Japan’s Jazz Age: Flappers and Feminists ~ by Lesley Downer

‘In the beginning, woman was the sun.’

Hiratsuka Raichō

Moga, pictured in 
Mainichi shimbun 

‘Modern gals’

If you had visited Tokyo in the 1910s and 1920s, you would have met Japanese women stepping out confidently with short flapper skirts and scandalously short hair, a million miles from the stereotypical ‘submissive Japanese woman.’ They were moga - ‘modern gals’ - a term coined by the great Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in his novel A Fool’s Love. Not all women were moga, but there were enough to flavour the era.

While Europe was engulfed in World War I, Japan, which was allied to Britain, was enjoying an economic boom. In the Meiji period, Japan’s Victorian era, the country had burst spectacularly into the modern age and onto the world stage. And by now westernisation, prosperity and mass culture had spread to nearly everyone in Japan. Now everyone was enjoying the benefits.

1929 ad for Shirokiya department store

Speed, sport and sex
After the hard work and discipline of the Victorian era, when the government was determined to build up the nation to protect it against colonisation, the new era (named Taishō, after a new emperor came to the throne) was like a fresh breeze blowing through.

The Meiji constitution had been all about keeping women in their place, slotting them into the template of ‘good wives, wise mothers’. But by the 1910s and 1920s the rebuilding was done. Suddenly people were free to let their hair down and be themselves. 

At last the younger generation had a voice. They didn’t have to follow in the drab footsteps of their elders. Those of us who remember the Sixties - Flower Power, Women’s Lib - will recognise the thrill, the exhilaration. 

Moga 1928 in 'beach pyjama' style

Youth power
This was Japan’s Jazz Age - the age of speed, sport and sex, of anything goes. There was universal education. With one of the world’s largest student populations, Tokyo was enjoying a boom in the publishing of books, journals and newspapers. People were free to think and talk and argue and throw around words and ideas like socialism, Marxism, anarchism, democracy and freedom. They also had money which they could spend any way they liked.

Forget ‘good wife, wise mother’. These women had jobs. They could be typists, elevator girls, shop clerks, nurses, writers, journalists or beauticians, and be financially independent. Some moga worked as waitresses in cafes, dispensing sexual favours where they saw fit, like Naomi in Tanizaki’s ground-breaking A Fool’s Love, a sort of Japanese Lolita, the story of a man hopelessly besotted with one of these cool aloof creatures.

Tipsy by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi

The moga were the trendsetters along with mobo - ‘modern boys’. Moga cut their hair short, like boys, and flaunted short flapper skirts, while dapper mobo wore their hair long and swept back in the all-back style and sported bell bottoms, bowler hats and horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd glasses.

They hung out in cafes and bars, they smoked, talked and argued, they practised free love and they strolled along the Ginza, Tokyo’s most fashionable street. They listened to jazz, danced the Charleston, watched American movies and ate ice cream. Until the authorities clamped down, Marxism was all the rage and everyone read the latest revolutionary Russian novels, such as Aleksandra Kollontai’s A Great Love.

Militant feminists
Out of this fizzing free love milieu sprang pioneering feminists.

Hiratsuka Raichō (1886 - 1971),
 from her autobiography

Hiratsuka Raichō lived the life. She famously said that marriage was ‘slavery during the daytime and prostitution at night.’ In 1908 at the age of 22 she eloped with an older married man, Morita Sohei, and the two tried - and failed - to commit suicide together in time-honoured Japanese fashion. She then had two children by a much younger lover whom she only married when her children were adults, taking her husband’s surname so that her son would not be negatively impacted when he was drafted.

She was also more than prepared to speak up for women’s rights. In 1911 she founded Seitō - Bluestocking - Japan’s first all-women literary magazine. The first words were ‘In the beginning woman was the sun’ - a reminder that in Japanese mythology the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, is the creator of all life.

