STARCROSSED

Starcrossed

A Biography of Madame Butterfly

Brian Burke-Gaffney

Published by Eastbridge Books, an imprint of Camphor Press Ltd

83 Ducie Street,

Manchester,

M1 2JQ

United Kingdom

www.eastbridgebooks.com

Copyright © 2004 & 2017 Eastbridge. First e-book edition 2017.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-78869-115-4

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction

1. The Historical Backdrop: Foreign Men and Japanese Women in Old Nagasaki

2. Through the Filter of Literature: The Impact of Pierre Loti’s Travel Essay, Madame Chrysanthème

3. True, but Also Untrue: The Tale of “Madame Butterfly”

4. David Belasco, Giacomo Puccini, and the “Yellow Peril”

5. Prima Donna Miura Tamaki and Nagasaki’s Journey to Hell

6. Madame Butterfly in Postwar Japan and Beyond

7. The Real Face of Madame Butterfly

- Notes

- Bibliography

For Michiko, Taka, and Saya

Acknowledgments

The present inquiry began as curiosity, then doubt and skepticism, about the portrayal of the former Glover residence in Nagasaki as the “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly.” From there it proceeded backwards into the postwar and prewar history of the former Nagasaki foreign concession, into the life and times of Miura Tamaki, Giacomo Puccini, David Belasco, John Luther Long, Pierre Loti, and the other people involved in the creation of the opera Madame Butterfly, and finally into the history of medieval Japanese-European interaction and the opening of the port of Nagasaki for foreign trade in the sixteenth century. Like any other search for truth, it was both inspired and expedited by the ideas and people encountered along the way, like a ship making headway with the help of beacons on a dark, indiscernible coast.

I thank Alexander McKay, Naito Hatsuho, and Ano Kametoshi for their insights into the legacy of the Glover family; Honma Sadao and the other staff of the Nagasaki Prefectural Library for their assistance in unearthing information and deciphering Japanese documents; Tanabe Hisayuki, Suga Hiroto, and Yoshinari Daishiro for their advice about Miura Tamaki, Nagato Miho, and the history of opera in Japan; and to Jamie Berger, Aaron Cohen, Harada Hiroshi, Hayashi Kazuma, Ichikawa Shinichi, Kakikoshi Masatoshi, Matsutake Hideo, Motoshima Hitoshi, Okabayashi Takatoshi, Shima Suehiko, Suzuki Naomi, Albert Walker, and all the other friends, associates, and mentors who provided advice and support. I would like to thank Burton Levin for his interest in my research and kind help in pursuing this project, Doug Merwin of EastBridge for his support and encouragement despite the geographical gap, and Tom Fenton for his editorial wizardry. I extend special thanks to Arthur Groos, whose groundbreaking work on the Madame Butterfly story is one of the pillars upon which this book stands. And finally but most importantly, I thank Lane Earns, my longtime collaborator in Nagasaki studies, for generously sharing the fruits of his research and for offering valuable comments on the manuscript in its final stages.

Nagasaki, Japan

May 2003

Note: All names of Japanese people, ancient and modern, are rendered in the Japanese manner with the surname first.

Introduction

I recall an evening in 1961, waiting in the wings for the curtains to rise on an elementary school speech contest, when one of my fellow contestants said, “I feel like I have the whole cast of Madame Butterfly in my stomach” and the rest of us broke into a muffled but curative peal of laughter. It is remarkable in retrospect that every one of a group of Canadian ten-year-olds recognized the words “Madame Butterfly.” This after all was a time when television was still in its infancy and the information highway nonexistent, and if asked to elaborate on “Madame Butterfly” I doubt that any of us could have come up with the word “opera,” let alone specifics such as Nagasaki or Giacomo Puccini. Yet we laughed, just as we would have laughed at a timely joke involving the words “Sleeping Beauty” or “Robinson Crusoe.”

Since its debut in Italy in 1904, Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly has enjoyed unfailing popularity, playing to audiences throughout the world, undergoing reincarnations in Hollywood, inspiring acclaimed modern plays such as “M. Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon,” and appearing as a commercial logo for everything from cigars to playing cards. And even if most people are unaware of the exact content of the opera or its literary background, the stereotypes and inequitable relationship between East and West evoked in the tragic tale of a pure-hearted Japanese girl forced into suicide by the betrayal of a capricious American naval officer, have sunken deep roots into the collective Western consciousness and continue to this day to color perceptions of Japan in particular and Asia in general. An analysis of the opera therefore promises not only to clarify the background and development of one of the world’s best-known works of art but also to shed light on the inner workings of the dilemma expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s maxim: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

The script of the opera Madama Butterfly (Italian spelling) begins as follows with a brief description of the setting and the stage directions for the opening scene (from Nicholas John, ed., Madama Butterfly Opera Guide [London: John Calder, 1984]):

A Japanese house, terrace and garden. Below, in the background, is the bay, harbour and town of Nagasaki. From the room at the back of the little house, Goro, with much bowing, leads in Pinkerton; with much ostentation but still obsequiously he draws his attention to the details of the structure. Goro makes a partition slide out at the back, and explains its use to Pinkerton. They come forward a little onto the terrace.

We find that Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American navy lieutenant, has arranged with the marriage broker Goro to wed a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl named Cho-Cho-san (cho-cho is Japanese for “butterfly”). Sharpless, the American consul and a friend of Pinkerton, warns him not to treat the marriage lightly because his bride-to-be is really in love with him, but Pinkerton, already ridiculing the arrangement, replies, “All that I know is, she, with her innocent charm, has entranced me.…I’m all afire for her.…Although her wings might, in the game, be broken.” Then he proposes a toast to “my real wedding day when I will marry a real wife from America.” Soon the beautiful Cho-Cho-san arrives for the wedding ceremony at the head of a procession of friends and relatives. In a brief exchange with Sharpless, she reveals the fact that her family was once wealthy but that hard times forced her to become a “geisha.” She also discloses the fact that her father is dead, and Goro, who has been hovering nearby, tells Pinkerton that he committed ritual suicide at the emperor’s command. The next arrivals on stage are Cho-Cho-san’s relatives and the “High Commissioner” and the “Registrar” who will officiate over the ceremony and certify the marriage. The ceremony is interrupted by the “Bonze,” a Buddhist priest who condemns his niece Cho-Cho-san for going to the Christian mission in Nagasaki and for renouncing her ancestral religion. Pinkerton steps in and angrily orders all the guests to leave. The opera script describes the subsequent scene as follows:

At Pinkerton’s words, they all rush hastily towards the path which leads down to the town: Butterfly’s mother again tries to approach her but is dragged away by the others. The Bonze disappears down the path to the temple, followed by his acolytes. The shouts gradually grow fainter. Butterfly remains silent and motionless, her face in her hands, while Pinkerton goes to the top of the path to make sure that all these troublesome guests have gone. Butterfly bursts into childish tears. Pinkerton hears her and anxiously hastens to her side, supporting her as she is fainting, and tenderly takes her hands from her face. After this Pinkerton comforts the distraught Cho-Cho-san with words of affection, and the two return to the house to make love. The curtain falls on Act I.

Act II begins with the announcement that Pinkerton has been gone from Nagasaki for three years. Cho-Cho-san’s devoted maid Suzuki expresses fear that the American will never return, but her mistress insists that he will keep his promise and admonishes the maid for her pessimism. It is at this point that Cho-Cho-san sings Un Bel Di Vedremo (“One Fine Day”), the hauntingly beautiful aria that is now not only the hallmark of Madame Butterfly but probably the best-loved composition in the whole repertoire of opera:

Listen. One fine day we’ll notice

A thread of smoke arising on the sea In the far horizon

And then the ship appearing;

Soon the trim white vessel

Glides into the harbor, thunders forth her cannon.

See how he is coming!

I do not go to meet him. Not I! I stay upon the brow of the hillside and wait there…and wait

For a long time, but never weary of the long waiting.

And from the crowded city I see him coming,

From far away approaching,

A man is climbing the hillside,

Can you guess who he is?

And when he reaches the summit,

Can you guess what he will say?

He will call: “Butterfly” from the distance.

I, without answering, hold myself quietly concealed,

A bit to tease him and a bit so as not to die.

At our first meeting; and then a little troubled

He will call, he will call:

“My dearest Butterfly — My little orange blossom!”

The names he used to call me when he lived here.

This will all come to pass, of that I’m certain.

Banish your idle fears, for he will return, I know.

The prima donna’s voice is still echoing poignantly when the American consul Mr. Sharpless arrives at the house to accomplish the unpleasant task of showing Cho-Cho-san a letter from Pinkerton and informing her that the latter has taken an American wife. But before Sharpless can persuade the woman to focus her attention on the letter, the wealthy Japanese suitor Prince Yamadori enters and attempts, unsuccessfully, to convince Cho-Cho-san to give up her futile vigil and to accept his hand in marriage. After Yamadori’s departure, Sharpless finally manages to get his message across, but Cho-Cho-san rejects it outright, clinging to the conviction that since divorce is illegal in America, Pinkerton will most certainly return to her. Then she goes into the next room and comes back carrying a little boy, and when Sharpless asks if it is Pinkerton’s son, she replies: “No Japanese boy was ever born with eyes as blue as these are. Such lips too? And such a head of golden ringlets?”

As Sharpless promises to tell Pinkerton about the boy, Suzuki discovers Goro skulking in the garden, and the two women angrily chase him away when he contends that illegitimate children are shunned throughout their lives and treated as outcasts in America. And just then, a cannon booms in the distance, and Cho-Cho-san, running back into the house and picking up a telescope, spots the Stars and Stripes flying over a warship entering the harbor and rejoices at Pinkerton’s return to Nagasaki.

Suddenly the stage brightens and the tempo of the music quickens. Cho-Cho-san orders Suzuki to decorate the house with flowers. Then she fixes her hair, so excited that she is barely able to sit still, and changes into the kimono that she wore on her wedding night. Finally she sits down at the shōji screen with Suzuki and the child, poking holes in the paper so that she can watch the path below and surprise Pinkerton when he comes up to the house. But afternoon fades into evening and still no one ascends the steps from the waterfront. The opera script describes the next scene as follows:

It is night and the rays of the moon light up the shosi [sic] from behind. The baby falls asleep, sinking down on his cushion. Suzuki, still in her crouching position, falls asleep too; Butterfly alone remains rigid and motionless.…A weary night of watching passes. The clanging of chains and anchors and the distant voices of sailors rise from the harbour at the foot of the hill. When the curtain rises, it is already dawn; Butterfly, still motionless, is gazing out into the distance. At length she rouses herself and touches Suzuki on the shoulder. The latter wakes with a start and rises, whilst Butterfly turns towards the baby and takes him up with tender care.

Pinkerton arrives at the house later in the morning with Sharpless, just after Cho-Cho-san has retired to sleep, exhausted after her all-night vigil. His American wife Kate is at his side, and he is now painfully aware of the events that unfolded in his absence. He tells Suzuki not to rouse ChoCho-san, and when the maid asks whom the woman might be, he identifies her as his wife. Suzuki collapses in shock. Then Pinkerton pushes some money into Sharpless’s hand and asks him to give it to Cho-Cho-san. Before running off in a fit of remorse, he also asks the consul to inform her that he and Kate want to adopt the boy and take him back to America with them.

Cho-Cho-san awakens and, seeing Sharpless, searches the house in the belief that Pinkerton is hiding somewhere. But then she notices that Suzuki is weeping and finds Kate standing in the garden, whereupon the truth finally dawns on her. She agrees to relinquish the child if Pinkerton will come for him after half an hour. Solemnly, Cho-Cho-san prepares for death. After bidding farewell to her son, she takes up the same dagger that her father used to commit ritual suicide. The opera script describes the final scene as follows:

Butterfly takes the child, seats him on a stool with his face turned to the left, gives him the American flag and a doll and urges him to play with them while she gently bandages his eyes. Then she seizes the dagger, and with her eyes still fixed on the child, goes behind the screen. The knife is heard falling to the ground and the large white veil disappears behind the screen. Butterfly emerges; tottering, she gropes her way toward the child. The large white veil is around her neck; smiling feebly she grasps the child with her hand and drags herself up to him. She has just enough strength left to embrace him, then falls to the ground beside him. At this moment Pinkerton’s voice is heard outside calling repeatedly: “Butterfly! Butterfly!” Then the door on the right opens violently. Pinkerton and Sharpless rush into the room and up to Butterfly who, with a feeble gesture, points to the child and then dies. Pinkerton falls on his knees whilst Sharpless takes the child and kisses him, sobbing. The curtain falls swiftly.

This tragic tale, embellished by Puccini’s heartrending arias and the lavish products of set and costume designers, continues to draw tearful sighs from opera audiences a century after its debut. Madame Butterfly is similar to other Japan-based operas, such as Iris by Pietro Mascagni and The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, in that the composer and librettists had no personal knowledge of Japan and, as artists both influenced by and bowing to popular perceptions, were willing to let dramatic appeal take precedence over fact. In a word, the Japan-based operas were made by and for Westerners and provided entertainment, not social commentary or historic analysis. But Madame Butterfly stands apart in one rather odd way: unlike the other operas, which no one doubts to be fictional, Puccini’s tale of ill-fated love is the subject of an ongoing and sometimes passionate debate about whether or not Cho-Cho-san is based on a real-life model. The question of the tragic heroine’s identity was posed, in fact, even before the development of the opera from the original story by American author John Luther Long, and in subsequent decades innumerable writers have tried to answer it, delving into the wellspring of literature and history from which the story issues.

Yet Nagasaki, the setting of the opera and a city with a unique profile as an international-port-turned-atomic-wasteland, has remained curiously silent on the topic of its famous daughter. In the present work I search for clues in the side streets and back quarters of old Nagasaki, and I look at the opera in the context of its importance, not merely as one of the world’s best-known works of art, but as a window on Japan’s changing relationship with Europe and America. If this undertaking resolves the debate over Cho-Cho-san’s identity, then the effort will be amply rewarded; if it helps in some small way to bridge the gap between East and West, then the heroine’s pining heart may finally rest in peace.

1

The Historical Backdrop

Foreign Men and Japanese Women in Old Nagasaki

Little Rome

Portuguese missionaries and adventurers first sailed into Nagasaki Harbor in 1567, searching for a stable foothold and a base for religious and commercial activity on the western fringe of the still little-known kingdom of Japan. The community they found here was similar to every other fishing hamlet tucked away in the folds of the ragged shoreline of Kyushu, but the Europeans could tell without even leaving the deck of their ship or sinking a leader that they were bobbing on one of the best natural harbors in the world. Enclosed by hills on three sides, it bottlenecked at the entrance and enjoyed both the protection of a cluster of well-defined islands on the approach and the convenience of a shoreline sheer enough to allow large ships to pull right up to the rocks. The most distinctive feature was a slender promontory — the nagasaki (“long cape”) of the name — that protruded into the harbor like a finger pointing to the world’s oceans and predicting the role that the port would soon play in international affairs.

The Portuguese had been in Japan for more than two decades, but local wars and difficulties with the inhabitants of Hirado and other ports in northwestern Kyushu had kept them constantly on the lookout for a secure base. Finding the promise of this in Nagasaki, they entered into negotiations with the local feudal lord, Omura Sumitada, and promptly received permission to open the port for foreign trade and missionary activity. As a result, the sleepy hamlet turned almost overnight into a boom town, with aspiring merchants and flocks of laborers pouring in from other parts of western Japan and buildings shooting up like bamboo sprouts on the promontory and waterfront. In 1580 the trade was so lucrative that Omura, anxious to keep the Portuguese in Nagasaki, took the unprecedented measure of transferring jurisdiction of the port and environs to the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits proceeded to erect a large building for their headquarters at the tip of the promontory and to assume the role of supervisors over Nagasaki. Significantly, however, they did not build any of the ramparts or fortifications deemed necessary to ward off invasions from hostile natives in many other European enclaves in Asia and the Americas, a fact that reflects the generally cordial relations between the foreigners and their Japanese hosts and the consensus that the interaction in Nagasaki was beneficial to both sides. By the middle of the 1580s the fishing village had grown into a bustling international port studded with Catholic churches, frequented by European traders and missionaries, and populated almost exclusively by native Christians who ate meat and bread, drank wine from glass goblets, played chess and backgammon, and otherwise carried on in a manner unimaginable in other parts of Japan. It is no wonder that visitors referred to the town as “Little Rome.”

1-1. Portuguese ship and Jesuit Headquarters at the tip of the Nagasaki promontory. From an early folding screen. (Itsuo Art Museum)

The European visitors were invariably male and liaisons with Japanese women were frequent. These could take the form of everything from marriages sanctified in churches to brief encounters in the brothels operated freely and openly in town. Nagasaki historian Koga Jujiro asserts that many of the Portuguese traders hired Japanese women to serve as wife-servants during the interim of their stay in port, often for periods of several months, and that the women received generous wages and various other favors from their employers.[1] A seventeenth-century Spanish commentator named Domingo Fernandez Navarette confirms this in a report from China, although he conveys the information with a tone of disapproval that is notably absent in Koga’s account: “What the people of Macau did in Japan is well known, and they ingeniously confess it; they own’d it to me in that City, and F. Gouvea told it to me at Canton. It was, that till the ships return’d, they publickly without any shame keep common Women in their houses. A good help toward the Conversion of those people!”[2]

Liberalism and cosmopolitanism may have characterized the Nagasaki community, but the religion professed by the Europeans began to lose favor in the centers of power because its followers, whose numbers in Japan grew to a peak of some 300,000 by the turn of the century, tended to   choose God over allegiance to their feudal lords and thus posed a threat to national security. In 1587, stunned to learn about the extent of Christian influence in Kyushu, national ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi   seized   control over Nagasaki from the Jesuits and ordered all the Catholic priests and brothers to leave Japan within twenty days. Although a few churches were destroyed in the wake of the expulsion order, some well-placed bribes helped to diffuse the animosity and the priests were able to carry on with their work as before, albeit less publicly. A decade later, however, Hideyoshi surprised the complacent Christian community by ordering the execution of six European priests and their Japanese followers, enraged this time by a shipwrecked Spanish seaman’s boast that armies would follow in the footsteps of the Catholic missionaries. The twenty-four — plus two more Japanese followers who joined of their own volition along the way — were rounded up in Kyoto and Osaka and marched all the way to Nagasaki for execution, a deliberate warning to the still mostly Christian population   of this port that the foreign religion would no longer be tolerated.[3]

After consolidating its power and establishing a bakufu (shogunate) in Edo (Tokyo) in 1603, the Tokugawa family at first accepted the stubborn presence of the Catholic priests and their Japanese congregations as an unavoidable condition for continuation of the profitable trade with Portuguese ships. But in 1612 it imposed a complete and final ban on Christianity and ordered the destruction of all churches, the expulsion of priests, and the registration of every last Japanese citizen as a member of one of the principal Buddhist sects. The impact could not have been felt any greater than in Little Rome: churches were razed, crucifixes were wrenched from Japanese hands, and anyone who insisted upon professing Christianity was dealt a gruesome death penalty.

In 1634, the Tokugawa Shogunate ordered a group of Nagasaki merchants to build an artificial island called Deshima (“protruding island”)[4] in Nagasaki Harbor and to erect buildings that could be inhabited by Portuguese residents. By isolating the Portuguese from the rest of the Nagasaki populace, the authorities hoped to maintain commercial interaction while keeping the banned religion at bay. But the Shimabara Uprising,[5] a peasant revolt instigated primarily by heavy taxation but viewed by nervous officials in Edo as a Christian-inspired insurrection (because the area was indeed populated heavily with former Japanese Christians), convinced the Tokugawa Shogunate to expel the Portuguese from Japan and to curtail all trade with the Catholic countries. Subsequently, Nagasaki was placed under direct control of the Shogunate, and local affairs were entrusted to a magistrate dispatched from Edo and to an assembly of city elders. To revive foreign trade, the Shogunate granted special permission to the Buddhist Chinese and the Protestant Dutch to continue a modicum of strictly regulated trade in the port of Nagasaki on the condition that they eschew all activities related to Christianity.

In 1641, employees of the Dutch East India Company established a “factory” or trading post on Deshima, which had been vacated two years earlier by the Portuguese, and began a more than two-century-long career as the only Europeans allowed contact with Japanese. The fan-shaped island was circumscribed by walls and connected to the shore of the town by a heavily guarded bridge. The dozen or so employees lived on the island with their Indonesian servants, waiting for the arrival of the three or four trade ships that reached Japan every year from the company headquarters in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). Daily life on the island — characterized by historian Charles Boxer as “beginning with gin and tobacco in the morning and ending with tobacco and gin at night”[6] — was so monotonous, and restrictions on the movements of the Dutch so severe, that assignment to Deshima was tantamount to a prison term on the farthest edge of the earth. The Dutch East India Company, indeed, may have disclaimed its monopoly on trade with Japan if it had not been for the one major respite from this tedium and isolation — companionship with the Maruyama courtesans.

1-2. Edo-period woodcut showing Nagasaki Harbor, with fan-shaped Deshima Island in the foreground. Publisher unknown. (Nagasaki Municipal Museum)

Flower Quarters

One of the measures taken by the Shogunate to tighten its control over the activities of citizens in the wake of the Christian period was the establishment of licensed “flower” quarters in major urban centers. Promulgated in Nagasaki in 1642, this edict resulted in the closure of brothels scattered previously throughout the town and their reopening under government supervision in the neighborhoods of Maruyama-machi and Yoriai-machi,[7] an elevated tract of previously undeveloped land across a canal from the town center. After that the flower quarter, detached legally and physically — and in a sense, spiritually — from the rest of Nagasaki, developed into an exotic little world of its own where patrons could cast the cares and restraints of reality to the wind and enjoy forays into a parallel realm of musical, culinary,   and   erotic delights.

Often larger and more opulently furnished than any house in town, the yūkaku[8] were two or three-story wooden buildings with walls hiding inner gardens and with latticework facades that allowed a blurred view indoors. The entrance to each establishment was guarded by a bantō (watchman) who kept a wary eye on patrons coming and going. Farther inside were large party rooms, inner gardens, and dozens of smaller chambers. The women working here were called yūjo, which literally means “play woman” or perhaps “loose woman” (loose in the sense of unattached) and is usually translated as “courtesan.” In almost all cases they were daughters of destitute parents sold to the brothel as children. They worked under a system called yūjobōkō (“courtesan service”), which amounted to temporary slavery because the debt incurred by their parents left them no alternative but to surrender their fate to the brothel owner. They usually acted as servants or kamuro (assistants to courtesans) until the age of fifteen, at which point they began an approximately ten-year term as prostitutes and could not quit unless they either died or convinced a wealthy patron to pay off the debt hanging over their heads.

The courtesans were divided into three ranks: tayū, mise jorō, and nami jorō.[9] Tayū, the highest class, were women of exceptional physical beauty and intelligence who from a young age had undergone training in dance, music, and tea ceremony and who were made available to customers only by special appointment and at considerable financial expense. Also called oiran or keisei (“castle topplers,” an allusion to their ability to drive men to ruin), these women epitomized the glamor of the flower quarter and have been immortalized in innumerable ukiyoe woodcuts. The mise jorō, or “prostitutes on show,” were also known as kōshi (lattice) because they sat behind the latticework facades of the brothel waiting to be selected by a customer. The nami jorō, or “ordinary prostitutes,” occupied the lowest rung of the ladder of beauty and charm and could be engaged for small sums of money. These women were often referred to sarcastically as daruma because their repeated, perfunctory encounters with customers evoked the mechanism of the popular papier-mâché doll of the same that jumps back to an upright position after being tipped over.

Customers usually visited the brothel in the early evening and began their festivities with an opulent dinner. Their courtesans of choice hovered nearby to keep saké cups filled, to playfully convey food to mouths on the tips of chopsticks, to negotiate caresses, nudges, and kisses, to engage in mirthful conversation, and just generally to maintain a happy, erotically charged atmosphere. Entertainment in the form of music and dance was provided by a bevy of geisha (literally, “persons of art”) who, despite the common image, could be male if that was the wish of the patron. As the evening wore on and the flush of inebriation deepened, the balance between civility and promiscuity would usually start to tilt in favor of the latter. Before retiring to separate compartments, the revelers would often participate in kan-kan odori (“look-look dance”), an indigenous amusement of the Maruyama flower quarter made popular by Chinese customers.[10] This was a kind of strip poker that the men usually lost because of all the tortoiseshell hairpins and hidden undergarments worn by the giggling courtesans. It is said that this indiscreet pleasure of the Nagasaki night inspired the naming of France’s famous Can-Can.

German-born physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), who served as physician at the Dutch East India Company factory on Deshima from 1690 to 1692, was the first European scientist to publish impressions of Japan. In his monumental work The History of Japan, he provides a detailed description of the Nagasaki flower quarter:

My next step shall be, according to the custom of the country, from the Templer over to the Bawdy Houses, the concourse of people being as great at the latter, as it is at the former. That part of the Town, where they stand, is call’d kesiematz [keisei-machi, the quarter of the “castle topplers”], that is, the Bawdy House quarters. It lies to the South, on a rising hill, call’d Maria [Maruyama]. It consists, according to the Japanese, of two streets, which an European would be apt to mistake for more, and which contain the handsomest private buildings of the whole Town, all inhabited by Bawds.…The place accordingly is extraordinarily well furnish’d, and after that of Miaco [Kyoto] the most famous of the whole Empire, the Trade being much more profitable here than it is any where else, not only because of the great number of foreigners, Nagasaki being the only place they have leave to come to, but also on account of the inhabitants themselves, who are said to be the greatest debauchers and lewdest people in the Empire. The Girls are purchas’d from their Parents, when very young. The price varies in proportion to their beauty, and the number of years agreed for, which is generally speaking, ten or twenty, more or less. Every Bawd keeps as many as he is able in one house together, from seven to thirty. They are very commodiously lodg’d in handsome apartments, and great care is taken to teach them to dance, sing, play upon musical Instruments, to write Letters, and in all other respects to qualify them for the way of life they are oblig’d to lead. The old ones being more skillful and expert, instruct the young ones, and these in turn serve them as their Mistresses. Those who make considerable improvements in what they are taught, and for their beauty, and agreeable behaviors, are oftener sent for, to the great advantage of their masters, are also by him better accommodated in cloths and lodging, all at the expense of their lovers, who must pay so much the dearer for their favours. The price paid to their Land lord, is from one Maas to two Itzebi for a Night, beyond which they are forbid to ask, under severe penalties. One of the sorriest, and almost worn by too much use, must watch the house overnight, in a small room adjoining to the door, where any passenger may have to do with her, paying but one Maas. Others are sentenc’d to keep the watch by way of a punishment for their Misbehaviour. After having served their time if they are married, they pass among the common people for honest women, the guilt of their past life being by no means laid to their charge, but to that of their parents and relations, who sold them for so scandalous a way of getting a livelihood in their Infancy, before they were able to choose a more honest one.[11]

As Kaempfer points out, the liberated courtesans often went on to become wives and mothers in mainstream society and suffered little denigration or discrimination from other citizens. After all, they had simply obeyed their parents’ wishes in entering the life of prostitution and moreover had attained, especially if they were tayū, a level of cultivation all but impossible for girls remaining in remote, poverty-stricken villages. Also, the practice of visiting brothels and dallying with courtesans did not come under any of the moral fire that it would have in Europe. On the contrary, a husband may have respected his wife as the pillar of his household and the mother of his sons, but that did not prevent him from enjoying himself in brothels or from reserving a courtesan or two for his own exclusive pleasure. Even modern Japanese terms for “wife” — such as kanai (“in the house”) and okusan (“person of the interior”) — reflect the historic fact that women were assigned by reason of marriage to a role behind the scenes, and that men were able, if not encouraged, to draw a clear distinction between family responsibilities and social pleasures. According to one seventeenth-century Japanese writer, “No matter how superior a man, if he does not buy prostitutes, he is incomplete and tends to be uncouth.”[12]

The typical Western response to the brothel culture of old is a cry of disgust at its apparent lovelessness and perfidy. But this is sizing up medieval Japan with a Judeo-Christian yardstick. The treatment in kabuki plays and other traditional Japanese arts of the emotion that Westerners might call “true love” probably mirrors the social reality of the time: couples who fall in love outside the boundaries of convention invariably disappear together, not over a horizon to live happily ever after, but over a high cliff or into the dark water of a river because there is simply no refuge for them elsewhere. Fidelity to parental, social, and ancestral demands — not romantic love in the Western sense — was the supreme, universally accepted virtue in premodern Japan, and women acquiesced to their subservient role in patriarchal society because that was the way the world worked.

It should be noted, nevertheless, that the justification of prostitution and the many assertions that the courtesans suffered no discrimination come exclusively from male writers, both Japanese and foreign. If the courtesans themselves had been asked how they felt about their lost childhood and youth, a different story would undoubtedly have emerged. In any case, it is clear that extramarital sex was the overt rule not the covert exception in Japan, that the Dutch East India Company employees assigned to Deshima found themselves in a moral realm altogether different from the one they had left behind in Christian Europe, and that the Japanese women exuded an aura of sweetness, steadiness, and enthusiasm that, to the foreign men first encountering it, seemed utterly out of joint with the concept of “prostitution” and with the total subjugation forced upon the women in Japanese society.

In 1645, only three years after the establishment of the Nagasaki flower quarter, the Shogunate granted permission for the brothel owners of Maruyama to send courtesans to the Dutch East India Company factory on Deshima. This home-delivery system was unique to Nagasaki — in Edo (Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka the courtesans were invariably forbidden to cross the boundaries of the brothel quarters — and it issued from an eagerness on the part of the Shogunate to encourage the Dutch and Chinese to spend money by the boatloads without leaving their restricted quarters or mingling unnecessarily with the native population. As a result, the Maruyama courtesans came under a set of divisions unknown to their counterparts in other cities, that is, the women catering to Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese customers were distinguished as oranda-yuki (Holland-goers), tōjin-yuki (Chinaman-goers), and nippon-yuki (Japan-goers), respectively. This special service for foreigners, which stemmed from Nagasaki’s status as Japan’s only point of contact with the outside world during most of the Edo Period, is the historical loam from which the tale of “Madame Butterfly” would later sprout.

Swedish physician and botanist Charles Peter Thunberg, who served as resident physician on Deshima from 1775 to 1776, mentions the Nagasaki courtesans and their visits to the Dutch East India Company factory in a book published after his return to Europe:

If any one desires a companion in his retirement, he makes it known to a certain man, who goes to the island every day for this purpose. This fellow before the evening procures a girl, that is attended by a little maid-servant, generally known under the denomination of Kabro, who fetches daily from the town all her mistress’s victuals and drink, dresses her victuals, makes tea, &c. keeps everything clean and in order, and runs on errands. One of these female companions cannot be kept less than three days, but she may be kept as long as one pleases, a year, or even several years together.[13]

In this short paragraph Thunberg provides the historical prototype of the main character quadrangle in the opera Madame Butterfly. The courtesan serving the Dutchman corresponds to Cho-Cho-san. The maid-servant (kabro, i.e., kamuro) waiting on the courtesan is Suzuki, who in the original story and opera seems to be roughly the same age as Cho-Cho-san but who in historical reality would have been a child of about ten years old. The Dutchman employing a Japanese woman to join him on Deshima as a temporary wife-companion is Pinkerton. And the Japanese man who helps the Dutchman find the suitable woman is Goro. Additionally, it is possible to draw an equation between Thunberg, with his cool, apparently objective description of the arrangements between foreign men and Japanese women, and the fictional American consul Mr. Sharpless.

1-3. Dutchmen with their Japanese consorts and Indonesian servant, watching the arrival of a ship from the roof of a Deshima building. From the Rankan Naizu (Views Inside the Dutch Factory) by Kawahara Keiga. ca. 1820. (Nagasaki Municipal Museum)

Thunberg also mentions the offspring of the international relationships on Deshima, children who correspond to the little boy whom Cho-Cho-san named “Trouble” and vowed to rename “Joy” upon Pinkerton’s return to Nagasaki:

It very seldom happens that one of these ladies proves pregnant by any of the Europeans; but if such a thing happens, it was supposed that the child, especially if it were a boy, would be murdered. Others again assured me, that such children were narrowly watched until the age of fifteen, and then were sent with the ships to Batavia; but I cannot believe the Japanese inhuman enough for the former procedure, nor is there any instance of the latter taking place. During my stay in this country, I saw a girl of about six years of age, who very much resembled her father, an European, and remained with him on our small island the whole year through.[14]

This observation is interesting because it indicates that some of the Dutch East India Company employees stayed willingly beyond their usual term of one or two years and that their relationships with courtesans had all the characteristics of marriage, aside that is from permanence. The Dutchmen’s attachment is hardly surprising, though, because the courtesans, their maids, and the children mentioned by Thunberg were the only Japanese citizens other than a few officials, merchants, and interpreters allowed regular contact with foreigners. The all-male cast of official characters participated with the Dutch in business negotiations and occasional social affairs, but, however invisible they may be in history books, it was the courtesans who became their intimate companions, who joined in their daily activities and provided the warmth of home, and who probably helped the interpreters when they faltered on some obscure expression in the Dutch language.

The conjecture that the Dutch found something more than just physical gratification in the courtesans of Nagasaki is supported by the story of Martin Remei, a physician assigned to the Deshima factory in 1659. Remei summoned a Maruyama courtesan to his quarters, but the woman stayed on the island for only the minimum period of three days before returning to the flower quarter. As a result, Remei left a suicide note on his desk and disappeared. The note stated that since he could not have the woman he loved, he had no choice but to die. His Dutch colleagues scoured the island but could not find him and so notified the magistrate’s office. After a four-day search throughout the town and harbor, the authorities finally discovered the heartbroken Dutchman hiding, cold and starving, under the sails of a Chinese ship. It seemed that he had jumped over the island wall intending to drown himself but had changed his mind and climbed aboard the Chinese ship to try to work up his determination.[15]

1-4. Early nineteenth-century Nagasaki woodcut (entitled “Inside the Chinese Quarter”) depicting a Chinese merchant with his Japanese consort.

Although the Dutch connection has elicited more interest among historians, the Chinese merchants of Nagasaki in fact made a far greater contribution to the city’s economy and exerted a much more significant impact on local culture. Their sheer numbers underline this assertion: while there were never more than twenty Dutch living on Deshima, the Chinese headcount is said to have reached a high of about ten thousand, or one sixth of the entire Nagasaki population, near the end of the seventeenth century. In 1689 the Tokugawa Shogunate ordered the internment of the Chinese in a fenced-off hillside area to the south of town. But unlike the segregation of the Dutch on Deshima, the exclusion order issued from alarm over smuggling, not from any religious or political issue. Even after the establishment of the Chinese Quarter, the visits of the Chinese ships continued to vastly outnumber those of the Dutch and to serve as a barometer for the economic well-being of Nagasaki as a whole and of the Maruyama flower quarter in particular.

The neglect by historians of Chinese contributions is attributable in part to the modern Japanese habit of raising antennas higher to European than to fellow Asian countries. But another problem is that, while the Deshima physicians published one account after another of their adventures in mysterious Japan, few of their Chinese counterparts seem to have considered the task worth the effort, conceited as they were about the superiority of the “Middle Kingdom.” One notable exception is the artist and man-of-letters Wang Peng, who visited Nagasaki in 1764 and penned a description of the town’s sights, sounds, and flavors, including a colorful portrait of the Maruyama courtesans.[16] Reports Wang: “There are many intelligent women among the courtesans. They speak vivaciously and are skilled in conversation. They are good at making themselves up, and their dazzling apparel matches their beautiful faces.…They serve their patrons elegantly and attend to every little need. From meals to financial accounts, their consideration is such that they seem to be cherishing a lifelong companion. When they are with the Chinese, they act no differently than they would with a beloved husband.” Wang goes on to chirp that few of his compatriots could “transcend the sea of love and desire” and that because of this they spent money like “fountains.” Finally he turns to poetry for a last word on the young women who arrived at the Chinese Quarter from Maruyama:

Row upon row of hair-ties amid the mist-like rain,

Sweeping back their raven tresses, the girls answer the call to enter.

Their Szechwan silk is beyond reproach, yet its flower brocade is crude;

On departing, the gold coins they clutch embroider their silken waistcoats.[17]

1-5. Japanese courtesans visit the Nagasaki Chinese Quarter in the Edo Period. From the Nagasaki meishô zue (Famous Scenes in Nagasaki). (Nagasaki Municipal Museum)

We see, therefore, that many of the residents of the Chinese Quarter, like the Dutch on Deshima, engaged in genuine, loving affiliations with Japanese women. They also fathered children and established households. But however closely the relationship between a foreigner and his consort approximated marriage — and no matter how deep the foreigner’s affection for his mixed-blood offspring — the day was bound to come when the man boarded a ship and sailed away, never to return. And if she had not been released from indenture by a lump payment from her patron or by completion of her period of service during his stay, the mother, strictly forbidden to leave Japan, had no choice but to go straight back into the life of a courtesan and to give her child up for adoption by the brothel.

One of the mixed-blood children left behind by their fathers after a period of bliss on Deshima was Michitomi Jokichi,[18] the product of a liaison between the Dutch East India Company factory director Hendrik Doeff and a courtesan named Uriuno. Although the director’s term of office was usually one or two years, Doeff served for fourteen years from 1803 to 1817 because of the suspension of trade during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the annexation of Holland by France. During Doeff’s tenure, when Deshima was the only place on earth still flying the Dutch flag, all communication with Holland was severed and the residents of the island had to depend on their Japanese hosts for food, water, and other staples. The director returned the favor by fending off the advances of British ships and by assisting in the compilation of dictionaries; he achieved an unprecedented level of friendship and cooperation with Japanese officials. But a Dutch ship eventually appeared in Nagasaki Harbor carrying the next factory director and the news that Holland had regained its independence. Doeff was compelled to pack up his belongings and bid farewell to Japan. History books proclaim that upon departure he received an award of fifty silver pieces from the Tokugawa Shogunate, but the only information about his undoubtedly tearful separation from Uriuno and the then eleven-year-old Jokichi is a footnote saying that he left a large sum of money for the boy’s upbringing and asked the Nagasaki officials to provide for his later employment. Despite the fatherly gestures and the efforts of Doeff’s Nagasaki friends to fulfill his wishes, Michitomi Jokichi died six years later at the age of seventeen. His gravestone stands today on the hillside above the Nagasaki temple quarter, a typical Buddhist obelisk stained dark by nearly two centuries of exposure and forgotten among weeds and drooping tree branches. A small stone incense burner and two stone vases stand in front of the gravestone. One of the vases is embellished with a bas-relief showing the initials “HD” (for “Hendrik Doeff ”) enclosed in a circle, a unique substitute for a family crest. Interestingly, the other vase is inscribed with the agehachō (“butterfly with raised wings”) crest. As we will see later, this crest was used commonly by courtesans, geisha, and other Japanese women who did not engage in conventional marriages.

1-6. Hendrik Doeff in an 1803 portrait. (Kobe City Museum)

1-7. The stone vases in front of Michitomi Jokichi’s gravestone. The one on the left is engraved with a crest using Hendrik Doeff’s initials, and the other with the “butterfly with raised wings” crest.

Another Deshima child lifted out of obscurity on the carriage of parental notoriety is Kusumoto Ine, the daughter of German physician Philipp F. von Siebold and his Japanese consort Taki. Siebold, who served as Deshima physician from 1823 to 1829 and in the interim conducted groundbreaking research on Japan, immortalized his relationship with “O-Taki-san” by naming the Japanese hydrangea — today the city flower of Nagasaki — Hydrangea otaksa. But although he gained fame throughout Japan for his medical skills and contributions to the development of modern science, the circumstances of his departure contrasted sharply with the tribute paid to Hendrik Doeff: he was arrested and then expelled after maps of Edo Castle and other banned items were found in his luggage. Only three years old at the time, Ine nevertheless went on to study Western medicine under her father’s Japanese students and to become this country’s first woman physician, even helping to deliver one of the children of Emperor Meiji. And unlike her unfortunate predecessor Michitomi Jokichi, she lived to see her father again because, three decades after Siebold’s expulsion, Japan opened its doors to a new era of international exchange and the German physician was among the first foreigners to step on its shores.[19]

The Doors Open

During Japan’s more than two-century-long period of national isolation (1641–1859), the Japanese people lived in a state of peace and self-sufficiency under the benevolent dictatorship of the Tokugawa Shogun and his train of feudal lords. World news trickled into the country via the Dutch and Chinese in Nagasaki (and the Koreans who engaged in small-scale trade with the residents of Tsushima in present-day Nagasaki Prefecture), but the insularity of the country was such that the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and other global events were as consequential to most of the nation as temperature shifts on Jupiter. But by the 1830s the reports of international upheaval were beginning to issue from sources alarmingly close. In 1842, the Chinese were devastated by the British in the Opium War and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, a set of unilateral demands including payment of a crushing indemnity, cession of the island of Hong Kong, and the opening of five coastal towns including Canton and Shanghai as trade ports with low fixed tariffs and extraterritorial rights for foreigners.

Despite warnings from the Dutch about an impending crisis, the Japanese continued to maintain their ostrich-like approach to international relations until July 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry anchored a squadron of American warships in Tokyo Bay and presented an ultimatum to the stunned Tokugawa Shogunate, demanding the opening of Japan to trade and diplomatic relations with the United States. The following month, Russian Admiral Evfimii Putiatin sailed into Nagasaki Harbor to accomplish the same mission, competing directly with Perry but taking the more judicious approach of submitting the request through the open port of Nagasaki. Both the Americans and Russians eventually succeeded in winning agreements from the Shogunate, setting precedents that were followed by Britain, France, and the Netherlands.

Nagasaki enjoyed a sharp increase in activity during the middle of the decade, because navy vessels visited the port frequently during the course of negotiations, and the Tokugawa Shogunate, now keenly aware of the need for modernization, enlisted its old friend the Netherlands to assist in the establishment of a naval training institute, shipyard, iron foundry, and Western-style hospital in Nagasaki. In the tradition of the employees of the Dutch East India Company factory on Deshima, the Dutch working at these new facilities hired Maruyama courtesans to help fend off loneliness, although instead of oranda-yuki (“Holland-goers”), the women were referred to as shūsenjo-yuki (“shipyard-goers”), yōtetsusho-yuki (“iron foundry-goers”), and so on.

In 1858, the Shogunate signed full-fledged commercial treaties with the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and the Netherlands and opened, effective July 1, 1859, the three ports of Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Hakodate, thereby bringing an irrevocable end to its long disengagement from the global network of economic and political relationships. No warfare or outright force was involved in the forging of these treaties, but Japan’s huge military and economic disadvantage left it little choice but to agree to the tariffs fixed by the foreign countries, to grant extraterritorial rights to foreign residents, and to allow the construction of foreign settlements or “concessions”[20] in each treaty port. Yokohama was close to the seat of the Shogunate in Tokyo and would soon grow into the largest of the foreign concessions, but in 1859 Nagasaki was still the most important port because it had been Japan’s only open window during the period of national isolation and because it was close to Shanghai, the point of departure for most of the ships making the first voyages to Japan. Soon foreigners of various nationalities were arriving here in droves to begin the work of building communities on the blueprints of the foreign concessions in China and to establish links with Japanese merchants, officials, and agents of feudal lords.

One of the earliest foreign visitors to record his impressions of Nagasaki was Henry Arthur Tilley, a Briton serving as a language instructor on the Russian corvette Rynda, which anchored here in June 1859 shortly before the official opening of the ports for trade on July 1. Tilly devotes an entire chapter of his travel journal to Nagasaki, including descriptions of the Japanese officials who came aboard the ship after its arrival, of the Russian navy officers and crew billeted at Goshinji Temple,[21] and of the people and customs of a sleepy port on the verge of momentous change. Like Kaempfer, Thunberg, and his other predecessors, Tilly also paints a vivid portrait of the Maruyama brothels:

The tea-houses are situated in the upper part of the town, and confined to one or two streets. Some few are placed in gardens, laid out in Japanese style, with rocks, pools of water, mountains in miniature, dwarf cedars, and large shrubs of Camelia [sic] Japonica. The entrance to them is generally through a large gateway, inside which the first thing seen is the kitchen; on either side of this are raised platforms covered with mats, which form the saloons by day, and the chambers by night of the different inmates. At night the whole space is partitioned off by small folding screens, five or six feet high; or, as often may be seen, the different couples lie stretched on their mattresses promiscuously over the floor, half concealed only by a coarse green mosquito curtain. The second story is generally reserved for the better sort of visitors, and lately, since the buildings have been open to Europeans, for their use.[22]

1-8. The Nagasaki flower quarter (Yoriai-machi street), taken around 1865 as part of an investigation into the conditions awaiting American sailors in Japanese ports. Courtesans of tender age are looking at the camera from the second-story window of a brothel. (Naval Historical Center)

He goes on to describe the denizens of these institutions, who in 1859 were leading a life that differed little from that of their sisters of the past two centuries:

Some of the women in these houses are the prettiest in Japan, and in a few may be detected descent from a European father.…These girls are simple, modest in their demeanor, and would, if they could, be honest and faithful to one. They must not be judged by the same standard and measure as the fallen ones of European lands: it is their misfortune, not their fault. Received when children of tender age into these houses, they are carefully and even kindly brought up; care is bestowed on their education; they are taught to sing, to play the mandoline, to embroider, and so forth; but their fate must be accomplished. Arrived at a nubile age, and often before, they are given over to some satyr of a Japanese, and henceforth they form part of the establishment. Often they may be seen, dressed out in their best, in scarlet and gold embroidery, their beautiful black hair decorated with flowers, toddling with their shuffling gait to the house of some official, to whom they have been ordered beforehand, to join the revel and its licentious sequel. When their time of service is accomplished they are free. Many are fortunate enough to be chosen as wives by Japanese during their stay in the establishment; but for the most part, these victims of depravity become old while still young in years, and enter into the order of female religious mendicants.[23]

1-9. “Foreigners Enjoy a Party in the Gankiro brothel in Yokohama” by Utagawa Yoshitora. Ca. 1860. This sketch, which was never developed into a finished woodcut, may have been censored because of its stark portrayal of scenes that foreigners preferred to keep secret. (Yokohama Archives of History)

Tilley’s report, the detail of which indicates firsthand experience, provides a number of useful insights into the development of the Madame Butterfly story. One of these is his use of the term “tea house” instead of brothel,[24] a euphemism that crops up frequently in later foreign accounts and helps, as in Madame Butterfly, to obscure the reality of prostitution in Japan. Tilley is probably also the first commentator to Anglicize the Japanese word musume (which literally means “girl” or “daughter”) and to use it as a synonym for “courtesan.” He mentions in his account of Nagasaki that he had been coached in the Japanese language by the head priest of Goshinji Temple, who “took great trouble with me during two or three days, to teach me a few hundred of the most common words, and wrote me a long vocabulary, to which I put the English sounds, as he pronounced them in Japanese.”[25] For musume, Tilly created the transliteration “moosoome,” a term that would go on to become a byword in the hands-on cultural exchanges of the foreign concession and a useful epithet for the Japanese women in the sex trade.

