The Itos are the Smiths of Japan. There is one President of the Privy Council, one the chief naval authority and head of the naval board. There are two generals named Ito and statistics alone know how many private soldiers are thus made still more common. The Asahi to-day told of an Ito hanged for a triple murder. In the adjoining column account was made of another Ito decorated by the Portuguese government. The reason, not stated, was that the king of that decrepit monarchy, wishing to assimilate some stray rays of good fortune from this rising sun, chose three men in Japan on whom to bestow his ribbons of mark. These were the Emperor, the Emperor’s son and an old man by the universal name of Ito.
A strange circumstance permitted me to ride for an hour one morning in a railway coach with this other Ito—the only Ito. Ambitious of that smartness which can save where any simpleton can spend I procured a second-class ticket from Yokohama to Tokyo, a run that covers some twenty-eight miles in twice as many minutes. The ticket cost fifty-three sen, and as the rate of exchange for American gold here now is 213 you will see that the ride cost less than a quarter. I could have gone first class for seventy-four sen, or ten more American cents—hardly worth the saving. Still, it is more interesting second class. Only foreigners, and Japanese who ape foreigners, ride first class.
Japanese railway coaches are of three classes. It is not necessary to experience the third to know it. A look is enough. Red, like the emperor’s, they are the antithesis of imperial. Only in an imperial land, dyed in the ancient belief that certain men are by birth superior to other men, could these third-class coaches exist. They are for the common people. Small as the dummy cars of an intramural railway they are boxed off in sections similar to continental compartments. These are loaded with as many of the riffraff as the station guards can crowd in. Hard seats and plain company with transportation at the mere cost of hauling is the rule there. The fare is thirty sen (fifteen cents). The government, which owns the railway, conducts its business on the theory employed by Japanese merchants—sell to the poor at cost and let the rich pay the profits.
The difference between the first and second class is twofold. One is the color—white for the first class, blue for the second. The accommodation is just the same—leather and plush upholstering of seats plenty large enough, with washstand, toilet and drinking water handy and clean midway of the car. The chief difference is sociologic, tinged with political, economic and moral degrees. First class is for the nobility, second for the bourgeoisie. Though the first-class carriage is lawfully open to anyone possessing seventy-four sen, no second-class Jap ever dares aspire to it. So secure are the officials in the morale of the people that tickets are never examined. You show your pasteboard at the gate as you enter the platform at the beginning of the journey, again as you leave the platform at the end, but not on the train. A third-class fare could easily ride in a first-class coach. No one but a foreigner would ever think of this. I tried it one day and succeeded, getting seventy-four sen worth of nobility for thirty sen. It is an axiom that all foreigners are noble; hence all foreigners should travel first class. Some day Japan will really be civilized.
This morning the first-class coach was filled with London tiles and Paris frocks, all silked and diamonded. It was the day of the imperial garden party and all foreigners of note in Yokohama were on their way to the palace in Tokyo. There was a crush of German, French and English. I detected one pair Castilian in suavity of accent. All were agog with gossipy gayety. The men, sleek on Oriental dining as fresh pork packers, plumped seats unusually commodious quite full of broadclothed avoirdupois. The women were agush with scents, mowed from the four quarters. Feminine with suggested lingerie, they left the men to the papers, for the London mail was just in, and toasted some stale diplomatic scandal whose drift I vainly strove to get. Between silk tiles and be-birded bonnets there was not a vacant seat left in the first-class coach.
I found a seat in the rear of the second-class coach, which was but half filled. The occupants were Japanese, evidently business and professional men of note, perhaps fifteen all told. Except for the complexions, the upward slant of the eyes and the uniform small stature they might have passed for the occupants of the nine o’clock car downtown any American morning. The dress was the same, the average of intelligence the same. Before I began my paper I studied each face. The Japanese countenance is inscrutable. From coolie to Mikado exists the same placid, patient, nearly always alert expression of canny indifference. Before such uniformity, such hidden power, purpose and weird beginning toothed in the husk of time the most expert western physiognomist is baffled. The geography alone of these humanists of hardy strife can be sketched. Of their history, legends, poesy, knowledge and aspiration little may be said at the outward glance.
