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A War of Words

University of Queensland Press

THE HOUSE OF SILK

Oh, ragged sparrow without any mother, When we are lonely, let's play with each other!

— 'The Orphans', by Issa

Yokohama 1891

He could never remember his father's face.

There is a photograph, a studio portrait taken by Fréderick Boissonnas of Geneva, showing a man looking to one side. The man has a high-bridged nose, a commanding look, close-cropped hair, a greying goatee and swept-up moustache. He is wearing evening dress or a dark coat with a white shirt and bow tie. Some kind of order, perhaps his third-class Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Meiji emperor, is pinned to his right lapel. There is a note in French to one side, from the Swiss village of Dully, dated in March 1878, making the man about 38 years old. The portrait is addressed with his affectionate regards to an unknown person, wishing health, happiness and prosperity. It was his father, Edouard de Bavier.

Taken ten years before his birth, Charles could make no connection between the portrait and his recollection of his father's physical presence, which were just cloudy memories from infancy, almost mythical but intensely evocative. When he tried to recall certain scenes and figures he found the European faces were blurred. Above all, he recalled the colours that he would forever associate with his early childhood. On the European side there were grey jackets, tall grey legs, grey whiskers, grey top-hats, vast expanses of pale-coloured skirts, pink faces and hands. On the Japanese side, black kimonos and outer kilts, yellow complexions, black oiled hair, a glossy lacquered setting for the bright floral-patterned kimonos of the women. These were the colours Charles was most familiar with.

By that stage Charles was living with his mother – his Japanese mother, Chika Sakai. They lived in a two-storey wooden house set behind a thorny hedge by the park that separated the Japanese and European quarters of Yokohama. A contractor named Takashima Kaemon had bought up wasteland, levelled it, filled in its swamps and built an estate for the expanding numbers of prosperous Japanese connected with the foreign settlement.

The park was surrounded by white-painted pickets. It had an inner fence around a lawn oval where the foreigners played cricket and baseball, applauding each other from the little grandstand, much to the private scorn of the town's Japanese and its industrious Chinese, the latter who wore their hair in long queues and thought sports were for children. Once, for several days, a balloonist came and set up his equipment in the oval. The park was packed with foreigners, coloured now pink and white because it was summer. The men wore white suits and topees, the women hooped skirts and feathered hats, holding up parasols. The sun shone on brass instruments. The great silk canopy of the hot-air balloon pulsated as it was filled with gas or hot air. The moustachioed young European pilot, also in sporting whites, got into the basket and rose into the sky amid cheers, disappearing into the summer haze over the Kanagawa hills. Several hours later he came back, grinning, in a rickshaw.

There is a studio portrait of Charles at this time – a little boy in a light coloured kimono with a black coat bearing the Sakai crest of three oak leaves in a circle, his feet in white tabi, traditional socks, and inserted in wooden geta, or clogs, that raised his height by a couple of inches. His mid-brown hair is slicked down and parted in the middle. The backdrop shows a Palladian landscape. The boy is clutching a striped ball in his right hand. He looks with an anxious expression to one side, as if to an adult coaxing him to sit straight and look at the camera.

The foreign ladies of Yokohama often used to pet over Charles in the streets when he went out with Chika, probably taking him for the child of a European merchant in the care of a housekeeper. He had a dread of them, for reasons he could not put into thought, far more than of foreign men.

It was a bustling town then. Along the Yokohoma Bund, facing the busy harbour with its glittering water, was a row of substantial masonry houses occupied by Jardine Matheson & Co. and other big mercantile firms, ending at the Grand Hotel with its verandahs facing the water. Lesser trading houses occupied the streets behind, and then beyond the park and a ring of canals lay the Japanese town: flimsy houses and shops of dark-stained wood, alive with big-character signs and theatre banners hung on long bamboo poles. Tokyo had a horse-drawn tramway across the city but in Yokohama people walked or took rickshaws pulled by short, muscular men who went nearly naked in summer, loincloths showing off tanned brown skin and ornate body tattoos of dragons and warriors.

Twenty years earlier, the emperor had abolished the samurai privilege of riding horses, along with the right to carry swords (to the relief of foreigners, constantly fearful of being cut down at any moment by an unreconciled adherent of the old order). But even then, the only Japanese who rode or used horse-drawn carriages were high officials and nobility. Few of the rich merchants starting to emerge in Yokohama – the Haras and Mogis, the Hiranumas and Masudas – thought it becoming for a man of trade to indulge in such extravagance.

The exceptions were the Japanese wives or, more usually, the o-meikake-san, or mistresses of foreign merchants. They dressed well, usually in kimono, and held their heads high, though the latter were never acknowledged in their paramour's society and were described as servants in the police register of inhabitants.

