Of the records written on the American side about the embassy to the United States of 1860, the one long held most worth consulting is the journal of the American naval lieutenant Johnston (Lieutenant Johnston). Unlike a newspaper reporter, he was close beside the party all through the voyage.
Who Lieutenant Johnston was
Johnston was a serving officer of the United States Navy's frigate Powhatan, the ship the envoys sailed in. He had come to Japan as, in effect, the officer attending the embassy on the American side, went with the party as far as Washington on familiar terms, watched over what they did in detail and looked after them. After his return, released from the duty, he left a written account of the party. There are other records by foreigners of the same time, but his has been held far above them, because his judgements of the envoys are hardly ever off the mark.
How the journal came to be known in Japan is a little out of the ordinary too. Ninagawa Arata got hold of Man'en Gannen Kenbei Shisetsu Zuroku, a pictorial record of the 1860 embassy to the United States, and in its appendix Johnston's journal stood under the title “The Man'en Japanese embassy as an American saw it”. Ninagawa lent it to Abe Dōzan, who had long been searching for it. At the front of the volume Ninagawa had written in his own hand: “The taifu went abroad as envoy and did not disgrace his lord's charge.” The “taifu” is Kōzukenosuke. What the volume holds, though, is not the whole journal but extracts.
The Japanese aboard ship
The lieutenant's observations begin with how they lived.
“They never made troublesome demands about where they were to sleep, but slept in the hammocks allotted to them, or, if the fancy took them, on deck. In the middle of the room stood the one brazier they cannot do without, with charcoal burning in it, banked round with ash. The manservants, in straw sandals, … kept bringing fresh tea without a pause. For they drink tea the whole day long.”
No demands about where to sleep, a hammock as allotted, the deck if the fancy took them; a brazier in the middle, and tea all day. How quickly a party crossing the Pacific for the first time settled into life aboard, and how cleverly they made their space go — of that the lieutenant writes, “there was nothing to do but wonder”.
The next thing to surprise him was their memory.
“They had the names and the ranks of every officer aboard off by heart within twenty-four hours of boarding. … They always have a notebook and a portable brush-and-ink case by them, and will come up to anybody without the least reserve, nudge him with an elbow to catch his attention, and repeat, ‘Your name.’ The moment they hear our answer they copy it into the notebook in their own characters, and go over it again and again until they can pronounce it exactly.”
How he saw the three plenipotentiaries
Johnston's judgements of character are plain and unsparing. Of the chief envoy Shinmi Buzen-no-kami: “about thirty-seven years of age. Somewhat given to silence, but with a mild and kindly face, and very easy to be familiar with. He was plainly not a man of brilliant parts.” He goes on that Shinmi was of good family and genteel in bearing and in movement. The account handed down, that he was chosen as chief envoy for his imposing presence, is thus borne out by a foreigner's observation.
Of the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami he is harsher still. On the passage to Honolulu Muragaki suffered from seasickness and kept to his cabin, hardly coming on deck, so that nobody had any dealings with him. From his having served as commissioner at Hakodate he appeared to have the better head of the two, but “he seems to have been added as a second to give the party weight, taking no part in the consultations and never putting forward an opinion of his own.” It is thanks to the voyage diary Muragaki left, however, that the whole of this embassy became clear to later ages, and the lieutenant missed his gift as a writer, if nothing else.
Then the third of them.
“Oguri Kōzukenosuke (Bungo-no-kami) was certainly the ablest and the most practical man in the party. The formal negotiations with the authorities of every place the envoys visited were handled by him and by him alone. He was about forty years of age and a small man, but, judged by phrenology, a man of fine intellectual powers. His slightly pockmarked face shone with intelligence and understanding.”
Oguri was thirty-four at the time; he seems to have looked a little older. The pockmarks were a fact, and the lieutenant has it right further: that Oguri had earlier held a weighty post close to the shogun; that his charge this time was to report to the shogun clearly and faithfully how a party attempting an unprecedented journey fared; and that the title “no-kami” was conferred on him when he was appointed to the embassy. The officer in attendance saw clearly enough who the centre of a party of more than eighty was.
A day at the navy yard
The visit to the navy yard, which was probably the most important of all to Oguri, gets only the briefest entry in Muragaki's diary. Johnston's pen was another matter. The chief envoy replied to Captain Buchanan's words of welcome, and they went round and saw the work of each department. In the machine department they exclaimed over the large engine then being built for fitting into the Pensacola; in the gun department they watched the making and filling of percussion caps, the making of bullets for the Minié rifle, and the casting and finishing of brass howitzers, and praised again the Americans' skill and the scale on which they worked.
Afterwards a photograph was taken, with the envoys set at the front and the yard's officers ranged behind them together with the attendants and the newspaper men. To finish, a finely made Dahlgren gun and a howitzer were fired for them; the party, it says, opened their eyes in wonder and watched the shot skim away over the surface of the river, well satisfied.
World geography, astronomy, the organization of a navy, the organization of an army, agriculture, natural history: it was through Lieutenant Johnston, the journal itself records, that Oguri was able to get some glimpse of these in the course of the long voyage. What the later biographies have held is that the knowledge gained on the voyage mattered more to Japan than the charge of exchanging the ratifications.
Source: Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (the book carries a strong colouring of its time in its praise of the navy, and its quotations need handling with care)
→ “The ablest Japanese of them all”, as Americans saw him ／ Tommy the attendant: his popularity, and a false report