AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPAN

AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPANBY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFISAuthor of “The Religions of Japan,” “The Japanese Nation in Evolution,” etc.ALL the world knows that Commodore Matthew C. Perry “opened Japan,” very much as one opens an exposition. He touched the button that set in operation the waiting wheels of a century or more of interior, intellectual preparation. It is not so well known that to President Millard Fillmore belongs the credit of organizing the expedition sent out in 1852, although it was William Alexander Graham, Secretary of the Navy, who brought up the subject in cabinet meeting.Other American makers of Japan lived before Perry. Our flag, covering Dutch ships, was mirrored in Nagasaki Bay in 1798. In 1837, S. Wells Williams, printer and diplomatist, who, in the American shipMorrison, fitted out by Mr. Charles W. King, sailed from Hong-Kong to return shipwrecked Japanese, was driven away from Uraga with cannon-fire and balls. From these waifs, by word of mouth, he learned the spoken language; he then translated the gospels into Japanese, and in 1852 acted as Perry’s interpreter and proposed “the favored nation” clause in the treaty.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 JAPANIn 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 allsubsequent 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 YORKExcept 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?WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFISOur first consul-general was Townsend Harris, merchant, and President of the Board of Education in New York City. In accepting President Pierce’s nomination, he changed his skies, but not his constant mind, and hardly his chair of instruction. This founder of the institution that became the College of the City of New York, during twenty-two months at Shimoda and in Yedo, taught Japan’s leading men the practical details of modern civilized intercourse. The hermits yielded, and opened five seaports and two cities to trade, residence, and the work of teachers, missionaries, and experts who made labor honorable. It was Harris who lifted the flood-gates of modernism, set the precedents, and fixed the limits of the later treaties with twenty nations. Even more, despite diplomatic limits, he discerned in the Japanese character a frankness and honesty that some of our newspapers have not yet discovered. Hence in Yedo, with a courage born of faith that fails not the true discerner, Harris, without a soldier, marine, or sailor, kept the stars and stripes flying over the American legation—the only one left in Yedo—when all the foreign envoys, despite big battalions and artillery, had struck their flags and fled to Yokohama, thus insulting a proud nation by their absence from its capital for nearly a decade. The popular Japanese title of Townsend Harris is “the nation’s friend.”CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE OPENING OF THE FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL IN JAPANHaving committed herself by treaty, Japan then had to make trade and toil honorable and develop the resources of the country, or else go the way of India, be prostrate like China, or fall into the maw of Russia.Where look for wealth? The soil was already worked to its full capacity as then known. Despite artificial checks to population, which had stood stationary for a century, the land seemed to cast out its human occupants. Famines, often carrying off two millions of people a year, desolated the land with appalling regularity. They were obliged to look to the mines and the precious metals, despite the double danger of a social revolution sure to be wrought from honoring men of pick and tools rather than of swords, and of the wrath of the gods and dragons that guarded jealously the treasures of the underworld.It was as Nicodemus by night that high-bred men, shuddering at the necessity of it, came to Mr. Harris to ask for American mining engineers to prospect for gold. In 1861, with appalling promptness, arrived Messrs. William Phipps Blake and Raphael Pumpelly. Then the frightful problem of etiquette at once upreared itself. Should they be received as mechanics in overalls or as subalterns in an embassy? The answer to the question referred to Mr. Harris was startling: “In America the President of the United States would receive them as his equals.”That settled it. The monetary equilibrium of the world was not disturbed then or since by Japan’s output of gold. Social and economic conditions, as well as lack of lodes prevented, but Pumpelly taught blasting, and incidentally lighted the fuse that blew up feudalism. Later, Professor Benjamin Lyman, with Harry Smith Monroe and others from America, explored, surveyed, and mapped Japan’s treasure-lands, saving the waste of millions in wild delusions.Pumpelly builded better than he knew, healing an age-long breach between honor and toil. Without knowing it, he ushered in a new industrial era. Townsend Harris was the glad sponsor of the missionaries, who for ten years were in effect the sole teachers of the nation in science, history, medicine, and statesmanship; for of Christianity, until 1872, the Japanese, knowing only the Portuguese and Spanish type, and refusing to jest at their scars, would have none.A TYPICAL STREET CONVEYANCE IN JAPAN BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF JINRIKISHASSome unseen power must have presided over the choice of the four American pioneer missionaries—Channing Moore Williams, Samuel Robbins Brown, James Curtis Hepburn, and Guido Fridolin Verbeck—who arrived on the soil in 1859, each one to live through forty years of altruistic toil. They seeded Japan