Lesley Downer
Showing posts with label Lesley Downer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lesley Downer. Show all posts

Under the Volcano - by Lesley Downer


On August 11th 1863 seven British warships steamed into Kinko Bay in the southern Japanese province of Satsuma and dropped anchor in the shadow of the great volcano, Sakurajima, draped, then as now, with a plume of black ash.

The British crew and marines and legation officers on board were some of the first westerners ever to see the beautiful bay with its fringe of palm trees, balmy blue skies and precipitous hills soaring behind. I was there just last month and found myself trying to imagine how they must have felt as they saw this scene which has changed surprisingly little in the last 155 years. Later visitors called it the Naples of Japan.

But the British hadn’t come to sightsee. They’d come to attack the city of Kagoshima on the opposite shore.
Sengan-en Villa with Sakurajima behind

In those days Japan was made up of two hundred and sixty princedoms, each ruled by a daimyo lord, much like the earls and barons of Elizabeth I’s day. The Satsuma domain, in the far south, was so far from the capital, Edo, that it felt like another country. To this day the people of the area still think of themselves not so much as Japanese but Satsuma. The old clan loyalties remain.

The Prince of Satsuma was one of the wealthiest and most powerful in the land. Besides his imposing castle set against a dramatic hillside covered in dense forest, he had an exquisite seaside villa surrounded by pleasure gardens, overlooking the bay.
Replica of Princess Atsu's lavish palanquin,
 belonging to Shimazu Nariakira

But the lord who had brought the domain to its pinnacle had died five years before the British arrived. Shimazu Nariakira, a brilliant and wise man, was fascinated by Dutch knowledge, the only western knowledge available in Japan at the time. He spoke Dutch, met the Dutch scholars who spent time in Japan, collected western books, studied western technology, and even kept a diary written in the Roman alphabet. He had a telegraph system, the only one in Japan, installed in his castle grounds, and owned Japan’s first camera, a daguerreotype, bought in 1853 in Nagasaki. The first photograph to be taken in Japan was of his castle and the first photographic portrait was of him.
Kagoshima Castle

He also established Japan’s first glass works which produced beautiful red and blue Satsuma cut glass. And he had built a whole industrial complex under the cliffs down by the bay, looking across to the volcano. There he had a foundry and the first reverberating furnace in Japan where he cast cannon. He also had a secret shipbuilding yard on the lower slopes of the volcano where he built his own warships in defiance of the shogunal decree forbidding such activity because he anticipated western attack and wanted to be ready.

But this great and enlightened lord had no surviving children and when he died was succeeded by the young son of his ruthless and unscrupulous half brother, Hisamitsu, who thereafter held the reins of power.

Satsuma glass ware with Sakurajima behind
  When the British sailed into Kinko Bay it was ten years after Commodore Perry had appeared in Edo Bay with his four Black Ships to force Japan to open to the west. So the people of Kagoshima had certainly heard of these monstrous ships even if they hadn’t seen them. All the same it must have been an awe-inspiring sight - seven mammoth warships, fifteen times bigger than the largest Japanese ship, steaming into the bay in a long line, bristling with cannon..

First the British seized three merchant ships and pillaged them. But the people of Satsuma were not easily frightened. Hearing the British were on their way they set up gun emplacements all along the seafront and turned the cannons, cast in the late lord Shimazu Nariakira’s iron foundry, on the British ships.

Bombardment of Kagoshima by the Royal Navy
August 15th 1863, Le Monde Illustre
They also knew there was a typhoon coming and that it would cause havoc for the British ships. The British were taken by surprise. They'd seen themselves as administering punishment to unruly natives; they didn’t expect the Satsuma to fight back. It took them a couple of hours to regroup. Then they sailed along the coast bombarding the city.

The reason for the attack was the death of a British merchant, killed the previous year by samurai of the Satsuma domain. Charles Richardson, a British merchant from Shanghai, had been visiting Yokohama for a few days and wanted to go riding. He’d been warned not to go on the highway because there was a huge procession coming through. But he ignored the advice. After all, he was British.

