Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East

By Jonathan Clements

Togo Heihachiro (1848-1934) was born into a feudal society that had lived in seclusion for 250 years. As a teenage samurai, he witnessed the destruction wrought upon his native land by British warships. As the legendary "Silent Admiral", he was at the forefront of innovations in warfare, pioneering the Japanese use of modern gunnery and wireless communication. He is best known as "the Nelson of the East" for his resounding victory over the Tsar's navy in the Russo-Japanese War, but he also lived a remarkable life: studying at a British maritime college, witnessing the Sino-French War, the Hawaiian Revolution, and the Boxer Uprising. After his retirement, he was appointed to oversee the education of the Emperor, Hirohito. This new biography spans Japan's sudden, violent leap out of its self-imposed isolation and into the 20th century. Delving beyond Togo's finest hour at the Battle of Tsushima, it portrays the life of a diffident Japanese sailor in Victorian Britain, his reluctant celebrity in America (where he was laid low by Boston cooking and welcomed by his biggest fan, Theodore Roosevelt), forgotten wars over the short-lived Republics of Ezo and Formosa, and the accumulation of peacetime experience that forged a wartime hero.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Aug 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9781912208104

Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements presented several seasons of Route Awakening (National Geographic), an award-winning TV series about Chinese history and culture. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Confucius: A Biography, and The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. He has written histories of both China and Japan, two countries that have, at some point, claimed Taiwan as their own. He was a visiting professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2013 to 2019. He was born in the East of England and lives in Finland.

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Introduction

In 1996, during a British parliamentary debate on the selling of naval assets to a Japanese consortium, an MP alluded to the awful prospect that a road on former Admiralty property might be renamed Admiral Tōgō Avenue.¹ It was assumed by both speaker and audience that this would be a bad thing – a strange and inadvertent reversal of fortune for a naval commander who had once been so feted by the British establishment. Nobody pointed out the irony that the same Admiral Tōgō had been trained by the British, that he had held that rank for a 20-year period when Japan and Britain were allies, or that his presence was already stamped on British road maps, in the form of Mikasa Street in Barrow-in-Furness, named after his flagship. Once hailed as a world-class hero, Admiral Tōgō’s reputation was sunk in the afterlife, consumed in the maelstrom of war crimes by others. Six decades after his death, he was simply assumed to have been Britain’s enemy.

Tōgō Heihachirō’s military career began in the last days of the samurai, when Japan’s self-imposed exclusion was smashed apart by Western powers in search of trade concessions. He became a member of what would become the Japanese navy during the brief civil war that constituted the Meiji Restoration, in which he was a low-ranking samurai in just one of several factions, all claiming to be ‘loyalists’. Luckily for Tōgō, his faction was victorious, and thereby able to impose its concept of loyalty on the rest of Japan – a loyalty that favoured the abolition of the Shōgunate, the restoration of power to the Emperor himself and the modernisation of Japan to meet the challenge from the West. It was as part of this modernisation that Tōgō was sent to learn from the British – he studied for seven years in England, to the extent that his later victories were often misleadingly claimed by British newspapers to be the accomplishments of a local hero, in imitation of a British icon.

It is considered condescending today to attach associations of one culture to that of another. Calling Tōgō the ‘Nelson of the East’ implies by some token that he is merely a mimic of a European predecessor, a pale shadow of a true hero. However, Tōgō’s interest in Horatio Nelson was a much-recorded feature of his own time, and so I have retained the sobriquet that was so often heaped upon him in the early 20th century, including: ‘Nelson of Japan’ (Western Mail), ‘Nelson of the East’ (Glasgow Herald), ‘Nelson of Japan’ (New York Truth), ‘Nelson of the East’ (Newcastle Chronicle), ‘Nelson of the East’ (South Mail), ‘best compared with Nelson’ (New York Tribune), and ‘modern naval officers should find it more helpful … to study tactics of Tōgō than those of Nelson’ (New York Sun). Indeed, the concept was soon embraced by the Japanese themselves, who never seemed to tire of styling themselves as the ‘British of Asia’, or comparing Tōgō to the victorious admiral of Trafalgar. Nelson was Tōgō’s hero, a figure who inspired him during his student days in England, and whose Trafalgar tactics he adapted at Tsushima. In the Song of Condolence composed to mark Tōgō’s funeral, the poet Doi Bansui defiantly reversed the cliché, instead referring to Nelson as the ‘Tōgō of England’.

