The most popular man of the embassy with the Americans was neither the chief envoy nor the vice-envoy but Oguri Tadamasa's attendant Tateishi Onojirō — Tommy. He was seventeen by Japanese count. The son of the Dutch interpreter Tateishi Tokujūrō, he had asked to learn about conditions abroad and to study English, and was taken into the party as a trainee interpreter.
Why “Tommy”
The origin of the name is clear. His adoptive father Tokujūrō called him by his childhood name Tamehachi — “Tame!” The American naval officers who heard it began to call him Tommy. He was an engaging boy and particularly keen on speaking English, using the words he had just learned to address the Americans in broken phrases, so that he had already made friends with the officers and sailors aboard the Powhatan.
Many of Oguri's attendants were young: besides Tommy there were Mimura Keizaburō at seventeen, Fukushima Yoshikoto at nineteen and Miyoshi Gonzō, also nineteen. Kimura Tetsuta at thirty-one was among the older of them. The grouping may have been deliberate.
Chased by Yankee girls
His popularity rose by the day once they landed in America. At Washington, when Tommy came near a gathering of society ladies, “the place fell silent”. On Broadway in New York the crowds that came out to welcome the embassy set a record for the city, and when Tommy waved from the parade carriage a handkerchief given him by an American woman, the crowd roared.
He was not abashed by it. He was said to have fallen in love with several young ladies, told a reporter of the New York Times that he wanted to grow his hair, enter the American naval academy and take an American girl for a wife, and showed photographs of the “candidates” he had in mind. On the voyage home he was forever looking at the photograph of a girl he had met in Washington, and showed it to the American reporter travelling with them so often that by the end the man had had enough of it.
The false report that “he was ordered to commit harrokaroo”
He went too far, and his master Oguri reproved him. That, though, got into the papers in a big way.
“Oguro has ordered Tommy to commit harrokaroo” — to cut his belly
It was a false report, of course. No one had been ordered to cut his belly. The Japanese relation of master and servant and the custom of seppuku had joined together in an American reporter's head. The American papers went on to speak for their readers and press Oguri: “Please don't scold Tommy!” A censor of a diplomatic mission admonished in the press merely for reproving his own attendant: an oddity of a time when relations between the two countries had only just begun.
What this enthusiasm crystallized into was the sheet music of the “Tommy Polka”. 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; the printing is of 1860. The dedication reads, “to Tateishi Onojirō, also called Tommy, of the Japanese embassy”. The words ran like this.
The wives and the young ladies in the street／crowd round him, enchanted／a little gentleman full of charm／and his name is Tommy／yellow Tommy, come from Japan／witty Tommy
The tune was a great hit across the United States, and American society played it, sang it and danced to it. It has been called a last cheerful interval in the gloom of the eve of a civil war in which brother would eat brother. The score itself was lost for more than a century, and for a long time only the words were known.
A thin thread after the return
No source has turned up on what became of Tommy after he came home. One thin thread can be followed, though. Masuda Takashi, later the first president of Mitsui Bussan, learned English from Tateishi Onojirō as a young man. That English, and the power of negotiation it gave him, won him the notice of Minomura Rizaemon — the man who had become chief manager of Mitsui thanks to Oguri, and who founded Mitsui Bussan on the model of the Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan, which Oguri had established; Minomura took Masuda as its first president.
A seventeen-year-old attendant reproved by his master on the voyage to America taught English to a young man who became president of a trading company carrying on his master's design — and none of them knew of the connection.
Source: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, “Hyōgo Shōsha” o Tsukutta Saigo no Bakushin: Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the last shogunal official, the man who created the Hyōgo Shōsha: the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987
→ Tateishi Onojirō, “Tommy” — the life of the attendant who set America alight ／ A great welcome at New York, and the “Tommy Polka”