In the far corner sat a man whose personality attracted with an unmistakable potency. Sensitive to what psychologists call the aura, I instinctively felt that he was a person of distinction, a distinction genuine in that it must be inherent, for nothing obvious indicated his difference from the other Japanese. He wore a frock coat which had seen use and a beaver hat, apparently of English make, as it had a Piccadilly smugness found nowhere else. None of his countrymen in the car wore cuffs like his, which were links. The others were old-fashioned in plain roundness. His tie was ample and of heavy silk, four-in-hand with a certain regality of flourish. His shoes were wide, short, homely, well-furnished. Only two items of his apparel were unlike those of anyone else. One was the pendant from his watchchain, a superb head of polished onyx on which I could make out the square and compass of the Masonic regalia. The other was a button the size of an American copper cent which he wore in his left lapel. It looked like the button of the Legion of Honor. Later I learned that it was the insignia of the first-class order of the Rising Sun. Only twenty-two men in the world have the right to wear that. I also noticed that his left leg was slightly bent. He appeared to be bow-legged.
The unknown held a newspaper in front of his face. When the train had been two minutes out of Yokohama he put the paper down and looked out upon the landscape. Then I recognized the Marquis Ito, who was born a poor boy of ordinary family in an imperial land, and who is now known before the world as the father of the New Japan.
Some historian has written that the Nineteenth Century produced four constructive statesmen of the first rank; two—Bismarck and Cavour—in the west, and two—Li Hung Chang and Ito—in the east. Another puts him down as the greatest of the four because he is the most humble.
Of Ito’s place in history it is not the purpose here to speak. This is but the record of a chance hour when I saw him this morning take a second-class carriage to Tokyo that he might escape the crowd of foreigners whom he doubtless felt would annoy him with attention, when he wishes to be undisturbed. He has one sure mark of the prophets, that of being unhonored in his own country. The people say that he is proud, which is their interpretation of his aloofness, and that he does things unbecoming a gentleman. By this they mean his fondness for geisha, which he makes no attempt to conceal, despising public opinion and thus calling upon his head that which he despises. He is the antithesis of Disraeli, of whom Gladstone could say that he was the only public man in England, unmarried, who could live his maturity without being mixed up with a petticoat. Ito makes no secret of his feminine promiscuity.
The Marquis can well afford to ignore public opinion. With what monarch of what age would he trade places? He has no position, no titles and no responsibilities. Yet he is the most powerful person in Japan. He is simply referred to as the chief of the “genro,” or elder statesmen. What a benign reference! He is general utility man for the government, and with that self-effacement which marks the Japanese of whatever station he accepts his duties with as unswerving a fidelity as the meanest gunner at his post.
When the Emperor wanted a delicate mission to Korea executed he sent Ito with absolute diplomatic power. Ito went, conducted the business with entire success and returned home quietly. He has political enemies, of course, but these in the great hour of need stand aside and recognize his voice for what it is, the guiding genius of the nation. Emperor, ministers and generals come to him for final advice. He is not bothered with the routine of an office or the social duties of a position. He lives as obscurely as I saw him this morning in the second-class coach, yet on such significant occasions as that presentation by the Portuguese King he is the one man selected.
Ito is now sixty-two years old. In this magnificent prime of a great life he is at one of the ideal positions of all time—the real dictator of the glorious future of a coming people. What a contrast to petty jealousies and inefficient systems of western races, who have so ill disposed of men of similar stamp! At the same age Bismarck was hurling his thunders of wounded pride from Friedrichsruhe at the young William. Cavour, momentarily anxious, was tottering in an insecure seat; Grant, honored by the nations, had to submit to the humiliation of a defeat at the hands of his own party; Gladstone, hoary in public service, wavered between the fires of an outraged public and an obtuse monarch; Cleveland and Harrison, whose service may be said to compare with that of the Japanese, at the very moment when their experience, their age and their disinterestedness would be of most service to the state, are relegated, like broken horses, to quiet pastures. Ito alone holds his rightful power—unchecked, supreme at the helm of state where alone the joy of the soul of such a man can find a vent.
