Nitobe Inazo — The Man with No Dignity

What Do You Mean?

"I would like to become a bridge across the Pacific."

The young man answered with a laugh. He had been asked what he planned to do with the study of English literature.

The one who asked was a professor at Tokyo University named Toyama Masakazu. The reply that came back was light and a little cold, he wrote later.

"I don't understand what you are talking about. What do you mean?"

The young man had no choice but to explain.

"I want to be a go-between. I want to carry Japanese thought to other countries, and carry other countries' thought to Japan."

This was around 1883, an interview to get into the university.

The young man was Nitobe Inazo. Later he would write Bushido in English and work for the League of Nations, an early organization for world peace. At this time he was just past twenty. He had graduated from Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido and was trying to study again in Tokyo.

He was born in 1862 in Morioka, the third son of a samurai family of the Nambu han, a domain ruled by a lord. His father died while Inazo was still small.

In 1871 he was adopted by an uncle and went to Tokyo. He was nine years old, he recalled later.

He never saw his mother again. She died in 1880, when Inazo was a student in Sapporo.

In Tokyo in those days, anyone who had set foot on foreign soil, even for a moment, was pointed at on the street and whispered about as so-and-so. So the biggest goal for boys like him, his own book says, was to go abroad once and later become a councillor, a high post in running the country.

But going abroad takes money. Straining without money was no different from a sumo wrestler stamping his feet alone, he also wrote.

About himself in those days, he later confessed something.

"When I was small, I was extremely short-tempered. I got into fights, I said nasty things to people, I even hit them."

He wanted to cure it somehow, it seems. At seventeen or eighteen, every night before bed, he thought over the day. How had he lost his temper today? How many times had anger beaten him? And he put it all in a chart.

A report card for his anger.

He did not throw the chart away.

By the time he came to the university interview, he had already given up the idea of becoming a councillor, they say. And after the interview, Professor Toyama looked after the young man who had talked about bridges with a laugh, with real warmth, it is said.

Around then, a friend in America sent him a book. Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. Once he began, he could not put it down. He kept it inside his coat even at lectures and read it in between.

One day, Professor Toyama came into the classroom a little before class. Inazo happened to be sitting alone in a corner, reading that book.

"What are you reading?"

"This book."

"That is a famous book, but it has not reached Japan yet. I have not seen it myself. Would you write a summary of it and put it in a scholarly magazine?"

The professor urged him strongly.

But Inazo had noticed something else. The book had come out years ago. The ads even said it had been translated into the languages of Europe. And yet it had not reached the only university in Japan.

Japanese scholarship was behind by at least eight years. Even if he studied here and reached the very top, he would be only a bat strutting around in a land with no birds. That was what he thought, he wrote.

He had to go out into the wide world.

The useless stamping he had been doing alone turned into getting ready for a journey. Once your mind is made up, wings grow on your heels. That was how he described his feelings at that moment.

In September 1884, Inazo left Tokyo University and set out for America, paying his own way instead of using government money.

The young man who had said he wanted to be a bridge across the Pacific was crossing it for the first time.

A Woman's Nightgown

It was the middle of the night when he reached San Francisco.

Passengers could not go ashore until daybreak. The ship dropped anchor, and everyone slept in their cabins.

Inazo could not wait. He wanted to see the new continent as soon as he could. Even though it was the middle of the night, he rushed out of his cabin and went up on deck, repeating a line from a Goethe novel he had loved for years, it is said.

"This is America. There is no America but here."

He walked around the deck trying to see land. But that night, of all nights, the deck seemed strangely long. The ship was a small one, a little over a thousand tons. No matter how far he walked, the deck did not end.

Strange, he thought as he went on, and suddenly he ran into a big iron gate.

It was the customs house.

"Hey, you. Where are you going?"

Only when he was called did he finally notice. The ship was tied up at the quay, and in the dim light he had walked ashore without realizing it. He had assumed, the Japanese way, that when a ship arrived you took a small boat to land. It was embarrassing, he wrote.

That was his first step in America.

It took almost a week by train to reach the universities in the East. One evening, five or six bored passengers gathered in a corner of the car, and the talk turned to religion, and then to whether God exists. Inazo began to argue, waving around the philosophy of Spencer that he had half-read in Sapporo and Tokyo, as if he knew all about it.

Before he knew it, his audience had grown to twenty or so. A beardless youth speaking what he himself called "broken English," and everyone was listening quietly.

When he finished, he suddenly felt embarrassed. It was like strutting about alone on a stage. Trying to hand the argument over, he said, apparently:

"What do you think? Please tell me."

