Tateishi Onojirō was a youth who went with the 1860 embassy to the United States as an apprentice interpreter. He was seventeen by the old count, close to the youngest in a party of seventy-seven samurai, and in America he was called by the pet name “Tommy” and set the whole country talking.
Seventeen, and in the party because he begged his adoptive father
Onojirō's adoptive father was Tateishi Tokujūrō Nagahisa, an interpreter of Dutch. The embassy's interpreters were officially Namura Gohachirō Motonori and Tateishi Tokujūrō Nagahisa, and Onojirō went as an apprentice to them. By Sakamoto Fujiyoshi's account, Onojirō longed to learn about foreign countries and to learn English, and begged his adoptive father, was allowed to go, and was added to the attendants of Oguri Bungo-no-kami Tadamasa. He was not chosen for a duty: he crossed the Pacific because he volunteered.
The pet name “Tommy” also came out of that relation. Onojirō's childhood name was Tamehachi, and Tokujūrō usually called him “Tame!” American naval officers who heard the sound of it took to calling him “Tommy”, and the name stuck.
Oguri's attendants were largely young men, whether by design or not. Besides Onojirō there were Mimura Keizaburō at seventeen and Fukushima Yoshikoto and Miyoshi Gonzō at nineteen. The oldest, Kimura Tetsuta, was thirty-one.
A favourite already, aboard the Powhatan
Onojirō had charm, and he was unusually keen on speaking English. He used what he learned at once, talking to Americans in broken phrases, so that he was already on easy terms with the American officers and sailors aboard the Powhatan as she crossed the Pacific, so it is said.
Several records of the time tell how his popularity rose after he landed. At Washington it was said that when Onojirō came near the ladies of society “everything around went dead quiet”. On Broadway in New York the crowd that came out to welcome the Japanese embassy was the largest on record, and Onojirō waved a handkerchief given him by an American woman from the carriage in the parade, at which the crowd gave a great cheer.
He seems to have enjoyed it himself. To a reporter of the New York Times he said:
I want to let my hair grow, enter the American naval academy and take an American girl for my wife
He even showed the photograph of the “candidate” he had in mind, the record says. Oguri reproved him for carrying on too far, which only made a great story in the newspapers — that affair is taken up in detail in the chronology.
The “Tommy Polka” — sheet music of 1860
What came of all this enthusiasm was a dance tune, the “Tommy Polka”, printed in 1860. The cover shows a young samurai seated in a chair in haori and hakama, a short sword at his waist and a long sword in his hand. Below the title was added this.
Dedicated to TATEISH ONOGERO (or TOMMY) of the JAPANESE EMBASSY
— that is, “dedicated to Tateishi Onojirō, otherwise Tommy, of the Japanese embassy”
The words go on: wives and young ladies in the street crowd round him, carried away — a little gentleman full of charm, and his name is Tommy. American society played the tune, sang it and danced to it. In the strained air on the eve of the Civil War, it was also the last light-hearted while that came.
That the tune was the rage all over America was discovered by Murayama Tamotsu, a reporter of the Japan Times, who introduced the words; it was taken up as well in Shichinin no Samurai Amerika e Iku (seven samurai go to America, Kōdansha) by Hattori Itsurō, a great-grandson of the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami. The sheet music itself, however, was lost for more than a century, and both men died without seeing the thing itself. It was later found by Paul Blum, and the first person to play it in Japan was the pianist Ōkawa Midori.
The ship home, and after
A story in character survives from the homeward voyage as well. He had a photograph of a girl he had met at Washington and was always looking at it; but he showed it to the American newspaperman travelling with them so often that by the end of the voyage the man had begun to lose patience with him.
No source has been found that records what road Onojirō took after he came home. A trace of him remains, though, in an unexpected form: Masuda Takashi, who was to be the first president of Mitsui Bussan, learned English from Tateishi Onojirō as a young man.
Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sees a strange chance in this one point. Masuda was recognized by Minomura Rizaemon for his power of negotiation, which rested on that English. Minomura was the man who became chief manager of Mitsui through Oguri. And Minomura founded Mitsui Bussan on the model of the Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan, which Oguri had set up, and took Masuda as its first president. The English brought back by a boy who crossed to America as Oguri's attendant had come round, by a long way, to the side that brought the seed Oguri sowed to fruit — and none of them knew of any such connection, Sakamoto writes.
Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Tatsunami, the journal of the memorial society
→ Tommy the attendant: his popularity, and a false report
→ The founding of the Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan