When the embassy, its presentation of the sovereign's letter at Washington and its assay of coin at Philadelphia behind it, arrived at New York, American feeling burst out. The official record puts the troops turned out at 6,440. “A welcome that a visit by the Queen of England would not have come near,” Sakamoto Fujiyoshi writes.
Seats on the stands went up to a dollar
On the day the envoys arrived, stands were put up along the pavements of Broadway. As the crowds grew, charges were made for the seats: twenty-five cents a head at first, then fifty, then seventy-five, until a dollar became the going rate.
What people held in their hands was the Stars and Stripes, and one other flag: a red disc in a rectangle — the sun flag. The shogunate had made it the “ship's mark” for all Japan in the seventh month of 1854, but it had been formally settled as the flag representing the country only just before this embassy was sent. Most Japanese did not yet know the flag. The sun disc met the eyes of a general public on the other side of the world before it did in Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Americans saw it and waved it.
Buildings were hung with banners of welcome of every kind: “Welcome, Japanese Embassy, Welcome”; “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”; “1860, Peace, Progress, Prosperity”; “Japan and the United States, Nations in Friendship”; “One Blood, All Nations”. Small Japanese and American flags fluttered at window after window, ropes were stretched across the broad street from building to building, and huge sun flags hung from them. Manhattan, an island of eight hundred thousand, was choked with fresh expectation, the papers of the day wrote.
A six-horse carriage carrying the box with the treaty
At the head of the parade rode eight mounted police. Then came twenty police on foot, dragoons in six ranks of eight, the Seventh Regiment in four ranks of nine, twelve sappers of the Eighth Regiment, twenty drummers, thirty-two musicians and a company of the guard — and only then the carriages of the Japanese embassy.
Behind the envoys' carriages came a carriage drawn by six horses, on which the box holding the treaty was splendidly set. Morita Kiyoyuki, one of the attendants, set it down in the Akō Nikki.
Like a Japanese festival float: four posts set up, and a gay stand wrapped about with cloth
By Nonomura Tadamitsu's Kōkai Mokuroku (his catalogue of the voyage), “a coloured awning was stretched” over the top of it “and flowers set about”, with the sun flag and the Stars and Stripes raised on it. The box itself was shaped like a small Japanese palanquin, a frame of black gleaming lacquer with vermilion leather over it — an object Americans had not seen before.
The procession went on: twenty carriages of attendants and servants, the secretary of the joint committee of the New York city council, the council's sergeant-at-arms, the president of the board of aldermen, thirteen carriages of aldermen and councilmen, and carriages of the Philadelphia city council. Four hundred police had been turned out, and even so it seemed impossible to keep the crowd in order.
Among that crowd was Walt Whitman, the poet of Leaves of Grass. He put the strong impression of the day into verse, in the poem that survives as “Over the Western Sea”.
A serenade at midnight
After the parade came a review of the troops. The party went into the six-storey Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway. It was already evening; a sun flag fluttered at every window, and “white and red lanterns” were lit, so that “inside and out it was like broad day”, the Akō Nikki records. On the balcony was an illuminated sign, “Welcome Japanese Embassy”. From eleven at night a band of more than a hundred began to play beneath the balcony, and the midnight serenade went on for about an hour, which ended the day's events.
The “Tommy Polka”
What this enthusiasm crystallized into was a sheet of music printed in America in 1860. On the cover is a young samurai seated in a chair in haori and hakama, a short sword at his waist and a long sword in his hand: Tateishi Onojirō, an attendant to the three envoys and a trainee interpreter. The Americans called him by the pet name Tommy.
Dedicated to TATEISH ONOGERO (or TOMMY) of the JAPANESE EMBASSY
The words begin like this: wives and young ladies in the street crowd round him, enchanted — a little gentleman full of charm, and his name is Tommy. At Washington, when Tommy came near a gathering of society ladies, “the place fell silent”. In the Broadway parade he waved from the carriage a handkerchief given him by an American woman, and the crowd roared.
To a reporter of the New York Times he said that he wanted to grow his hair, enter the American naval academy and take an American girl for a wife, and he even showed photographs of the candidates he had in mind. He carried on so much that Oguri reproved him, and that got into the papers in a big way: “Oguro has ordered Tommy to commit harrokaroo” — a false report, of course.
The “Tommy Polka” was a great hit. American society played it, sang it and danced to it. It was also a last cheerful interval in the gloom of the eve of a civil war in which brother would eat brother.
The sheet music then became a “lost score” for more than a century. That the tune had been a hit across the country was found out some twenty years ago by Murayama Yū, a reporter of the Japan Times, who published the words; the words alone were also given in Shichinin no Samurai Amerika e Iku (seven samurai go to America) by Hattori Itsurō, a great-grandson of the vice-envoy Muragaki Awaji-no-kami. Both Murayama and Hattori died without ever seeing the score itself.
“Through oddly shaped spectacles”
The American papers did not have eyes only for Tommy. They wrote of each of the three envoys in turn. Shinmi Buzen-no-kami, the chief envoy, “was friendly in his dealings but kept always a dignified silence”. Muragaki Awaji-no-kami, the vice-envoy, “was a good-natured man who never let fall his air of waiting upon events”. And of the censor, Oguri Bungo-no-kami —
The third “no kami” (Oguro Bungo no Kami) saw through everything there was, through a pair of oddly shaped spectacles
That the embassy mixed fairly freely with the citizens of America and yet kept within bounds was due, Sakamoto Fujiyoshi considers, to Tadamasa's judicious guidance as censor. Tateishi Onojirō, for his part, taught English after his return to the young Masuda Takashi. Minomura Rizaemon recognized Masuda's command of the language, and Masuda went on to become the first president of Mitsui Bussan.
Source: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ Tommy the attendant: his popularity, and a false report