The passengers' answer was this: We are busy with our own work. We can only hear talk about souls and the next world at idle times like this. It is interesting, and it does no harm to listen.

Afterward, Inazo added:

"For a sermon, the ear matters more than the mouth. Listen, don't preach."

On the same trip, while the train was standing at a station, a man on the next platform looked at Inazo and called out. John, John.

He had heard that in America some people used that name to look down on Chinese people. He pretended not to hear, but the man was so persistent that he answered. The man asked where his pigtail had gone. Inazo said he was Japanese. Then the man said:

"What's Japan? Is that part of China?"

Inazo explained that it was an independent country, an island nation east of China. The man asked again:

"An island near China? Is there a bridge or something?"

Inazo wrote that he explained it while trying not to get angry. He wanted as many people as possible to know about Japan, even one more.

Then the man ducked into the train and came back with three women or so. Pointing at Inazo, he explained, in a know-it-all way: This man is from a country called Japan. He is going to study economics at a university. Japan is not part of China. It was like being on show, Inazo wrote.

One more story from his first days in America.

A Japanese friend at the same lodging came down with a fever and asked Inazo to buy him a nightgown. Inazo rushed into a shop nearby and said:

"Give me a nightgown."

The woman in the shop brought one out, looking puzzled. It had lace on the collar and the cuffs. He had her bring out several others, but every one had lace. Was this how all American nightgowns were? Jumping to that conclusion, he bought one and went home.

His friend had come to America three years before him. The moment he saw the nightgown, he forgot the pain of his illness and burst out laughing.

"This is a woman's nightgown, my friend. Where on earth did you buy it?"

When Inazo tried to take it back, his friend stopped him. Being embarrassed once was bad enough; going back would be like being embarrassed twice.

Not knowing what to do, Inazo hid the nightgown at the bottom of his bag for about two years. In that time he became friendly with his landlady, and finally he got a woman who worked at the lodging to take it, he wrote.

In 1887, Inazo was ordered to study in Germany. He was to study agricultural economics at the university in Bonn.

While he was in Europe, he sent a letter to Laveleye, a Belgian scholar he had long admired from his books. He had no letter of introduction. He just asked to meet him. He hesitated at first himself, it is said, thinking it a bit rough, a student's way of doing things.

A reply came within days. Come to my house on such-and-such a day.

Feeling as if he were walking on air, he arrived in the town of Liège. The professor opened the door himself, together with his daughter, and welcomed him. Inazo stayed in that house for about a week.

One day, as the two walked through town, the talk turned to education in Japan. He wrote down their exchange like this.

"In Japanese schools, what does religious education teach?"

"We don't teach religion."

Inazo answered calmly. The professor was greatly surprised and asked, puzzled:

"Then how do the schools teach ideas of ethics?"

"There is no separate subject of ethics."

The professor suddenly stopped walking. He stood silent for a while, and then said, as if to himself:

"Guiding a nation without any lessons in morals. How do they learn the difference between right and wrong?"

It was not a question aimed at him, so he did not answer, he wrote.

But after hearing it, he began to wonder himself. He had never studied ethics at school. Still, he knew right from wrong at least as well as any European. Where had that come from?

He had crossed the sea saying he wanted to be a go-between who would carry Japanese thought to the world. Now he was the one carrying a question.

That question would not leave his head for many years.

Mother's Memorial Day

When he was in Bonn, Germany, Inazo had a daily routine.

Around three in the afternoon, he always went out for a walk to a place called the "Milk Garden." It had cows and thick trees and shade. Children who had finished their naps came there with their mothers, fathers, or nannies, drank milk, and played in the shade of the trees.

Inazo sat there with a cup of coffee, watching the children. That was "almost my only pleasure," he wrote.

One day, a Catholic nun came by with about forty children.

They were orphans.

They passed by, looking very enviously at other children their age playing with their parents, glancing this way and that. Inazo felt sorry for them. A poem by the haiku poet Issa came to his mind, it seems.

"Come and play with me, / little sparrow with no parents."

That day happened to be the anniversary of his mother's death.

She was the mother he had left at nine to go to Tokyo, and lost without ever seeing her again.

Let me do a little charity for once, he thought, and he asked the old woman who ran the milk place:

"Could you give those orphans a cup each of chocolate or milk? I'll pay, but please don't tell the nun."

The nun gladly accepted. The children broke their stiff line, sat down, hopped about, and each ordered what they liked and drank a cup.

As they were leaving, the nun asked the old woman whom she should thank for today's treat. The old woman came to Inazo and asked if she could tell her.

