Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852’1912 (111 page)

Cowen then described his own experiences. He had been in the city during the four days following the victorious attack by Japanese forces. He stated as a fact that although there had been no resistance in the city, almost every male inhabitant had been slaughtered, and some women and children had also been killed accidentally. Japanese soldiers had looted the whole city. He had reported to Viscount Mutsu that he had seen many Chinese prisoners, both hands tied behind their backs and stripped of their clothes, who had been hacked and slashed with swords. The intestines of some men had been torn out and their hands and feet cut off. Many corpses were partly burned.
³⁸

The immediate reaction of the Japanese government to this and similar dispatches that appeared in the foreign press was to send out reports favorable to the Japanese.
³⁹
Bribes were given to Reuters to circulate pro-Japanese articles. Some newspapers like the
Washington Post
were directly paid to print articles favorable to Japan.
⁴⁰
Various foreign journalists were by this time in the Japanese pay.
⁴¹

Military censorship of the Japanese press was initiated at this time. A set of four regulations was drawn up, headed by the following instructions: “Reports should record insofar as possible true facts concerning acts of loyalty, courage, righteousness, and nobility and should encourage feelings of hostility toward the enemy.” Those who violated these regulations would be suitably punished.
⁴²

Worldwide attention was drawn to the events that had occurred at Port Arthur by a brief cable dispatch from James Creelman, a foreign correspondent of the New York newspaper the
World
:
⁴³

The Japanese troops entered Port Arthur on Nov. 21 and massacred practically the entire population in cold blood.

The defenseless and unarmed inhabitants were butchered in their houses and their bodies were unspeakably mutilated. There was an unrestrained reign of murder which continued for three days. The whole town was plundered with appalling atrocities.

It was the first stain upon Japanese civilization. The Japanese in this instance relapsed into barbarism.

All pretenses that circumstances justified the atrocities are false. The civilized world will be horrified by the details.

The foreign correspondents, horrified by the spectacle, left the army in a body.
⁴⁴

The response of the Japanese press was to justify Japanese actions in terms of the unspeakable trickery of the Chinese soldiers who, even after shedding their uniforms and putting on civilian clothes, continued to resist. They were as dangerous as mad dogs let loose among the population, and the Japanese army had no choice but to kill them before they could bite.
⁴⁵
The atrocities perpetrated against the bodies of captured Japanese were repeatedly cited as the cause of the hatred of the Japanese troops for the Chinese.
⁴⁶

As for the “massacre,” it was claimed that the British in India had committed worse. Maoris had been massacred in New Zealand. The recent massacre of Armenians by a Bulgarian army unit in the service of the Turkish government was termed far worse than anything that had occurred in East Asia. The lynching of a black man in Texas, whose only crime was to aspire to a good education, was cited not (as one might expect) as a deplorable instance of racial prejudice but to show that civilized people (like the American lynchers or the Japanese) found it hard to sympathize with barbarians (like the black man or the Chinese).
⁴⁷

The full accounts of the massacre at Port Arthur, as seen by three foreign correspondents (Cowen, Creelman, and Frederic Villiers of the
North American Review
), are horrifying. They all bear witness to the fact that the Japanese troops killed everyone in sight, even though there was no resistance. Old people, kneeling and begging for mercy, were stabbed with bayonets and their heads cut off. Women and children who fled to the hills were pursued and shot. The shooting was indiscriminate: anything that moved, even a dog, a cat, or a stray donkey, was shot. Cowen declared that as far as he could see, not one shot was fired from inside the houses at the Japanese, but this did not keep the Japanese from reckless shooting. The streets were filled with corpses, as the photographs show, and a river of blood flowed. According to the foreign correspondents, none of the corpses looked like soldiers or carried weapons.
⁴⁸

No prisoners were taken, although it was officially announced that 355 were being well treated in captivity and would soon arrive in T
ō
ky
ō
.
⁴⁹
The
Yorozu ch
ō
h
ō
for December 4 asked why there were so few prisoners, and then answered its own question by saying that if the Japanese army and navy had wished to take prisoners, they could have taken as many as they pleased. But a large number of prisoners would have been a nuisance, so the Second Army killed every man who either was armed or looked as if he might resist the Japanese soldiers. That was why there were so few prisoners.
⁵⁰

A few Chinese were in fact not killed, probably because their help was needed in burying the dead. They were given white tags bearing such inscriptions as “This man is obedient. Do not kill him” and “Do not kill this man. By order of the XX unit.”
⁵¹

Although prohibited by international law from bearing arms, coolies with the Japanese army eagerly took part in the slaughter. In time, when it became impossible for the army to deny that a massacre had occurred, drunken coolies were blamed for what happened. The looting by the Japanese army, which stripped the houses of Port Arthur of every article of value, was formally denied by General
Ō
yama.
⁵²

