Owning up to your choices

20th May 2010

An afterword to the Bakumatsu arc. Not PG-rated at all but don't let that stop you from reading it.

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It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I’d been wanting to write about 1860s Japan for a while, in particular the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate – years of confusion, drawn swords and foreign devils that ended one of the stablest regimes the country had ever known.

But if you’re going to do one piece, said a voice in my head, why not do a bunch of them? If you start with 1853, when the Americans and their gunships arrived, and finish around 1900, when the new imperial government had more or less got the hang of things, that gives you, what, 50 years of history? Should be good for at least four columns. Which, in a fortnightly gig, means 10 weeks of not having to worry about what to write next.

Something whispered misgivings but it went unheard against the louder, much louder voice that boomed, ‘Eight Weeks Free Of Columnist’s Block!’

So I began the research last year for the series I thought of as my Bakumatsu arc, a nod to the Japanese name for the end (matsu) of the shogunate (bakufu).

Six months later, the loud, pompom-waving cheerleader that promised the reprieve from Columnist’s Block had slunk away. All that was left was the little warning voice.

And this is what it said at the beginning and throughout the months of research: it won’t work.

Surrounded by history books and notes punctuated with the occasional exclamation mark of despair, I was forced to admit what I had known from the start – that there was no way I could fit a period as complex as the Bakumatsu into a newspaper column, not even five of them.

I mean, just the number of the players alone! They made War And Peace look like a budget production. To make things fit, I had to leave out swathes of history and 98.7 per cent of the cast of thousands. Writing about the past? I was running through it, apologising to ghosts.

But there was a much bigger problem: sources.

The horror began on a sunny day last year. I’d just finished taking photos of an old bridge when I walked past a historical plaque.

I stopped to read it. I reread it. Not trusting my eyes or my Japanese, I read it again. No. No, no, no, no, no.

Even on the third reading, the words on the plaque didn’t change. They declared that Sakuma Shozan, a leading 19th century proponent of Western knowledge, had been assassinated in that spot. Trouble was, I’d just read in a book that he’d been killed in a temple on the other side of town. And I was relying on that book – written by a distinguished historian – for much of the planned columns.

This wasn’t an issue of interpretation, a matter of arguing why the shogunate collapsed or how important a particular pact was in bringing it down. It was a question of who had got their facts right.

The nightmare didn’t end there. In March 1866, pro-emperor activist Sakamoto Ryoma was about to go to sleep in a Kyoto inn when a maid came running to warn him of a shogunate raid. She had seen the police through a window while taking a bath and dashed out. Some sources say she was completely naked; another notes that she took the time to throw on a robe but did not belt it. Yet another version has Ryoma, not the maid, as the one in the bath and claims that he fled through a window in the buff.

Who to believe? I began checking sources against each other. If Historian A’s account of an event corresponded with the versions by Historians B and C, I thought, it was bound to be more accurate.

And in many instances, Historians B and Co. did agree with Historian A. But only because, as the source attributions revealed, they were quoting Historian A. In a system where experts constantly cite each other, a mistake can be perpetuated for years.

The despair that descended was now so familiar we were on first-name terms.

A huge question mark hung over the historians’ work. But what about the primary sources? Surely those who had lived through the Bakumatsu and survived to write memoirs or to be interviewed could be trusted?

Conflicting accounts proved otherwise. Two people remembering a battle 50 years later will not tell the same story. Apart from lapses in memory, there is also the inseparable tint – or taint – of character. Anyone speaking of the past is bound to colour it: He wants himself, his comrades and his enemies remembered a certain way.

Despair was back again, showing me pictures of its children, Suspicion and Tight Feeling In The Stomach.

With so much that could not be verified, my account of the Bakumatsu would only be as reliable as a retelling of a reworking of a record of a recollection. It seemed like the most scrupulous thing to do would be to abandon the project – even if it meant throwing away half a year’s work.

But Despair reminded me that the last time we met, it was to angst over the unreliability of information in general. Whether the matter was the state of an inn maid’s undress or the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting, it might be impossible to be certain about anything.

Yet whether the issue is history or climate change, walking away does not seem to be the answer.

In the face of so much uncertainty, it is still possible to choose and – more important – to be honest about the limits of your choice. Acknowledging the shifting ground under your feet makes it easier to stand in it – and to take a different stance if something new is revealed when the winds change.

The past four pieces that appeared under this label were my Bakumatsu. They are not authoritative essays on the period but a trail of breadcrumb words leading to a time 150 years ago, when Japan was plunged into crisis and men and women at every level of society and all sides of the conflict responded with courage, fear, self-interest, self-sacrifice, irrationalism, imagination and every shade of complexity available to the human heart.

Breadcrumb trails don’t last but if this one took you far enough to start looking for your own Bakumatsu – or just elsewhere for a little while – it’ll have lasted long enough.

The Ninomaru palace in Kyoto's Nijo castle where, in November 1867, shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu summoned all the feudal lords present in the city and announced his decision to return his political powers to the throne. This marked the end of over two centuries of military rule by the Tokugawa house and paved the way for Japan to become a modern nation.

Before throwing away the epic notes, I thought that I'd take a few souvenir shots of some of them. Each sheet is A4.