There were many other customers, and he felt awkward. He refused: please keep quiet, as I asked.

Then the nun told the children, since we don't know who treated us, let us thank them by singing a hymn together.

About forty children sang at the top of their voices.

It was as if he had offered a foreign song before his mother's memorial, in place of incense and flowers. He felt as though he had done something for her as a son, Inazo wrote.

At the bill, there was one more surprise. The price was five sen a cup (a sen is a small coin, and a hundred of them make one yen), so forty cups should have been two yen. But the old woman wrote up a bill for one yen. I have always wanted to give those children some milk myself, she said. But this is my business, so I can't do as I wish. For today, it is enough to be paid what it cost me.

Back at his lodging, he bowed before his mother's photograph. He felt as if the old woman had joined in the prayer for his mother, too, he said.

"When you want to be kind to your parents, they are gone." This old saying holds endless bitterness and regret. So on his mother's memorial day, he too wanted to make up in some way for not having been a good son. Inazo wrote this right after the story.

The next year, still in Bonn, he tried to do the same kind of thing again on her memorial day.

This time, he meant to hide it better. He asked his landlady to bake one big cake, her pride and joy. When she asked where it was going, he said he could not tell her. He hired a man loitering at the station and sent the cake to the town's orphanage, with an unsigned letter.

In the letter, he wrote, apparently: I am someone who has come to this town from far away. Today is the anniversary of my mother's death, so in her memory please share this cake with children who have no mother.

About five weeks later, two brothers who lived across from the lodging came to visit. Both of their parents had died at once, and the boys had been sent to the orphanage.

The landlady, since it had been a while, brought out her famous cake. The two boys said: We ate this cake the other day.

Impossible, said the landlady's children. Only our mother can make this cake. No, it was the same, said the brothers. When the landlady asked when and where they had eaten it, it turned out to be about five weeks earlier.

Inazo happened to be out at the time. When he came back, the children laughed at him at the door, and when he went inside, the landlady said to him, it is said:

"If you had told me where it was going, I would have prepared something suitable. And if it was for children, I could have put more thought into it. The trouble is that you want to do good all by yourself."

A good deed that nobody knows about is called intoku, a hidden virtue. In his own words, "My hidden virtue was found out at once, maybe because it did not suit me, or because I was not used to doing it."

Indeed, the trouble is that you want to do good all by yourself. Repeating the landlady's words just as she said them, Inazo goes on.

Well, how interesting.

One Thing That Does Not Perish

It was she who spoke of love first, it is said.

When Inazo gave a talk about Japan in a town in America, one of those who came to listen was Mary Elkinton. Afterward she was the one who confessed her love, wrote his student Kawai Eijiro.

He had crossed the sea saying he wanted to tell other countries about Japan. A talk by that young man was what brought them together.

In January 1891, the two were married.

The next month, Inazo returned to Japan and became a professor at his old school, Sapporo Agricultural College. In 1894 he also opened a night school in a poor district of Sapporo, for children who could not go to school.

But after about six years, his body gave up first.

In October 1897, Inazo left Sapporo Agricultural College because of a nervous illness.

That November, resting in Kamakura, he wrote in the preface to a book: I have been ill since this summer, and my doctors forbid me not only to do research but even to write.

Even so, he did not stop working. He talked from his sickbed for twenty or thirty minutes every day and had Kotani Takeji, an agriculture graduate who was nursing him, write it down.

In July 1898, in Ikaho, Inazo wrote the preface to the finished book, On the Basics of Agriculture (Nogyo Honron).

In it, he looks back on what made him take up the study of farming. In 1876, when the emperor toured the northeast, his eldest brother's house at Sanbongi, the land his family had cleared, was chosen as a temporary lodging. His grandfather and father were praised for digging a waterway and turning wasteland into fields.

The family wept with joy. The three brothers each decided to carry on their grandfather's aim. The eldest put his strength into waterways, the second studied agriculture, and Inazo too meant to give his whole life to farming.

And yet, unexpectedly, both his brothers died one after another and left him behind. Right after writing that, this sentence comes.

"Oh, there is no greater joy in life than to have one's parents well, and nothing better than to have a strong body."

His father and mother were both gone. And his body did not do as he wished.

But the same preface goes on.

"Yet I have one thing that does not lose its light and does not perish. How could I be broken?"

He wrote this book to comfort himself and to honor his two brothers' unfinished wishes. He lay in bed much of the time, had few reference books at hand, and could not write as he pleased, so there would be mistakes. He asked readers to read with that in mind.

