Takahashi Korekiyo — The Man Who Never Learned

The Boy Who Was Sold

"What would happen if I killed a Chinese man?"

In Oakland, a town on the west coast of America, a boy of about thirteen from Japan asked this of the man whose house he lived in. Decades later, he told the story himself in his autobiography.

The man, it seems, made a strange face.

"If you kill a man, you will be killed too. Why do you say such a thing?"

The boy meant it.

He would later serve as finance minister many times and even become prime minister. His name was Takahashi Korekiyo. As a child, he was called Wakiji.

He was born in Edo, the city now called Tokyo. Right after he was born, he was sent out to be raised in the Takahashi family, low-ranking samurai foot soldiers of the Sendai domain, a region ruled by a lord. It was the family's grandmother who raised him.

When he was small, he went to watch a lord's procession. Someone across the road beckoned to him, and he ran out without thinking. He fell. Two mounted samurai, riding ahead to clear the way, came galloping down like a gale. The boy was trampled under a horse's hoof.

Everyone ran over in shock and picked him up. He was not hurt. There was only the print of a horse's straw sandal on the family crest of his coat.

The Takahashi boy is lucky. He is a happy child. The talk reached the boy's own ears.

"I am a happy man. I am a lucky man."

He believed this deeply from childhood on, he says himself.

At twelve, Wakiji was chosen to go to America as a student sent by the Sendai domain. The night before the ship, his grandmother cut off his topknot with her own hands. She also gave him a short dagger. According to the autobiography, she even taught him how to cut his belly, and said:

"If you ever bring shame on yourself, use this and cut your belly. But never use it to hurt another person."

In San Francisco, he and a friend named Suzuki were left in the house of an old man called Van Reed.

At first they were welcomed. But the meals got worse and worse, and they were not allowed to go to school. They helped in the kitchen, cleaned rooms and ran errands. When the wife went shopping, they followed her carrying a big basket. At night they were hungry. They bought a big five-cent loaf from the bakery across the street and ate it in secret, he and Suzuki, it is said.

You broke your promise, so I will not work anymore. Wakiji insisted on this and stopped listening to anything he was told.

Before long the wife gave up on him. She took him to the house of a rich acquaintance in Oakland. When he said it looked like a good place, the old man told him that if he lived there, he could study.

At the old man's office, a paper was put in front of him. A friend who had come along looked at it, but they had only just begun to learn English, and neither could tell what it said. Still, he would be able to study, as he had hoped. Wakiji signed it, full of joy. His friend said this, the autobiography records:

"It seems to say you are going off somewhere. It says something about three years."

Wakiji did not doubt anything. He went back and boasted to Suzuki, and made him jealous, it is said.

The young wife in the Oakland house was kind. She checked his English handwriting and even made clothes for him. Soon he was given the care of the cows and horses, and the job of sawing firewood.

And then came that morning.

Splitting the sawn wood was the job of the Chinese cook who worked in the same house.

That morning, the cook was sawing the wood. Today is washing day, Wakiji thought, so he must be doing it for me. Without thinking twice, he began to split the logs.

The cook yelled at him in a terrible rage.

"Why are you doing my work?"

Wakiji yelled back, not willing to lose. The other man would not give in either. Today is washing day and we need lots of firewood, he said, and you have not sawn any at all!

The words took him by surprise. Wakiji "flared up," the autobiography says, and raised a broad axe. The cook ran away. Wakiji chased him and threw the axe, and it hit the door of the shed.

Even so, his anger did not settle. He quietly slipped his grandmother's dagger into his pocket. The cook, too, had put a small hatchet in his pocket, to be safe.

Just then, he suddenly remembered two words his grandmother had told him to keep in mind. Kannin: hold your temper.

This is a time to hold my temper, he thought. But Grandmother also taught me to cut my belly if I am shamed. If I am going to cut my belly, I must first beat the other man. But if I beat him, what will happen to me?

According to the autobiography, that was how the boy's thoughts went around and around. And in the evening, he threw his question at the master of the house.

The master scolded him: you are at fault too. You tied the cow in the wrong place. This morning you did not saw the firewood. You are in the wrong because you did not do what you should.

The next day, Wakiji thought it over for the whole day. It would be silly to kill a Chinese man and be killed himself. It would be foolish to trade lives with a man like that. So he changed his mind, the autobiography says.

