Water, sky; sky and water, clouds; these gave way to land, seemingly floating in the water; this was the mainland of China. This was to be my second homeland, one that had appeared so often in my dreams.
—MIYAZAKI TŌTEN
Kawashima Naniwa’s reputation has been assaulted from various quarters over the years, and mention of his name can still bring on a lot of yelling. That kind of roughing up, however, does not take place within hearing of his small circle of surviving fans, who would not tolerate such insults. Led by those from Naniwa’s birthplace in Nagano Prefecture, these admirers continue to view his legacy with reverence and hold up his activities as an example to all. There are of course those in Nagano who object to this, but they have the good sense to avoid a wrangle. In the decades since Naniwa’s death, his supporters have continued to extol the native son, who traveled widely but returned home at the end, ever true to his visionary ideals.
Among the contingent of Naniwa’s devotees, few make their position more plain than Wada Chishū, a retired journalist, who was born in Nagano City. Like his hero Naniwa, he lived for some time in Tokyo, but Wada was not won over by the marvels of that metropolis. Instead, he returned to the shimmering landscapes of his home, to Nagano’s pines and bamboo on gently sloping mountains, and the springtime gift of mountain cherry trees. Wada found Tokyo also lacking in an aspect crucial to a Nagano native: Tokyo may be the center of the universe, but Wada couldn’t find any decent hot springs. Nagano is known for its piping hot natural baths, and according to Wada, those around Tokyo are tepid.
“No competition in Tokyo at all,” he told me. “I wasted my money.”
In his seventies now, Wada Chishū is an impressive sight as he climbs about the mountains of Nagano, in search of vegetables or a cedar planted by Naniwa himself. He does not appear to have heard about what can happen if ageing human bones smash against mountainsides.
“I climb mountains every day here. It’s just a part of my life. Worry about breaking bones? Not at all. I worry more about snakes, and there are a lot of them around. I should have worn boots today but I forgot. … The secret of my health? Alcohol. I drink every night. I start with two glasses of beer and then drink three cups of shōchū, straight. Every night.”
On the front of his business card, Wada describes his occupation as a “researcher on Kawashima Naniwa,” and on the back he offers ringing praise of his subject:
Patriotic man of high principles, Kawashima Naniwa (1865–1949) was born in the city of Matsumoto in Shinshū [the old name for the region]. He lived life on a large scale. He served as a Chinese translator, composed many poems in Chinese. … As an expert on China, he was involved in forming our nation’s policies on that continent both overtly and covertly.
Clearly Naniwa could not ask for a more positive assessment, and Wada followed up on this with a series of articles about Naniwa in a local newspaper. Here is one of Wada’s summations of Naniwa’s policies regarding Japan’s role in Northeast China:
Kawashima’s idea in those days was to forge an independent state with a shining culture in Manchuria and Mongolia, which basically had no leadership, and to establish an ideal government there. … As a result, there would be an end to the chaos of world war. And with the development of this country in an ideal fashion, both Japan and China would benefit, assuring their futures.
Wada’s position represents one extreme in analyses of Naniwa’s contributions; detractors use the same evidence to reach other conclusions, labeling Naniwa an ultranationalistic betrayer of China, and worse. Floating about these different interpretations, though, are certain facts that are not under dispute. For example, it is certain that, more than once, Naniwa, acting as an agent of the Japanese government, supplied arms and expertise to those aiming to set up an independent state in Manchuria and Mongolia. It is also certain that Naniwa was given Yoshiko to raise by her father Prince Su, that he took the Manchu Yoshiko into his home, and that he became the single most important influence on her life. In Yoshiko’s ideas and sorrows, Naniwa’s hand is everywhere evident. He also certainly had his own plans for her upbringing, emphasizing her Manchu heritage and inculcating in her his own very special view of world affairs: “Manchuria is the very nerve center of East Asia’s life and death struggle,” he wrote. Evaluations of Kawashima Naniwa’s achievements vary, but Wada and other commentators agree that this was no ordinary father.