He and three friends were on the Tokaido highway riding towards Edo. At Namamugi village they met Hisamitsu himself, Nariakira's haughty half brother, heading straight towards them at the centre of a huge procession with an escort of a thousand retainers. The procession was a mile long. It filled the entire road, from one side to the other. Like Trooping the Colour, it didn’t do to barge into it. When such a procession passed, Japanese fell to their knees and bowed their heads. An American merchant, Eugene Van Reed, meeting this same procession did the same, to the disgust of the foreign community. But at least he managed to keep his head.

Richardson (in the middle, with hat) meets Hisamitsu (to the right) at Namamugi
Richardson refused to dismount. He rode down the middle of road and came between Hisamitsu’s palanquin and his bodyguards - like getting right up close to the queen’s carriage at Trooping the Colour. The bodyguards cut him down. 

The British were outraged. The death of an Englishman was an unforgivable offence. They demanded that the shogun’s government pay a huge indemnity of £100,000, more than £10 million today, and 1/3 of the Japanese government’s annual revenues, enough to bankrupt the shogunate. They threatened to bombard Edo if payment was not made. They also demanded that the offending clan, the Satsuma, arrest the perpetrators and pay £25,000 compensation, nearly £3 million today.

The shogunate paid up but Satsuma refused. The British waited a year and eventually sent seven ships from Yokohama to attack Kagoshima.

In the end Kagoshima burnt down and many beautiful buildings and treasures were lost. However the city had already been evacuated and only 5 Japanese were killed as opposed to 11 British.
Under the volcano: Sengan-en Villa with Sakurajima behind

To the British it was just another small war, a very long way away. Probably very few British people ever even heard of it. This was an era when Britain was waging wars and taking colonies all over the globe. It was not long after the Crimean War in which Britain along with France and the Ottoman Empire had defeated Russia while in China the Second Opium War had only recently come to an end. Britannia definitively ruled the waves. But in the annals of Satsuma it looms large as the Anglo Satsuma War.

The long term result was that Satsuma recognised the superior fire power of Britain and wooed the British who were impressed in their turn by the spirit of the Satsuma. They ended up backing them against the shogunate and, as usually happened in those days, the side the British backed won.


Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is the epic tale of Princess Atsu, Shimazu Nariakira's adopted daughter, whom he sent to Edo to marry the shogun. Out now in paperback. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

The pictures of Kagoshima Castle, the bombardment of Kagoshima and Charles Richardson at Namamugi are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The rest are mine.
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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.
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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
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Jetting off to Japan - by Lesley Downer


New Year's, Osaka 1978; w Shige
and Reiko Tohmine. I'm on left.
Forty years ago this month, in September 1978, twenty-two fresh-faced young university graduates set off for Japan. Our mission was to teach English - not at language schools but in universities and high schools, and not in Tokyo but in the provinces, places which had never had an English teacher before or had the chance to see a real foreigner. In later years it would come to be called the JET Programme and thousands of young students would go out. But ours was the very first year and was by way of being a bit of an experiment.

The interviews took place at the Japanese embassy, an intimidating building in Grosvenor Square where nine interviewers sat in a line facing the interviewee in a huge high-ceilinged room. I had borrowed a suit from my mother for the occasion. Many years later one of the then interviewers told me that what they were really looking for was not qualifications or teaching skills or self-confidence or anything else but to assess whether we were the sort of people who could stick it out. And indeed in later years I’ve met people who went to Japan on the JET Scheme and ended up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t stick it out and came home again. But we twenty two were made of sterner stuff.

Forty years ago certainly feels like history now - and here is a little of what we experienced.
Narita Airport, Japan, September 1978. I am at bottom left, kneeling.
In those days there was no direct flight to Japan. The journey took 18 hours with a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska. The airport was a 1 1/2 hour bus ride from Tokyo, which at first sight was distinctly unprepossessing.