The first issue of Seitō, 

September 1911,

cover illustration by 

Naganuma Chieko

Seitō was packed with stories and articles expressing women’s sexuality with no holds barred. One story detailed the break up of an arranged marriage, another was a graphic description of casual sex with a man the author picked up in a bar. The upholders of traditional values, particularly in the government, were outraged and both issues were banned.

Then Hiratsuka started publishing articles daring to attack the capitalist system and the established order and demanding women’s rights. For the powers that be this was the last straw. In 1916 the Home Ministry forbade distributors to supply the magazine. Sales instantaneously dried up and the magazine had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Hiratsuka. At the time women were banned from attending political meetings on the basis that they should be at home looking after their families. In 1922 Hiratsuka and her fellow activists managed to get this law overturned though female suffrage was still a long way off. Women were not included when universal male suffrage was introduced in 1925. She and her fellow activists were condemned as ‘New Women’, a term which they enthusiastically embraced.

Yosano Akiko (1878 - 1942)

Seitō’s most famous contributor was the poet Yosano Akiko. She too had an affair with a married man whom she later married; the couple had eleven children. Her first volume of poems, Midaregami - Tangled Hair - was a passionate expression of her love for him. Critics attacked the book as immoral and obscene but it was loved and widely read and became a beacon for supporters of women’s rights. At the height of the Russo-Japanese War she published a poem entitled ‘Thou shalt not die’, exhorting her younger brother who was a soldier not to sacrifice himself for this senseless war. It became the anthem of the anti-war movement and was picked up again after World War II.

Midaregami (Tangled Hair)
by Yosano Akiko

These were women who took their lives in their own hands. Their power was their independence. Perhaps some of them even thought that the times they were a-changing, that a new age was dawning, as we did in the Sixties as we looked forward to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. But those that did discovered all too soon - as we did - that they were wrong. The era of speed, sport and sex turned out to be just a flash of brightness before the darkness of World War II closed in.

For more on Japan’s pioneering feminists, you could read

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Hiratsuka Raichō, translated with an introduction and notes by Teruko Craig (Columbia University Press 2006)
and
A Girl with Tangled Hair: the 399 poems in the Midaregami by Akiko Yosano, translated by Jane Reichhold and Machiko Kobayashi

All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. For more about these amazing women and much else, please see my new book, The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications). My travel book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, was also reissued last year, by Eland. For more see www.lesleydowner.com
    

Aliens Invade! - by Lesley Downer

Black Ship - a Japanese artist imagines

On July 14th 1853, 166 years ago today, an event occurred that completely changed Japan and the world. I’ll start by winding the clock back a few days.

First Contact
On July 8th 1853, fishermen casting their nets at the mouth of Edo Bay saw an unimaginable sight. It was a windless day and their boats were becalmed, yet surging towards them were four monster ships, bigger than any they’d ever seen. ‘As large as mountains’, said a fisherman later, moving ‘as swiftly as birds,’ and two ‘afire’ with smoke pouring out of them like a dragon’s breath. Worst of all, they were heading for the capital, Edo. They dropped anchor at the mouth of the bay and turned their cannons on the little town of Uraga there.

Panicking, the fishermen hauled their nets in and rowed for shore to send a warning to Edo.

Not Martians - Americans! 
The government officials knew exactly what this was - an alien invasion, not Martians but Americans. It was Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships.

Perry stayed hidden but that didn't prevent
artists from imagining what he looked like.
Honolulu Museum of Art

For more than 200 years, since 1639, Japan had been closed to the western world, except for twenty Dutch merchants who lived on Dejima island off Nagasaki. Every year a Dutch ship came with goods to trade, enabling the Japanese to keep abreast of developments outside and to buy western technology and books. By remaining closed they’d managed to stave off colonisation. But they were well aware of the Opium War of 1839 to 1842 and of British incursions into China. They knew the wolf was at the door. In fact the King of Holland, their ally, had written to the shogun warning that an American fleet was on its way.

