his fame will rest chiefly on his achievement in establishing the Kei-o-gi-juku College, wherein a large percentage of the leading men of the Japan of to-day graduated, and by not a few of whom he is revered as having been in no small degree the architect of their fortunes.

Mr Fukusawa,—as he preferred to remain despite the offer of a peerage in his later years,—was born in Osaka, on the 12th of December 1834, that being the year which corresponds to the fifth of the Tempo era, and while yet an infant was taken to his father’s native province of Buzen, in Kiushiu, the family residence being in the town of Nakatsu, a port on the north-east coast of that island. The elder Fukusawa had been staying at Osaka for a time in the service of his feudal chieftain the lord of Buzen. Yukichi dwelt at home, pursuing the customary studies of youths of his age, but with a decided bent towards foreign literature, until in the first year of the Genji period (1854), he went to Nagasaki, and there began the study of Dutch. Prior to this he had been conspicuous as a hard-working scholar in Chinese, which to the Japanese was then, and is still, what Greek and Latin are to us. Yukichi was a whole year at Nagasaki, and then he removed to Osaka, and became a pupil of the celebrated doctor of medicine Ogata Ko-an, under whose guidance he continued the study of the Dutch tongue, and in 1858, the fifth year of the An-sei era, he went to Yedo, and began to impart to a few beginners the knowledge he had thus far acquired of the foreign language. It must be remembered that during Japan’s long seclusion from the rest of the world there were always a few Dutchmen dwelling at Nagasaki, and that Dutch was, as a consequence of that isolation, the only foreign tongue spoken down to the advent of Commodore Perry in 1853. Although by 1858 people of other nations had begun to make their appearance in the country, English was as yet almost an unknown tongue, and Dutch was still the only medium of communication with the Occident.

In Yedo Mr Fukusawa occupied quarters in a mansion at Teppodzu which belonged to his feudal chieftain the lord Okudaira of Buzen, and it was while the scholars were immersed in their study of Dutch works that the opening of Yokohama to foreign trade brought about a change in their ideas, and led their tutor to enlarge the field of his own researches. For by the year 1859 the treaties with five foreign powers had been concluded, and the first steps were taken by Japan to fully acquaint herself with what had been the progress of other nations during the period of her voluntary severance of all communication with them. Yukichi was only twenty-five years old when he paid his first visit to an open port and saw something of the British people of whose characteristics he had read a great deal but had had previously no personal experience. He had at that time no knowledge whatever of English as a language, but he set himself diligently to work, and with the aid of a dictionary compiled in English and Dutch he sought, by private study, to master the difficulties of a tongue which he perceived would afford him the key to learning of the kind that his ambitions prompted him to seek. It was impossible at that time for him to procure an English teacher, or in all probability it would have been his choice to obtain his information direct rather than by the roundabout fashion in which he was compelled to acquire it—by Dutch intervention, as it were,—and, as it was, the burden of the task of procuring a competent knowledge of so complex a language as ours was rendered vastly more onerous by the nature of the method that he was driven to adopt in his studies. It is due to the memory of this eminent scholar to declare that he surmounted all the obstacles in his path and became the first of Japanese teachers of the Western tongue.

But in the meantime, towards the close of 1859, he sailed for the United States of America, in the suite of Kimura, the lord of the province of Settsu, who was despatched on a mission to America by the Government of the Shogun. The party voyaged in the little man-of-war _Kan-riu-maru_, commanded by Katsu, the feudal lord of Awa, and Yukichi was in the United States for some months. The following year he returned to his own land, and his first act was to publish in book form a translation of a work which he had brought with him from the other side of the Pacific. This was the beginning of a long series of similar educational works from his pen for which Japan is deeply indebted to him.

In the year 1861 Mr Fukusawa voyaged to Europe on a British man-of-war, being entrusted at that time with a government mission to make literary researches, and he travelled through England, Holland, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal. On his return to Japan in the ensuing year he translated and published many of the English and other books which he had brought back with him, thereby adding immeasurably to the store of information then possessed by his countrymen on the subject of foreign lands and peoples. After occupying himself in this useful work more or less until 1867 he was despatched in that, the third year of the Kei-o era, to the United States, taking his passage this time in an American mail-boat for San Francisco. His object accomplished, he returned to Yedo just at the beginning of the Meiji period, and established in 1868 the College with which his name will for ever be associated.

The Kei-o Gi-juku school was first set up in the temple of Shinsenza, in the Shiba quarter of the capital, but in the fourth of Meiji (1871), it was transferred to more spacious and convenient premises at Mita, still in the Shiba district, the curriculum including law, mathematics, and political economy. Not less than 14,000 students claim to have passed through this college, and at the present time fully 2500 are entered on its books.

It is impossible to convey an adequate idea in so many words of the extent of Mr Fukusawa’s influence and the share which he had in building up the fabric of modern Japan, for at one time and another by far the major portion of her leading men derived their education either by direct training at his school or by the perusal and study of the English works which he translated. He was an ardent advocate of the early opening of the Diet, and was a resolute opponent of those ancient customs that tended to hinder Japan’s progress, strongly insisting, for one thing, on monogamy and the equality of rights of the sexes, having accomplished much in his lifetime towards raising the status of womanhood throughout the Japanese dominions. He vigorously opposed Confucianism in his “General laws of the doctrines of Morality,” a work which had for its primary object the enforcement of the principle of the independence and justification of the right of prudent self-government of man.

The value of Mr Fukusawa’s work was enhanced by the circumstance that it was perseveringly carried on in spite of opposition and almost contumely, and in days when the utility of a sound commercial education could not be discerned, for the samurai abhorred of all things the contamination of trade, and those who devoted themselves to the acquisition of other than classical knowledge, equally with those who might seek to impart it, were openly scoffed at. It has been pointed out with much force by one of his contemporaries that long before the Jo-I and Kai-koku parties in the State had adjusted their differences concerning the retention or abandonment of a policy of isolation, Mr Fukusawa was enjoining on his pupils the benefits to be derived from a study of Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” and that while feudalism was still in the ascendant his students were deep in the mysteries of the standard work on “Representative Government” by John Stuart Mill. The greater the opposition that he encountered, the more determined was Mr Fukusawa to fulfil the task which he had set himself, and he no doubt imbibed during his stay in America not a few ideas relative to the spread of education that were of use to him later in life. Mr Fukusawa seemed to be marked out for the post of Minister of Education whenever that post might fall vacant, but he consistently declined to take office, preferring to carry on his school rather than to aim at rank and station. And when it is remembered that he was mentor to half the statesmen who have risen to power in the Meiji era, the extraordinary influence that he exerted indirectly on the affairs of his country will readily be comprehended.

Mr Fukusawa died in 1900, and his second son Sutejiro, who—together with his elder brother, Mr Fukuzawa Ichitaro,—went to America in 1883, to prosecute his studies, and entered at Yale University, remaining there until 1890, now edits the _Jiji Shimpo_ in Tokio, and married the daughter of Viscount Hayashi, the Japanese Ambassador to Great Britain.

XVII

MARQUIS KIDO KOIN