His appearance! Of the cryptogram of that typical Oriental countenance only stray ideographs can be learned. Like them all it is inscrutable. The skin, old and yellow with the impenetrable age and the hoary toughness of parchment, lay in sleek, well-grained folds across a dome of brow. The eyes gazed out with reserve, incisive, mild from a flat setting. The iris—as what Japanese is not?—was brown-black, the white yellow with the musty haleness of yellow marble. The look was simple and quiet. Yes. It was profound. Yet it was alert.
I realized that I was looking on that which was older than the saber-toothed tiger or the mausoleums of time, as old as the riddle of the Sphinx. I was gazing upon the oldest thing in the world—the spirit of progress.
When the train reached the last station, Shinegawa, eight minutes from Shimbashi, which is to Tokyo what the Grand Central station is to New York, there were but two vacant seats left in the car, one beside the Marquis, one next myself. Two Japanese entered. The first was well dressed, foreign style, and, without looking, plumped into the seat near the Marquis. I was, apparently, the only one in the car who had recognized the great man.
The second newcomer was one of those queer specimens of the hiatus from old to new which may be seen in the streets of the large cities. He wore the wooden Japanese geta and a half-caste kimono, but on his head was a dinky derby hat so low in the crown that the ticket he had stuck in the band was as tall as the hat. He halted in the door, abashed. Plainly he had taken the wrong coach. He should have gone third class. He was in a land where caste is everything and he felt out of his element. His limp attitude told his embarrassment and even his inscrutable face showed his pain. But the train had started and he could not get out.
Marquis Ito touched the man on the arm and pointed out the seat at the farther end of the car. The poor fellow was only more embarrassed. He looked like a street tramp who might have stepped into a Fifth Avenue prayer meeting. At one shrewd glance the Marquis Ito saw the situation. He rose from his seat, offered it to the stranger with a simple gesture and himself walked the length of the car to the vacant place.
Know a nation’s great men and you know the nation, says the spirit of biography. Marquis Ito is to Japan what Count Tolstoi is to Russia, with this difference: Ito is in power, Tolstoi all but exiled. You may say that one is a statesman, the other a writer, and that hence they are not comparable. Yet, each stands before the world as the most significant intellectual figure among his people.
There are other differences between the two. Ito is silent, Tolstoi has a clarion voice; Ito is omnipotent, Tolstoi powerless; Ito has no ostensible followers, Tolstoi counts his by the tens of thousands. Again you will say this is the difference not between men, but between statesman and prophet. Granted. But a curious fact lessens the force of that truth. Ito and Tolstoi are working for the same ends. Both seek the enfranchisement of men. The true difference between them is this: Ito sinks his personality in the cause he champions, satisfying Tolstoi’s own definition of the great man as being one too great to tell of his own goodness, while Tolstoi stalks his stalwart way to the limelight and focuses upon himself the attention of an age.
Hundreds have written of Marquis Ito, and the only reason for writing of him again is that he may thus be seen in some new light. He is not the only interesting man in Japan, nor the only great one, but he is certainly a dominating figure which fills the horizon with a mighty presence. He is not popular. The papers make only formal announcements of his movements. He passes to and from his country residence and the Imperial Palace without escort or demonstrations. He has no official position, Katsura being the prime minister, except the titular one of President of the Privy Council, which carries with it neither stated duties nor salary. He may be easily approached and is seen by all who have the desire. He is as free from pose as it is possible for man to be. He doesn’t chop trees like Gladstone or pet great danes like Bismarck or walk in melancholy solitude like Disraeli. As a picturesque personality he is disappointing. He is more like Ben Harrison leaving the White House to practice law in Indianapolis; or, imagine Abraham Lincoln surviving the war and settled quietly in a side street in Washington and you will have Marquis Ito as he is to-day. Only add to that the absolute confidence of an all-powerful emperor and the support of all politicians, even those of life-long enmity.
