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JAPAN THROUGH WESTERN EYES
Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats, 1853-1941

Part 6: Correspondence and Papers of Sir Ernest Satow (1843-1929) relating to Japan from Public Record Office Class PRO 30/33

Further Reading

The following extracts are taken, by kind permission, from Introduction to the Collected Works of Ernest Mason Satow by Dr Nigel J. Brailey, University of Bristol, England. (Ganesha Publishing, Edition Synapse, 1998)


Early Days in Japan


In 1893 for instance, he [Satow] declared, ‘those years from ’62 to ’69 were the most interesting portion of my life; then I lived. Now I seem to vegetate.’ He was required first to report to the British Legation in Peking, and only arrived in the foreign settlement at Yokohama in September 1862. A fortnight later, the British merchant Richardson was cut down outside Yokohama by samurai in the train of the Satsuma regent Shimazu Hisamitsu, his companions barely escaping with their lives. And these years were littered with such incidents . . . in May 1867, Satow himself with a companion was fortunate to survive a night attack at an inn where they were staying . . . Many of these incidents were caused merely by odd pairs of samurai, but this was an era of war in Japan, both external, in the form of British-led punitive naval attacks on both the two main southwestern clans in 1863 and 1864, each accompanied by Satow, and civil war.

Eventually, both these clans sought to overthrow the two-and-a-half century regime of the Tokugawa shoguns (‘Kings’) which had brought much prosperity to the country, as no longer able to defend Japan’s sovereignty and sakoku ‘closed-country’ policy. And even after they were victorious, in 1868, strife continued for some time . . . Of course, Satow was one who wanted to explore. These were also the years when he learnt the language and got to know Japan as probably no Westerner had ever done before him. Also, thanks in part to his official position, culminating in appointment as Japanese-language Secretary to the British Legation in 1865, he was able to make the acquaintance of many leading Japanese, in particular those emerging through the so-called ‘Meiji Restoration,’ for instance the two incendiaries of the British Legation, Ito Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru. Satow contributed to the myth of a ‘restoration’ by publishing articles in the local English-language press supporting the claims of the tenno to a power he was never in fact to realize, which some Japanese took to indicate the policy of Sir Harry Parkes. However, later on, Satow invariably referred to the ‘Restoration’ as a ‘revolution,’ albeit a kind of middle-class displacement of the existing hoary oligarchy by a new set of men. It also appears that he enjoyed a lively private life in these years, although in view of his later discretion, this may have been exaggerated.

For Satow, the 1870s were rather different. To begin with, in 1869, he was awarded a long-home leave, during which he spent some time in Paris and visited Germany twice, once with his parents, and again with his father alone; by the time of his next leave, his father was dead. Back in Japan, the atmosphere had changed, opportunities for youthful initiative had diminished, and the official work become more mundane. Thus Satow sought instead to apply his linguistic skills to scholarship as an early member of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and became a great bibliophile. In 1875-1876, he was again granted extended leave, during which he paid a first visit to Italy… On his next return to Japan, Satow was at once given by Parkes the fascinating job of going down to Kagoshima, in the southern island of Kyushu, to investigate the developing political tension there. Walking across the island from Nagasaki, Satow met up with one of his old acquaintances, the great Satsuma partisan Saigo Takamori, before the latter marched north with his army of discontented ex-samurai. Shortly after, having been repulsed by the garrison of Kumamoto castle, the rebels were confronted by the new regime’s new conscript army and defeated, and Saigo committed Seppuku. However, in 1878, he was in a sense revenged through the assassination in Tokyo of his great rival, Okubo Toshimichi, an event which even Satow welcomed.


On his first arrival in Japan in 1862, Satow had become at once an active diary writer. After 1869, he seems to have lost his enthusiasm for it and entries became quite desultory for a while. However, the Kagoshima visit promoted renewed activity in this respect which never again went into real decline. The diaries of this period and various surviving letters portray him as an increasingly committed and self-satisfied scholar, who believed he spoke Japanese as well as any native. Finally, this was also the period when Satow, now living inside the Ushigome Gate, commenced a family with a Japanese woman called Takeda Kane which he kept quite secret from his relatives in England . . . This time, Satow quickly settled down to renewed legal studies for the Bar, passing the examination with distinction in the autumn. Otherwise, his mind was still on Japan, meeting Ito Hirobumi, one of his old friends, and by now Japan’s chief minister, en route to the continent to investigate European constitutional systems, particularly

Germany’s, as a model for his country. By the time his legal studies were complete, he was busy with a lengthy and convoluted memorandum for the new British Minister in Tokyo-elect, Francis Plunkett. This proposed the elimination of British consular courts (extraterritorial jurisdiction) in Japan, an infringement on local sovereignty stemming from the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ signed back in the 1850s, already sought by the Japanese for more than a decade. Plunkett, however, seems to have held back this sensitive document, as likely to embarrass Satow’s career prospects which now took a market turn for the better.