with new thoughts and raised a regiment of trained men, with faces set toward the Occident. These serve, or have served, as van-leaders of reform and progress, not a few being in the high councils of the nation. Of the four pioneers, three, having been in China, soon got a grip on the native script and literature, which, like most things Japanese, is based on the Chinese. Dr. Guido Fridolin Verbeck, master of seven languages, became later chief government translator, adviser of the emperor, and the star preacher in Japanese. This “Americanized Dutchman,” educated in technical science at Delft, had at once the mind of an engineer and of a statesman. At Nagasaki he took hold of the boys, taught them the New Testament and the Constitution of the United States, and, to feudal and divided Japan, Christopher Martin Wieland’s poem, “Where is the German Fatherland?” Verbeck dictated what should be the languages for medicine (German), law (French), and education (English). He hewed out the channels of progress by urging that while students should be sent abroad in large numbers, foreign experts in all departments should be brought to Japan; by proposing an imperial embassy to go around the world, and by elaborating a scheme of national elementary education. Dr. Samuel Robbins Brown, the schoolmaster, intellectual father of the first American woman’s college chartered as such, at Elmira, New York, who had in 1847 brought the first Chinese students to America, introduced photography and raised a body of intellectuals. To-day a hundred Japanese lawyers, doctors, editors, ministers, and public men revere his name.In December, 1867, the older native statesmen, with long preparation, and the younger ones, with the new mind “brought from over the sea,” got possession of the imperial palace and person in Kioto, and began, in the boy mikado’s name, that series of far-reaching reforms that have made a new nation. In the new Government possibly half were pupils of Verbeck. His heart beat faster when in one of the five articles of the charter oath of the emperor in Kioto, the basis of the Constitution of 1889, it was sworn that“intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world in order to restore the foundations of the empire.” Leaving Nagasaki and going at once to headquarters, Verbeck secured the turning of the stream of students to America, where soon hundreds, mostly at New Brunswick, New Jersey, were, from 1866 onward, pounding at the gates of knowledge. Verbeck was then called to Tokio to be president of the Imperial University of Tokio and incidentally to be factotum of a government then in novelty and isolation. When the embassy set out to go around the world in 1872, Verbeck, who had suggested the idea, found that more than one half of its personnel had been his pupils.WILLIAM ALEXANDER GRAHAM, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY IN 1831From 1868 to 1900, in response to the Mikado’s invitation, about five thousand experts or assistants in every line of human achievement went to Japan, from master or ordinary mechanics, boatswains, and corporals to superintendents and professors. Their salaries ranged from day’s wages to a salary then exceeding that of the President of the United States. Of these, about twelve hundred were American teachers. Of all these foreign helpers (yatoi), called out under the charter oath, I had the honor to be the first appointed and on the ground.It was my good fortune to arrive in Fukui, Echizen, in 1871. I enjoyed the unique advantage of living in the far interior, in a daimio’s castle, of seeing feudalism in operation, and of being present. October 1871, at the solemn and impressive ceremonies at its fall and the transference of sovereignty to the emperor.There was as yet no national department of education. Perhaps it is no accident that, out of the province of Echizen, where public schools were first organized, was raised the Ninth Division of the army that took Port Arthur. The chemical laboratory, training-class of teachers, lecture-and recitation-rooms, equipped with blackboards and modern furniture, were in the actual “palace” occupied for two centuries by the Baron of Echizen, one of the seventeen great feudatories of the empire. As I had been a soldier in the Civil War, I was asked my opinions as to the value of forts in miniature then being built with trowel and clay. Almost the first call to apply my knowledge of chemistry and physics was to show the Japanese how, by the use of electric wires and fulminates, to blow up ships by submarine wires and torpedoes. The introduction at that time of chairs in the schools, and changes in method and habits of sitting, have during a generation elongated the legs of a nation, adding half an inch to the Japanese stature.Seeing the danger in a scheme of education of exclusive devotion to book-learning, and knowing the value of manual and technical training, I elaborated the plan of a technological school. The letter reached Tokio almost on the day that the first minister of education, Oki Takato, was appointed and the department was organized. Summoned by return messenger to the capital, I was about to begin with four professional chairs, but happily, with enlarged ideas, the Government organized a few months later on a larger scale the superb College of Engineering, in which such men as Dyer, Milne, Divers, and Ayrton taught, and such pupils as Takaminé, Shimosé, and Oda were graduated. Transferred to the Imperial University, I had the honor to serve during three years. I taught science by contract; but also ethics, philosophy, and literature voluntarily, in order to know the Japanese mind. Of my pupils, some entered the cabinet; others to-day occupy places among the highest in education, diplomacy, or