In 1978 Japan was 33 years out of World War II and still rebuilding. The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 had helped bring back a degree of prosperity but many of the buildings had been thrown up at great speed and still looked jerry built.

In front of the tokonoma (I'm in the middle)
We were put up in a drab hotel and rushed almost straight away into a welcome meeting at the Ministry of Education, where we sat on metal chairs around long metal tables while what seemed like very old men droned on in Japanese, which none of us could speak, while we, horrendously jet lagged, tried to stay awake. The twenty two of us were to be scattered across Japan. There were two in Tokyo, two in Osaka, but most were in small towns where no one had ever seen a foreigner before.

There we were introduced to our hosts, in my case Professor Shimizu of Gifu Women’s University, who had come to take me to Gifu.

We went down on the bullet train. I remember my first sight of Mount Fuji - a perfect symmetrical cone rising out of the plain. Other mountains are obscured by mountain ranges but Fuji stands all alone in the flat plain, ethereal and beautiful with a trail of smoke wafting from the crater and a wisp of cloud crowning the summit. 
Gifu Castle, Japan

At the job interview at the Japanese Embassy in London, I’d been asked, ‘If you were offered this job, where would you like to go - Tokyo or the countryside?’ I’d said ‘countryside’, picturing green trees, fields, sheep, cows. Little did I know that to my Japanese interlocutor the word inaka - ‘countryside’ - actually means ‘the provinces’, ‘the sticks’, anywhere that isn’t Tokyo. 

And so I found myself in the grey industrial city of Gifu, a city no one had heard of, where so far as I knew no westerners ever went. It was autumn, when the rice has been harvested and the paddy fields are brown and threadbare. Early on I climbed to the top of Mount Kinka, which rises to one side of the city, and peered around, looking for any sign of countryside; but all I could see was brown and drab. I had to wait till spring to see the paddy fields turn brilliant green.

Initially I stayed in a seventh floor room in the Nagaragawa Hotel. I’d barely been there a night when I was woken by my bed swaying violently back and forth. ‘Earthquake!’ I thought in horror and leapt out of bed, wondering what to do. I soon learnt that it was just a tremor, an everyday occurrence. A real earthquake is a lot more dramatic.
Visiting a temple. I'm tucked away behind, in the middle
The staff at Gifu Women’s University had heard that foreigners need a lot of space so they arranged two tiny apartments for me, not one. I used one as my bedroom and bathroom and went along the outside landing to the next, which became my living room and kitchen. My colleague, Mrs Miyabe, took me to the electrical appliance shop to get a doll’s house sized fridge, a tiny purple washing machine and spin drier, an oven big enough to bake a loaf of bread or a cake and a one-person-sized vacuum cleaner, also purple. 

Eventually I moved to a bigger apartment, set in fields of daikon radishes. I also began to explore. Back in the sixteenth century, when Japan was made up of warring princedoms, Gifu was the capital of the famous and formidable warlord Oda Nobunaga. His castle is perched at the top of Mount Kinka. For reasons unknown the Americans bombed this little castle even though it’s a long way from anything industrial. By the time I got there it had been rebuilt in ferro concrete. You climb through the woods along footpaths to get there. It’s hard to imagine Oda and his thousands of samurai warriors making their way up and down the stony hillside. 

I studied tea ceremony ...
To get to the university I had to take the bus destination Mino, written only in Japanese at the front: 
美農
I’d stand at the bus stop looking at the characters which my Japanese colleague had written for me on a piece of paper and comparing them with the characters at the front of each bus as it drew up. Japanese buses are as strictly timetabled as the bullet train and by the time I’d worked out that this was my bus, the doors would have closed and the bus would be pulling away.

Most people in Gifu had never seen a foreigner before. I’d never felt so isolated. Then after three months a colleague asked, ‘Would you like to meet the other foreigners?’ I hadn’t realised there were any. It turned out there were two - a married couple, John from Coulsdon and Sarah from Seattle. They became close friends. 
  