The huge increase in the number of foreign ships arriving in Nagasaki precipitated a burst of prosperity for the brothels in the Maruyama flower quarter. The reaction to this new demand for sexual services from foreigners was generally positive. As Nagasaki historian Nagashima Shoichi points out, the courtesans of this city were not merely accustomed to foreign patrons; they actually preferred them to Japanese men because of their refinement and generosity.[26] But it is hard to compare the twenty-year-old Russian and British sailors flooding ashore in 1859 with the wealthy, educated Chinese merchants of the Edo Period. The Maruyama courtesans may not have experienced the revulsion and bewilderment of their counterparts in Yokohama, where foreign patronage was an unprecedented event, but the arrival of foreigners oblivious to the various parameters of old Nagasaki nevertheless caused a number of headaches, particularly the drunkenness and rowdiness of the sailors visiting the flower quarter. There were some Japanese who lost all patience with the foreign incursion, namely, samurai from the clans of southwestern Japan who were bitterly opposed to the opening of Japan’s doors and who, on several occasions during the 1860s, attacked foreigners when they passed along poorly lit side streets or lay unconscious on the street after imbibing too much saké in Maruyama. These outside forces were rankled by the cosmopolitan activity of the city and by the contamination they thought it implied, but few Nagasaki citizens ever resorted to violence because for them, as always, the intermingling with foreigners was nothing less than the lifeblood of the city.

Another issue that arose in the wake of the influx of sailors into Maruyama was foreign concern over the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. Soon after the opening of Nagasaki in 1859, Russian navy doctors insisted that the courtesans in the Maruyama flower quarter undergo examinations for syphilis. The brothel owners, steeped in traditional attitudes and largely unaware of the impact of venereal disease, condemned this as an insult and steadfastly refused to comply. An agreement was finally reached the following year when Japanese physician Matsumoto Ryojun, director of the Dutch-supervised Koshima Hospital,[27] arranged for the opening of a separate brothel for Russian sailors in the Inasa neighborhood on the other side of Nagasaki Harbor and for examinations for sailors and courtesans alike. For the Maruyama brothel owners this killed two birds with one stone: it sharply reduced the number of foreign sailors going on drinking sprees in the flower quarter and at the same time answered the demand from the foreign doctors for medical examinations without directly involving the old brothels.

In 1860, a group of Inasa entrepreneurs, acting under a kind of franchise agreement with the Maruyama flower quarter, constructed a large building near Goshinji Temple and opened it as a brothel exclusively for the use of Russian sailors. Called the Rosea Matorosu Kyūsokusho (“Russian Sailors Rest Place”), this facility had none of the cultural ambience or peripheral amenities of the Maruyama brothels. Sailors simply waited in line to have sexual relations with prostitutes ensconced in rows of cubicles. There was no privacy, no dignity, and little time for anything but quick physical gratification. The twenty-eight women enlisted to welcome the Russian sailors were fourteen to twenty-two years of age, all had been sold to the brothel by destitute parents specifically for service here, and all were bound to continue working until they returned the debt. To mark their reincarnation as prostitutes, all were given new names beginning with “Ina” such as Inaoka, Inasato, and Inakaze, “Ina” being the first of the two ideographs in the place name “Inasa.”[28]

Japanese Marriage

The sailors may have been able to alleviate their frustrations in the Russian Sailors Rest Place during shore leave, but they invariably stayed on board ship at other times and followed a strict schedule of duties and drills. By contrast, the officers on the same warships made arrangements to rent houses in the Inasa neighborhood during their stay in Nagasaki, a custom that had a precedent in the Dutch sojourn on Deshima and also, as mentioned above, in the more recent visits of Dutch engineers and doctors hired by the Japanese government to establish a shipyard and other facilities in Nagasaki. In his 1859 report, Henry Arthur Tilley mentions that some of the Russian officers had “formed liaisons with some pretty Japanese women, and had their own menage in the town,”[29] confirming the existence, even before the official opening of Japan’s doors for trade, of a system of sexual service in which foreigners were able to establish temporary households complete with a female companion and servants.

Since the houses rented by the Russian officers were located outside the officially designated foreign concession in the Oura district, the Japanese owner of the house and his Russian tenant were required to submit a request for permission to the local government office. Hundreds of these documents are preserved today at the Nagasaki Prefectural Library, the large number attesting to both the popularity of the custom and its overt acceptance in Japanese society at the time. The Maruyama courtesans who associated with foreigners after the opening of the port were called rashamen, a term said to be derived from the Portuguese raxa, meaning “woolen cloth.” This word, which harks back to the sixteenth century when Portuguese traders carried prized fabrics to Japan, provided a convenient allusion to both the foreign interaction and the expensive kimono and dresses worn by the young women.

1-10. Inasa rashamen ca. 1870. (Nagasaki Municipal Museum)

By the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the rashamen were in great demand, and their stamping grounds had expanded from Deshima and Inasa to the foreign concession in Oura and virtually every other destination where single foreign males resided. The practice of keeping Japanese women as temporary wives had gained such a reputation that it was known widely by the nickname “Japanese marriage” among sailors and travelers. It was loudly denounced by Victorian ladies and Christian missionaries visiting the ports of Japan, but the foreign men living with Japanese women remained as impervious to condemnation from purists as they were geographically detached from the social constraints of Europe. In response to reports about the plan of a Christian women’s group to open a home for illegitimate children of mixed parentage, an anonymous contributor to the Nagasaki Express, whom the editor refers to as “a very respectable resident,” defends his fellows living in sin and attributes the custom of keeping a temporary Japanese wife entirely to economic factors:

In regard to these putative fathers, it is a charity to assume in their behalf that they are not led into this licentiousness from natural moral obliquity, but solely from its cheapness; and for this consideration alone they endure its nastiness. They would not practise it at home, not only from the sacred influences of mother and sisters, as well as the more practical ones of public opinion, but also because it is vastly more expensive.…It is not impossible eventually that the aspirations of those who have lived in this state may reach the height of endeavouring to marry one of their own colour, education, and religion — but what refined, educated, and virtuous woman would knowingly consent to occupy the place that had been previously equipped with a moosmie’s greasy pillow, and what security would the father of legitimate white children have, that they would be free from the contamination of disease absorbed by his system in his intercourse with the foulest women on the foot-stool, who it is well known invariably require a Japanese lover in addition to their acknowledged protectors![30]

This article elicited an indignant letter to the editor, published in the next issue of the newspaper under the pseudonym “Minerva”:

I cannot refrain from addressing you, to record my protest against your allowing the anonymous letter to appear in your last issue. Although the letter is weak and rambling, my object is, neither to raise a controversy nor to prevent the subject it treats upon from being discussed, provided it is conducted in a decorous manner. My sole object is to protest against your indiscretion in giving facilities to anyone to make use of such obscene language as that contained in the letter I complain of.…In conclusion, I would add that your journal finds its way into the hands of ladies, who scarcely can do otherwise than wonder how the writer of last week’s letter acquired his unenviable knowledge of the minute but questionable details he gives.[31]

The fact that both the sympathizer and his critic preferred to remain anonymous shows how the topic of prostitution could arouse keen and sometimes even passionate interest yet still did not quite make it out into the forum of open discussion. But, however couched in polite language, the outcry from foreign residents like Minerva soon brought Western values to bear on the age-old custom of “courtesan service.” The new Meiji government, after all, could hardly turn a deaf ear to American and British disapproval after trumpeting its decision to renovate Japan on the basis of European social, economic, and industrial models. In October 1872, it issued a proclamation ordering the emancipation of girls and women held in bondage and nullifying the debts incurred by their parents. The effect of the proclamation was reported shortly thereafter in the Nagasaki Express:

On Tuesday last, the institutions in the town of Nagasaki at Maruyama known as “The Tea Houses” were cleared of their occupants and closed by order of the local authorities, in conformity with the instructions they received from Yedo by the steamer New York on Sunday last. The inmates, we hear, were not slow in availing themselves of the new emancipation act which enabled them to obtain their freedom.[32]

The government decree sent shockwaves through the flower quarter, where a profitable traditional industry suddenly lost is prime source of raw material. But it certainly did not bring an end to prostitution. The Maruyama brothels responded to the decree by transforming into “rental parlors” and by employing women outside the former system of bondage. The government not only sanctioned this innovation but also gleaned revenue from it by demanding the purchase of expensive licenses for both prostitutes and geisha (geisha who engaged in prostitution as well as entertainment had to obtain two licenses). Again the foreign response is reflected on the pages of the Nagasaki  Express:

The anticipations formed by nearly everyone when they heard of the good intentions of the government to discontinue making the “Tea Houses” contribute anything in the shape of revenue, have been considerably shaken during the week, by the announcement that these establishments will be continued on what may be termed a voluntary system. The inmates are to be free from control, but they are all to be subject to a licencing fee ranging from $1½, up to $2 per month for the singing girls. However much a government might be disposed to connive at their existence, it would be much better for them to ignore them altogether, by refusing to accept any such filthy lucre as revenue from any such disreputable sources.[33]

1-11. The Maruyama flower quarter in the early twentieth century.

There were undoubtedly some young women who hailed the emancipation order as a ticket to freedom and an opportunity to finally return to the loving arms of their parents and relatives in the country. But “freedom” had little meaning in Japanese society in 1872, especially for women. Indeed, most of the former indentured courtesans found themselves in limbo, unwelcome in their poverty-stricken native villages and unable to find employment elsewhere because jobs for women in factories and stores were still nonexistent. The lack of alternatives was so acute and the financial incentive so great that most continued either to work in the rental parlors or to provide independent sexual services through the introduction of pimps. Moreover, the fact that the existence of brothel slavery was reported here as late as 1946[34] shows that the old system continued, despite the governmental gestures, through under-the-table negotiations between brothel owners and the impoverished parents of young women.

1-12. These Maruyama geisha look like children by today’s standards.

In his magnum opus on the history of the Maruyama flower quarter, Koga Jujiro discusses the change in the system of prostitution and claims that many of the former courtesans were not only willing to engage in freelance affiliations with foreigners but in fact welcomed them as Cinderella opportunities:

The ones among them who were beautiful enough became the mistresses of Russian officers. They threw off the traditional garments of a courtesan, tied their hair up in the fashion of Caucasian women and whitened their faces with European makeup. Reeking of European perfume, they adopted Western-style dress, wore rings of gold and jewels on their fingers, kept handkerchiefs in their sleeves and held fancy parasols over their shoulders. And when they appeared on the streets of Nagasaki with all these alluring accouterments, they incited the envy of the daughter of every poor family in the city.[35]

This observation suggests that the young women who consorted with wealthy foreigners acted individually and that they kept their earnings for themselves, but the reality — particularly in view of the fact that the prostitutes were seldom more than twenty years of age and sometimes as young   as thirteen — is that the majority simply followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, dutifully obeying the wishes of their parents and funneling most of their income back to their families. And the fact that, as Koga points out, they were regularly heckled and hit by stones thrown from the street-side shows that the jealousy had a thick undercoating of contempt. But again it was the economic impact that eclipsed other concerns. A widespread cottage industry sprang up around the sex trade after the abolition   of brothel slavery in Nagasaki, and the custom of “Japanese marriage” — monopolized previously by the brothel owners in the licensed Maruyama quarter — became a source of easy money for any parent willing to peddle   a teenage daughter’s sexual charm. Ironically enough, it was the financial clout of the foreign community that assured both the downfall of the old system of prostitution and its continuation in a different form.

One of the hundreds of Russian navy officers who patronized this industry over the following decades was a man named Albiovich, an officer on the frigate Manamov who visited Nagasaki in the summer of 1885, rented a house in the Inasa neighborhood, and submitted a notification to the local government office in Russian with a Japanese translation. As mentioned earlier, this notification had to be submitted, not because of any connection with the sex trade, but because the Inasa neighborhood was outside the limits of the foreign concession. Dated June 29, 1885, and filed with a Japanese translation on July 13, the notification submitted by Albiovich (and one of his fellow officers) reads as follows:

I hereby inform the regional authorities that I am renting the house of Fukuda Yonezo in Inasa village for a period of two months at a rate of twelve pieces of Western silver per month and, moreover, that I will employ a maid and a servant as part of that agreement.[36]

1-13. The 1885 letter from Russian lieutenant Albiovich informing Japanese authorities that he will rent a house, complete with a “maid” and servant, in the Inasa neighborhood. (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

1-14. Japanese translation of the 1885 letter from Russian lieutenant Albiovich . (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

It is obvious that the words “maid” and “servant” refer to an Inasa rashamen hired by Albiovich to serve as his playmate during the two-month stay and to a servant who, like the kamuro of old, would prepare her meals and attend to her other needs. If she was typical of the hordes of other girls in her situation, the unnamed woman would have been the native of a rural community near Nagasaki between the age of fifteen and eighteen, her looks and level of cultivation would have been a factor in determining the monthly fee paid by the Russian, and her employment would have been arranged, possibly by the house owner Fukuda Yonezo himself, but more likely through a tout, jinrikisha driver, or some other waterfront ruffian doing a brisk side business as a pimp.

Just as Thunberg provided a prototype in his description of prostitution on Deshima in the 1770s, the notification submitted by Albiovich evokes the classic Madame Butterfly cast of characters: the foreign navy officer, the Japanese woman, her servant, and the pimp. The same imprint was rolled out again and again like a new edition of an ukiyoe woodcut every time a foreign warship steamed into Nagasaki Harbor, and in every historical instance committed to posterity by a rental notification, the woman is anonymous — indispensable to the contract but treated little better than a paper screen, charcoal brazier, or some other exotic accessory enjoyed and then summarily abandoned when the contract expires and the foreigner sails away from Japan. One young woman, however, was about to rise from the nameless, faceless sea of prostitution in Nagasaki, and the back-street world where she walked and breathed would soon be illuminated by the spotlight of literature, transformed from the shadowy unknown of an Oriental port into a realm of poetic beauty paraded in the arts of Europe.

2

Through the Filter of Literature

The Impact of Pierre Loti’s Travel Essay, Madame Chrysanthème

Nagasaki Stopover

The French frigate Triomphante steamed into Nagasaki Harbor on July 8, 1885, and eased up to an anchor buoy near the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, where it was scheduled to dock for repairs.[1] The 4,176-ton frigate was by far the largest ship in the harbor: the runners-up were the 2,380-ton British corvette, Champion, and the 2,300-ton American frigate, Trenton, the latter still decked out in banners from its celebration of Independence Day four days earlier. The harbor was scattered with water-going vessels of every size and shape: the Hiogo-maru[2] and other Mitsubishi steamships plying the regular routes linking Japanese, Chinese, and Korean ports; Austrian, British, and Russian gunboats flying their national flags; transports, tugs, coal barges, lighters, and junks in various states of repair; and hundreds of single-oar sampans ferrying passengers back and forth from the landing steps in front of the customhouse. At the side of the larger steamships, chains of basket-bearing laborers, some of them women with infants strapped to their backs, stood on ladders and passed coal up to the bunker ports with ant-like diligence. Other groups of Japanese sat in boats or clambered up onto the ship decks to hawk a dazzling array of crafts and curiosities, everything from bamboo ear cleaners to bird cages, silk kimono, Noh drama masks, scarlet lacquerware trays with mountain scenes painted in gold, and bottles of medicinal liquor containing poisonous snakes.

2-1. Foreign warships and merchantmen in Nagasaki Harbor around the time of Pierre Loti’s visit. (Nagasaki University Library)

2-2. The docking of the Triomphante at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard was reported in the July 22, 1885, issue of the Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express.

The city of Nagasaki stretched back from the waterfront, to the south the brick and stone buildings of the foreign concession and the villas of wealthy foreign residents hidden among trees on the hillsides; to the north at the head of the bay, straddling the artificial delta of Nakashima River, orderly rows of low wooden buildings with ceramic-tile roofs and white paper windows. A grid of flagstone-paved streets — one of the few reminders of the former Portuguese presence — led up to a string of Buddhist temples skirting the hillsides and, above them, graveyards looking out over the town as if to remind the populace of the impermanence of life. The former Chinese Quarter still had most of its old buildings and was still populated mostly by Chinese, and Deshima Island, now part of the foreign concession, was also intact, still untouched by the harbor reclamation projects that would engulf it by the turn of the century. Although the chonmage topknots and samurai swords of old were gone, most of the Japanese people walking in the streets wore traditional dress, lived in houses that dated back to the days before the opening of the port, cooked food with firewood in earthen kitchen kamado stoves, illuminated rooms with oil lamps, and enjoyed the same familiar Nagasaki diet of Japanese cuisine spiced with Chinese, Portuguese, and Dutch influences. There were no telephone poles, no modern vehicles (other than jinrikisha with spoked bicycle wheels), no significant military presence, and still very few artifacts of glass or steel to mar the historic townscape. In short, aside from the foreign concession and its Western-style buildings in the southern suburb, the lifestyles of the citizens of Nagasaki and the physical appearance of their city remained remarkably unchanged since the sunset years of the Edo Period.

Among the officers standing on the bridge of the Triomphante was a thirty-five year-old lieutenant named Julien Marie Viaud, a slender man whose dark eyes were absorbing every aspect of the town and every color and texture of the mountains still draped in the ragged clouds of the rainy season. Born in the seaside town of Rochefort, southwest of Paris, Julien Viaud was raised among female relatives who lavished him with affection. He was spoiled, overprotected, and neglected by his father, and he made few friendships among his male peers, preferring to play with the daughters of family friends or to spend hours in a fantasy realm of his own making. The one man who exerted an important influence on his life was his brother Gustave, a navy surgeon who sailed overseas and sent back letters and souvenirs that stimulated the boy’s fascination with the foreign and exotic. Just as Gustave — twelve years his senior — exerted a profound influence on Julien’s aesthetic imagination in life, his sudden death at sea in 1865 shot an arrow of grief through the boy’s heart and established a sense of anguish and cynicism that would tint all the future writer’s works. Some biographers have also traced Julien’s homosexual tendencies to the death of his brother.[3] But the tragedy did not dampen the boy’s desire to follow in his brother’s footsteps and to take to sea. When his mother reacted to Gustave’s death by announcing that she would never let her precious second son leave home, Julien revolted: “Precisely upon hearing what [my mother] had just said to me: ‘We will keep you!’ I understood for the first time in my life the whole project already scarcely consciously formed in my head, of going away also, of going away even further than brother had, anywhere, across the whole world.”[4] In October 1868, Julien enrolled in the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and studied for a year before passing the naval examinations, receiving a commission, and departing on his first tour of duty. In 1872 he sailed to Tahiti, finally fulfilling his childhood wish to retrace the steps of his brother and to bask under the hot sun of the South Pacific. In the wake of this experience he adopted the pen name “Pierre Loti” and began writing the autobiographical travelogue-novels that would soon become his trademark. His first major work was Aziyadé, about a romantic exploit in Turkey. This was followed by Le Mariage de Loti, a story based on his stay in Tahiti. From 1874 to the time of his Japan visit, he led a tumultuous private life in the intervals between naval assignments, variously suffering a broken heart in an affair with a married French woman in Senegal, almost dying of a fever, performing as a clown in a country circus, and committing himself to a Trappist monastery only to leave a month later, sorrowful and disillusioned. But it was also a prolific period for the writer Pierre Loti. By the time the Triomphante turned off its engines in Nagasaki Harbor, the Frenchman was leading parallel lives as a navy lieutenant serving his country on the world’s oceans and as an author enjoying fame in Europe for his keen powers of observation, his gift for poetic turn of phrase, his talent for smuggling himself into the bosom of exotic faraway lands, and his defiance of sexual taboos.

2-3. Pierre Loti (1850–1923), taken at the studio of Nagasaki photographer Ueno (Uyeno) Hikoma in July 1885. (Maison de Pierre Loti, Rochefort-sur-Mer)

Loti (I will refer to him hereafter by his pen name) was versed in the popular culture of Japan that had been introduced to Europe over the past two decades through the medium of travel books, photographs, and works of art. Like every sailor to the Far East, he was also well aware of the underworld of brothels, tattoo parlors, and drinking holes catering to foreigners and of the existence of a unique system of prostitution in which officers could rent traditional Japanese houses and hire women to serve as companions. On the first page of Madame Chrysanthème,[5] the best-selling travel essay that issued from his Nagasaki stopover and that set the stage for Madame Butterfly, we find the writer standing on the deck of the Triomphante with his friend Yves the evening before arrival in Japan, discussing what he plans to do after anchoring in Nagasaki. He is already taking literary license with the word “marry”:

As for me, I shall at once marry.…Yes I shall choose a little yellow-skinned woman with black hair and cat’s eyes. She must be pretty. Not much bigger than a doll. You shall have a room in our house. A little paper house in the midst of green gardens, prettily shaded. We shall live among flowers, everything around us shall blossom, and each morning our dwelling shall be filled with nosegays, nosegays such as you have never dreamt of.[6]

After anchoring, Loti catches a sampan to the waterfront and engages a jinrikisha driver to carry him to an establishment called the Jardin-des-Fleurs. About this place he says: “Many of my friends had, on their return home from that country, told me about it, and I knew a great deal; the Garden of Flowers is a tea-house, an elegant rendezvous. There, I would inquire for a certain Kangourou-San, who is at the same time interpreter, washerman, and confidential agent for the intercourse of races” [Loti’s italics]. Although Loti uses it as a man’s name, Kangourou (“Kangoro,” sometimes corrupted as “Kangaroo”) was actually a generic appellation used by foreigners to refer to the Japanese pimps who made arrangements for liaisons with Japanese women and whose role in the “intercourse of races,” as we have already seen, harked back to the days of the Dutch sojourn on Deshima Island. The word itself was relatively new, being derived from “Gankiro,” the name of a brothel catering to foreigners in the Yokohama flower quarter.

Loti says that he conveyed the name of the tea-house to the jinrikisha driver in Japanese, but unfortunately he does not mention the Japanese word. Aside from Kagetsu-ro (“Flower Moon House”), none of the old establishments in the Maruyama flower quarter have names similar to “Garden of Flowers,” and none fit the French author’s description of arriving “at the foot of a tall overhanging mountain; probably beyond the limits of the town, in some suburban district” and then having to climb an almost perpendicular narrow path on foot. The name may in fact come, not from the name of a brothel, but from Hyakka-en (“Hundred Flower Garden”), a popular sightseeing spot near a now nonexistent waterfall called Shiraitono-Taki in the former village of Koshima. Although records are scarce, it is possible that a traditional ryotei restaurant stood near the park and was frequented by visitors both Japanese and foreign.

2-4. Cover of the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème

Finding and then entering the tea-house, Loti paints a vivid portrait of the interior of the building and the people employed there. About the female servants who receive his request to summon Kangourou and to prepare “a well-served repast, composed of the greatest delicacies of Japan,” he says: “The more I look at you, the more uneasy I feel as to what my fiancée of to-morrow may be like. Almost pretty, I grant you, you are, — in virtue of quaintness, delicate hands, miniature feet, but ugly after all, and absurdly small. You look like ouistitis, like little china ornaments, like I don’t know what.”

While waiting for his meal to arrive he hears music in the compartment next door and peaks through a space in the fusuma screens, only to catch a glimpse of a masked girl dancing in front of a party of Japanese men whom he describes as an “areopagus of idiots.” Seeing her turn and take off the mask, Loti exclaims: “And behold! A darling little fairy of about twelve or fifteen years of age, slim, and already a coquette, already a woman, — dressed in a long robe of shaded dark blue china crape, covered with embroidery representing bats — gray bats, black bats, golden bats.” A few minutes later, much to the Frenchman’s surprise, the same girl comes through the door for a visit: “Suddenly there enters, like a night butterfly awakened in broad daylight, like a rare and surprising moth, the dancing-girl from the other compartment.“ And when she leaves, only seconds later, he laments: “Away she goes, the little fairy, to rejoice the drivelling fools on the other side of the screens.” This passage is interesting because Loti uses the relatively positive simile “butterfly” — elsewhere in the book he usually opts for derogatory appellations like “dog” and “grasshopper” to describe Japanese women — and because, when he asks Kangourou after the latter’s arrival if he can “marry” this girl, the latter emphatically says no because she is a guécha (geisha). While revealing the distinction between geisha and courtesans at the time, this exchange endows the dancing girl with an aura of glamorous unattainablility and imbues the word “butterfly” with erotic symbolism.

Kangourou rejects the idea of an arrangement with the geisha, but he accepts Loti’s request for help in finding wifely services and, after some consideration, declares his intention to introduce the Frenchman to a “very pretty girl of about fifteen” named Jasmin, who is living with her parents in the neighborhood of Diou-djen-dji (Juzenji) and who can be engaged “for about eighteen or twenty dollars a month, on condition of presenting her with a few dresses of the best fashion, and of lodging her in a pleasant and well-situated house, — all of which a man of gallantry like myself could not fail to do.” Juzenji, named after a defunct Buddhist temple, was originally a stretch of wooded hillside, its most significant landmark being the horse path leading out of Nagasaki toward Fukahori and other villages on the Nagasaki Peninsula. After the opening of Nagasaki as a treaty port in 1859, the area had undergone rapid urbanization because of its location between the Japanese town and former Chinese Quarter on one side and the foreign concession and international waterfront on the other. By the time of Loti’s visit it had developed into a densely populated mosaic of wooden houses, shrines, and workingman’s taverns pressing together across tiny walled-in gardens and narrow flagstone lanes and stairways.[7]

2-5. Illustration from the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème. The girl “Jasmin” was rejected by Loti because she was too young.

Three days after his visit to the “Garden of Flowers,” Loti has rented a house in the Juzenji neighborhood and is waiting there with his companion Yves for the arrival of Kangourou and Jasmin. Watching from a second-floor veranda, he describes in detail how the girl ascends the path and how she receives final touches to her kimono and hair outside: “Her dress is of pearl-gray silk, her obi [sash] of mauve satin; a sprig of silver flowers quivers in her hair; a parting ray of sunlight touches the little figure; five or six persons accompany her. Yes! It is undoubtedly Mdlle. Jasmin; they are bringing me my fiancée!” This scene of the wife-prostitute and her entourage arriving at the foreign patron’s house, alluded to only obliquely in the story Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long, plays a vital role in the first act of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, one of several ways in which Madame Chrysanthème served as an important reference in the creation of the opera.

Arrogance and mockery ooze from the French author’s account of his embarrassment at engaging in ritual bows with Jasmin’s companions when they enter the house and, after seeing the girl up close, his efforts to explain to Kangourou that he does not want her because she is too young. Seeing the disappointment of the accompanying women, whom he assumes are Jasmin’s mother and aunts, Loti says:

I feel really almost sorry for them; the fact is, that for women who, not to put too fine a point on it, have come to sell a child, they have an air I was not prepared for: I can hardly say an air of respectability (a word in use with us, which is absolutely without meaning in Japan), but an air of unconscious and good-natured simplicity; they are accomplishing an act perfectly admissible in their world, and really it all resembles, more than I could have thought possible, a bonafide marriage.

In the midst of the confusion and consternation, Loti notices another girl sitting in the background and asks Kangourou who she might be, whereupon the pimp introduces her as “Mdlle. Chrysanthème” and makes her stand up for the Frenchman’s perusal, assuring him that, although she is attending merely as a spectator, she is just as available as the other girl because “she is not married.” After a discussion with the girl’s parents (not the girl), Kangourou tells Loti that they will agree to “give her up for twenty dollars a month, the same price as Mdlle. Jasmin.”

In a letter from Nagasaki to his friend Mme Juliette Adam, editor of La Nouvelle Revue, Loti reveals that Kiku (“Chrysanthemum”) was not the real name of the woman he purchased for twenty dollars: “Last week I was married…to a young girl of seventeen. She is called Okane-san. We celebrated with a lantern procession and a tea party. The validity of the marriage is entirely at the whim of the two parties.”[8] Loti’s motivation in inventing the fictional name Chrysanthème, despite his claim in the introduction to Madame Chrysanthème that the book “is a diary of a summer of my life, in which I have changed nothing,” is probably the same as his reason for changing the names of Tahitian women in the earlier autobiographical novel La Mariage de Loti, namely “for purposes of aesthetic distancing.”[9] His use of “Madame” instead of “Mademoiselle” is another deliberate departure from the truth and example of his sarcastic characterization of the temporary relationship. In fact, even the name “Kane” (with the honorifics “O” and “san” before and after) is suspicious, because, although possible as a woman’s name, okane can also mean “money” and thus suggests another bit of Lotiesque satire. In any case, the lack of a surname and the informal nature of the liaison makes it all but impossible to trace the girl’s identity. Okane-san is, after all, another lost face just like her predecessors in the Inasa neighborhood and the old flower quarter, captured only fleetingly in a cabinet photograph taken with Loti and his friend Yves, in a few illustrations in Madame Chrysanthème, and in the literary portrait of one lonely month painted by a foreign patron whose fame in Europe was probably completely lost upon the young woman.[10]

2-6. Illustration from the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème. Pierre and Chrysanthème visit the local government office to register their “marriage.” In his description of this event, Loti did not miss the opportunity to ridicule the Western-style uniforms worn by the police.

2-7. Yves, Chrysanthème, and Pierre Loti, taken at the studio of Nagasaki photographer Ueno (Uyeno) Hikoma in July 1885. (Maison de Pierre Loti, Rochefort-sur-Mer)

Madame Chrysanthème contains other fabrications that Loti added to achieve his desired literary effect. One of these is the scene in which he tells readers about going to the local government office with Chrysanthème and her mother to submit a notification and receiving written permission to live “with a person called Chrysanthème, the said permission being available under protection of the police, during the whole of my stay in Japan.” Like Albiovich and his partner, who were living together in Inasa at the same time, Loti had to report his contract with the house owner in Juzenji, not because he was joining in temporary nuptials with a Japanese woman, but because he was taking up lodgings outside the foreign concession. Although it unfortunately cannot be found today, Loti’s notification, like the Russian officer’s cited before, would not have named the girl because, to put it bluntly, she was no more important to the contract than the tatami mats in the house. Just as he masked the true nature of the relationship with the “Madame” of the title, Loti probably wanted to instill Chrysanthème with some measure of independence and integrity so that she would be more acceptable to European readers, while at the same time adding another bit of farce to his comédie Japonaise. But whatever the motivation, this seemingly trivial fiction introduced an element of commitment that had no foundation in the actual relationship, and it played a crucial role in the reincarnation of Loti’s philandering as a love-tragedy in Madame Butterfly.

With the help of Kangourou, the French author settles into the house in Juzenji with Chrysanthème and a maid whom he identifies as “Oyouki.” Here again is the Madame Butterfly cast of characters: the visiting navy officer, the wife-prostitute, the maid filling the role of the kamuro of old, the pimp, and the detached but sympathetic friend Yves who provides a rough prototype for the American vice-consul Sharpless of the opera. Armed with his trademark irony and poetic prose, Loti launches into a description of his experiences during the following days and weeks. He takes his readers on a spellbinding tour into the back-quarter world of cicadas whirring in bamboo groves, candles flickering in paper lanterns daubed with strange designs, flagstone paths to ancient shrines, congested markets and Japanese theaters, and the plaintive notes of a shamisen guitar and the rich deep drone of a temple bell vibrating in the summer air. He picks up the thread of every color, every sound, every smell, and weaves these into a brocade that evokes the experience of Japan with tremendous power and persuasion.

But still, for a book about a sailor’s layover with a prostitute, Madame Chrysanthème is curiously devoid of eroticism, let alone graphic sex scenes. When it comes to his fille de joie, Loti is infuriatingly ambivalent, consistently delivering an insult just when he seems to be showing some affection or admiration:

As a mere outline, little Chrysanthème has been seen everywhere and by everybody. Whoever has looked at one of those paintings on china or on silk that now fill our bazaars, knows by heart the pretty stiff head-dress, the leaning figure, ever ready to try some new gracious salutation, the scarf fastened behind in an enormous bow, the large falling sleeves, the dress slightly clinging about the ankles with a little crooked train like a lizard’s tail.…They are so laughing, so merry, all these little Niponese dolls! Rather a forced mirth, it is true, studied and at times with a false ring in it; nevertheless one is attracted by it. Chrysanthème is an exception, for she is melancholy. What thoughts can be running through that little brain? My knowledge of her language is still too restricted to enable me to find out. Moreover, it is a hundred to one that she has no thoughts whatever. And even if she had, what do I care? I have chosen her to amuse me, and I would really rather she should have one of those insignificant little thoughtless faces like all the others.

Loti frequently likens Japanese people to animals, birds, and insects, as if to emphasize his disdain for them and to assure readers that he is perfectly aloof. In a description of an evening excursion into the town with his fellow officers and their consorts (he states that “there are now four of us, four officers of my ship, married like myself, and inhabiting the slopes of the same suburb”), Loti looks at the four girls walking ahead of the French officers and says, “Yes, seen from behind, they are very pretty; they have, like all Japanese women, the most lovely turn of the head.” But he hurries to amend this expression of praise and apparent sexual interest by adding, “Moreover, they are very funny, thus drawn up in line. In speaking of them we say: ‘Our little dancing dogs,’ and in truth they are singularly like them.”

One day, Loti, Yves, and Chrysanthème visit the studio of Nagasaki photographer Ueno Hikoma and wait in the anteroom while a Japanese woman and her daughter finish having their portrait taken. Loti declares them to be “the first great ladies of this country that I have seen so near, with their long aristocratic faces, dull, lifeless, almost gray by dint of rice-powder, and their mouths painted heart-shape in vivid carmine. Withal an undeniable look of good breeding that impresses us.” Although he insisted before that he was engaged in an act “perfectly admissible in their world,” he sheds a more accurate light on the social status of his consort by reporting the reaction of the mother and daughter as they come out of the studio: “They scanned Chrysanthème with an obvious look of scorn, although her costume was as ladylike as their own.” This encounter with the two wealthy women (photographs were still an expensive luxury at the time) reveals the fact that, despite all his assurances to the contrary, Loti was frequenting a seedy fringe of society tolerated but deplored by most Japanese. The French author brings the passage to a close by declaring that the narrow eyes and mysterious expression of the mother and daughter “denote inner thoughts of a silly, vague, complacent absurdity, a world of ideas absolutely closed to ourselves” and by tacking on one of his usual trivializations: “And on the negative we are shown we look like a supremely ridiculous little family drawn up in a line by a common photographer at a fair.” The only time that Loti assumes a serious attitude is when he focuses on the exotic trappings of Nagasaki and on the pristine culture of ancient Japan lingering in the neighborhoods near his house:

There is yet another hour, at once joyous and mournful, a little later when twilight falls, when the sky seems one vast veil of yellow, against which stand the clear-cut outlines of jagged mountains and lofty, fantastic pagodas. It is the hour at which, in the labyrinth of little grey streets down below, the sacred lamps begin to twinkle in the ever-open houses, in front of the ancestors’ altars and the familiar Buddhas; while outside, darkness creeps over all, and the thousand and one indentations and peaks of the old roofs are depicted, as if in black festoons, on the clear golden sky. At this moment, there suddenly passes over merry, laughing Japan a sombre shadow, strange, weird, a breath of antiquity, of savagery, of something indefinable, which casts a gloom of sadness.

In another chapter he recounts a visit to one of the commercial streets in the town where, again, he admires the unspoiled face of Japan shining through:

This great Nagasaki is the same from one end to another, with its numberless petroleum lamps burning, its many-coloured lanterns flickering, and innumerable panting djins [jinrikisha drivers]. Always the same narrow streets, lined on each side with the same low houses, built in paper and wood. Always the same shops, without glass windows, open to all the winds, equally rudimentary whatever may be sold or made in them; whether they display the finest gold lacquer ware, the most marvellous china jars, or old worn-out pots and pans, dried fish, and ragged frippery. All the salesmen are seated on the ground in the midst of their valuable or trumpery merchandise, their legs bared nearly to the waist. And all kinds of queer little trades are carried on under the public gaze, by strangely primitive means, by workmen of the most ingenuous type. Oh! what wonderful goods are exposed for sale in those streets! what whimsical extravagances in those bazaars!

Readers press on through the pages of Madame Chrysanthème, relishing the portrait of a lifestyle unimaginably different from their own but still hoping for some expression of affection or some allusion to passionate sexual contact. In the end, however, their expectations are rewarded only with mockery, chauvinism, and indifference. They find that Loti’s book is a tribute, not to love, but to the author’s own towering ego, and that it exploits the sexual premise, the puppet-like Japanese characters, and the exotic ambience of Nagasaki merely as devises to that end. Under all the poetic bravado is a cry of despair over the evanescence of Loti’s own romantic vision, which for the moment is a collage of lantern processions, oil-paper parasols, silk kimono, ink paintings on sliding screens, and all the other features of old Japan fading in the process of modernization. Loti tells his readers in the introduction to the book that “although the most important role may appear to devolve on Madame Chrysanthème, it is very certain that the three principal personages are myself, Japan and the effect produced on me by that country” [Loti’s italics]. In another part of the book he admits with a tone of despondency that his Nagasaki story is devoid of drama, suspense, and genuine human interaction:

It is true that a complete imbroglio, worthy of a romance, seems ever threatening to appear upon my monotonous horizon; a regular intrigue seems ever ready to explode in the midst of this little world of mousmés and grass hoppers: Chrysanthème in love with Yves; Yves with Chrysanthème; Oyouki with me; I with no one. We might even find here, ready to hand, the elements of a fratricidal drama, were we in any other country than Japan; but we are in Japan, and under the narrowing and dwarfing influence of the surroundings, which turn everything into ridicule, nothing will come of it all.

2-8. Illustration from the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème. When he went back to the house for a last visit, Loti found Chrysanthème tapping the silver coins he had given her earlier, apparently to confirm their quality.

As we might expect, the French author loses interest in his “mousmé” (Loti’s spelling of musume) and tires of the game of play-house in Nagasaki. But the night before the departure of the Triomphante, when he bids farewell to Chrysanthème, he is surprised by her apparent sadness and by her request that he return to the house the following day to say a final goodbye, whispering confidentially that “I shall only return to my mother in the evening; you will find me still up there.” After a visit the following morning with Nagasaki tattoo artists — who embellish his chest with a blue and pink dragon — he returns expectantly to the house, inviting the reader to think that the book might just end with a display of genuine affection after all. Upon arrival, however, he finds Chrysanthème sitting on the floor and singing to herself, tapping the silver dollars — which he had given her the previous evening as payment for her services — with a wooden mallet to test their quality. He laughs, “Well after all, it is even more completely Japanese than I could possibly have imagined it — this last scene of my married life!” And then he assures us that there is no reason to be disappointed because, “I am, on the contrary, delighted. The fear that I might be leaving her in some sadness had almost given me a pang, and I infinitely prefer that this marriage should end as it had begun, in a joke.”

This last scene of Loti’s “married life” is certainly another fabrication, because he must have paid either the owner of the house or the girl’s parents at the beginning of the month. Clearly, he invented this vignette simply to show that Chrysanthème was interested only in money, that she had no regret at all about the sordid contract or its conclusion, and therefore that he was perfectly justified in abandoning her. His last words to her are:

Well little mousmé, let us part good friends; one last kiss even, if you like. I took you to amuse me; you have not perhaps succeeded very well, but after all you have done what you could: given me your little face, your little curtseys, your little music; in short, you have been pleasant enough in your Japanese way. And who knows, perchance I may yet think of you sometimes when I recall this glorious summer, these pretty quaint gardens, and the ceaseless concert of the cicalas [sic].

Amazingly enough, Pierre Loti managed to make a clean getaway, to transform a month of self-indulgence into an artistic sensation, and to maintain his own integrity as a man of culture. Despite all the narcissism, arrogance, and racism streaking through the book, his portrayal of Japan as a bizarre Never-Never-Land and Japanese culture as a delicate flame fluttering in the wind of change inspired people to buy Madame Chrysanthème by the thousands and stirred up unprecedented interest in the strange country at the farthest edge of the Orient. The willingness of most readers to suspend moral judgment was facilitated by the enormous geographical and cultural gap separating Europe and Japan at the time and by Loti’s ability to describe an episode of debauchery without as much as a glimmer of guilt, remorse or fear. This moral and intellectual independence is in fact the key to Pierre Loti’s success as a writer: He shuns every opportunity to refer to previous writings or to introduce historical or statistical information. He relies entirely on his own perceptions, plunging headlong into a world of raw colors and textures and abandoning analysis and explanation in favor of intuition, impression and the naked, somewhat disjointed realism of a diary.

2-9 Pierre Loti in later life.

The timing of Madame Chrysanthème was also a crucial factor in its commercial success. Loti’s revelations came on the heels of a surge of interest in Japanese art. International exhibitions in London in 1862 and Paris in 1876 and 1878 had provided Europeans with an opportunity to appreciate the unique beauty of Japanese crafts such as handpainted stoneware, embroidered kimono and obi sashes, and urushi lacquerware. The art form to exert the greatest impact of all was undoubtedly ukiyoe, the pictures of courtesans, actors, and   landscapes created by the meticulous overlapping of woodcuts. Perfected by masters such as Sharaku, Utamaro, and Hiroshige during the latter part of the Edo Period, these prints elevated the humble woodblock print into a realm of great sophistication, and upon arrival in Europe they startled artists out of the rut of traditional modes such as single-viewpoint perspective, naturalistic coloration, and formal portraiture. Like no other travel book before it, Madame Chrysanthème opened up a window on the culture from which all these strange yet beautiful works of art emerged, adding a third, real-life dimension to the two-dimensional world of Japanese ukiyoe already fascinating Europe in 1888.

One of the European artists affected first by ukiyoe and then by Pierre Loti’s aesthetic vision was Vincent Van Gogh. In a letter to his sister Wilhelmina from Arles dated June 1888, Van Gogh reveals that Madame Chrysanthème was one of the only books he was reading at the time,[11] and he mentions it again several times in letters posted that summer to his brother Theo and to fellow painter Émile Bernard. In one letter dated the summer of 1888 — only weeks after the publication of Loti’s book — he asks Theo, “Have you read Mme. Chrysanthème? It gave me the impression that the real Japanese have nothing on their walls, that description of the cloister or pagoda where there was nothing (the drawings and curiosities all being hidden in the drawers). That is how you must look at Japanese art, in a very bright room, quite bare, and open to the country.”[12]

In another letter to his sister dated early September 1888 he brings the subject up again, clearly demonstrating how Loti’s book and the ukiyoe prints he had seen in Paris were influencing his art:

I have just finished a canvas representing the interior of a night café lighted with lamps. A number of poor night wanderers are asleep in a corner. The room is painted red, and in it, under the gaslight, a green billiard table casts an immense shadow on the boarded floor. There are six or seven different reds in this canvas, from blood red to delicate pink, contrasting with as many pale or deep greens. I sent Theo a sketch of it today which is like a Japanese crepe print.

Theo wrote me that he had given you Japanese pictures. This is surely the practical way to arrive at an understanding of the direction which painting in bright clear colors has taken at present.

For my part I don’t need Japanese pictures here, for I am always telling myself that here I am in Japan. Which means that I have only to open my eyes and paint what is right in front of me, if I think it effective.[13]

The “direction” referred to by Van Gogh came to be known as Japonisme, and it influenced a whole generation of artists, architects, thinkers, connoisseurs, and chefs, reverberating to the present day in diagonal composition, truncated objects, unsymmetrical design, and other artistic techniques utterly unfamiliar to Europeans prior to the late nineteenth century; in picture windows, unfinished wood, garden views, and other attempts to harmonize architectural interiors and exteriors; in the deliberate accident of brush strokes and rustic integrity of plain fireclay in ceramic art; and in delicate healthful cuisine that appeals as much to the eye as to the tongue. All of this should have provided an opportunity for Europeans to admire the sensitivity and ingenuity of Japanese people and to welcome them as a nation into the international community. But the derogatory descriptions penned by Pierre Loti and Western writers of similar bent — not to mention the racial prejudice already deeply rooted in European society — served to detach and even to disqualify Japan from its cultural achievements. Despite all his lamenting about the contamination of this country by Western influences, Loti in fact justifies this contamination and encourages colonial domination by portraying Japanese people as infantile, licentious, and ultimately incapable of civilization.

2-10. The last illustration in Loti’s book takes a final sarcastic stab at Japanese people and their adoption of Western culture. This illustration was omitted from later editions and English translations.

The downside of the cultural phenomenon caused by Madame Chrysanthème is the fact that the scenes of Nagasaki in 1885, underscored by the archaic images conveyed in ukiyoe, became lodged in the Western consciousness like images captured in photographs, forever unchanging despite the evolution of the subject in real life, and that Pierre Loti’s blanket condemnation of Japanese modernization and belittling of Japanese people continued to inform European attitudes in later decades, even, or rather especially, when Japan reached a level of industrial and military strength that rivaled that of the United States, Britain, Russia, and Loti’s own France.

A Sword in Cotton Batting

One of the few Japanese women to emerge from the backrooms of international sexual collaboration in Nagasaki — without the help of a foreign writer — and to leave a mark on local history is Michinaga Ei, known better here as “Inasa no O-Ei” (O-Ei of Inasa). Most writers claim that Michinaga was born around 1860 in the Amakusa Islands of present-day Kumamoto Prefecture, lost her parents due to a sudden illness at the age of twelve, and secured employment as a maid in an inn before coming to Nagasaki to work at a club for Russian officers.[14] There is little hard evidence, however, to support this assumption. Considering that Amakusa was one of the principal supply areas for the courtesans of Nagasaki and that “maid” is used so frequently elsewhere as a euphemism for prostitute, it is just as possible that she started her career as one of many teenage girls scouted for their good looks, purchased from their families, trained in the arts of seduction and entertainment, and then dispatched to various stations of the Nagasaki sex trade. In any case, she ended up at the “Volga,” a restaurant and club for Russian officers situated on the Inasa waterfront, sometime around 1880. The founder and operator of this establishment was a remarkable woman named Moro’oka Matsu. Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, who visited Nagasaki in 1886 as a young navy officer, wrote later about the Volga and the services — culinary, sexual and spiritual — afforded to the Russian officers by Moro’oka and her staff.[15] About the proprietor (whom he mistakenly refers to as “O-Machi-san”), he says: “She was considered a godmother to the Russian Navy.…She employed Russian cooks, spoke Russian fluently, played Russian melodies on the piano, and on the guitar, served hardboiled eggs and spring onions with fresh caviar, and created in general the atmosphere of a typical Russian inn on the outskirts of Moscow.”[16]  He goes on to recount how Moro’oka paraded more than sixty of Nagasaki’s most attractive rashamen in front of him before he finally chose his own little “toy woman.”

