Abstract
Long before our journey to the Far East in 1911 the Japanese had seemed to us certainly the most arresting, and perhaps the most gifted of the coloured races belonging to the ancient civilisations of the Asiatic continent. What struck us was their curiously combined but contrasted characteristics. Who would have foreseen that the little yellow men and women pictured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular musical comedy The Mikado, with their fantastic rites and ceremonies and flippant and even naughty ways, would not only defeat the Chinese multitudinous armies, but would beat back decisively and once for all, in 1905, the steam roller of Tsarist Russia, reputed to be one of the great powers of the European continent. Why did the Conservative Government, as Mr. Arthur Balfour told me, remain in office without dissolving Parliament, in order to carry out a defensive alliance with this far-off island,2 no bigger than our own Great Britain? Moreover, we had heard about Japan from our friend Sir Charles Eliot, after his visit in 1907, and he, after all, with his knowledge of Eastern languages, was an authority on the subject.
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Notes
At the foot of the page is the entry ‘Letters From the Far East by Sir Charles Eliot, K.C.M.G. (1907), pp. 2, 6, 20–21, 27.’
Otani Kozui (1876–1948). 24th Chief Abbot of the Nishi-Honganji temple at Kyoto, one of the head temples of the Shinshu sect of Japanese Buddhism.
William Archer (1856–1924). Theatre critic and journalist, and a London acquaintance of the Webbs.
George Etsujiro Uehara (b. 1877). The Political Development of Japan, 1867–1909 (London, 1910) was Uehara’s LSE Ph.D., and was published in a series edited by W. A. S. Hewins, an early Director of The London School of Economics. In light of Sidney’s observation that he ‘thinks of going into Parliament’, it is worth noting that Uehara not only did so but was to prove, in tumultuous times, a remarkably intrepid politician. First elected to the Diet in 1917, he was re-elected a dozen times and survived down into the post-Second World War period, representing the Japanese Diet upon Japan’s admission to membership in the United Nations.
Sir Charles Tennant (1823–1906). A wealthy British industrialist, Liberal MP, art patron and social acquaintance of the Webbs.
Tanaka Hozumi (1876–1944). Journalist and educator, who would become, in 1931, President of Tokyo’s Waseda University, from which he had graduated in 1896.
Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), socialist iconoclast, author in rebellion against Victorian convention and respectability, sandal-maker. His Art of Creation (1904), Carpenter’s thoughts on art, was a variation on a theme running throughout his extensive publications: the attempt to analyse and interpret an ineluctable emotional state he believed to be the driving force of his own intellectual development, and a crucial element of the human understanding.
Omori Sho-ichi (b. 1856), Governor of Kyoto from 1903, and previously Governor of Nagasaki and Hyogo.
Sir William Peterson (1856–1921). Scots-born classical scholar and university administrator. Appointed President of McGill University in 1905, the Webbs had met Peterson on the Canadian leg of the 1911–12 world tour.
Sir Arthur Rucker (1848–1915), Professor of Physics at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington (now Imperial College), and from 1902, Principal, University of London.
Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), in his Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798), had famously expounded the principle that, since population increases in a geometrical ratio while subsistence does so only in a mathematical ratio, population is inevitably and necessarily limited by the checks’ of vice and misery. The same conclusion was less bleakly stated in the largely re-written second edition of 1803, where Malthus makes more of the case for prudential intervention, and less of what, in the earlier edition, had appeared to be insuperable obstacles to all social improvement. At the time of the Webbs’ visit to Japan, a steadily rising birth rate was nearing its peak: whereas the 1872 Meiji enumeration had given Japan’s population at 33111000, the 1920 census would show a total of 56963000 (close to half its present total). Birth control measures of a ‘neo-Malthusian’ sort had made little headway, and abortion was strictly illegal; it was not until the early 1950s that liberalised access to induced abortion was legally condoned in Japan. The somewhat sanguine ‘patriotic’ assumption alluded to here, drawn from classical economic reasoning, was that industrialisation and urbanisation must cause both the birth and death rates to fall.
