Finding Japan: Early Canadian Encounters with Asia

257 Pages·2012·8.172 MB·English

by  Anne Shannon

Finding
J A P A N
EARLY CANADIAN ENCOUNTERS
with ASIA
Anne Shannon
VancouVer • Victoria • calgary
Copyright © 2012 Anne Shannon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans-
mitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwise—without
the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.
Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.
heritagehouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Shannon, Anne Park
          Finding Japan [electronic resource]: early Canadian encounters with Asia / Anne Shannon.

Electronic monograph in multiple formats.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-927051-56-6 (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-927051-66-5 (PDF) 
          1. Canadians—Japan—History.  2. Japan—Relations—Canada.  3. Canada—Relations—Japan. 
4. Japan—Civilization—
Western influences.  5. Japan—History—1868–.  I. Title.

DS832.7.C3S43 2012             952.03             C2012-904128-9

Edited by Lana Okerlund
Proofread by Renate Preuss
Cover design by Jacqui Thomas
Front cover image details clockwise from top: Canadian Embassy Tokyo; Library and Archives Canada,
Sir William Cornelius Van Horne collection (PA-206846); Vancouver Maritime Museum; BC Archives
(A-02284); Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1966.041.11); UBC Rare Books and Special Collections,
Chung collection; United Church of Canada Archives (1989.054N); Royal Ontario Museum, Sir
Edmund Walker collection (926.18.609); bamboo by rusm/iStockphoto.com;
Heritage House acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of
Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), Canada Council for the Arts and the province of Brit-
ish Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
PARt 1: ARRIVInG (1848–1900) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Inspired Madness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
those seductive treaty Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Missions and Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
no Geisha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Highway to the east . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
PARt 2: GRoWInG (1900–30) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Myths and Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
King’s Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Flaming Passion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
the Great Quake and Commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
sir Herbert and the Legation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
PARt 3: stRUGGLInG (1930–50) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
the Dark Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
War and Reconciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
norman Sensei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
sources and Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