When Michinaga Ei took up employment at the Volga in 1880, some six years prior to Alexander’s visit, she was probably engaged not as a prostitute but as a handpicked assistant and future successor to Moro’oka Matsu. Whether she started studying Russian before or after that date is unclear, but she was soon speaking the language as fluently as her mentor and charming the Russian officers out of their chairs with her beauty and spirit of service. According to the theory accepted by most Nagasaki historians, she made several trips to Vladivostok and Shanghai during the 1880s and somehow managed to amass a personal fortune. In 1889 she opened her own hotel in Inasa, the Vyesna (Russian for “spring”), and served as hostess to Russian officers in a style grander than ever. At the same time she moved with two maids into a house overlooking the harbor, an unprecedented extravagance for an unattached woman of only twenty-nine years of age.

In the spring of 1891, Michinaga’s ability in the Russian language took on importance in Russian-Japanese diplomacy — and made her the talk of the town — when Nikolay Aleksandrovich, the future Nicholas II and last tsar of Russia, visited Nagasaki as the first stop on a tour of Japan. His flagship the Pamiat Azova dropped anchor in Nagasaki Harbor on April 27, but the young prince declined all invitations to official events and meetings from local government officials and instead spent the first seven of what was to be a nine-day visit on incognito excursions into the town, shopping for coral and tortoiseshell ware in Motokago-machi, posing for photographs in a jinrikisha, sitting in the shade of temples, and sipping tea from Arita-ware cups. Nicholas was a cousin of Grand Duke Alexander and so may have heard reports from him about the attractions of Nagasaki, but it is also likely that the prince had been mesmerized, like so many other members of his generation, by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème and that his week-long jaunt in Nagasaki was an attempt to trace the French author’s footsteps. Nicholas even imitated Loti by hiring Nagasaki tattoo artists to visit his ship and to embellish his arms with dragons, never knowing that these would later be used by frenzied revolutionaries to identify him and to speed his execution and the murder of his family.

Aware that the Russian tsarevitch had arrived in Nagasaki, a wealthy Inasa merchant arranged for a dinner party in his honor and enlisted the only woman in Nagasaki capable of serving as both elegant hostess and confidant in the Russian language, namely, Michinaga Ei. After the first meeting at the merchant’s house, Nicholas apparently arranged to see her again. Although the details of this liaison are sketchy at best, it seems that, on the evening of May 2 the prince and his traveling companion Prince George of Greece boarded a cutter to the Inasa waterfront where Michinaga was waiting under the lamplight, that the trio proceeded to the Volga to enjoy dinner, dancing, and billiards in a private party room, and that Nicholas and George stayed overnight in the house of the above-mentioned Inasa merchant. Says Nagasaki historian Koga Jujiro about this nocturnal rendezvous: “There is much to be said about Michinaga Ei in her early years. It was common knowledge at the time that she shared the Russian prince’s pillow and enjoyed his affection that night in Nagasaki."[17]

Nicholas sailed out of Nagasaki Harbor on May 5 — his happy memories of this port and friendly feelings toward Japan to be ruined a few days later by an assassination attempt in Otsu near Kyoto — and Michinaga Ei went back to her work, operating her hotel and taking over Moro’oka Matsu’s reputation as the “godmother of the Russian Navy.” A few years later she also gave birth to a son whose features indicated that the father was Caucasian. She made no excuses for the illegitimacy of the child and went on to raise him singlehandedly, defying traditional attitudes and ignoring the raised eyebrows of her neighbors.

Michinaga’s independence was of course facilitated by the prosperity of her hotel and an opulent guest house that she had opened on the Inasa hillside, which in turn banked on the regular visits of the Russian East Asian fleet to Nagasaki. When relations between Japan and Russia soured over conflicting interests on the Korean peninsula, therefore, her fortunes followed those of the international port of Nagasaki into a downward spiral.

2-11. Nicholas II on a Nagasaki jinrikisha in May 1891. (Nagasaki Bunkensha Co.)

In June 1903, Nicholas, who by this time had ascended the throne, sent his minister of war A.N. Kuropatkin to Japan to confer with government officials. On his way home, Kuropatkin stopped at Nagasaki and spent several days in Michinaga’s guest house, perhaps seeking out the famous hotelkeeper’s sympathy to soothe the effects of the cold reception he had received in Tokyo. Her next Russian guest of note was Lieutenant General A.M. Stossel, the commander of Lushun who surrendered the strategic fortress to the Japanese forces in January 1905 and was brought to Nagasaki with his family under guard — the Russo-Japanese War now speeding to conclusion in Japan’s favor. Stossel spent three days under Michinaga’s care before setting sail for Europe and a court martial at the hands of his compatriots.

After the Russo-Japanese War, the warships of the Russian Navy called at Nagasaki only occasionally and the Vyesna and other Inasa facilities that had catered to Russian officers and sailors since the 1850s closed down. Michinaga retired into a life of quiet simplicity, serving on the women’s auxiliary at Goshinji Temple, walking to the market and public bath, and spending hours alone tinkering in her garden. She died of hepatitis in 1927 at the age of sixty-seven, a legend in her time.[18] There is nothing to suggest that Michinaga Ei had any direct connection with the development of the Madame Butterfly story, but she is relevant to the present discussion because she exudes, like so many other Japanese women lost to history, the seemingly contradictory qualities of loving, joyful devotion to men and yet great self-sufficiency, diligence, and integrity, like, to borrow the Zen expression, a “sword in cotton batting.” Moreover, her mastery of foreign languages, adventurousness, and ability to associate comfortably with foreigners reflect the history of the Maruyama courtesans who for more than two centuries were the only women in Japan allowed contact with foreign men, the only denizens of flower quarters to go out to work, and certainly the only women to make such an important contribution to the economic welfare of their country. In short, Michinaga Ei is an excellent example of the type of woman who enchanted foreign visitors to Nagasaki over the years. And however unrelated to the creation of the story, it is her aura that surrounds the beautiful, vivacious, and passionately faithful heroine in the opera Madame Butterfly.

2-12. Michinaga Ei defies tradition in the late nineteenth-century photograph by wearing her hair down in the Western fashion. (Nagasaki Bunkensha Co.)

Another man of note who visited Nagasaki on the heels of Pierre Loti is British novelist Rudyard Kipling, author of the famous postulate, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”[19] Kipling stopped in Nagasaki during a trip from India to England in 1889, and he wrote a report on Nagasaki that smacks of Loti’s approach to the exotic charm of the city. Like his French predecessor, he begins by recounting the voyage into Nagasaki Harbor and his first sight of Japanese shores, going on to express amazement at the cleanliness and architectural beauty of Japanese houses, the perfection of which he likens to fine cabinetwork. After a detailed description of the exterior and interior of a traditional shop in the town and its kimono-clad owner, he mentions that some Japanese men have begun to adopt Western-style dress and endorses Loti by denouncing this trend as “vile.” Then, recalling a rumor that Western dress is more the rule than the exception in Tokyo and other urban centers, he moans, “I am disposed to conclude that the sins of their forebears in making enterprising Jesuit missionaries into beefsteak have been visited on the Japanese in the shape of a partial obscuration of their artistic instincts. Yet the punishment seems rather too heavy for the offence.”

After a stroll through the town, Kipling visits a “tea-house” for lunch and launches into another long delineation of the beauty of the building and its traditional accessories. However, when it comes to “O-Toyo” and the other maids who serve him during the meal, he parts company with his cynical predecessor Pierre Loti and gushes with admiration:

My very respectable friends at all the clubs and messes, have you ever after a good tiffin lolled on cushions and smoked, with one pretty girl to fill your pipe and four to admire you in an unknown tongue? You do not know what life is. I looked around me at that faultless room, at the dwarf pines and cherry blossoms without, at O-Toyo bubbling with laughter because I blew smoke through my nose, and at the ring of Mikado maidens over against the golden-brown bearskin rug. Here was color, form, food, comfort and beauty enough for half a year’s contemplation. I would not be a Burman any more. I would be a Japanese — always with O-Toyo bien entendu — in a cabinet-work house on a camphor-scented hillside.[20]

Passed through the filter of literature by Pierre Loti, the pastime of lingering with a Japanese woman in a house on a Nagasaki hillside had changed from the clandestine activity of lonely naval officers to an aesthetic pursuit that captured the Western imagination. And now, with contributions from writers like Rudyard Kipling whose bent was altogether heterosexual, the focus was beginning to shift from Loti’s pavilion of cultural oddities to the charms of the women who inhabited it and to their precarious relationships with the foreign men who visited Nagasaki and basked, temporarily, in the scent of camphor trees and the luxury of economic advantage.

3

True, but Also Untrue

The Tale of “Madame Butterfly”

Incorrect and Improper, Period

The words “Madame Butterfly” first appeared in print in January 1898 as the title of a nineteen-page novella in the New York literary journal The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (vol. 40, no. 3). The author, John Luther Long (1861–1927), was a Philadelphia lawyer who wrote fiction as a hobby. Long was a native of Hanover, a small town in southern Pennsylvania near Gettysburg. The town had been settled in the late eighteenth century by German-speaking Lutherans whose descendants farmed the rich, rolling land and engaged in small-scale industries. As his name suggests, Long grew up steeped in the starched-collar work ethic and religious conservatism cultivated by the Lutheran and Methodist Episcopal churches that predominate here. Despite the importance of the Japan theme in his books, he never visited this country and in fact never apparently strayed far from his narrow professional and social life in Pennsylvania.

3-1. John Luther Long (1861–1927), author of the novella Madame Butterfly.

Long’s first published work was a full-length novel entitled Miss Cherry Blossom of Tokyo.[1] This story is similar to Madame Butterfly in that it is set in the foreign concessions of nineteenth-century Japan and peppered with information about Japanese culture, and that it adopts the Western man-Japanese woman motif established by Madame Chrysanthème, but adds elements of drama and true love that are glaringly absent in Pierre Loti’s travelogue. However, it has none of the immediacy or authenticity of either Loti’s book or on-site accounts like Rudyard Kipling’s essay because Long had no personal experience of his setting and so naturally had to rely entirely upon imagination and secondhand information.

In 1898, the same year as the magazine publication of Madame Butterfly, the Century company published a hardcover collection of Long’s Japan-based stories with Madame Butterfly as the title piece. The other four stories in the collection, Purple Eyes, A Gentleman of Japan and a Lady, Kito, and Glory, resort to the same formula as Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo and Madame Butterfly and employ the same contrived style of dialogue and Japanese stereotypes. Over the following years Long produced several more novels, stories, and plays, many of them set in Japan, but it was the tremendous success of Madame Butterfly as a Puccini opera that chiseled his name on the literary map. Indeed, it is safe to say that if the tale of failed love between Cho-Cho-san and Pinkerton had not been developed later into an opera, John Luther Long’s contributions to literature would be all but forgotten today.

3-2. John Luther Long in an illustration from “Booklovers Magazine Advertiser.”

Most reports on the origins of Madame Butterfly state simply that Long garnered source material from his sister, Sarah Jane (Jennie) Correll, the wife of a Methodist Episcopal minister and school principal who lived in the Nagasaki foreign concession from 1892 to 1897. This is certainly true, but few of Long’s letters to or from his sister remain today and so no judgment can be made about the exact extent of her influence,[2] and, in any case, his knowledge of Japan (albeit frequently distorted) is too extensive to think that he gained it merely through family correspondence. Long obviously referred to a wide variety of works by previous authors on subjects such as Japanese culture, language, and religion. And the content of Madame Butterfly reveals clearly that one of his most important sources in the creation of his famous story, if not the inspiration for it, was Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème.[3]  As we have seen, the impact of Loti’s book reached far beyond the borders of France, reverberating in literary and artistic works by Westerners and continuing to this day to inform perceptions of Japan. Madame Chrysanthème’s early crossing of the French-English language barrier and Loti’s elevation, worldwide, to the position of leading prolocutor on Japan are indicated by the following passage in the December 17, 1892, issue of the Yokohama newspaper Japan Weekly Mail: “The process by which Englishmen learn to know about Japan is slow and somewhat fortuitous. The comparatively few persons who travel eastward read, doubtless in many cases though not in all, the standard works about the country, and some, even though they do not contemplate a journey of such length, read the writings of men like Norman, Arnold, ‘Loti’ and so forth, for the sake of the literary ability of these authors and of the novelty of their subject.”

One of the British travelers to consult Madame Chrysanthème before visiting Japan was Douglas Slader, who, also in 1892, published a book in London about his visit here and provides a further insight into the popularity of Loti’s book abroad:

In Nagasaki harbour, made classic by that incorrect, highly improper, and altogether delightful book, “Madame Chrysanthème”…incorrect, though it shows the life that nine out of ten gay young bachelors lead in Japan.…I longed to see Nagasaki from the moment that I read “Madame Chrysanthème” — there is such a fascinating ingenuousness in the story — and I was not disappointed with the reality. There was a French man-of-war lying in the harbour. And in every narrow picturesque street, with stone slab paving laid in the middle like tramway lines, and overhanging houses nearly meeting across the thoroughfare, like those of the old fifteenth-century Mercery Lane which leads to the Cathedral Close at Canterbury, I was prepared to see the troops of little musumés.…[4]

3-3. The cover of the 1898 Century Co. publication containing Madame Butterfly and four of Long’s other Japan-based stories.

Slader characterizes Madame Chrysanthème as incorrect, improper, and delightful in one breath, an opinion heartily shared by Vincent Van Gogh, Nicholas II of Russia, and a whole generation of other young men beguiled by Loti’s adventure. Even some European women seem to have endorsed the French author’s depiction of lechery in back-street Japan. World traveler Katherine S. Baxter, for example, mentions Loti as follows in her description of the scenery of Nagasaki: “Madame Chrysanthème and the cottage where she resided with her French husband were not en evidence; but Pierre Loti’s charming sketch made the whole environment seem strangely familiar.”[5] It is interesting that she uses the word “husband” without any hint of irony. In still another book published in the interim between Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly, British writer Albert Tracy takes Pierre Loti’s joke about “marriage” and, straight-faced, informs readers that the temporary relationships between foreign men and Japanese women are bonafide unions in the eyes of Japanese law. His statement reveals how Loti’s comédie Japonaise, through the sheer force of its popularity and the shortage of more accurate information, spawned wild misconceptions about the nature of international sexual liaisons in nineteenth-century Nagasaki:

Every foreigner engaged in commercial pursuits is expected, if he has no family at home, to take a Japanese wife. I say “wife” because, as in the State of New York, no religious ceremony is necessary to make the relation quite legal, according to Japanese law. But supposing the merchant retires from business? Then he ‘divorces’ his wife; provides for her future, and that of her children, if she has any; and sails away to European respectability. Sometimes he departs without making any provision for his offspring, and leaving the mother to poverty.[6]

There were dissenting voices, nevertheless, among the roar of praise for Madame Chrysanthème and the gullible acceptance of its characterization of “Japanese marriage.” In the view of many readers, especially missionaries and critics of prostitution who shuddered at the sinful enticements awaiting sailors in faraway ports, the assessment of Loti’s book ended at “improper.” Because it cast doubt on their own actions and on the integrity of their Japanese wives, many members of the resident foreign community of Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama also took exception to Loti’s portrayal of the foreigner’s decadent life in Japan and to his demeaning portrait of Japanese women. In the April 15, 1893, issue of the Japan Weekly Mail, a writer identified only by the initials “H.P. ” contributed a long article entitled O Aya San, offering it as an account of a true episode that he had witnessed many years earlier. He launches into the article as follows: “There is a book written by a certain Frenchman, a man of a very peculiar and precious genius, which tries to prove to the satisfaction of its author and for the confusion of other men, that the women of Japan are heartless and venal creatures. I will not give its name. Now, I am an old man, not a clever man, or one who was skilled at any time in writing, but the taste of that Frenchman’s book has remained bitter in my mouth and filled me with the desire to tell the tale of a sweet, Japanese girl I knew once in the long ago.”[7]

H.P. goes on to tell the story of an artist friend named Bertram who settled in Kanazawa to teach English at the request of the feudal lord of Kaga — the words “feudal lord” indicating that the episode he was about to describe took place in the 1860s. During a visit to Kanazawa to visit his friend,

H.P. saw a painting of a beautiful Japanese woman in the latter’s house. Bertram explained that, while out on an excursion to sketch one day, he had rescued the woman from kidnappers and had discovered that she was the only daughter of one of the feudal lord’s chief retainers. As an expression of gratitude, the father had asked Bertram to do a portrait of his daughter, failing to foresee that the two would fall in love as a result. Several months later, Bertram appeared at the author’s house in Tokyo, having encountered “the fate which sooner or later befalls all men in the Japanese service. He was no longer wanted, and so he was sent away.” Then he sailed for England, where he planned to sell his paintings and return to fetch O-Aya-san. But Bertram did not return, and O-Aya-san sent one letter after another to H.P. expressing worry, sadness, and finally despair at her lover’s silence, but “never a word of anger did she breathe: hers was a love deep as the depths of the sea which no storms can ever ruffle or disturb. He might forget her; she would love him to the end.” Then a year later the author was suddenly summoned to an inn where O-Aya-san lay dying with tuberculosis. It seemed that she had refused her father’s command to marry the son of a friend and had run away from home. About Bertram she said, “He will come soon will he not? He has not forgotten me do you think? No! I know him too well! I know he has not, he cannot forget me. Am I not his? Is he not mine? Death will not part us.” And just then, to the author’s amazement, Bertram appeared and the two lovers were finally reunited. The next morning the author returned to the inn only to find them lying dead in each other’s arms. He attributed it to the weariness of waiting in O-Ayasan’s case and to heartbreak in Bertram’s and guessed that, although many letters had been written on both sides, all of these had been intercepted and destroyed by O-Aya-san’s possessive father.

Although its verity is questionable, this story is interesting in that it typifies the critical reaction to Madame Chrysanthème that erupted in the foreign concessions of Japan just when Jennie Correll was living in Nagasaki and supposedly conveying information to her brother in Philadelphia. H.P.’s emphasis on the beauty and integrity of the Japanese woman is a direct rebuttal of Pierre Loti’s derisive caricature. He actually raves a bit too adoringly about O-Aya-san, showing more of the flair of a novelist than the cool objectivity of a reporter with images like the “eerie beauty of the small face of an almost perfect oval,” the “luxurious hair, more raven than the raven’s wing,” and the “shapely wrist and arm, curving gently and soft like the neck of a swan.”

There is no way to know whether John Luther Long read O Aya San before writing Miss Cherry Blossom of Tokyo and Madame Butterfly or whether it exerted any effect on his creative process. But features such as the reaction to Madame Chrysanthème, the obscure border between fiction and nonfiction, the themes of “love or die” and unflagging faith, the Japanese heroine’s defiance of tradition and refusal to marry a Japanese suitor even though her foreign lover has fallen out of touch, and the portrayal of the woman as beautiful, aristocratic, and luckless are common to all these stories and characterize the tragic-dramatic approach inherent in Long’s writings on Japan. When he depicted himself later as “a sentimentalist, and a feminist and proud of it,”[8] Long was confirming his rejection of Loti’s cynicism but also revealing an unwillingness to recognize the distasteful reality of prostitution in Japan. The fact that he never felt an urge strong enough to actually visit the setting of so many of his stories only underlines this reluctance to let the needle of truth prick his idealistic bubble.

Efforts to pull a rose-colored veil over Loti’s emotionally defused portrait of life with Chrysanthème occurred on stage as well as on paper. In 1893, the same year that residents of the foreign concessions of Japan were shedding tears over O Aya San, Parisians flocked to see an opera version of Madame Chrysanthème created by the celebrated French composer André Messager. Presented in three acts with a prologue and epilogue, the opera follows the book from the vignette on the bridge of the ship where “Pierre” announces his decision to marry, through scenes in which he engages in a mock wedding with Chrysanthème and lounges with her in the sunlit Nagasaki house. But instead of taking opera-goers into the world of Loti’s ennui, Messager has the French lieutenant fall passionately in love with the Japanese woman and ends the opera with a tearful separation made inevitable by the departure of the former’s warship. It is easy to imagine Pierre Loti in the audience at the Théatre Lyrique de la Renaissance — where the opera was first presented — smirking and shifting in his seat.

Christian-Caucasian Chauvinism

Despite his rejection in principle of Pierre Loti’s philandering, John Luther Long not only referred to Madame Chrysanthème in the creation of Madame Butterfly but borrowed from it so generously that he risked being accused of plagiarism. At the beginning of Madame Chrysanthème, Loti is standing with Yves on the deck of the Triomphante and boasting that he will “marry” as soon as he reaches Japan. Similarly, Long launches into Madame Butterfly with a short chapter in which two American navy officers, identified as Pinkerton and Sayre, are discussing the possibility of “marriage” on the deck of their ship as it steams toward Nagasaki. Rather than having Pinkerton voice his own intentions, though, Long has Sayre say, “For lack of other amusement you might get yourself married.….” This comment is followed by a terse exchange between the two men about the “story of the Pink Geisha.” Interestingly, Long also mentions this in the first paragraph of his novel Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo,[9]  but in both stories he just leaves it dangling without any further elaboration. The reader is left with the vague impression that the two Americans are talking furtively about prostitution but never knows for sure. Already we see one of the crucial differences between Pierre Loti and John Luther Long: the former delighted in plunging into the taboo of illicit sexual liaisons and discussing it from the inside, but the latter, however fascinated with the subject, preferred to avoid any direct reference to it.

The next thing we know, Lieutenant Pinkerton, with the help of a marriage-broker named “Goro,” has married a woman named Cho-Cho-san and rented a Japanese house for her on “Higashi Hill” overlooking Nagasaki Harbor. This mimics the temporary arrangement that Loti formed with Chrysanthème through the pimp Kangourou, but Long does not provide any information about the events leading up to it, nor does he bat a literary eye at the word “marry”: he seems to be saying quite frankly that Pinkerton and Butterfly were engaged in a legal marriage, or at least a legal marriage in Japanese eyes. As expected, however, the American lieutenant vacates his love nest as soon as his warship leaves Nagasaki, just as surely as Loti sailed away after the repaired Triomphante slid out of dry dock at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard. Up to this point the plot of Madame Butterfly recapitulates that of Madame Chrysanthème, albeit without the clear use of irony in describing the “marriage.” Only the names have changed in the process: Loti and his friend Yves become Pinkerton and Sayre, the pimp Kangourou is now Goro, the maid Oyouki is Suzuki, and the woman at the center of the story is converted from a Chrysanthemum into a Butterfly.

The similarity of the two titles also calls attention. Long uses “Madame,” the French spelling of a word that English speakers would normally render as “Madam,” reinforcing the already strong impression that he imitated Loti’s title.[10] The hint for the rather unlikely name “Cho-Cho-san” may also have come from the pages of Loti’s book, perhaps the teahouse “Indescribable Butterflies” visited by the French author, or the butterfly designs on teacups, parasols, and women’s kimono sleeves scattered throughout his descriptions of Nagasaki, or the first girl whom Loti encountered here: the geisha at the “Garden of Flowers” restaurant who was entertaining Japanese men in the room adjacent to Loti’s. But wherever he struck upon it, John Luther Long undoubtedly chose the word butterfly not because it was an actual person’s name but because it was an evocative metaphor of Japanese culture similar to the “chrysanthemum” in Loti’s title and to the “cherry blossom” in his own previous story.

Another word that Long borrowed directly from Madame Chrysanthème is “mousmé.” Loti created this word as his personal spelling of musume, the Japanese word for girl or daughter. This word, as we saw earlier, was first adopted into English by Western visitors who needed a euphemism for the Japanese prostitutes of tender age serving as consorts for foreigners. In the Roman alphabet it was invariably rendered as “moosmay” or “moosmee” in order to approximate the original sound of the word. Loti deliberately changed the spelling to “mousmé,” saying how much he liked the word because it has a little “pout” in the very sound and therefore evokes the charms of Japanese girls. This play on words can only be appreciated in French because the word for pout in that language is moue. Rather than the established English “moo,” Long invariably uses the spelling “mou.” In a passage describing the visit of the wealthy suitor Yamadori to Butterfly’s house, for example, he writes that, “With the air of a princess she put on in an instant all the charms of a mousmee.”

3-4. The illustration on the inside cover of Madame Butterfly imitates the inserts in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème and yet lacks their authentic look.

Despite John Luther Long’s obvious appropriations from Loti, Madame Butterfly is better called a continuation — in movie parlance a kind of “Madame Chrysanthème 2” — than a rehash of the French author’s book. While Loti abandons Chrysanthème as summarily on paper as he did in real life, Long has Pinkerton leave Nagasaki early in the story and devotes the rest to a description of Butterfly’s wait in the house with her maid Suzuki and son “Trouble,” who was born after Pinkerton’s departure. He was perhaps so frustrated with Loti’s asexual relationship with Chrysanthème and the bleak circumstances of their parting that he took it upon himself to write a sequel that would serve justice to the woman while, at the same time, exposing the Frenchman’s wrongdoings and establishing a conclusion that would satisfy other readers like himself. The problem is that Long, however well intentioned, introduced his own set of prejudices and bent the story out of line with reality because of his complete lack of personal experience.

The woman with whom Loti associated in Nagasaki could not speak a word of French or English, and Loti makes no attempt to conceal this fact. He refrains from supplying her with any dialogue other than a few oneword utterances in Japanese, such as “nezumi!” (“mouse!”) when she hears a pattering sound above the ceiling boards in the house in Juzenji. He also admits his failure to surmount the communication barrier, although he brazenly attributes this not to his own lack of study or interest but to Chrysanthème’s mental deficiency. John Luther Long, by contrast, had no appreciation for the language barrier — or for the dismal social circumstances from which most Japanese prostitutes emerged — because he had never wet his own boots in Japan. He portrays Cho-Cho-san as the beautiful daughter of a samurai who committed suicide by seppuku (“harakiri”), throwing his family into poverty and giving his daughter no choice but to earn a living as a geisha. Unlike sulky, taciturn Chrysanthème, Cho-Cho-san is a vivacious chatterbox who, after Pinkerton’s departure, insists upon speaking only in English and who spends day after day dancing around the house in ecstatic expectation of the American’s return. Even her maid Suzuki, as if by magic, has become a competent English speaker. In one scene, talking gushingly to the American vice-consul Mr. Sharpless, Cho-Cho-san recounts her first meeting with Pinkerton:

[The nakodo] say he thing I don’ lig [Pinkerton], account he America-jin, he also remarking with me that he a barbarian and a beas’. Well, me? — I say I don’ wan’ him. I ‘fraid beas’. But aevery one else they say yaes — yaes, ah, yaes — he got moaney, an’ for jus’ liddle while I got endure him. So I say, ‘Bring me that beas’. An’ lo! one day the ole nakodo he bringing him for look-at meeting. Well!…At firs’ I thing him a god, he so tall and beautiful, an’ got on such a blue clothes all full golden things.…He make my life so ver’ joyous, I thing I never been that happy.

This short passage provides a number of important insights into Long’s story. Cho-Cho-san’s bizarre manner of speech, for one thing, does not even approximate a Japanese accent. A hodgepodge of pidgin English, African-American dialect, and pure imagination, it was good enough, nevertheless, to convince American readers because very few of them knew anything about Japanese manners of speech either. Long also strays from the truth in giving the impression that a teenage Japanese woman pushed by her cash-strapped family into selling her body had some say in the choice of a partner. In this respect he is simply equating prostitution in Japan with that in the United States by attributing it to an individual woman’s conscious choice. In the real world of Japan, not only the prostitutes who stood in line waiting to be chosen by customers at brothels or who provided sexual services on a freelance basis, but even the daughters of well-to-do families preparing for marriage, had no alternative but to bend obediently to the wishes of parents and employers. Just as it is doubtful in terms of common sense that a young woman rented out to a foreign navy officer for moaney and for “jus’ liddle while” could fall blindly in love, it is implausible in the light of historical and cultural reality that she would misconstrue the relationship as a genuine marriage.

Another piece of misinformation in the above passage is Long’s use of the Japanese terms “nakodo” and “look-at meeting” in reference to the marriage-broker Goro and to the first encounter between Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-san, respectively. Although it means something like “go-between,” nakōdo is used exclusively in Japanese to refer to the person — almost always a family friend or business colleague of the parents — who brings potential marriage partners together for an omiai (“look-at meeting,” or, better translated,”meeting to become acquainted”) or who at least acts as a symbolic mediator at their wedding. In Madame Chrysanthème, Loti at least reveals Kangourou for what he was, namely, a waterfront tout and slave-dealer, a “rascal of the meanest kind.” Long probably took the words “nakodo” and “look-at-meeting” from some treatise on Japanese culture, but his portrayal of the pimp as an authentic marriage go-between and of the meeting between Cho-Cho-san and Pinkerton as an omiai is an arrant misrepresentation. Marriage is marriage, and the Japanese version, then as now, is no less legal or binding than its American counterpart. What Long has done, we see, is to borrow Loti’s story about prolonged cohabitation with a Japanese prostitute and to fuse it with textbook information about Japanese marital customs.

Furthermore, Long’s fatuous suggestion that Cho-Cho-san fell in love with Pinkerton at first sight, regarding him as a tall and beautiful “god,” reflects the Christian-Caucasian chauvinism that characterized the European attitude in early encounters with the people of Asia, Africa, and pre-colonial America. Echoing the zeal of his missionary sister, Long reports that when Butterfly “diffidently undertook to explain the phantoms which made up her ‘religion,’ Pinkerton expounded what he called the easier Western plan for salvation,” and as a result, “he struck deeper than he knew; for she went secretly to the church of the missionary who served on the opposite hill.…” In a comment about Cho-Cho-san’s baby, he also says: “He was as good as a Japanese baby, and as good-looking as an American one.”

The chauvinism and narcissism sometimes take on an erotic tone in Long’s writings. For example, in the story Purple Eyes published along with Madame Butterfly in the Century company collection of 1898, he describes the Japanese woman of the title (“Purple Eyes,” oddly enough, is her name) ogling the American protagonist Garland when he is undressed in the bathroom. He then goes on to offer a glimpse into his own fantasizing about encounters with Japanese women: “[Garland] abandoned a temporary impulse to scuttle behind the screen because of the admiration he saw in her eyes, and then he half turned that she might see the muscles of his back. ‘How you are beau-ti-ful!’ she said slowly, as her eyes traveled, quite without embarrassment, over his athletic uppers.” In this area, Long is reminiscent of the hypocritical pastor in W. Somerset Maugham’s famous story Rain who condemns a prostitute for her sins and makes a show of reforming her only to end up taking advantage of her sexually.

John Luther Long begins to pipe-dream in earnest when he describes the visit of Yamadori, with Goro, to Cho-Cho-san’s house to propose marriage. Yamadori, we learn, is a former prince who has been living in the United States but still owns a castle with “a thousand servants.” The historical reality here is that, when the feudal clans were abolished in the wake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, most of the former daimyo (foreign residents commonly referred to them, inaccurately, as “princes”) left their domains to live in Tokyo as members of a new class of nobility based roughly on the British model.[11] By 1875 or so nothing remained of the old feudal system, let alone a castle with a thousand servants.

Another revealing aspect of the scene with Yamadori is the information that Cho-Cho-san’s father was on the side of the emperor in the Satsuma Rebellion and that he committed ritual suicide. In a nutshell, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was a revolt by samurai of the Satsuma clan and other former feudal domains in the southern island of Kyushu (where Nagasaki is located) who were unhappy about their loss of status and income in the new social system introduced by the Meiji government. A conscripted government army was dispatched to squelch the revolt, and many of the rebels died in battle or committed suicide — one example of the latter being the famous statesman Saigo Takamori. Long does not seem to have gotten his history straight: if Cho-Cho-san’s father was on the side of the victorious government, why did he need to commit ritual suicide? As though grasping at straws, however, researchers have clutched onto the words “Satsuma Rebellion” as proof that the story is based on a real episode and some have even launched investigations into possible candidates.[12]

3-5. Cover of the 1903 hardcover edition of Madame Butterfly. The cover design is similar to that of the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème.

Cho-Cho-san’s euphoric patter reaches a crescendo when she hears from Sharpless, during a visit to the American consulate, that Pinkerton’s ship is expected in Nagasaki “about the first of September.” Delighted, she returns to the house on Higashi Hill and waits for her lover’s return, gazing out over the harbor with a telescope. The first of September comes and goes, days pass, and finally, on September 17, she sees Pinkerton’s ship steam into the harbor and, deliriously happy, decorates the house with flowers[13] and sits down at the shōji screens with Suzuki and her son, expecting him to come at any minute. But night falls   and another day passes without any word from the American lieutenant. A week later, Cho-Cho-san notices him standing on the deck of a passenger steamer with a blonde-haired woman, but she remains confident that he has merely been delayed by duties and will soon come up the path to the house. She watches in disbelief the following day, however, when his warship leaves Nagasaki Harbor, and she runs to the consul to seek an explanation, unable to contain herself any longer. While she is speaking with him, the blonde woman comes into the room and asks the consul to forward a telegram. She identifies herself as Mrs. Pinkerton and then reads out the telegram that she wants sent to her husband:

Just saw the baby and his nurse. Can’t we have him at once. He is lovely. Shall see the mother about it to-morrow. Was not at home when I was there to-day. Expect to join you Wednesday week per Kioto maru. May I bring him along?

— Adelaide

After reciting this to a dumbfounded Sharpless, Mrs. Pinkerton notices Cho-Cho-san sitting in a chair, calls her a “pretty plaything,” and asks for a kiss. When this is refused, she laughs and says, “Ah, well, I don’t blame you. They say you don’t do that sort of thing — to women, at any rate. I quite forgive our men for falling in love with you.”

Cho-Cho-san returns heartbroken to the house and stabs herself in the neck with the dagger that her father used years earlier to commit ritual suicide. In what looks like another example of Christian compunction, Long does not let the tragic heroine succeed in the mortal sin of suicide, but simply tells us that “the stream [of blood] between her breasts darkened and stopped” and that “the little maid came in and bound up the wound.” Then the story ends with the sentence: “When Mrs. Pinkerton called the next day at the little house on Higashi Hill it was quite empty.”

Both True and Untrue

Is John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly an account of a true episode or a product of imagination? This question seems to have come up as soon as readers lifted their eyes from the last page of the Century Magazine installment, and it continues to this day to cause puzzlement and debate. In October 1903, probably responding to the popularity of the play developed by David Belasco and its impending incarnation as a Puccini opera, the publishing house Grosset and Dunlap issued Madame Butterfly as a 152-page hardcover novel, stretching out the story by printing only a small square of text on each page and by adding illustrations. When asked by the publisher to write a foreword for the book, Long at first submitted “a poem of the most obscure and exalted nature, concealed in prose dithyrambics.” But the publisher wanted the author, not to hide the truth in poetry, but to “tell the plain people plainly how the story was born; how it went out into the world and touched the universal heart,” that is, to reveal whether or not it was true. Long wrote a two-page introduction as a result, but unfortunately this does not help to answer the above question any better than the exalted poem:

And where has [Butterfly] gone? I do not know. I lost sight of her, as you did, that dark night she fled with Trouble and Suzuki from the little, empty, happy house on Higashi Hill, where she was to have had a honeymoon of nine hundred and ninety-nine years!

And is she a fancy, or does she live?   Both.

And where is Pinkerton? At least not in the United States Navy — if the savage letters I receive from his fellows are true.

Concerning the genesis of the story I know nothing. I think no one ever does. What process of the mind produces such things? What tumult of the emotions sets them going? I do not know.…

3-6. Three illustrations from the 1903 hardcover edition of Madame Butterfly. The features of the characters are unmistakably Caucasian.

Why is Long so evasive? If he did not know the genesis of the story, then who else possibly could? Researchers who insist that Madame Butterfly is based on a true episode say that he refrained from admitting outright that the story was true because, if he did, he would be accusing the American navy officers who visited nineteenth-century Nagasaki of being philanderers and thus would invite only another flood of “savage letters.” The danger of a cry of protest was no doubt real, but Long’s explanation sounds more like the kind of shaggy answer that a parent gives a child when asked if Santa Claus really exists, avoiding a clear-cut response because to say “yes” would be a lie and to say “no” would demolish the child’s sense of wonder about Christmas. That is, Long may have feared that acknowledging the fictional nature of Madame Butterfly would reduce the story’s appeal, especially at a time when Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was busy making it into an opera. But he could not say that it was true because, of course, it was not.

It is also interesting that he addresses his readers as “Messieurs, Mesdames,” echoing Loti, and that he pins the Japanese expression gomen nasai (“forgive me” or “I’m sorry”) onto the end of the introduction. Why suddenly French, one is left thinking, and why did he need to apologize?

Although John Luther Long never committed himself any further on the subject, there was one key figure who came out and told the public, obliquely and far too late to allow verification, that the story was indeed based on a real episode. That was Long’s sister Jennie Correll, who lived in the Higashiyamate (Higashi Hill) neighborhood of the Nagasaki foreign concession from 1892 to 1897 and who provided her brother with information about Japan.

The Heathen Woman’s Friend

As a result of the treaties signed by Japan and Western powers in 1858 and effectuated the following year, the Dutch East India Company lost its monopoly on trade and converted its Deshima factory into a consulate. The Dutch had been confined to Deshima and limited to tiny numbers for more than two centuries, but the treaties opened the floodgates and guaranteed the construction of special neighborhoods, referred to in English as “concessions” or “settlements,” where foreigners of various nationalities could enjoy freedom from Japanese laws, form their own governing councils, and erect buildings suited to European taste and convenience.

In Nagasaki, foreign representatives and Japanese authorities selected a stretch of coastal and hillside property south of the old town, and in 1860 workers began to fill in the mut flats along the coast and to build the waterfront bund[14] that would serve as the facade and main street of the foreign concession. Oura Creek, which cut through the site and poured into the harbor, was also reinforced on both sides with stone embankment walls.

3-7. The Nagasaki foreign concession around 1865. The hillside to the right is Higashiyamate, the “Higashi Hill” of Madame Butterfly fame. (Nagasaki University Library)

The two hillsides rising away from the creek were earmarked for residential districts, the one close to the old town named Higashiyamate (“Eastern Hillside”) and the other Minamiyamate (“Southern Hillside”). Formerly part of the Omura feudal domain, both areas were undeveloped, inhabited only by a few farmers cultivating loquats and oranges on the sunlit slopes. But during the following months the hillsides were carved into ledges and reinforced with stone walls to make space for the construction of Western-style houses, a network of stone-paved gutters was installed for drainage, and flagstone paths and steps were laid to provide access to individual lots. In a matter of one or two decades, the concession was home to a large multinational community, the waterfront was lined with fine brick and stone buildings of companies like Jardine Matheson and Co., Great Northern Telegraph, and Holme Ringer and Co., the back streets formed an orderly labyrinth of hotels, warehouses, merchant shops, newspaper offices, and other establishments run by foreigners, and Oura Creek had a row of taverns with names like “Man at the Wheel” and “The Prince of Wales” that catered to the sailors who came ashore by the hundreds with the arrival of every foreign ship. The two hillsides, meanwhile, were studded with gracious colonial-style villas that displayed all the features demanded by the wealthy foreigners who inhabited them, such as high windows and doors, wood-strip floors ready for carpets, coal-burning fireplaces, spacious gardens, and wide verandas commanding panoramic views of the harbor. The Nagasaki foreign concession, in short, was like a patch of San Francisco or Vancouver sewn onto the waterfront of a Japanese town.

One of the clashes that arose from the opening of Japan’s doors and the establishment of foreign concessions was the fact that, while the ban on Christianity enforced by the Tokugawa Shogunate since the early seventeenth century was still firmly in place, the foreigners taking up residence here naturally wanted to build churches and to conduct religious services. In view of the extraterritorial rights granted foreigners, the Shogunate had little choice but to permit the construction of churches within the confines of the concessions. But it strictly outlawed any attempt to win Japanese converts and only stepped up its efforts to suppress the religion in the local community.

The first Catholic church to appear in the Nagasaki foreign concession was Oura Cathedral at No.1A Minamiyamate, a quasi-gothic structure built by Japanese carpenters under orders from French missionaries and completed in February 1865. It was at the door of this church, only weeks later on March 17, that a group of peasants from Urakami village approached Fr. Bernard Petitjean and informed him that they shared his belief in “Santa Maria.” This event marked the discovery of the “underground Christians,” whose ancestors had sought refuge from persecution in remote islands and villages in the early seventeenth century and who had kept their religion alive for two centuries despite complete isolation from the Church. Petitjean and the other French priests defied the law and made surreptitious visits to Urakami and other villages where Japanese Christians were hiding. But the authorities learned of the existence of the underground groups and in the latter part of the decade took the drastic measure of exiling the entire population of Urakami to other parts of Japan.

While all this was going on, the early Protestant missionaries found themselves in a different situation. The American Episcopal Church, which had a station in China, sent two missionaries to Nagasaki prior to the official opening of the port in 1859, and one of these, C.M. Williams, constructed Japan’s first Protestant church on the Higashiyamate hillside in October 1862. Unlike the Catholic priests, however, Williams failed to draw Japanese Christians out of hiding. In fact, the greatest success achieved by the Protestant missionaries among the Japanese was in language teaching, not evangelism. The Japanese authorities were well aware that English was the up and coming lingua franca of international business and diplomacy, and in the early years after the opening of the port they enlisted Protestant missionaries to serve as instructors at a government-run foreign language institute in Nagasaki. Their appointment to positions as English teachers provided access to the Japanese community, but the early Protestant missionaries had to keep their bibles under cover and to stick to English grammar and pronunciation because their students risked severe punishment if they showed any interest in the outlawed religion. The role of Protestant mission schools as sites for linguistic, rather than religious, training is a circumstance that continues to this day, and the enduring Japanese view to this effect is indicated by the fact that, while Catholic priests like Marco de Rotz and Zeno Zebrowski are revered as saintly heroes who gave their lives for the common people, the early Protestant missionaries are remembered mostly for their contributions to modern, Western-style education.

In 1873, the Urakami Christians were permitted to return to their village and to engage freely in religious activities, and the missionaries in Nagasaki and other treaty ports were finally given a green light to teach Christian principles to Japanese students. This was not a empathetic gesture by Japanese government officials but rather a grudging compromise made in response to complaints from foreign powers about the ill treatment of the underground Christians and the insulting practice of fumie,[15] and, however freed from constraints, the Protestant missionaries found it as difficult as ever to win new converts in Japanese society.

Another headache for the nineteenth-century missionaries of Nagasaki was the poor example set by their fellow Christians, that is, the sailors and other foreign visitors who poured out of ships and lost themselves in orgies of drunkenness and promiscuity in the taverns of the concession and in the brothels that catered to foreigners in the Japanese town. The Bishop of Hongkong, for one, characterized the early foreign visitors to Nagasaki as “the disorderly elements of California adventurers, Portuguese desperadoes, runaway sailors, piratical outlaws and the moral refuse of European nations.”[16]

3-8. The Nagasaki foreign concession around 1890. The back streets and riverside were dotted with taverns and gambling dens that catered to the hundreds of foreign sailors coming ashore on leave. (Nagasaki University Library)

The missionaries lamented what they saw as the collapse of Christian morality in the relationship between foreign men and Japanese women, and they threw their arms up in disgust at the popular custom of keeping Japanese courtesans as temporary wife/companions. When their efforts to eradicate this practice failed, they turned their attention to the offspring of illicit interracial encounters, children who, as half-Caucasian, were deemed Christian by default. One group of American Christian women established a home for children of mixed parentage in 1871, stating their purpose and calling for donations in the English newspapers of Japan:

A subject of deep importance, but one which public journalists are slow to take up, has long obtruded itself upon general notice. We allude to the children of foreign fathers and Japanese mothers, who have become very numerous in the foreign settlements of Japan. The question now forces itself upon us, more and more strongly, what is to become of these children? Are they to be allowed to grow up as heathen among the Japanese? Or, shall they be taken from the mothers and taught the truths of Christianity? Doubtless every father of such little ones must desire that his offspring not be given over to superstition and idolatry; and yet this is all they are likely to learn from their mothers or from their maternal relatives and friends.[17]

If this deposition is any indication, the primary concern of the missionaries was not the welfare of the Japanese mothers but the salvation of the children of foreign fathers. And it is considerably easier, in view of this anecdote, to understand Adelaide Pinkerton’s cheerful willingness to adopt the child born from an illicit encounter between her husband and a Japanese woman and to completely disregard the mother.

It should be noted that the American missionaries in the treaty ports made noble efforts to instill awareness about women’s rights and to build the foundation for women’s education, which had been all but nonexistent here until their arrival. They also helped to found orphanages for Japanese children as well as the offspring of foreign fathers. But the compassion nevertheless seems to have come on the condition that the Japanese women receiving assistance subscribe to Western values and acknowledge the inferiority of their own religion and world-view. This ambivalence is illustrated by the oxymoronic title of the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society newsletter: The Heathen Woman’s Friend. It also surfaces in John Luther Long’s novella Madame Butterfly, when Cho-Cho-san converts to Christianity.

Interestingly, most of the finger-wagging at miscreant sailors and efforts to stamp out “Japanese marriage” came from the Protestant, not the Roman Catholic, missionaries. Aside from saying Mass on Sundays and keeping the confessionals manned, the priests at Oura Cathedral do not seem to have made any special efforts either to save the souls of visiting sailors or to remind them of the wrath of God. In fact, they poured most of their energies into reestablishing the Catholic Church in Japan and servicing the spiritual needs of the already Christian populations of Urakami, Sotome, Goto, and other remote and often poverty-stricken areas of Nagasaki Prefecture. Although attributable in part to the fact that more Protestant American and British sailors came ashore than Catholics, it was the Protestant missionaries who vehemently condemned the promiscuity and insobriety rampant in Nagasaki and who struggled to divert sailors from the evil embrace of Japanese prostitutes by opening rest homes and reading rooms near the waterfront.