On the other side of the world, the Crimean War was brewing. It broke out that same month, tying up the three great colonising powers - Britain, France and Russia - and leaving the way open for the fledgling United States of America.

Whaling
Whaling was the spark that ignited the flame. In 1851 Hermann Melville wrote in Moby Dick, ‘If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale ship alone to whom the credit will be due, for already she is on the threshold.’

In America people lit their homes with whale oil lamps. Baleen whale bones were to stiffen crinolines and industrial machinery was lubricated with whale oil. For decades whaling ships from New England had plied the rich waters around Hokkaido but could not put in even for supplies; and shipwrecked sailors who fell into Japanese hands were treated harshly and usually ended up in prison.

In November 1851 President Millard Fillmore instructed Commodore Matthew Perry to deliver a letter to the Japanese Emperor demanding that American whalers and other vessels be allowed access to one or two ports of call to take on coal and water and that castaways be treated humanely. Initially at least the Americans did not insist on a trade treaty, just these two small specific demands.

Confrontation 
The American squadron, two steamships and two sloops with 61 guns and 967 men, entered Edo Bay at nearly 9 knots, leaving the shogunal navy scrambling in their wake and fishermen, as the journalist Bayard Taylor, looking down from his perch on the upper deck, wrote, fleeing for shore ‘like wild birds at a sudden intruder’.

Guard boats swarmed out to intercept the ships, rowed by ‘tall athletic men naked save for a cloth around the loins.’ Officials on board held up a huge sign reading, ‘Depart immediately and dare not anchor’ in French.

There were also artists on board, busily sketching. They knew there was going to be a huge demand for pictures of the Black Ships.

The intruders drove the guard boats away with pikes.

Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) 

Met Museum

Perry kept out of sight in his cabin. He was determined only to speak to a man of the highest rank, equal to his own. ‘I was well aware that the more exclusive I should make myself and the more exacting I might be, the more respect these people of forms and ceremonies would be disposed to award me,’ he later wrote.

Nevertheless the Americans were never fully aware of exactly what was going on.

Eventually Nakajima Saburonosuke was allowed on board. Somehow the Americans had the impression that he was the vice governor of Uraga. In fact he was a mere police magistrate.

Bayard Taylor described his black cloak and shorter undergarment, the two swords in his waistband, his sandals and white toed tabi socks, and his red lacquered helmet shaped like an inverted basin.

With the translation going from English into Dutch, then into Japanese, and back again, using two not particularly skilful interpreters, Lieutenant Franklin Buchanan told Nakajima that the Americans had a letter they had to deliver to the Emperor. This made the Japanese chortle to themselves. The Emperor was an impoverished Pope-like figure who played no part in government affairs. The Americans added that if they were refused they would go ashore ‘with sufficient troops’ and deliver it themselves - a chilling threat indeed.

Meanwhile the second police magistrate, Kayama Eizaemon, had counted seventy cannons on the ships. The shogunate had 100 cannons dotted around Edo Bay but only 11 of comparable calibre. The Japanese were completely outgunned.

Panic
By evening panic was growing. The government declared a state of emergency. The daimyo warlords in charge of the defence of Edo Bay rushed off to rally their troops. People living near the coast fled inland, carrying all the possessions they could on their backs or in carts.

Kayama Eizaemon
Thereafter Kayama Eizaemon, the second police magistrate, took over as chief go between. His elaborate silk garments embroidered with gold and silver peacock feathers presented a colourful spectacle and the Americans were impressed with his gentlemanly deportment. Kayama tried using delaying tactics but the Americans issued an ultimatum, giving him three days to come up with an answer before they went ashore themselves.

The problem was that Perry insisted that only men of the highest rank should receive the letter, but no high ranking man wanted to touch it.

