The Narrative of a Japanese; What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years
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The narrative of a Japanese; what he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. By Joseph Heco. Edited by James Murdoch THE NARRATIVE OF A JAPANESE. THE NARRATIVE OF A JAPANESE; What he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. BY JOSEPH HECO. Edited BY JAMES MURDOCH, M.A. VOL. I. The narrative of a Japanese; what he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. By Joseph Heco. Edited by James Murdoch http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.113 (FROM THE TIME OF HIS BEING CASTAWAY IN 1850 DOWN TO THE FIGHT OF SHIMONOSEKI.) PRINTED BY THE YOKOHAMA PRINTING & PUBLISHING CO., LT'd. INTRODUCTION. Some time in the spring of 1892, I was handed eight thin but closely-written note-books, with a request that I should extract from them all that was of more than purely personal interest, and if I deemed the excerpts so made worthy of being made public, to see to the publication of the same. The first two of these volumes contained all that the writer could recall of his childhood in old Japan, of his being cast-away and picked up and taken to America, and of what befell him there. The remaining six formed a portion of the regular diary which Mr. Heco has kept ever since the time he began to write English. Dealing as they do with such stirring themes as the opening of the Treaty Ports, and life in them at a time when all the pomp and splendour of the old feudal Japan which has now so utterly passed away were daily before men's eyes, at a time when it was not good for folks to walk abroad at night without an armed guard, at a time when the social and political fabric of centuries was surely tottering to its fall, the pages of these note-books are of more than mere passing interest. From his official II position—Interpreter to the U.S. Consulate—and from the fact that in those early years he was almost the only Japanese who spoke English, Mr. Heco had unusual opportunities of seeing and hearing things from two stand-points, from the native as well as the foreign; opportunities of which he seems to have availed himself with no mean measure of shrewdness. Then there are visits to the U.S. in the troublous times of the Great War, and LINCOLN and SEWARD, and SUMNER, and BROOKE of Merrimac fame appear to play their part in the story. Later, on Mr. Heco's return to Japan, we have a faithful record of how one feels on shipboard when the round shot are whizzing in the rigging, for the Interpreter of the Consulate was on board the Wyoming when McDougal ran amuck with such deadly effect among the Cho¯shiu batteries and men-of-war at Shimonoseki in 1863. It is at this point that Volume I. comes to a conclusion. The The narrative of a Japanese; what he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. By Joseph Heco. Edited by James Murdoch http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.113 second part of the book will be found of even greater interest. It will deal with the tortuous plots and intrigues that preluded the overthrow of the Tokugawa despotism, with the problems that the Revolution of '68 set, and with the solutions that men like KIDO, OKUBO, ITO and INOUYE found for them. Nothing in the sense of Mr. Heco's diary has been changed in the setting forth of his story. I have III confined myself to condensing it, and to weaving as far as possible the disconnected items into a continuous narrative. For the first few chapters of Vol. I. my responsibility ends with cutting out a quantity of irrelevant details, and with here and there recasting a paragraph. These chapters had been already prepared for publication when I took the matter in hand. JAMES MURDOCH. My Birth Place. I. I was born in the Island Empire of Japan, in the village of Komiya in the Province of Harima in the Sanyo¯do¯ on the shore of the Harima Nada. The Harima Nada is the easternmost reach of the famous Inland Sea, that beautiful land-locked stretch of water which separates the main island from the smaller ones of Shikoku and Kiushiu. At the time of my birth in 1837, Komiya was a good-sized village of some four or five hundred houses, with from 2,000 to 2,500 inhabitants; it has now dwindled to about one-seventh of its former size and importance. The majority of its people were farmers; the remainder were fishermen, sailors and traders. My father was a well-to-do farmer. He died some twelve months after I was born, and my mother a few years after his death re-married into a family in the adjoining town of Hamada. The inhabitants of this place were also principally 2 farmers and fishermen, although a few were sea-faring men, since that village too was on the shore. The narrative of a Japanese; what he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. By Joseph Heco. Edited by James Murdoch http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.113 My parents had two sons, of whom I was the younger. From his youth my brother had always been very fond of roving, and at last my step-father seeing the impossibility of keeping the boy quietly at home, apprenticed him at the age of 16 to his uncle, the captain of a large junk trading between O¯saka and Yedo. The lad was quick to master his work, and in a few years' time he had worked himself up to be second officer on his uncle's vessel. All this time I remained quietly at home, and went to school. But I am afraid there was a good deal of the rover in my disposition too. Whenever my brother came home he used to deliver himself of the story of his travels to the family and to our neighbours. He would tell of his voyages to different places, and of the adventures that had befallen him, perhaps sometimes touching up his pictures a trifle with a little extra colour as travellers are wont to do. He would repeat to us the strange stories he used to hear from the still stranger people he had met —people who had ways so different from our own (my townsmen), for in these days the means of communication and travel were very different from the railways, steamers, and telegraphs of to-day, 3 and the simple village-folk seldom went further from their own homes than perhaps a distance of twenty or thirty miles, so that Nagasaki was as far from us then comparatively speaking as was Moscow from London at that same date. My brother's stories soon made him quite famous, and the courage displayed by one so young in daring forth to such distant places earned for him the highest praise. My brother's talk and the praise bestowed upon him led me to think that if I too could travel, I might be received in the same way and made as much of by the villagers;—besides, I thought often and wistfully of the different places I could see and the novel experiences I could have. Thus the first thought of rambling crept into my mind, and from that moment my desire to leave home never ceased. Yet I little thought of ever seeing anything beyond my own country; indeed, I don't suppose that at the time I even dreamt of the existence of other lands, or if I did, it was to pity the Barbarians who, I may have heard, came each year or so to Nagasaki to trade with us. One day, I bit by bit disclosed to my mother my wish to go to sea. She asked me, as how many mothers have done in all parts of the world, what reason I had for quitting a comfortable home and going to sea, where I was sure to be miserable, when 4 I might be happy and at my ease on shore. The narrative of a Japanese; what he has seen and the people he has met in the course of the last forty years. By Joseph Heco. Edited by James Murdoch http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.113 She also used many other arguments to dissuade me from leaving her and our home. I explained to her that my brother seemed to have visited many new places, and to have seen many strange things without much effort, and I said that if I followed his occupation, I too would have the same chance of visiting different places and seeing wonderful things. My mother said; “I have no objection to your going to see new places and novel things, but you know that you are too young to go far away from home. Besides, sea life is not so very pleasant, nor is it considered so very respectable, unless one works up to be a Captain, or at least an officer. For youngsters have to go through a long and generally a very disagreeable apprenticeship. If I were to let you go to sea, and there should be bad weather, I would be very anxious for you as well as for your brother, and your step-father.