In the evening, Wakiji went to the master and asked for time off. I don't want to be with a man like that, he said.

The master's answer was this:

"You cannot take time off and go home as you please. Your body has been bought and paid for, for three years. In fact, you and your friend even signed a paper."

Wakiji was stunned. Was that paper he had signed a contract selling himself? He had to find a way to escape from here somehow. So he thought, the autobiography goes on.

Please give me just one day, he said, because I want to go to San Francisco tomorrow and talk with my friend. At that, the master shouted "How dare you!" and suddenly struck him across the cheek.

The blow made him let out a puff of gas.

He was a little embarrassed, so he smiled, still angry. He tells us that the wife, standing nearby, stopped her husband. You must not be so rough, she said.

Three years. That was what the paper said, the one he had signed his name to so happily.

Just Neighbors

It was the Japanese friends in San Francisco who thought of a way out. They made it look as if his domain had called him home, forged a letter, and got the contract broken.

At the end of the first year of Meiji (by the old lunar calendar), Wakiji, who would be known as Korekiyo, came home to Japan.

When his luggage was searched at Yokohama, a pistol turned up in Korekiyo's trunk. In America, someone had asked him for the dagger his grandmother had given him, and he had traded it for a pistol, then forgotten it at the bottom of the trunk.

Mori Arinori took in Korekiyo and the others who had come home. To keep him safe, Mori even had his name changed. People began to call him Hashi-san.

The next year, fourteen-year-old Korekiyo became a teacher at Daigaku Nanko, a government school. He had gone from being taught to teaching.

In 1870, three younger students from the same school came to him with a request. They were in debt and could not go back to their home domains. Without 250 ryo (an old gold coin), they were stuck.

Korekiyo had no such money. He went to a merchant who was a distant relative, signed an IOU as the borrower, and handed the money to the three.

To thank him, the three invited Korekiyo to a teahouse in Ryogoku called Kashiwaya.

Before long he noticed that he was the only one being treated lightly. The three wore silk and carried swords with gold on them. He wore plain cotton clothes and a hakama (the wide trousers samurai wore) of cheap cloth. At the end of the night, geisha carried the three swords to the door on silk wrappers. Only his sword was left lying in the alcove.

"I cannot let men like that look down on me."

That is what he thought, the autobiography says.

Korekiyo asked a secondhand clothes dealer to find him the same kind of kimono and hakama as the three wore, and a sword that looked like gold, gilded would do. On New Year's Day, in the evening, he invited the three back to the same teahouse and called the same geisha.

This time, everything was different. They welcomed him warmly. People change how they treat you according to what you wear and how freely you spend. He understood that, he looks back.

Then, to join their circle of fun, he started learning songs and dances from the three. Night after night, he sang and danced at the top of his voice in the house of his teacher Verbeck, where he was boarding. The cook of that house watched, and went to tell Korekiyo's friend that Hashi-san had gone mad, it is said.

Korekiyo felt he could no longer stay in that house. He told his teacher he wanted to board somewhere else.

The teacher did not say much, Korekiyo says.

"If you want to come back someday, you may come back at any time. Do not hesitate."

With these words, he took down a big Bible with a black leather cover and put it into Korekiyo's hands.

"Whatever happens, look at it once a day."

Once he moved out, he did not have to answer to anyone. His partying got worse and worse.

One day at a theater in Asakusa, Korekiyo and a friend were drinking hard in a box seat, wearing geisha's long under-kimonos. Between acts, a group came walking down the aisle toward them. Three foreigners and two Japanese. The foreigners were teachers at his school.

That same day, Korekiyo handed in his resignation. When Kato Hiroyuki tried to stop him, the autobiography says he answered:

"I have behaved badly. I have no right to teach anyone."

His savings vanished in no time. He still had to pay interest on the money he had borrowed for the three. Korekiyo sold everything he owned, books and clothes alike. Only one thing was left: the Bible from Verbeck.

He opened that Bible once a day without fail. Each time, he felt that he was in a bad way and had to change soon. But he could not stop his partying, because he was caught up in his feelings for a woman, he says.

It was around that time. His grandmother, who lived in Shiba, came to visit his lodgings one morning.

That day, a geisha he knew well, Masukichi, had stayed the night. A younger geisha had just brought breakfast packed in tiered boxes. They were in the back room. There was nowhere to run.