Higashi Hill

Most of the Protestant missionaries settled in the Higashiyamate neighborhood of the Nagasaki foreign concession — the “Higashi Hill” of Madame Butterfly fame.[18] The American Episcopal Church constructed by C.M. Williams in October 1862 was located at No. 11 Higashiyamate. After the abolition of the ban on Christianity in 1873, Henry Stout, a missionary of the Reformed Church in America serving as an English instructor at the government school, started bible classes for Japanese students in his home at No. 14 Higashiyamate and, with his wife Elizabeth, opened mission schools for young men and women that grew into Tozan Gakuin and Umegasaki Jogakko, respectively — both located on the Higashiyamate hillside. Eliza Goodall, the widow of an Anglican military chaplain, started classes in English and dressmaking for girls in her house at No. 3 Higashiyamate and thus laid the foundation for Nagasaki Jogakko (Girls’ School). The No. 3 Higashiyamate lot had originally been rented by Guido Verbeck, the pioneer American missionary and educator who worked at the government school in Nagasaki and went on to lay the foundation for what is now Tokyo University. Another notable American missionary is John C. Davison, a native of New Jersey and member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who came to Nagasaki in 1873, helped to establish a Protestant church at Deshima in 1876, and arranged through the American Board of Foreign Missions for the dispatch of ministers to found Methodist mission schools in Nagasaki. As a result of his efforts, Kwassui Jogakko (for young women) and Chinzei Gakuin (for young men) were established on the Higashiyamate hillside in 1879 and 1881, respectively. Both soon became Nagasaki landmarks and exclusive purveyors of Western-style education.

In late 1891, the Methodist Episcopal missionary Irvin H. Correll arrived in Nagasaki to succeed the retiring principal of Chinzei Gakuin, and the following year he was joined by his wife Sarah Jane (Jennie), elder sister of John Luther Long, and their children. The family took up lodgings in the principal’s residence at No. 12 Higashiyamate, a colonial-style bungalow nestling with a number of other missionary homes in a closed-off hillside niche that overlooked the business district of the foreign concession and Nagasaki Harbor. With their airy rooms, European furniture, spacious lawns, and troops of servants — not to mention the buffer of extraterritoriality and the economic advantage enjoyed by their inhabitants — these homes were so removed from the reality of life in the poor neighborhoods of Nagasaki that they might as well have been in Boston or Philadelphia.

3-9. Jennie and Irvin Correll. (Courtesy of Arthur Groos)

The “Nagasaki Directory”[19] and other records for the year 1893 provide the following information about the residents of Higashiyamate, which was broken up into lots numbered from 1 to 16, around the time of the Corrells’ arrival:

1. Kaisei School (a Catholic boys school founded in 1892 and run by French priests)

2. W.K. Wilson (manager of the trading company Browne and Co.)

3. Mrs. E. Goodall (Anglican Church Mission)

4. Methodist Episcopal Church (Chinzei  Gakuin missionary housing)

5. Methodist Episcopal Church (Chinzei Gakuin gymnasium)

6. Chinzei Gakuin (Methodist Episcopal Church)

Rev. E.R. Fulkerson

Rev. H.B. Johnson

7. Rev. A.R. Fuller (Anglican Church Mission)

8. Rev.   Henry Stout (Reformed Church in America)

9. Tozan   Gakuin (school of the Reformed Church in America)

10. Rev. A. Oltmans (Reformed Church in America)

11. Anglican Church (American Episcopal Church)

12. Rev. Irvin H. Correll (Methodist Episcopal Church)

13. Kwassui Jogakko (Methodist Episcopal Church)

Miss E. Russell

Miss J.M. Gheer

14. Rev. H. Stout (Reformed Church in America)

15. Owned by British merchants Henry Hunt and Frederick Hellyer but apparently uninhabited this year

16. Rev. A. Pieters (Reformed Church in America)

As this list shows, with the exception of one or two households, as well as the Catholic Kaisei School founded on the highest part of the hillside the previous year, the Higashiyamate neighborhood was inhabited exclusively by Protestant missionaries, their families, and the teachers at the Protestant schools located there. It is no wonder that it was known among foreign residents and visitors as “Missionary Hill.”

3-10. The house at No. 12 Higashiyamate (right edge) around the time that the Correll family inhabited it. Above it are the buildings of Kwassui Jogakko (Gakuen), the Methodist mission school for women. (Nagasaki University Library)

3-11. The house at No. 12 Higashiyamate served during the 1920s as the U.S. Consulate, reinforcing the image of Higashiyamate as an American enclave.

Irvin and Jennie Correll served their church in Nagasaki for a period of five years, returning to the United States in the autumn of 1897 only a few months before John Luther Long published Madame Butterfly. The absence of any special mention of the Corrells in either the English or Japanese newspapers of Nagasaki during the five-year period indicates that their stay here was quiet and unexceptional. Moreover, since Jennie Correll had to attend to the needs of six children,[20] it is likely that she spent most of her time at home, not out on fact-finding or soul-saving tours in the town and countryside. One interesting event during the five-year period, however — and one in which the Corrells would have been deeply interested — was the establishment of the “Christian Endeavor Home for Seamen” in the foreign concession in 1896.[21]

Most attempts to establish homes of this type had faltered as a result of insufficient funds or simple failure to attract enough sailors away from the siren-song of alcoholic oblivion and indulgence in the charms of mousmé. When the U.S.S. Charleston anchored here in 1894, however, a group of sailors who were also members of the popular Christian Endeavor Society put together the hefty sum of 650 yen as a donation toward the foundation of a seamen’s home. One of the Charleston crewmen expressed his opinion of Nagasaki as follows: “Nagasaki is the first city I have ever visited where I could not find a place to eat and sleep and rest when coming ashore without having to do so in a saloon, a gambling den, or in a house of ill repute, and that is saying a great deal, for I have spent three years in travelling in foreign lands.”[22] To augment the donation from the sailors, the Higashiyamate missionaries launched a fund-raising campaign among foreign residents of Nagasaki and other parts of Kyushu. The usefulness of such an institution and the motivation of the people promoting it were called to question by some skeptics, such as the writer of an article in the local English newspaper who sarcastically urged the missionaries to use one of their own “imposing and palatial residences” as a site for the home.[23] But eventually 3,000 yen was collected, a building was rented (in the form, ironically, of a former tavern) at No. 26 Oura, and the missionaries opened the home on February 3, 1896.

3-12. American sailors pose for a photograph with their female companions in turn-of-the-century Nagasaki.

3-13. The “Seamen’s Home” was founded in the Nagasaki foreign concession in 1896 by Protestant missionaries and members of the Christian Endeavor Society.

3-14. Sailors relax in the Seamen’s Home, without alcoholic refreshment or female companionship. (Western Theological Seminary Collection, Joint Archives of Holland)

Jennie Correll: Memories or Illusions?

This and other stories about missionary work in Nagasaki, along with copies of English newspapers and magazines published in Japan, would have formed the bulk of Jennie Correll’s reports to her brother before and after her return to the United States in the autumn of 1897, and it is clear from Madame Butterfly that John Luther Long wove some of the information from his sister into his story. For example, Cho-Cho-san’s house is located on “Higashi Hill,” a name that is undoubtedly derived from Higashiyamate where the Corrells lived. But distortions inevitably crop up because of the communication gap and Jennie Correll’s own distance from the hard realities of Nagasaki. Just as Long makes errors in rendering and translating Japanese words,[24] there are several important parts of his story where the information apparently relayed by his sister is twisted. One of these is the “999-year lease” on Butterfly’s house. This clearly refers to the “perpetual lease” granted to residents of the foreign concessions by the Japanese government in keeping with the terms of extraterritoriality agreed upon in the commercial treaties of 1858. Issued in lieu of a title deed, the perpetual lease allowed foreigners to buy and sell property but prevented them from legally owning the land. The house at No. 12 Higashiyamate was part of the foreign concession and so was built on property subject to a perpetual lease, but of course no such system applied to the Japanese neighborhoods such as Juzenji and Inasa where foreign navy officers like Pierre Loti rented houses on a monthly basis. About the house where Pinkerton and Butterfly lived, Long says: “Some clever Japanese artisans then made the paper walls of the pretty house eye-proof, and, with their own adaptations of American hardware, the openings cunningly lockable. The rest was Japanese.” Long obviously wanted the house to be a traditional Japanese building, like the type that Pierre Loti had inhabited with Chrysanthème. But, if it was, then it could not have been in the foreign concession or subject to a perpetual lease.

John Luther Long, as we saw before, never committed himself on the question of whether Madame Butterfly was based on a real episode or a product of imagination. Jennie Correll also remained silent on the subject until March 13, 1931 — four years after the death of her brother and more than three decades after her sojourn in Nagasaki — when she gave a speech to the Pan-Pacific Club in Tokyo. The content of this speech was published word for word in the March 15, 1931, issue of the newspaper Japan Times and republished in an edited version in Japan Magazine some six months later.

3-15. The March 15, 1931, issue of the Japan Times carried the article about Jennie Correll’s speech on the top of the front page and reported that she “knew” the original Madame Butterfly. (National Diet Library, Tokyo)

In the speech, Correll told her audience about her house at No. 12 Higashiyamate and about how, because “in Nagasaki there were no places for men to go except the saloons, and you know what happens in saloons,” she used to invite young officers up to the house for afternoon tea on the front porch. Then she goes on to talk about the young woman who purportedly served as the model for the story Madame Butterfly:

Now on the other hill was a dear little teahouse girl living, as pretty as a picture, and her name was Cho-san. No one had ever said anything against her, and she was sweet and pretty and everyone liked her. But after a little while we learned she had a lover. They all have lovers I guess if they can get them. The young man was a nice young fellow, but horribly lonely.…One evening there was quite a little sensation. It was that Cho-san and her baby had been deserted. Poor little Cho-san. When he left her he made promises that he would return soon, and there was a signal to be given when the ship came, so she waited and broke her little shoji open to look out, but never a sign.

3-16. The article in the March 13, 1931, issue of the Jiji Shimpo reporting Jennie Correll’s comment that she had “heard the pathetic story of o-cho-san from a merchant who frequented our house.” The photograph shows Correll at her Tokyo hotel and John Luther Long (insert). (Tokyo University Library)

This reminiscence has sent many a modern researcher out in search of traces of a real-life Butterfly. Arthur Groos, for one, took on the Herculean task of combing United States Navy records for persons who fit the description of the players in the story. As a result, he pinpointed a navy doctor named John S. Sayre, who served in the Far East and visited Nagasaki on several occasions during the period that Jennie Correll lived here. He also identified an ensign named William B. Franklin, whose name is vaguely similar and whose dates of visits to Nagasaki coincide to some extent with those of B.F. Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly.[25] John Luther Long does indeed seem to have referred to his sister’s descriptions of actual persons, particularly John S. Sayre, while constructing the characters of Sayre and Pinkerton in his story. But this does not bring us any closer to determining the origin of the story or the identity of the tragic heroine. On the contrary, navy records show that both Sayre and Franklin came down with venereal diseases,[26] which means that their liaison with Japanese women — if that is where the infections originated — was anything but the idyllic one depicted in Madame Butterfly or the kind about which missionaries would later wax nostalgic.

A number of other problems and contradictions call the soundness of Jennie Correll’s memory into question. For one thing, “Japanese marriage” had become a cottage industry in Nagasaki by the time of her visit and its widespread popularity makes it highly unlikely that the desertion of one girl, even if she was really in love with her “husband,” could incite pity — let alone “quite a little sensation” — among missionaries who continually condemned the custom as the abomination of a heathen culture. Moreover, “sensation” suggests an immediate reaction to a sudden event, but Correll tells us that “Cho-san” waited for her lover and that there was “never a sign,” which indicates a long and inconclusive vigil. The melodramatic comment about Butterfly breaking open her shōji to peer over the harbor — taken with the complete lack of specific names, dates, and places in the reminiscence — suggests that Jennie Correll’s memories were not only dimmed by the passage of time but also affected, however unconsciously, by her own emotional reaction to Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly and its huge worldwide success.

Another contradiction crops up in the edited version of Correll’s speech published in Japan Magazine under the title Madame Butterfly: Her Long Secret Revealed. In the speech Correll said nothing about a “secret,” but in the edited version she claims that Madame Butterfly was based upon a true episode known only to her brother John Luther Long and herself. This is rather hard to believe when she tells us in the same breath that the failure of Butterfly’s lover to return to Nagasaki caused a “sensation.” Moreover, she refers to a collective “we” learning that Butterfly had a lover, which, since Long was not in Nagasaki, presumably means the missionary body in whole or in part. The “revelation of a secret” therefore looks like an addition made by the Japan Magazine editor who molded Correll’s choppy speech into a polished piece of prose and who wanted to catch the attention of readers.

The credibility of Mrs. Correll’s recollections sinks lower than ever in an article about the speech published in the March 13, 1931, issue of the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo, the same day that Correll made the speech in Tokyo. The writer, who visited Jennie Correll the previous evening for a private interview, quotes her as saying that she “heard the pathetic story of O-Cho-san from a merchant who frequented our house,” a statement that contradicts both the speech she made the next day and the article attributed to her in Japan Magazine.

Jennie Correll was eighty-four years old in 1931 and the only survivor among the various persons involved in the creation of the Madame Butterfly story. It is not surprising that she had trouble distinguishing between events that happened in real life many years earlier and those that occurred on paper or on stage. In the final analysis, the “sensation” she mentioned in her speech seems to apply not to a failed international relationship in nineteenth-century Nagasaki but to the tragic suicide in the opera Madame Butterfly — the artistic creation of David Belasco and Giacomo Puccini.

4

David Belasco, Giacomo Puccini, and the “Yellow Peril”

The Bishop of Broadway

In 1849, three years after signing the Oregon Boundary Treaty, the British government declared Vancouver Island a crown colony and leased it to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which then concluded a number of treaties with the local people and procured huge tracts of land. White settlers began to arrive by the hundreds at Victoria, the company fort at the southern tip of the island, and to break out onto the undeveloped fields of Sooke and Saanich to establish homesteads. This was happening just when Europeans were trying to pry open Japan’s closed doors and to win commercial and diplomatic agreements that would bring this isolated, mysterious country into the global economic network. But there was a crucial difference: although they had little choice but to agree to trade and to allow the establishment of foreign concessions, the Japanese protected their ancestral heritage and quickly rose to a level equivalent to Europe in the arts of Western civilization. The first nations of Canada and the United States, by contrast, watched almost helplessly as their property converted to statistics in European ledger books and their ancient cultures dropped to third-class status in their own ancient homelands.

In 1858, just when Nagasaki was preparing to open its doors to a new era of international exchange, the Fraser Valley gold rush turned Victoria into a boomtown as the principal gateway for prospectors arriving from San Francisco and making preparations for the arduous trip inland. Among the migrants were a Spanish-Portuguese Jew named Abraham Belasco, his wife Reina, and their young family. Natives of England, Abraham and Reina had emigrated to San Francisco in the heat of the California gold rush but, like many other entrepreneurs, had decided to move northward with the hordes of wishful prospectors heading to Canada. Abraham opened a tobacco shop at No. 4 Yates Street,[1] and the family resided in Victoria for the following seven years, a time when the town was evolving rapidly from a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost into a busy international port.

The Belascos’ eldest child, David, was five years old at the time of the move. During the stay in Victoria, and again after returning to his native San Francisco at the age of twelve, the boy worked frequently as a child actor at local theaters, an activity that his father permitted and probably even encouraged because of his own early career as a harlequin in London. Before reaching puberty David was already demonstrating the dramatic flair that would later make him famous. While still a grammar school pupil in San Francisco, he won first prize in a school exhibition for his rendition of The Maniac, stunning the audience with a death scene in which he broke open a sponge soaked in red ink that he had hidden under his white shirt.[2] After graduation he continued to work as a stagehand and actor in San Francisco and often joined fly-by-night companies on tours to mining camps, where he gained experience in stage production and deepened his hankering for the thrill of applause and laughter. His first play to attract attention on a national level was Hearts of Oak, and his next, La Belle Russe, won wide acclaim after opening at the renowned Baldwin Theater in San Francisco.

4-1. David Belasco (1853–1931) around 1900, the year that he produced the play Madame Butterfly.

Reports of David Belasco’s talent and his success in San Francisco were so loud that he was invited to New York in 1882, at the age of twenty-nine, to work as stage manager at the prestigious Madison Square Theater. Moving later to the newly built Lyceum Theater, Belasco co-wrote and produced several plays that were both commercially successful and artistically acclaimed. In 1895, the Civil War melodrama The Heart of Maryland marked his first independent hit, playing to packed houses in New York and London and on a tour of several American cities. By the end of the century David Belasco was the luminary of American theater, lauded by playgoers for his innovative productions and known reverently as the “Bishop of Broadway” because of his angelic facial features and fondness for priestlike garb.

Belasco became so well known, in fact, that his name on the billboard was sufficient to attract standing-room-only audiences to the theater. This advantage enabled him to employ relatively unknown actors and playwrights and to wield total artistic control over the plays presented under his name. His hallmarks were lavish sets, adventurous mechanical effects, and experiments in lighting that revolutionized the appearance of the stage, made traditional footlights obsolete and brought an atmosphere of intense realism to theatrical productions. Said the impresario himself: “Before that time it had been the practice, as a means of stirring the feelings of audiences or intensifying the emotional effect of a speech or situation, to have some sort of a musical interpretation accompany the play.…But my conviction was that the most powerful emotional appeal could be made and the strongest interpretive power gained by the use of color and light.”[3]  Another tool that Belasco used to effect was erotic titillation, but sometimes his experiments apparently slipped over the edge into vulgarity. One of these indiscretions was a farce entitled Naughty Anthony produced for the Herald Square Theater in New York in the spring of 1900. The play featured a beautiful young actor named Blanche Bates, but her appearance seminude did not make the impression the director had hoped for. On the contrary, “Mr. Belasco’s friends began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the smart of failure in addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His affairs, moreover, began to take on a desperate aspect; the season threatened to be a ruinous failure, and he had no play ready to substitute for ‘Naughty Anthony.’”[4]

In the midst of these dire straits Belasco recalled John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly, a copy of which a friend had sent him some time earlier. Seizing upon the story as a path to financial salvation, he mobilized all his talents in creating stage props, visual scenes, costumes, and lighting effects that would transport his audience, hopefully breathtaken and heartbroken, right into the secret bosom of old Japan. On March 5, 1900, only two weeks after making this decision, he presented a one-act melodrama entitled Madame Butterfly, A Tragedy of Japan at the Herald Theater in New York, with Blanche Bates playing the role of Cho-Cho-san for the first time on stage.

Belasco collaborated with John Luther Long in creating the script for Madame Butterfly, A Tragedy of Japan and borrowed heavily from the American author’s story in fashioning both the plot and dialogue.[5] But the fact that he also consulted Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (perhaps at Long’s recommendation) is evident in the scene in which Pinkerton, after returning to Nagasaki with his American wife, learns the shocking truth that Cho-Cho-San has been waiting for him the whole time. Says the lieutenant to the consul, pleading innocent by virtue of ignorance: “Sharpless, I thought when I left this house, the few tears, sobs, little polite regrets, would be over as I crossed the threshold. I started to come back for a minute, but I said to myself: ‘Don’t do it; by this time she’s ringing your gold pieces to make sure they’re good.’ You know that class of Japanese girl and — ” The image of coin-tapping and its use by the foreign man to excuse himself from the sin of dallying with a prostitute come straight from Pierre Loti. If he had been in New York to see the play, the French author would have been smirking and shifting in his seat all over again.

4-2. Blanche Bates (1873–1941) was the first actor to play the role of Cho-Cho-san on stage.

Like John Luther Long, David Belasco had never, and would never, visit Japan. And just as Long had no personal knowledge of the reality of prostitution in Nagasaki or the complex psychology of the young women involved in it, Belasco was impervious to the sociopolitical meaning of the play and to the possibility that it might lack credibility in the light of contemporary Japanese culture and lifestyles. Long’s story was simply a convenient opportunity for his favorite theatrical devices, namely, the dramatic portrayal of a strong but vulnerable heroine and the use of stunning stage effects to entertain a crowd. For Madame Butterfly he created an array of exotic landscapes and authentic-looking Japanese interiors, but his boldest innovation of all was to allot a full fourteen minutes — a near eternity in stage time — to a wordless, motionless scene in which Cho-Cho-san waits at the shōji screens in her house for Pinkerton’s arrival. Belasco condensed the week-long wait described in Long’s story into a one-night vigil, making wizardly use of lights to evoke the passage of time. Afternoon turned into a sunset-stained evening, first pink then orange fading into red and purple; lanterns scattered around the stage floor flickered on one by one while the sky gradually darkened, fine blue lights appeared like stars and moonlit silhouettes slipped around the stage; then the lanterns went out, again one by one, and finally a dull blue glow illuminated the screens, revealing Cho-Cho-san still sitting, unmoving, and Suzuki and Trouble sleeping beside her. This long, silent scene was risky because it tested the audience’s patience, but New Yorkers hailed it as yet another masterpiece from the Bishop of Broadway. Belasco also took artistic license at the end of the play by having Cho-Cho-san explicitly commit suicide instead of evaporating into nowhere as in Long’s story. He knew perfectly well that Long’s wishy-washy conclusion would fall flat on stage, and, sure enough, his gruesome suicide scene — with Pinkerton rushing in from stage-right sobbing “Butterfly! Butterfly!” — succeeded in lifting the drama to a heartbreaking crescendo and in rocking the audience with emotion. Belasco later reflected as follows about Madame Butterfly:

I have been asked many times what I consider my most successful achievement in stirring imagination through the agencies of scenery. I invariably reply that the scene of the passing of an entire night in ‘Madame Butterfly’ has been my most successful effort in appealing to the imaginations of those who have sat before my stage. In that scene the little Japanese heroine is waiting with her child for its father, Lieutenant Pinkerton, to come from the American ship. Her vigil represented an entire night. To portray this episode, Blanche Bates was compelled to hold the stage for fourteen minutes without uttering a word. So, to keep an audience’s imagination stirred to persuade it that what it was witnessing was real it was necessary to have a scene of changing beauty. There was not a dissenting voice in the criticism of that scene.[6]

4-3. Scene from the stage presentation of Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly. (From “The Future of Vaudeville in America” in The Cosmopolitan, April 1905.)

4-4. This portrait (by Sigismond de lvanowski for the March 1907 issue of Century Magazine) shows Blanche Bates in the play Madame Butterfly and evokes an odd mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and European elements.

Belasco and his associate Charles Frohman were scheduled to present two plays in London the following month, Zaza at the Garrick Theatre and Miss Hobbs at the nearby Duke of York’s Theatre. Encouraged by the success of Madame Butterfly in New York, Belasco decided to arrange for a showing of his new play as an after-piece to Miss Hobbs. The first performance was held on April 28, with a different cast of players but with the real stars of the show — the lighting and other stage effects — unchanged. As in New York, the British debut was received at first with “absolute silence, except for the sound of a few women crying,” and then by thunderous, unrelenting applause. The audience refused so stubbornly to desist from clapping and shouting that Frohman had time to fetch Belasco from the Garrick Theatre and to bring him to the stage to take a bow.[7] Belasco remembered the London debut as follows: “Giacomo Puccini, the Italian composer, was in front that night and after the curtain fell he came behind the scenes to embrace me enthusiastically and to beg me to let him use ‘Madame Butterfly’ as an opera libretto. I agreed at once and told him he could do anything he liked with the play and make any sort of contract he liked — because it is not possible to discuss business arrangements with an impulsive Italian who has tears in his eyes and both his arms around your neck!”[8]

4-5. Playbill from the first British performance of the play Madame Butterfly. Puccini was so taken with the performance that he decided on the spot to make it into an opera.

The Maestro

The ancient Roman town of Lucca lies in the northwestern part of Tuscany near Pisa, its centro storico scattered with old buildings, gardens, medieval towers, and a seemingly countless number of churches built in the imposing Romanesque style, the town encompassed by a ring of walls with ramparts dating back to the sixteenth century, and the air tinted with the aroma of the succulent olives growing on surrounding hills. Giacomo Puccini was born here in 1858, a sprout on a long branch of church organists and composers. He graduated from the Conservatory of Milan in 1883, and his first opera, Le Villi, was staged successfully at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan the following year, establishing the young composer as one of the rising stars in the world of Italian opera. In 1891 he moved to a house at Torre del Lago, a secluded village on a lake halfway between Lucca and the seaside resort of Viareggio, and it was here that he went on to compose La Bohème, Tosca, and other classic works of opera. By the spring of 1900, when he visited England for the British premiere of Tosca at Covent Garden and took in Madame Butterfly at the Duke of York’s Theatre, he was already one of Europe’s most illustrious composers.

4-6. The Puccini Villa in Torre del Lago.

Giacomo Puccini was in the same boat with Belasco and Long in that he had never visited Japan, but in addition to a lack of firsthand knowledge about the setting of the play, he did not speak a word of English and so could hardly appreciate the dialogue or the literary messages intended by the author and playwright. Clearly, it was the parade of colored lights, the images of beautiful landscapes, the lavish costumes and exotic interiors, the long silent vigil, and the pathos of the suicide — in short, the stunning stage effects contrived by David Belasco — that moved him to tears and awoke his operatic instincts. It is also reasonable to assume that he had been on the lookout for a Japanese theme before even coming to London, because he was certainly aware of the fad of Japonisme taking the European art world by storm and of its successful operatic expression in works like Madame Chrysanthème and, particularly, Iris.[9]

4-7. David Belasco with Pietro Toscanini (center) and Giacomo Puccini. (Metropolitan Opera Archives)

In any case, the Italian composer fell in love with Madame Butterfly. After obtaining opera rights from David Belasco and John Luther Long, he began composing arias for the various scenes in the play, and he enlisted his collaborators Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa to write the libretto. Using Italian translations of Long’s story and Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, Illica completed the first draft of Act I in the spring of 1901.[10] This early version of Act I, which would change beyond recognition as a result of later revisions, reveals the influence of Pierre Loti’s insulting attitude toward Japanese people and his treatment of the liaison with the Japanese woman as a farce. The most frequent stage directions for Pinkerton and Sharpless are laughs, laughing, and comically as they prepare for the arrival of Cho-Cho-san and her “wedding” with the former, a scene borrowed directly from Loti’s description of his wait with Yves on the Juzenji hillside for Jasmin and her entourage. Sharpless would become a reserved and critical figure in the final version of the opera, but in this early script he parrots Loti/Yves by applauding Pinkerton’s debauchery and likening Japanese characters to animals and insects. Illica’s first instinct seems to have been to reject John Luther Long’s ambiguous portrayal — having seen through its prudish concealment of the sordid nature of the liaison between the Japanese girl and her American patron — and to opt for Loti’s derisive but candid account of his actual experiences in Nagasaki.[11]

Neither Long nor Belasco had had direct contact with Japanese collaborators in the development of the story and play, but Puccini was fortunate enough to receive advice from the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy who called on him during a visit to Viareggio in 1902. The composer reported the encounter to Giulio Ricordi in a letter from Torre del Lago:

I have had a visit today from Mme Ohyama, wife of the Japanese Ambassador. She told me a great many interesting things and sang some native songs to   me. She has promised to send me some native Japanese music. I sketched the story of the libretto for her, and she liked it, especially as just such a story as Butterfly’s is known to her as having happened in real life.[12]

When she told Puccini that “just such a story as Butterfly’s is known to her as having happened in real life,” Mrs. Ohyama was undoubtedly thinking of the innumerable illicit liaisons that had occurred over the past decades between the officers of foreign navies and Japanese courtesans in Japanese ports. Although he reports her impression of the story as favorable, the composer tells Ricordi in the next sentence that “she does not approve of the name Yamadori, on the ground that it is feminine and otherwise not appropriate.” Puccini would go on to weave some of the melodies learned from Mrs. Ohyama into the Madama Butterfly score, but he ignored her advice about the name of Cho-Cho-san’s Japanese suitor.

In sharp contrast to Belasco’s swift and easy development of the story into a play, the process of creating the opera Madama Butterfly was   plagued with difficulties, including a car accident in which Puccini broke his leg, disagreements among the collaborators, and marital discord between the composer and his wife, Elvira. Puccini was still vacillating about whether to present the opera in two acts or three when Madama Butterfly debuted at La Scala on February 17, 1904. Puccini had of course hoped that the premiere of his new opera would be an instant success, but this was not to be the case. Rosina Storchio, the celebrated prima donna hired to play the lead role, looked anything but geisha-like in her poorly fastened kimono, and a breeze blowing across the stage caused the front of it to billow out, inciting jokes among the audience that the singer looked pregnant. The problems only grew worse as the performance proceeded. The two children (there were two, not one, in the original version of the opera) began to chase each other around the stage, distracting the singers and eliciting further laughter from the audience, which by now had decided to be entertained not by appreciating the opera but by ridiculing it. The musical accompaniment to the sunrise at the beginning of Act 2 included the calls of songbirds, but when these delicate sounds issued from the orchestra pit, hecklers reacted by mimicking the cries of cows and roosters. Even “One Fine Day,” the exquisite aria expressing Cho-Cho-san’s ardent belief that Pinkerton will one day return, failed to turn the tide of audience disfavor. The final curtain came down amid a loud chorus of boos, hisses, shouts, and laughter, and Puccini’s new opera — derided by the public and condemned by critics as “the result of an automobile accident” — closed down after only one performance.

4-8. Rosina Storchio, the first singer to play the lead role in Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. (Courtesy of Pat Novak, www.historicopera.com.)

Undeterred by this initial failure, Puccini and his librettists made a number of revisions, including the shortening of Act I and the insertion of an interval in the middle of Act II. They also had Pinkerton — who in the first production was absent from Act I until the closing scene —join his American wife Kate and Sharpless in coming up to the house on the hill to speak with Cho-Cho-san about adopting the child. Puccini wrote a new arietta entitled “Addio, fiorito asil” (“Farewell, beloved home”) for Pinkerton to sing as he withdraws from the garden in a fit of guilt before Cho-Cho-san wakes up and has a chance to see him. This reshaping of Pinkerton from a callous chauvinist into a man capable of remorse is significant in that it reflects still another diversion from Pierre Loti’s emotionless yet realistic portrait. Opera audiences, after all, wanted to be electrified, not guilt-ridden as fellow Westerners and tacit accomplices in the American lieutenant’s inhumanity. Puccini’s new Pinkerton effectively served this purpose by expressing repentance and thus, like a sinner in a confessional, gaining some measure of absolution.

The revised version of Madama Butterfly opened in May 1904 at the Teatro Grande in Brescia, a city between Milan and Verona, and proved a great success. This reversal of fortunes seemed to give the opera a go-ahead for worldwide delivery, but Puccini was so anxious about the possibility of a repetition of the Milan fiasco that he insisted upon being consulted about the choice of singers and upon personally supervising the final rehearsals of all subsequent productions, and consequently few performances were made for the first two years after Brescia. The performances that did see the light of day were, nevertheless, enormously successful. In a letter dated July 30, 1905, to his associates in New York, the British impresario George Edwardes reports as follows the success of the opera that year in London:

On my return from Carlsbad I heard of the extraordinary success of Puccini’s ‘Madame Butterfly’ at Covent Garden. I saw Mr Messenger [sic], Managing Director of the Opera, and he assured me that it was the greatest success they had had for many, many years in London. Four performances were given to the full capacity of the house and the piece was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. Her Majesty the Queen attended three performances in succession and the opera was certainly the talk of the town when I returned.[13]

4-9. Early poster for the opera Madame Butterfly..

4-10. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) signed this photograph at the London premiere of Madame Butterfly in 1905.

In June 1906, Giacomo Puccini and his publisher Giulio Ricordi finally decided to print a full orchestral score for Madama Butterfly that could be used thereafter as a standard reference for conductors, indicating agreement among the collaborators that no further changes were needed. But this was put on hold when the French director and impresario Albert Carré, who was preparing for the premiere of Madama Butterfly in Paris, demanded cuts and alterations, claiming that without them Parisian audiences would react negatively to the opera. Puccini rushed to Paris to confer directly with Carré and in a matter of only one day agreed to a number of major revisions, including the deletion of large chunks of Act I containing the Lotiesque insults toward Japan incorporated by Illica, as well as further plastic surgery to Pinkerton and his wife Kate. Another subtle but important way in which Carré altered the script was to revert to John Luther Long’s blurred image of prostitution: he deleted a comment from Cho-Cho-san that she had been paid one hundred yen by Pinkerton and replaced it, melody intact, with a declaration of her intention to convert to Christianity. It is one of many ironies in the saga of Madame Butterfly that Albert Carré, whose Paris presentation was published by Giulio Ricordi and became the standard worldwide version of the opera, was determined to remove all traces of the lurid scenario created by his compatriot Pierre Loti. A little less than two decades had passed since Loti surprised the world with his tale of philandering in an exotic Far East port. In the interim, his taciturn playmate in Madame Chrysanthème had evolved into the intelligent and passionate daughter of a samurai in John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly and into a living breathing character, changing with each new telling, on stages adorned by David Belasco and Giacomo Puccini. Meanwhile, the images of Nagasaki evoked by the story of doomed interaction between a foreign man and Japanese woman had also strayed widely from the reality of Japan, a country that by now had shed the cloak of medieval slumber and embarked on a career of military and industrial modernization that was already causing a different kind of surprise.

The Yellow Peril

On February 8, 1904, only nine days before the first production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly in Milan, Japan launched a naval attack on the Russian fleet at Lushun (Port Arthur), opening the floodgates on the “Russo-Japanese War” and stunning the international community with the audacity of an Asian country, just yesterday a quaint little mystery-world of paper lanterns and seaweed soup, challenging one of the world’s great military powers. The astonishment only increased as reports of one Japanese battle victory after another danced across world newspapers, and it would continue until May 27, 1905, when the Imperial Japanese Navy led by Admiral Togo Heihachiro demolished the Russian Baltic Fleet in Tsushima Strait and put the final seal on Japan’s triumph in the war.

While war raged in the summer of 1904, the Japanese minister in Vienna, Makino Nobuaki, responded to a question from a reporter about the “yellow peril,” a term that had come into vogue in editorials about the war, particularly in France and Germany, allies of Russia whose own colonial designs in the Far East were jeopardized by a strong Japan. Makino pointed out tactfully that Japan had adopted a policy of national isolation in the seventeenth century in reaction to what it had perceived to be a “white peril,” namely the spread of Christianity, and that this decision had done nothing but strangle the modern development of the country. Then, referring to the opening of Japan to foreign influence in the middle of the nineteenth century, he reminded his interviewer that

[t]he European nations have been able to satisfy themselves during a generation whether there exists in Japan any danger for civilization. The Christian has equal rights with the Buddhist. The late President of the Chamber was a Christian. I myself have a near relation a Christian, who is President of the Supreme Court of Justice. Very often in the same family some are Christians, others Buddhists, and no difficulty whatever is placed in the way of mixed marriages.…Has civilization really anything to fear from a nation which is thus organized? Our ambition is to be recognized as collaborators of Europe and America in the great development of commerce, industry and culture. Our aim is to contribute to the economic and scientific riches of the world. I hope that in the intelligent circles of the West no one will consider our legitimate wishes and ambitions a “Yellow Peril.”[14]

While anxiety over Japan’s new military presence in the Far East mounted among European powers, animosity toward Japanese immigrants intensified in California and the other states on the American west coast where “Orientals” were thought to be a different but equally noxious form of yellow peril. Both the United States and Canada had exploited Chinese labor to wield picks and hammers on the transcontinental railroads and to perform other menial tasks shunned by white workers, but when the Chinese began to settle with their families in cities and to establish their own businesses and communities, elements of the white population on the Pacific coast cried foul. By the end of the century the object of malevolence had begun to shift from the Chinese, whose immigration had been curtailed, to the Japanese, who still enjoyed relative freedom in entering the United States and Canada. As early as 1891 the Japanese consul at Vancouver was warning his government about this trend. In order to win the trust and respect of their Canadian employers and avoid being treated “simply as Chinese,” he said, Japanese immigrants should show an intention to remain permanently in the country and pay heed to local manners and customs. He even recommended that they become Christians and attend church on Sundays.[15] Most of the immigrants lived up to these admonitions and became model citizens, but the hatred toward them only increased, especially when the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers inflamed racial antagonism by trumpeting the dangers of a powerful Japanese presence in the Pacific and an unchecked flow of Asian immigrants who would snatch up the jobs of white workers.

The official voice of the Japanese government remained silent on the matter because most politicians dismissed the anti-Japanese sentiments as hot air from a few extremist newspapers and from the embittered working people who were ignorant of Japan’s advances. But this complacency turned to dismay in 1906 when the animosity thought to be confined to a reactionary minority received a stamp of approval from the San Francisco Board of Education. In October that year, the board passed a resolution to exclude Japanese children from public schools, blatantly violating, it seemed to Japan, the 1894 Japan-America Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with its affirmation of the equality of the two countries and guarantee of free mutual immigration. The Japanese consul at San Francisco lodged a complaint with the Board of Education, and the Japanese ambassador in Washington made a similar appeal to the State Department. In response, E.C. Leffingwell, the unrepentant secretary of the San Francisco Board of Education, wrote to the Japanese consul refusing to rescind the order and calling the consul’s attention to Article 10 of the School Law of California promulgated in 1903: “Trustees shall have the power to exclude all children of filthy or vicious habits or children suffering from contagious or infectious diseases and also to establish separate schools for Indian children and for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent. When such separate schools are established, Indian, Chinese or Mongolian children must not be admitted into any other school.…”[16]

This rhetoric of course only amplified the insult. Japan had clearly demonstrated its superiority by vanquishing Russia on the battlefield, by expanding its sphere of influence to Taiwan and Korea, by making leaps and bounds in the development of modern industry, and by signing international treaties that recognized its parity with Europe and America. It was insufferable, said many Japanese, to be inaccurately labeled “Mongolian” and to be thrown into the same lowly pot with China.

In Washington, Secretary of State Elihu Root promised to consult President Theodore Roosevelt on the subject and predicted that the latter would take up the matter with the authorities in California. While the presidential reaction remained on hold, former prime minister and elder statesman Okuma Shigenobu spoke to a reporter of the Japanese newspaper Jiyu Tsushin, calling the segregation order “most unpleasant news” and expressing Japan’s position in much sharper terms than those used by his minister in Vienna some months earlier:

If the present questions in San Francisco were simply started by selfish laborers it would be quite a light matter; but if the educated classes have endorsed that movement, we must appeal to the righteous spirit of the American people; for the greatness of America in the eyes of humanity and civilization lies in her justice and righteousness. On the contrary if they regard our people — who are contributing to the peace of the Far East allied with our American cousins and by the very Americans who are said to appreciate our alliance with England — to be the same as the Chinese, the thing is too incredible to be taken into serious consideration. In my opinion, President Roosevelt and his Cabinet will surely render justice towards our honor, and I hope that before long the friendly relations of our two countries will be re-established. If not, I must say to the Japanese as a nation we cannot bear injustice from any nation whatever.[17]

The San Francisco Chronicle also abandoned the use of niceties in outlining its stand on the controversy:

The people of California have as friendly a feeling for Japan as for any other nation in the world. They confess that we grossly abused Japan in forcing an entrance into that country, although in the end Japan has greatly profited thereby. But while Japan has doubtless profited by the forcible introduction of Western civilization, we in California are of the opinion that we shall not profit by the introduction of Oriental civilization. We are not opposed to Japanese labor because it is Japanese, or Buddhist, or yellow, but because our own people cannot maintain their own civilization and standard of comfort in contact with it.…While it is true that the workingmen of the United States are a unit in favor of the exclusion of all Oriental coolies, the measure has the most earnest support of all the more thoughtful men who know by observation what Oriental immigration and competition mean. And those who have most respect for Japan and the most admiration of her wonderful progress, and who have noted the results of the contact of the two races, are the most sincere and earnest in their profound conviction that the only way to maintain a permanent friendship between Japan and America is to keep the two races apart.[18]

In the autumn of 1906, the same year that he won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the conflict between Japan and Russia, President Theodore Roosevelt devoted part of his “Message to Congress” to the Japanese problem, praising the Japanese for their military and industrial achievements, calling for tolerance and cooperation, and stating emphatically, with regard to the disorder on the West Coast, that

[i]t is the sure mark of a low civilization, a low morality, to abuse or discriminate against or in any way humiliate a stranger who has come [to the United States] lawfully and who is conducting himself properly.…But here and there a most unworthy feeling has manifested itself toward the Japanese — the feeling that has been shown in shutting them out from the common schools in San Francisco, and in mutterings against them in one or two other places, because of their efficiency as workers. To shut them out from the public schools is a wicked absurdity, when there are no first-class colleges in the land, including the universities and colleges of California, which do not gladly welcome Japanese students and on which Japanese students do not reflect credit. We have as much to learn from Japan as Japan to learn from us; and no nation is fit to teach unless it is also willing to learn. Throughout Japan Americans are well treated, and any failure on the part of Americans at home to treat the Japanese with a like courtesy and consideration is by just so much a confession of inferiority in our civilization.[19]

He then went on to recommend that the laws of the Unites States be amended to give the federal government powers to enforce the rights of foreigners promised by international treaties, and he issued a stern reminder that a mob in one city might be able to act with violence against a certain ethnic minority but could certainly not defend itself if the country thus offended declared war as a result. In February the following year he summoned the mayor of San Francisco and representatives of the city’s board of education to the White House and persuaded them to rescind the segregation order, pledging his personal attention to the immigration question. The same month, the United States and Japan concluded the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and the Japanese government, its ruffled feathers caressed back into place by Roosevelt’s assurances, agreed to deny passports to laborers intending to enter the United States.

4-11. Postcard advertising the American debut (in Italian) of the opera Madame Butterfly (back)

4-12. Postcard advertising the American debut (in Italian) of the opera Madame Butterfly (front)

But no amount of platitudes or rationalization could weed out the deep-rooted prejudice of white Americans, Australians, and British Canadians conditioned to look down upon people of other races. Attacks on Japanese and Chinese businesses and individuals continued in San Francisco and other cities on the west coast, despite the political conciliation. With fears of an armed conflict rising, Okuma Shigenobu again spoke to the press, this time laying blame for the trouble squarely on the American government and delivering a grave warning that “if the authorities concerned continue to commit one fault after another there may be a spontaneous explosion, which might perhaps lead to unfortunate results, even a war.” Then he asked the interviewing reporter:

How can the question be solved? It is not merely a matter of the segregation question, the immigration treaty, and the present disturbances. The entire problem must be solved as to secure that the Japanese shall be treated on an equality with the Europeans. Once this is done all the other difficulties will disappear. By the appointment of an ambassador to Japan, America has recognized the latter as a great and powerful country. Why, then, does she not treat Japanese as if they were the people of such a country. As it is, she treats them as an inferior nation of some inferior country. Such conduct is not compatible with international friendship.[20]

It is one of the most remarkable, albeit little discussed, aspects of the development of Madame Butterfly that the opera’s celebrated American debut — the first performance was a presentation by the English Grand Opera Company at the Columbia Theatre, Washington, D.C., on October 15, 1906[21] — coincided with an unprecedented surge of anti-Japanese feelings in the United States, Canada, and Australia and with the beginning of the psychopolitical face-off that would continue until the explosion of violence at Pearl Harbor in 1941. This apparent contradiction points to an important truth: the people of San Francisco and other American cities who thronged to see Madame Butterfly while their fellow citizens were throwing rocks through Japanese neighbors’ windows found the opera enjoyable and acceptable for the very reason that it portrayed Japan in its innocuous premodern state and that it confirmed the conviction that Japan, however beautiful, faithful, or diligent, will be the loser in any altercation with a “white” nation.

Strategic Gun Port

The expansion and sophistication of the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard was bringing great changes to Cho-Cho-san’s hometown around the turn of the century. Mitsubishi had purchased the shipyard from the Japanese government in 1887 and, with the help of a team of British engineers and naval architects, had worked feverishly to build docks and building berths, to erect factories and install machinery, and to master state-of-the-art shipbuilding techniques. The company was expanding on other fronts as well, spearheading the rapid industrialization of Japan by purchasing mines, buying out foreign competitors, improving industrial facilities, and procuring land for further expansion. One of the more notable properties acquired by the company was the Marunouchi district of Tokyo where the First Mitsubishi Building was completed in 1894. This was followed by a series of other imposing red-brick buildings that transformed the old wood-and-paper neighborhood into a Western-style business district nicknamed Itcho Rondon (“London Block”) and that sparked a rush to build similar bank buildings, government offices, and train stations in urban cores throughout Japan.

4-13. The Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard around 1910.

On April 16, 1898, the 6,000-ton Hitachi-maru slid down the ways at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard amid great fanfare, eliciting applause in the English-language press as “an unprecedented event in the annals of Japanese shipbuilding.” While the new ocean liner anchored in the harbor for finishing touches, a Lloyd’s examiner conducted a formal inspection and later submitted his report to Iwasaki Yanosuke, president of Mitsubishi: “Sir, — With reference to the steel steamer No. 99 now building by the Mitsu Bishi Co. at Nagasaki, with a view to class 100 A-1 [the highest classification for an ocean-going steamship], I have carefully examined the vessel all fore and aft, and I find the workmanship, including the riveting, satisfactory and equal in quality and efficiency to that done in good shipbuilding establishments in the United Kingdom.”[22] Iwasaki probably jumped out of his chair in delight, because this was precisely the assessment that the company, and indeed the entire nation, had been striving for since the awakening of Japan from feudal slumber four decades earlier.

4-14. Postcard showing a Japanese karayuki in Saigon, French Indochina. By this time “Madame Chrysanthème” had clearly become a pronoun for Japanese women in the sex trade. (Courtesy of Suzuki Naomi)

4-15. Postcard showing Japanese karayuki in Saigon, French Indochina. These still-adolescent women are referred to as “mousmé” in keeping with the term coined by Pierre Loti. (Courtesy of Suzuki Naomi)

One of the results of the increased mobility of Japanese in the latter part of the nineteenth century — and the growing fame of Japanese women as sexual companions — was the internationalization of Japanese prostitution and a whole new set of tribulations for the women of tender age obliged to engage in it. Poverty stricken families in villages dotting the Shimabara Peninsula and nearby Amakusa Islands, that in previous years had kept starvation at bay by selling a daughter or two to the Nagasaki flower quarter, began to accept offers from procurers to purchase girls for shipment to Hong Kong, Saigon, Jakarta, Singapore, and as far away as Australia. The ignorant girls left home thinking that they would be employed as maids or nannies, but the majority ended up in houses of ill repute, against their will but with no choice except either to comply or to hang themselves from the nearest rafter. Since they could not leave (or return to) Japan legally, they were almost always smuggled out as stowaways on steamers calling at local ports, particularly Nagasaki and Kuchinotsu on the Shimabara Peninsula. They usually spent the long voyage hiding in poorly ventilated holds and coal bunkers with little food or fresh water and so often died before even reaching their destinations. In one widely reported case in 1890, eight out of twelve stowaways on the Japanese steamship Fushiki-maru were found dead in the ship’s coal bunker, their presence betrayed by the stench of decay, shortly before arrival in Hong Kong.[23]

The young women who traveled overseas instead of entering brothels at home came to be called karayuki (“China-goers”[24]), after the old Nagasaki custom of labeling courtesans associating with foreigners as oranda-yuki (“Holland-goers”) and tōjin-yuki (“Chinaman-goers”). Unlike their Nagasaki forebears, however, the karayuki seldom saw their homeland again or survived beyond the age of retirement from the sex trade. Thousands made the trip until the practice was finally halted by the Japanese government around World War I and condemned, albeit only after the women had made their unsung contribution to this country’s economic development, as a shame upon the nation.[25] Needless to say, the reputation of Japanese women as attractive but submissive sexual companions — a reputation stemming from the cult of Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly — was a vital factor in the demand for the services of karayuki among white residents of Southeast Asia.