The Emerging Diplomat


An approach to Satow by Philip Currie of the Foreign Office, back in 1876, enquiring of him what policy he would follow in Japan if he were British Minister there, doubtless had already sowed the seed of ambition, and opened up the possibility of his transfer out of the consular corps to the diplomatic branch. At all events, by 1883, as Assistant Under-Secretary, Currie, now Sir Philip was deputy head of the Foreign Office, and in a position to exert influence. In December 1883, with his return to Japan just weeks away, Satow was persuaded to apply for the post of Agent and Consul-General at Bangkok, as a likely stepping-stone back to the Legation in Tokyo. Better still, the Foreign Office was already considering elevating the post to a Legation itself, similarly headed by a Minister. And indeed, unbeknown to Satow himself, by early February 1885, he was already under consideration for the transfer back to Tokyo in consequence of the death of Parkes in Peking, and the proposal to replace him with Plunkett transferred from Tokyo. However, Plunkett declined to move except back to a European appointment, and Satow’s official return to Japan was thereby to be postponed ten years . . .


At all events, on arrival in Bangkok in April 1884, Satow took up his new responsibilities with great energy… The feature of Satow’s stint in Bangkok was his commitment to the independence of Siam, by the end of 1885, the sole remaining sovereign state in Southeast Asia. Apparently this was partly to facilitate a trial run for his favourite idea of abolishing extraterritoriality, ultimately to be applied in Japan too . . . it can be said that Satow succeeded in his broader aim, though not the narrower one of restoring general judicial sovereignty to Siam. That had to await efforts by the Siamese themselves to bring their legal system in line with the West over the next half-century. And he escaped censure he might otherwise have attracted for his efforts by ceding responsibility for the policy to the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury himself. But when Satow returned to London on sick-leave in 1887, Salisbury seems to have taken the view that it was best that he did not return to Bangkok. When, after nearly two years home-leave, he followed the recently deceased Palgrave out to Montevideo in 1889, he seems to have felt himself that his career was nearly over at the early age of forty-five.


Indeed, the years 1888-93 form the nadir of his official career, and he fell into a state of some depression. Admittedly, his spell in Siam was apparently also one of considerable scholarly and literary activity . . . However, there was to be a final crescendo to his official career, which commenced with a sudden invitation from London, in June 1893, to transfer to the essentially ‘oriental’ Sultanate of Morocco in North Africa . . . The circumstances which had caused the Foreign Office to drag Satow away so suddenly from the sensitive enough problems of Morocco, were the aftermath of the 1894-95 First Sino Japanese War. Satow himself seems to have viewed the Japanese as guilty of adventurism, and having provoked the Triple Intervention of Germany, Russia and France in April 1895, to divest them of their prize war-booty, the Laiotung Peninsula commanding the approaches to Peking. But the Intervention, taken without London’s approbation, and implicitly in conflict with its ‘open-door’ policy in China of the previous half-century, was also destructive of British pre-eminence in the East. While Satow came increasingly to fear that if Japan again provoked a similar response, Britain under a Tory government would after all cooperate with the other Powers against Japan, the remarkable fact is that his final five years in Tokyo were instead to set the scene for Anglo-Japanese cooperation and the 1902 alliance. This was to prove the most significant and influential international commitment made by Britain in decades, if also a recognition of her declining power like the Entente Cordiale which followed it.


See also

  • Sir Ernest Satow, Japan and Asia: The Trials of a Diplomat in the Age of High Imperialism, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. 35, no. 1 (1992), pp.115-50.
  • Protection or Partition: Ernest Satow and the 1880s Crisis in Britain’s Siam Policy,
    Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 1998), pp.1-23.

Introductions to:

  • Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Siam (Gartmore Stirling, 1996).
  • N. J. Brailey (ed.), The Satow Siam Papers (Bangkok, 1997-).


Forthcoming:

  • N J. Brailey, ‘Sir Ernest Satow and his book A Diplomat in Japan’ in the Proceedings of the Japan Society, London.
  • N. J. Brailey, ‘Sir Ernest Mason Satow’ in The New Dictionary of National Biography.
  • I. Ruxton ed., Diaries & Letters of Sir E. M. Satow, (E. Mellen Press, Lewiston/Quuenston/Lampeter, 1998)

 

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