Tōgō was witness to the bloody birth-pangs of modern Japan, and one of the victors in the conflict that toppled the short-lived breakaway Republic of Ezo. While some of his countrymen, and even family-members, clung to the old order, Tōgō embraced the new, abandoning his clan allegiances to become one of the first officers of the national navy. He was, fortunately for him, posted abroad in the 1870s, and hence was not dragged into the counter-revolutionary Satsuma Rebellion, which saw the death of his brother and many of his old clan colleagues in a protest against the end of samurai traditions. He is remembered chiefly for his command of Japanese fleets as a high-ranking officer approaching retirement, but the groundwork for his achievements was undoubtedly laid during the long years of peace, when a younger Tōgō gained a reputation as an expert, or even something of a stickler, on the subject of maritime law. His grasp of naval etiquette and protocol was no idle occupation, but allowed him to maintain ‘active’ service even during long stretches bedridden with illness. It also kept the young captain from making hot-headed decisions during tense stand-offs that could have ruined a less careful sailor’s career. Crucially, it gave him the incisive intellectual tools to deal with the thorniest problem he ever faced: the no-win situation in the Yellow Sea in 1894, when he was confronted by mutinous Chinese soldiers aboard the British-registered transport ship Kowshing.

Tōgō was closely associated with the transformation of Japanese sea power and its first relations with the Western world. As a teenager, he saw samurai standing waist-deep in water, angrily brandishing their swords at distant British warships. He witnessed the last gasp of old-school abordage, as sword-wielding marines braved a deck-mounted machine gun to leap aboard one of the first ironclads. After decades with barely a shot fired in naval combat, or overwhelming broadsides by European ships against hopelessly outclassed native boats, Tōgō was a participant in the first battle to pit modern naval technology against itself. The Battle of the Yalu set the German-built battleships of the Chinese navy against the British-built cruisers of Japan, a generation before the First World War. Most famously, Tōgō was the admiral who led the Japanese navy to a resounding, crushing victory against two fleets from the Tsar’s Russia, the first time that an Asian nation had bested a modern European power.

In later life he was a reluctant celebrity, embraced by the Japanese as a man whose sense of duty placed him above party politics, and feted by the wider world as an invincible admiral. His fame seems odd today because he was far from charismatic. His nickname among his men, Oni (‘The Devil’), may even have been a facetious, sarcastic sass – a terrifying name for a commander who was actually rather quiet and unassuming. Throughout his life his associates described him as quiet, dedicated and stubborn, but also as workmanlike. Tōgō’s genius lay in training, in operational ideas, in strategic thinking. His great victory at Tsushima was arguably won not at sea in 1905, but in the drills and intelligence-gathering of the preceding two years. He is certainly not the kind of man who would become a celebrity today: he was not a creature of soundbites, nor did he cut a conspicuous figure in a crowd. And yet, Tōgō was the first Japanese subject to grace the cover of Time magazine, which described him in 1926 as ‘short even for a Japanese, shy even for a hero’.²

Tōgō was at the forefront of the 20th-century rise of Japan, the poster boy for a generation of Japanese that expected to be taken seriously by the Great Powers, and whose hopes were dashed by the First World War and the Peace Conferences that followed. In old age Admiral Tōgō was an example to both his naval inheritors and to the future head of state – he was placed in personal charge of the education of the teenage Hirohito, the Shōwa Emperor. Seven years after Tōgō’s death, his successors in the Japanese navy re-enacted his textbook assault on Port Arthur and shocked the world by making Pearl Harbor their target. But it seems strange, almost suspicious in the hindsight of history, that naval analysts in the USA did not expect the Japanese to try something akin to Tōgō’s Port Arthur strategy in the infamous 1941 surprise attack.

