A parade during General Grant’s visit in 1879. Woodcut by Kunichika (The Metropolitan Museum of Art: gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1962)
The general and the emperor saw a good deal of each other. The general paid a courtesy call on the Fourth of July, the day after his arrival. They had breakfast together after a troop review on July 7, and met again at the great Ueno reception in August. Also in August, they had a long and relatively informal meeting in the Hama Palace. The general argued the virtues of democracy, though with a caution against too hasty adoption of this best of systems. He expressed the hope that the Japanese would be tactful and considerate of Chinese sensibilities as they took over the Ryūkyū Islands, claimed by both countries. A few days before his departure, he took his leave of the emperor.
Though overall the visit was a huge success, there were a few unpleasant incidents. Clara Whitney overheard a catty Japanese lady remark “that General Grant is treated so much like a god here that a temple should be erected immediately.” Towards the end of his stay there were rumors of an assassination plot, but they proved to be the inventions of a jealous Englishman. The 1879 cholera epidemic, by no means the only such epidemic in Meiji, had led to the building of the first isolation hospitals in the city. Rumors spread similar to earlier ones about telegraph poles (see p. 65): the hospitals were for purposes of snatching livers, General Grant being ready to pay a handsome price for a liver.
These were minor details, however. On the whole, the city seems to have loved the general and the general the city.
The high point of the visit, for the historian of the event if not for the general himself, was his evening at the Kabuki. He went to the Shintomiza near Ginza, the most advanced theater in the city. Carpets and lacquered chairs had been carried in from the Hama Palace. Three royal princes were in attendance, as was the prime minister. The play was called The Latter Three Years’ War in the North. Minamoto Yoshiie, the victorious general in that war (a historical event), resembled the visiting general in a most complimentary manner: he behaved with great courtliness and magnanimity towards his defeated adversary.
The theater manager, accompanied by Danjūrō, the most famous actor of the day, stepped forth in frock coat during an entr’acte to thank the general for a curtain he had donated. The climax was a dance performed against a backdrop of flags and lanterns. Some of the musicians wore red and white stripes, others stars on a blue ground. Then appeared a row of Yanagibashi geisha, each in a kimono of red and white stripes drawn down over one shoulder to reveal a star-spangled singlet. Japanese and American flags decorated their fans.
“Ah, the old flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes!…” Clara Whitney wrote in her diary. “It made the prettiest costume imaginable… We looked with strong emotion upon this graceful tribute to our country’s flag and felt grateful to our Japanese friends for their kindness displayed not only to General Grant but to our honored country.”
Next to General and Mrs. Grant, the foreigner who got the most at tention from the newspapers and the printmakers was probably an Englishman named Spencer, who came in 1890, bringing balloons with which he performed stunts, once in Yokohama and twice in Tokyo. The emperor was present at the first Tokyo performance. Parachuting from his balloon, Spencer almost hit the royal tent, and injured himself slightly in his efforts to avoid it. He drew huge crowds at Ueno a few days later, and this time landed in a paddy field. An American named Baldwin tried to outdo him the following month, with aerial acrobatics and a threatening smoky balloon. Spencer is the one who is remembered, to the extent that he was given credit by the printmakers for stunts that apparently were Baldwin’s. The following year the great actor Kikugorō appeared on the Kabuki stage as Spencer, in a play by Mokuami. Coached by a nephew of Fukuzawa Yukichi, he even essayed a speech in English. There was a vogue for balloon candies, balloon bodkins, and, of course, balloon prints. Since the Japanese had been launching military balloons for more than a decade, it must have been the parachuting and stunting that so interested people—or perhaps they enjoyed seeing a foreigner in a dangerous predicament.
W. E. Griffis, who felt that those two grievously wounded Englishmen (see page 113) deserved what they got, said that the same judgment applied to all attacks upon foreigners of which he was aware. It may be true. The attack on the czarevitch may not seem to fit the generalization as well as it might, but the assailant could have argued that Russia itself was behaving provocatively. Violence was also directed at Salvation Army workers, and much the same justification might have been offered—the army itself was provocative.
An American colonel of the Salvation Army arrived and set up an office in the summer of 1900. Very soon afterwards he published a tract called Triumphant Voice (Toki no Koe), addressed to the ladies of the Yoshiwara. It exhorted them to flee their bondage, and offered help to those who responded positively. The brothel keepers attempted to buy up all copies. A Japanese worker for the Salvation Army was pummeled by a Yoshiwara bully boy as he hawked Triumphant Voice. Two men tried to rescue a lady from the Susaki quarter, and they too were attacked. This charitable endeavor attracted the attention and support of the newspapers. A reporter succeeded in rescuing a Yoshiwara lady, whereupon fleeing the quarters became something of a fad. The Salvation Army announced that during the last months of 1900 there were more than a thousand refugees in Tokyo alone. The figure is not easy to substantiate, but publicity was enormous. The vogue presently passed, and the Salvation Army was not afterwards able to match this initial success.
The “double life,” that mixture of the imported and the domestic, was certainly present from early Meiji and indeed from late Tokugawa, for people to enjoy and to be tormented by. Eminent foreigners came, objects of admiration and emulation, and once Civilization and Enlightenment had been accepted as worthy, it must have been difficult to see pinching shoes and injunctions to urinate indoors as other than important. Through most of Meiji, however, the cosmopolitan part of the double life was the part added, the frills attached somewhat selfconsciously and discarded when a person wanted to be comfortable. The big change, the domestication of the foreign, began in late Meiji, at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and the advertising man and the retail merchant may have been responsible for it. Perhaps it would have occurred without their aggressive urgings. Yet the old drygoods store became the modern department store in late Meiji, and in the change we may see how the double life itself was changing. Civilization and Enlightenment were no longer much talked of in late Meiji, but it was hard for anyone, in the dingiest alley east of the river, not to know what the Mitsukoshi and the Shirokiya were offering this season.
Advertising is a modern institution. The canny merchant of Edo had been aware of its merits, and there are well-known stories of Kabuki actors who promoted lines of dress. Edo was a closed world, however, in which vogues, led by the theater and the pleasure quarters, spread like contagions. People knew their stores, and stores knew their people. Even the largest and richest were highly specialized. Faster transportation led to the development of a wide clientele, gradually becoming something like national. At the same time came the idea of offering everything to everyone.
Through most of Meiji, the old way prevailed. The big shops specialized in dry goods. The customer removed his footwear before stepping up to the matted floor of the main sales room. There was no window shopping. If the customer did not know precisely what he wanted, the clerk had to guess, and bring likely items from a godown. Aristocratic ladies from the High City did not go shopping in the Low City. Clerks came to them from the big “silk stores,” or from smaller establishments that would today call themselves boutiques.
The Mitsui dry goods store, presently to