Finally the government found a way round it. The small town of Uraga had two governors - Toda Izu and Ido Iwami. In short order they were declared princes of Izu and daimyo of Sagami, making them of high enough rank to deal with Perry and receive the letter. Toda, now ‘prince of Izu’, was most amused at his sudden promotion, like being promoted overnight from Mayor of Margate to Earl of Essex.

Delivery of the President's letter.
Lithograph, J Sinclair, Philadelphia,
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The Americans were satisfied and they set the date and the place for the delivery of the letter.

Kayama explores the ship

To celebrate, the Americans took Kayama and the interpreters on a tour of the ship. The Japanese marvelled at the size and complexity of ship’s engines and its fearsome Paixhans gun, saw their first photographs and tasted whisky and brandy. The Americans assumed the Japanese didn’t know the world was round and showed them a globe, expecting them to be bemused. Kayama coolly pointed out New York and Washington and asked about railroad tunnels, the Panama railway which was under construction at the time and if ship’s engines were akin to those used in railroad engines. The Americans were, they wrote, surprised by the Japanese officials’ grasp of the ‘general principles of science and of the facts of the geography of the world.’

July 14th - delivering the letter
Perry, afraid of treachery, insisted on meeting at Kurihama where they could bring the American ships close enough to shore to bring the beach within range of their guns.

The Americans were kept awake by the banging as carpenters worked through the night to build the reception halls.

The next morning they saw the results of their labours. There were two pavilions decorated with flags and banners and fifty Japanese guard boats, each decorated with a red flag. More than 5000 samurai gathered and there were women peeking from behind screens, and local villagers too had gathered around. The Japanese officials wore brocaded silk overgarments trimmed with yellow velvet and embroidered with gold thread. It was all so splendid that ‘it made me think that had come to be a spectator at some joust or tourney,’ wrote a young American clerk called J W Spalding.

Pomp and circumstance
At 10 o’clock 250 Americans left the ships to a thunderous gun roll of 13 guns. And finally Perry appeared. He stepped into a white barge and went ashore to a roll of drums, flanked by two huge black stewards, ‘two of the best looking fellows of their colour that the squadron could furnish’. Behind hum came two cabin boys carrying rosewood boxes wrapped in scarlet cloth holding the letters. While the band played ‘Hail Columbia’ the procession followed Kayama and the interpreters up the hill to the reception hall.

The Japanese had even managed to procure an armchair for Perry.

Perry and his armchair
Library of Congress, public domain

Toda was there to receive the letters - one from President Fillmore pledging friendship and requesting the opening of relations, the other Perry’s instructions to open negotiations on a treaty of amity between the two nations. Perry said he would return next April or May with more ships, ‘as these are only a portion of the squadron.’ It was a straightforward threat.

The Americans collected shells and stones from the beach as souvenirs and compared swords with the Japanese soldiers. And finally they marched back to their ships to the strains of ‘Hail Columbia’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’.

Opening the door
Perry had opened the door. He returned the following year with not four but nine ships and forced the Japanese to sign a treaty opening the ports. But that was just the beginning. Other nations rapidly arrived demanding similar concessions - and more and more concessions followed.

What the newcomers didn’t realise was that their arrival had cast Japan into upheaval. The result was a breakdown of order in Japan and the overthrow of the shogunate. In 1868, a mere fifteen years after Perry arrived, the teenage Emperor Meiji became the figurehead of a new government and modern Japan was born. Perry’s initial incursion had entirely changed the course of history.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death in nineteenth century Japan, begins at the moment when Black Ships are sighted off the coast and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Dancing into the Modern Age: 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration - by Lesley Downer

November 1868: Emperor Meiji enters Edo in his phoenix palanquin

On November 26th 1868, a hundred and fifty years ago this month, a vast procession three and a half thousand strong filed through the massive gates of Edo Castle, with musicians stepping out in front. Right at the centre, born on the shoulders of forty or fifty close packed bearers, was the imperial palanquin, topped with a golden phoenix, carrying the sixteen year old Emperor Mutsuhito, whom we now know as Emperor Meiji. 