Gifu 1983 (I'm in the middle)
To counter the loneliness I went for walks to the beautiful nearby temple, which had a lake with tiny green turtles swimming around in it and a little stall that sold tofu with sweet miso sauce brushed on top, grilled over charcoal. I also taught myself Japanese; as there were only three foreigners there was no call for Japanese teachers. I studied tea ceremony and flower arranging and immersed myself in Japanese literature in translation. 

I also hitchhiked. By the end of my first year I’d been up to the north of the country and down to the far south.

In my time off my colleagues took me to see sword making, local festivals, paper making and cormorant fishing, for which Gifu is famous. But I still found myself on my own a lot. 

Then I started to make women friends. They took me on trams that trundled off deep into the countryside to ancient moss-covered temples with stone Buddhas outside and Shinto shrines with vermilion arches in front, often both religions celebrated side by side. There we dined on temple food, extraordinary delicate dishes. 

It was the beginning of a never-ending love affair with Japan, enough to fill a lifetime of writing. 


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 are mine except the picture of Gifu Castle, which is courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
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The Victorians meet the Geisha - by Lesley Downer


Playing the shamisen by Felice Beato (1860s)
In 1867 a 24 year old Englishman called Ernest Satow was travelling around Japan. Satow could speak and read Japanese - he was the legation interpreter - and had heard all about the ‘famed singing and dancing girls’ of Ozaka (Osaka). He was referring to geisha, though the word with all its titillating associations had yet to enter the English language. Japan had been open only a few years and no one in the west knew much about it, nor had the geisha and the myths that surround them become the source of fascination that they now are.

Satow went to a party where some performed but was not impressed. ‘Some of them were certainly pretty, others decidedly ugly, but we thought their looks ruined any case by the blackened teeth and white-lead-powdered faces,’ he wrote.
Kiyoka of Shimbashi
by Kazumasa Ogawa, 1902


For centuries there had always been twenty stalwart Dutch merchants who inhabited the tiny Dutch trading post of Dejima, but apart from them Japan had been closed to westerners. Westerners first arrived in any quantity in 1853, when the American Commodore Matthew Perry hove into view with his four gunships bristling with cannon. The following year his crew billeted at the port of Shimoda demanded women. Anxious to protect respectable women and to limit contact between foreigners and ordinary Japanese, the shogunate sent them geisha, who were in any case the only sort of women suitable for such a job. Having enjoyed their company and spawned a fair number of mixed raced babies, the Americans wrote in shocked tones in their journals and reports about what a sexually lax race the Japanese were.

Thus from the very start of western interaction with Japan, the western arrivals - initially entirely men - had a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards Japan and Japanese women.
Kobayakawa Okichi of Shimoda by
Kobazakawa Kizoshi, 1930s

In 1858 the first American Consul, Townsend Harris, and his Dutch secretary, Hendrick Heusken, arrived. They too demanded women and put their negotiations on hold until they got them. As before, the only women available for the job were geisha. Townsend Harris was given a geisha called Okichi and Ofuku moved in with Heusken. According to legend Harris later left Okichi without a second thought and she ended up turning to drink and drowning herself.

Townsend Harris’s negotiations forced the Japanese to allow westerners to settle in Japan. They built a town - Yokohama - to house them. They also provided a pleasure quarters just outside, on the not unreasonable assumption (to the Japanese way of thinking at the time) that westerners, being men, would need one. There were geisha, courtesans, dancing, feasting - but mysteriously not many westerners went. The Japanese managers finally worked out that while westerners had the same impulses as them, they preferred to satisfy them surreptitiously, rather than be seen walking into the pleasure quarters in broad daylight.
The Teahouse Beauty
by Utagawa Toyokuni (1769 - 1825)


One of the most sympathetic visitors to Japan was Ernest Satow’s friend and colleague at the British Legation, Algernon Mitford, the grandfather of the Mitford sisters. He spent three years there in the 1860s and was very impressed by the orderly society he saw. He visited the most famous pleasure quarters of all, the Yoshiwara, which was, he wrote, a decorous place where prostitution was confined and ritualised and kept well away from ordinary people. Yokohama, however, with its western seamen and adventurers, was almost ‘as leprous a place as the London Haymarket’ - prostitution being, of course, at least as prevalent back home.

