The public is invited to the monthly ASJ lectures. A 1,000 yen donation from non-members would be appreciated, but is not required.
Place: The Society does not have a fixed place for its lectures at this time. Watch each month's lecture announcement for the location.
Inquiries: Tel: (03)5549-4751 (ASJ Office is open irregularly), E-mail: asj@gol.com
Summary of the December meeting.
Dr. Berendt opened the December meeting -- the last of this millennium -- by announcing the sad news that our oldest member, Miss Eloise Cunningham, founder of Music for Youth, had passed away, and he called upon Mrs. Sayoko Arai, President of Music for Youth, to say a few words about their founder. He then asked the assembled company to observe a moment's silence in her memory (see also the News Notes). He also made the announcement given above about the manning of our office.
Our speaker on this occasion was Dr. Matthew M. Hanley, Associate Professor of English at Keio University. His subject was "Kipling's Imperial Gaze and Japan: the letters from Japan in the context of his life and work". Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865, and died in January 1936, just as the British nation was mourning the death of King George V. His father was an art teacher and was connected with the Pre-Raphaelites; one of his mother's sisters married Edward Burne-Jones, while another became the mother of Stanley Baldwin. He was sent to school in England, which he found like moving from Paradise to Hell. He was not good at sports, but showed an early talent for writing. In 1882 he returned to India, where he became a journalist first in Lahore and then with the Pioneer in Allahabad. He was rigorously trained in such matters as meeting deadlines and keeping his pieces to within a certain length. By the age of 21 he showed an astonishing maturity, and had developed his own style of writing, which was tinted with "English spectacles". (All this was later evidenced in the letters dispatched to the Pioneer from Japan.) He became the regular contributor of short articles of 2,000 words on the centre page, which ran over to the next page if necessary, and were known as "turnovers"; they were topical and arresting, and some of them were later reprinted in Plain Tales from the Hills. (1888).
His first visit to Japan came in 1889, when he returned to England via the British colonies in southeast Asia, Japan, and America. He was astounded by the vitality of Meiji Japan. He also noted the same vitality in America, but tempered his praises with negatives: he condemned America for infecting Japan with ideas of 'Progress' and struggling to get ahead of one's neighbour.
In London he was lionized by the literary set, such people as Henry James, Bram Stoker and Edmund Gosse. He was also helped by an American, Wolcott Balestier, whose home was in Vermont; Kipling's writings were being pirated and Wolcott set about protecting his copyrights. In 1892 he married Wolcott's sister Caroline ("Carrie"), and they had three children, Josephine, Elsie and John. (Josephine died young and John was killed in WWI.) His second visit to Japan came as part of their honeymoon trip, but the rest of the trip had to be cancelled when the bank he was using in Yokohama collapsed and he lost all his savings and had to return to Vermont. After a quarrel with Carrie's ne'er-do-well brother Beatty, which became a media sensation, he returned to England and settled in Sussex in 1897; he came to love this county, and studied it. For many years he used to winter in South Africa, staying at "Groote Schuur", the home of his friend Cecil Rhodes. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was honoured by many universities; but he never would accept a knighthood, not wishing to be associated with the imperialist establishment.
Many of his writings spring from his experiences in India. Such works are Plain Tales from the Hills (the hill stations such as Simla), Kim, the great novel of India, and The Jungle Books. Kipling is thought of as the great representer of the British Empire to the world, and undoubtedly his writing is coloured by his Indian background. When he travelled, he interpreted all he saw in Indian terms (admittedly, he was often writing for an Indian readership), using Indian words such as "nautch" for a cherry blossom dance; he saw the same kind of people, the sahibs, the colonels, as in India. But he was not what we think of as an imperialist, with white superiority, though he could see that the British Raj bred good characteristics, such as a sense of duty. His attitudes are often misjudged from famous quotations taken out of context. His poem "Recessional" written in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, is a warning against national pride -- "Lest we forget!" "The Ballad of East and West" is known for its lines "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet", but the moral of the lines that follow is less well known: "But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!" Similarly, "Buddha at Kamakura", which appears as an epigraph to the first three chapters of Kim, is a plea to abandon religious superiority.
When he sent his letters from Japan in 1889, Kipling regarded himself as a "globe trotter". He only stayed four weeks but, unlike some tourists who set themselves up as experts after that time, he knew his letters would be impressionistic and did not pretend to give a definitive account of Meiji Japan. (Chamberlain praised his writing.) He arrived in Nagasaki, where the view of the shore seemed to him like a Japanese screen. Then he went through the Inland Sea to Kobe, passing a panorama of islands. He was impressed by Osaka Castle, and found Kyoto "happy, lazy and sumptuous". He saw a cherry blossom "nautch", of which he gave a lyrical description, and went to Arashiyama, captivated everywhere by the colours and the small children. At Otsu, by contrast, he found a "shoreless, rainy lake". He went by train from Nagoya to Yokohama, and had high praise for the Japanese railways. He took in visits to Hakone and Nikko, which he found confusing but impressive. Tokyo was too modern for his liking: "two-thirds civilized and altogether progressive"; but he was impressed by the military, apart from the cavalry. The letters sent in 1892, with appended verses that are the best part of them, were intended for a wider audience, being printed in The Times in London and The Sun in New York, as well as in India.
Kipling had a good eye for colour. From his port-hole at Nagasaki he says he could see two grey rocks streaked with green, crowned by blue-black pines. A boy in indigo blue, with an ivory face, was hauling on a rope....and so on. When he had tea at Arashiyama he noted the different colours of the dresses of the tea girls flitting in and out. With this went an eye for aesthetics, whether of the ivory and wood carvings and netsuke shown to them (he was accompanied by a Professor Hill), or for the beauty of a Japanese garden. His concern for preserving the traditional Japan led him to suggest in one piece, tongue in cheek, that an international suzerainty should be established over Japan to ensure that it went on making beautiful things. He opines that a brush could paint Japan better than a pen, and in fact Professor Hill was taking photographs, an album of which Dr. Hanley had examined at the Huntington Library last November.
The threat to the old Japan was exemplified in the Meiji Constitution, which had been promulgated in February 11th, 1889, and was to be seen in every bookshop. Kipling records that "an execrable man" met him on the deck at Nagasaki, with a copy of the Constitution in a pale blue cover bearing the chrysanthemum crest. Kipling found it a terrible thing to study because it was "so pitifully English". The man said to him, "You do not seem to be interested in Japanese progress." Kipling felt the contrast between technical progress in the West and spiritual progress as represented by Japan. He saw the kind of "Japanese progress" he deplored in a customs official in a badly-fitting German uniform, whom he regarded as a French-German-American hybrid -- "a tribute to civilization". He concluded that Japan would find she had sold her birthright and would be sorry that she had begun tampering with "the great sausage-machine of civilization", out of which would come mincemeat. It was not that Kipling was against progress, but he felt it must evolve organically; successful assimilation was dependent on the suitability of the thing assimilated.
Dr. Hanley concluded with a quotation from Kipling's last poem, "The Appeal", published posthumously, in which he pleaded, "seek not to question other than the books I leave behind."
A very short time was left for questions, and the meeting was closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Charles De Wolf, who said that Kipling was very up-to-date in his ambivalence towards civilization, and wondered what he would have thought of Tokyo today.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 1", January 2001, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
Return to the ASJ 2000 lecture schedule