For foreign residents of Nagasaki, the most notable event at the turn of the century was the abolition of extraterritorial rights. Ever since the 1850s when military and industrial inferiority gave Japan no choice but to sign disadvantageous agreements with foreign powers, the Japanese government had been yearning to abolish the former treaties and to replace them with diplomatic and economic agreements similar to those concluded among European nations. The foreign concessions of Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama had given Japan an immediate example for its emulation of Western-style industry, business, and justice and for its adoption of all the artifacts of Western culture from sewer pipes to arm chairs, coffee cups, and neckties. But by the 1890s, the extraterritorial rights enjoyed by foreigners and the enclaves of Euro-American culture that they had fenced off for themselves on Japanese soil had become unwanted common points with China and unbearable symbols of this country’s foiled attempts to take a place among the great powers of the world.

In July 1894 the Japanese ambassador to Britain, Aoki Shuzo, succeeded in negotiations with his British counterparts to revise the Anglo-Japanese treaty in force since 1858. Signed in London on July 16, 1894, and effective as of July 17, 1899, the new “Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty” called for an end to extraterritoriality and a restoration of Japan’s right to autonomy in customs tariffs. Britain agreed on the condition that Japan guarantee the rights of British entrepreneurs to travel, live, and do business anywhere they wanted in Japan. Another less explicit motive was British apprehension about the Russian threat in the Far East and the need to maintain a relationship of cooperation with Japan in counteracting it. The revision of the old treaties was soon emulated by the United States, France, and other countries.

Many foreign residents of the treaty ports in Japan were opposed to any change in the status quo because it threatened their long-standing financial and legal privileges and, although few would admit it overtly, jeopardized their cherished sense of superiority, an illusion maintained and nurtured, wherever the tentacles of colonial expansion extended, by keeping the “natives” at bay. Cries of apprehension began to echo in the streets of the foreign concessions soon after the announcement of treaty revisions:

That this uneasiness is not without reason may easily be understood by those who have had any experience of Japanese customs. It has been the fashion, and therefore a stupid conventionality, of late to extol the virtues of Japanese institutions and undoubtedly these are not without their points. But Japan as a nation is still too vexed and restricted in her progress by truly Oriental survivals to be given dominion over Europeans, their lives and properties. By this, it will, we are sure, be understood we do not intend any reproach to the Mikado’s Government, nor do we ignore the humanity of the motives by which the Japanese as a people are generally inspired. But we do hold, and insist, that until the laws and institutions of her land shall have more nearly approximated to our own, British subjects, and for that matter all Europeans, should be permitted to enjoy the boon of extraterritoriality.[26]

During the months leading up to the effectuation in July 1899, the foreign community shuddered on the precipice of change, as reluctant to jump into the same pool with the Japanese nation as swimmers into an arctic lake, a fact that reflects just how little trust had been cultivated in foreign hearts during the four decades of cohabitation and supposed cooperation. The momentous change in Japan’s relationship with the world and in the status of foreigners living in this country arrived on July 17, 1899. At the top of its editorial page, the Nagasaki Press gushed:

To-day, the 17th of July, marks an epoch in the history of Japan, a country that has already surprised the Occident by its wonderful adaptation in so short a time to the modern civilization of the Western world. After years of patient toiling on the part of her able statesmen, Japan to-day enters upon an equal footing with all the Powers, and now holds the proud distinction of being the first Oriental nation to exercise jurisdiction over Occidentals. The old Treaties have ceased to exist, and there is reason to believe that under the new order of things foreigners resident in this country, and those who come after, will have little to fear from the change.[27]

In this same issue of the newspaper, U.S. Minister Alfred E. Buck published a front-page notification calling on American residents of Japan to comply with all the new rules and regulations:

In their relations with the people of this country [American citizens] should show at all times, by their demeanor and by their every act, such sentiments of regard with whom they will necessarily be associated and for all laws, regulations and customs, as will demonstrate that reciprocal friendship reasonably expected of them in response to the kind, considerate and just treatment enjoined on all Japanese subjects by His Imperial Majesty and by the high officials of the Government. The United States was the first of all the Powers to enter into “a Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce,” with Japan. From that time the bonds of friendship uniting the two countries have become stronger with passing years, and it is the duty of all citizens of the United States in this country to see to it that nothing on their part is done to cause reflection upon the people of their nationality.[28]

The disciplinary tone of this notification — and the fact that none of the other foreign ministers or ambassadors felt the need to admonish their subjects in Japan — suggests ironically that Buck feared that his fellow citizens would not adhere to the new letter of the law. Sure enough, the first arrest of a foreigner by Japanese police occurred on July 21, only four days later, and the history-making person was an American sailor, seriously the worse for drink, who damaged a Nagasaki rickshaw, assaulted its driver when asked for compensation, and soon found himself being marched off to the local police station.[29]

Still, despite a few isolated incidents and the grim forecasts made by the diehards who interpreted the new treaties as a humiliating compromise, the transition went so smoothly for most foreign residents that one of them compared it to crossing the equator for the first time when “you expect something to happen, something that will mark the event, but nothing occurs.” About the only negative impact of the treaty revisions was the annoyance of having to apply for business licenses and to register the names of family members at city hall. The perpetual leases on residential and business properties — the so-called “999-year leases” mentioned by John Luther Long — were honored by the Japanese government under the new system, the Japanese laws that foreigners were now obliged to observe were essentially the same as the extraterritorial regulations, and, more than anything else, the ports of Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama continued to ride a wave of prosperity that was high enough to eclipse concerns about the future. Thus, although legally abolished, the Nagasaki foreign concession persisted as an unofficial institution retaining its primarily foreign population, its unique social infrastructure, and its quasi-Western architectural identity. And for the foreigners who lived there, the neighborhoods of Higashiyamate and Minamiyamate continued to provide a safe gray zone neither really in Japan or out, a refuge from both the impenetrable world of Japanese culture and the pigeon holes of life “back home.”

4-16. A foreign family with their Japanese servants in Minamiyamate, Nagasaki, 1909.

One of Nagasaki’s most lucrative sources of income was tourism, a new phenomenon stimulated by the increase in global shipping and the accessibility of the exotic scenes described in Madame Chrysanthème that only a decade earlier had seemed so impossibly distant. On any one day during the warm months at the turn of the century, several thousand people might disembark from ships and pour out into Nagasaki from the quarried steps at the Bund, sailors disappearing into the bars and bowling allies in the back quarters of the foreign concession or stealing into the brothels in Maruyama, Izumo, and Inasa, the others streaming out of the concession into the labyrinth of narrow streets in the Japanese town, eddying in the studio of pioneer photographer Ueno Hikoma and reaching out in adventurous trickles to Suwa Shinto Shrine, the Buddhist temples in Teramachi and the still pristine countryside in Urakami and Tomachi. In the shops the visitors could choose from an array of beautiful arts and crafts like tortoiseshell ware, silver dragon spoons, Nagasaki embroidery, Arita porcelain, ukiyoe prints, and lacquerware. Silk kimono, pearl necklaces, souvenir photograph albums, and picture postcards sold so quickly that the shop owners could barely keep their showcases decorated, and jinrikisha drivers became so proficient at pidgin English that they were able to serve as guides for tourists while at the same time continuing their traditional sideline as pimps for lustful sailors following in the well-trodden footsteps of Pierre Loti.

4-17. Jinrikisha in Motokago-machi, a Nagasaki shopping street popular among foreign visitors.

But the implications of the new treaties were by no means lost on Japanese leaders watching global affairs from their perch in Tokyo. In August 1899, only days after the abolition of the foreign concessions, the Japanese government promulgated the Strategic Zone Law and designated Nagasaki as the center of a high-security area because of its close proximity to the continent. As a result, a battalion of the Sasebo Fortress Artillery Regiment moved permanently to the Takenokubo neighborhood of the city under the name Nagasaki Yōsai Shireibu (Nagasaki Fortress Headquarters), and a strict ban was imposed on measurement and photography of the city, harbor, and environs. Unbeknownst to most outside observers, the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard also began to undertake orders from the Imperial Navy to design and build ships of war, an enterprise that would gather momentum in subsequent years until culminating in the construction of the world’s most formidable battleship, the Musashi, on the eve of World War II.[30]

4-18. The battleship Kirishima receives final touches at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard in 1913. This is one of the last photographs of the shipyard and harbor allowed publication prior to World War II.

One of the foreigners to comment on Nagasaki’s change of atmosphere was none other than Pierre Loti. In La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune, an account of his second stay here during a 1901 tour of the Far East on the French warship Redoubtable, Loti expresses regret over the increased presence of Japanese military forces, the proliferation of imports such as whisky, suit coats, and chairs, and the ongoing loss of what he considered the “true face” of Japanese culture. At one point he relates how, during a stroll in the Motokago-machi shopping street with his comrades, he came upon a skirmish between two French officers and a group of Japanese merchants. It seemed that one of the officers had kicked a dog belonging to a local resident and the Japanese had set upon the Frenchmen to vent, in Loti’s words, a “need for national revenge upon two strangers.” No blows were exchanged, but all the French officers including Loti were “dragged off to the station by a squad of police, just as happened last week to the officers of another European fleet.” Loti proceeds to condemn the Japanese for their hatred of Caucasians, tacking on a vicious and entirely irrelevant racial slur: This little people, arrogant and full of mystery, hides, under a gracious exterior, a savage hatred of men of the white races. Could one so much as imagine that one of their grounds for jealousy of the Europeans is that they themselves cannot, because of their flat faces, wear pince-nez! So their dandies are the more determined to wear them, even if they have no need of them, supposing they can discover in the middle of their faces a suspicion of anything sufficient to perch them upon.[31]

Now we see Pierre Loti, the renowned “romantic escapist” and author of Madame Chrysanthème, in a starker and far less sympathetic light. But Loti was certainly not the only one making comments like this. His churlishness is better understood as the manifestation of a general, mutual disenchantment, expressed on the foreign side as disappointment over the littering of old Japan with telephone poles, factory chimneys, and other modern accouterments and the rapid disappearance of the economic advantage that in previous decades had allowed the rank-and-file to live like nobility; and on the Japanese side as disillusionment with the dream of “modernization” and unwillingness to continue any longer in the role of servant and student of Western civilization or to bend compliantly to foreign designs in the Far East.

For the first few years after the turn of the century, Nagasaki was prosperous enough as a trade port, coaling station, and shipbuilding center to laugh off a few scuffles with foreign sailors, but as soon as war broke out between Japan and Russia in February 1904, the Japanese government imposed martial law on the city because of its proximity to the theater of war, and military forces established checkpoints at key locations, laid mines at   the entrance to the harbor, and monitored all maritime traffic. In the ensuing months the city fell into a deep economic slump as a result of the suspension of commercial shipping. Companies run by Russians or involved    in business with Russia, such as N. Mess & Co. and the Russo-Chinese Bank, closed their Nagasaki offices or transferred their agencies to British firms. Hotel rooms, restaurant tables, and bar counters in the former foreign concession meanwhile lay vacant, and the flow of business in the Japanese town froze up under the constraints of martial law and the added burden of war  taxes.

The depression in Nagasaki’s business activity during and following the Russo-Japanese War, coupled with the soaring cost of living in Japan, precipitated an exodus of foreign residents. The author of an article entitled “The Decline of Nagasaki” in the March 19, 1908, issue of the Japan Weekly Chronicle, an English newspaper in Kobe, commented on the trend as follows:

The next few weeks will witness the departure of no fewer than 35 foreign residents of Nagasaki. Of these not more than eleven are going on furlough, so that none of the others are expected to return. Two of the best-known of those that are leaving for good are Mr. John H. Shaw and Mr. Clark, who have just severed their long connection with the Mitsu Bishi Shipbuilding Yards. Considering the recent advances that have been made there under their supervision it is not easy to see how their services can be dispensed with; but this is probably one more indication of the movement in Japan towards doing without the assistance of foreign experts in modern industries.[32]

The author goes on to blame the problem on Nagasaki customs officials, who he says insist on opening and inspecting all the luggage of passengers in transit and thus discourage people from landing. This was not a new complaint. Foreigners had been groaning as early as the 1870s about how the customs officials inspected and stamped every last article of luggage and cargo passing through the port. As a way to dissuade them from wielding the stamp, one person had even suggested importing “something a trifle more vicious, say a little alligator, a small tiger or a few young rattlesnakes.”[33] But of course the reasons for Nagasaki’s troubles ran much deeper than irritations at the waterfront. However inconspicuously, Cho-Cho-san’s hometown was changing from a commercial and cultural “window to the world” to a strategic gun port and shipbuilding center as Japan stepped up its efforts to establish itself as the foremost imperial presence in East Asia and to win the elusive goal of parity with the developed countries of Europe and North America.

5

Prima Donna Miura Tamaki and Nagasaki’s Journey to Hell

Strangely Beautiful Decline

Germany and the other Central Powers surrendered in the autumn of 1918, bringing World War I to a close. Representatives of the victorious Allied countries gathered in Paris early the following year to pick up the broken pieces of Europe and, sickened like everyone else by the huge loss of life and destruction of property caused by the war, to lay the framework for an organization called the “League of Nations” that would serve as a forum for international dialogue and thus prevent a repetition of the horrors of the past four years. During the discussions for this new organization, Japan resurrected its old grudge about racial discrimination, insisting that the new body could not succeed without an affirmation of human equality. The idea was summarily rejected by most of the representatives and disappeared from the conference agenda before even coming to a vote. For Japan, the rejection was another in a series of doors slammed in its face by the “white nations”; for the countries that protested, it was a safety latch on the flood gate of Asian immigration and also, perhaps, an indication of mistrust in Japan’s own commitment to human equality.

The wounds of World War I were still healing in January 1921 when a large group of Japanese residents of Nagasaki, including the prefecture governor, mayor, chairman of the local chamber of commerce, and representatives of “every section of the Japanese official, professional, commercial and industrial communities of this port” invited their counterparts in the foreign community to an evening of entertainment at the posh Japanese restaurant Koyotei. The guests included the consuls of each country and dozens of prominent foreign residents. The governor made the first address at the outset of the festivities, saying in English that, “Nagasaki is, as you know, the oldest port in Japan for foreign trade and partly owes her present prosperity to the foreign peoples who are in amicable relations with us. I hope that the intimate relations hitherto existing between us will become closer and closer as time progresses.” Alexandr Maximov, the Russian consul and elder among his colleagues, responded with thanks and a comment about the world situation affecting Nagasaki: “The year begins amid doubts and uncertainty. The future of the whole world is dark, clouds are heaped up on the horizon.…We are in great want of better times, of a new year bringing really new welfare, new and firm assurances of prosperity and happiness, new forces and strong activities in the realm of peace and friendliness.” After this the participants enjoyed traditional Japanese cuisine and entertainment and completed the evening in a mood of fun and laughter with a game of “musical futons,” the cushions being used in lieu of chairs.[1]

The foreigners who participated in this party were obviously touched by the show of goodwill because, only two weeks later, they organized a reciprocal event in the dining room of a large hotel in the former foreign concession. Tables were joined to allow six or seven people to sit together, each table being named after a flower that was placed as a centerpiece. An exchange of greetings similar to that of the Japanese party ensued, and afterwards the group moved to the Nagasaki Club, another institution in the former foreign concession, for cigars and liqueur. The Nagasaki Press reported the party in detail three days later, commenting that “it was a very happy evening, especially as the language difficulty was not very pronounced, most of the guests speaking English.” The article also mentions that most of the work in preparation for the event was done by American consul Raymond S. Curtice and the British-Japanese entrepreneur Kuraba Tomisaburo.[2]

These displays of goodwill between the Japanese and foreign communities of Nagasaki may have enhanced the atmosphere of friendship but they did little to halt the city’s declining fortunes as a trade port and business center. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had brought foreign trade to a virtual standstill, and the enforcement of martial law and stationing of troops had assigned the city a role in the Japanese military machine that permanently changed its economic underpinnings. This role was filled in large part by Mitsubishi, which accepted orders from the Imperial Navy for the construction of warships and established a succession of related manufacturing facilities in the city, one of them being the “Mitsubishi Nagasaki Arms Factory” established in the northern suburb of Mori-machi in March 1917 and welcomed into existence as the first and only civilian weapons factory in Japan.[3] However, for the very reason that military-related projects predominated in Mitsubishi’s facilities here, the increasing world cry for peace and disarmament and particularly the ongoing negotiations for a naval limitation treaty were, as the Russian consul pointed out, heaping dark clouds on the Nagasaki horizon.

On August 22, 1921, the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard launched its most sophisticated creation to date — the super dreadnaught Tosa, named after the home province of Mitsubishi’s Iwasaki family. Members of the imperial family, high-ranking government officials, the foreign consuls in Nagasaki, and a large number of ordinary citizens attended the launching ceremony. The American consul at the time was none other than Irvin C. Correll, son of former Nagasaki residents Irvin and Jennie Correll and nephew of John Luther Long, author of Madame Butterfly. Correll had replaced Raymond Curtice earlier in the year and had settled into the American Consulate, not likely failing to note that he was filling the shoes of Mr. Sharpless in his uncle’s famous story.

The launching of the Tosa was celebrated with the usual fanfare — flags of all nations, brass band, champagne, military salutes, congratulatory speeches — but the mood of the Nagasaki participants was anything but jubilant because of the already widely recognized likelihood that the Washington Naval Treaty would demand the destruction of the new battleship. Sure enough, the treaty signed by Japan, France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States on February 6, 1922, tagged the Tosa and a number of other ships to be scrapped. This agreement was welcomed by a majority of Japanese as a relief from the burden of military expenditures and an opportunity to shape a new lifestyle characterized by international cooperation and greater individual rights and freedoms. For Nagasaki, however, the terms hammered out in Washington had a devastating effect. The number of laborers employed in the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard and affiliated factories, always an accurate index of the city’s economic well-being, plummeted from 18,008 in 1921 to only 7,716 in 1925,[4] throwing the entire city including of course the former foreign concession into an unprecedented depression.

Ironically enough, it was just when Nagasaki was wallowing in its worst economic slump and seeing fewer foreigners on its streets than ever that the city began to capture the imagination of Japanese artists and writers interested in its ikoku jōcho (“exotic atmosphere”) and history of international exchange. The renowned artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) was among them. Takehisa gained fame in the post-Russo-Japanese War period for his modernistic illustrations, particularly his dreamy portraits of Europeanized Japanese women and children that seemed to symbolize the new Japan embracing Western civilization. His works graced the covers of magazines and books throughout the country and epitomized the lighthearted, fashion-conscious tone of the interlude known today as “Taisho romanticism.” After a prolonged visit to Nagasaki in the summer of 1918, Takehisa published Nagasaki Jūnikei (“Twelve Scenes of Nagasaki”), a series of watercolors that skillfully evoke this city’s cosmopolitan and slightly decadent atmosphere. As with other Nagasaki paintings, novels, and songs of this period, however, the artist clearly garnered inspiration not from the gleam of a busy international port but from the afterglow of a once prosperous town in sad but strangely beautiful decline. Moreover, some of the watercolors are so reminiscent of the cult of Pierre Loti and John Luther Long that Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly seem to have been part of the cultural detritus from which Takehisa gathered ideas. This is particularly evident in Keshōdai (“The Dressing Table”), a risqué portrait of a Japanese woman undressing in front of a foreign navy officer in a room overlooking Nagasaki Harbor.

The “Twelve Scenes of Nagasaki” certainly indicate a willingness on Takehisa’s part to accept and romanticize the permeation of Japanese culture with Western artifacts, including the tales of illicit relationships between foreign men and Japanese women that frequented European and American literature in the slipstream of Pierre Loti’s travel essay. But, in the end, Takehisa’s vision turned out to be just as empty as Japan’s wish to take a place among the world powers. In 1931 he traveled to California and opened an art studio in Carmel, confident that his unique eclectic style would be as appealing to Americans as it had been to Japanese. Much to his chagrin, however, he failed to sell his works or to win recognition, and he returned to Japan via Europe in 1933, his dreams shattered and health ruined; he died the following year in a sanatorium in Nagano Prefecture. Takehisa’s diary of the California sojourn brims with his disappointment over life in America and over the culture that had fascinated him so deeply before. He reveals the depths of his disenchantment in one particularly sardonic comment, perhaps written while thinking wistfully about moon-viewing parties and poetry readings in Japan: “What a stupid moon! The California moon just hangs like a rotten melon over the bald mountains, doing nothing. Nobody even stops to look at it. Nobody says ‘encore,’ and still it comes up into the sky. What a stupid, stupid moon.”[5] The “stupid moon” is, of course, a biting metaphor for Takehisa himself and for Japan in its turbulent relationship with the United States.

Miura Tamaki and Nagasaki

When Rosina Storchio and the other players in the first production of Madama Butterfly were booed off the stage at Milan’s Teatro della Scala that catastrophic evening in February 1904, Giacomo Puccini and his collaborators resolved to prevent a repetition of the disaster by weeding out any aspect of the opera that invited audience displeasure. One of the problems in the early performances was the often glaring disparity between the image of a delicate fifteen-year-old Japanese girl and the physical reality of the broad-shouldered, big-bosomed Italian and Hungarian singers who filled the lead role. Much to the delight of the composer and the directors of later productions in Europe and North America, a solution to this problem appeared little more than a decade after the opera’s debut in the form of Japanese soprano Miura Tamaki.

5-1. Keshōdai (The Dressing Table), one of the “Twelve Scenes of Nagasaki” by Takehisa Yumeji. The painting evokes an image reminiscent of Madame Butterfly, except that it depicts the Japanese woman in Western rather than traditional Japanese attire. (Kawamura Collection)

The daughter of a wealthy Tokyo lawyer, Miura Tamaki (1884–1946, née Shibata) studied at the prestigious women’s school Tokyo Kogakkan and joined in a traditional marriage at the young age of sixteen, agreeing to the arrangement, it is said, on the condition that she be allowed to enter the Tokyo Conservatory and study singing. This she did the same year, quickly winning recognition for her strong, sweet voice and ability with foreign lyrics. She also earned space on the pages of Tokyo newspapers as the jitensha bijin (“bicycle beauty”), a tribute to her good looks, Western leanings, and affluent upbringing that gave her a first taste of the publicity that would surround her in later years. In 1903, at the age of nineteen, she was chosen to fill the leading role in a performance of Orpheus at Sogakudo in Tokyo, an event that marked both the blooming soprano’s debut and Japan’s first full-length opera. Four years later she accepted the position of assistant professor at the Tokyo Conservatory, creating a candle-at-both-ends situation that soon led to divorce because she refused to tow the conventional line of housewife. The bicycle beauty remarried in 1909, this time to a promising young medical scientist named Miura Seitaro. In 1912 she accompanied her husband to Singapore, where he worked as the resident physician on a rubber plantation and saved money to fulfil his dream of studying in Germany. This dream was realized in 1914, but the outbreak of World War I forced the young couple to leave Germany and to proceed to England. Seitaro enrolled in London University and began the study of vitamins.

Tamaki meanwhile knocked at the door of the composer Sir Henry Wood, hoping to bolster her husband’s delicate finances by obtaining work as a singer, and she impressed him so much in an audition that he invited her to sing in a concert at Albert Hall in October 1914. This was received with great enthusiasm and resulted in requests for further performances. Then in May 1915, as though fulfilling some predestination, she played the lead role in Madame Butterfly for the first time.[6] After that there was no turning back. Sought out by opera producer Max Rabinoff, she agreed to visit the United States in the autumn of the same year to play Cho-Cho-san in a tour of American and Canadian cities by the Boston Grand Opera Company. Laudatory reviews led to further invitations to sing in the great theaters of the United States and Europe, firmly establishing her as the world’s foremost interpreter of Cho-Cho-san and contributing significantly to the perpetuation of the opera’s popularity. Reported the New York Times after a performance at the Lexington Theater in January 1919:

Not to have seen Mme. Miura as Cio-Cio-San is to have missed something unique in the most seasoned opera-goer’s experience, something that brings back the real Japan to those who’ve been there and come West, “homesick forever,” as Mark Twain wrote of some nearer Pacific isles in the sunny days of “Roughing It.” She has always lived rather than acted the part, a creation in her case of vital imagination, fired by passionate artistic enthusiasm, that has won in five years here a wider public than any Western woman who sings the role. A big, brilliant audience gave the little Nippon beauty a great ovation at every curtain.[7]

In an interview in New York a short time later, Miura attributed her success in the lead role of Madame Butterfly to the fact that “she is a Japanese heroine and I am a Japanese artist and have the figure and also an understanding of the part from the racial angle which, perhaps, no other singer can claim to have. I do not have to imagine how poor Butterfly feels, I really know.”[8]

Although audiences and opera critics noticed only Miura Takaki’s great talent and physical presence on stage, her rise to stardom had been facilitated by her inherent financial advantage and by the remarkable understanding of her husband. After moving to the United States, Miura Seitaro not only allowed his wife to pursue a stage career (not a particularly respected occupation in Japan at the time) but even put his research at Yale University on hold to serve as her companion and road manager, inviting scorn from other Japanese residents of the United States for his “unmanliness.” Eventually, however, the two careers veered apart, Tamaki continuing to appear in as many as one hundred opera performances a year in the United States, Europe, and South America and Seitaro returning to an academic post in Japan.[9]

5-2. Miura Tamaki as Cho-Cho-san. The singer signed the picture postcard in both Japanese and English.

5-3. Publicity photo of Miura Tamaki from “The Japanese Peril in Music,” Musical America, March 15, 1919.

Giacomo Puccini heard Miura Tamaki’s Cho-Cho-san for the first time at a 1920 performance of Madama Butterfly in Rome. Dazzled by it, he called at the prima donna’s dressing room and invited her to visit Torre del Lago the following day, enlisting his son Antonio to drive her from Rome to the lakeside villa.[10] Puccini showed Miura the piano upon which he had composed Madame Butterfly and other paraphernalia related to the opera. He also explained how he had woven a number of Japanese pieces such as “Kimigayo” (the Japanese national anthem), “Miyasan Miyasan,” and “Echigo Jishi” into the arias. He had encountered these melodies, he said, while listening to recordings of Japanese music and through the tutorship of Oyama (Ohyama) Hisako, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to Italy at the time. About Miura’s performance of the previous day, Puccini gushed: “When I heard your ‘Madame Butterfly,’ I did not hear you singing Mrs. Miura; I felt that the ideal Cho-Cho-san — the Cho-Cho-san that I have etched in my heart — appeared on stage.”[11]

In April 1922, after a long tour of performances at theaters in Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Florence, and Rome, Miura Tamaki returned to Japan with her Italian pianist and rumored lover Aldo Franchetti, and in June the same year the pair visited Nagasaki. For both it was a first, and, as it would turn out, only visit to the setting of the opera with which Miura Tamaki was now so closely linked.

The local English newspaper Nagasaki Press responded to the arrival of the famous prima donna with a long article entitled “Madame Butterfly at Nagasaki.” The newspaper’s coverage includes the complete program of the concert that Miura and Franchetti gave here on June 2, a lengthy “appreciation” by an unnamed contributor, and a letter-to-the-editor from a foreigner complaining that he had been seated next to the washroom at the Minamiza Theater and therefore was unable to enjoy himself because of the smell. The newspaper seldom devoted so much space to a single story.

Although hailed as “Madame Butterfly,” Miura actually sang only two pieces from the opera. The rest of the program was devoted to European and Japanese popular songs. According to the writer of the above appreciation, “All her songs were charmingly rendered, but, as is only natural, the Japanese songs became her best and she sang them with the rich delicacy of tone of a great singer accompanied by the gracefulness of movement which is peculiarly Japanese.…The grandest item of the evening was undoubtedly the aria from ‘Madame Butterfly,’ which was sung to perfection and followed by the final song from the same opera. Madame Miura wore a European dress during the first half of the Programme, but after the interval she changed into her native costume, so that she fully looked the part of ‘Butterfly.’”[12]

During the interval, Aldo Franchetti addressed the audience with the interpretation of local scholar Muto Chozo, expressing thanks for the warm response and pointing out that, “‘Madame Butterfly’ (the opera in which Madame Miura has made a name in Europe, America, and other parts of the world) belongs essentially to Nagasaki, the story being woven around the port and the scenery taken from 14, Minami Yamate [sic]. The story was written by an uncle of the present American consul of Nagasaki, Mr. Correll. It was later put to music by Giacomo Puccini.”[13]

As Franchetti told the audience, Irvin C. Correll was still serving as American consul in Nagasaki when Miura Tamaki visited this city in 1922. By coincidence, his mother Jennie Correll was also in Nagasaki at the time. The Corrells were introduced to Miura and Franchetti, and on the morning of the concert, the group, clearly at the request of Miura Tamaki, embarked on an excursion to Nagasaki sites connected with the opera. The excursion was reported in the Nagasaki Press as follows:

On Friday morning Madame Miura, Mrs. Correll, and Mr. and Mrs. I.C. Correll, accompanied by Professor Muto, paid a visit to 14, Minamiyamate, the residence of Mrs. Ringer, which was formerly the residence of the United States Consuls at Nagasaki and figures largely in the pathetic story of “Madame Butterfly.” Photographs were taken which will be very interesting souvenirs of the opera and Madame Miura’s visit to Nagasaki.[14]

5-4. (Left to right) Muto Chozo, Aldo Franchetti, Miura Tamaki and Jennie Correll (the woman in the rear is unidentified) during Miura’s June 1922 visit to Nagasaki. The group posed in front of the former Alt House at No. 14 Minamiyamate because it had been the U.S. Consulate during Mrs. Correll’s Nagasaki sojourn in the 1890s. (Nagasaki City Hall)

The gracious bungalow of wood and stone at No. 14 Minamiyamate, overlooking Nagasaki Harbor in the former foreign concession, was built in 1865 by the British merchant-adventurer William J. Alt, and after his departure a few years later it served as a school building and then as a residence for a succession of foreign residents.[15] Its tenure as the residence and office of the American consul to Nagasaki, William H. Abercrombie, extended from September 1893 to January 1898,[16] a period that closely overlaps the Nagasaki sojourn of Jennie and Irvin Correll.

5-5. The former Alt House as it looks today.

Nothing, of course, has been found in consular reports to indicate a visit to the consulate by a young woman named “Cho-Cho” or any other occurrence that might have inspired the tale of Madame Butterfly, but it is interesting nevertheless that Jennie Correll — the one person aside from the author himself who knew best about the background of the story — took Miura Tamaki to the former Alt house, and apparently nowhere else, when the soprano asked to see sites connected with the opera. John Luther Long’s original story reaches a climax when Cho-Cho-san meets Mrs. Pinkerton at the consulate and realizes that her lover has married an American woman. This scene, however, is absent in the opera: the entire plot unfolds in and around the house that Pinkerton rented on “Higashi Hill.” In both the story and the opera, moreover, it is not the consulate but the house — the place where Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-san make love, where Cho-Cho-san waits with unbending faith for months and years, and where in despair she grasps a sword to end her life — that serves as a stage for the drama that makes Madame Butterfly so enduringly popular.

In her speech to the Pan-Pacific Club in Tokyo nine years later, Jennie Correll would say: “Now on the other hill was a dear little teahouse girl living, as pretty as a picture, and her name was Cho-san. No one had ever said anything against her, and she was sweet and pretty and everyone liked her. But after a little while we learned she had a lover.…” This statement, if accepted as proof that there was in fact a real-life model for Madame Butterfly, shows that Correll knew at least the approximate location of the house where the “little teahouse girl” had been living. Why, then, did she not take Miura there? And why did the itinerary not include the former Correll residence at No. 12 Higashiyamate or at least some part of the Higashiyamate neighborhood, which had obviously been the source of the “Higashi Hill” of the story?

No one but Jennie Correll can answer these questions conclusively, but the facts reported in the Nagasaki Press suggest that both Correll and Miura Tamaki were fully aware that there was no “flowery refuge” in real-life Nagasaki and that the house at No. 14 Minamiyamate — as the former American Consulate — was the only artifact in the city that could approach the content of the fictional story, or, as Aldo Franchetti pointed out in his intermission speech, provide “scenery” for the opera. This may also explain why Correll said in the 1931 speech that the unfortunate girl had been living on “the other hill,” which, since the Corrells lived in Higashiyamate, seems to refer to the Minamiyamate neighborhood across Oura Valley. That is, in her unfocused way, Mrs. Correll may have been referring to the former Alt House in Minamiyamate and perhaps even to the visit she paid there with Miura Tamaki in 1922 when she said, “Now on the other hill was a dear little teahouse girl living, as pretty as a picture, and her name was Cho-san.…”

Another interesting fact about the 1922 visit of Miura Tamaki to Nagasaki is that while the English-language Nagasaki Press covered it in great detail, the Japanese newspapers in the city virtually ignored it. This disparity between the coverage in the two media reveals that the opera Madame Butterfly, however popular in Europe and America, still had a long way to go before sounding any high notes in Japanese hearts.

Puccini’s famous opera may in fact have elicited feelings quite the opposite of interest or appreciation. The Japanese reaction to Western opera set in Japan is indicated by the widely reported protests against British performances of the Gilbert & Sullivan farce The Mikado in 1907. In an interview in London that year, Baron Kikuchi Dairoku, former Tokyo University president and Japanese minister of education, expressed the Japanese position as follows:

Of course, the play is an old one, and was written, I suppose, before our China war, when the general impression seemed to be that Japan was not a country to be treated seriously. A Japanese who had never been out of his country before would probably be more hurt at seeing a matter which is almost a religious one treated in so light a manner. The Mikado is a subject of which our conception is almost sacred, and to see him represented as a figure for buffoonery is obviously one which would not be pleasing.[17]

Madame Butterfly did not offer insult to any cherished institution, nor were interpretations of it banned in this country. But the glorification of a prostitute’s illicit relationship with a foreigner (a custom with which Japanese people were all too familiar at the time), the archaic images paraded across the stage, the confusion of Chinese and Japanese artifacts in costumes and sets, the degrading portrayal of male characters, and Puccini’s use of the Japanese national anthem to embellish a scene in which the pimp Goro appears on stage were hardly likely to make a favorable impression. The fact is that producers found it all but impossible to please a Japanese audience without adding native entertainment or altering the many parts of the opera that veered from the truth.[18] The early Japanese reaction to foreign productions of Madame Butterfly, in short, was similar to the reaction of Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling to early attempts by Japanese to imitate European customs: disdain.

5-6. Miura Tamaki on the playbill of a 1924 performance of Madame Butterfly in Illinois.

Miura Tamaki would go on to carve a permanent niche in Japanese history as one of this country’s great modern singers. But the reality of her position in prewar Japan is that most of the admiration and notoriety she enjoyed among her compatriots was due, not to her skillful portrayal of Cho-Cho-san, but to her stunning success in a field restricted previously to Westerners.

National Dishonor Day

In 1924 the American Congress passed a bill to completely suspend Japanese immigration to the United States. Traditionally, the United States and Canada had been “open,” meaning that any member of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” could come and make a new start there. But when unemployment and housing shortages increased after World War I, public opinion tipped heavily in favor of limitations on immigration, and the racial intolerance already brewing for decades on the west coast boiled over and spilled across the continent. First came the Quota Act of 1921 imposing an annual quota on the number of immigrants. Based on a set percentage of immigrants from each country already resident in the United States, this law came up for renewal in 1924, and during deliberations in Congress a proposal was presented for the exclusion of all persons ineligible for naturalization, meaning non-white “Asiatics.” When he heard about the proposal, the Japanese ambassador to the United States sent a letter to Congress warning of “grave consequences” if a policy of Japanese exclusion was adopted, a rash turn of phrase that only excited the indignation of many senators. The legislation, by then widely known by its nickname “the Japanese exclusion bill,” was passed by an overwhelming majority on April 18 and approved by President Calvin Coolidge on May 26.

The news from Washington caused an eruption of anger and dismay in Japan. Official and private Japanese organizations ranging from the Imperial Educational Society to the Federation of Naval Labor of Yokosuka and Association of Christian Churches in Japan issued protests. People throughout the country joined in demonstrations, parades, and public meetings to denounce the bill. Newspapers trumpeted outrage over the insult to Japanese honor and condemned it as the last straw in a long line of broken promises, unfair treaties, and racial slurs. Public address systems rattled with cries for the permanent designation of May 26 as “National Dishonor Day,” for boycotts on American goods, and for a ban on American literature and the Hollywood movies recently in vogue. Said the editor of the Japanese newspaper Yamato:

It may be argued that thoughts of the Presidential election and party strife and lust for power entered largely into the motives of the American Congress in passing the bill, but in [our] opinion, the underlying motive is racial prejudice. It is impossible to go to people obsessed with such bigoted views for the vindication of international justice. The Japanese people have been spat upon by the Americans. How can they possibly submit to such insulting treatment? It is, of course, Japan’s sincere desire to settle the trouble by pacific means, but there are limits to everything. The Japanese people are confronted by a very serious issue affecting their national honour, and it is for them to consider deeply and carefully how to shape their course.[19]

Popular opinion about how to “shape their course” was mostly moderate in tone, as expressed by the director of the Nagasaki Higher School of Commerce at a public meeting here when he said, “the Japanese people should persevere and strive to attain real power, economically, politically, and in military affairs, but particularly in economics, while conducting their relations with foreign countries in such a way as to win the respect of other nations.”[20] But the exclusion order helped to fan the already smoldering fire of ultranationalism and to give a confident new voice to militant activists trying to chastise the “spineless” statesmen and scholars of Japan and to purge Japan of the degrading influence of Western culture. In one incident, a group of patriots entered the ballroom at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and shouted “admirers of vulgar and indecent Western dances ignore Bushido [the “Way of the Samurai”] and endanger the Empire,” then brandished swords and performed a traditional Japanese dance. While this was going on, about twenty of their colleagues burst into the room dressed like samurai, cried “Attack the United States” and ordered the orchestra to play the Japanese national anthem.[21] No one was harmed, but from this time forward the campaign to suppress Western influence and to restore the “spirit of Japan” steadily gained momentum.

The resentment provoked by the exclusion order could only work in the converse direction of exciting a hatred for foreigners. Insulted, exasperated, and revengeful, many Japanese began to subscribe to the opinion that the Americans and British were not friends to be made or emulated but enemies to be brought to their knees. If Japan could not gain entry to the party of the white nations by fellowship and invitation, some concluded, then it should crash through the back door with military force. Said the Yamato: “The day of reckoning has arrived for the aggression of the White peoples which has been rampant since the closing days of the 18th century. It is high time that not only the British and American peoples but all the White peoples were rid of the illusion that the coloured races are doomed to be controlled and that the East is designed for their aggression.”[22]

Professor Uesugi Shinkichi of Tokyo Imperial University, for one, advocated the convention of a conference of all the non-white races in Tokyo “to discuss ways and means of firmly establishing the principles of true justice and humanity,” and he called on the people of his own country “to foster a sound national spirit at home and to work for a strong combination of all colored peoples abroad.”[23] These appeals for solidarity rang hollow, however, because, as the Japan Chronicle acidly pointed out,

the one thing that Japan has been demanding of America is treatment different from that accorded to China. If there had been any inclination to say in the past, “You exclude our brother the Chinese, you may as well exclude us,” the present outburst of regard for the fellow-Asiatic would be quite impressive. But Japan has so long been demanding a place in the international parlour among those insisted on keeping China in the servants’ hall, that the change — although it began as long as a year ago — comes with rather bad grace.[24]

Westerners living in Japan at the time of these convulsions naturally found themselves in an awkward position. If Japanese are barred from the United States and forbidden to own land there, many of their Japanese neighbors asked, why are Americans allowed to come and stay in Japan? In July 1924, only weeks after the exclusion order, the Japanese government passed a law calling for a heavy tariff on “luxury items” imported from abroad, meaning commodities such as English tea, cheese, and soap. Although championed as a way to offset the country’s deepening financial troubles, the legislation reeked of retaliation because foreign merchants were the prime victims of the tariff. The foreign communities of Kobe and Yokohama let out a rather sheepish cry of protest, but it was clear to all that Japan’s romance with the West was faltering and that its patience with foreigners was wearing dangerously thin.

As on previous occasions when insults from abroad aroused Japanese anger, the Christian missionaries resident throughout the country were among the prime scapegoats. In view of their extensive interests here, the various American-based Protestant churches had vehemently supported Japan during the exclusion crisis and made valiant efforts to prop up the crumbling dike of credibility. But one barb after another came flying their way from nationalist organizations and right-wing newspapers. In an erudite article entitled “Christendom and Heathendom,” journalist and super-patriot Tokutomi Soho lashes out at the hypocrisy of Americans in advocating Christian principles while upholding a policy of racial discrimination:

The passing of the anti-Japanese Immigration Bill through the American Congress is the most eloquent proof of the extent to which the great Christian principles of universal brotherhood and mutual human love are acted upon in Christian countries. After what has happened in America, I wonder how the so-called missionaries, particularly those sent from America, can have the face to stay in Japan.…I wonder whether the Japanese Christians still regard the present anti-Japanese attitude of America as the outcome of universal brotherhood and mutual human love, and are ready to acclaim it, or whether they are prepared to do their best in the cause of justice and in pursuance of the Christian principles. Religious history abounds in cases where men have risked their lives in their fight against autocracy, oppression, iniquity and inhumanity. Luther, Knox and Bunyan are a few examples among many. I am on the tip-toe of expectation for a Japanese Christian who will raise cries of just protest against America, who arrogates to herself the name of a Christian country.[25]

Tokutomi may have been thinking of Nagasaki when he delivered this chilly message because it had (and still has) by far the highest concentration of Christians in Japan. His demand that his countrymen choose between adherence to the tenets of a foreign god and allegiance to the cause of Japanese honor was ominously reminiscent of the ultimatum dictated to Christian peasants when persecutions rocked this city in the early seventeenth century. But although Nagasaki had seen public meetings and parades to denounce the exclusion bill, the fact that these exerted little negative effect on the position of American missionaries is shown by the fact that an entourage of Nagasaki officials, including the mayor and governor, filed down to the waterfront on July 7, 1924, to bid farewell to R.N. Scott, principle of the American Methodist mission school Chinzei Gakuin and a successor to Irvin Correll, when he left Japan on furlough. It is also noteworthy that, despite the animosity toward the United States whirling through Japan in 1924, Nagasaki politicians and civil servants assisted Chinzei Gakuin in acquiring government-owned land in Takenokubomachi for relocation of the school.[26]

5-7. Cover of the sheet music for the 1928 jazz song Nagasaki.

Wicky Wacky Woo

Harry Warren (1893–1981), composer of immortal jazz numbers like Chattanooga Choo Choo and The More I See You, was born Salvatore Anthony Guaragna in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Italian immigrants. A self-taught musician, he did odd jobs in a circus and movie studio before serving in the navy for about a year in 1917. It was around the time of military service that he began writing songs, the first of which, although now lost, is said to be a number entitled How Would You Like To Be A Sailor. In 1922 his song Rose of the Rio Grande became the first of many hits and established his position as one of the musical trend-setters of the roaring twenties. In 1928, four years after the eruption of anti-American feelings in Japan over the ban on Japanese immigration, he joined with lyricist Mort Dixon in composing a foxtrot entitled Nagasaki that quickly gained nationwide popularity. The song went on to become a standard number in the repertoire of the “big-band era” and was recorded by a glittering array of performers from Fats Waller to Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman. Doris Day even sang it in the movie My Dream Is Yours. The following are the lyrics of the first verse and chorus:

Verse 1:

Fellows if you’re on, I will spin a yarn,

That was told to me by able seaman Jones.

Once he had the blues,

So he took a cruise

Far away from night clubs and from saxophones.

He said, “Yoho, I think I made a certain port,

And when you talk about real he-man sport.”

Chorus 1:

Hot ginger and dynamite,

There’s nothing but that at night,

Back in Nagasaki

Where the fellers chew tobaccy

And the women wicky wacky woo.

The way they can entertain

Would hurry a hurricane,

Back in Nagasaki

Where the fellers chew tobaccy

And the women wicky wacky woo.

Oh, Fujiyama,

You get a mommer,

And then your troubles increase;

In some pagoda

She orders soda,

The earth shakes milkshakes, ten cents a-piece.

They kissee and hugee nice,

By jingo, it’s worth the price,

Back in Nagasaki

Where the fellers chew tobaccy

And the women wicky wacky woo.[27]

The images evoked in the lyrics are so generic that they could apply to virtually any Far East destination of the American navy, and it is not unreasonable to assert that the word “Nagasaki” was chosen simply because it provided the right rhythm and ease of rhyme. Moreover, Fujiyama is nowhere near Nagasaki, “pagoda” conjures up images of Kyoto and Nara, and tobacco chewing has never been common anywhere in Japan. Still, it seems unlikely that Warren and Dixon just pulled “Nagasaki” out of thin air. As a composer of Italian descent, Warren no doubt admired Giacomo Puccini and the opera Madame Butterfly, and during his brief stint in the navy he would certainly have heard cabin rumors about all the hedonistic enjoyments available in Oriental ports. In the safe harbor of jazz, the composer and his lyricist were able to stand firmly behind B.J. Pinkerton, celebrate the landed sailor’s joy of sexual abandon and poke fun at the missionaries and other strait-laced authorities who acted as moral searchlights in ports around the world. And the huge popularity of the song indicates a covert agreement in American society with the general principles of this celebration.

With their thinly disguised obscenities and allusions to prostitution, the lyrics of Nagasaki show how the image of Japan in particular, and the Asia-Pacific region in general, as a philanderer’s dream resort — an image created by Pierre Loti, embellished by John Luther Long, and cultivated by all the Madame Butterfly successors — pervaded American attitudes and persisted right into the years before and after World War II.

National Essence

The Japanese government invoked the “Peace Preservation Law” twice between 1927 and 1930, first on March 15, 1928, when about sixteen hundred suspected communists were arrested in a nationwide sweep and again on April 16, 1929, when another seven hundred were apprehended. The law had been enacted in 1925 in reaction to growing discontent among the public over Japan’s economic doldrums and to a surge in leftist political activity. In effect, it empowered the government to silence dissenters, and it imposed a system of thought control on the population that championed the concept of kokutai. Usually translated as “national essence,” this concept had been expounded in the Edo Period by scholars trying to break Japan’s adherence to Confucianism and other imported systems and to revive indigenous Shinto doctrines. The scholars applied the term to the unbroken imperial line descending from the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami and to the unique status of the Japanese people as a family with the emperor as patriarch. But the inclusion of the term in the “Peace Preservation Law” of 1925 transformed what in the Edo Period had been little more than a bookish abstraction into the moral responsibility of every Japanese person to avoid diversions from the ideological mainstream. Needless to say, there was little room in the edifice of kokutai for Puccini operas or other aspects of foreign culture.