The life of Tōgō Heihachirō is also, by necessity, an oriental tragedy: the story of the insistence of Western powers that the isolated, mysterious Empire of Japan join the international community, and the hellish uproar that ensued when that genie was let out of its bottle. Tōgō was one of the engines of Japan’s dramatic rise and response, instrumental in the winning of new conquests on Taiwan, in China and Korea. He died in 1934, in a Japan drunk on militarism, determined to build its empire even further and doomed to lose it all within a decade in a cataclysmic fall.

1

The Last Samurai

The domain of Satsuma was as far to the south as it was possible to go and still be in mainland Japan. It sat at the furthest south-western tip of Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyūshū – beyond, there were only the scattered islands of the Ryūkyū chain; to the east, the open Pacific stretched thousands of miles, all the way to Mexico.

The ruling clan, House Shimazu, had its headquarters in the castle town of Kagoshima, a picturesque huddle of fishing villages partway up the long north-south inlet of Kagoshima Bay. In June, warm rain poured from the skies. Fierce summer sun sparkled off the waves, and the same semi-tropical light beat down on the verdant hills. Spring came to Kagoshima many weeks ahead of more northern parts of Japan. The temperature rarely fell below freezing in winter, and the grass grew all year round. Only half a mile to the east of Kagoshima sat the huge, smouldering bulk of Sakurajima, a triple-peaked volcanic island that almost entirely blocked the mid-point of the bay, and loomed ominously above the daily life of Satsuma samurai.

Satsuma and the nearby enclave of Chōshū were still paying the price for a civil war some centuries earlier, when their ruling lords had been slow to pledge allegiance to the first victorious Shōgun of House Tokugawa. The lord of Satsuma had to make regular pilgrimages to the Shōgun’s headquarters in Edo, involving weeks of slow litter-borne transit along half the length of Japan, attended by platoons of soldiers. But for as long as he paid lip-service to his Shōgunal master, the Satsuma domain remained his – a prosperous coastal fief that had been in the hands of House Shimazu since the Middle Ages.

When House Shimazu had first gained control of the region in the 13th century, Kagoshima had been five townships, granted to a loyal retainer of a samurai master. Each was initially ruled by a son of the original lord, with their descendants taking their surnames from their new areas of responsibility. In particular, we might note the domains of Saigō, literally ‘West Village’, whose leading men would become famous in the time of the Meiji Restoration, and Tōgō, the East Village, whose scions were often depicted in local legend as driven and dedicated.

The founder of the Tōgō family was a retainer of House Shimazu from Japan’s medieval civil war, rewarded with the administration of one of the local hamlets for his prowess in battle. But the Tōgō family seemed unable to stay out of trouble. The most famous pre-modern Tōgō was one Shigechika, a samurai frustrated by a three-generation feud with nearby rivals, who donned full armour and rode his horse off a cliff. Although such an act initially baffled his enemies, Shigechika had claimed he was dying in order to enlist supernatural aid. When his enemy perished soon after, it became a matter of local superstition that Shigechika had returned from the grave to win a supernatural victory. Such was the legendary, bloody-minded stubbornness of the Satsuma men, and the Tōgō family in particular.

Politically and geographically on the edge, the lords of Satsuma looked to illicit foreign trade. Even before the upheavals of the 19th century, the men of Satsuma belonged to the sea. They maintained ties with the Ryūkyū Islands, allowing for a discreet two-way trade in Chinese and Japanese goods and information. It was at a trading post on Tanegashima, a small island just off the Satsuma coast, that the Japanese saw their first Europeans in 1543, and hence became the first to meet with Christianity and musketry. The matchlock arquebus, or tanegashima as it was then known after its place of ‘discovery’, thrust Satsuma men to the forefront of Japan’s 16th-century civil war, briefly carrying them to the position of rulers of almost all Kyūshū, before they were beaten back to the south by the overwhelming forces of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Cowed but still proud, men of the Tōgō and Saigō families accompanied House Shimazu and thousands of other samurai in an ill-fated invasion of Korea in 1592, organised, at least in part, as an exercise to export idle warriors out of the newly pacified Japan. The invasion of Korea raged for a decade before the troops pulled out, but the Satsuma men did not leave empty-handed. Along with the spoils of war, they returned to their domain with a number of skilled Korean artisans. It was these prisoners of war, forced to revive their craft in their new home, who created the polychrome dishes still known around the world as Satsuma ware. Such exotic ‘imports’ gained greater value during the period of seclusion that followed, as a Japan fearful of foreign intrigues walled itself off from all but a handful of approved merchant contacts.