His grandmother looked at the two geisha and asked:

"And these ladies are?"

Korekiyo answered on the spot:

"Just neighbors."

"Oh, I see. My grandson must give you a lot of trouble. He is still young and has so much to learn. Please look after him."

The two geisha, greeted so politely, could not bear it and ran away.

He had expected a scolding afterward. His grandmother did not scold him at all.

"You are not at an age to be lectured anymore, so think it over well, and do not waste your life. As I always say, all I pray to the gods and Buddha for, morning and night, is that you will make something of yourself."

Masukichi seems to have been deeply moved by the way his grandmother acted. Korekiyo wrote that it seemed to him that this was why Masukichi later offered to take him into her own home.

But at Masukichi's house, her parents treated him as a nuisance, and he even ended up helping to carry a shamisen player's instrument.

A man can't go on like this. He had lost patience with himself. One evening, he stood in front of Masukichi's house, looking up at the sky and thinking, the autobiography says.

Suddenly, someone called to him from behind.

"Aren't you Wakiji? It's been a long time!"

It was his name from childhood.

All the Debts Are Gone

The voice belonged to Obana Manji, someone he had known as a child in Yokohama.

Asked what he was doing now, Korekiyo answered this way, the autobiography says:

"I am doing nothing. I feel I have to do something."

"That is just right."

Obana's story went like this. The Karatsu domain in Kyushu was building a school to teach English and needed a teacher. The pay was 100 yen a month, with meals provided.

Korekiyo accepted. He borrowed against his pay to have a Western suit made, and he settled his debts. For the rest of the 250 ryo, he rewrote the IOU and agreed to pay it back from his monthly pay. He also changed his name, to Azumataro, after Masukichi's family name.

Masukichi had taken on the care of his aging grandmother. She quit working as a geisha, rented a house in Asakusa and lived there with her. It did not last long, because Masukichi was soon called back by her parents.

At the school in Karatsu, every class was in English. But the students had no way to know whether the English they learned would really be understood by foreigners.

One day, a foreign ship came into the port of Karatsu to load coal. Korekiyo took fourteen or fifteen of his upper-class students aboard and explained to the captain.

These people have never once talked to a foreigner. They doubt that their English will work. They may ask odd questions, but please treat it as English practice and talk with them.

The captain gladly agreed and even served them beer. The students rushed to try the conversations they had learned at school. The captain answered them. They found out that their English was real, and everyone was delighted, the autobiography says.

On Korekiyo's suggestion, the school moved into the palace inside the castle, after the lord had left, and the number of students grew. One of them was Tatsuno Kingo, who would later become a doctor of engineering.

Once he had paid off his own debt, Korekiyo said he no longer needed the full 100 yen. He took sixty yen for himself and put the other forty into the school's costs.

A letter he sent to his grandmother from Karatsu is printed in the autobiography. It is written in the old style, with a lot of hiragana.

"Shakkin mo mina nuke moshi sōrō mama goanshin kudasaredo nenji sōrō"

My debts are all gone, so please do not worry.

It was signed with the name Taro.

But in Karatsu, it was not only his students that grew in number.

It was sake. Cold sake before class in the morning. A sho (about 1.8 liters) at noon. At night, drinking parties with the school's caretakers. On average, he says, he drank three sho a day.

In the first month of the lunar calendar in 1872, he finally collapsed from drinking. The doctor warned him:

"This is serious. I told you not to drink too much, and you drank too much. This is sake poisoning. You will lose your life to this."

After about a week, he could walk around the room. After the illness, he could not stand even the smell of sake.

When he went down to the lower room for the first time in a while, the teachers were drinking as usual.

"Sensei, how about a cup?"

"No, I have come to hate even the smell."

Then one of them said:

"If you hate the smell, hold your nose and drink."

He held his nose and drank. It was actually good. From the second cup on, it was good even without holding his nose.

"In the end, I never learned my lesson, and became a drinker again."

That is how Korekiyo tells it in his autobiography.

Even after he left Karatsu, Korekiyo could not settle down. At a government office, the Post Office Bureau, he clashed with his superiors and quit. He also tried his hand at speculating in the markets.

In 1881, he tried to join the Ministry of Education. Word reached him that a man named Hamao Arata was against it. Someone who had spent his time partying and speculating should not be let into the office of education, the man said.