Yet, in spite of seclusion, in spite of a simplicity possible only to men of the very first rank, Ito charms and holds attention. One finds traces of him, hears accounts of him, feels his pervading influence everywhere. When I told of riding in the second-class coach with him from Yokohama to Tokyo the day of the imperial garden party, I did not tell of the talk I had with him after he had given up his seat to the abashed countryman and had taken one next to mine. After a minute and when I saw that he was not occupied I had the temerity to say:
“Your Excellency, I am an American, and as I see you are unoccupied would be glad if you might say a few words that I could repeat to my countrymen.” The never-to-be-forgotten way in which he turned to me replying, “Certainly,” was at once benign and shrewd. There was something of the fatherly old priest about him. Yet through his naïve simplicity there shone a canny alertness such as critics say the French landscapist, Corot, preserved in all his idealist vagaries.
The way in which the old statesman interviewed me was masterly, yet as gracious and lovable as any of the compelling things produced by any of the artists of these forty million. I had before then been sent on newspaper embassies to famous interviewers of the west. Of these J. Pierpont Morgan is of the roughest squeeze, ripping the marrow from a scribe with one smash of his lion paw. Elihu Root glances through one like a rapier, gashing incisive questions into the very pith of the attempt. But you leave such knights of power and purpose dismayed and disheartened. You have been baffled and beaten, the door slammed in your face; you have been caught up by a strong wind and flung blindly to the ground. You need not cry. It is only the wing of destiny clipping a wee mortal as it hurls skyward in its flight.
Not so with Ito. He is all gauzy silk over his shimmering steel. I left him satisfied, enthusiastic about his priceless simplicity, jubilant over his grave dexterity, worshipful at his fatherly equality. Surely, he was a great man worthy of the name.
What had he told me? Nothing.
What had I told him? Everything.
Do not laugh, thinking mine the joy of one self-pleased at his own prattle. No. It was sheer delight in the knowing of one who towers above the greatest without conscious effort, and who reaches to the lowest without condescension. When I shook hands with him I felt that I had known him all my life. When I saw him into his carriage ten minutes later I felt that I should call him brother through all the lives that Buddha promises.
How did he do it? By flattery? How vain! By subtlety? How futile! There were a few details of person to note—a slim flex of the wrist as it dangled majestically across his lap, the weatherly gray old look of battles fought and conquered and of tempests braved and won; then always that inscrutable squint of the brown-black eyes with their yellow whites. For the rest you must seek it in that alchemy which the world, in spite of poets and prophets innumerable, seems still to overlook.
In the last quarter century the Marquis Ito has made the same change in his attitude toward the Japanese house of peers that Gladstone made in his lifetime on the slavery question. In the beginning he believed—or at least contended—that it should hold but one allegiance—toward the Emperor. Now he believes that it should owe a duty to the people, as well. Count Ogura, leader of the opposing political party, has had the honor of bringing him around. Ogura from the first has been a stanch democrat. Ito has been neither imperialist nor democrat; he has been both. Like every successful constructive statesman he has been an opportunist, taking things as they existed and improving them as he could. And he has had as phenomenal a success as any man that ever lived. His attitude on the peers question alone will illustrate the manner of his policy. In the beginning he feared to make too great a breach from the old ways, not sure that either people or peers would stand it. Slowly he released the old beliefs, educating his countrymen, by other innovations, to the new. Now when he finds that neither peers nor populace will stampede at so complete a revolution he forsakes that consistency which is the weakness of little minds.
