FIRST VISIT TO JAPAN
In the summer of 1877 he came home; and, having no impulse toward a
profession, he went into the office of his grandfather, John Amory
Lowell, where he was engaged in helping to manage trust funds. In
this,—in learning the ways of business, for a time as acting treasurer,
that is the executive head, of a large cotton mill, and withal as a
young man of fashion,—he spent the next six years. With money enough for
his wants, never extravagant, and with the increase that came from
shrewd investment, he felt free in the spring of 1883 to go to Japan to
study the language and the people. Both of these he did with his
habitual energy, learning to speak with great rapidity, meeting socially
Japanese and foreign residents in Tokyo, and observing everything to be
seen. His own view of the value of travel and study is given in a letter
to a sister seven years his junior, written apparently in the preceding
summer when she was in Europe.[1] “I am very glad,” he says, “that you
are taking so much interest in studying what you come across in your
journey and after all life itself is but one long journey which is not
only misspent but an unhappy one if one does not interest one’s-self in
whatever one encounters—Besides, from another standpoint, you are
storing up for yourself riches above the reach of fickle fate,—what the
moths and rust of this world cannot touch. You are making, as it were, a
friend of yourself. One to whom you can go when time or place shall
sever you from others, and the older you grow, sweet puss, the more you
have to depend upon yourself. So, school your mind then, that it may
come to the rescue of your feelings—and a great thing is to cultivate
this love of study while yet you are happy. For if you wait until you
need it to be happy, you will, with much more difficulty, persuade
yourself to forget yourself in it—Now as to particulars, you need never
worry yourself if you do not happen to like what it is orthodox to
prefer. You had much better be honest with yourself even if wrong, than
dishonest in forcing yourself to agree with the multitude. That is, the
opinion one most commonly hears is not always the opinion of the best.
And again, always be able to give a reason for what you think and, to a
great extent, for what you like.”
At once he was fascinated by Japan, its people, their customs, their
tea-houses, gardens and their art. Much of this was more novel to his
friends at home when he wrote about it than it would be now; although
even at that time he saw how much Tokyo had already been influenced by
Western ideas and habits. He kept his attention alert, observing,
studying, pondering everything that he saw or heard. In fact, within a
fortnight he lit upon two things that later led to careful examination
and the writing of books. In a letter to his mother on June 8, in
dealing with differences that struck him between the people of Japan and
occidentals, he writes: “Again, perhaps, a key to the Japanese is
impersonalism. Forced upon one’s notice first in their speech, it may be
but the expression of character. In the Japanese language there is no
distinction of persons, no sex, no plural even. I speak of course of
their inflected speech. They have pronouns, but these are used solely to
prevent ambiguity. The same is true of their genders and plurals. To
suppose them, however, destitute of feeling, as some have done, I am
convinced would be an error. The impersonalism I speak of is a thing of
the mind rather than the heart. I suggest rather than posit.” In a
letter, three days later, he tells of a friend whose jin-riki-sha man’s
wife had the fox disease, “a species of acute mania supposed by the
people to be a bewitchment by the fox. As the person possessed so
regards it and others assist in keeping up the delusion by interpreting
favorably to their own views, it is no wonder that the superstition
survives.” Some years later an unexpected sight of a religious trance on
Mount Ontake gave rise to a careful study of these psychic phenomena.
Well did Pasteur remark that in the fields of observation chance favors
only the minds that are prepared.
He hired a house in Tokyo, set up his own establishment as if he had
been born and bred there, and after three weeks on shore wrote: “I am
beginning to talk Japanese like a native (of America), and I take to ye
manners and customs of ye country like a duck to the water.” He stayed
enjoying the life, and the many friends he made, until the middle of
July, when, with Professor Terry of the University, he started on a trip
across the mountains to the other side of the island. The journey was
hard, and at times the food and lodging poor. “Think,” he writes, “of
the means of subsistence in a land where there is no milk, no butter, no
cheese, no bread, almost no meat, and not over many eggs. Rice is the
staple article of food, then vegetables, eggs and fish; the last two
being classed as the food of the richer, and most eaten in the greater
centres. Some country people are so poor that they have not rice, and
eat barley instead. It is considered a sign of poverty to be without
this universal article of diet, but in travelling about in
out-of-the-way corners one meets with such places. I have myself lit
upon such at the noon-day halt but have never been obliged to spend the
night there.” But the scenery was fine, and the people unchanged by
contact with the foreigner. He noted archaic devices still in use for
pumping and boiling water; yet, in visiting a ruined castle, he saw that
while the interior of the country had as yet been little affected by the
impact of the West its political condition had been transformed with
amazing speed. “We mounted through some seven barnlike rooms, up
Japanese ladders to the top story. Sitting by the window and looking at
the old feudal remains below, the moat with its stagnant slime and the
red dragon flies skimming its surface, the old walls, the overgrown
ramparts where now the keeper tries to grow a crop of beans, all tended
to carry my thoughts back to the middle ages, or was it only to my own
boyhood when the name _middle ages_ almost stood for fairy land? And yet
all this had been a fact, even while I had been dreaming of it. My
dreams of Western feudalism had been co-existent with Eastern feudalism
itself. So it was only eleven years ago that the last Daimio of the
place left the castle of his ancestors forever.”
From his journey across Japan he got back to Tokyo on August 13th, where
a surprise and an opportunity awaited him. On the very evening of that
day he was asked to accompany a Special Mission from Korea to the United
States as its Foreign Secretary and Counsellor. About this Dr. W.
Sturgis Bigelow wrote to Percival’s father:
“After two days of unconditional refusal and one of doubt Percy has
finally yielded to the wishes of the U. S. Legation here and accepted
the position of Foreign Secretary and General Counsellor to the
Embassy sent from Korea to the U. S.
“The position practically amounts to his having complete charge and
control of the most important legation from a new country that has
visited the U. S. since the opening of Japan. The U. S. authorities
here are greatly pleased at having secured so good a man, as is
natural. There were many applicants for the place.”
He goes on to say the hesitation was mainly due to anxiety to what his
father would say, and adds:
“He distrusts himself too much, he has great ability, he has learned
Japanese faster than I ever saw any man learn a language—and he only
needs to be assured that he is doing the right thing to make a success
of anything he undertakes, whether science or diplomacy.”