Korekiyo went to see Hamao on his own. And he told him everything just as it was, he says. He had speculated in order to earn the money to support some thirty young students, and he had stopped now. He no longer went out to party, either.

"For these reasons, please understand that the Takahashi of today is a different man from the Takahashi of yesterday."

Hamao replied, so it is said, that this was fair enough, and that he should join the ministry soon.

Six years later, in 1887, Korekiyo had become head of the Patent Office. As an official, he was halfway up the climb.

Two years later, he would leave that chair. For a silver mine in Peru, in South America.

Start Me as an Apprentice Boy

March 26, 1890. In Peru, Korekiyo had a visitor. His technician, Koike, suddenly came down from the mountain.

Something terrible has happened, and I came to tell you in secret, Koike said.

The tunnels of the silver mine the company had bought were empty. It was an old abandoned mine, dug out to the very bottom.

"Ah, it is all over."

The twenty-sixth of March in the twenty-third year of Meiji was a day he would never forget as long as he lived, Korekiyo says.

The man who had examined the mine and made the report was named Tajima. He was a former student of Korekiyo.

Korekiyo woke Tajima and pressed him. When we first bought the mine, did you really look at the site? Tell me plainly.

Tajima finally answered.

"The truth is, I did not investigate it well at that time."

The report was a translation of records at a Peruvian mining school, which someone had read aloud to him in English. He had not gone up the mountain himself. Tajima confessed this in tears.

Once there was a boy who happily signed his name on a paper he could not read. That boy was now thirty-five, and he was the man in charge of a mine bought on the report of his own student.

When he returned to Japan, the next things he tried failed one after another: a farm in Fukushima and a mine in Amanuma. The jeers and laughter of the world would not die down.

What he still owed on his shares remained as debt. He sold the house and grounds where he lived, added what money he had, and finally settled things. He moved to a small rented house just behind his old one. The rent was six or seven yen, he thinks.

His friends urged him to go back to being an official, and offered him jobs here and there. Korekiyo turned down every one. If he became an official just to eat, there would come a time when he had to obey a superior even if the superior was wrong. That would not do, he thought, the autobiography says.

So one day, he gathered every member of his family. From the failure in Peru to the farm in Fukushima, the mine in Amanuma and where things stood now, he told them everything for the first time.

"Now we must leave our fortune to heaven, and the whole family must pull together to rebuild our home. So let us go to the country, and adults and children together, work as hard as we can. And if we still go hungry, then I ask all of you to go hungry with me."

His older son, Korekata, listened. The younger, Koreyoshi, was ten.

"If that happens, I will sell clams and help the family."

Everyone swallowed their tears, Korekiyo says. His wife earned a little pay by knitting wool at home.

April 1892. His friend Maeda Masana brought news. Kawada Koichiro, governor of the Bank of Japan, wanted to meet him.

Early one morning, Korekiyo visited Kawada's house. I know the outline of what happened in Peru, Kawada said.

Korekiyo warned that it would take at least two hours to tell it properly, and then told everything from the very beginning to that day. Kawada turned away the visitors who came in the meantime and listened, it is said.

When he had heard it all, Kawada said: you cleaned up everything and left not a speck of dust behind. If I were in your place, I could not have done more. And it is not good to hide away in the country. You can win back any failure.

Korekiyo answered: I am only human, so I have some pride. But that pride was the thing I got most wrong, so from now on I have decided to keep to my place, do my best, and leave the rest to fate. That is what he said, the autobiography records.

After a while, Kawada offered him a post: the president's chair of a certain railway company was empty, why not sit in it?

Korekiyo refused. He knew nothing about railways. He had no confidence that he could be a president without making mistakes.

"If you are going to put me into the business world anyway, please start me as an apprentice boy."

A detchi was a boy who lived in a shop and worked from the very bottom.

That is an odd thing to say, Kawada told him, but quite right.

June 1, 1892. Korekiyo became the chief clerk for the construction of the new Bank of Japan building.

The man who led the technical department of the building office was Tatsuno Kingo. He was a student Korekiyo had taught English at the school in Karatsu.

Heaven's Help

April 1904, London. Japan was in the middle of a war with Russia.

War costs money. The only way was to sell government bonds, certificates of the nation's debt, abroad. The man who had come to London for this job was Korekiyo, deputy governor of the Bank of Japan.