For two centuries the Japanese islands maintained a strict policy of exclusion. No foreigners were permitted to set foot in Japan, except for a few Chinese sailors and a tiny coterie of quarantined ‘Dutchmen’ in Nagasaki harbour. The Shōgun, the supreme general who ruled Japan in the Emperor’s name, had been most specific about the dangers presented by foreign contacts.

For the future, let none, so long as the Sun illuminates the world, presume to sail to Japan, not even in quality of ambassadors, and this declaration never to be revoked on pain of death.

Despite such a clear admonition, ships continued to arrive, with entreaties for trade, for coaling facilities, for simple repairs. On all reported occasions, the authorities shooed the foreigners away. In 1808, the British naval vessel Phaeton was refused entry to Nagasaki after a tense stand-off – several Japanese officials were obliged to commit suicide as an act of contrition, simply for letting matters go so far. In the same year, the Shōgun felt obliged to dispatch an expeditionary force to the lawless island of Ezo in the north, to thwart Russian attempts to build a base. In 1837, the American vessel Morrison arrived off the Satsuma headquarters, Kagoshima, ostensibly to return some Japanese sailors who had been shipwrecked in America. Its captain had already been turned away from the Shōgun’s city, but hoped to conclude a separate deal with the local samurai of the Shimazu clan. Despite the temptations he offered, the Shimazu still feared the Shōgun’s wrath, and after some tense negotiations, opened fire on the Morrison with land-based artillery.

The incident spoke volumes about the troubles that were to come. The cannonballs of the Shimazu clan fell short of the Morrison, plunging harmlessly into the waters of Kagoshima Bay. The captain of the Morrison took the hint, raised anchor, and sailed lazily back out to sea, entirely untroubled by the coastal defences.

Tōgō Heihachirō’s father Kichizaemon had been one of the witnesses of the Morrison’s dawn departure. He was thirty-two at the time, and a minor officer in the military hierarchy of House Shimazu. Kichizaemon’s wife, Masuko, was also the child of a samurai family. She bore her husband five boys and a girl, although the girl and the second son died in infancy. Her fourth son, born in 1848 and called first Nakagoro and then Heihachirō, would make the Tōgō family famous all over the world.¹ As a result, Masuko was destined to become one of the last of the legendary samurai wives, with several memorable episodes of stoicism or martial intractability entering 20th-century Japanese folklore as the recollections of her most famous son. According to later stories of Tōgō’s youth, Masuko insisted on strict rules of propriety in her house, even to the extent of refusing to pass her sleeping sons except by the foot of their futons, it being considered ill-mannered to pass at the head.

However, such stern parenting does not seem to have been much help. Surviving stories of Tōgō’s childhood paint him as a boisterous, unpleasant child, constantly vying with his brothers. Once, up to no good in the family stables, he teased one of his father’s horses and the beast responded by biting him on the top of the head. The young Tōgō retaliated by striking the horse with a stick, but was found out later in the day when Masuko noticed the wound on her son’s head. Confessing immediately, Tōgō was punished for his misbehaviour, only to return to the stables to beat the horse again for causing him such inconvenience.²