Emperor Meiji on his way to Edo

He had been wending his way across the country from his ancestral home in Kyoto for twenty days. Ten thousand people lined the streets to watch him pass. Shortly afterwards Edo was renamed Tō-kyō, ‘Eastern Capital’, and Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace. The event was dubbed the Meiji Restoration. A whole new era had begun. 

Shoguns had held power in Japan for many centuries. During those years the emperors had been like popes, spending their lives sequestered in the imperial palace in Kyoto and never leaving. For 250 years the country enjoyed uninterrupted peace. Japanese culture flourished - the world we see depicted in woodblock prints and on the stage of the kabuki theatre, the world of Basho’s haiku, Zen and much else. 

During most of those years Japan was closed to the west. The only westerners were 20 Dutch merchants who were allowed to live on a small island off Nagasaki. A Dutch ship came once a year and kept the Japanese up to speed with western science and developments. Thus the Japanese knew a fair bit about the west but the west knew very little about Japan. 

The rickshaw, invented in Japan in 1869

Then, in a single day - July 8th 1853 - everything changed. Fishermen in their boats at the mouth of Edo Bay saw four monstrous ships surging towards them, spouting steam. ‘As large as mountains,’ the fishermen reported, ‘moving as fast as birds.’ It was as if aliens had landed. But it was not Martians. It was Americans. It was Commodore Matthew Perry and his famous Black Ships. 

The fifteen years of turmoil that followed ended with the shogun being overthrown. The fifteenth and last shogun retired to his family lands and the teenage Emperor was borne in splendour into Edo, now Tokyo. And straight away things started to change. 

Ginza Bricktown 1874

Under the shoguns Edo had been an eastern Venice, lined with canals, with willow trees swaying along the banks. People went around by water, on foot, by palanquin or on horseback. There were no wheels for transporting people, only for goods. Wheels were quick to arrive. The rickshaw was invented almost instantaneously - in 1869. Soon rickshaws were everywhere, clattering through the streets, with the drivers shouting and threatening to mow people down if they didn’t leap out of the way fast enough. 

Tokyo mushroomed much as China is mushrooming now. New buildings shot up in the western mode, of brick and stone, not wood. One of the first was the Mitsui House, a splendid wedding cake-like confection, owned by the wealthy shopkeeping and money exchanging Mitsui family, soon to found a business and banking empire.

Then in April 1872 an area called the Ginza, full of furniture shops and second hand shops, mysteriously burnt down. No one was hurt, generating the suspicion that the fire had been set deliberately. The area was rebuilt entirely in sparkling new brick buildings and called Ginza Bricktown. The street was lined with all sorts of wonderful shops - a brand new newspaper office, a post office and a beef restaurant where people could dine on an exciting new dish - beef. In 1874 the Ginza was lit with Japan’s first gas lamps. 

First train at Shimbashi station by Shōsai Ikkei, circa 1870 -
donated to Wiki Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Also in 1872 the first train line opened linking Tokyo and Yokohama, built under the direction of the Englishman Edmund Morell. He had succumbed to fever and died at the age of 30 the year before the railway opened and is buried in the Foreigners’ Cemetery in Yokohama. The emperor was there in all his regalia to open it. He was 20 by now. He soon set an example by changing to western clothing (a military uniform with lots of medals) for official duties. He also made the revolutionary announcement, ‘I shall eat beef.’ 

The empress followed suit. In 1873 she announced she was going to give up teeth blackening which was quite as shocking as if Meghan had suddenly announced she was going to blacken her teeth. Up till then adult women had always painted their teeth with lacquer to make them a lovely shiny black.

View of Benten Shrine: The Emperor and Empress cherry blossom viewing with their attendants
by Utagawa Hiroshige III 1881 - donated to Wiki Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the cities at least everyone who could afford it was madly experimenting. Men rushed to the new-fangled barber shops - the first opened in 1869 - to have their oiled samurai topknots cut off and their hair cut in the latest style, the jangiri style, the cropped cut. People who had grown up wearing topknots and swords tried the bizarre new western fashions - trousers and Sherlock Holmes capes and incredibly uncomfortable leather boots.