the enterprises of the Government. One of these was the Marquis Komura, who, after winning laurels in London, Washington, and Peking, sat opposite Serjius De Witte, the Russian, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. Remembering his daily work in the classroom, I was not unprepared for his brilliant success. Against the Russian, he scored all points on the Manchurian question, which to-day is the pivot of politics in the Far East. Komura and Takahira, both ambassadors, the latter to Washington in 1905, had been my pupils, Komura during nearly three years.The missionaries were the pioneers of every good feature of civilization. In 1859, Hepburn opened the first dispensary in a land where there was no public hospital, or chimney, or newspaper, or milk-wagon, or stationary wash-stand, or any other than medieval devices of comfort. Public hygiene was scarcely known. The highways were full of sights of horror: a million outcasts, swarms of beggars, gamblers, lepers, smallpox patients moving freely abroad; eye-disorders, blindness, unmentionable diseases, and their victims; phallic shrines on the road, and phallic emblems freely exposed in the shops and at temple festivals; pilloried heads, gory execution-grounds, and blackened remains of judicial incineration. In the prisons, the apparatus of torture was elaborate and of infernal variety. Rotten humanity crowded the seats in Hepburn’s chapel, while about him were a dozen or so of the future physicians and surgeons now famous. To-day Japan has a thousand hospitals and a faculty of world-wide fame, while no nation excels her in public hygiene.WILLIAM H. JAQUES, WHO INTRODUCED STEEL-MAKING PROCESSES INTO JAPANESE WAR-SHIPSLong before the government hospitals or officially trained nurses were heard of, Dr. John Berry, a medical missionary, now of Worcester, Massachusetts, the father also of prison reform in Japan, had taught women nurses and begun the development of a noble army of white-robed ministering angels. Indeed, the first message of Christendom has been to womanhood, and gratefully have the Japanese made acknowledgment. As early as 1861, Mrs. James Curtis Hepburn opened at Yokohama a school for girls; she was followed by Miss Mary Kidder of Brooklyn. In 1871 was founded the Woman’s Union American Home, “on the Bluff,” in which hundreds of girls received the education that has made a multitude of homes in which the social equality of husband and wife is a reality. This home has now a hundred missionary duplicates. In 1872 Miss Margaret Clark Griffis began thefirst government school for girls, out of which have developed the Peeresses’ School and the Tokio Normal School, which have educated thousands of female teachers. It was an American woman missionary, Mrs. James Ballagh, who in 1863 first demonstrated, with two boys, the capacity of the Japanese voice to sing our scale. Since that time, besides Mr. Mason’s training of pupils in the public schools, pianos and brass bands have become common. Mr. Edward House, with a native orchestra in Tokio, gave an oratorio beautifully, and now in New York Mrs. Takaori is singing our airs.A GROUP OF STUDENTS TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIOHow, in a brief article, can one recite what American women have done in education, from peasant hut to emperor’s palace, or tell of statesmen and diplomatists like E. Pershine Smith, John W. Foster, Henry Willard Denison, Durham White Stevens, John Hyde de Forest, the Rt. Rev. Merriman C. Harris; of Charles P. Bryan, who organized the national postal system; of men of finance, like George Burchell Williams; of art experts, like Ernest F. Fenollosa; of archæologists, like Edward S. Morse; of engineers, like William H. Jaques; of surgeons, like Duane B. Simmons and Albert Sydney Ashmead; of translators, like Daniel Crosby Greene or Nathan Brown, the latter by himself alone, after seven years’ study, making a superb version of the New Testament, and of a host of others of whose work it shames the writer not to speak? Lack of space forbids even mention in detail of the great missionary enterprise, with its university, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, and an army of high-souled and cultivated men and women. It has been possible to name scarcely any others than the pioneers. Yet without the direct influence of their foreign Christian teachers, and their practical training received in the sessions, debates, committee and public meetings of the church-congregations, the large measure of representative and self-government, already reached in constitutional Japan, would have been impossible. Only in this way can we explain the large proportion of active members of the Christian Church in the Imperial Diet and local assemblies.MISS MARGARET GRIFFIS AND HER PUPILSMiss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in JapanIt was ours to be servants only, and joyful was the service. After forty-seven years’ close acquaintance with these people, I am unable to trace any inferiority in intellect, or any fundamental difference in human nature, character, or brainpower in the Japanese, as compared with Occidentals. Being a student of history and nations, I believe in their honesty and morality. All that we did was to show the way. The capacity was already theirs. Nevertheless, as Verbeck said, “New Japan came from beyond the sea.” To an Englishman we leave the final verdict.—“New Japan is the creation of the foreign employé.” Japan’s true line of advance has really been less in exterior brilliancy than in interior reconstruction, in coöperation with her foreign helpers; and these, in overwhelming preponderance, whether of numbers or personality, have been Americans.RESIDENCE OF TOWNSEND HARRIS AT SHIMODA (1835–1838)

