Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville
while both were on their way to cover the Greek-Turkish War, de Guerville with his new red-haired bride in tow and still laboring as a freelancer. By Creelman’s account, not long into the train journey from Bologna to the port of Brindisi in southern Italy, de Guerville came knocking on his compartment door.
His voice was broken and his eyes were filled with tears as he told me that the story that he had sought to contrive my death by treachery had ruined him; it had damned his reputation and shut all avenues of journalistic employment.. . . He [de Guerville] told me that he had never insinuated that I was a Chinese spy in the Japanese army but admitted that he had made a remark which if badly translated . . . might have caused some suspicion.77
The precise truth behind such high jinx has been lost to history; in the end one is simply left with the distinct impression that Creelman had succeeded in spiking his competitor’s guns after all.
III. Au Japon Then and Now
The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.77
—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”
Au Japon defies easy categorization. It is part comic portrait, part nostalgic memoir, part apology, and part earnest analysis of political developments in the Far East. All of it is a product of A. B. de Guerville—the man and his environment.
For the first half of the book de Guerville’s role as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition is nearly superfluous, serving only to explain what he was doing in Japan to begin with. This portion of the book is taken up mostly with humorous portraits of people and events in Japan (though some of these should be taken with a grain of salt). Only in the second half does the work change tone as the author discusses his experiences in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. Then, Au Japon becomes more journalistic and analytical, examining such things as the Japanese Red Cross, the character of the Genro [elder statesman] Yamagata Aritomo, and the Japanese army’s conduct in the Sino-Japanese War, all the while refusing to forsake its sense of irony and somewhat salacious humor.
But if one were to indulge in the dubious exercise of placing Au Japon, then perhaps it belongs halfway between two genres: it is in small part a journalistic autobiography along the lines of Frederic Villiers’ Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, or James Allan’s Under the Dragon Flag. More than anything, Au Japon seems to echo that work by de Guerville’s fellow journalist, and erstwhile rival, Creelman, whose book of reminiscences On the Great Highway appeared in 1901. Indeed the lives of these two men seem to parallel one another to an uncanny degree. Creelman was ten years de Guerville’s senior, but their two lives were remarkably similar in their particulars: both men were naturalized Americans and self-made journalists; both wrote for a series of New York publications, including the New York Herald, and both at one point managed the The Illustrated American; both became foreign correspondents and then war correspondents during the Sino-Japanese War. Both men were also fond of boasting of their mutual successes, including interviews with Pope Leo XIII (Creelman beat de Guerville by three years) and kings (they interviewed Korea’s King Kojong weeks apart). In the pair’s contradictory assertions over the alleged “Port Arthur massacre” their lives at last collide and a thus far unspoken rivalry is made manifest. Though the two men certainly knew one another (and not on pleasant terms), their surviving published writings never mention the other by name.
Au Japon is very much a sentimental and subjective account of travels and impressions of life in the Far East, in the spirit of Sir Edwin Arnold (whom de Guerville admired and with whom he once shared a jinrikisha) and Lafcadio Hearn (who first arrived in Japan a year before de Guerville). Au Japon echoes both Arnold’s Japonica (1891) and Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). Although de Guerville certainly indulges in some of the sentimental exocitizing of Japan—best manifested by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum—de Guerville’s is also a sympathetic and progressive pen. Though he may poke fun at aspects of the Japanese and life in Japan, he does so in a spirit of good-naturedness and not out of condescension or a sense of superiority, moral or otherwise. De Guerville is as interested in the nation’s modern transformation as he is in its traditions. He sees value in Japan’s modernization, in the education of women, and in the rise of Japan to equality with the industrialized nations of the west—rather than simply its perpetual relegation to “enchanted bamboo land” of geishas and tea houses. He also takes issue with the then prevalent idea that Japan was, through industrialization and Western influence, only then emerging out of barbarity into civilization.
One should not lose sight of the fact, and indeed it is hard to, that Au Japon is foremost a comical look at Japan from a Westerner’s perspective. With its risqué and irreverent outlook, Au Japon is very much a French book of travel writing. Au Japon simply does not take itself too seriously, and this in itself is endearing. To be sure, de Guerville records several dialogs that he certainly did not witness, and quite likely never took place. The confusion over the meaning of “Teikoku,” for instance, would only be plausible if the Japanese in question had been conversing with de Guerville in French, not something very likely to have occurred. But even these “imaginary” conversations serve not to mislead so much as to entertain. In the end we are to trust in the Japan Weekly Mail’s assertion that, delightful as Au Japon may be, “to take it seriously from cover to cover would be imbecile.”79
Au Japon is also simply a humorous account of a foreigner’s misadventures in Japan. De Guerville’s obvious delight in recounting the creaking of western ladies’ corsets as they sat down to an uncomfortable tea à la Japonaise, or the flatulence of his Korean “coolies”; his racy account of foreign scandal in the pleasure district of Tokyo, or humorous take on everything from Japanese bathing to firefighting; all these reveal the book’s comic quality. One might be reminded of Thomas Raucat’s L’Honorable partie de campagne (1924), or, even racier still, that same author’s De Shanghai à Canton (1927).80 But whereas Raucat’s humor is delivered in more of a deadpanned manner, one can almost hear de Guerville laughing out loud, or regaling an audience at New York’s Lotus Club, as he recounts his experiences. Indeed, it would come as little surprise for a reader to learn that before his success as a writer de Guerville was an accomplished and popular lecturer during a time when public speaking was a much lauded talent.
Au Japon should also be viewed in the context of the period trend towards travel books in general and Japan in particular. At the time, writing about Japan sold well. Besides de Guerville, there were legions of aspiring authors ready to feed a seemingly insatiable Western curiosity for this intriguing and modernizing island nation. “True it is, ‘and pity ’tis ’tis true,’ with reference to Japan, that ‘of making many books there is no end,’” intoned one period editorial.81 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century travel books on Japan had become a virtual cottage industry. Between 1875 and 1900 no fewer than two hundred books of travel impressions on Japan appeared in Western languages. Many were the products of journalists like de Guerville, but their authorship ran the gamut from diplomats to adventurers, educators to engineers, and from missionaries to sailors, doctors, general misfits, and the odd man or woman of leisure. In regards to their treatment of Japan, certain trends can be discerned in such works.