IntRoDUCtIon
This book is about early encounters with Japan, the first place Canadians
found when they crossed the Pacific. In contrast to the widely known
experience of Japanese who came to Canada, it looks at movement the
other way.
It began in Tokyo, where I worked during the 1980s and, like many
foreigners, became intrigued with the society around me. Only in my case
the object of fascination was not simply the Japan I was in; it was also other,
earlier Japans I might have experienced had I only arrived there sooner. A
chance visit to a local book fair led to Ranald MacDonald, the young half-
Aboriginal son of a Hudson’s Bay trader who dared to smuggle himself into
Japan in 1848 when it was still closed to the outside world—quite possibly
the first person of Canadian origin to reach the shores of Asia. I was hooked.
I began ransacking second-hand bookshops, libraries and archives, and asked
friends and colleagues for their recollections.
The result is the colourful and disparate cast of characters who inhabit
these pages—adventurers, military and technical advisers, missionary educat-
ors and social workers, businessmen and art collectors, politicians, diplomats
and soldiers, as well as the occasional misfit.
Their stories took place during the tumultuous 100 years roughly
between 1850 and 1950, when Japan made its spectacular leap from a
closed and largely feudal society to a major power—an arc that coincid-
entally also mirrors Canada’s own rise to nationhood. Part 1 (1848–1900)
tracks early arrivals during the half century when Japanese began boot-
strapping their country into the modern world. Part 2 (1900–30) is about
expanding economic, government and other connections during the early
20th century against the backdrop of growing international tensions over
5
competing interests in China. Part 3 (1930–50) is about struggling through
the deteriorating decade of the 1930s and the Pacific War.
The stories provided the feeling and texture of earlier Japans that I was
looking for. I could imagine MacDonald alone in his boat off the north-
ern island of Hokkaido, counting on goodwill and a collection of books to
save him from the terrible fate that awaited any foreigner who showed up
on Japan’s shores. Picture eager young missionary Alexander Shaw sneaking
out of Tokyo’s treaty port in 1873 and setting up camp in a corner of a
Buddhist temple—and sense his relief at being discovered by the era’s great
modernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi. See budding British Columbia lumber mag-
nate H.R. MacMillan pacing the docks of Yokohama, pursuing sales and
dodging dubious middlemen as Canadian exports to Japan exploded during
the 1920s. Identify with diplomat Hugh Keenleyside in Canada’s new leg-
ation in Tokyo in the early 1930s, comparing notes with Herbert Marler,
Canada’s first minister to Japan, over the latest incident in Japan’s growing
confrontation with China—possibly after a morning of duck-netting at the
Hama Detached Palace.
The discoveries were not only of young men. As a foreign woman working
in the economic and financial field in Tokyo at the time, I was struck by the
independent professional women who had boldly set off for Japan a hundred
years before and prospered building schools and other social institutions. The
notion that foreign women cannot operate effectively in “male-oriented Japan”
not only was outmoded, but apparently less than accurate to begin with.
An unanticipated dividend was the leading Japanese personalities of
the era who popped up. In addition to Fukuzawa, now immortalized on
the 10,000-yen note, there was revolutionary hero Katsu Kaishū, illustri-
ous late-19th-century prime minister and statesman Itō Hirobumi, leading
female educator Tsuda Ume, early-20th-century foreign minister Komura
Jutarō, Bushido author and controversial internationalist Nitobe Inazō, and
business giant Baron Sumitomo, among others. The remarkable social activist
and prison reformer Caroline Macdonald—said to have been the best-known
foreigner in Japan in the 1920s—seems to have connected with everyone,
from convicts to businessmen to bureaucrats to academics to labour organ-
izers. There were also names that should be better known, notably Tamura
Shinkichi, the Kobe businessman who went to Vancouver and pioneered
early development of Canada–Japan trade.
6 Finding Japan
At the same time, some stories also illuminated more troubling passages
in Canada’s history with Japan. William Lyon Mackenzie King will be forever
remembered for his government’s egregious treatment of Japanese Canadians
during the Pacific War. But the image of an earlier King—one who made a
little-known visit to Japan in 1909 and established a diplomatic legation in
Tokyo in 1929 as part of Canada’s international coming of age—adds dimen-
sion to a complex persona. In another vein, the shafts of human light that
emerge in the recollections of Canadian prisoners of war in Japan give nuance
to an episode that is otherwise grimly dark.
Indeed, what leaps out of many pages is the sheer power of human con-
nection, the sparks of energy that transcended seemingly impossible cultural
barriers and ignited some remarkably productive relationships. There was also
the foreign tendency to misread Asian cultures by exoticizing them on one
hand and stereotyping them on another. Early modern Japan was certainly
different, but it was neither as enticing nor as frightening as it was sometimes
made out to be. And there were many different Japans and different kinds
of Japanese. To paraphrase Herbert Norman, the brilliant born-in-Japan
Canadian scholar-diplomat whose tragic story concludes the book, it is
possible to prove that virtually any set of qualities is inherent in the Japanese
character—and come away none the wiser for it.
Ultimately, however, the book is about more than Japan. It is also about
the role Asia played in the Canadian historical imagination. Lachine on the
St. Lawrence River, it should be remembered, was named in the 1600s for the
early explorers who set off westward into the interior of North America in the
belief they were on their way to China.
Author Pierre Berton did Canadians a tremendous service when he high-
lighted the key role the Canadian Pacific Railway played in the making of
Canada—the fulfillment, in the words of his well-known volume, of the
“National Dream.” In the process, however, something tended to get lost
along the way—the role Canadian Pacific also played in fulfilling the older
“International Dream” of a fast rail-and-ocean route from Europe across
North America to Asia. The image of the legendary William Van Horne
collecting Japanese ceramics while designing Asia-inspired travel advertising
that urged passengers to take “The New Highway to the East”—that is, the
Far East—provides a context for the enterprise that goes beyond the popular
metaphor for Canadian nation building it has become.
Introduction 7
Similarly, present-day visions of vast market opportunities in China,
India and other rising Asian economies are not entirely new, but hark back
to Wilfrid Laurier’s tantalizing 20th-century vision of wheat as “the tea of the
Orient,” which rallied support for the opening of the Canadian Northwest
and heralded Japan’s emergence as a major Canadian trade and economic
partner in the 1920s.
During most of the last century, attention focussed on nation building
and realizing opportunity within North America. Now, as global dynamics
shift in Asia’s direction, it is time to reset the compass and to recognize that
Canada has long been a Pacific, as well as an Atlantic and North American
country. And while it may be best known as a land of opportunity and immig-
ration, Canada's west coast has also been a gateway for adventurers to explore
the Pacific Rim. This is a story of women and men who have demonstrated
that great things can be achieved by those with the courage to look beyond
their own boundaries, both geographic and cultural.
Finding Japan is offered in this spirit, in the hope that it may help to
inspire new and productive connections across the Pacific in the years ahead.
A Note on Japanese Names
In the interest of simplicity, Japanese names are rendered in the traditional
Japanese way—that is, family name first. Exceptions are when the person is
best known by an honorific or artist’s name.
8 Finding Japan
PART 1
ARRIVING (1848–1900)