Tales of Old Japan

Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1^st Baron Redesdale (1837-1916) was an English aristocrat and diplomat who was posted to the British Legation at Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in 1866. Japan was on the brink of immense change: the Meiji Restoration of 1868 would herald the abolition of the samurai class and the dismantling of the feudal system, along with rapid industrialization and modernization. Mitford arrived just in time to glimpse the ancien regime before witnessing its violent dissolution—hence his title, Tales of ‘Old’ Japan’, which began as a series of articles in the Cornhill magazine attempting to explain the traditional structures and values of Japanese society to the British public. Mitford was not only a talented linguist but an original and enterprising writer. Rather than Japanese classical poetry or fiction like The Tale of Genji, he chose to translate folktales and popular historical narratives, largely based on bunraku (puppet theatre) performances that he saw in Edo, as a more effective introduction to Japanese life, manners, politics, and religion. He also cleverly made use of another form of Japanese popular culture, the woodblock print, to add visual interest to his book, commissioning local artists to produce a series of illustrations for the tales. ‘My object is to show a picture of Japanese society drawn by the Japanese themselves’, he wrote to his father in England, referring both to the stories and the accompanying woodblock illustrations.

The tale that made by far the greatest cultural impact in the West was ‘The Forty-Seven Ronins’, a story of feudal loyalty and vendetta that begins when a nobleman, Asano Naganori, is ordered to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) after assaulting a high court official. Believing that their lord was dishonourably provoked into his rash act, forty-seven of Asano’s dispossessed retainers or ronin (who have now become masterless samurai or ronin), plot revenge on the court official. After two patient years, during which their leader allays the suspicions of his victim by pretending to lead a dissolute life in the taverns and brothels of Edo’s pleasure district, the ronin strike on a snowy night, storming their enemy’s mansion, killing his guards, and carrying off his severed head. They escape the death of common criminals and are instead permitted to commit seppuku, after which they are buried beside their master in the precincts of the Sengakuji Temple. The story is based on real events that took place between 1701 and 1703, but which have been represented in graphic art, theatre and film so frequently that it has become an intricate blend of fact and fiction. These fictionalized narratives are known collectively as Chushingura (‘the treasury of loyal retainers’), and while Mitford was not the first foreigner to recount the story, his version has been easily the most influential, powerfully shaping Western perceptions of Japan as an aristocratic and martial culture governed by a warrior code of honour.

This copy carries a presentation bookplate indicating that it was donated to the Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, by the estate of a former pupil, Hubert Engelbert Teschemacher (1856-1907). Born into a wealthy family in Boston, Teschemacher became a cattle baron and politician in Wyoming, helping to draft the state’s constitution when it joined the Union in 1890. He left Wyoming two years later after his involvement in the Johnson County War, a violent conflict between ranchers in which a force of fifty armed men led by Teschemacher and his friends briefly rampaged through northern Wyoming, setting fire to a farmhouse and lynching several men whom they accused of being cattle rustlers. Despite his capacity for brutality, he was also a highly cultured, cosmopolitan man who did much of his reading in French. Among the surviving archive of his cattle company is a box of French books, among them a copy of Pierre Loti’s travel sketches from Japan, Japoneries d’Automne (1889), which contains several pencil annotations. This book is unmarked, though pasted inside the front cover is the red sticker of the famous Tokyo bookshop, Maruzen Kabushiki Kaisha, indicating that Teschemacher almost certainly purchased the book on a visit to Japan.