5-8. Mary Pickford stars in the first cinematic production of Madame Butterfly. (From Photoplay Magazine, February 1916)

In 1928, the same year that American dance halls began thumping to the rhythm of “wicky wacky woo,” extremist officers of the Guandong Army (in Japanese Kantōgun, i.e., the Japanese forces originally assigned to guard areas of southern Manchuria leased by Japan from China after the RussoJapanese War) hatched a plot to assassinate Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin and thus to necessitate their involvement in the affairs of north China, and they succeeded in doing this by blowing up his train as it returned to Mukden in June 1928. Already evolving into a government of its own, the Guandong Army struck again at Mukden on the night of September 18, 1931, retaliating, it claimed, for a bomb attack on the same railway by Chinese insurgents. Within weeks the Japanese forces had occupied several strategic centers in Manchuria, and the Japanese government had little choice but to acknowledge the action as a fait accompli. When China appealed for help in halting Japanese aggression, the League of Nations appointed an investigatory commission headed by the Earl of Lytton to look into the causes of the Manchurian Incident. In its report to the league in October 1932, the commission named Japan the aggressor and urged it to withdraw its troops. The Japanese government responded by pulling out of the League of Nations, turning its back on international opinion, and taking a first fractious step toward the calamity of World War II.

In December 1932, just when the international community was listening nervously to the news about Japan’s aggression in Manchuria, Paramount Studios released Madame Butterfly as a feature film starring Sylvia Sidney and heartthrob Cary Grant. This movie has interesting similarities with the first cinematic interpretation of the opera, a 1915 silent film of the same title starring Mary Pickford.[28] The two movies end with the suicide of the Japanese woman, as in the opera, but they veer from the original story when it comes to the character of Lieutenant Pinkerton, the 1915 movie by arranging for him to meet Cho-Cho-san, not through the introduction of a pimp, but by chance in a jinrikisha collision, and the 1932 movie by having him return to Nagasaki in the company of his American wife, apologize to Cho-Cho-san, and leave without ever learning about the birth of his son. Just as the blameless, cinematic Pinkerton is inconsistent with his predecessor in both the original story and opera, the pity that most movie viewers felt for Cho-Cho-san contrasted sharply (yet reassuringly) with the fear creeping through Britain and American over the rise of Japanese militarism.

5-9. Still from the 1932 movie Madame Butterfly starring Cary Grant and Sylvia Sidney.

Tension was mounting in China and Japan’s relationship with the West was rapidly souring on December 24, 1935, when an article about Miura Tamaki’s personal meetings years earlier with John Luther Long and Giacomo Puccini appeared in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo. The article is written in the first person, but it is undoubtedly based on an interview, and — in keeping with previous Japanese perceptions of the prima donna’s career — it puts more emphasis on her interaction with the famous author and composer than on the opera Madame Butterfly per se. Says Miura about John Luther Long:

I met and dined with [John] Luther Long in Philadelphia, and he told me various things about the story [Madame Butterfly], such as anecdotes about his younger brother serving as American consul in Nagasaki and the fact that the real O-Cho-san did not die but went on to raise her child. Then during my first trip back to Japan I went to Nagasaki, met the consul, and again heard about the sources of the story and other matters.[29]

Miura’s comment about Long’s younger brother serving as American consul is a mistaken reference to Long’s nephew I.C. Correll, whom Miura met in Nagasaki in 1922. And when she quotes Long as saying that “the real O-Cho-san did not die but went on to raise her child,” she is probably recounting his reminder that the Madame Butterfly of his original story — which of course he considered to be the “real” one — had not committed suicide as depicted in Belasco’s play and Puccini’s opera but had only vacated the house on Higashi Hill before Mrs. Pinkerton went there looking for her husband’s child. The supposition that Long was simply emphasizing the precedence of his story is supported by the lack of any mention of a “real Cho-Cho-san” or even of the meeting with John Luther Long in Miura Tamaki’s autobiography, letters, and other writings.

Like Jennie Correll’s speech to the Pan-Pacific Club in 1931, however, this reminiscence on the part of Miura Tamaki has been cited by several writers as proof that there was in fact a real-life model for the Madame Butterfly story.[30] But the writers invariably quote only the words “the real Cho-Cho-san did not die but went on to raise her child” and ignore — or rather, due to the language barrier, remain unaware of — Miura’s statement at the beginning of the very same article: “The opera ‘Madame Butterfly’ began with Pierre Loti writing about actual events. Then the American John Luther Long made it into a story, Belasco dramatized it and Puccini composed music for it. Thus the story set in Japan reached completion through the cooperation of people from France, the United States and Italy.” We see, therefore, that Miura Tamaki’s reminiscence only supports what we have been suspecting all along, namely, that the authentic albeit loveless relationship described by Pierre Loti in Madame Chrysanthème was used to fabricate a fictitious love-tragedy by John Luther Long and then was lifted to the rarified realm of drama and opera by Belasco and Puccini.

Miura Tamaki’s last appearance in the lead role of Madame Butterfly abroad — said to be exactly her two thousandth time to sing out toward a make-believe Nagasaki Harbor — was a presentation of the opera in Palermo, Italy, in January 1935. After returning to Japan the same year, she embarked on several tours around the country and seems to have played to packed houses wherever she went, but Puccini’s opera was not part of her repertoire. Laments the soprano in her autobiography: “I presented solo concerts throughout the country and received tremendous applause. My only regret is that I was unable to perform ‘Madame Butterfly’ for the people of Japan.”[31]

In June 1936, however, Miura’s desire to play the role of Cho-Cho-san in her native country was finally, albeit briefly, fulfilled: the fifty-two-year-old soprano appeared in a production at the Kabukiza Theater, Tokyo, alongside a cast of other Japanese singers. The event was hosted, interestingly, by the Tokyo Women’s League, an indication that many women considered the international achievements of Miura Tamaki and perhaps even the integrity of her Cho-Cho-san character to cast a positive reflection on Japanese women. Indeed, the newspaper article describing the Kabukiza performance stresses the purity of the heroine and tries to convince readers that they will enjoy Madame Butterfly because “it is a beautiful opera that abounds with Japanese melodies such as Echigo Jishi.”[32] In a tribute to the world famous singer, the Tokyo radio station JOAK relayed Act I directly from the stage on June 28. The sound of Miura Tamaki’s voice thus echoed from Tokyo radios that summer evening of 1936, providing the prewar Japanese population with a rare and as it would turn out last taste of the opera loved so much in the countries now ascending Japan’s horizon as enemies.

The End of Free Expression

In December 1935 — the same month that the article on Miura Tamaki appeared in the Jiji Shimpo — British, American, and Japanese delegates met in London to discuss the terms of the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty, which was up for renewal. The Japanese representatives issued an unequivocal demand for parity among the three nations in all warship categories and, when this was rejected, angrily withdrew from the conference, emulating Japan’s 1932 decision to pull out of the League of Nations and clearing away the last obstacle to military and territorial expansion. This shift in the gears of military policy translated into a boom for the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard and other Mitsubishi industries in Nagasaki. The number of employees rebounded, and by the beginning of 1936 every dock and building berth at the shipyard was filled with a ship in the making; the steel works, electric plants, and arms factories were bustling with activity; and the people of Nagasaki were reveling in relief and optimism over the change in their fortunes. In the former foreign concession, however, the prevailing mood was anything but optimistic. The Euro-American population was now very small, comprised mostly of missionaries, consular employees and a few stubborn merchants and naturalized citizens like Kuraba Tomisaburo and Robert Walker.[33]  Most of the foreign-run trading companies had closed, the former public hall was boarded up, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping had moved to Shimonoseki, the local Freemasons’ Lodge and other organizations had disbanded, and almost all the foreign-run provision stores, tailors, bicycle shops, and bars that once thrived here were gone. The last foreign bank — the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Nagasaki Branch — had closed in 1931, and the imposing three-story building that housed it was sold to Nagasaki Prefecture and turned into a police station.

As war loomed on the horizon, the Japanese government began to impose restrictions on the lifestyle of ordinary citizens and to give increasing powers to a specially trained military police force called the “Kempeitai” that had honed its skills of intimidation and coercion in Korea and Manchuria. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, and Japan’s declaration of war on China, the Kempeitai attempted to remove all traces of Nagasaki’s deep connections with the enemy, canceling the annual Peiron (dragon boat) races, a seventeenth-century import from China and a highlight on the Nagasaki summer calendar, and banning the use of firecrackers — another custom borrowed from China and unique to Nagasaki — during the Buddhist Bon Festival in mid-August 1937. A month later a civilian defense corps was established in City Hall under Kempeitai supervision to prepare for possible air raids and to organize blackout simulations and anti-air raid drills. Then in October, the Japanese government promulgated the “national spiritual mobilization movement” to enhance unity among the Japanese people and to galvanize wartime attitudes. The nationwide effort to strengthen defense systems resulted in an order for the organization of civilian guards and the compulsory establishment of neighborhood groups called tonarigumi that assisted as a kind of peer-police in weeding out slackers and dissenters. It also served as an impetus for the “new military secrets protection law,” which gave authorities far-reaching powers to arrest and imprison anyone suspected of collecting sensitive information or leaking military secrets to outsiders.[34]

On December 13, 1937, news that the Chinese capital of Nanjing had fallen to the Japanese Army reached Nagasaki and elicited an eruption of euphoria. The Nagasaki populace, utterly unaware of the atrocities perpetrated by their countrymen during the siege, came out onto the streets to join in victory parades and evening lantern processions, and the Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun and other newspapers trumpeted felicitations with front-page headlines like “Joy Explodes in Nagasaki Prefecture.”

One of the most horrendous aspects of the “Rape of Nanjing” was, literally, the mass violation of Chinese women. As they marauded through the streets of the capital hunting down enemy soldiers, some of the Japanese forces entered houses at will and engaged not only in pillage and random violence but also in an uncontrolled orgy of rape, subjecting every woman they could find, including children and the elderly, to their barbarous purpose. The exact extent of the depredation may never be determined because of the paucity of on-site reportage and the many conflicting accounts that come down to the present day, not to mention the unwillingness of many modern Japanese to look upon Nanjing as anything more than a wartime battlefield. One former officer, though, acknowledged the high incidence of rape in Nanjing and frankly attributed the blind, violent sexuality of the Japanese forces to Japan’s age-old and widespread system of licensed prostitution and to the insensitivity toward women that it bred.[35]

In the months following the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese armed forces established “comfort stations” in virtually every one of their outposts in the Asia-Pacific region and recruited tens of thousands of young women to cater to the sexual needs of Japanese soldiers. The rationale was that the stations would prevent the kind of random sexual violence that had occurred in Nanjing and thus avert further animosity toward the Japanese troops in occupied territories. The military authorities, like the Russian naval authorities who demanded examinations for Nagasaki prostitutes in 1860, were also concerned about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the threat that it posed to the health of the armed forces. Referred to euphemistically as jūgun ianpu or “comfort women serving the military,” the women hailed from various Asian countries, but about 80 percent are said to have been recruited directly from Korea, a Japanese colony since 1910. The existence of the comfort stations is universally acknowledged, but their justification remains a subject of bitter controversy. Some Japanese brush them off as necessities and declare that the women were prostitutes who came forward of their own volition or who acquiesced to parental wishes (which, to a certain mind-set, is the same thing). Critics, however, condemn the comfort stations as abominations and insist that many if not all of the women were forced into sexual slavery.

Japanese people who were in the higher grades of elementary school around the same time, particularly in economically depressed rural areas, can recall how many of their pretty classmates suddenly stopped coming to school because they had been scouted to work in brothels. These people will often claim that the appointment to brothel service was looked upon as a kind of privilege, that the girls were respected as defenders of their families and villages, and that most of them went away happy with the promise of good food and beautiful clothing in the city. Some will also explain that prostitution was regarded simply as a form of manual labor and thus carried no special stigma. Needless to say, however, this was a view ingrained historically in Japanese, not necessarily Korean or Chinese, society. In the final analysis, the disparity between the Japanese claim that the comfort women served willingly as paid prostitutes and the position that they were abused as sex slaves derives from the fact that Japan imposed a unique domestic value on people of other cultures.

The year 1937 was a portentous one not only for the people of China and Korea but also for the “Higashi Hill” of Madame Butterfly fame. Kwassui Gakuin, the Methodist school for girls, was now the only remaining American mission school in Higashiyamate,[36] and its staff and students were participating regularly in Shinto rituals for the war dead and send-off ceremonies for troops leaving the port of Nagasaki for China. The school had no choice but to allow the Japanese military to install machine guns on the roof, which as always commanded a panoramic view of Nagasaki Harbor, and to station Kempeitai officers in the school as supervisors. In April, the American principal, Anna White, went to the Nagasaki Prefecture Office to receive portraits of the emperor and empress and carried these back to the school for enshrinement. The “One Hundred Year History of Kwassui Gakuin” claims that she did this in a very reverent manner, walking ceremoniously and wearing white gloves to carry the portraits. But the likelihood that she was feeling as much exasperation as reverence is indicated by the fact that she left Japan only three months later and submitted her resignation, citing ill health. Subsequently, a Japanese (male) teacher assumed the position of principal for the first time since the foundation of the school, and the Methodist Women’s Foreign Missionary Society donated the land and buildings at No. 12 Higashiyamate — the former residence of American missionaries including Irvin and Jennie Correll — to the school’s Japanese board of directors.”[37] The French principal of Kaisei Gakko — a Catholic mission school for boys established at the crest of the Higashiyamate hillside in 1892 — and many other European priests and teachers also left Nagasaki in 1937.

On March 29 the following year, a ceremony was held at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard — unbeknownst to the vast majority of the Nagasaki population both Japanese and foreign — to mark the commencement of construction of the mammoth battleship Musashi. After withdrawing from the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty in 1936, the Imperial Navy had formulated plans to build battleships larger and more formidable than any ever seen before on earth. The two sister-ships Yamato and Musashi were to be constructed at the Kure Naval Dockyard and the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, respectively, and to be embellished with forty-meter-high control towers, twelve-inch bulkheads, eighteen-inch guns with a range of forty kilometers, and accommodations for a crew of about three thousand men with enough room left over for seven fighter aircraft. The No. 2 building berth at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard was reinforced and modified, auxiliary facilities and equipment were added, and thousands of workers were mobilized under a strict oath of secrecy. All of the country’s resources and all of the shipbuilding and industrial skills cultivated over the past decades were to be funneled into the construction and launching of this colossal symbol of Japanese military might. The building berth was hidden from view with metal sheets, and rope curtains were draped over a high frame as the battleship took shape during the following months.

The Kempeitai meanwhile rolled out a tight blanket of security to ensure that outsiders, particularly foreigners, were prevented from glimpsing the activity on the building berth. One of the first persons labeled was Kuraba Tomisaburo, whose family house stood on the Minamiyamate hillside and commanded a bird’s-eye view of the shipyard. Kuraba sold the house to Mitsubishi in June 1939, clearly under pressure from the Kempeitai, and moved down the hillside to the house at No. 9 Minamiyamate with his wife, Waka. His many close friends at the company were grieved to see this happen, but their sentiments had no sway over the decisions of the military. The naval authorities and military police dispatched to Nagasaki from other parts of the country had no knowledge of or interest in Kuraba’s contributions to the city’s economy and culture in peacetime.

With the Kempeitai ensconced as overseers, the spiritual mobilization movement began to tighten its clutch on the lifestyles of ordinary citizens, forcing businesses to close early and to refrain from using neon lights, prohibiting the exchange of gifts and the sale of alcoholic drinks, and banning long hair among students and the curling or dyeing of hair by women. All photographs and postcards had to bear a stamp of approval from the Nagasaki Fortress Headquarters (i.e., the Kempeitai) and newspaper reports could not stray beyond the tight bounds of information provided by the military government. After the Nazi attack on Poland and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, a ticket system was implemented to ration staples such as rice, barley, towels, and charcoal. Anything that fell even loosely under the category of “luxurious” disappeared from stores and homes.

5-10. Kuraba Tomisaburo’s British-Japanese wife Waka (far right) with other members of the “Patriotic Women’s Association” in the late 1930’s. Waka and Tomisaburo would soon find themselves under house arrest as potential spies. (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

5-11. Kuraba Tomisaburo and his wife Waka after the move to No. 9 Minamiyamate in 1939. The photograph bears a stamp in Japanese saying “Passed by Censors of the Nagasaki Fortress Headquarters” in the right lower corner. (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

The Musashi slipped into Nagasaki Harbor around 9:00 A.M. on November 1, 1940. All harbor traffic was halted that day, and no one was allowed on streets or lookouts from which the launching might be observed. All citizens living in houses facing the water were forced to close their rain doors and shutters, to draw all indoor curtains and to stay inside. Even the approximately eighteen hundred military and civilian police on guard were required to turn away from the harbor at the time of launching and to refrain from looking at the ship. To divert the attention of all remaining foreigners, a police force broke into pairs and, disguised as census takers, conducted a simultaneous visit to their homes at the predesignated moment.

In July 1941 all assets of nationals of the “ABCD” (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) were frozen and foreign business came to a complete standstill. The consulate employees and other foreigners remaining in Nagasaki hastily closed their offices, gathered their belongings, and sailed out of Nagasaki Harbor. Except for one dauntless seventy-five-year-old woman named Sara Couch,[38] all of the last American missionaries and teachers departed, bringing an end to the presence of foreigners in the former foreign concession. Standing on the steamer decks watching the hillsides fade from sight, the departing foreigners may have embraced a sliver of hope that they would be able to return soon, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 8 (Japan time), 1941, all chances for a peaceful solution evaporated. Japan plunged into all-out war, its forces immediately swooping southward and occupying every port and city formerly dominated by its Western foes. Tsuji Masanobu, chief of the invading army’s planning staff, wrote a manual entitled Read This Alone — And the War Can Be Won that was distributed to every soldier leaving for the battlefields. In it he pointed out:

In the Japan of recent years we have unthinkingly come to accept Europeans as superior and to despise the Chinese and the peoples of the South. This is like spitting into our own eyes. Once you set foot on the enemy’s territories you will see for yourselves just what this oppression by the white man means. Imposing, splendid buildings look down from the summits of mountains or hills onto the tiny thatched huts of the natives. Money that is squeezed from the blood of Asians maintains these small white minorities in their luxurious mode of life. After centuries of subjection to Europe, these natives have arrived at a point of almost complete emasculation.[39]

Tsuji’s criticism was directed at Europeans in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian cities, but he could just as easily have been referring to the residents of Higashiyamate, Minamiyamate, and the other posh neighborhoods of the former foreign concessions of Japan.

After the declaration of war on the United States and its allies, the Kempeitai clamped down as never before on “unpatriotic activities,” which encompassed anything and everything connected with the enemy. In Nagasaki, Sara Couch and the handful of Catholic priests and nuns who had ignored injunctions to leave Japan were summarily arrested and interned in concentration camps. Their Japanese colleagues were meanwhile forced to take off their tunics, to wear the rough work dress worn by the general population, and to participate in air-raid drills, work crews, and other communal activities. Religious statues were removed from their pedestals, teachers were forbidden to teach subjects like Latin and English, and Japanese Christians, now openly accused of being brainwashed hikokumin (“non-citizens”), were forced with special fervor to bow to the authority of the emperor. One former teacher at Kwassui Gakuin remembers how a student representative was called to the principal’s office every day and forced to choose between a crucifix and a photograph of Emperor Hirohito.[40] “Madame Butterfly” was about the last thing on anybody’s mind as Japan threw itself into the machinations of war and the unknowing people of Nagasaki embarked on a death march to the atomic bombing.

5-12. Kuraba Tomisaburo also went by the name “T.A. Glover.” (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

One Fine Day

Robert Walker and his wife Mabel and three children — who had escaped incarceration because of their Japanese citizenship and who along with Kuraba Tomisaburo and Waka constituted the last vestige of the former Nagasaki foreign concession — were able to stay in their house at No. 28b Minamiyamate because it was located on a fold in the hillside that did not have a view of the shipyard. But the Kempeitai imposed a heavy mantle of surveillance on the movements of both families to prevent anti-Japanese subterfuge, and after Pearl Harbor both Robert Walker and Kuraba Tomisaburo were placed under virtual house arrest.

The naval battle at Midway in June 1942 and the fall of Guadacanal Island in February the following year precipitated a turn in the course of the war. Routed on land and vanquished at sea, the Japanese forces switched to the defensive while their American adversaries launched a concerted drive northward, capturing one South Pacific stronghold after another and pressing with increasing confidence and ferocity toward the Japanese home islands. One of the drastic measures taken by the Japanese military was to form a “Kamikaze Special Attack Force”[41] and to hurl young pilots and their bomb-laden zero fighters right into the laps of the advancing American warships. These suicide attacks — highly publicized and hotly condemned in the United States — gave Americans a taste of the same Japanese fidelity-unto-death that they had embraced so enthusiastically in Madame Butterfly, except that the object of the fidelity was the beloved homeland, not some fictitious American naval officer. Few of the sailors ducking as shrapnel and broken airplane parts crashed across the deck of their crippled ship would have stopped to appreciate the fact, but the heroism of the teenage kamikaze pilots was analogous with the sacrifice of Madame Butterfly’s real-life prototypes who surrendered their bodies and their youth to rescue impoverished parents and siblings.

The American aircraft carriers soon got close enough to Japan to launch air raids against the home islands. In April 1942 a squadron of American B-25 bombers flew from a carrier in broad daylight and conducted air raids on the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe, marking the beginning of a reign of terror that would soon bring destruction and death to every major Japanese city. In the summer of 1944 the American forces initiated air raids from bases in the Chinese interior, using giant B-29 superfortresses to unload bombs over the industrial belt in northern Kyushu. On August 11 that year they made Nagasaki a target for the first time. A light rain was falling around midnight when the city’s air-raid sirens and fire bells frantically reported the arrival of enemy aircraft. People fled into shelters, searchlights scanned the dark sky, and antiaircraft guns crackled while B-29s roared over the city and released their bombs into the clouds. Fortunately for Nagasaki the results of this air raid were poor: only thirteen people — Nagasaki’s first civilian victims of World War II — were killed and fewer than a dozen houses destroyed. Although fires broke out in a few adjacent neighborhoods, the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard and the industrial zone north of Nagasaki Station also emerged unscathed, most of the bombs having fallen harmlessly into the damp forests of surrounding mountains.

5-13. Robert Walker Jr. (Uoka Robato) and his wife Mabel in 1937. By the end of August 1945, the Walker family would be the last “foreign” residents of the former Nagasaki foreign concession. (Courtesy of Albert Walker)

5-14. A regiment of student reserve soldiers descends the flagstone path in Higashiyamate (the “Higashi Hill” of Madame Butterfly fame) during World War II. The trees to the right are in the garden of the house at No. 12 Higashiyamate, the former Correll residence. (Kaisei High School Alumni Association)

By now little was left of the vaunted Imperial Japanese Navy. The Musashi, the largest battleship ever built and the prized symbol of the Japanese military, went down under a torrent of bombs, torpedoes, and bullets in the Sibuyan Sea, Leyte Gulf, on October 24, 1944, taking half of its crew to a watery grave. The ship’s career of two years and two months in battle formation had been shorter than the time it had spent under construction in Nagasaki. The Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) sister ships Nagasaki-maru and Shanghai-maru, the last carriers of passengers and cargo between Japan and the continent in an age of peace that now seemed impossibly distant, also joined the debris of Japan’s failed aspirations on the bottom of the East China Sea.

During the early months of 1945, the Nagasaki air-raid sirens had little rest because the city lay squarely in the path of the B-29 formations streaking across the sky on bombing missions to other Japanese cities. After the near total subjugation of Japanese forces on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the aircraft enjoyed unobstructed passage to the home islands, and the Japanese people, isolated, deprived, and starving, could only sit and wait for the relentless carpet bombings that followed. In a desperate attempt to ward off the inevitable, the Japanese government announced a reduction in rations of staples and encouraged the consumption of alternative foods such as tea dregs, weeds, and dumplings made from acorns. Pumpkin stalks, tree bark, potato vines, and other fare considered inedible before were now a common sight on Nagasaki dinner tables.

While subject to all the deprivations of other Japanese cities, Nagasaki remained relatively free from air raids over the following months. The populace just watched in fear every morning and evening as the B-29 bombers passed high over the city. They attributed their good luck to the foreign prisoners-of-war working in local factories and shipyards and to Nagasaki’s history of international exchange. No one could possibly guess that one of the reasons for the lull was the city’s addition to the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

On August 8, 1945, the citizens of Nagasaki conducted their usual monthly observance of the “Day of the Great Imperial Edict,” that is, the anniversary of the December 8, 1941, declaration of war. The newspapers of this day carried front page articles informing readers with deliberate obliqueness that a small B-29 squadron had attacked the city of Hiroshima on August 6 with a new-type bomb and had inflicted “considerable” damage. Around this time, American aircraft scattered leaflets on Nagasaki and other cities, one side showing an image of the ten-yen note and the other emblazoned with the following Japanese-language message:

Japan, the paper country,

Will soon become a country of ashes.

Leave the city at once![42]

This message hides a sarcastic reference to the emperor and his divine status in that the words kami no kuni (paper country) can be rendered with different ideographs meaning “divine country.” Kempeitai members scoured the city for the leaflets and punished anyone seen reading them, and as a result very few remain to this day. But it is clear that the people of Nagasaki, however blindfolded by censorship and indoctrination, had intimations of the great calamity that was to befall their city the next day.

August 9, 1945. The sun rose on a clear summer sky. At 11:02 A.M. the Walker family was sitting in the garden at No. 28b Minamiyamate, about to enjoy a lunch of homegrown vegetables, when the distant drone of airplane engines interrupted their conversation. Glancing upward, Robert noticed an airplane flying high above the city and, an instant later, a parachute drifting downward in its wake. He immediately rushed his wife and children into the family air-raid shelter, not quite managing to get in himself before a brilliant flash of light filled the sky and a wave of intense heat struck his back, followed after several morbidly silent seconds by a thunderous explosion and violent blast of wind. While the family reeled in shock and clutched each other in the darkness of the shelter, a mushroom cloud churned up into the sky over the northern part of Nagasaki and the American B-29 Bockscar, light now after dropping the second atomic bomb on Japan, disappeared to the south.

In contrast to the clockwork precision of the Hiroshima bombing three days earlier, the Nagasaki atomic bombing was fraught with mistakes, irony, and, to this day, doubt about its necessity. First the aircraft carrying the bomb failed to rendezvous with reconnaissance planes over Yakushima Island south of Kyushu. Then Kokura, the steelmaking center on the northern coast of Kyushu and original target, was obscured by cloud cover, and Captain Charles Sweeney decided after circling it several times to fly to the reserve target Nagasaki. Nagasaki had also become overcast by 11:00 A.M., but the bombardier spotted the Mitsubishi factories north of Nagasaki Station through a break in the clouds and released his deadly cargo into the Urakami Valley. Thus the Nagasaki atomic bomb exploded, not over the earmarked bombing point in the heart of an enemy city, but right over the heads of Japan’s largest Catholic community. The bizarre irony of this shift in the object of destruction is compounded by the fact that crew of the Bockscar had been blessed by their chaplain before departing on their mission from Tinian Island.

The buildings of “Higashi Hill” and other parts of the former foreign concession were located several kilometers from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb explosion and so, like much of the historic center of the city, were spared destruction. But the entire northern section of Nagasaki was reduced in one blinding instant to a charred wasteland, veiled from the rest of the city by a huge column of smoke, dirt, and blood that reached up to the sky, sullied the clouds, and rattled the floors of heaven.

6

Madame Butterfly in Postwar Japan and Beyond

The Atomic Bowl

Nagasaki was still in a state of paralysis a month after the atomic bombing. Most of the tens of thousands of corpses lying in the charred rubble or festering on river banks had been collected and cremated, but the stench of death and conflagration hung in the air as though permanently imprinted there. The northern half of the city was so devastated that it was difficult to discern even the line of former streets, the surrounding hillsides were stripped of vegetation and the soil contaminated with residual radiation, and a large proportion of the surviving population was struggling to find enough food to ward off starvation. The Nagasaki Prefecture government sent a message to neighborhood leaders ordering the evacuation of all people remaining in the atomic wasteland “because plants and trees will not grow in the Urakami district for seventy years to come.”[1] But most people ignored the decree, happy now at least to be able to defy orders, and continued to gather scraps of lumber and sheet metal to build shacks or to settle in former air-raid shelters.

One of a few concrete buildings spared complete pulverization in the atomic wasteland was Chinzei Gakuin, the school that Irvin and Jennie Correll had helped to develop and that in 1930 had moved from Higashiyamate to Takenokubo-machi — only five hundred meters southwest of the atomic bomb hypocenter. The blast wind had assailed the four-story reinforced concrete building, crushing the fourth story and the part of the third story facing the hypocenter, and fire had then roared through the building and destroyed the attached wooden structures. The school was being used at the time as a Mitsubishi factory and administration office, and the students once enrolled there had either been drafted into the armed forces or mobilized to work in munitions factories. The exact number of deaths remains unclear to this day because the school records were destroyed in the blaze.[2]

6-1. The northern part of Nagasaki after the atomic bombing, as seen from an American aircraft. The black clump on the left bank of the Urakami River (center of photo) is the ruins of the Mitsubishi steel works and arms factories. The carcass of Chinzei Gakuin stands at the edge of the cliff above the river (right). The triangular section of elevated land (lower center) is the hypocenter. The gantry crane at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard is also visible at the top (right of center). (Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)

6-2. Chinzei Gakuin (background) was one of the only buildings that remained upright in the hypocenter area. (Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)

Although the brunt of the atomic bomb damage was confined to the northern part of the city, the Nagasaki Prefectural Office, Nagasaki District Court, and a large number of other public buildings in central Nagasaki had been destroyed in secondary fires. The buildings in the former foreign concession had also suffered damage from the blast but, due to their distance from the hypocenter and the protection of hillsides and canals, were intact for the most part. Those abandoned and uninhabited from before the war were now serving as impromptu receptacles for the people trudging out of the burned out areas or beginning to arrive, stupefied, and bedraggled, from former Japanese colonial outposts in China and Korea. The former Glover House, for one, stood empty on the Minamiyamate hillside, its broken windows looking out onto the devastated harbor and city like the eye holes in a skull. In 1943, four years after being forced to move into a house at the base of the hill, Kuraba Waka had died of tuberculosis and left her husband, Tomisaburo, alone to experience the atomic bombing and Japan’s surrender in August 1945. Then on the morning of August 26, Kuraba had strangled his dogs and hanged himself to death, apparently succumbing to fear that the British and Americans victors, who were soon to land, would construe his Japanese citizenship as an act of treason.

Nagasaki Prefecture Governor Nagano Wakamatsu and other local representatives met an advance party of the U.S. 6th Army in early September and agreed to cooperate in the release of prisoners-of-war and to make all necessary preparations for the arrival of Occupation forces, expected before the end of the month. On September 13, the governor issued a set of directives to the heads of cities, towns, and villages in the prefecture, including admonitions to stay away from the areas demarcated for use by the Occupation forces and to desist from picking up any of the foodstuffs and other supplies dropped by American airplanes into former prisoner-of-war camps.

The governor also issued a set of ten directives specifically to women and girls, evidence of the deep-seated fear that the occupying soldiers would go on a rampage as soon as they stepped ashore. These directives are as follows:

- Be conscious of your pride as Japanese women and under no circumstances be off guard in the presence of foreign military personnel.

- Always wear mompé [baggy cotton trousers] and do not go outdoors in a summer dress or underwear.

- Do not go out at night or walk alone on mountain paths or in parks or shadowy places.

- Never go about naked or half-naked indoors, let alone outdoors.

- Always bathe in a shielded place.

- Do not show your bare legs on the veranda or at windowsills.

- Do not breast-feed your baby on the train or in other public places.

- Women should not respond when approached with [the English words] “hello” or “hey” or in broken Japanese.

- Let men give directions on the street.

- Avoid being alone at home whenever possible.3

The formal occupation of Nagasaki began on Sunday, September 23, 1945. Ships carrying the 2nd Marine Division of the 6th Army, which had been stationed in Saipan, steamed into the harbor and docked at Deshima Wharf, and hundreds of fully armed soldiers poured out of the transports and took formation on the waterfront as though preparing for battle. The segment of the Nagasaki population brave enough to come out onto the street watched the troops march through the city in good order, and over the next few days they gazed in amazement at the jeeps, trucks, and other American military hardware that cranes brought out of the ships’ holds like magicians conjuring rabbits out of a hat, at the shiploads of meat, canned food, and flour that piled up like mountains on the wharf, and at the sturdy garrison buildings erected by healthy looking soldiers. Comparing these to their own emaciated, threadbare condition, the Japanese could only stand by and nod in understanding at the outcome of the war.

6-3. The hospital ship U.S.S. Haven docked at Deshima Wharf on September 11, 1945. Sent to pick up prisoners-of-war, it was the first American ship to visit Nagasaki Harbor in the wake of World War II.

To provide space for offices and private residences, the Americans requisitioned a number of buildings and houses in the city, summarily evicting anyone who happened to be inhabiting them. The many Western-style buildings in Minamiyamate and Higashiyamate of course provided ideal accommodations. While inspecting the former, the Americans discovered that Robert Walker and his family were the only “foreigners” remaining in Nagasaki and so provided them generously with food and supplies, placed a guard at their gate and employed Mabel’s daughter Mary as an interpreter.[4] Most of the other former European residences of Minamiyamate and Higashiyamate, including the former Glover, Ringer, and Alt houses and the Correll residence at No. 12 Higashiyamate, were earmarked for requisition on the very day of the Occupation landing. The Western-style dormitories of mission schools such as Kwassui Gakuin and Kaisei Gakko, meanwhile, were converted into barracks for enlisted men, and the old customs house on the waterfront was cleared out to serve as Occupation headquarters.

The marines immediately set about their mission to repatriate prisoners-of-war, to confiscate weapons and military equipment and to dump them at sea, to arrest suspected war criminals, to restore the activities of the municipal administration and local businesses under Allied supervision, and to take measures to suppress typhoid, cholera, and other diseases in the squalor of the devastated city. The 6th Army was inactivated on January 1, 1946, and replaced by a division of the 8th Army that continued the task of disarming the population and establishing Occupation facilities. Before they left Nagasaki, the former held a football game, complete with a band to play pep songs and marches, in an area of the atomic wasteland cleared to make an airstrip. They called this game the “Atomic Bowl,” not scoring too many points for consideration toward the atomic bomb survivors or the spirits of the countless dead.[5]

Butterflies Rise from the Rubble

The Occupation forces did not go on a rampage or subject women to the kind of mass violation that many Japanese feared. But nor did some Japanese women heed the admonition to avoid foreign military personnel. Almost as soon as the Americans constructed the first provisional barracks, women came forward to cater surreptitiously to their sexual needs and to fill the role of female companions. Some probably acted independently, but many others sacrificed themselves — just like the courtesans of old — to save their families from starvation. It was as though, after so many years of effort to reach a level of economic, industrial and military development commensurate with that of the West, Japan had reverted to the state of poverty and disadvantage that had generated the “Japanese marriages” contracted by Pierre Loti and other foreign navy officers the previous century. Even if they were not involved directly in prostitution, Japanese women understood the demand for their company and the financial rewards it implied. Only weeks after the arrival of the 2nd Marine Division of the 6th Army in Nagasaki, an enterprising young woman named Kogano Tomiko opened the “Takarazuka Dance Hall” in the surviving downtown neighborhood of Hamanomachi and hired legions of attractive young women to serve as dance partners — and whatever else developed therefrom — for the hundreds of American servicemen free on leave, flush with back pay, and eager to find a respite from boredom and loneliness.[6]

In the eyes of many members of the Occupation forces, meanwhile, Japanese women in general were — to quote Mrs. Pinkerton in John Luther Long’s story Madame Butterfly — “pretty little playthings.” As John W. Dower points out, “the defeated country itself was feminized in the minds of the Americans who poured in. The enemy was transformed with startling suddenness from a bestial people fit to be annihilated into receptive exotics to be handled and enjoyed.…Japan — only yesterday a menacing, masculine threat — had been transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, into a compliant, feminine body on which the white victors could impose their will.”[7] Until now an invisible presence behind the guns and barricades, Japanese women surprised and enchanted the battle-weary soldiers arriving here in the wake of World War II, providing, just like the “Holland-goers” of the Edo Period, both a sexual refuge and a bridge into the heart of an otherwise inimical culture. The mingling of foreign servicemen and Japanese women became so prevalent that, as early as March 1946, GHQ-SCAP (General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) issued a ban on kissing and other public displays of affection because it was “inappropriate” for members of the Occupation forces to be associating so intimately with the former enemy.[8]  An alarmed GHqSCAP also stepped up efforts to control sexually transmitted diseases and ordered nocturnal roundups of women in public places, thereby weeding out infected prostitutes but also subjecting many innocent women to the humiliation of medical examinations. In no way, however, did these measures put a damper on the fraternization of soldiers and Japanese women.

6-4. American servicemen dancing with Japanese women in Nagasaki shortly after the end of the war. (From the “Pictorial Arrowhead: Occupation of Japan by Second Marine Division,” 1946)

“Madame Butterfly” and “The Mikado,” Revisited

In Tokyo, the seat of GHQ-SCAP and temporary home for the largest segment of the Occupation forces, American authorities tried to provide wholesome recreation for servicemen by requisitioning theaters left unscathed by air raids and using them for the presentation of musical performances, plays, and Hollywood movies. The Toho Theater, Hibiya Public Hall, and even the Kokugikan, the center of Japanese sumo wrestling, were among the facilities that came under the control of the Occupation forces in late 1945. The famous Tokyo Takarazuka Theater followed the next February, becoming an exclusive venue for Occupation events and undergoing a change in name to the “Ernie Pyle Theater.”[9]

Since foreign civilians were still barred from visiting Japan, the authorities naturally turned to Japanese musicians and singers to provide entertainment, particularly those with ability in classical music, jazz, and other Western genres, and the latter came forward willingly to please their new overseers if only because of the financial rewards that came to the few Japanese lucky enough to have skills valued by GHQ-SCAP. Tokyo was still smoking from wartime air raids and thousands of people were homeless when the sound of concerts and recitals began to echo from local theaters in the autumn of 1945.

One of the singers to indulge the wishes of the Occupation forces was Miura Tamaki, who had been living with her mother in the countryside since 1944. Miura presented recitals at the Hibiya Public Hall on December 1 and 7, 1945, and again on March 21, 1946, singing numbers from Schubert’s Winterreise and Die Schoene Muellerin.[10] These turned out to be the famous prima donna’s swan song: she died of intestinal cancer on May 26, 1946, at Tokyo University Hospital, drawing the curtain on a colorful and turbulent life of sixty-two years. The Nippon Times, Tokyo’s English-language newspaper and now virtually the official voice of GHQ-SCAP, reported Miura’s death in an article entitled “‘Madame Butterfly’ Succumbs to Illness,” mimicking the Nagasaki Press, which twenty-four years earlier had reported her visit to this port with an article entitled “‘Madame Butterfly’ at Nagasaki.” The prima donna’s friends and associates gathered a few days later for a “musical funeral” at her grave and saluted her achievements with songs rather than eulogies.

6-5. Advertisement for the opera The Mikado (from the June 5,1947, issue of the Nippon Times). This illustration was used frequently in postwar advertisements for both The Mikado and Madame Butterfly.

Among the mourners at Miura Tamaki’s funeral was a diminutive thirty-five-year-old soprano named Nagato Miho, who, as though taking a cue from her illustrious predecessor, soon formed the “Nagato Miho Opera Company” and began rehearsals for Madame Butterfly. A native of Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu, Nagato had spent several years in Germany as a child and had won first place in the singing division of the 1934 Japan National Music Competition. During World War II she had been enlisted by the armed forces to contribute to the war effort, gaining the nickname Gunkan (“warship”) because of her nominal connection with the Imperial Japanese Navy’s battleship Nagato, and after Japan’s surrender she had joined the troops of entertainers doing an about-face and catering to the wishes of Occupation personnel. The Nagato Miho Opera Company presented Madame Butterfly at the Tokyo Gekijo Theater in November 1946, with Nagato playing the lead. This was probably the first full-fledged performance of the opera Madame Butterfly in Japan. According to the soprano, it also established a world record because she played the grueling role of Cho-Cho-san nine times in three days.[11]

In his autobiography, the renowned British-Japanese tenor Fujiwara Yoshie also remembers how his opera company responded to requests from the Occupation forces for musical performances, and he cites Madame Butterfly as the favored selection:

In the early postwar period, musicians were enlisted to perform at the American Navy Headquarters in Yokosuka. My opera company was also invited many times to present Madame Butterfly. Upon departure, we received a huge supply of souvenirs in the form of coffee, cigarettes, chocolate, and other goods, and we stuffed these into our valises and violin cases before heading off to the train station.[12]

The Occupation forces seem to have had something more on the agenda than mere recreation when they insisted on Madame Butterfly and other Western operas set in Japan and encouraged the Japanese population to view them. This is indicated by the fact that in June 1947 the Nagato Miho Opera Company presented Japan’s first performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan farce The Mikado directly under orders from GHQ-SCAP.[13] If the foremost mission of the American Occupation was to remove all traces of militarism and emperor-worship from Japan’s psychological landscape, then the operas Madame Butterfly and The Mikado served this purpose ideally because, couched in the form of entertainment, they negated the warrior-aggressor image of prewar Japan, emphasized the triumph of Western values, and brought the emperor down to a level where he could be viewed and, if necessary, ridiculed in a democratic manner. The presentation by Japanese singers of operas that had been rejected as ludicrous if not insulting prior to World War II — and yet were being performed now as though they had a bona fide place in the files of Japanese art — poignantly symbolized Japan’s subjugation to the whims of the victors.

In the case of Madame Butterfly, there was indeed an uncanny similarity between the scenes unfolding on stage and the Allied Occupation: the navy lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton enjoying a romp in the exotic Far East corresponded to the Occupation forces; Cho-Cho-san, the guileless geisha devoted to her fickle patron, represented the troops of Japanese prostitutes catering to American sexual needs in the aftermath of World War II; and the subservient pimp Goro and the military officer Yamadori who fails in his bid to win Cho-Cho-san’s heart mimicked the male component of the Japanese population, incapacitated and demasculinized by defeat.

“Trouble,” the son of Cho-Cho-san and Pinkerton born after the latter’s departure from Japan and the reason for a considerable proportion of the tears elicited by Puccini’s opera, also had a real-life counterpart in the postwar period. From the middle of 1946, Japanese women began to bear the illegitimate offspring of foreign servicemen, making a unique and mostly unwanted addition to the postwar Japanese population. GHQ-SCAP fired a Japanese radio announcer in the summer of 1946 for referring to the children sarcastically as “the first Occupation present.” Fearing anti-American propaganda, the Americans subsequently suppressed the issue by censoring all further discussion of it in the Japanese press. But the so-called “GI babies” continued to be born by the thousands, and after the restoration of Japan’s sovereign rights in September 1951, their predicament came to light in both the Japanese and English media, stirring up controversy and inciting reactionary comments in Japan such as a recommendation that the children be rounded up and shipped to Brazil for adoption by Japanese farmers in need of cheap labor.

One of the journalists to bring the subject to the attention of the American public was Peter Kalischer, a United Press reporter who had been covering the Occupation from shortly after the end of the war. In 1951, late enough to avoid flack from GHQ-SCAP, Kalishcher contributed a long article to the popular magazine Collier’s, complete with heart-rending color photographs of Eurasian and Afro-Asian tots stranded in a Yokohama orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Not surprisingly, the article is entitled “Madame Butterfly’s Children.” Reports the author, echoing the sentiments of nineteenth-century journalists who wrote about the attempts by missionaries to rescue the offspring of “Japanese marriages”:

A potentially tragic generation of “untouchables” — the disowned and unmistakable “seed of the conqueror” — is growing up in Japan. Their plight and its alarming implications have aroused every Christian organization, as well as the Armed Forces chaplains and the American consulate.…It came as a surprise to many that the white man has no monopoly on race prejudice, and that the Japanese consider themselves racially purer than Americans.[14]

Nagasaki Military Government Team

On September 23, 1946, exactly one year after the arrival of the first wave of American forces in Nagasaki, Colonel Victor Delnore assumed the position of first commander of the “Nagasaki Military Government Team,” an assignment that paralleled a nationwide change of emphasis in Occupation policy from military to civilian-based administration.[15] The headquarters of this new body was inaugurated in a three-story building at Shindaiku-machi, later to become the office of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) and a center for research into the late effects of radiation exposure. Under Delnore’s supervision, the American personnel established a camp in the Japanese residential neighborhood of Katafuchi-machi and named it “Camp Patton” after the famous World War II general. With its insular structure, Western-style buildings, and inaccessibility to “natives,” the camp resembled the former foreign concessions and presaged the American naval bases of today. In addition to barracks, a mess hall, chapel, and other facilities, Delnore opened a booth where men could obtain condoms free of charge twenty-four hours a day, a service deemed necessary to ward off sexually transmitted diseases from Japanese prostitutes and to inhibit the birth of unwanted GI babies.

By early 1947 many of the American officers in Nagasaki, Victor Delnore included, were bringing their families to join them here and taking up lodgings in requisitioned houses. The Delnore family lived in a large house owned by a Japanese family in Atago-machi, while many of his staff took up residence in the houses of the former foreign concession in Minamiyamate and Higashiyamate.

One of the Americans working under Delnore in the Military Government Team was Captain Joseph C. Goldsby, an engineer who had arrived in Nagasaki in September 1945 with the 2nd Marine Division of the 6th Army. After the shift in Occupation policy in September 1946, Goldsby’s wife Barbara joined him from the United States, and the couple took up residence at No. 14 Minamiyamate, the former American Consulate and the building that Miura Tamaki had visited in 1922. Goldsby was granted an honorable discharge in August 1947, but he stayed in Nagasaki with his wife to assume new duties as a civilian employee. It was at this juncture that Joseph and Barbara Goldsby moved into the Glover House, becoming the last people to inhabit that historic building.

