When Francis Hall arrived in Yokohama in 1859 he found that the place had "all of the newness of a Western town" and that is was just as dangerous. You started out for a walk "by putting a revolver in one pocket and copy of Tennyson in the other."
Even in the safer neighborhoods there was an off-putting curiosity. "One man, determined to know the whole mystery, examined closely my overshoes, then my laced garters minutely, then my pantaloons and, turning up the bottom of them, was passing his scientific investigation on my ankles and shin bones when I moved on, now knowing where his thirst for knowledge might lead him."
However, Hall, a businessman, was determined that Japan should be reformed. It was, after all, "a land which sat by itself far away -- absorbed in its own intolerant selfishness till America . . . came knocking at its gates and demanded admittance for herself and the wide world."
Such conventional thoughts were, then as now, bolstered by scandalized reports of just how business was actually conducted in Japan. "Everyone is so tied up by routine and hampered by forms that the greatest stretch of patience if necessary to do any business."
In the customs house, for example, "four hours business could have been performed by an American of ordinary capacity in half and hour." Indeed, "to do business promptly is not a part of Japanese usage" and "the perfection of how not to do it belongs to this empire."
Along the way he picked up an amount of curious knowledge. The fact that one could hire a mistress in Hakodate for half of what it would have cost in other ports, that the French minister's mistress was called coquettish by the Japanese who, questioned on the term, said: "Coquettish. She goes to the bath twice a day and that kind of thing."
He also disapproved of Townsend Harris, the American consul, who did not favor American businessmen. The consul had his reasons for not doing so. He wanted to convince the shogunate trade with the U.S. was inevitable and it would be wiser to conclude with an amicable settlement. An Edo swarming with importunate and unpopular American business men would not suit these aims.
Hall, however, believed Harris' "opposition to Americans visiting Edo amounts to a mania . . . one might suppose from his anxiety that the integrity of the Japanese Emperor [sic] depends on his keeping at bay every American."
The differences continued during Harris' stay but Hall stayed longer and mellowed considerably, even on the subject of business. Toward the end he was saying that he had come to believe that "had Perry never opened Japan to the West and [had] the Dutch remained a century longer at Deshima, Japan would have improved in civilization steadily" and the gain would have been "far greater and more permanent."
Nevertheless, it was his opinion "nothing is so difficult to understand in Japan as the peculiar complex characters of its political institutions." At the end opting for the drama of difference rather than the certainty of similarity, Hall left the country and disappeared from history.
Or would have except for the discovery of his journals which turned up several years ago at a used-book dealer and were acquired by the Cleveland Public Library where they now reside. A full edition was published by Princeton in 1992 and now comes this abridgement (432 pages from an original 652) done by the original editor.
An interesting and homey look at Japan newly opened by a businessman who had a ringside seat as the Tokugawa order gave way to the forces behind the Meiji Restoration, these diaries offer a lively and prejudiced authenticity missing from later accounts.
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