AMERICAN MAKERS OF THE NEW JAPANBY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFISAuthor of “The Religions of Japan,” “The Japanese Nation in Evolution,” etc.

BY WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

Author of “The Religions of Japan,” “The Japanese Nation in Evolution,” etc.

ALL the world knows that Commodore Matthew C. Perry “opened Japan,” very much as one opens an exposition. He touched the button that set in operation the waiting wheels of a century or more of interior, intellectual preparation. It is not so well known that to President Millard Fillmore belongs the credit of organizing the expedition sent out in 1852, although it was William Alexander Graham, Secretary of the Navy, who brought up the subject in cabinet meeting.

Other American makers of Japan lived before Perry. Our flag, covering Dutch ships, was mirrored in Nagasaki Bay in 1798. In 1837, S. Wells Williams, printer and diplomatist, who, in the American shipMorrison, fitted out by Mr. Charles W. King, sailed from Hong-Kong to return shipwrecked Japanese, was driven away from Uraga with cannon-fire and balls. From these waifs, by word of mouth, he learned the spoken language; he then translated the gospels into Japanese, and in 1852 acted as Perry’s interpreter and proposed “the favored nation” clause in the treaty.

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 allsubsequent 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?

WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

Our first consul-general was Townsend Harris, merchant, and President of the Board of Education in New York City. In accepting President Pierce’s nomination, he changed his skies, but not his constant mind, and hardly his chair of instruction. This founder of the institution that became the College of the City of New York, during twenty-two months at Shimoda and in Yedo, taught Japan’s leading men the practical details of modern civilized intercourse. The hermits yielded, and opened five seaports and two cities to trade, residence, and the work of teachers, missionaries, and experts who made labor honorable. It was Harris who lifted the flood-gates of modernism, set the precedents, and fixed the limits of the later treaties with twenty nations. Even more, despite diplomatic limits, he discerned in the Japanese character a frankness and honesty that some of our newspapers have not yet discovered. Hence in Yedo, with a courage born of faith that fails not the true discerner, Harris, without a soldier, marine, or sailor, kept the stars and stripes flying over the American legation—the only one left in Yedo—when all the foreign envoys, despite big battalions and artillery, had struck their flags and fled to Yokohama, thus insulting a proud nation by their absence from its capital for nearly a decade. The popular Japanese title of Townsend Harris is “the nation’s friend.”

CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE OPENING OF THE FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL IN JAPAN

Having committed herself by treaty, Japan then had to make trade and toil honorable and develop the resources of the country, or else go the way of India, be prostrate like China, or fall into the maw of Russia.

Where look for wealth? The soil was already worked to its full capacity as then known. Despite artificial checks to population, which had stood stationary for a century, the land seemed to cast out its human occupants. Famines, often carrying off two millions of people a year, desolated the land with appalling regularity. They were obliged to look to the mines and the precious metals, despite the double danger of a social revolution sure to be wrought from honoring men of pick and tools rather than of swords, and of the wrath of the gods and dragons that guarded jealously the treasures of the underworld.

It was as Nicodemus by night that high-bred men, shuddering at the necessity of it, came to Mr. Harris to ask for American mining engineers to prospect for gold. In 1861, with appalling promptness, arrived Messrs. William Phipps Blake and Raphael Pumpelly. Then the frightful problem of etiquette at once upreared itself. Should they be received as mechanics in overalls or as subalterns in an embassy? The answer to the question referred to Mr. Harris was startling: “In America the President of the United States would receive them as his equals.”

That settled it. The monetary equilibrium of the world was not disturbed then or since by Japan’s output of gold. Social and economic conditions, as well as lack of lodes prevented, but Pumpelly taught blasting, and incidentally lighted the fuse that blew up feudalism. Later, Professor Benjamin Lyman, with Harry Smith Monroe and others from America, explored, surveyed, and mapped Japan’s treasure-lands, saving the waste of millions in wild delusions.

Pumpelly builded better than he knew, healing an age-long breach between honor and toil. Without knowing it, he ushered in a new industrial era. Townsend Harris was the glad sponsor of the missionaries, who for ten years were in effect the sole teachers of the nation in science, history, medicine, and statesmanship; for of Christianity, until 1872, the Japanese, knowing only the Portuguese and Spanish type, and refusing to jest at their scars, would have none.

A TYPICAL STREET CONVEYANCE IN JAPAN BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION OF JINRIKISHAS

Some unseen power must have presided over the choice of the four American pioneer missionaries—Channing Moore Williams, Samuel Robbins Brown, James Curtis Hepburn, and Guido Fridolin Verbeck—who arrived on the soil in 1859, each one to live through forty years of altruistic toil. They seeded Japan with new thoughts and raised a regiment of trained men, with faces set toward the Occident. These serve, or have served, as van-leaders of reform and progress, not a few being in the high councils of the nation. Of the four pioneers, three, having been in China, soon got a grip on the native script and literature, which, like most things Japanese, is based on the Chinese. Dr. Guido Fridolin Verbeck, master of seven languages, became later chief government translator, adviser of the emperor, and the star preacher in Japanese. This “Americanized Dutchman,” educated in technical science at Delft, had at once the mind of an engineer and of a statesman. At Nagasaki he took hold of the boys, taught them the New Testament and the Constitution of the United States, and, to feudal and divided Japan, Christopher Martin Wieland’s poem, “Where is the German Fatherland?” Verbeck dictated what should be the languages for medicine (German), law (French), and education (English). He hewed out the channels of progress by urging that while students should be sent abroad in large numbers, foreign experts in all departments should be brought to Japan; by proposing an imperial embassy to go around the world, and by elaborating a scheme of national elementary education. Dr. Samuel Robbins Brown, the schoolmaster, intellectual father of the first American woman’s college chartered as such, at Elmira, New York, who had in 1847 brought the first Chinese students to America, introduced photography and raised a body of intellectuals. To-day a hundred Japanese lawyers, doctors, editors, ministers, and public men revere his name.