Wada wonders at how a man of Naniwa’s small stature—he was just five feet tall and weighed eighty-eight pounds—could have found the energy to go back and forth between Japan and China throughout his life. In 1875, when he was ten years old, his family moved from Nagano to Tokyo. Naniwa himself has conceded that he was a weakling when growing up. “By nature, I was a nervous boy, fragile as glass, affected by the slightest disturbance and very easily shattered.” Bullied by his classmates and ashamed of his cowardice, he took the easy way out by skipping school. With nothing else to do, he passed his days lolling about in the woods or playing with the birds. One Sunday, a missionary’s son happened to invite him to a service at the Russian Orthodox church in Tokyo, known as the Nikolai Cathedral, where he was exposed to Christianity for the first time. The sermon, which informed him about the omniscience of God, gave Naniwa a fright. “God can see into a person’s good and bad sides,” the sermon warned. “Even if you do something bad deep down in a hole where humans will not notice, it will be visible to God.”
Sure now that his naughtiness was about to be exposed, Naniwa returned home in tears. His mother was disgusted by his sniveling since she had been promised a more radiant son. “You are a child made with the moon and the sun inside you,” she once informed him. “It is said that long ago the mother of [the great warrior] Toyotomi Hideyoshi dreamed that the sun had entered her breast when she became pregnant with him. When I became pregnant with you, both the sun and the moon became a part of you. I dreamed one night that the moon and the sun appeared lined up side by side in back of the peak of Higashiyama. … So you must become more eminent than Hideyoshi.” The mother lived to regret instilling in Naniwa such grand notions, especially when she was close to starvation and he abandoned her by sailing off to meet his destiny in Shanghai. His adopted daughter, Yoshiko, too would feel the devastating effects of Naniwa’s determination.
Yet Naniwa’s account of his own beginnings—his timidity as a child, his mother’s outsized expectations—leads up to his larger message of personal grit and single-minded dedication that are essential to such life stories. Because spinelessness did not suit a young man carrying around inside him both the sun and moon, Naniwa determined to build himself up. Of samurai stock, he did not have to look far for lessons about stoicism and physical courage. He began to fight back against the bullies at school, but soon that challenge did not suffice. He next took to throwing himself in the frozen waters of a forest lake at night and under a waterfall, to test his endurance. “Absolutely naked, I sat in prayer beneath the waterfall and fought against the cold.” Along with immersions in the freezing lake and the waterfall came other tests of his bravery, like facing down foxes. He climbed mountain peaks and meditated alone in remote temples.
Thus Naniwa was ready when China beckoned. He eventually joined the ranks of the Japanese men known tairiku rōnin—“continental adventurers”—who, for an assortment of reasons, made China the center of their lives. In 1919, an exasperated contributor to the New York Times described these Japanese in China as “those gentlemen who are conspicuous by the lack of wealth, occupation, and profession, but have a lot of big political ideas.” Others would define their activities more charitably and see them as Japanese idealists who wanted to assist in lifting China out of backwardness. There were also those rōnin who were freelance operatives in China, seeking only to benefit their native country by enlarging Japan’s presence there. Whatever their motives, these Japanese rōnin were a disorderly bunch who become known for things as diverse as aiding Chinese revolutionaries or leading murderous mobs to kill Chinese protesting against the Japanese in China or organizing drug-trafficking rings.
One also gets the idea that no matter what spurred the rōnin on, a small country like Japan cramped their style. China in those days was inspiring, deep, troubled, vast; a certain type of restless Japanese man was eager to be let loose there. Miyazaki Tōten, one of the best known of the China rōnin, provided critical help to revolutionary Sun Yat-sen in the struggle to overthrow the Qing dynasty and establish the Republic of China in 1912. Miyazaki’s autobiography is a rollicking mixture of high principles, high spirits, and profligacy.