One evening, at a dinner party at a friend's house, Korekiyo found himself seated next to an American banker. His name was Schiff. Korekiyo had never even heard the name.

Schiff asked detailed questions about Japan's economy and its people. Korekiyo answered as carefully as he could.

The next day, a banker named Shand came with unexpected news. Mr. Schiff had said he would take the remaining five million pounds of the bonds and sell them in America.

The deal came together quickly, and ten million pounds of bonds could be issued in England and America at once.

"I was greatly delighted, taking it as nothing but the help of heaven."

Tenyu means help from heaven. That is what Korekiyo wrote in his autobiography. The boy who was trampled by a horse and ended up with only the print of a straw sandal on his coat was now forty-nine.

Fukai Eigo, who worked at his side, later told how Korekiyo behaved in London.

Before Schiff went back to America, he wanted to meet you. When Shand said this, Korekiyo asked: do you mean I should go to him? Well, yes, came the answer. Korekiyo bristled and snapped, so it is said:

"Mr. Schiff is a great man, and I respect him and thank him for what he has done. But I am here now as the representative of a whole country. If he wants to meet me, he should come to me."

At that time Schiff was a man invited to lunch with the King of England. Fukai says he felt a chill.

But before long, Schiff did come to Korekiyo's lodgings, Fukai says.

The lodging, it is said, was a third- or fourth-rate hotel, about the level of a merchants' inn in Bakurocho in Tokyo. Korekiyo did not care about the rank of his inn at all.

Now it was Korekiyo's turn to go and return the visit. According to Fukai, Schiff was staying at the finest hotel in London, where royalty and nobles of many countries and the very rich stayed.

The moment he came back, Korekiyo is said to have remarked:

"Schiff's hotel is like a palace. We should change hotels too."

But he could not find a good place at a fair price. The time to go home was near. In the end, the hotel stayed as it was.

Afterward, Korekiyo became governor of the Bank of Japan and served as finance minister many times.

Mitsuchi Chuzo, who worked with Korekiyo for many years, left this scene in writing. It happened in 1920, in a committee of the House of Peers, the upper house of the Diet.

Korekiyo had disagreed with the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, and Mitsuchi and others had stepped in and put together a plan. Perhaps he had forgotten what it said. Korekiyo went on and on about his original opinion. A committee member asked: the explanations of the two ministers do not agree. Which should we take as the government's view?

Korekiyo said that if his explanation conflicted with the other minister's opinion, he would take back his answer. The chairman cut in: why not take back only the part that does not match?

"No. I take back all of it."

Korekiyo said this calmly, and the whole room burst into laughter, it is said.

This is how Mitsuchi described him:

"In self-control, he was not a man who stood out above others. Rather, he was open and innocent, and he spoke and acted as his feelings poured out."

Mitsuchi also wrote that Korekiyo cared so much about the country that perhaps he had no time to think about his own dignity or appearance.

He was the young man who had once been looked down on at a teahouse in Ryogoku with his sword thrown in the alcove, and who had held a New Year's party to get even.

The next year, 1921, Korekiyo even became prime minister.

February 26, 1936. Korekiyo, then finance minister, was assassinated in the February 26 Incident, an attempted military coup. He had been fighting with the army because he wanted to hold down military spending. He was eighty-one.

I am a happy man. Because he believed so, Korekiyo says in his autobiography, he worked with all his heart through every failure and every tight spot, sure that good luck would come around someday.

The friends who forged a letter for a boy who had been sold. Verbeck, who handed him a Bible and said he could come back anytime. Masukichi, who quit being a geisha to live with his aging grandmother. Kawada, who turned away his visitors and listened for two hours.

And his grandmother, who did not scold him in front of the geisha and said all she prayed for was his success.

"What would happen if I killed a Chinese man?" The boy who asked that in Oakland remembered the two words his grandmother had told him to keep in mind, kannin, and did not kill. Perhaps those two words did not really take hold of him, even to the very end.

Let me go back to the night before he left for America.

His grandmother cut off the topknot of her twelve-year-old grandson with her own hands. Strangely, that topknot turned up in an old document box, and he still keeps it, he says in his later years.

The next day, seen off by his grandmother, the boy boarded the ship. The ship had a strange smell, and his grandmother could not drink the tea she was served.

But the boys, it is said, were simply too happy to hold it in.