Beatrice Webb, The Minority Report in Its Relation to Public Health and the Medical Profession (London, 1910), the fruit of Beatrice’s dissenting membership on the Poor Law Commission of 1905–09; and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Prevention of Destitution (London, 1911) which attempts to set out in more positive terms the wide-ranging proposals of the Minority Report itself. The Webbs had urged (as had the Majority Report) the abolition in Great Britain of the general workhouse which was a feature of the nineteenth century Poor Law, and the transfer of the administration of relief to local authorities. Their characteristic view, that so far from poverty being the fault of individuals, it was ‘a disease of society itself’, would come to be regarded as an important contribution to the eventual emergence of the welfare state.
Inuzuka Katsutaro (b. Tokyo 1868). He had been in America and Europe in 1895 to inspect railway affairs, and again in 1910, and had served briefly as Governor of Nagasaki from September 1910, before taking up his position at Osaka.
Frederic Harrison (1831–1923). Author and leading British positivist.
E.H. Pember (1833–1911). Intellectual lawyer and prominent figure in the social and literary life of London.
Sir Oliver Lodge (1850–1940). Physicist, first President of Birmingham University, and a pioneering researcher in psychic phenomena.
George Tyrell (1861–1909). Modernist English Jesuit priest, whose attacks on conservative Catholicism, reaching a large audience, led to his eventual excommunication.
Max Muller (1823–1900). Enormously productive and influential Oxford philologist and orientalist, whose large library was acquired by Tokyo University in 1901.
Okuma Shigenobu (1838–1922). Meiji-era statesman, who narrowly survived an assassination attempt in which he lost a leg. Founder of the Tokyo Semmon Gakko, predecessor of Waseda University.
Naruse Jinzo (1858–1919), a convert to Christianity, was the founder of the Baika Girls’ School in Osaka, 1888, and, with Aso Shozo, of the Nihon Women’s College, which opened in Mejiro, Tokyo in 1901. Known today as the japan Women’s University, it attained university status in 1948.
Takakusu Junjiro (1866–1945). An Oxford student of Max Muller, his crowning achievement in a career full of honours was the collaborative editing and publishing, with Watanabe Kaikyoku, of the Taisho shinshu daizoko, a hundred-volume edition of the Tripitaka, a basic source for the study of Buddhism.
Suga Kanno (1881–1911), journalist and anarchist. Fleeing confinement in an arranged marriage to work for a socialist newspaper, she had begun living with the leftist Kanson Arahata in 1906. Both were arrested and imprisoned for their role in street demonstrations in 1908, but she took up on her release with Kotoku, Kanson remaining in prison. For a time, she became Kotoku’s common-law wife, but eventually left him, thinking him too moderate politically. Both were amongst the two dozen arrested and brought to trial for high treason in 1910, and both were among the twelve subsequently hanged.
Hayashi Tadasu (1850–1913). As Minister to Britain from 1900, he worked to bring about the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. He was Foreign Minister in the 1906 Saionji Kimmochi Cabinet, and in the second, of 1911, when the Webbs met him, the very recently-appointed Minister of Communications.
Arthur Balfour (1848–1930). English philosopher and Conservative Prime Minister, 1902–05, author of works of philosophy and metaphysics widely noted in his day, and a personal friend of the Webbs.
Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91). Free-thought advocate and radical politician.
Dr Moncure Conway (1832–1907). Author and Unitarian minister.
J. M. Robertson (1856–1933). Free-thought author and Liberal MP.
Andrew Young (b. 1858). Socialist schoolmaster and Labour MP, 1923–4.
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© 1992 The London School of Economics and Political Science
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Feaver, G. (1992). Japan. In: Feaver, G. (eds) The Webbs in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12328-5_2
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