I imagined myself entering the Chinese continent in front of a host of Chinese, a general mounted on a white horse in white raiment. When I thought about this I would cry for joy and fortify myself with saké. At other times, when I dreamed of the trials of the Chinese revolution, the white-robed general would fall victim to the enemy assassin’s dagger. And when I dreamed of tragedy I would end up heading for the geisha house singing a gambler’s song. Ah, that white-robed general on his white horse, he was not the real me but a phantom of my high ambition, a make-believe figure. I couldn’t get away from such illusion; I was not yet a stable, mature individual single-mindedly pursuing my purposes. Instead, at that point I was a make-believe figure, the phantom. Certainly I had high ideals, but I lacked the morality appropriate to them. Consequently spirit did not match with morality, and will wandered apart from resolve so that they could not proceed in tandem. I hadn’t come to realize that half my life was made up of saké and sex.
As he toiled on behalf of Sun Yat-sen, Miyazaki neglected his wife and children back in Japan. More than one commentator has observed that while the Japanese rōnin took naturally to certain Chinese customs, the Chinese emphasis on family responsibility did not make a big impression on them.
*
During Naniwa’s youth, conditions in China looked bleak to Japanese observers, with Western powers stripping China of resources and sovereignty. Not only were the Japanese angered by this treatment of another Asian country, they also feared that Japan might next be overtaken by the rapacious West. “Many in Asia were being increasingly dogged by the detestable pressure of the white race,” Naniwa wrote of the period. “Many had already pretty much lost their independence under this occupation. Asian people had sunk so deep as to become their slaves, and only a few countries like China, Korea, and Japan remained free. Our indignation gave rise to the idea that we had to rally against this chaos. Japan was the first to promote the idea that, first of all, we must stop the ruin of China.” As a statement of his intentions, this presents only one side of his ambitions, the side—emphasized by writers like Wada—that sought only the uplift of China. Less-sympathetic analysts emphasize Naniwa’s other facets: there was also the Naniwa who believed that Japan had to establish itself in China before other powers seized everything.
With the resolve that he had shown sitting under waterfalls, Naniwa began a study of China. His birthplace was Matsumoto, which had once been an important town in Japan’s old feudal regime, a history still remembered in the city’s wonderful castle. Solid grounding in Chinese classics had been an essential element in the educational system of the old days, and there were centers of Chinese learning still functioning in Matsumoto when Naniwa was young. Then there were the Matsumoto natives lauded for bringing back news of China, in particular army general Fukushima Yasumasa, who eventually became Naniwa’s patron. Fukushima had achieved the status of national hero, an icon of Japanese male might, when he set out alone on horseback in February 1892 and rode for sixteen months from Berlin to Vladivostok, collecting intelligence along the way.
Still, in the 1880s, when Naniwa was a student, learning Chinese was not a popular choice among Japanese youth; Western languages promised more opportunity to the ambitious. “Those were the days when everyone in Japan was trying to be very up-to-date,” Naniwa wrote, “and you were disdained as a barbarian if you couldn’t read Western works written horizontally across the page.” When one of his relatives berated him for sticking to Chinese rather than French and English, Naniwa became enraged, as he often did: “Swallows and sparrows can’t comprehend the dreams of the great phoenix. I won’t step foot in this house again until I have succeeded.”
Although Naniwa was not a star pupil at his language school, he immersed himself in Chinese history and culture. When his behavior became too disruptive, he was confined to his quarters or forced off the premises, again exhibiting the explosive nature more suited to a roving rōnin than an ordinary citizen of Japan. Naniwa claims that school authorities misjudged him. “I was the rowdiest of the rowdy but I never stooped to low behavior. I used to beat up the weaklings who frequented the pleasure quarters.” Through it all, he remained stalwart in his refusal to learn English, registering a lifelong resistance to Western influences. “I’ll show you how I can achieve much in life without knowing even the ‘A’ of ‘AB.’”
Ignoring all advice, Naniwa left his language school without graduating and made plans to go to China. Before departing, he had to contend with his poverty-stricken parents, “blessed with many children”—they had ten—who begged him to stay at home in Tokyo. He was the oldest son, and traditions of filial piety demanded that he renounce his own desires for his family’s sake, but Naniwa seems to have had little regard for this old-fashioned Confucian concept.