Around the time of the move, Goldsby posed for a photograph with two of his colleagues in front of the house.[16] The military uniforms worn by the men and the jeeps parked in the background vividly demonstrate the American military presence in Nagasaki and the effect it exerted on the once-peaceful atmosphere of the foreign concession. On the back of the photograph, Goldsby penciled in the words “Mme. Butterfly House, 1947.” This clearly shows that, at least as early as 1947, the American Occupation personnel in Nagasaki were using the nickname “Madame Butterfly House” to refer to the former Glover residence.

6-6. Capt. Joseph Goldsby (center) with fellow military personnel at the former Glover House in 1947. (Courtesy of Lane Earns)

6-7. Inscription on the back of the photograph.

A Jewel on the Hillside

From the time of its construction in 1863, the home of Scottish merchant-adventurer Thomas B. Glover (1838–1911) was the most beautiful and ideally situated building in the foreign concession of Nagasaki, an elegant colonial-style bungalow with a fan-shaped roof, stone-paved veranda, and spacious front garden commanding a spectacular view of Nagasaki Harbor and the island-scattered mouth of the bay.[17]  Glover made a fortune selling ships, guns, and other merchandise to the feudal clans of southwestern Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and his house stood on the Minamiyamate hillside like a new-generation castle, a symbol of the importance of commercial wealth and international exchange as Japan transformed itself from a feudal backwater into a world power.

In 1870, Glover’s Nagasaki trading firm Glover and Co. went bankrupt as a result of debts incurred during the late 1860s, but the Scotsman stayed in Japan and became involved with expanding Japanese industries, particularly Mitsubishi. The same year as the bankruptcy, he fathered his only son to survive beyond infancy: the boy who would grow to be Kuraba Tomisaburo. Although the identity of Kuraba’s mother is a subject of controversy, the koseki (household registers) preserved at Nagasaki City Hall indicate that he was the product of a illicit liaison between Glover and a Japanese woman named Kaga Maki, probably a rashamen with whom Glover lived temporarily.[18] Although the evidence is only circumstantial, it would seem that Glover took the boy away from his biological mother at a tender age and brought him up with the help of his common-law Japanese wife Tsuru. The boy attended Chinzei Gakuin, where he was one of the school’s first pupils, and moved on later to Gakushuin (Peers School) in Tokyo and, from 1888 to 1892, to Ohio Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Nagasaki in 1892 and took up a position with the British firm Holme Ringer, later acquiring Japanese citizenship and assuming the legal name “Kuraba Tomisaburo.”

6-8. Wedding reception at the Glover House for Hana Glover and Walter Bennett in 1897. The bride’s parents, Thomas (in bowler hat) and Tsuru, are standing behind the groom. A twenty-six-year-old Kuraba Tomisaburo is standing to the right, behind the woman with the black dress. (Nagasaki Prefectural Library)

Thomas Glover left Nagasaki in 1877 to serve as a consultant to Mitsubishi in Tokyo, entrusting the management of his house to his brother Alfred, who in turn rented it to a succession of wealthy foreign residents including Mitsubishi business advisor Frederick Krebs, German consul G. Müller-Beeck, and Holme Ringer executive P. J. Buckland. In 1909, Kuraba Tomisaburo moved into the house with his wife, Waka, and became its sole owner two years later when his father died in Tokyo. The couple, who had no children, lived in the house over the following decades and enjoyed an important role in the economic and social life of the city. But as described earlier, they were forced to sell the house to Mitsubishi in 1939 and to move out because it commanded a clear view of the building berth where the battleship Musashi was taking shape — quite an irony considering that Kuraba’s father had been a high-ranking Mitsubishi confidant and that he had assisted in the company’s efforts to procure and expand the Nagasaki shipyard. During the war years Mitsubishi used the building as a guest house called the “Oura Club,” but it fell into disuse as the tide of war turned against Japan and suffered minor damage as a result of the atomic bombing.

The former residence of Thomas Glover thus lay virtually empty for several years before the Occupation forces added it to their list of requisitioned buildings. But after the American families moved in, it quickly became the star building of occupied Nagasaki just as it had been the jewel of the Minamiyamate hillside during the foreign concession years, gaining notoriety for its unique European-Japanese architectural style and its breathtaking view over Nagasaki Harbor. And it is precisely these two characteristics that led to the nickname “Madame Butterfly House.”

Nothing has been found in pre-World War sources, including the letters, photograph albums, and other documents of the Glover family, to indicate any connection between the house and the story, play, or opera Madame Butterfly. The nickname “Madame Butterfly House” penciled on the back of Joseph Goldsby’s 1947 photograph was obviously born from the imagination of Occupation personnel who were taken with the building and its beautiful view but who — although aware that Nagasaki was the setting of the famous opera — were totally ignorant of the history of the house and its former owners. This supposition is endorsed by Victor Delnore, the commander of the U.S. Military Government Team in Nagasaki from 1946 to 1949, who wrote in a 1996 letter: “As to your query about Madame Butterfly’s house, [I] attribute the remark to Joe Goldsby. The embellishment of his remark came from his wife, Barbara. I never heard anyone else say anything regarding this subject. When it was brought up in the presence of the Japanese, they would smile condescendingly and pass it along.”[19]

The nickname appears again in a twenty-six-page English-language guidebook entitled Nagasaki Souvenir published by a group of Nagasaki residents for use by the Occupation personnel.[20] An introductory article describing the history and sights of Nagasaki includes a photograph taken from the garden of the former Glover House, with the caption: “Nagasaki City seen from Madam Butterfly’s Home.” Despite this provocative comment, however, there is not a single reference to the house anywhere else in the booklet, even in an article on the very subject of the opera, a fact that indicates the common awareness between the Japanese writers and their American readers that the nickname had been applied arbitrarily on the basis of the atmosphere and view and nothing else. The introductory article also mentions the amenities at Unzen Park and serves up a bit of old-time Nagasaki hospitality with the testimonial that “lovely Japanese girls serve your every whim” at the hotels there.

6-9. Barbara Goldsby (white dress) at a function for children in Nagasaki. Her husband Joseph stands behind her. The officer on the far left is Lt. Col. Victor Delnore. (Courtesy of Lane Earns)

The last entry in this odd yet instructive booklet is an article entitled “Pierre Loti” that discusses the legacy of Madame Chysanthème and touches upon the origins of the opera Madame Butterfly. The author begins the article by introducing a man named Miyazaki Kiyoshige, an employee of the Nagasaki Museum who he says had been conducting research on Pierre Loti from the prewar years and who had pinpointed the location of the house rented by Loti in Junin-machi (Juzenji) on the basis of interviews with elderly people living in the neighborhood. After a description of Loti’s career and a claim that “Nagasakians believe Giacomo Puccini used incidents from the life of Okikusan [Madame Chrysanthème] to write his opera,” the author then goes on to introduce another Nagasaki Museum employee named Shimauchi Hachiro who had been “chasing the Madame Butterfly legend for more than 20 years.” According to the author, “One promising trail led him to Omura where it was stated that Cho Cho-san [sic] began life as the daughter of a down and out samurai. Investigations in this city banged up against a dead end, and since that day he has been following leads of all kinds, but he confessed that he was nowhere from where he started. ‘It’s a kind of wil o’ the wisp story which you cannot pin down,’ he said.”

6-10. The Japanese version of the article appeared in the Mainichi Shimbun on August 10, 1948.

It is noteworthy that Shimauchi’s twenty-year-long search had not led him to the Glover House. Just a few months after the publication of the booklet, however, the Nagasaki Museum employee stumbled upon what he had been looking for — or at least what he concluded was a reasonable candidate. In a conversation with a Mainichi Shimbun reporter in May 1948, Shimauchi revealed that a plan was afoot to erect a monument to Madame Butterfly at the former Glover House:

Nagasaki means Madame Butterfly, and Madame Butterfly means Nagasaki. Nagasaki is famous worldwide for the atomic bomb and Madame Butterfly, but there is nothing here to remind visitors of Madame Butterfly. Because of this, a group of interested persons including myself is working on a project to establish a Madame Butterfly monument. And so what about the place to put it? Of course the [former Glover] house in Minamiyamate is the best choice. It fits perfectly with the image of Madame Butterfly.[21]

After the interview with Shimauchi, a Mainichi reporter and photographer visited the Glover House and asked Barbara Goldsby — an attractive woman with dark hair who could have passed for an actor portraying the tragic heroine — to pose for a photograph in the front garden. Then on August 6, 1948, an article entitled “House of ‘Madam Butterfly’ Discovered” appeared in the Mainichi (the newspaper’s national English-language edition) along with the photograph of Goldsby posing in front of the house with a paper parasol held provocatively over her shoulder, apparently in imitation of Cho-Cho-san. The full text of the article is as follows:

NAGASAKI, Aug. 5 — The house in which “Chocho-san,” heroine of the famous opera “Madam Butterfly” by Puccini lived and ended her life tragically has been discovered on the eve of the cultural festival commemorating the third anniversary of the atom bombing of this city. The house, a pseudo-western style building, is situated at 12 Minami Yamate-cho [sic, it is actually No. 3 Minamiyamate], and all data and information indicated it to be the most probable house in which “Madam Butterfly” lived. The credit for this historical discovery goes to Hachiro Shimauchi and other native historians, who   have conducted the search with undying enthusiasm on the theory that the   girl whose tragic life was adapted into the famous opera actually existed. A plan is under way to construct a memorial tower within the “house,” to be completed before the 400th anniversary of the arrival of St. Francis Xavier in April, next year. The “house” and its beautiful garden will be used in minute details as the scene of the opera “Madam Butterfly” to be presented by the Nagato Miho opera company at the Tokyo Theater beginning August 28, this year. (The photo shows the “Madam Butterfly residence” and its beautiful garden. Strolling in the garden is Mrs. Goldsby, who now occupies this house.)[22]

The writer says that “all the data and information” indicate that the building is the “most probable house in which ‘Madam Butterfly” lived, but he gives no idea as to what this information might be. He also says nothing about the Glover family, underlining the supposition that the prewar history of the building had nothing to do with the “Madame Butterfly House” naming. The mistaken identification of the address as “12 Minamiyamate” may stem from the fact that the former Correll family residence at No. 12 Higashiyamate had been cited, and rejected, by Shimauchi or someone else as a candidate for the installment of a Madame Butterfly monument.

Another interesting fact about this article is that, even though based on an interview conducted by a Japanese reporter from the Mainichi branch office in Nagasaki, it appeared first as a translation in the newspaper’s Tokyo-based English-language edition. It was not until August 10, 1948, that the article, with the same photograph of Barbara Goldsby, appeared in the Japanese-language newspaper. Clearly, it was considered a story of interest to foreign, not Japanese, readers.

The timing of the English-language and Japanese-language articles is also noteworthy, if not downright bizarre. For one thing, three months had passed since the Mainichi reporter and photographer visited Barbara Goldsby at the former Glover House, a delay that suggests some deliberate motive on the part of the newspaper or the Occupation government controlling all press releases at the time. August 6, the day the English-language article appeared, was the third anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, and the August 10 issue in which the Japanese article appeared was the same issue that reported the commemoration of the Nagasaki atomic bombing held the previous day. In the Japanese article, no more than two inches from the photograph of Barbara Goldsby holding her parasol, is a photograph of orphaned children praying at the Nagasaki hypocenter. These two photographs not only illustrate the huge disparity between the pampered life of American Occupation personnel and the desperate existence of survivors eking out a living in the atomic wasteland only a few kilometers away, but even seem to represent an attempt to divert attention from painful memories of the atomic bombings and to prevent a possible surge in anti-American feelings. The fact that the atomic bomb anniversaries were designated as “cultural festivals” under the Occupation only emphasizes this strange juxtaposition.

Yamamura Tsuru

Shimauchi Hachiro and his Nagasaki Museum associate Miyazaki Kiyoshige — intent on solidifying the connection between Madame Butterfly and the Glover House — unearthed the old Glover family photo albums, which had found their way to the Nagasaki Prefectural Library after the disposal of Kuraba Tomisaburo’s belongings by Mitsubishi. In these albums they discovered photographs of Thomas Glover’s common-law Japanese wife, “Yamamura Tsuru,” and noticed that she often wore a kimono with a butterfly mark on the sleeve. Digging deeper, they realized that Tsuru’s gravestone and ihai (posthumous name tablet) at Taiheiji Temple in Nagasaki were embellished with an agehachō (“butterfly with raised wings”) family crest. This in itself meant little, because the butterfly crest was used widely by unwed geisha and foreigners’ consorts who, because they did not engage in conventional marriages, were barred access to traditional family crests. The agehachō was a tsūmon (universal crest), that is, a crest that anyone could wear regardless of family background. Moreover, the butterfly design was often used deliberately by geisha and other women in the entertainment business because the metamorphosis from humble caterpillar to beautiful butterfly expressed the geisha’s dream to find a wealthy patron and to be reborn as a lady of high standing.[23] Although Shimauchi and Miyazaki insinuated that the agehachō crest was unique to Tsuru Glover, it can be seen on the gravestones of several Japanese women who married foreigners and who are buried today in Nagasaki’s international cemeteries. It is also carved on the gravestone of Michitomi Jokichi, the son of Deshima factory director Hendrik Doeff and the Japanese courtesan Uriuno mentioned earlier in this work.

Thus Tsuru’s use of this crest simply indicated that she was a geisha married to a foreigner. But it was just what Shimauchi and Miyazaki needed to establish a connection with the Glover House and Madame Butterfly and to proceed with their plans to erect a monument that would attract foreign tourists to Nagasaki.

On July 2, 1949, Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun reported the discovery of Tsuru’s photographs, gravestone, and ihai and the opinion of local historians (i.e., Shimauchi and Miyazaki) that she was the model for the tragic heroine. Revealingly, however, the article refers to the Minamiyamate house as “the home of Mr. Goldsby” and makes no mention whatever of either Thomas Glover or Kuraba Tomisaburo. With regard to Tsuru the article says: “The photographs discovered at the Nagasaki Library and deemed to be that of O-Cho-san show a woman who is quite old and not very beautiful, and so we will have to wait for further research in order to determine whether she was the living model for “Madame Butterfly.”[24]

6-11. Yamamura Tsuru (Tsuru Glover), with the butterfly mark on her sleeve. Taken around 1895.

This and a number of other newspaper articles elicited a debate over the roots of the Madame Butterfly story, and the argument soon expanded from local to national news. One of the persons to join the fray was a Japan National Railroad employee named Noda Heinosuke. Reading the article by chance in the northern Kyushu city of Kokura where he was working at the time, Noda remembered that his wife had a great-grandmother named Yamamura Tsuru who was said to have married a foreigner, and so he visited Nagasaki to determine whether or not the woman mentioned in the article was in fact his wife’s ancestor. On October 9, 1949, the Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun published an article entitled “Descendant of Madame Butterfly Comes Forward,” reporting Noda’s reaction to the July 2 article, his success in clarifying his family connection with Tsuru, and his pat conclusion that, in view of the butterfly crest, she must indeed be the Madame Butterfly model. Noda also provided the following information about Tsuru’s background:

Tsuru was born as the daughter of Nakanishi Yasubei, a carpenter in Okajo, Takeda Village, Oita Prefecture. At the age of fifteen she married Yamamura Kunitaro of the same village and became Yamamura Tsuru. In 1863 she gave birth to a daughter named Sen, but her relationship with her mother-in-law was bad and, moreover, she could not endure the degenerate ways of her husband. After a divorce, she went to Osaka where she worked as a geisha for a year, then went to Nagasaki and became a geisha there. In Nagasaki she married Thomas Glover, an advisor at the Mitsubishi Shipyard. She died in Tokyo on February 23, 1899, her last years spent in the lap of luxury.[25]

Less than a week later, Koga Jujiro, Nagasaki’s leading local historian, convened a meeting at the Nagasaki Prefectural Library to iron out the truth about the Glover House, Tsuru, and Madame Butterfly. Miyazaki Kiyoshige stuck to his guns, insisting that the butterfly crest used by Tsuru, coupled with Jennie Correll’s statement published in the March 13, 1931, issue of Jiji Shimpo that she had “heard the pathetic story of O-Cho-san from a merchant who frequented our house” was sufficient to prove that Tsuru was the model and, therefore, that Nagasaki City was justified in showcasing the Glover House as “Madame Butterfly House.” Watanabe Kurasuke, another well-known local historian, refuted this, pointing out that “the butterfly crest can be found anywhere, and it was a favorite of geisha and other women. The fact that Tsuru used this crest is not sufficient to prove that she was Madame Butterfly. Moreover, in the story the house was in Higashiyamate and Madame Butterfly could see Pinkerton coming up the slope from the landing dock. But Glover House is in Minamiyamate, and you can’t see the waterfront from there.”[26]

Watanabe seems to have been unaware of the fact that in June 1922 Jennie Correll guided Miura Tamaki to the house at No. 14 Minamiyamate, and only there, when the soprano asked to see places connected with the opera. If Tsuru had had anything to do with the creation of the story, Correll would surely have taken Miura to the Glover House — which is located only steps away and where Kuraba Tomisaburo was living at the time — or to Tsuru’s grave at Taiheiji Temple or the Glover family grave in Sakamoto International Cemetery. The published fact that she did not visit the Glover house, along with the photograph showing Correll and Miura in front of the former Alt House at No. 14 Minamiyamate, would have been sufficient to resolve the controversy.

But the meeting convened by Koga Jujiro in October 1949 ended without drawing a conclusion either way, and to conciliate the two conflicting opinions, city officials decided to do away with the name “Madame Butterfly House” and to designate the Glover House as “The Place Connected with Madame Butterfly,” the ambiguous appellation that persists to this day. Soon after these convolutions, Joseph and Barbara Goldsby left Japan and the former Glover house reverted to the possession of Mitsubishi,[27] which resumed its use of the building and gardens as a recreation facility for employees. As a result of all the publicity in the newspapers, however, tourists began to flock to the Minamiyamate hillside for a glimpse of the house, ignoring the “no trespassing” signs at the entrance. Nagasaki City, in turn, began to promote this and other local attractions as a way to lift itself out of the misery and poverty of the postwar period. The efforts of the city to find a new path to prosperity through tourism were rewarded in October 1950 when Nagasaki won first place in the city category of the “Best Hundred Sightseeing Places in Japan” contest. Unable to hold back the tide of tourist interest, Mitsubishi finally relented and donated the house to Nagasaki City in 1957, the centennial of the founding of the Nagasaki Shipyard.

6-12. 1950’s postcard showing the Glover House (and the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard across the harbor). The ambiguity of the nickname “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly” is reflected by the English translation. It is also interesting that there is no mention of the name “Glover.”

Tourist Mecca

Japan’s tourism industry, stagnant since the late 1930s, received an injection of new life in the summer of 1947 when GHQ-SCAP authorized visits by a small number of business representatives entering Japan to begin the process of establishing commercial links. It was not until December 28 that year, however, that the first authentic tourists — a group of eighty wealthy Americans — arrived in the port of Yokohama on the President Monroe and embarked on a tour of Kamakura, Nikko, and other sightseeing spots in the Tokyo area.[28] More and more groups followed, both by ship and by the airplanes that started carrying tourists here in October 1948, and the network of destinations gradually extended from Tokyo to Kyoto and Nara and, by the end of the decade, to Nagasaki and other parts of southwestern Japan. The money spent by these affluent travelers on hotels, meals, and souvenirs was Japan’s most important source of revenue in the wake of World War II and brought great benefits to the municipalities with attractions popular among foreigners.

During the first months after the war, the Occupation forces knew Nagasaki exclusively as one of two cities almost wiped off the map by an atomic bomb. But, in the midst of renewed fascination with the opera Madame Butterfly, they began to remember that Nagasaki was the setting of the famous story and to pose questions about the opera’s historical background. Thus, when news spread about the discovery of the “Madame Butterfly House” — and assurances were made that comfortable accommodations could be found in the atomic-bombed city — Nagasaki turned rapidly into a favorite destination of both Occupation personnel and the tourists arriving in Japan in increasing numbers.

The slippery attitude adopted by Nagasaki officials with regard to the historical connection between the Glover House and the opera is reflected in an article entitled “Madame Butterfly and the Glover House” by Yoshimatsu Yuichi, councilor of the Nagasaki International Culture Association, in the September 25, 1951, issue of the newspaper Nagasaki Minyu:

[John Luther Long’s] novel was created on the basis of Pierre Loti’s novel “Madame Chrysanthème,” and so, needless to say, it is mostly the product of a fertile imagination.…There are some who claim that Thomas Glover’s wife Tsuru was the model for Madame Butterfly or that the property behind the Glover house was called the “land of Madame Butterfly” in old days. But even if these claims are untrue, there is probably no other place in Nagasaki aside from the garden of the Glover House that evokes the famous scene in which Madame Butterfly sings: “One fine day.…”

In Fukushima Prefecture, near Kurozuka Station, there is a statue called Kurozuka Kannon. This is represented in scrolls and other historic documents as the place where the Adachi-ga-Hara Devil Woman lived. Even Matsuo Basho, in his book “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” mentions stopping here. But a closer look reveals this to be merely a legendary sight fabricated on the basis of a poem. Most so-called famous sights and legendary spots come into existence this way, and after many years they can develop even into immovable objects of local worship. In this light I do not think that it is inappropriate to make the Glover House “the famous sight connected with Madame Butterfly.”[29]

6-13 Nagasaki postcard from the early postwar period depicting the ruins of Urakami Church and a room in a local hotel. The spelling errors reveal the lack of practice in the language of the former enemy.

It is clear, therefore, that the Nagasaki officials trying to make the Glover House into a tourist mecca were fully aware that they had no leg to stand on historically. They simply pushed ahead with the project because they considered the need to promote economic growth more compelling than responsibility to convey the truth.

The falsehood of the “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly” campaign did not go unnoticed. Shimauchi Hachiro, for one, suffered pangs of conscience about his role in creating the sham. On November 5, 1953, when the opera Madame Butterfly was presented in Nagasaki for the first time by the Nagato Miho Opera Company, a message from Shimauchi entitled “Joy at Welcoming the Opera” appeared in the opera program. In his message, the former Nagasaki Museum employee, now referred to as a “poet,” expresses more repentance than joy:

Local historians argued vehemently about whether or not Butterfly is fiction. They argued even more vehemently about whether the Glover House was the real setting. It was Ishida Hisashi, chief judge of the Nagasaki Court and myself who, in the midst of these arguments, suggested that the Glover House be designated as the setting. Our reason was that the house is aesthetically appropriate. As a result we now have the “Garden Connected with Madame Butterfly,” but I have regrets about this, and I have been severely castigated over it, and so I think that the naming should be changed to the “Garden Reminiscent of Madame Butterfly.”[30]

Another person vexed by the misrepresentation of the former Glover House was Harold S. Williams, an Australian resident of Kobe since the 1920s and the foremost authority on the history of the former foreign concessions of Japan. Wrote Williams in an essay entitled Miss Butterfly and Miss Chrysanthemum:

At first when the Nagasaki City authorities decided to whip up the tourist trade by putting on the “Madame Butterfly House” hoax, they described it rather obliquely, or shall we say with calculated ambiguity. But now the gloves are off. The Butterfly romance, we are now being told, really happened in the Glover mansion, and both the lady and the house are now given a prominent place in the tourist attractions along with the memorial to the twenty-six Christian martyrs, and the other truly historic monuments of Nagasaki’s past. We say this in sorrow more than in anger, because we always receive the most kindly treatment from all the officials there whose assistance we seek in our researches. It is sad to know that most of the tourists, both Japanese and foreigners, who visit the delightful villa overlooking the harbour, leave believing they have seen the actual house wherein the Madame Butterfly romance and tragedy occurred, and they will remember it as such, rather than as the home built in the early days by the highly respected British merchant, Thomas B. Glover, who lived there with his wife and children.[31]

When Shimauchi wrote his message in the opera program he was well aware of the appearance of Noda Heinosuke, the descendant-in-law of Thomas Glover’s wife, Yamamura Tsuru, and of the argument about the butterfly crest, and so his negation of the “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly” label proves that he rejected the theory that Tsuru had been the model for the tragic heroine. But despite this clear-cut disavowal by Shimauchi and the appeals of expert observers like Harold S. Williams, no efforts were made in Nagasaki to change the designation of the house or to dissuade tourists from assuming that Tsuru was the model for the opera. On the contrary, the tendency to choose atmosphere over history only grew stronger in subsequent years. The Madame Butterfly theme was used extensively in advertisements, signs, and pamphlets and in various other efforts to bolster Nagasaki’s new tourism industry. Even bus guides showing people around the house were required to learn the aria “One Fine Day” and to sing it for the entertainment of customers.

But for people who remembered Nagasaki in its prewar heyday as an international port, it was painfully clear that the Madame Butterfly craze came in the same parcel with hamburgers, Mickey Mouse, professional wrestling, Westerns, striptease, and all the other Americana flooding Japan in the wake of defeat. Some looking more deeply may also have noticed a similarity between Nagasaki’s willingness to ignore the facts of history in the presentation of tourist attractions and Japan’s general postwar amnesia about its actions in Asia prior to and during World War II.

Flights of Fancy

News of Nagasaki’s “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly,” further warped by poor translation and frivolous writing, soon reached the attention of opera and music enthusiasts abroad and blossomed into a global-level comedy of errors. In a 1953 article entitled “The Original Cio-Cio-San,”[32] a certain Duiti Miyasawa relates how Miyazaki Kiyoshige of the Nagasaki Museum “insisted that the original Butterfly was a woman named Tsuru Yamamura.” He then launches into a description of Glover and his son Tomisaburo, stating mistakenly that Glover brought Tomisaburo to Nagasaki after the latter’s birth to Tsuru in Osaka, and that Tomisaburo was taught by Irvin Correll at Chinzei Gakuin. Miyasawa also makes the groundless assertion that Tsuru had been called “O-Cio-san” because of the butterfly crest seen on the sleeve of her kimono. He offsets this, though, with mention of the fact that Nagasaki historian Watanabe Kurasuke had rejected the Tsuru-as-model theory. And then he shrugs off everything he has said to that point by conceding that “it does not matter if Cio-Cio-San was Tsuru or not,” and he brings his piece to an end with the irrelevant, oddly malicious observation that “the streets of Tokyo are still filled with girls, waiting for their Pinkertons [i.e., American servicemen], while it has been estimated that there are nearly 200,000 little ‘Troubles’ [i.e., GI babies] throughout the country.”

The similarly titled and widely quoted 1962 article “The Real Madame Butterfly”[33] by Roderick Cameron proceeds in the same vein as the Miyasawa piece but offers no resistance to the Tsuru theory, concluding blithely that “we cannot doubt that it was Mrs. Glover who had served as the inspiration for Long’s Butterfly” and that “The Glover Mansion was Madame Butterfly’s house” while at the same time demonstrating the author’s lack of research with whoppers like this: “Having no family, [Thomas Glover] willed his pleasant European bungalow on the hill to the shipyard he had founded.”

Released into the mainstream, these bogus assertions and mistaken conclusions surfaced in countless other newspaper articles, reviews, and opera programs around the world. And just as Harold S. Williams had feared, most of the thousands of people visiting the former Glover House every year came away convinced that they had seen the cradle of the famous opera. One of the important writers to accept the sham at face value was Mosco Carner, Giacomo Puccini’s respected biographer. On the first page of his 1979 work Madam Butterfly, Carner relays the misinformation from Roderick Cameron’s article and adds further distortions:

This story [Madame Butterfly] appeared in the Century Magazine in 1898 and was based on a real incident that had taken place in Nagasaki. The historical Butterfly was one Tsuru Yamamura (1851-88), who had a child by a wealthy English merchant, and whose attempt at hara-kiri, after his desertion, had been frustrated. Her son was later taken by his father to an American missionary school in Nagasaki.[34]

Thomas Glover lived with Tsuru until her death in 1899 (not 1888) and remained single until his own death in 1911. Moreover, unless she kept it secret or gave up the attempt before making a serious cut, there is nothing to suggest that Tsuru ever tried to imitate a dishonored samurai by slashing open her belly. Carner’s comment about hara-kiri, then, is a fabrication based upon a falsehood, but he was never called on it because his readers were just as isolated from correct information about Japan as he was and because few Japanese with any knowledge of or interest in Yamamura Tsuru ever saw his book. Moreover, Carner’s depiction of the Aberdonian as an “English merchant” should have raised many a Scottish eyebrow. But like the Puccini expert’s other mistakes, it elicited little or no response because Glover was all but unknown in his homeland and little systematic research had been conducted on his life and work. The lie of the “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly” was able therefore to prosper unchecked, both in Nagasaki and abroad.

Heartened by the boom in the tourism industry and the dawn of Japan’s period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s, the city elders in Madame Butterfly’s hometown conceived a plan to create a hillside theme park called “Glover Garden” and to cash in on the increased mobility of the Japanese middle class. With the already well-known Glover House as a centerpiece, the park was to include the former Ringer and Alt houses at No. 2 and No. 14 Minamiyamate, respectively, which had been acquired recently by Nagasaki City. In addition, a number of old Western-style buildings slated for demolition in other parts of Nagasaki were to be dismantled and relocated to formerly undeveloped parts of the hillside behind the original houses. The inspiration for this theme park came from “Meiji Village,” a facility created on a stretch of open land in Aichi Prefecture in 1965 to preserve historic artifacts such as the old Imperial Hotel of Tokyo and the former residence of novelist Natsume Soseki. All of the buildings that ended up in Meiji Village were caught in a crossfire between advocates of historic preservation and urban developers who looked at anything old as an obstacle to progress. The crucial difference between Glover Garden and Meiji Village, therefore, is that the former was located on the actual site of the former Nagasaki foreign concession, while the former was simply a museum of relocated buildings.

In 1972, as bulldozers cleared and leveled the leafy upper slopes of Minamiyamate, Tsuru descendant Noda Heinosuke published a forty-threepage booklet in Japanese entitled Guraba Fujin (“Madame Glover”),[35] describing his efforts to elucidate Tsuru’s background after first learning of the family connection more than two decades earlier. In this rambling first-person account, Noda recalls how he met Ikegami Heizo, a former Holme Ringer employee serving in 1949 as custodian of the former British Consulate, and he quotes Ikegami as saying, “I was close to Kuraba Tomisaburo, but I know little about his mother. But I remember the following. About seventeen or eighteen years ago (1931 or 32), the novelist Muramatsu Shofu visited the Holme Ringer office and asked Tomisaburosan, ‘Is it true that your mother was the model for Madame Butterfly?’ In response, Tomisaburo laughed and nodded as if to say yes.”[36]

Noda does not provide any corroborating evidence, such as a quotation from the writings of Muramatsu Shofu or some other anecdote from either Kuraba or Ikegami. Since Kuraba, Muramatsu and Ikegami had all died by the time of the writing, Noda demands a huge leap of faith, not only in his account of a casual conversation with Ikegami two decades earlier, but also in Ikegami’s memory of an exchange he had supposedly witnessed another eighteen years before that.

Other aspects of Guraba Fujin cast serious doubt on Noda’s reliability. For one thing, he claims that he visited Nagasaki in May 1949 to attend the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Francis Xavier’s arrival in Japan and that he “just happened” to remember the request from relatives to look for Tsuru’s grave. But the article we saw earlier in the October 9, 1949, issue of the Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun states clearly that he read about the discovery of Tsuru’s photographs and gravestone in the July 2, 1949, issue of the same newspaper and that he came to Nagasaki only after that date. Moreover, although Noda revealed in the 1949 newspaper article that Tsuru was the daughter of a carpenter who left her Japanese husband because of domestic trouble and went to Osaka to work as a geisha, he claims in the book that Tsuru was born in Osaka (Kamigata) and came to Takeda (Oita Prefecture) in the company of the feudal lord of Takeda, when he returned to his home province after his tribute to the shogun [sankinkōtai]. At the time, [great-grandfather] Yamamura Kunitaro was serving the lord of Takeda. A daughter named Sen was born to Kunitaro and Tsuru in 1863. But when Sen was two years old, Tsuru left Sen in Takeda and returned to Osaka. These were the turbulent last years of the Edo Period, and one of Tsuru’s relatives was a samurai of the Hitotsubashi Clan, one of the three Tokugawa families. Until then the Takeda Clan had been on the side of the Shogunate, but in 1863 It had switched to the side of the monarchists. It is surmised that, as a result, Tsuru found herself unable to remain and that she left Takeda and returned to her parents’ home in Osaka.[37]

In the course of his investigations in the 1950s and 1960s, Noda had found Tsuru’s koseki (household register) at Nagasaki City Hall.[38] This document was created in 1894, some two decades after Tsuru’s affiliation with Thomas Glover. It says nothing about her birth or early life in Oita Prefecture, including her marriage to Yamamura Kunitaro and mothering of Sen, reporting rather that she was born, “date unknown,” as the eldest daughter of Otsuki Matasuke of Shin-machi, Osaka, and that she was later adopted by a certain Awajiya Yasubei.[39] The question of the significance of this information aside, nowhere in his book does Noda provide evidence for the samurai roots, for the supposed connection with the Tokugawa family, or for the divorce caused by differences in political alignment — a suggestion that in any case has been criticized as doubtful in light of the few freedoms enjoyed by women at the time.[40] Unless he had some untold reason to conceal his sources, it is hard not to conclude that Noda was whitewashing Tsuru’s curriculum vitae and expecting readers to accept the new version solely on the basis of his credentials as a great-grandson-in-law.[41] Previously he had only the butterfly crest to work with, but now he uses the revised portrait of Tsuru to assert that she was indeed the Madame Butterfly model, that is, that Jennie Correll told John Luther Long about this resolute samurai’s daughter who left her husband and baby out of political loyalty and that Long based his novel on that information.

Japanese industrialist Matsumoto Kenjiro, an old friend of Kuraba Tomisaburo, was quoted in a 1955 newspaper article as saying: “I knew Tomisaburo’s [step] mother Tsuru very well. She was a modest and stately woman, but I hear that in Nagasaki she is now being paraded as the model for the opera Madame Butterfly. This is really stretching the limits of idle fancy.”[42]

The Comedy of Errors Continues

The first comprehensive biography of Thomas Glover in the English language is Alexander McKay’s Scottish Samurai, published in Edinburgh in 1993.[43] Both in the original and in Japanese translation, this carefully researched book has raised awareness about Glover’s remarkable contributions to Japan’s modernization and helped to correct much of the misinformation of past decades. But McKay unfortunately follows in the rut of other postwar writers by subscribing to the Glover-Madame Butterfly connection, adding a new twist to the already tangled web by suggesting that it was not Glover’s common-law wife, Tsuru, but his mistress, Kaga Maki, whose tragic tale inspired John Luther Long to write Madame Butterfly. McKay surmises that Maki, who is named as Kuraba Tomisaburo’s biological mother in official family registers but who otherwise has disappeared into the fog of history, attempted suicide when forced to give up her baby. He does not, however, provide any corroborating evidence for either the suicide or for the supposed connection with John Luther Long.

In a book published in 2001, Jan van Rij reiterates McKay’s Kaga-Makias-model theory and backs it up with the contention that Miura Tamaki heard from John Luther Long that “Tom Glover” was the real name of Cho-Cho-san’s son.[44] But, except to say that “Miura’s story has been reported by at least four different authors,” van Rij leaves the crucial question of the origin of this stunning information unanswered. As we have already seen, Miura discusses her meeting with Long in the Jiji Shimpo article of 1935, but there is certainly no mention of a “Tom Glover” in that article, nor, as far as the present author knows, in any other writing on or by Miura Tamaki including the prima donna’s autobiography quoted earlier. Van Rij makes no mention of Alexander McKay in this regard, but the source of the misunderstanding is probably the latter’s article entitled “Madame Butterfly’s Scottish Samurai” (The Scotsman, December 30, 1989) and his erroneous suggestion therein that Miura brings up the name “Tom Glover” in the Jiji Shimpo article.[45] Van Rij uses unconfirmed hearsay for historical substantiation in other places as well, such as his groundless claim that members of the Kaga family associated with the Glovers and posed for photographs with them.[46]

In reality, the only primary source of information about Kaga Maki is two koseki household registers — one belonging to Kuraba Tomisaburo and the other to the woman herself — preserved today at Nagasaki City Hall. The former clearly names Maki as Kuraba’s biological mother, but it provides no further information about her. In fact it does not even identify Thomas Glover as the father. The latter says that Maki was the sister of Kaga Seisaburo of Konya-machi, Nagasaki, that she married Machida Otokichi of Obama (a seaside town near Nagasaki) in 1877 and divorced him in 1888, and that she died in the Dekidaiku-machi neighborhood of Nagasaki in 1905. That is it. There are no other official documents, letters, newspaper articles, obituaries, photographs, or anything else to shed light on this skeleton in the Glover closet.

Thus everything written about Kaga Maki, including the widely accepted theory that she reared Tomisaburo until the boy was six and submitted to the wishes of Thomas Glover in giving him up, is conjecture dangling from the thin threads of the above information. In the final analysis, it does not constitute even a remote possibility that Kaga Maki was the real-life model for Madame Butterfly.

A wistful, hypothetical style of writing may characterize the debate about the identity of Cho-Cho-san, but in Italy, the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, the question of historical verity and sociopolitical implication is eclipsed more than anything else by adoration of the opera’s beautiful arias and the artistic grandeur of its ever-evolving presentations. Only six years after the composer’s death in 1924, Pietro Mascagni and other friends gathered on a landscaped piazza in front of Villa Puccini at Torre del Lago to launch the “Puccini Festival.” Growing quickly into one of Italy’s most important opera events, the festival is now held annually at a four thousand-seat open-air theater in Torre del Lago and showcases the cream of worldwide opera talent. During the opera season the theater is embellished with arched Japanese-style wooden bridges that look as though they come straight out of a Hokusai woodcut.

Villa Puccini, the Torre del Lago house where Puccini lived from 1891 to 1919 and where he composed several famous works including Madama Butterfly, is preserved today exactly as the composer left it, complete with cozy, modestly furnished rooms, coffered ceilings, and mementos of decades of work and recreation. Puccini’s piano also stands intact in its original location in the room near the entrance, the composer’s eyeglasses, pen, and inkwell on the table beside it giving the impression that only seconds earlier he stood up from a composition and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of Chianti. One of the first things to greet the eyes of visitors to Villa Puccini is a black-and-white photograph of the Glover House in Nagasaki hanging in plain view above the reception desk, a surprising transplantation of the masquerade started by American Occupation personnel in 1947.

Most people looking for the tragic heroine in her hometown still go to Glover Garden and sit on benches gazing at the former Glover House, envisioning Cho-Cho-san, Suzuki, and the little Eurasian boy peering out the windows. They climb the steps beside the house and visit the narrow plaza above it where, in 1963, Nagasaki City erected a statue of Miura Tamaki playing the role of Cho-Cho-san and built a shallow fountain with water spurting out of faucets arranged on the wall behind it so as to form part of the score of “One Fine Day.” Across the plaza is a garden where winners of the biennial Worldwide Madame Butterfly Competition planted commemorative trees from 1967 to 1992 (the soaring value of the yen apparently made the Nagasaki visits prohibitive after 1992). In 1996, Giacomo Puccini’s home region of Lucca donated a life-sized alabaster statue of the composer to Nagasaki City, and this was installed near the statue of Miura Tamaki, adding another Madame Butterfly artifact to the collection and positing once again the counterfeit connection between the opera and Glover Garden. The most recent embellishment to this section of the facility is an expensive marble plaque unveiled in the year 2000 to remind visitors in both Japanese and English of Giacomo Puccini’s achievements. On this plaque, inscribed deeply to last for generations, the composer’s name is misspelled.

6-14. The statues of Miura Tamaki and Giacomo Puccini at Glover Garden.

7

The Real Face of Madame Butterfly

In Search of Cho-Cho-san

Nagasaki residents of a certain age can remember the days when the Maruyama neighborhood was still a licensed brothel district with nineteenth-century wooden buildings flanking the stone-paved paths and with the muffled twang of shamisen guitars echoing from behind paper windows. They can recall the hawkers standing in lamp-lit doorways, clapping their hands and shouting, “Welcome! Welcome!” to passersby, and the young women sitting at the balustrades of second-floor windows, their heavy makeup and scarlet-colored kimono undergarments giving off the scent of enticement. But when they describe these faded scenes, the witnesses speak in ambiguous terms, sometimes referring to the neighborhood as a colorful oasis of music, art, and entertainment, confident in its role as a vehicle of traditional culture, but characterizing it at other times as a gloomy, sinister place religiously avoided by women and children. One elderly lady recounted, with an odd mixture of nostalgia and distaste, an evening as a small child when she walked through Maruyama with her father after visiting the house of friends nearby. As soon as she and her father turned onto the stone path sloping through Maruyama, the painted women came out onto the flagstones and tugged coquettishly at her father’s sleeves while she clutched his other arm to thwart what she thought was an attempted abduction.

In 1958, the Japanese government enacted the Prostitution Prevention Law, honoring the spirit of human rights and the principles of American-style democracy instilled in the new postwar constitution. This legislation fulfilled the wish of the Corrells and other nineteenth-century missionaries to rid Japan of its “social evil,” but it also plunged the flower quarters of Japan into dire economic straits. Over the following years the former houses of ill repute tried to stay afloat as drinking and eating establishments, but the new wave of economic prosperity and urban development reshaping the face of Japan resulted in the demolition of most of the old townscape of Maruyama and its replacement with a disjointed jumble of ferro-concrete buildings. Today the only relic of the seventy-odd brothels that prospered here is Kagetsu (“Flower Moon”), once part of the Hiketaya yūkaku but now an exclusive Japanese restaurant with gleaming wooden floors, art works of untold value hanging in the alcoves of tatami-matted rooms, and a maze of corridors connecting exquisitely tended inner gardens.

7-1. The Maruyama district as it looks today.

Still, despite its loss of architectural integrity, the neighborhood retains a strong semblance of its former character in that it is Nagasaki’s foremost entertainment district, a nighttime resort bulging with bars and eating spots. By far the most common form of business establishment here is the sunakku (“snack”), typically a one-room lounge with a bar and a few tables staffed by a “mama-san” and a bevy of young “hostesses” who sit with their customers on comfortable sofas. The customers are usually married men enjoying a night out on the town with at least the passive consent of their wives, just as men of the Edo period made forays into the flower quarter without suffering any sort of social stigma. Often barely out of high school, the hostesses dress expensively and use flirtation and flattery to effect while serving drinks, lighting cigarettes, reciprocating banal conversation, and helping to relieve the stress of many an overworked “salaryman.” Although it rarely crosses the boundary of decorum or legality, the male-female interaction in these establishments replicates its precedent in the Maruyama brothels, and the Japanese man’s historic inclination for young musume continues to manifest itself, not only in his patronage of sunakku, but also in phenomena such as the difficulty faced by Japanese women in achieving equality in the workplace.

7-2. Kagetsu Restaurant, once part of the Hiketa-ya yūkaku, is now one of the last vestiges of the former Maruyama flower quarter.

In our search for traces of Madame Butterfly we wander through the streets and alleys of the former flower quarter, conjuring up images of teenage courtesans sitting like dolls for sale at the windows of brothels and tuning our ears to hear echoes of the laughter and whispers of visitors walking purposefully down the flagstones. To gain access to the flower quarter, the visitors of old had to cross a bridge over a canal dividing it from the rest of the downtown area. The bridge was called Shianbashi (“Hesitation Bridge”), a playful reference to the qualms (probably mostly monetary) that brothel patrons suffered as they journeyed into the realm of sensual delights. Now the canal is covered over and the bridge exists only as the unofficial name of its former vicinity, but the ghosts of the orandayuki (“Holland-goers”) and their child-maids seem to linger there, glancing back as they depart for Deshima to serve as temporary wives of Dutch East India Company employees.

Turning the pages of history back to the Edo Period, we indeed find the prototypes of the characters in the opera Madame Butter  fly — the Holland-goer alias Cho-Cho-san, the lonely Dutchman alias Pinkerton, the kamuro maid alias Suzuki, and the mercenary agent “for the intercourse of the races” alias Goro. But, looking closely, we realize that the faithfulness and self-sacrifice of the adolescent courtesans of Maruyama was directed, not toward their foreign patrons, but toward their parents and siblings stuck in the quagmire of poverty in nearby villages. Amid all the music and revelry of Maruyama we hear a far more plaintive melody, a half-forgotten childhood lullaby interspersed with sobs and sighs of homesickness.

In the Inasa neighborhood on the other side of Nagasaki Harbor we continue our search, approaching, we think, the image of Madame Butterfly in the “Japanese marriages” arranged by wealthy Russian navy officers. But although records of a few indentured teenage prostitutes with names like Inaoka, Inasato, and Inakaze emerge from research on the former “Russian Sailors Resting Place,” the women who served as consorts for foreigners, both before and after their official liberation from slavery in 1873, are as recognizable as the chairs and charcoal braziers in the houses rented by the Russian officers. Nowhere is there mention of a vivacious fifteen-year-old named Cho-Cho-san or of a suicide due to abandonment or unrequited international love. On the contrary, what predominates is the image of a temporary, illicit liaison in which the Russian exploits his great financial advantage to indulge briefly in Oriental luxury and revels in his isolation from the searchlight of Christian probity and the critical eye of his wife, mother, and sisters back home. At this point doubts start to creep into the vanguard of our inquiry; we begin to wonder if Cho-Cho-san is nothing more than a figment of the Western imagination, a projection of the primordial male wish for complete love and devotion from the female analog without any commitments or responsibilities.

7-3. The Russian Cemetery at Goshinji Temple in Inasa. The “Russian Sailors’ Rest Place” was located only steps away from this spot.

In Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème we finally taste the truth and, riding into the streets of old Nagasaki on the magic carpet of the author’s beautiful prose, we think we catch a glimpse of Cho-Cho-san’s face in the descriptions of his “mousmé.” The sense of reality becomes stronger when we follow the French lieutenant’s footsteps into the labyrinth of lanes and stone steps in Junin-machi, looking at the eroded flagstones that his shoes must have trod and imagining him sitting with Chrysanthème fanning himself in the summer heat of 1885. The outline of Madame Butterfly is indeed right here in his story: the voyage into Nagasaki Harbor on a foreign warship, the rental of a house on the hillside, and the departure after a period of exotic cohabitation. But despite the similarities in age, name, and circumstances, the heroine of Loti’s travelogue bears no resemblance to the tragic heroine of the opera in the decisive area of her relationship with her foreign patron. We sigh, suspecting that she served as a hint for the protagonist of Puccini’s famous opera but knowing that, after all, she is not the woman we are looking for.

7-4. The sloping path in Junin-machi as it looks today. “Jasmin” ascended this path on her way to Loti’s rented house, never knowing that her visit would later be immortalized in the first act of an opera by Giacomo Puccini.

