The Lion and the Eagle by Kathleen Burk

Author:Kathleen Burk [Burk, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Rutherford Alcock arrived in Japan in June 1859 to take up his position as British Consul-General. Born in 1809, the son of a surgeon, he studied medicine at King’s College London. In 1844 he was appointed to the position of Consul at Foochow (Fuzhou) in China, one of the treaty ports, followed by consulships at Shanghai and Canton. In 1858, with the signing of the treaty between Great Britain and Japan, British representation was needed there and Alcock was appointed Consul-General.

He was unhappy. Instead of a position nearer home, ‘I am now transferred’, he wrote to Edmund Hammond, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, ‘to the most outlying region in the world … either to die in these regions where so many have gone before me, with two or three years more service, – or be expended, as naval stores are expended – so long as wear & tear will let them hold together, with no unnecessary regard to what is to become of them afterwards.’132 He was probably equally unhappy with his instructions, which seemed simple but would be difficult to implement: he was to insist upon fulfilment of the treaty, but to allow it to be done with all deliberate speed, making no threats and making allowances for the ‘ignorance and timidity’ of the Japanese.133 Sadly, Alcock rather liked threatening to use force.

The assumption in the Foreign Office seems to have been that China and Japan were much the same, and that Alcock’s experience in China would transfer easily across the Sea of Japan. There were, however, significant differences. First of all, Japan was an organised, strongly hierarchical and, normally, controlled country, wholly inward-looking, and with a government system that had ruled successfully for over 200 years; it was not falling apart and being nibbled at by Western Powers, as was China. Secondly, as already noted, Japan had thousands of two-sword men, the clan samurai and the rōnin, all over the country, who were always straining to fight; the Chinese government had no such trained forces. And thirdly, a major problem which rapidly arose was that Westerners were, quite frankly, used to pushing the Chinese around. When this was tried in Japan, the Japanese fought back, or, at the very least, used strong passive resistance.

Alcock shared the Western habit in the Far East of calling on military force or perhaps a simple gunboat to enforce unmet wishes; the exception here was the US, which had very few spare ships. Alcock annoyed the Foreign Office at one point by asking for part of the Royal Navy to steam over from China to enforce British treaty rights. (As far as the Foreign Office, and Parliament, were concerned, Great Britain did not need yet another war in the Far East.) He also had high expectations of the position he would occupy as the first British representative in Japan. Indeed, he promoted himself. He believed that no other representative should outrank him, and that if all were consuls-general there would be no hierarchy, except for that of seniority.

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