WHITE HOPE OR YELLOW PERIL?: BUSHIDO, BRITAIN, AND THE RAJ

Hashimoto Yorimitsu

Bushido: The Soul of Japan was published in Philadelphia in 1900 by Nitobe Inazo.1 Although the word “bushido”—the way of the war- rior—was largely unfamiliar to the Japanese, thanks to this book the image of the samurai acting according to a noble bushido code of values became widespread in the English-speaking world.2 During the Russo-Japanese War, Japanophiles and Japanophobes alike began to use the term. Some who praised bushido saw it as a modern form of chivalry which the Western world had lost but longed to revive, while others, fearful of the “Yellow Peril” and Pan-Asianism, denounced it as a fanatical Japanese jihadism that sought the destruction of the West. In both cases bushido was considered to be the force that for better or worse drove contemporary Japanese progress and mod- ernization. How bushido was understood by Japanese writers and interpreted in Edwardian Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century is the subject of this article, which illuminates contemporary British perceptions of the state of their nation, their empire, and the world, and contributes to our understanding of both European Orientalism3 and the global phenomenon of “invented traditions.”4

1 According to the copyright page, it was 1899. But I have not found any copy published earlier than 1900. 2 Colin Holmes and A. H. Ion, “Bushido and the Samurai: Images in British Public Opinion, 1894–1914,” Modern Asian Studies, 14 (1980), 312; Rajyashree Pandey, “Traditions of War Literature in Medieval Japan” in The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–05, ed. David Wells and Sandra Wilson (London, 1999), 44. Both authors emphasize differences between Nitobe’s bushido and its prototype. 3 The classic statement is Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). For a critique of Said and a fuller and more balanced view of Orientalism, see John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, 1995). 4 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). 380 hashimoto yorimitsu

The Turn of the Tide: Pre-Bushido Historical Contexts

In the late nineteenth century the tide of European dominance seemed to be receding as the alleged superiority of the white male Christian came under challenge. In the heyday of the British empire this sense of crisis was captured by two well-known poems by the renowned Anglo-Indian writer , “Recessional” (1897) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1898). The former, which appeared in time for Queen ’s Diamond Jubilee, was a forceful reminder that every empire eventually declines, as demonstrated by the ruins of ancient monuments. The latter asserted the civilizing mission of the white man. Together, the poems mix pessimistic fatalism with a quest for regeneration, and they express the unsettled spirit of the age. Popular novels also reflected and amplified this mood of angst. The most prophetic voice can be found in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in which the turn of the tide on the River Thames symbolically depicted the inevitable drawback of the empire. The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells implied that a superior civiliza- tion could attack England as the advanced English had once attacked others inferior to them. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) hinted at sim- ilar anxieties. Just as English explorers had prepared for their con- quests, so Count Dracula collects books on Britain and studies English before his trip to Britain. Dracula calls an estate agent from London to his homeland, Transylvania, and says to him that he has learned English only “through books.” He confesses that “true, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them,” and he continues, “I would that you tell me when I make error (sic), even of the smallest, in my speaking.”5 Dracula is worried about passing himself off as English. This apprehensiveness, perhaps related to Bram Stoker’s Irishness, was commonly found in immigrants and colonial subjects of the British Empire. But Dracula also represented the menace from outside England where British knowledge and power was seen as being appropriated for purposes of retribution. At the same time, the modern Japanese imperial state came into being in the 1890s. Japan’s stunning victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the subsequent struggle with Russia for supremacy

5 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, (New York, 1997), 26.