Again to-day I came across Marquis Ito—his mark. In this Japanese room made of a roof on pegs, with walls of paper shutters, and its floor ten blanketed mats, there are three decorations. They belong to a hotel of the second class. First is a spray of lordly wistaria, leaning slender and dainty from a majolica vase. Next is a bronze statue of a Chinese prophet, sword-habited and tiara-coiffured. The third faces me, leaning above the sliding paper doors. It is a motto in Chinese characters, two yards long and a yard wide. At the left end is a signature and below the signature two seals, one an ochrish yellow, the other vermilion. For days that motto has stared at me its baffling puzzle. Were it the conventional lettering of any language but that of the East I would not be so much concerned. But in the dreamy half light of evening or in filmy moonbeams these ideographs dance; they cry aloud; they gesticulate; they demand utterance. Each stroke is masterly; each separate character a picture—more a poem! I am haunted by their blazing signals. Are they of appeal, or of warning, or of blessing? I try to study them out and fancy I can make a tortoise of the first. The last is a straight dash, the exclaimer of a prodigious font of type, clasped by two crossbeams. Perhaps this ideograph shows a man embraced by welcome arms—appropriate for a bedroom. At last my curiosity bubbles over and I drag Kato in to translate.
“It is very difficult to explain the meaning,” he says. “It is simple to a Japanese, but impossible to a foreigner. The first character is a tortoise, which to us is the symbol of wisdom and eternity. The next means to pray. The last shows pilgrims climbing the sacred mountain, Fujiyama. That straight dash with the cross-beams is the crater with clouds floating about it.”
“The motto thus means, ‘Pray that you may be as a tortoise on the sacred mountain.’”
“Yes. It means to wish eternal wisdom and happiness to the dweller in this room.”
“And the signature?”
Kato looks again. “Hiburimo Ito,” he spells. “The Marquis Ito.”
“The Marquis Ito,” I cry.
“There is only one,” says he.
“The motto was given by him to the master of this house. See! the yellow and red seals are his. He did the work himself. This is the mark of his brush.”
“Is he a friend of the master?”
“No. But the master has a friend who came from the same province, Tosa, in the south. It is called the Statesman Province, for Ogura and Komura also came from there, while Satsuma in the west, from which Yamagata, Oyama and Hirose came, is called the Warrior’s Province. This friend went to school with the Marquis Ito when they were both poor and now that the Marquis is rich and powerful his friend asked him for some motto of good fortune. And he was given this. It is a custom.”
The Marquis Ito says but little. Of whatever subjects he speaks he illumines, and he never hesitates to break into a conversation if it interests him. Some time ago he rivaled that unknown New Yorker who achieved fame for a single toast of nine words:
“The new woman, once our superior, now our equal.”
It was at a reception and the Marquis interrupted a discussion of the difference between American and Japanese women to say to an American: “When I marry I take on a head servant; when you marry you become one.”
It was only last week at a banquet that Mrs. Wood, wife of the United States Military Attaché at the legation here, was asking Baron Komura, Minister of Foreign Affairs, if it was true that the Japanese government had made an appropriation to buy back the heirlooms which needy Japanese of good family had sold abroad.
“No,” said Komura, “we are too poor. What is gone is gone. It may be that some private parties are buying them up, but not the government. I have heard that even some of the temple relics, their most prized bronzes and lacquers, have gone. The people forsake the old gods, the priest gets poor, the curio man comes with gold and away go the musty monuments of centuries.”
At this moment, with an almost sinister frown the Marquis Ito interrupted. “What’s that?” he called. The conversation was repeated. The inscrutable eyes closed, then he opened them with a squint and said to Mrs. Wood:
“America can have all the relics Japan has—her bronzes, gilts, ivories, lacquers, silks, her temples, everything but the land and the people—for gold. We want American gold.”
“Couldn’t America buy Japan?” asked Mrs. Wood, playfully.
The old man mused a while. Finally he said:
“I have no doubt that America has the enterprise to build a ship large enough to float our island to the Golden Gate and anchor it there, but if you do that I bid America beware that we do not annex her!”