In 1856, the eight-year-old Tōgō took full advantage of a day off school for the Feast of Lanterns. Instead of joining in local festivities, he was found in a nearby stream, slashing at passing fish with a short sword. In the space of only a few minutes, Tōgō managed to slay over fifty fish, although the story seems to lack context. How would Tōgō find so many carp in such close concentration? Were they really just swimming past, or did the young Tōgō go on a killing spree in a nearby pond? If so, there is no record of any punishment he may have received. Nor is he known to have been chastised for another incident, in which he stole and ate an entire jar of candies from his mother’s kitchen. Tōgō had asked his mother if he could have some of the sweets, and Masuko had replied with a parental deception: that all the candies were gone. Tōgō then reportedly waited until his mother was out of the house, climbed up to the cupboard and ate the contents of the entire jar. Berated by an angry Masuko on her return, Tōgō replied with an icy rationalisation, calculated to strike at his mother’s sense of fair play: ‘What wasn’t there can’t have disappeared.’³

At around the age of ten, Tōgō argued with his brother Sokuro about an unknown point of contention. Later in the day, his brother came out of an inn’s communal bath parched with thirst and ordered Tōgō to bring him a drink. Quarrels or not, Tōgō was obliged by custom to obey his elders and he dutifully fetched some water. However, he added a liberal seasoning of raw pepper. Sokuro drank deeply from the cup, only realising his mistake as the hot pepper caused him to choke and splutter.

The errant Tōgō was dragged before the family and ordered to apologise. He refused to do so, immediately elevating fraternal high spirits to a matter of honour – he was not now teasing his brother, he was disobeying his father, a far more serious offence. With Tōgō refusing to budge, he was sentenced to ten days ‘exile’ from the family, confined under house arrest at the home of one of Kichizaemon’s subordinates. He returned to the family when his sentence had passed, unrepentant.⁴

Tōgō’s education followed traditional lines, even in progressive Satsuma. He would wake before dawn each day, leaving at sunrise for the house of Saigō Kichijirō, a local dignitary who taught the boys calligraphy. In this capacity, Tōgō also met Saigō’s elder brother Takamori, who would become a famous military hero. Two hours later, the boys would return home for their ablutions, the ‘tying-up of hair’ before heading out for a second home school where they studied the Confucian Classics – long regarded as the only education worth having. In the afternoons, Tōgō would practise for an hour each day with a sword, and any energy that may have remained after such exhausting studies would be dissipated in afternoon play by the banks of the River Kotsuki. Among Tōgō’s childhood playmates were at least two men who would go on to military careers, Kuroki Tamesada, who would become a general in the Russo-Japanese War, and Ijichi Hiroichi, who would be Tōgō’s companion in his early naval days.

History and Japanese literature were added to Tōgō’s curriculum at the age of eleven, and by 1860, when he was twelve by Western reckoning, he was officially recognised as an adult. The teenaged Tōgō was put to work for his clan as a minor clerk in one of the Shimazu clan offices. As with all samurai, his salary was paid in rice, half a bushel a month. But it would be inaccurate to describe Tōgō as a mere clerk – he was also a sometime farmer, tending the family’s vegetable patch and studying gunnery.

The samurai expected trouble, and largely expected it from foreigners. While there were still ample quarrels among the various noble houses, the Japanese were united in their mistrust of the Europeans and Americans and their constant agitations for trade. Even progressive Japanese, keen to learn from the new arrivals, often couched their rhetoric in terms of knowing one’s enemy. The Japanese may have been isolated, but they were well aware of the behaviour of the Westerners in China, where they had ignored Imperial edicts, peddled drugs to the populace, and carved enclaves for themselves out of Chinese territory. The Westerners constantly spoke of ‘trade’ as if buying and selling might solve all the world’s ills. The Japanese, whose social system placed merchants at the very bottom of the hierarchy, below bold warriors and honest farmers, preferred to keep foreign trade corralled into specially delineated ghettos, and opened new ports to foreigners only with great reluctance.

The other favourite subject of the foreigners was religion, which the Europeans and Americans were keen to force upon the Japanese. Christianity had been one of the most unwelcome foreign imports in the samurai era and its practice was still an offence punishable by death. This would only add to the unease of the government in years to come, as the foreign visitors began to insist on freedom to worship and, eventually, to proselytise.