Eventually Japan opened up fully and westerners began to flood in, bringing with them all their Victorian preconceptions and prejudices.

Early visitors were shocked to the core to discover that men and women cheerfully bathed together in large hot baths. They concluded the Japanese were licentious, promiscuous and immodest, with a shocking lack of moral fibre - not surprising, given that they were pagans and thus inferior to the European master race. Then in 1882 one British visitor, well ahead of his time, began to wonder if perhaps the Japanese ‘simply did not look at each other’s nakedness with lust or lewdness, inconceivable though this may seem to the European mind.’

The easily shocked Victorians were also horrified by the way Japanese women casually slipped their arms out of their sleeves and rolled down their kimonos to breast feed in public. And once or twice a Victorian was out riding when a whole family- grandparents, parents and children - leapt from the bath and rushed out stark naked to have a good look at the extraordinary sight.
Girl playing a Gekin by
Baron Raimund von Stillfried, 1890


But the Japanese soon got the measure of western prudery and thereafter kept their clothes on, at least when westerners were around.

It didn’t take long before the word ‘geisha’ entered the English language. To this day people still worry about whether geisha do or don’t. There’s also the confusion between who is a geisha and who is an ordinary girl in a kimono.

One problem is that westerners are ignorant of the different sorts of kimono (the word just means ‘clothing’) and the different ways of wearing it and what they signify and thus can’t distinguish between respectable kimono-wearing women and geisha or courtesans. As a result geisha and ordinary young Japanese women exist ‘interchangeably in the western imagination in the twilight zone between respectability and decadence, between prudery and immodesty’ (to quote a wonderful book on the subject called Butterfly’s Sisters, by Yoko Kawaguchi.)

All of which is rather satisfying to western men, who have long been convinced that Asian women are of deliciously dubious morality, a quality embodied above all in the concept of the geisha.
Kyoto maiko by me


When I lecture on the geisha, I start out by explaining that the word means ‘artiste’ and that geisha undergo a rigorous five year training in classical Japanese dance and music, akin to becoming an opera singer or joining the Bolshoi ballet. But no matter how often I repeat that geisha are independent, empowered women, sooner or later someone will stand up and ask, ‘But are they prostitutes?’ The fantasy that geisha are ‘submissive’, trained in the arts of pleasing men, is one that western men are not prepared to relinquish.


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

If you’re curious about geisha you could also take a look at my oldie but goldie, Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World. 

And the marvellous Butterfly’s Sisters by Yoko Kawaguchi, Yale University Press, 2010
For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Old photographs and woodblock prints of geisha courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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Things that go bump in the night - by Lesley Downer

Assorted strange creatures by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
In the 19th century, a time of particular upheaval and uncertainty in Japan, people would spend a summer evening sitting around telling ghost stories, lit by candles and lanterns (a hundred was the canonical number). At the end of each story they’d extinguish one until at the end of the last (and most frightening) story the last candle would go out, plunging the room into utter darkness - at which moment everyone would hold their breath, hoping a real ghost might materialise.

This year, as you will all know, there have been terrible and unprecedented floods in the south west. But usually the dog days of summer are even hotter and more stifling in Japan than we have had this year in Britain. In the old days Japanese would take all the sliding wooden and paper doors out of their houses so that the house became a breezy pavilion. Those that live in traditional houses still do. People made a point of eating oily foods like grilled aubergine and grilled eel and drinking iced barley tea. Essential accessories included a fan and a parasol. Another essential was ghost stories to send shivers down your spine. To this day the kabuki theatre always shows ghost stories.

Maruyama Okyo paints a ghost by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892)

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, a great master of the bizarre, made a woodblock print depicting a famous Kyoto artist called Maruyama Okyo. It was said that Okyo’s paintings were so true to life that bees tried to pollinate the flowers he painted. He once made the mistake of painting a ghost. To his horror it came to life, looming up from the block. 