Chika Sakai was even more exceptional for those times. She would wear European clothes, riding her pony side-saddle or taking a gig. She spoke fairly fluent French, it was said, and had many of the upper-class Japanese accomplishments as well, the koto (a traditional Japanese instrument), as well as ikebana, and a fine hand in writing letters.

'O-Chika-san of Number 76', the first address of his father's firm Bavier & Co. on the bund, was a respected and familiar sight around Yokohama in those days. Once she had her tortoiseshell comb snatched from her head and the thief taunted her from a short distance accusing her of being a white man's plaything. Hobbled in her tight kimono but furious, Chika drew from her handbag a small revolver that Edouard had given her and blazed away at the robber. She had no chance of scoring a hit with the short-barrelled gun but the thief dropped the comb and ran. Chika gave the 'contaminated' item to her servant.

How Chika met Edouard de Bavier is unclear, but Charles later assumed that Chika's own mother had fixed it. His grandmother, which is how he regarded his stepmother's stepmother, was O-Fuku-san. She lived in a small house with a maidservant, both paid for by Chika, not far from their place by the park. Often O-Fuku-san would bundle Charles away to spend the night with her. Already into her sixties, a rare age for a Japanese then, she was tall with cropped white hair on an elegantly shaped skull, still showing the foundations of the aquiline beauty she had been. Only a few of her teeth remained, enough to stop her lips from falling in.

Demolishing any food placed before her, O-Fuku-san had a reputation for gulping down sake as fast as it was poured into her cup. She adored male company and made much of Charles as her 'little warrior', telling him tales of the ancient heroes of Japanese history and legend. O-Fuku had been a courtesan in the Yoshiwara pleasure district of Tokyo, when the city was the Edo of the shogunate, becoming an oiran, a woman of distinction and accomplishment with some say about whom she bestowed her favours upon. As was often the way she had formed an attachment with a favourite patron, a wealthy carpenter named Matsugoro. He took Fuku to his home in Odaki, on the east side of Edo. They adopted Chika and another unrelated girl, Kame, from somewhere nearby in the Chiba countryside. In the last years of the shogunate (which ruled Japan from 1600 to 1868), Matsugoro won a contract to build coastal fortifications around Yokosuka on the western side of Tokyo Bay, a belated response to the arrival in 1853 of Commodore Perry of the United States navy and his smoke-belching 'black ships', which forced a reopening of Japanese trade with the West following over 200 years of self-imposed isolation.

Like other commoners under the three centuries of the shogunate, Matsugoro had grown up without a family name. On the emancipation of 1871, he had taken the name and family crest of a distant relative, a low-ranking samurai called Sakai. This samurai might have objected, had he been alive, as he had been a diehard defender of the levelling reforms made in the emperor's name. But he had fallen in the last stand of the shogunate's defenders at what is now Ueno Park, on the northern side of the city.

Matsugoro died in the great cholera epidemic that swept Japan in 1886, after unwisely eating watermelon. But by then both adopted daughters had been placed with men of substance.

Edouard de Bavier had arrived in Japan in 1862 as an attaché in the Swiss Legation, aged about 20. A couple of years later he moved to Jardine Matheson to gain experience in commerce, before setting up his own firm. By then the treaty port of Yokohama – excised from Japanese jurisdiction and its foreign inhabitants ruled by the consuls of their home governments – was a busy and unruly trading town, full of carousing Western sailors, drifters and adventurers.

It was a time of insecurity for the first foreign residents. Within the treaty boundaries near Kamakura, it was reported that a group of English people had unwittingly ridden their horses across the path of an entourage of the feudal lord of Satsuma, and had been attacked by angry samurai for failing to dismount and respectfully wait for the retinue to pass. For similar reasons many foreign merchants would wait for Japanese traders to bring their silk yarn to Yokohama. Despite the risks, Edouard would venture to inland villages to buy silk and silk waste directly from the cocooneries and spinning workshops. It was at one small cocoonery, about 80 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, that he met a tall, broad-shouldered, pockmarked yet handsome fellow named Naganuma Bunshiro, whom he hired as his banto, or local manager.

Edouard was an aggressive, unpopular, though grudgingly respected businessman. Years later, Bunshiro told Charles of a clash between Edouard and the ancient trading firm of Mitsui over some silk shipments. A Mitsui manager had insisted on payment immediately on shipping the goods, Edouard on payment after safe arrival in Europe. The Mitsui man came waving a sword, followed by a band of Yokohama riffraff, with the aim of stopping the shipment. Edouard took shelter in his godown as the watchmen for the foreign community battled them off. Foreigners didn't like him much either, since he insisted on paying taxes to the Japanese government while others sheltered behind their extraterritorial rights.