The peculiar rules of Japanese diplomacy made it difficult to mount a concerted defence. It was, supposedly, the Shōgun’s job to keep out foreigners. With every indignity or incursion, the Shōgun’s competence was called into question. The Emperor would order him to deal with the foreign problem, and he would promise to do so. Meanwhile, the Shōgun’s rivals would fume that they could do a better job themselves, and in some cases took matters into their own hands.

The southern domains of Satsuma and Chōshū were particularly notorious. Chōshū even commenced firing upon foreign shipping in the Straits of Shimonoseki, leading to the arrival of a punitive multinational task force. Not to be outdone, Satsuma soon manufactured an incident of its own in 1862. The catalyst was outrageously disproportionate to the response, amounting to a scuffle on the road in the small village of Namamugi, near Yokohama. Shimazu Hisamitsu, father and regent to the young ruler of House Shimazu, had completed his most recent period of mandatory attendance in the capital, and was returning to Satsuma. As was usual for samurai potentates, he travelled in a long caravan of horsemen, retainers and palanquins. Outriders galloped ahead announcing the approach of a feudal lord, ordering all in the Satsuma lord’s path to avert their eyes, bow low to the ground and above all, to stand aside.

At Namamugi, the Satsuma group ran into a small party of mounted foreigners, who refused to give way. Charles Lennox Richardson, a British merchant with a bullish reputation, was accompanied by his associates Mr Marshal and Mr Clarke, and by a lady, Miss Borodaille. Reputedly proclaiming, ‘I know how to deal with these people,’ Richardson deliberately rode into the path of the Shimazu lord, intent on forcing his way through.

Neither side can be relied upon for an unbiased account. The British survivors would claim that they had simply refused to dismount – which would have been rude, but was still legal under the extraterritorial agreements that allowed British subjects to disregard Japanese law. The samurai saw things differently, and interpreted their behaviour as a direct challenge. Even if Richardson had merely crossed in front of the baggage train, that would have been tantamount to an assault in the eyes of jumpy henchmen – the Satsuma finances were being carried in the foremost boxes.

In the melee that followed, the Satsuma retainers drew their swords, killed Richardson and seriously wounded the other two men. Miss Borodaille escaped with ‘only the loss of her hair’, implying perhaps that a samurai had hacked off her braid before she fled. One of the foreigners pelted off back to the safety of the foreign concession in Yokohama, while the Satsuma party continued on its way.⁵

The samurai knew that there would be trouble. On the advice of Ōkubo Toshimichi, a young tax administrator in the group, they did not spend the night in nearby Kanagawa as originally planned, but ran for the more distant Hodogaya instead. It was a deliberate attempt to get away from the scene of the crime, but whose crime remained a matter of some dispute.

When the news reached Britain, the blame was immediately laid at the feet of the Japanese. An angry diplomatic communiqué ordered that the lord of Satsuma was to pay substantial damages in atonement for his regent’s misdeeds. Furthermore, an even more substantial sum was to be handed over by the Shōgun himself. The incident was an awful loss of face for the Shōgun, who had been embarrassed enough by the requirement of dealing with foreigners at all, and was now obliged to pay damages on account of his inability to guarantee the safety of foreigners within his own domain.

Vice Admiral Augustus Kuper, commander of the British fleet in China, was ordered to send ships to Yokohama. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Neale arrived in August 1863 with seven ships and a total of 121 guns.⁶ Shōgunate officials had little choice but to pay their share of the indemnity. But with the Satsuma samurai refusing to acknowledge their supposed crime, Neale was ordered to sail south to Kagoshima. This was, pleaded the Shōgun’s envoys, a matter of great embarrassment to the Shōgun. The Shōgunate even offered to send one of its own ships to accompany the British to Shimazu, although the promised support never arrived. Nor did it seem likely, since in actively resisting ‘barbarians’, the samurai of Shimazu were effectively showing greater obedience to the Emperor than the more accommodating