In December, 1867, the older native statesmen, with long preparation, and the younger ones, with the new mind “brought from over the sea,” got possession of the imperial palace and person in Kioto, and began, in the boy mikado’s name, that series of far-reaching reforms that have made a new nation. In the new Government possibly half were pupils of Verbeck. His heart beat faster when in one of the five articles of the charter oath of the emperor in Kioto, the basis of the Constitution of 1889, it was sworn that“intellect and learning should be sought for throughout the world in order to restore the foundations of the empire.” Leaving Nagasaki and going at once to headquarters, Verbeck secured the turning of the stream of students to America, where soon hundreds, mostly at New Brunswick, New Jersey, were, from 1866 onward, pounding at the gates of knowledge. Verbeck was then called to Tokio to be president of the Imperial University of Tokio and incidentally to be factotum of a government then in novelty and isolation. When the embassy set out to go around the world in 1872, Verbeck, who had suggested the idea, found that more than one half of its personnel had been his pupils.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER GRAHAM, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY IN 1831

From 1868 to 1900, in response to the Mikado’s invitation, about five thousand experts or assistants in every line of human achievement went to Japan, from master or ordinary mechanics, boatswains, and corporals to superintendents and professors. Their salaries ranged from day’s wages to a salary then exceeding that of the President of the United States. Of these, about twelve hundred were American teachers. Of all these foreign helpers (yatoi), called out under the charter oath, I had the honor to be the first appointed and on the ground.

It was my good fortune to arrive in Fukui, Echizen, in 1871. I enjoyed the unique advantage of living in the far interior, in a daimio’s castle, of seeing feudalism in operation, and of being present. October 1871, at the solemn and impressive ceremonies at its fall and the transference of sovereignty to the emperor.

There was as yet no national department of education. Perhaps it is no accident that, out of the province of Echizen, where public schools were first organized, was raised the Ninth Division of the army that took Port Arthur. The chemical laboratory, training-class of teachers, lecture-and recitation-rooms, equipped with blackboards and modern furniture, were in the actual “palace” occupied for two centuries by the Baron of Echizen, one of the seventeen great feudatories of the empire. As I had been a soldier in the Civil War, I was asked my opinions as to the value of forts in miniature then being built with trowel and clay. Almost the first call to apply my knowledge of chemistry and physics was to show the Japanese how, by the use of electric wires and fulminates, to blow up ships by submarine wires and torpedoes. The introduction at that time of chairs in the schools, and changes in method and habits of sitting, have during a generation elongated the legs of a nation, adding half an inch to the Japanese stature.

Seeing the danger in a scheme of education of exclusive devotion to book-learning, and knowing the value of manual and technical training, I elaborated the plan of a technological school. The letter reached Tokio almost on the day that the first minister of education, Oki Takato, was appointed and the department was organized. Summoned by return messenger to the capital, I was about to begin with four professional chairs, but happily, with enlarged ideas, the Government organized a few months later on a larger scale the superb College of Engineering, in which such men as Dyer, Milne, Divers, and Ayrton taught, and such pupils as Takaminé, Shimosé, and Oda were graduated. Transferred to the Imperial University, I had the honor to serve during three years. I taught science by contract; but also ethics, philosophy, and literature voluntarily, in order to know the Japanese mind. Of my pupils, some entered the cabinet; others to-day occupy places among the highest in education, diplomacy, or the enterprises of the Government. One of these was the Marquis Komura, who, after winning laurels in London, Washington, and Peking, sat opposite Serjius De Witte, the Russian, at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. Remembering his daily work in the classroom, I was not unprepared for his brilliant success. Against the Russian, he scored all points on the Manchurian question, which to-day is the pivot of politics in the Far East. Komura and Takahira, both ambassadors, the latter to Washington in 1905, had been my pupils, Komura during nearly three years.

The missionaries were the pioneers of every good feature of civilization. In 1859, Hepburn opened the first dispensary in a land where there was no public hospital, or chimney, or newspaper, or milk-wagon, or stationary wash-stand, or any other than medieval devices of comfort. Public hygiene was scarcely known. The highways were full of sights of horror: a million outcasts, swarms of beggars, gamblers, lepers, smallpox patients moving freely abroad; eye-disorders, blindness, unmentionable diseases, and their victims; phallic shrines on the road, and phallic emblems freely exposed in the shops and at temple festivals; pilloried heads, gory execution-grounds, and blackened remains of judicial incineration. In the prisons, the apparatus of torture was elaborate and of infernal variety. Rotten humanity crowded the seats in Hepburn’s chapel, while about him were a dozen or so of the future physicians and surgeons now famous. To-day Japan has a thousand hospitals and a faculty of world-wide fame, while no nation excels her in public hygiene.