Women were more conservative in their dress choices. Geisha being trendsetters were the first to try western clothes - bustles and bonnets. The very first person to wear high heeled shoes was a Nagasaki geisha in the 1880s.

Then in 1883 the Rokumeikan - the Hall of the Baying Stag - opened in central Tokyo right opposite the Imperial Palace. It was a rather flashy Italianate mansion of white painted brick with colonnaded verandas, set in landscaped gardens. There Japanese high society - gentlemen in frock coats, ladies in bustles, bows, corset and bonnets - dined on French food cooked by a French chef, using knives and forks, played billiards, had charity bazaars, sang western songs and played western musical instruments.

Dancing into the future - at the Hall of the Baying Stag

There were also famous balls. The idea was that gentlemen should appear with their wives on their arms as western people did. But unless you were an ex-geisha as quite a few of the ladies were, most upper class Japanese women were not accustomed to going out with their husbands, so a lot of the ladies at the Rokumeikan were actually the geisha of the gentleman in question, not the wife.

From Aguranabe, 'Sitting round the beef pot'
by Kanagaki Robun

All this modernising was a lot of fun but it also had a serious purpose - to persuade the western powers that the Japanese were every bit as civilised as them so that they would repeal the hated unequal treaties, by which the Japanese had to pay inflated export duties and the exchange rate was rigged in the westerners’ favour and many other humiliating clauses besides.

But despite all the dancing and modern clothes, the treaties were not repealed until 1895, after Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War. As a Japanese diplomat said wearily a decade later, after Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War: ‘My people had been sending artistic treasures to Europe for some time, and had been regarded as barbarians. But as soon as we showed ourselves able to shoot down Russians with quick firing guns, we were acclaimed as a highly civilised race.’

In case anyone might like to hear more, I’m giving a couple of lectures to mark the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration - at the Ashmolean in Oxford on Friday November 23rd from 1 to 2 and at the British Library on Tuesday November 27th at 7.15. 

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale very much based on a true story and set in Japan at the time of the turmoil preceding the Meiji Restoration- out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons or private collection.

The Pleasures and Perils of Living Abroad - by Lesley Downer

My Idealed John Bullesses 
by Yoshio Makino 1912

London in 1900 was like New York today, a city where you craned your neck gazing up at the towering stone buildings while all around people rushed hither and thither, sleek and well-dressed, full of importance. At least that was how it seemed to a sensitive 33 year old Tokyoite called Natsume Soseki who arrived on October 28th that year. 

Tokyo too was prosperous and had its share of stone buildings, built largely by western architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. But it was primarily a low rise city full of narrow streets of dark wooden houses with bamboo shutters and tiled roofs. London was not just huge - a ‘maze’, Soseki called it - but the heart of the greatest empire in the world, whereas Japan had only just had the insulting ‘unequal treaties’ with Britain and other western powers nullified. When the actress Sadayakko performed here, also in 1900, reviewers expressed amazement that someone ‘primitive’ (i.e. not European, let alone British) should seem perfectly sophisticated.

Fleet Street by James Valentine c 1890

Soseki (his first name and pen name) was a pre-eminent scholar of English literature and one of the first graduates of Tokyo Imperial University’s English Literature department. He had been sent to study for two years by the Japanese government, keen to learn as much as possible from the most powerful country in the world.

But he really didn’t want to go. For a start he had to leave his pregnant wife behind. He had a very small stipend and spent most of it on books, which didn’t leave much for rent. He stayed in a succession of shabby lodging houses - in Gower Street near the British Museum, Priory Road in West Hampstead, the ‘gloomy, squalid neighbourhood of the notorious slum Camberwell’, Tooting and lastly Clapham Common, the one place where he felt even remotely contented. 