At the start of the 460-page book is a short dedication. In memory of my late mother, I dedicate this book.

His mother, whom he had left at nine and never seen again.

After that, to rest, Inazo crossed the Pacific once more.

And in 1900, in America, he published a book in English. He had written it while ill. The title was Bushido. The way of the samurai, Japan's warrior class.

It was the answer to Laveleye's question on the day of that walk.

If Japanese are not taught ethics in school, where do they learn right from wrong? After thinking about it for years, he reached an answer of his own. From long ago, among the samurai, there was a morality passed not through books but from heart to heart. He tried giving it a name: bushido, he wrote.

But Inazo had not been able to tell this answer to the person who gave him the question.

It is a pity now that I could not tell him while he was alive, he wrote years later.

A Thoughtless Talker

"To put out such a trivial, silly story would make a man who already has no dignity even lighter. You had better give it up."

In 1907, a friend who read the manuscript of Inazo's book gave him this advice, it seems. Inazo wrote so himself in the book's preface.

Inazo was forty-five then. Since the year before, he had been principal of the First Higher School in Tokyo, known as Ichiko.

What became the book was that string of failures. The night the deck would not end. The station platform where he was asked, "Is there a bridge or something?" The nightgown hidden for two years at the bottom of a bag.

When he came home from abroad seven years earlier, he had told these stories to the old people and children of his household around the dinner table and the kotatsu, a low heated table. He had them written down, and kept them put away for years, so the story goes.

Even after his friend tried to stop him, Inazo published it. That summer too he was ill in bed for several weeks. He took it as a chance, called a stenographer to his bedside, and kept adding stories until he reached exactly one hundred. The title was Kigan no Ashi, The Reed of the Homecoming Goose.

In the preface, he calls himself "a thoughtless talker." When he dictated the stories, he had used rough and vulgar words too, so when proofreading he changed some, he said, so that women readers would not be troubled.

The book ends with a story about wild geese flying north. According to an old Chinese book, geese carry a reed in their beaks to avoid arrows shot at them as they fly.

Going back and forth between countries, he had brought home no gifts, he said ashamedly. Then Inazo ends:

"Carrying a heavy load on a long road, I too have brought back one stalk of reed to protect myself, just enough care not to be hit by some stray arrow."

It was a very light thing to protect oneself with.

The stray arrows had already begun to fly.

Right after he took up the post at Ichiko, he met fairly strong resistance from the school's old traditions, wrote Kawai, his student.

According to Kawai, the students who disliked him came in three groups. Athletes who held out for the old traditions. Literary students who felt Nitobe's ideas were too ordinary. And students who disliked him for no particular reason, just as "a show-off, someone we don't like."

Around the same time, he was also made a professor in the agricultural college at Tokyo Imperial University. But since it was decided from above without going through the professors' discussion, the professors there all rebelled. It is said he was never once allowed to give a lecture.

Even so, in 1910, Inazo dedicated a book based on his talks at Ichiko, The Story of Faust, to the Ichiko students. The dedication, written in English, says that their friendship was a comfort to him, their spirit renewed his heart, and their sincerity strengthened his trust in the future of our country.

And he did not hide his own awkwardness in his books.

Shuyo (Self-Cultivation), from 1911, is a book on training the mind. In its preface, he tells about an old "Professor Forgetful." There was a scholar so learned that he still forgot people's names and ages, and the world laughed at him as Professor Forgetful. After that story, Inazo writes:

"On the single point of forgetting, I must confess that, sadly, I do not yield a single step to the professor."

In a book the next year, 1912, he wrote about anger.

His anger had not gone away. He admitted he still got into fights sometimes, because he was not a saint. What is more, he sometimes even thought:

"Have I really become this spineless? Wouldn't it be better to get a bit more angry?"

For a while he also apparently tried to control his anger by thinking of the other person as a fool. But he gradually became arrogant and began to look down on people, so he stopped.

What he recommended instead was saying this when the other person was angry:

"Forgive me. It was my fault."

And in the same piece, he revealed that the anger chart he had kept at seventeen or eighteen was still with him.

"Opening it now, I feel a little ashamed, but I also feel as though I have passed another milestone."

In the old days, a mound was built along the main roads every ri, about four kilometers, to mark the distance. That was the milestone he meant.

Thirty years and more had passed since he started the chart.

The Far Shore

I will never go to America again.

Inazo kept insisting on this. In America, a law had been passed to shut out immigrants from Japan. As long as that law was in force, he would not go. He kept turning down invitations, about ten of them from universities and others, he later said.