Our next destination is the former foreign concession of Nagasaki where people directly related to the publication of the Madame Butterfly story lived and worked in the late nineteenth century. We climb Orandazaka (“Hollander Slope,” named after the old Nagasaki custom of referring to everything Western as Dutch), and we arrive in the former residential area of Higashiyamate, the site of the homes of Jennie Correll and other Protestant missionaries and the “Higashi Hill” of John Luther Long’s story. We sit on the veranda of the former Correll residence and look out over the rooftops of the former concession just as visiting American naval officers did while sipping tea here a century ago and bowing to the missionaries’ silent demand for moral behavior. We seem to be getting cold now though; the spacious lawn of the house and distinctly European style of the building lack the aura of authenticity we felt in the former flower quarter of Maruyama or even in Loti’s former stamping grounds in Junin-machi. We feel as detached from the truth of Madame Butterfly as the life of Jennie and Irvin Correll was removed from the sweat and tears of people living in the congested back streets of fin-de-siècle Nagasaki.

7-5. The former Correll residence at No. 12 Higashiyamate as it looks today.

Finally we cross the Oura valley to the Minamiyamate hillside and enter “Glover Garden,” where we come upon a statue of Miura Tamaki portraying Cho-Cho-san in Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, and we read in the pamphlet that the former home of the Scottish merchant-adventurer Thomas B. Glover is the “Place Connected with Madame Butterfly.” We can only agree that there could be no better place than this scenic perch on the Minamiyamate hillside to imagine the thin, distraught but still exquisitely beautiful Cho-Cho-san gazing at Nagasaki Harbor and pining for the wisp of smoke than would signal the arrival of Pinkerton’s ship. But we know that we are now in an artificial realm, like Disneyland, where visitors pay to be swept up into just this kind of trance and where the mundane facts of history are happily left behind at the gate.

7-6. The former Glover House remains today as Japan’s oldest Western-style building.

Thus, everywhere we go in search of Madame Butterfly, we think we see her and we rush after her, but each time she slips away and disappears, and however hard we try we cannot grasp her.

Many others have strived to find her, too. They have scoured police records in the Nagasaki area for cases of suicide among young women in the late nineteenth century; they have spent hours — assuming that the story is based on an actual marriage and not just a contract between prostitute and her patron — looking through dusty library records for mention of an appropriate marital link between a Japanese woman and foreign man; they have sought information about a proud samurai who committed ritual suicide in the wake of the Satsuma Rebellion; they have pored over books on the history of Japanese sword-making looking for the “Ikesada” tantō that John Luther Long tells us Cho-Cho-san kept as a memento of her father and used in the attempt to end her own life; they have searched through volume after volume of American naval archives for the names and faces of officers whose records might lead to her; they have tried to prove that she is derived from another woman, such as Thomas Glover’s wife, Tsuru, or Kaga Maki, the mysterious woman mentioned in household registers as the mother of Glover’s son, Kuraba Tomisaburo. But these efforts have also drawn a complete blank or postulated only the most tenuous connections. Yet however futile, the attempts share one important feature, namely the burning desire to confirm that the story of Madame Butterfly is true. Indeed, it is this same desire that motivated John Luther Long to turn Pierre Loti’s poetic but callous travelogue into a love-tragedy and that inspired David Belasco and Giacomo Puccini to lift it to high crescendoes of emotion through the use of stage effects and music. What all our efforts to find Madame Butterfly signify, therefore, is the stubborn belief of humankind in the existence of an island of absolute love and trust somewhere in the sea of dishonesty, disloyalty, and indifference that inundate the world in which we live. And surely it is this belief — not the exotic sets, the colorful costumes, or even the beautiful music of the opera — that explains the undying popularity of Madame Butterfly.

Love, Trust, and International Cooperation

We may have failed to find a real-life model for Madame Butterfly, but the history of her hometown provides countless other examples of how people from diverse cultures came together and forged a life of coexistence, respecting differences out of commitment to common goals. Unlike many other Asian ports, Nagasaki was opened for trade with Europe, not as a result of war or colonial expansion, but on the basis of an agreement made on an equal footing by feudal lord Omura Sumitada and the Portuguese in 1570. The Japanese people who gathered here to participate in trade hailed from various parts of southwestern Japan and so had to deal with differences among themselves as well as differences with the foreigners with whom they conducted business. In this way, coexistence and respect for diversity became a feature of the local culture of Nagasaki. The Christian persecutions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century seem to contradict this culture, but in fact it was not the citizens of Nagasaki but the central government that enforced persecutions as a way to stamp out political nonconformity.

One of the historic figures whose life embodies the cosmopolitan culture of Nagasaki is Kuraba Tomisaburo, the Japanese-British son of Thomas Glover who, as we saw earlier, was forced to sell the Glover House prior to World War II and who has been cited as the model for the unfortunate offspring of Cho-Cho-san and Pinkerton. During the war, Kuraba suffered from the suspicions of his Japanese countrymen that he might spy for the enemy, and then with the end of the war he faced the prospect of accusations of treason by the Americans and British. His self-inflicted death only days after the announcement of surrender was due not just to despair but to his fundamental inability to take sides in the conflict. In a word, Kuraba Tomisaburo was both Japanese and British, a state that reflected the traditional culture of Nagasaki but proved unacceptable in wartime.

7-7. The flagstone-path sloping up through Higashiyamate, the “Higashi Hill” immortalized in Madame Butterfly. The house at No. 12 is visible at the top.

Today Nagasaki is a typical regional city, but below the surface it is scattered with reminders of its golden age of international coexistence. These include the eclectic presentations in the Nagasaki Kunchi Festival, cuisine like shippoku blending elements of different cultures, unique styles of architecture born from the fusion of Japanese building methods and foreign lifestyles, and the profound impact of Catholicism on local culture. Even the Nagasaki dialect includes words, now completely naturalized, that foreign residents introduced many years ago.

The lack of interest in Madame Butterfly among the citizens of Nagasaki is indicated by the fact that this city, despite its status as the setting, rarely sees a performance of the opera. But this does not mean that they are unfamiliar with the spirit of the story or the aura of its tragic/heroic antagonist. On the contrary, the faithful heroine lives on as an icon in local culture, anonymous but unmistakable, a composite image drawing elements from the Virgin Mary (revered here as Maria-sama), from the Buddhist deity of mercy Kwannon and from her clone used by the former “hidden Christians” as a cover for worship of Mary, from the strong women of the past who emerged from humble circumstances as leaders in the economic development of the city, and from the countless women who, for reasons beyond their own control and yet stoically and insouciantly, served over the centuries as courtesans and geisha in the Maruyama flower quarter.

7-8. Statues of Mary and St. John guard a portal in the ruins of Urakami Church. Taken in October 1945 by Hayashi Shigeo. (Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum)

However indirect the link may be, physical structures connected with the opera Madame Butterfly are also evident. The former Correll family house at No. 12 Higashiyamate has been designated an important cultural asset and is open to the public as a museum on the history of mission schools in Nagasaki. The former Alt House visited by Jennie Correll and Miura Tamaki in 1922 is on display in Glover Garden and retains much of its original atmosphere, and the Glover and Ringer houses and other historic buildings in the former foreign concession continue to remind visitors of the years when foreigners, while enjoying the benefits of economic advantage, helped Japan to emerge from the cocoon of national isolation and to gain expertise in the ways of Western civilization. Similarly, the stone steps upon which Pierre Loti walked in 1885 still carry pedestrians up the slopes in Junin-machi, and the back streets of Maruyama and Yoriai district still whisper tales of sexual intrigue.

Just as interludes of peace tend to go unrecorded in history books, most of the stories of romance spanning the barriers of nationality in Nagasaki did not find their way into writing and so have faded irrevocably from memory. But traces of a few are etched in stone in Nagasaki’s international cemeteries.

One is that of Prussian merchant Gustav Wilckens and his lover Tamagiku. Wilckens died in Nagasaki in 1869 at the age of thirty-seven and was buried in the international cemetery at Goshinji Temple. His gravestone — the largest in the cemetery — has an inscription in Japanese on the side saying Tsunokuniya nai Tamagiku (“Tamagiku of Tsunokuniya”). Although nothing else is known about the couple, it seems that Tamagiku, a courtesan working at the Tsunokuniya brothel in Maruyama, was the Prussian’s lover and that, grief-stricken over his death, she used her own money to erect the gravestone.

7-9. The name of a Japanese courtesan is inscribed on the side of the gravestone of Gustav Wilckens, who died in Nagasaki in 1869.

Another example is Victor Pignatel, a native of Lyon, France, who came to Nagasaki at the age of seventeen to join his father’s import and export company here. He took over the company when his father died in 1870 and rose to a position of importance in the Nagasaki foreign concession, even serving for some time as French consul. But one day he suddenly abandoned his business, cut off all his social contacts, and retreated into the life of a recluse in his house at No. 5 Deshima. By the end of World War I he was virtually unknown to other members of the foreign community, but he had become a kind of celebrity in the Japanese town by tramping around the downtown area in shabby clothing. Children teased him with shouts of selyō banzo (“Western bum” in Nagasaki dialect). Only after his death in 1922 did the reason for his solitude and odd behavior come to light. It is said that, as a young man, Pignatel fell in love with and married a geisha from the Maruyama flower quarter named Masaki. The couple took up residence together in Pignatel’s house, but Masaki died of pneumonia a few years later and the Frenchman was so heartbroken that he could not bring himself to return to his previous lifestyle. He was found dead in his house, lying with his head on the lacquerware pillow that Masaki had used before her death some thirty years earlier.

Victor Pignatel was buried according to European custom in Sakamoto International Cemetery, a large graveyard for foreigners located only a few hundred meters from the hypocenter of the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Since it is the newest of Nagasaki’s seven international cemeteries (opened in 1888 and extended in 1903), it contains a large number of gravestones belonging to former foreign residents of Nagasaki who married Japanese women, had families, and lived here for as long as forty or fifty years before their deaths (foreign women who married Japanese men were generally cremated and interred with their families in temple graveyards). The cemetery is beautiful in spring when the cherry trees are blooming, but, now closed to new burials and all but forgotten by the descendants of the people buried here, it is rather desolate at other times of year. Most of the gravestones are sorely neglected, some broken from the force of the atomic bomb explosion, others defaced by erosion or overturned by the thickening roots of trees.

There is one gravestone, however, that often has fresh flowers in its vases. This belongs to Marcel Giroit, a French resident who died in Nagasaki in 1963 at the age of seventy-three, and his Japanese wife, Kuni, who erected the gravestone for her husband and was buried here with him when she died in 1979 at the age of eighty-one. While the inscriptions on most of the other gravestones in the cemetery include short poems or religious platitudes, the gravestone that Kuni built for her husband is inscribed with a touchingly personal message in French:

Je suis là avec vous. Je vous aime. (I am here with you. I love you.)

7-10. The gravestone of Marcel and Kuni Giroit.

However obsolete the cultural images evoked in Giacomo Puccini’s opera and in the stories from which it is derived — and however seemingly insurmountable the differences that culminated in the atomic bomb explosion so close to this spot — a person visiting the gravestone of Marcel and Kuni Giroit cannot help but agree that the love and trust expressed by “Madame Butterfly” and the spirit of international cooperation glimmering in the back pages of Nagasaki history really do exist in our world.

Notes

Chapter 1

1. Koga Jujiro, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. I (Nagasaki: Bunkensha Co., 1968), pp. 2-3. As the title (“Maruyama Courtesans and the Chinese and Dutch”) suggests, this two-volume, 1,600-page work is a detailed history of the Maruyama flower quarter and licensed prostitution in the international port of Nagasaki.

2. Domingo Fernandez Navarette, An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral and Religious (Madrid, 1676). Cited in Koga, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. I, pp. 5-6.

3. The six Franciscan priests and twenty Japanese followers ranged in age from twelve to sixty-four years. They were executed by crucifixion on the Nishizaka hillside, in full view of the Nagasaki populace, on February 5, 1597. The group was canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862 as the “Twenty-six Saints of Japan” and are commemorated today by a monument and museum on the site.

4. The word is usually rendered as “Deshima,” “Decima,” or “Desima” in European documents. In Japanese, the ideographs can be pronounced either as “Deshima” or “Dejima.”

5. A port on the Ariake Sea in present-day Nagasaki Prefecture, Shimabara was ruled with an iron fist by the Matsudaira family. The peasant uprising began in December 1637 and spread quickly to surrounding areas. The Shogunate mobilized a huge army and succeeded in suppressing the uprising in April the following year, slaughtering some 37,000 people taking cover in Hara Castle on the Shimabara Peninsula. Interestingly, the brothel quarter in Kyoto (from which courtesans were strictly forbidden to leave) was later named “Shimabara” as an allusion to the rebels sequestered in Hara Castle.

6. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600 to 1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 233.

7. Machi means “block” or “quarter.” In Nagasaki the word referred to a street and buildings facing it on both sides. Although comprised of two separate blocks, Maruyama and Yoriai, the Nagasaki brothel quarter is usually referred to simply as “Maruyama.”

8. Literally “play pavilion.” For lack of a better word I translate yūkaku as “brothel,” but this is inaccurate because the Japanese word has a somewhat more refined ring, suggesting a place for the enjoyment of artistic and musical pursuits, conversation, culinary adventures and alcohol-fueled reverie in addition to simple sexual contact.

9. Koga, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. I, p. 227. The tayū were also called “tayoshi” in Nagasaki dialect.

10. Nagashima Shoichi, Zokuzoku nagasaki monoshiri techō (Nagasaki: Nagasaki Hoso, 1983) pp. 289-91. The word odori is Japanese for “dance,” but the word kan-kan comes directly from Chinese, underlining the fact that the custom arose from interaction between Japanese courtesans and their Chinese patrons in Nagasaki.

11. Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, Vol. II (Glascow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), pp. 83-4.

12. Yoshiwara shittsui, 1674, Mikan zuihitsu hyakushu, Vol. 5, p. 322. Quoted in Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 153.

13. Charles Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia between the years 1770 and 1779, Vol. III (London, 1796), pp. 74-5.

14. Ibid., pp. 76-7.

15. Koga, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. I, pp. 808-10.

16. Wang Peng, “Xiuhaibian,” in Zhaodai zongshu, Vol. 56, ed. Wang Xiji (China: Shigaidang, 1876), fascicle 29. I thank Jamie Berger for this information.

17. Translated from the Chinese by Jamie Berger.

18. The surname “Michitomi” is composed of two ideographs that — in the onyomi or Chinese reading — are pronounced “Dōfu”and thus simulate the pronunciation of “Doeff.”

19. After returning to Europe, Siebold published Nippon and a number of other works presenting the results of his extensive research and establishing himself as the foremost European authority on Japan. He also married a German woman and had several children with her. On the eve of Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan, Siebold offered his services as advisor, but the Americans refused because they thought his previous expulsion from the country might jeopardize the expedition. As a result, the aging scientist became a consultant for the Russians, convincing them to submit their request through Nagasaki and to desist from any show of force in dealing with the Japanese. Within days of the opening of the country in 1859, he returned to Nagasaki and was reunited briefly with his daughter and her mother Taki (who had also married in the interim). He served briefly as a foreign advisor to the Tokugawa Shogunate but soon returned to Europe, where he died in 1866 at the age of 70.

20. I opt for the term “concession” in the present work because it implies, accurately I think, that the Japanese government agreed only reluctantly to the establishment of patches of foreign jurisdiction on its own land.

21. A temple of the Buddhist Jodo Sect located in the Inasa neighborhood across the harbor from the main part of Nagasaki, Goshinji had been provided by Japanese authorities as a resting place for Russian ship crews since Admiral Putiatin’s second visit in January 1954. For a detailed description of the early Russian contacts in Nagasaki see William McOmie, “The Russian Frigate Askold and the Opening of the Russian Settlement of Nagasaki,” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 4 (summer 1996), pp. 1-32.

22. Henry Arthur Tilley, Japan, the Amoor and the Pacific (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1861), p. 66.

23. Ibid., pp. 66-7.

24. The names of all the brothels in the Maruyama district — Chikugo-ya and Hiketa-ya, for example — end with the ideograph ya, meaning “house” or “shop.” But brothels in some other parts of Japan used the suffix chaya, meaning “teahouse,” and this may be the origin of the use the word as a synonym for brothel.

25. Tilley, Japan, p. 62.

26. Nagashima Shoichi, Zoku nagasaki monoshiri techō (Nagasaki: Nagasaki Hoso, 1977), p. 200.

27. Located in the Koshima neighborhood of Nagasaki, the “Koshima Yōjō- sho” was Japan’s first Western-style hospital and site of this country’s first full-fledged education in Western medicine. Another facility for the prevention of syphilis and other contagious diseases was the “lock hospital” established in both Yokohama (1868) and Nagasaki (1870) with Japanese cooperation by British naval physician George B. Newton.

28. Koga Jujiro, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. II (Nagasaki: Bunkensha Co., 1968), pp. 244-50.

29. Tilley, Japan, p. 60.

30. Nagasaki Express, August 19, 1871.

31. Ibid., August 26, 1871.

32. Ibid., November 23, 1872.

33. Ibid., November 30, 1872.

34. Nippon Times, January 12, 1946.

35. Koga, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. II, p. 282. Translated from Japanese by the author.

36. Gaimujimubo for 1885 (Nagasaki Prefectural Library, 14-481-1), p. 95. Translated from Japanese by the author. The term yōgin (“Western silver”) refers to the Mexican silver dollar, which was the standard trade currency in the ports of China and Southeast Asia and in the foreign concessions of Japan during the early years after the opening of Japan’s doors. Produced in Mexico, these silver coins were prized for their purity (over 90 percent). The exchange rate in Japan was set on the principle of same weight and same quality.

Chapter 2

1. The July 8, 1885, issue of the English newspaper Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express reports the arrival of the Triomphante on this day. In Madame Chrysanthème, Loti gives the impression that he came to Nagasaki earlier than this date, but it is safe to assume that the newspaper date is correct or at least indicates the date of official arrival. Established by the Tokugawa Shogunate with the help of Dutch engineers in 1857, the Nagasaki Shipyard had been leased by the Meiji government to Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Co. in 1884. It would be sold to the company in 1887 and grow over the following decades into one of the most important shipbuilding facilities in the world.

2. The Hiogo-maru was commanded by Captain R.N. Walker, a native of Maryport, England who had been working for the Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Co. since 1874. In 1885, the year of Pierre Loti’s visit, Walker moved with his Japanese wife Sato and five children (another four children would follow later) to Nagasaki and took up residence in the foreign concession. Walker’s second son, Robert Jr., appears later in the present account as one of the last inhabitants of the Nagasaki foreign concession.

3. For example see Clive Wake, The Novels of Pierre Loti (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 32.

4. Loti, Le Roman d’un enfant, pp. 285-6, quoted in Pierre Loti and the Ori- ental Woman, Irene L. Szyliowicz (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 23.

5. Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1888)

6. Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème, tr. Laura Ensor (Paris: Edouard Guillaume et Cie., 1893). All subsequent quotations are taken from this English translation.

7. The Juzenji neighborhood was renamed “Junin-machi” in 1913. Although reshaped somewhat by the removal of rows of houses to make firebreaks during World War II and by postwar amalgamations with adjacent neighborhoods, it retains much of its architectural identity and cultural ambience to this day.

8. Lettres de Pierre Loti a Madame Juliette Adam (1880–1922) (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1924), p. 69.

9. Pierre Loti, The Marriage of Loti, tr. Wright and Eleanor Frierson (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), p. xv.

10. In La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune, an account of the author’s second visit to Nagasaki in 1900 and a kind of sequel to Madame Chrysanthème, Loti reports meeting Chrysanthème’s mother and hearing from her that “her daughter, Madame Chrysanthème, was very satisfactorily settled in a neighboring town, married in the legitimate manner to a M. Pinson [Mr. Finch], wholesale manufacturer of lanterns; Heaven the while refuses, alas, to bless this union, which obstinately remains sterile, the only shadow upon their happiness.” But, again, there is no way to confirm the verity of Loti’s report or to determine the identity of “M. Pinson,” which is obviously a pseudonym.

11. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. III (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958), p. 437.

12. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958), pp. 610-1.

13. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. III (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1958), p. 443.

14. For example, see Matsutake Hideo, Inasa fūdoki (Nagasaki: Nagasaki Bunkensha, 1985), pp. 149-68.

15. Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, Once a Grand Duke (New York, 1932).

16. Quoted in Harold S. Williams, “The Wild Oats of The Grand Duke Alexander,” in Foreigners in Mikadoland (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1963), pp. 198-9.

17. Koga Jujiro, Maruyama yūjo to tōkōmōjin, Vol. II (Nagasaki: Bunkensha Co., 1968), pp. 284-5.

18. For a biography of Michinaga Ei, see Brian Burke-Gaffney, “The Tattoos of Michinaga Ei and Nicholas II” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 1 (summer 1993): pp. 91-105. Or in Japanese, Shirahama Shoko, Nikorai no kubikazari: Nagasaki no joketsu oei mongatari (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2002).

19. From The Ballad of East and West (1889), published the same year as Kipling’s Nagasaki visit. Although this one phrase alone sticks in the literary memory and serves to this day as a widely accepted truism about international relations, the poem of which it is part actually points beyond the dichotomy of East and West: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; 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!

20. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, Vol. I (London, 1900), p. 326.

Chapter 3

1. John Luther Long, Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo (Philadelphia and London: J.P. Lippincott and Co., 1895)

2. John Luther Long’s correspondence, papers and manuscripts are preserved today at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

3. Long may have referred to the English translation of Madame Chrysanthème (tr. Hettie Miller) published by Donohue, Henneberry and Co. of Chicago in 1892.

4. Douglas Sladen, The Japs at Home (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1892), p. 137.

5. Katherine S. Baxter, In Bamboo Lands (New York: The Merriam Company, 1895), p. 376.

6. Albert Tracy, Rambles through Japan without a Guide (London, 1892), pp. 8-9. I thank Arthur Groos for this information.

7. Japan Weekly Mail, April 15, 1893, pp. 456-8.

8. New York Times, November 1, 1927.

9. Long, Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo, p. 5.

10. In the opera’s American debut in October 1906, the title was altered from Madame Butterfly to Madam Butterfly. To this day, “Madam Butterfly” is used widely in the English-speaking world.

11. Long does not mention the name of Yamadori’s domain in the story, but, interestingly, it is identified as “Omura” in the libretto of Puccini’s opera. This obviously refers to the seat of the Omura family, former feudal lords of the Omura domain encompassing Nagasaki. Omura Castle was demolished — and the land upon which it stood transferred to public ownership — in 1869 as part of the change in political system after the Meiji Restoration. The last feudal lord, Omura Sumihiro, moved to Tokyo soon thereafter to join the new aristocracy, and his descendants continue to live in Tokyo today. How the word “Omura” found its way into the Madama Butterfly libretto is unclear, but it is undoubtedly derived simply from information that the Nagasaki foreign concession was originally part of the Omura domain.

12. For example, see Furusaki Hiroshi, Gensaku chōchō fujin (Isahaya: Chinzei Gakuin, 1981), pp. 105-8. Furusaki suggests that Saga, the only Kyushu district on the Meiji government side during the Satsuma Rebellion, might be the home province of Cho-Cho-san’s father, but he offers no further research on the subject nor any ideas about the reason for the supposed suicide.

13. It is certainly not a Japanese custom to decorate a house with flowers as a gesture of welcome, let alone to scatter flowers over the floor as portrayed in Madame Butterfly. Unless he confused Japan with Hawaii, Long may have derived this idea from Loti’s invitation to Yves at the beginning of Madame Chrysanthème: “You shall have a room in our house. A little paper house in the midst of green gardens, prettily shaded. We shall live among flowers, everything around us shall blossom, and each morning our dwelling shall be filled with nose-gays, nosegays such as you have never dreamt of.”

14. “Bund” is derived from the Hindi word bandh, meaning dyke or embankment. The Anglicized transliteration was first applied to the “Apollo Bunder” landing wharf in Mumbai (Bombay). Abbreviated to “bund,” the word followed the wave of British influence eastward and was applied to the waterfront streets and their rows of imposing buildings in Shanghai, Yokohama, and the other Far East treaty ports of the nineteenth century.

15. Literally meaning “trample the picture,” fumie (sometimes efumi) was a ritual forced upon the entire population of Nagasaki and surrounding areas until 1873. In January every year, citizens came to a specified location and, in the presence of authorities, demonstrated their rejection of the banned religion by stepping upon a bronze plaque bearing a cross or some other Christian image. The ritual was enforced with such rigor that even infants had to comply. If anyone was too ill or infirm to make the trip, the authorities came around later and pressed the image against the person’s foot.

16. George Smith (Bishop of Victoria), Ten Weeks in Japan (London, 1861) p. 263.

17. Nagasaki Express, August 19, 1871.

18. Although there was no special agreement to that effect, Britons and other Europeans tended to settle in Minamiyamate while Americans took up residence in Higashiyamate.

19. Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan and the Philippines. This list of foreign residents and businesses in the Far East was published annually in Hong Kong from around 1860 to the outbreak of World War II.

20. Kakkoku jinin narabi kosû shirabe hyō (Nagasaki Prefectural Library, 14-559-12). This handwritten register compiled by Nagasaki authorities lists the residents of the foreign concession at the end of each year from 1876 to 1900. The census results from 1893 to 1896 show Irvin H. Correll, his wife, and their two sons and four daughters living at No. 12 Higashiyamate.

21. For a detailed description of the development and demise of the Nagasaki Seamen’s Home, see Lane R. Earns, “Like a Lighthouse on a Stormy Night: The Seamen’s Home of Nagasaki,” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 4 (summer 1996): pp. 85-103.

22. Earle Sims as quoted in a January 12, 1895, letter from Rev. Albertus Pieters to John Karsten. Cited in Earns, “Like a Lighthouse,” p. 91.

23. Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express, June 26, 1895. I thank Lane Earns for this information.

24. For example, the first word in the Grosset and Dunlap edition is “Amachidosama,” a mistaken rendering of omachidosama, which means “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.” In another place, Long has Pinkerton call Butterfly Ane-san (“elder sister”) and then explains that it means “little sister.”

25. Arthur Groos, “Madame Butterfly: The Story,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 2 (1991), pp. 125-58.

26. Ibid., pp. 140 and 147.

Chapter 4

1. The British Columbia and Victoria Guide and Directory for 1863 (Victoria Public Library), p. 55.

2. Harriet Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984) p. 185.

3. David Belasco, The Theatre through Its Stage Door (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1919), p. 164.

4. Henry E. Krehbiel, A Second Book of Operas (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1909), p. 170.

5. William Winter, The Life of David Belasco (New York, 1918), p. 477. Belasco’s script appeared in print for the first time in Arthur Hobson Quinn, ed., Representative American Plays (New York: The Century Co. 1928), pp. 649-64.

6. Belasco, The Theatre, pp. 237-8.

7. Krehbiel, Second Book, p. 172.

8. Winter, The Life of David Belasco, pp. 488-9.

9. In this 1898 opera by Puccini’s compatriot and rival Pietro Mascagni, a beautiful young Japanese woman named “Iris” is abducted by a procurer and sold to his wealthy customer, while her father is told that she went to Yoshiwara (the Tokyo brothel quarter) of her own accord. Her father finds her but denounces her when deceived into thinking that she has been purchased by the procurer, and Iris commits suicide by throwing herself out a window. The fact that this opera had little to do with real-life Japan — and that the possible impression of a Japanese audience was never considered in its creation — is shown by the fact that the two leading male characters are named “Kyoto” and “Osaka.”

10. For a detailed description of the initial Illica manuscript and the impact of Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème on the Madama Butterfly libretto, see Arthur Groos, “Lieutenant F.B. Pinkerton: Problems in the Genesis and Performance of Madama Butterfly” in The Puccini Companion, ed. William Weaver and Simonetta Puccini (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994), pp. 169-201.

11. Illica also wrote the libretto for Messager’s opera version of Madame Chrysanthème and so he was more than familiar with Loti’s book and with the foreign-navy-officer-meets-Japanese-courtesan theme.

12. Giuseppe Adami, ed., Letters of Giacomo Puccini, tr. Ena Makin (London: George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd., 1931), p. 146.

13. George Edwardes to “Messre Klaw & Erlanger, New Amsterdam Theatre Building, 42 Street, New York,” July 30, 1905.

14. Nagasaki Press, July 18, 1904. Quoted from the Neue Freie Presse.

15. Japan Weekly Mail, September 5, 1891.

16. Ibid., November 18, 1906.

17. Translated in the Japan Times, October 29, 1906.

18. Quoted in the Nagasaki Press, November 21, 1906.

19. Japan Weekly Mail, December 15, 1906.

20. Kobe Herald, June 12, 1907.

21. The first American performance of the opera in the original Italian was at the Garden Theater in New York on November 12, 1906.

22. Nagasaki Press, April 16, 1898.

23. Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express, April 9, 1890.

24. “Kara” is the Japanese kun reading of the ideograph tō (in Chinese “tang”), which refers to the historic “Tang Dynasty” but is used widely to refer to all things Chinese.

25. The memory of the karayuki lives on today in a drab little museum in the town of Kuchinotsu, Nagasaki Prefecture, the port where many of the women caught a last glimpse of Japan. The karayuki also receive tribute in a few novels and movies, and — somewhat obliquely — in the “Shimabara Lullaby,” a beautiful, plaintive song with lyrics admonishing a child to go to sleep before the procurer “Kyusukedon” comes to take her away. For an account of the life and times of the karayuki and a discourse on the wider issue of sexual discrimination in Japanese society, see Morizaki Kazue, Karayukisan (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1980).

26. Consular Journal and Greater Britain (September 8, 1898), quoted in the Nagasaki Press, October 20, 1898.

27. Nagasaki Press, July 17, 1899.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., July 22, 1899.

30. The involvement of the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard in warship construction began in 1898, the same year as the construction of the Hitachi-maru and the debut of the Nagasaki facility as a world-class shipyard. At first, the company imported the parts of a German-built torpedo boat and re-assembled these as a vessel called the Shirataka (“White Hawk”). This served as a prototype for the totally Mitsubishi-manufactured Shiratsuyu (“White Mist”), a 380-ton torpedo boat launched into Nagasaki Harbor on February 12, 1906, with all its engines, guns, and fittings in place.

31. From the English translation (Madame Prune) by S.R.C. Plimsoll.

32. I thank Aaron Cohen for this information.

33. Nagasaki Express, November 8, 1873.

Chapter 5

1. Nagasaki Press, January 23, 1921.

2. Ibid., February 8, 1921. Kuraba Tomisaburo (aka T.A. Glover, 1870–1945) was born out of wedlock to the influential Scottish entrepreneur Thomas Glover and a Japanese woman named Kaga Maki. The name “Tomisaburo” is apparently derived from “Tommy,” while the surname “Kuraba” is the name “Glover” rendered with two ideographs (meaning “warehouse-place”) that evoke a phonetic similarity. Kuraba has been cited, as we will see later, as the model for the child “Trouble” in Madame Butterfly and his mother, in turn, as the real-life model for the woman in the story. For a biographical sketch of Kuraba Tomisaburo, see Brian Burke-Gaffney, “The Man who Could Not Take Sides,” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 3 (summer 1995), pp. 51-73.

3. Although no one could have imagined such a future in 1917, it was this same factory that produced the torpedoes used in the raid on Pearl Harbor and this same complex of buildings that the bombardier of the B-29 Bockscar spotted through a break in the clouds just before making history with a push of the thumb.

4. Nishi-Nippon Jūkōgyō Kabushikaisha Nagasaki Zōsenjo (ed.), Mitsubishi Nagasaki zōsenjoshi zokuhen (1951), p. 38. The number decreased to a low of 6,127 in 1932 — the lowest point in Nagasaki’s post-World War I depression — and then climbed back to a high of 25,013 in 1941 during the construction of the battleship Musashi. (Ibid., p. 66)

5. Yujobo Hideaki, ed., Takehisa Yumeji (Tokyo: Taiyō Bessatsu, no.20, 1977), p. 120. Translated from Japanese by the author.

6. Yoshimoto Akimitsu, ed., Miura Tamaki: O-Chō Fujin (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1997), p. 47. In this autobiography (although written in the first person, the book is actually based on interviews carried out by the editor), Miura states that she performed the lead role in the opera Madame Butterfly at the London Opera House on May 31, 1915, and that this marked not only her first performance but also the first time for a Japanese soprano to play the role of Cho-Cho-san.

7. New York Times, January 30, 1919.

8. Frederick H. Martens, The Art of the Prima Donna and Concert Singer (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923), pp. 214-15. I thank Lane Earns for this information.

9. During her more than twenty-year-long career as one of the world’s leading prima donnas, Miura Tamaki seldom returned to Japan and, judging from her letters to her mother (excerpts were published in a series of articles in the Asahi Shimbun from November 3 to 7, 1952), she felt a growing rift between her outgoing self and her reclusive, bookish husband. She also complained about how his family pestered her for money when she met them and, between the lines, revealed a keen distaste for the subservient role forced upon women in Japanese society. In a letter from New York in January 1924, she told her mother that she had read in American newspapers that Seitaro was suing her for divorce, and she requested assistance in retrieving family seals, etc. The divorce was put on hold, though, and the trouble between Tamaki and Seitaro evaporated with the latter’s sudden death in 1929.

10. Yoshimoto, Miura Tamaki, p. 87.

11. Ibid., p. 88. Translated from Japanese by the author.

12. Nagasaki Press, June 4, 1922.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. For a biographical sketch of William Alt and a description of the former Alt House, see Brian Burke-Gaffney, “The Alt House: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 6 (fall 1998): 89-106. From 1922 to 1940, members of the Ringer family, British proprietors of the prominent Nagasaki firm Holme Ringer & Co., inhabited the house.

16. Lane R. Earns, “The United States Consulate at Nagasaki 1859–1941,” in Nagasaki shiritsu hakubutsukan kanpō, no. 32 (March 1992): p. 22.

17. Quoted in the Nagasaki Press, June 23, 1907.

18. Part of Act II of Madame Butterfly was performed at the Imperial Theater in Tokyo in January 1914 as a prelude to a medley of Japanese songs. The opera saw a number of further interpretations here, but, like the first performance, these were either excerpts presented as part of larger programs or edited versions in which the elements repulsive to Japanese audiences were altered or deleted. For a discussion of the prewar performances of Madame Butterfly in Japan, see Arthur Groos, “Return to the Native,” in Madama Butterfly (The Royal Opera, London, 1993).

19. Nagasaki Press, May 6, 1924.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., June 19, 1924.

22. Japan Weekly Chronicle, December 18, 1924. 23.

23. Ibid., May 1, 1924.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., June 5, 1924.

26. Chinzei gakuin hyakunenshi, Chinzei Gakuin, ed. (1981), pp. 80-3. Discussions about the relocation of the school started after the main building in Higashiyamate burned to the ground in February 1924. The site selected for the new campus was the former artillery training ground of the Nagasaki Fortress Headquarters in Takenokubo-machi, a neighborhood in the Urakami Valley north of downtown Nagasaki. The new buildings were inaugurated, and the school officially relocated, in November 1930.

27. Words by Mort Dixon, music by Harry Warren. Copyright 1928 by Remick Music Corporation. For a biographical sketch and list of the works of Harry Warren, see David Jenkins, Harry Warren: Hollywood’s Unknown Composer (http://www.harrywarren.org).

28. For a discussion of the 1915 movie and its relevance to Western perceptions of Asia, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 78-89.

29. Jiji Shimpo, December 24, 1935. Translated from Japanese by the author.

30. For example, see Arthur Groos, “Madame Butterfly: The Story,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 2 (1991), p. 131, or Jan Van Rij, Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001), p. 113.

31. Yoshimoto, Miura Tamaki, p. 196.

32. Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, June 28, 1936, p. 14. Translated from Japanese by the author. Miura personally choreographed and edited the Kabukiza presentation, and so it is likely that she emphasized the aspects of the opera that were sympathetic to Japan and deleted parts that might offend the audience. Silenced by the rising tide of militarism, she later went into retirement and in March 1944 left Tokyo to live with her mother in a secluded house near Lake Yamanaka in Yamanashi Prefecture.

33. Robert Walker Jr. (1884–1958) was the second son of British ship captain Robert N. Walker (commander of the Mitsubishi steamship Hyogo-maru that anchored in Nagasaki Harbor concurrently with Pierre Loti’s warship in 1885) and a Japanese woman named Fukuda Sato. He had succeeded his father’s ship-chandling business, R.N. Walker and Co., when the latter left Nagasaki for Canada in 1908. He took Japanese citizenship in 1928, changing his legal name from Robert Walker to Uokµ Robµto, the surname and given name reversed in the Japanese fashion and rendered in the katakana syllabary.

34. The British ambassador to Japan sent a circular to his consuls in Nagasaki and other ports providing an English translation of the new law and advising them to warn all British subjects about its purport. (Embassy and Consular Archives: Nagasaki, Japan, PRO FO 796-197)

35. Personal communication from a former army officer who, at the time of the Nanjing massacre, was serving as a trajectory instructor at a base in Japan.

36. Chinzei Gakuin had moved to Takenokubo-machi in 1930, and Tozan Gakuin — the Reformed Church in America school for boys — had closed in 1933.

37. Kwassui gakuin hyakunenshi, Kwassui Gakuin, ed. (1980), pp. 176-98.

38. For a biographical sketch of Sara Couch and her Japanese companion, Tomegawa Jun (who seems to have been the American woman’s main reason for staying behind in Nagasaki), see Lane R. Earns, “At Home with a Friend: The Story of Sara Couch and Tomegawa Jun” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 1 (summer 1993): pp. 47-58.

39. Arthur Zich, The Rising Sun (Alexandria, Va.: Time Life Books, 1977), p. 123.

40. Personal communication from Iwasaki Yasu.

41. In Japanese, “Kamikaze Tokubetsu Kōgekitai” or “Tokkōtai.” The word kamikaze (divine wind) alludes to the typhoon that miraculously destroyed Mongol fleets attacking Japan in the thirteenth century.

42. Personal communication from Albert Walker, eldest son of Robert Walker Jr., who heard about these leaflets from his parents and who at the time of this writing still lives on the family property at No. 28b Minamiyamate.

Chapter 6

1. Nagasaki City (ed.), Nagasaki shishi nenpyō (Nagasaki, 1981) p. 195. Translated from Japanese by the author.

2. The school was later reestablished with American assistance in the city of Isahaya, near Nagasaki. Today the complex includes Nagasaki Wesleyan University. The property in Takenokubo-machi is now the site of a girls’ high school run by Kwassui Gakuin.

3. Nagasaki City, ed., Nagasaki shisei rokujūgonenshi (Nagasaki, 1959) p. 966. Translated from Japanese by the author.

4. Mary, Mabel’s daughter from a former marriage, was in her late teens at the war’s end. Robert Walker lived in quiet retirement in the Minamiyamate family house until his death in 1958. His wife Mabel died in 1996 at the age of eighty-four. The original Walker house was moved to the “Glover Garden” theme park in 1974, but the family lives to this day in a new house built on the original Minamiyamate property.

5. Photographs and a brief description of the game are included in “Pictorial Arrowhead: Occupation of Japan by Second Marine Division,” a booklet produced as a souvenir for the departing marines under the supervision of the Division Special Services Section.

6. Lane R. Earns, “Victor’s Justice: Colonel Victor Delnore and the U.S. Occupation of Nagasaki,” in Crossroads: A Journal of Nagasaki History and Culture, no. 3 (summer 1995), p. 88.

7. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton/The New Press, 1999), p. 138.

8. Nippon Times, March 24, 1946. Any soldier caught kissing or walking hand-in-hand with a Japanese woman was to be charged with disorderly conduct.

9. Ibid., February 24, 1946.

10. Ibid., November 19, 1945, and March 5, 1946.

11. Nagato Miho, “Watakushi no rirekisho” in Watakushi no rirelkisho bunkajin 14 (Tokyo: The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Inc., 1984), pp. 533-4. Translated from Japanese by the author.

12. Fujiwara Yoshie, Ryūten nanajūgonen: opera to koi no hansei (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 1998), p. 266. Translated from Japanese by the author. Fujiwara Yoshie (1898–1976) probably felt an affinity to the Madame Butterfly story because he himself was the illegitimate son of a British father (N.B. Reid, an employee of the Nagasaki firm Holme Ringer and Co.) and a Japanese geisha. Abandoned by both parents at an early age and raised by maternal relatives, he was later reunited with his father and received assistance in traveling to Europe to study music and singing. He went on to gain fame as the “Japanese Rudolph Valentino” and, like Miura Tamaki, played a leading role in the dissemination of opera and Western music in Japan. During a visit to the United States in early 1947, Fujiwara took in a performance of Madame Butterfly by the New York City Opera, and he reports that this was “painful to watch” because Japanese culture was portrayed so inaccurately. (Ibid., p. 193-4).

13. Nagato, “Watakushi no rirekisho,” p. 535.

14. Peter Kalischer, “Madame Butterfly’s Children” in Collier’s, September 20, 1952, pp. 15-8.

15. For a detailed discussion of Delnore’s activities in Nagasaki, see Earns, “Victor’s Justice,” pp. 75-97.

16. I thank Lane Earns for this information.

17. The former Glover residence, now part of the theme park “Glover Garden,” is Japan’s oldest Western-style building and an “Important Cultural Asset” designated by the Japanese government.

18. For an account of Glover’s relationships with Japanese women and an informed discourse on the controversy over the identity of Kuraba Tomisaburo’s mother, see Naito Hatsuho, Meiji kenkoku no yōshō: Thomas B. Glover shimatsu (Tokyo: Atene Shobo, 2000), pp. 349-67.

19. Victor and Catherine Delnore to Lane Earns, April 3, 1996.

20. This rather amateurish collection of articles was written by a certain M. Okamoto and published by H. Amamoto and I. Takeda. The printer, Fujiki Hakueisha Co. of Nagasaki, is still in business, but unfortunately has no record of this publication. Although the booklet carries no date, the use of the term “Military Government Team” and other features indicate that it was published between late 1946 and early 1948.

21. Yanagimoto Kenichi, ed., Gekidōnijūnen (Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1965), p. 172. Translated from the Japanese by the author. Entitled “A Turbulent Twenty Years,” this is a collection of reminiscences by a Mainichi reporter about events in postwar Nagasaki.

22. The Mainichi, August 6, 1948.

23. Kondo Masaki, Onna mon: ketsuen no fōkuroa (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1995), p. 199.

24. Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun, July 2, 1949. Translated from Japanese by the author.

25. Ibid., October 9, 1949. Translated from Japanese by the author.

26. Yanigimoto, Gekidōnijūnen, p. 173. Translated from Japanese by the author.

27. At war’s end, the Occupation government had ordered the reorganization of various branches of the Mitsubishi conglomerate as separate companies. After the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952, the ordinance banning the use of the old zaibatsu trademarks and names was abolished and many of the companies, while remaining independent, re-adopted the Mitsubishi name. Called the “West Japan Heavy Industries, Ltd.” during the Occupation period, the former Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard became the “Mitsubishi Shipbuilding and Engineering Co.”

28. Nippon Times, December 28, 1947.

29. Nagasaki Minyū, September 25, 1951. Translated from Japanese by the author.

30. Program of the “Grand Opera Madam Butterfly” presented at the Mitsubishi Kaikan, Nagasaki, on November 5 and 6, 1953, by the Nagato Miho Opera Company and hosted by the Nagasaki City Board of Education, the Nagasaki Music Promotion Association, and the Nagasaki Amateur Music Association. Translated from Japanese by the author. Nagato visited the Glover House during her stay in Nagasaki and sang a song from the opera there.

31. Harold S. Williams, Foreigners in Mikadoland (Rutland, Vt. and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1963) pp. 230-1.

32. Opera News, January 12, 1953.

33. Musical America, November 1962.

34. Mosco Carner, Madam Butterfly (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1979), p. 10.

35. Noda Heinosuke, Guraba Fujin (Nagasaki: Shinnami Shobo, 1972).

36. Ibid., p. 6.

37. Ibid., p. 7-8. The “sankinkotai” was a system of tribute adopted by the Tokugawa Shogunate, requiring the lords of all the clans throughout Japan to make regular extended visits to the capital at Edo.

38. The koseki household register is the legal vehicle for birth, death, and marriage registration in Japan. The typical koseki gives the name, date of birth, and permanent address of the household head, plus information on spouse and unmarried dependents.

39. Interestingly, Shin-machi is the name of the Osaka flower quarter, where, if Noda’s 1949 revelation is true, Tsuru may have worked as a geisha after she came to Osaka from Oita. Moreover, the name “Awajiya” is probably derived from the name of a business establishment; it ends with the ideograph “ya” (meaning “shop” or “business”), a suffix frequently used, as we have already seen, by brothels and restaurants.

40. Naito, Meiji kenkoku no yōshō, p. 356.

41. In a 1997 book co-authored with Kusudo Yoshiaki (Mō hitori no chōchō fujin) (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha), Noda Heinosuke’s daughter Noda Kazuko reiterates the revised version of Tsuru’s biography — and uses it as evidence that Tsuru was the model for Cho-Cho-san — but again provides no concrete evidence for the samurai roots or for the separation out of political differences.

42. Nishi Nihon Shimbun, November 30, 1955. Translated from Japanese by the author.

43. Alexander McKay, Scottish Samurai: Thomas Blake Glover, 1838–1911 (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1993). An enlarged second edition was published by the same company in 1997.

44. Jan van Rij, Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001), pp. 177-8.

45. Alexander McKay has long since acknowledged and corrected this error, as shown by the fact that he does not repeat it in his 1993 book. I thank him for his assistance in clarifying this point.

46. The photo albums kept by Thomas Glover and his son, Kuraba Tomisaburo, which found their way to the Nagasaki Prefectural Library in the chaos after World War II, contain a wealth of photographs depicting the activities of the Glover family over the decades. However, very few of the photographs have captions, and none carry any specific references to members of a “Kaga family.”

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About the Author

Brian Burke-Gaffney went to Japan in 1972 and trained for nine years as a Zen monk. A resident of Nagasaki since 1982, he has published numerous books and articles on Nagasaki history and Japanese culture, including Nagasaki: The British Experience, 1854–1945, The Light of Morning: Memoirs of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors, and Holme, Ringer & Company: The Rise and Fall of a British Enterprise in Japan, 1868-1940. He is currently professor of cross-cultural studies at Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Historical Backdrop: Foreign Men and Japanese Women in Old Nagasaki

Through the Filter of Literature: The Impact of Pierre Loti’s Travel Essay, Madame Chrysanthème

True, but Also Untrue: The Tale of “Madame Butterfly”

David Belasco, Giacomo Puccini, and the “Yellow Peril”

Prima Donna Miura Tamaki and Nagasaki’s Journey to Hell

Madame Butterfly in Postwar Japan and Beyond

The Real Face of Madame Butterfly

Notes

Bibliography

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