Japanese ghosts are the spirits of people whose lives have been cut short while they still have unfinished business - people who’ve died violently, haven’t received proper funerary rites, or died while consumed by a desire for vengeance. Such spirits can’t pass on peacefully to join their ancestors in the afterlife. According to Buddhist teaching, the journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead takes 49 days, and while they are in this limbo they can revisit the land of the living to sort out unfinished issues. A lot of these are the ghosts of women who have been spurned or killed by their lovers or husbands. They are yurei, which means something like 'faint or dim spirit'. 

Lantern Ghost by Hokusai
At the kabuki theatre I once saw the great male performer of female roles, Tamasaburo Bando, playing the ghost of a woman who had been killed by her husband. Her skin was white, her eyes sunken and ghastly. She was wearing a long white gown and floating high up the wall and her floor length hair was dishevelled and tangled in great knots. Wailing, she started tearing it out by the handful as clumps piled up in a heap on the floor. It was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen.

Katsushika Hokusai, the great woodblock print artist, loved depicting Japanese ghosts. The most famous and frightening ghost story of all is Yotsuya Kaidan, the story of the beautiful innocent Oiwa, who is poisoned and horribly disfigured by a rival who wants to marry Oiwa’s lover, Iemon. Oiwa ends up killing herself and the lover goes off with the rival. But Oiwa returns to haunt her faithless lover, emerging from a lantern hairless and jawless and with one eye hanging out of her head, until Iemon finally goes mad.

But yurei are not always women. There are also men, like Kohada Koheiji, a kabuki actor who specialised in yurei roles and whose wife had an affair with one of his rivals. The rival took him out for a boat ride, pushed him into the water and drowned him. But Kohada rose from his watery grave and haunted his wife and her lover for the rest of their lives, suddenly appearing leaning over the top of their mosquito net and grinning down horribly at them at the most unexpected moments. Both these stories, by the way, are based on true events.
Kohada Koheiji by Hokusai

And if these haven’t cooled you down enough, I have a ghost story of my own to scare you with.

I spent 3 years living in the small city of Kamakura, exactly an hour from Tokyo by train. It’s a beautiful place, full of mossy old temples and vermilion painted shrines with a huge famous stone Buddha.

My western friends and I rented a haunted house there. Japanese refused to live in it, which made the rent very cheap. Japanese ghosts are localised; they torment their own family members or whoever’s done them harm but they don’t trouble people at random and they don’t bother foreigners. In fact foreigners are so radically different that even the most ferocious of Japanese ghosts would probably steer well clear.

My friends and I lived happily in this large, rambling, rather shabby old house. It was beautiful. It had a tea ceremony hut and a carp pond and a very overgrown garden.

Everything was fine until the third summer. That year my western friends by chance all went away at the same time leaving me alone in the house. I had Japanese friends over to stay.
The Great Buddha in Kamakura

‘Lucky you,’ I told them. ‘You can have a room each!’

‘No, thank you,’ they replied. ‘That would be too frightening.’

I’d almost forgotten that the house was supposed to be haunted. Instead they all slept together in one room with their futon mattresses side by side down the middle.

The night after they left was my first on my own in the house. I was lying in my futons on the tatami mats of my room when I heard a distinct banging coming from the other end of the house, at the far end of a long dark corridor.

I listened hard. It sounded like boxes being thrown around. There was no one else in the house. I was definitely all alone. It couldn’t be a human being making all that noise. It could only be an obake - a one-legged umbrella ghost - but I certainly wasn’t going to go and investigate. I pulled my covers over my head, screwed my eyes tight shut and hoped for the best.

Thereafter I stayed well clear of the end of the corridor.
[Scroll on down to see the obake!]


Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale with plenty of ghosts, set in nineteenth century Japan, and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Woodblock print images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Photo of the Great Buddha by me.

Obake (on the right). The critters on the left are kappa.
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