He scrounged around to collect his travel expenses and at last took a boat to Shanghai in September 1886, explaining that if he did not go now, his future would amount to nothing. He urged his virtually penniless parents to hold out for just a little while longer and in later writings at least had the decency to say that he had felt qualms about leaving his relatives at the dock. “Weeping blood in my heart,” he took off anyway, dashing off some Chinese poetry to commemorate the occasion.
*
Once he reached China, Naniwa released the full might of a personality kept at a lower pitch in Japan. He had temper tantrums, which foiled his attempts to earn money, and was belligerent with strangers. His extreme restlessness and irascibility flourished in this foreign land still ruled by a Manchu dynasty; soon he was sporting Chinese clothes and a queue. In seeking to fulfill his ambitions, mere theories in Tokyo, he became involved in escapades possible only in a big country like China, where no one could keep an eye on him.
Following Naniwa’s early activities in China gives a clear sense of what Yoshiko later faced under his tutelage. A conventional life had perhaps never been possible for her since family connections and world history made inevitable her involvement in Sino-Japanese politics. Others can imagine a more ordinary fate. “Yoshiko was outstandingly gifted,” her niece once said. “She dropped out of high school, but she taught herself things like calligraphy, haiku, and painting. Everyone talked about how good she was in all of these. She was talented with her hands too—she did wonderful work in sewing, knitting, tea ceremony, flower arrangement. The food she cooked was delicious. If she had become a wife in an ordinary household, she’d have led a happy life and would now be surrounded by grandchildren.”
Yoshiko never imagined such a rosy future, nor did she consider herself much of a catch: “If in the end the restoration of the Qing dynasty turns out to be a hopeless fantasy, I’ll end up married to some lame or blind Japanese man.”
Yoshiko’s speculations fail to take into account the potency of Naniwa’s personality, which so affected her choices. Family and history nudged Yoshiko in certain directions definitely, but so did Naniwa, who, despite repeated failures, had enough plans and energy to power the activities of the next generation.
Naniwa next went to Tianjin, where he found out that his promised job had been taken by someone else. Alone, abroad, and with little money, he could not bring himself to coax his would-be employer to reconsider his decision. Rather, he stormed off in one of his fits of temper (“I don’t need your help!”) from his only potential source of income. Modifying his itinerary, he took a long nighttime ride in a horse-drawn carriage to catch a ship that would take him back to Shanghai. Once at the dock, he discovered that the ship would not be going to Shanghai and that he had contracted malaria. Feverish from his illness, he managed to get to Shanghai at last, and there he became acquainted with a Japanese naval officer who was on a secret mission to investigate the state of China’s coastal defenses. Derring-do despite malarial fevers was a point of pride for Naniwa, and we next find him aboard another ship accompanying the Japanese officer on his next assignment.
Once they disembarked, Naniwa’s temper got in the way of the secret mission’s success. He hired a local Chinese to guide him to the coast, and over lunch Naniwa requested a taste of the guide’s bean-stuffed rice ball. Refused even though he offered one of his own rice balls in exchange, Naniwa became furious and knocked the Chinese guide to the ground. Back on his feet, the Chinese fled from this violent foreigner.
Naniwa finally found his way back to the ship on his own and was preparing supper with the crew when the Chinese guide appeared, this time accompanied by a vengeful, club-wielding gang. The whole crew under assault from the gang’s clubs as well as rocks and bottles picked up along the way, the hotheaded Naniwa took out a shotgun and was about to shoot the attackers. Those fearing a mass slaughter urged him to restrain himself; finally he went along with the idea that the better course of action was a quick escape from the area.
Although such stories are presented as jolly exploits, they show Naniwa unable to control himself even when a cool head was crucial. For anyone searching for evidence, these incidents can provide clues about why later, more complex projects ended in failure.
*
In Shanghai, Naniwa came in contact with other like-minded Japanese who met regularly to discuss the dire state of affairs in China. He came to accept the prevailing view that Russia, seeking to acquire a warm-water port in Manchuria, posed the greatest threat to Japan. If the Russians took over Manchuria, they would eventually advance further into China and go on to take over Korea too. It was only a matter of time before the Russians turned their attention to Japan. In Naniwa’s view, Japan had to immediately establish a stronghold against the Russians in Manchuria; if the Japanese government could not rouse itself to act against this imminent danger, he was prepared to take over the job.