The premises of Bavier & Co. at No. 76 soon grew into a collection of two-storey stone offices and godowns. The cobbled courtyard in the middle was often packed with handcarts laden with bales of silk yarn and throngs of porters with top-knots and indigo-dyed topcoats waiting for Bunshiro to assay their offerings. In the centre of the yard rose a high white flagstaff, cross-treed and guyed like a ship's mast, with the Danish flag flying; Edouard had become Denmark's consul-general in 1868, and later of Portugal as well.

Who first came across the Sakai girls Charles was never told. Bunshiro married Chika's adoptive sister O-Kame, who had been working as a servant in the household of the Satsuma daimyo in Edo. Aged about 17, Chika became the consort of Edouard. She moved into the fine house of hybrid Japanese–European style Edouard had built for himself in the Europeans' residential quarter, on the bluff overlooking the town. The house and outbuildings stood on an estate he named 'Bavierville'. Looking southwards, the waters of Mississipi Bay were framed by tall pines and stone lanterns. Just to the north was the racecourse at Negishi where Edouard raced his own horses. To the west, in clear weather, rose the cone of Mount Fuji.

Bunshiro and Kame did not have their two children, Charles' cousins in effect, until much later, in the mid-1880s. So probably it was Edouard who discovered Chika first and then introduced them. Chika had a child by Edouard in about 1867, soon after they met, but the boy died three years later. Though they shared a bed for nearly 20 more years they bore no other children together.

It became a familiar enough story. After a quarter century in Japan, Edouard was drawn back to Switzerland and the heritage of his family, listed as one of the country's grand lineages in its almanacs. Edouard's considerable fortune had allowed him to buy an impressive château, a mixture of gothic and renaissance styles in yellow stucco, overlooking Lake Geneva from its western shore at the village of Dully. The wrought-iron gates were adorned with cross-keys, the Vatican emblem, referring to the de Bavier family tradition of sending their young men to become soldiers of the Swiss Guard protecting the Pope.

Edouard made longer trips home, away from Chika. At some point he had an affair with a European woman. This was Charles' real mother, though out of deference to Chika's memory he always mentioned her as his 'other mother'. He was born on 30 January 1888, and named Charles Souza Bavier.

For the rest of his life, Charles put down his birthplace as Dully, Switzerland. He was told, or assumed, he had been born in the château. But was this so? Or would it be more reasonable to assume he was born in Yokohama? And from where did his possibly Portuguese middle name come? There is no record of his birth in the de Bavier commune d'origin at Coire on the other side of Switzerland, or of any earlier marriage than the later one which yielded three sons for Edouard. Had this other woman perhaps been a Portuguese girl encountered by Edouard in his consular role, her unworldliness resulting in a pregnancy he had the wealth and means to conceal?

Whichever it was, Charles had no memory of his mother or of Switzerland. He often speculated that she must have died either in labour or while he was a baby. She floated in his mind as a nameless soul, like a stillborn sibling.

Charles' first memories started after he was given into the care of Chika, who by then had moved from the grand Bavierville at Negishi to her own small house down by the park.

Edouard had left Japan again, reappearing with a European wife. They brought Charles a present: carved and painted wooden soldiers about a foot high with a pair of wooden bowling balls to roll at them. A week later Chika dressed him in his best European clothes and took him in the horse-gig up to Bavierville.

The sea sparkled down below. Chika pointed out into the distance towards the entrance of Tokyo Bay, the lighthouses gleaming white on Cape Kannon and Cape Futtsu. A long gravel driveway led through turf embankments and artfully trained pine trees. In the sunlight on the porch was a large perambulator with a sturdy Chinese amah watching over it. The baby's name was André. Charles remembered fetching some pine cones and laying them on the baby's quilt as a present. Perhaps he was brought to be inspected by the new wife, to see if she would take to him. Perhaps it was just Edouard squaring off his accounts in Japan and easing his conscience.

A month or so later, Charles was taken to see Edouard and his wife again, this time at the Grand Hotel on the bund. He remembered spending some time in a room upstairs with baby André and the Chineseamah.He saw a steam launch with a glittering brass funnel coming into the quay right under the window. André was bundled off in the arms of the Chinese nurse. Later, as he was being held by Chika down on the bund, he saw the tall figure of his father, dressed and hatted, stepping along a gangplank to the launch. His wife, the amah and the baby were already sitting on its benches under an awning. A huge black-hulled steamer, heavy smoke pouring from its funnels, was lying out in the harbour.

Edouard halted halfway, turned, lifted his hat and bowed a little. The small crowd of Japanese, Chika and Bunshiro included, were sobbing. Then the gangplank was pulled onto the quay and the launch hissed its way out into the harbour. It was the last time Charles would see his father.

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Excerpted from A War of Words by Hamish McDonald. Copyright © 2014 Hamish McDonald. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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