On November 23 the Harvest Festival was celebrated with a party in the Port Arthur shipyard. At the height of the party
Ō
yama Iwao and other high-ranking officers were treated to being tossed in the air in celebration of the victory. That night Ariga Nagao, the legal officer of the Second Army, visited the foreign correspondents. Ariga had been a brilliant student at T
ō
ky
ō
University, reputedly the only student who fully understood Ernest Fenollosa’s lectures on art,
⁵³
but at this time he was an apologist for the Japanese military. He urged Villiers to say without hesitation whether he considered what had happened during the past days to constitute a massacre. Villiers avoided a direct answer, but in his article he characterized the events with another term, “cold-blooded butchery.”
⁵⁴

If there had been no foreign correspondents, these unspeakable events might never have been recorded.
⁵⁵
The massacre at Port Arthur remains a painful issue: How did it happen that men who were not monsters could have performed these terrible acts? In the heat of battle, and provoked by the sight (or report) of the dismembered bodies of their comrades, normal discipline may have been forgotten and individual convictions, including inborn decency as human beings, melted into an undifferentiated mass emotion characterized only by the instinct to kill.
⁵⁶

If people in the West had read reports of the massacre of the “natives” of some distant part of the world by the troops of a European or American country, they might have shrugged them off, saying that savages had to be taught to behave like civilized men. But when they read of the atrocities committed by Japanese troops, it confirmed the suspicions of some of them that Japan, for all its beautiful scenery and picturesque art, was a barbarian country that could not be dealt with as an equal.
⁵⁷

Ratification of the Japan–United States treaty by the Senate was immediately affected. On December 14 Minister Kurino Shin’ichir
ō
cabled Mutsu: “The secretary of state
⁵⁸
says that if the rumors concerning the murders of Chinese in Port Arthur are true, they will surely cause very great difficulties in the Senate.” Mutsu immediately wired back to Kurino that “while reports regarding the Port Arthur incident are greatly exaggerated, some unnecessary bloodshed and killing did occur. I believe, however, that there must have been provocation on that occasion, since the conduct of our soldiers everywhere else has been exemplary.” The Senate, after much delay, finally took up the treaty. Some senators opposed abandoning extraterritoriality in the light of Japanese behavior in China. Then an amendment was proposed that, according to Mutsu, “would have had the effect of virtually nullifying the entire treaty.”
⁵⁹
Not until February 1895 did the Senate approve the treaty.

Cowen was sure that the generals and other high-ranking officers were aware that the massacre had continued day after day.
⁶⁰
But it seems unlikely that the emperor in Hiroshima knew what had happened. The men close to him would hardly have disturbed him with reports that cast shame on the behavior of the imperial forces. The emperor scarcely looked at the newspapers, but even if he had read them carefully, he would have found only denials of the articles by foreign correspondents, and he had no reason to trust foreigners more than his own countrymen.

Perhaps the emperor’s most intimate knowledge of the fighting came from the wartime booty presented for his admiration. Although the booty included works of art, it consisted mainly of Chinese items of clothing, flags, and similar items. Most memorable was the pair of camels first offered to General Yamaji by the Japanese soldier who found them. Yamaji in turn offered them, together with a crane, to the emperor.
⁶¹
The camels arrived in Ujina on November 29. The emperor, in a good mood, jovially suggested that they be given to Horikawa.
⁶²
The puzzled nobleman somehow contrived to avoid the unwelcome gift,
⁶³
so in February the camels were presented to the Ueno Zoo as a gift from the crown prince.
⁶⁴

The emperor composed two
tanka
on the subject of the fighting at Port Arthur:

These were his most overt expressions of his feelings on learning of the capture of Port Arthur.

Chapter 46

After the disastrous defeat at Port Arthur, the Chinese tried once again to end the war. At Li Hung-chang’s suggestion, a German commissioner of customs at Tientsin named Gustav Detring was sent to Japan with a letter from Li to Prime Minister It
ō
. The letter related that the emperor of China had commanded Li to send Detring to Japan because he had “held office in our empire for many years and proved himself faithful, true and worthy of our highest trust.” Detring’s mission was to effect a settlement, and he was instructed by Li to “learn the conditions upon which peace may be regained and amicable intercourse be reestablished as of old.”
¹
Li also enclosed a private letter to It
ō
reminding him of their friendly meeting some years earlier in Tientsin and expressing the conviction that It
ō
and he had a common purpose.

Detring arrived in K
ō
be on November 26, 1894. He requested an interview with It
ō
through the governor of Hy
ō
go Prefecture, but It
ō
categorically refused to meet him, citing Detring’s lack of proper qualifications as an emissary from a country at war with Japan.
²
His rejection of an emissary on technical grounds suggests that Japan was basically uninterested at this stage in ending a war that was developing so strongly in its favor.