In 1889 Naniwa set off with two friends on a hike to Manchuria, where he intended to implement his ideas. Dressed like Chinese coolies from their ragged clothes to the bamboo shoulder poles the three comrades used to carry their possessions, they also brought along a pistol and a Japanese sword. Beautiful and ridiculous in Naniwa’s later description, this scheme had them winning over the hearts and minds of the people, living alongside them in harmony, and raising pigs and sheep together. Moreover, Naniwa says he planned to convince the local bandit gangs to join his crusade, and together they would rise up to beat off the Russian threat by building a new Manchu-Mongol state. It was Naniwa’s dream that the Japanese government would gradually join in to repel the Russians. Afterward, the people of Manchuria and Mongolia would reward these efforts by supporting a lasting Japanese presence in the region.
When Naniwa fell ill again, he urged his companions to carry out the mission without him. “You just leave me here and proceed on your own. Even though I may die here, you will fulfill my deepest wishes if you carry out my plan.” Rejecting this plea, his friends decided to give up on creating an independent state for the time being. One member of the band returned to Japan because his father had died; the other left to prepare for study in France. Alone and ill, Naniwa at last headed back to Tokyo to convalesce. He vowed to fulfill his dreams at a later date.
*
In recounting these escapades, Naniwa strives to create a winning impression of a youth with a noble mission in mind. The mature Naniwa remained true to his original purpose, but his spontaneous, low-budget efforts gave way later to violent, government-funded assaults on Manchuria and Mongolia.
In his dream of expanding his operations, Naniwa got a big break in 1900 when—according to Naniwa—he single-handedly saved the Forbidden City from destruction. An antiforeign secret society known as the Boxers had been killing Chinese Christians and then moved on to Beijing, where they started murdering foreigners. Foreign troops were summoned to put an end to the Boxers’ siege. When the German contingent threatened an assault on the Forbidden City, Naniwa was serving as Chinese translator for the Japanese forces in Beijing.
“Leave the Forbidden City to me!” was Naniwa’s cry as he kept the Germans at bay and saved the palace, as well as the members of the Qing royal family and their entourage, who were trapped inside.
With this deed, Naniwa earned the gratitude of the imperial family and, in particular, of Prince Su, who was awed by Naniwa’s professional abilities. Thus began that personal and political alliance between this Japanese man and the Manchu prince that would have far-reaching consequences. “Prince Su depended too much on Naniwa,” the prince’s great-granddaughter mused recently, looking back on the effects of this friendship on Chinese history and her own family. With Prince Su’s patronage, Naniwa secured prominent posts in last-ditch reformist projects of the Qing dynasty. In a more lasting role, he became an important behind-the-scenes agent of the Japanese government, which publicly denied any involvement in Chinese affairs.
Those wondering about the character of the Japanese man entrusted with bringing up the Chinese child Yoshiko must also take an interest in his shifting attitude toward China and its people. As a young man, Naniwa had starry-eyed views about the relations between China and his native land: “The proper way for Japan and China to interact should not be based on capitalistic exploitation, nor on invasions by militarists, but rather their exchanges must be based on a humanism founded on brotherly love that is mutually beneficial.”
Kawashima Naniwa and Prince Su Courtesy Hokari Kashio
But Naniwa’s affection for China, where he had won the respect of powerful Manchu officials and made himself extremely useful, soured as time passed. He got into the habit of saying things like “China is like a wrecked car” or “[The Chinese people] are like sand, completely incapable of forming a strong union on their own.”
Eventually his view of China settled into vituperative disdain. In 1928, he lost his temper in print and wrote, “I often say that Prince Su’s family is like China in miniature; if you want to know China, just study them. Prince Su was a great person, rare among men in China, but his more than twenty children don’t resemble him at all. It’s ironic, but in their stupid vulgarity they are perfect examples of the Chinese mentality.”