In those years he was in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1920 he worked for more than six years in the League of Nations secretariat as Under-Secretary-General, one of its top posts. His student Kawai Eijiro wrote that the doctor was a well-known figure in Geneva.

After the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the way Americans saw Japan turned very bad. Manchuria is the northeast of China. The incident was an affair started there by the Japanese army.

His disciple Yanaihara Tadao later wrote in a memorial essay: The professor's so-called "bridge across the Pacific" seemed to be starting to collapse, hit first by a blow from the other side, the immigration law, and now by another blow from this side.

The following year, in February 1932, something Inazo said in Matsuyama became a problem.

What did he say? In his memorial essay Yanaihara does not write the words themselves. He only calls it the "kōka incident," trouble caused by the mouth.

But Yanaihara wrote that this incident was proof that Nitobe did not approve of everything about the Manchurian Incident. And that Nitobe was threatened over it.

From February into March of the same year, there was also the League of Blood incident, a string of killings of politicians and business leaders. Around then, a police post was set up at Nitobe's house, and guards went with him when he went out, according to the memorial society's chronology.

Two months later, in April, Inazo set out for America. He broke the vow he had made himself.

He said that friends who worried about what would happen to American feelings toward Japan had asked him to go. The government side seemed to have the same worry too, he said. Going on his own would cost more than he had. His friends insisted that money was no concern, just go.

If he visited old classmates and Americans he knew and talked to them, they would pass it on to the people around them. That was how it was put to him, he said.

"That would work better than my talking directly in my own broken English."

Nearly fifty years earlier, a young man had made a train car listen to his philosophy in "broken English." Even after writing Bushido in English, he still called his English that.

It was planned as a six-month trip. On his way home, in California, the heads of universities held him back. American opinion of Japan is decided in California, they said. Stay here and speak.

But, they said, if you speak on your own, or with the help of the Japanese consulate, you will be suspected at once:

"A hired man of the Japanese government, or worse, a messenger from the military."

So the talks were held with a university as host. Then the Chinese consul came to the university two or three times to protest, it is said: why treat Japan so generously and China so thinly?

So the man chosen to sit in was Chester Rowell, a San Francisco newspaper editor. He felt deep sympathy for China and was against Japan using military force on China. Whenever Inazo spoke, this man always flew in from San Francisco.

Rowell would speak first, praise China's ancient culture, and then say that China was in chaos now. This was "very convenient" for Inazo, who spoke after, he said after returning home. And then he said to the audience:

"China is now in chaos, as Mr. Rowell said. This is the root of the worst troubles. When places like Mexico, Havana, Cuba and Haiti fell into disorder, did you not send in soldiers right away?"

When he said this, quite a few nodded, he said.

That is how he explained to Americans the reason Japan had sent troops to China.

There were people who criticized this trip. That Dr. Nitobe went to America and went around defending Japan's Manchuria policy had "stained his later years" as a man who had preached peace. Some even said he had compromised with the demands of Japan's military, Yanaihara wrote.

In Japan, he was threatened for his words in Matsuyama. In America, he was suspected of being a messenger of the military. And for that trip, he was said to have stained the later years of a man of peace.

In March 1933, Inazo returned to Japan, leaving Mary in America. That same month, Japan gave notice that it was leaving the League of Nations. It was the place where he had worked for more than six years.

The next month, Inazo gave a talk at a meeting of the Tokyo Imperial University's faculty of economics. It was the second talk Kawai had asked him for.

The first had been some years earlier. Kawai, who introduced him then, said that within the doctor, religion, philosophy and science, three things that usually do not mix, were in perfect harmony ("konzen to shite").

Standing on the platform, Inazo said, it is said, with a joke as usual:

"I'm not very bright, so I'm in 'konzen' too."

The two words sound the same. One means blended together perfectly. The other means all mixed up. The audience laughed, Kawai wrote.

In Kawai's memory, Inazo in his last years was over seventy, yet hale and hearty, with a voice that carried well.

That August, Inazo attended the Pacific conference in Banff, Canada. Afterward he entered a hospital in Victoria, Canada.

As his illness grew worse, he let slip that he wanted to hear the murmur of a mountain stream, it is said.

Mary and the nurses worked hard to use a rubber tube to let water fall on a sheet of tin or something, so he could hear the sound, they say.

Besides his wife, almost no acquaintances came to visit, apparently.

In mid-October 1933, Inazo died in that hospital. He was seventy-one.

"I would like to become a bridge across the Pacific."

Fifty years earlier, there was a young man who said this with a laugh, and was asked what he meant.

That man breathed his last on the shore of the Pacific opposite Japan.