WILLIAM H. JAQUES, WHO INTRODUCED STEEL-MAKING PROCESSES INTO JAPANESE WAR-SHIPS

Long before the government hospitals or officially trained nurses were heard of, Dr. John Berry, a medical missionary, now of Worcester, Massachusetts, the father also of prison reform in Japan, had taught women nurses and begun the development of a noble army of white-robed ministering angels. Indeed, the first message of Christendom has been to womanhood, and gratefully have the Japanese made acknowledgment. As early as 1861, Mrs. James Curtis Hepburn opened at Yokohama a school for girls; she was followed by Miss Mary Kidder of Brooklyn. In 1871 was founded the Woman’s Union American Home, “on the Bluff,” in which hundreds of girls received the education that has made a multitude of homes in which the social equality of husband and wife is a reality. This home has now a hundred missionary duplicates. In 1872 Miss Margaret Clark Griffis began thefirst government school for girls, out of which have developed the Peeresses’ School and the Tokio Normal School, which have educated thousands of female teachers. It was an American woman missionary, Mrs. James Ballagh, who in 1863 first demonstrated, with two boys, the capacity of the Japanese voice to sing our scale. Since that time, besides Mr. Mason’s training of pupils in the public schools, pianos and brass bands have become common. Mr. Edward House, with a native orchestra in Tokio, gave an oratorio beautifully, and now in New York Mrs. Takaori is singing our airs.

A GROUP OF STUDENTS TAUGHT BY DR. GRIFFIS IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKIO

How, in a brief article, can one recite what American women have done in education, from peasant hut to emperor’s palace, or tell of statesmen and diplomatists like E. Pershine Smith, John W. Foster, Henry Willard Denison, Durham White Stevens, John Hyde de Forest, the Rt. Rev. Merriman C. Harris; of Charles P. Bryan, who organized the national postal system; of men of finance, like George Burchell Williams; of art experts, like Ernest F. Fenollosa; of archæologists, like Edward S. Morse; of engineers, like William H. Jaques; of surgeons, like Duane B. Simmons and Albert Sydney Ashmead; of translators, like Daniel Crosby Greene or Nathan Brown, the latter by himself alone, after seven years’ study, making a superb version of the New Testament, and of a host of others of whose work it shames the writer not to speak? Lack of space forbids even mention in detail of the great missionary enterprise, with its university, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, and an army of high-souled and cultivated men and women. It has been possible to name scarcely any others than the pioneers. Yet without the direct influence of their foreign Christian teachers, and their practical training received in the sessions, debates, committee and public meetings of the church-congregations, the large measure of representative and self-government, already reached in constitutional Japan, would have been impossible. Only in this way can we explain the large proportion of active members of the Christian Church in the Imperial Diet and local assemblies.

MISS MARGARET GRIFFIS AND HER PUPILSMiss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in Japan

MISS MARGARET GRIFFIS AND HER PUPILS

Miss Griffis was the first American woman teacher in the government school for Samurai girls in Japan

It was ours to be servants only, and joyful was the service. After forty-seven years’ close acquaintance with these people, I am unable to trace any inferiority in intellect, or any fundamental difference in human nature, character, or brainpower in the Japanese, as compared with Occidentals. Being a student of history and nations, I believe in their honesty and morality. All that we did was to show the way. The capacity was already theirs. Nevertheless, as Verbeck said, “New Japan came from beyond the sea.” To an Englishman we leave the final verdict.—“New Japan is the creation of the foreign employé.” Japan’s true line of advance has really been less in exterior brilliancy than in interior reconstruction, in coöperation with her foreign helpers; and these, in overwhelming preponderance, whether of numbers or personality, have been Americans.

RESIDENCE OF TOWNSEND HARRIS AT SHIMODA (1835–1838)

Back to Index Next