Farewell photo before Soseki's departure
for London. Soseki is bottom right

From the start he was lonely and miserable. He hated the weather, the food and the tube, ‘the foulness of the air and the train’s swaying.’ He spent most of his time holed up in his room. The only English people he got to know were his landladies and their families.

When he did go out for a walk, he felt terribly self conscious about his smallness of stature. Everyone he met was ‘depressingly tall,’ he wrote. Once he saw an ‘unusually small person’ approaching and thought, ‘Eureka!’, then realised this person was still 2 inches taller than he was. Finally ‘a strangely complexioned Tom Thumb approaches, but now I realise this is my own image reflected in a mirror.’ In the park ‘herds of women walk around like horned lionesses with nets on their heads.’ He was struck by the fact that even tradesmen ‘are for the most part better dressed than many a high ranking official in Japan ... A butcher’s boy, when Sunday rolls around, will proudly put on his silk hat and frock coat.’

Behind his back he heard people referring to him as a ‘least-poor Chinese’, a very strange adjective, as he noted. He was also mistaken at the theatre for a Portuguese.

To improve his health his landlady suggested that he take up cycling so he set off for the horse riding area on Clapham Common where there would not be too many spectators. His efforts resulted in a series of comic mishaps with him nearly running down a policeman.

Soseki in 1912

Eventually he became so isolated and miserable that his landlady, doctor and fellow lodgers advised him to take a holiday. So he went to Scotland, where he made the discovery that British people didn’t go moon-viewing or appreciate moss and began to doubt whether the British were really worth the reverence in which they were held in Japan.

He did experience some kindnesses. A beefeater at the Tower of London went out of his way to show him a suit of Japanese armour, ‘presented to Charles II from Mongolia.’ He was in London when Queen Victoria died in January 1901 and his landlord lifted him onto his shoulders so that he could see the funeral cortege. 

Nevertheless all in all it was a miserable experience. ‘The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life,’ he later wrote. ‘Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves. I understand the population of London is about five million. Frankly speaking, I felt as if I were a drop of water amid five million drops of oil.’

Plaque at 81 The Chase, Clapham

But in fact Soseki’s lonely years were the making of him. He wrote about them wryly and humorously in several early works and went on to become one of the most beloved Japanese novelists of all time, author of Kokoro, Botchan and I am a Cat, among many others.

Yoshio Makino in contrast adored London. A artist three years younger than Soseki, he arrived a few years before him, in 1897, though there is no evidence that their paths ever crossed.

Makino particularly loved the mist and fog of the English landscape. He wrote, ‘London in mist is far above my own ideal ... the colour and its effects are most wonderful. I think London without mists would be like a bride without a trousseau ... The London mist attracts me so that I do not feel that I could live any other place but London.’

He lived in London for 45 years, mainly in Kensington, and did many paintings - of the Thames, Earl’s Court Station, Sloane Square, all studies in mist; of Fulham Road with a church spire looming out of the gloom, pavements glittering on a rainy night, shadowy nightspots with crowds of women emerging from brightly lit houses into a dark street. 

He also admired British women and painted many pictures of them. He called them John Bullesses (after John Bull). ‘Some John Bullesses bury themselves into such thick fur overcoats in winter. You can hardly see their eyes; all other parts are covered with foxes’ tails, minks’ heads, seals’ back skin, a whole bird, snakeskin, etc. ... But when they get into a house and take off all those heavy wearing, such a light and charming butterfly comes out,’ he wrote.

Soseki’s stay came to an end in January 1903 but Makino stayed on till 1942 when he was reluctantly repatriated. He spent the rest of his life trying to get back to England.

Quotations from The Tower of London, Tales of Victorian London, by Natsume Soseki, translated and introduced by Damian Flanagan, the great enthusiast of and authority on Natsume Soseki. Published by Peter Owen, 2005.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback.

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons