Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville

nothing more of de Guerville after his book on Egypt. Save for an article on the “situation in Egypt,” he writes no more, at least under that name.39 After five years of silence a tantalizing notice in The Times in the summer of 1911 remarked simply that de Guerville had been seriously ill in London for six weeks.40 But after this the silence is total. In all likelihood he died of the disease that had so long plagued him, though probably not in London, for his obituary never appears. Perhaps it was in some corner of North Africa, but more likely he was back on the continent,near his mother one hopes and not in the Spartan halls of the Nordach Clinic.

      II. The Sino-Japanese War and the Port Arthur Controversy

      It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.

      —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing

      It will be remembered that A. B. de Guerville’s second voyage to the Far East was undertaken to cover the Sino-Japanese War as special correspondent for Leslie’s Weekly and as a freelance contributor to the New York Herald. As such, he was in the company of a select handful of other foreign correspondents equally eager to get to the frontlines and make headlines. Most notable among these were James Creelman (New York World), Frederic Villiers (The Black and White), Thomas Cowen (The Times of London), a certain Laguerre (Le Temps), and Richard Harding Davis (who arrived too late to see any action).

      Late nineteenth century America and Europe were witnessing the emergence of what was then termed “the new journalism”—a more dynamic and more ruthless sort of journalism spurred on by larger urban audiences, faster and more efficient communications, improved technologies, all fed by the development of vast capitalist economies and the concomitant fortunes waiting to be made in advertisement space. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of American dailies increased six fold, from 387 to 2,326 (though it was by no means a uniquely American phenomenon).41 What this naturally meant was a fierce competition among journals and newspapers to increase circulation numbers by entertaining, shocking, thrilling, and titillating their readers in both words and pictures.

      It was perhaps inevitable that the foreign correspondent—and by extension the war correspondent—would be a byproduct of this new industry. The new journalism of the late nineteenth century cannot be fully understood without considering the fact that its emergence paralleled what historians often term the “new imperialism,” a second wave of Euro-American colonial expansion that brought with it a period of “dirty little wars” from Venezuela to Cuba, from the Sudan to Korea. In the late nineteenth century the figure of the journalist—particularly the war correspondent—rose to that of public icon, in what one writer later described as “the time of the Great Reporter.”42 Stephen Crane, Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, and even Winston Churchill became household names through their work as journalists, to say nothing of Henry Morton Stanley in Africa or Nellie Bly’s very well publicized 1889 journey around the world in seventy-two days. Never before or since have the newspaper and the journalist held such central places in the public consciousness as they did in those brief decades between the emergence of the telegraph and the radio.

      Background: The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895

      Historians still debate the causes and significance of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. In its most general sense it was a struggle between late imperial China and modernizing Japan over hegemony in Northeast Asia, which came to a head in a contest over Korea. On a more symbolic level, it has been characterized as the final showdown between the traditional political order of East Asia, represented by China, and the modern, Western-oriented international order that Japan was earnestly embracing. Or, to put it in the preferred Western terms of the period, a battle between barbarism and civilization.43

      For over a millennium China had viewed Korea as a “vassal state.” In the traditional geopolitics of China-centered East Asia, this was not as imperialistic as it might ring in modern ears. Rather, it was a relationship both symbiotic and symbolic: Korea, as did other smaller peripheral states to the “Middle Kingdom,” acquiesced to China’s political and cultural “superiority” in the form of semi-annual tribute missions. In exchange, China was assured of docile and friendly states on its borders. In Korea’s case, China not only allowed that state full political autonomy in the domestic realm but even sent armies to its aid when it was threatened by foreign invaders, such as the Japanese in the late sixteenth century.

      The arrival of industrialized Western merchants and missionaries in the early nineteenth century, soon backed by the technological and military wizardry of the age, precipitated the rapid collapse of the China-centered traditional international order of East Asia. Western powers were soon dictating at the point of gunboats the terms by which China was to open its doors to a whole range of Western activities—commercial, political, religious, and scientific. It was a reality that soon led by the mid-nineteenth century to China’s de facto entrance onto the modern geopolitical and diplomatic stage.

      The same reality was forced upon Japan with the arrival of the American “black ships” of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in Tokyo Bay in 1858. In stark contrast to China, however, Japan soon recognized the need to embrace the brave new world that was greeting them. Soon doing away with the thousand-year-old social and political system of the samurai, Japan began to outwardly remold its society and institutions along more Western lines. The result was that, by 1890, the year of the country’s Western-inspired Meiji Constitution, Japan could boast the highest industrial output in Asia, a modern army and respectable navy, a working political system, and a largely independent and thriving press.

      From as early as 1874 Japan had even begun to acquire colonies, first Okinawa and then Taiwan, which Japan seized from a virtually helpless China in 1895, in the flush of victory from the Sino-Japanese War. Thus the Sino-Japanese War was also the result of a Japanese desire to ensure the continuation of its own national development by acquiring sources of raw material beyond its own borders. From early in its drive towards national modernization Japan had begun to take an increasing commercial and political interest in Korea.

      Even by the 1890s Korea remained an anomaly, neither fully integrated into the new international order (few Western powers were interested in her), nor completely absolving its traditional tributary relationship with China, a relationship that had ceased to have any meaning outside the ceremonial. As Japan began to industrialize and China seemed only to grow weaker, and as Russia with its Trans-Siberian Railway began to dream bigger dreams of a Russian Far East, in international eyes Korea increasingly seemed less a nation than a geopolitical conundrum: “the Korean question” or “the Korean problem” took hold of policymakers, military strategists, and pundits everywhere. The question was this: could Korea modernize on its own? If not, then in the Social Darwinian international order, where survival was a privilege of the fittest, who would ultimately control Korea?

      By the end of the nineteenth century Japan had succeeded remarkably well in modernizing itself within the context of its traditional culture. The singular will that the Japanese applied to simply doing away with outmoded institutions still astounds the modern observer. To Japan’s senior policymakers, who through the late nineteenth century watched as Western powers came to control an ever larger share of the world, it became clear that Korea’s integrity (to mean its independence from Western control) must be maintained, and that doing so would mean that country’s modernization, by whatever means necessary. But China, which itself had set off on a belated attempt at industrialization and modernization as the nineteenth century closed, was no longer willing to sit aside and watch another of its former vassals be taken away. One could say that China attempted to transfer into the power-driven reality of the new international order notions of vassalship that only properly worked in the more symbolic and ceremonial traditional order. Through the late nineteenth century, China stubbornly resisted, and at times openly obstructed, any attempts to give Korea an independent international political identity.

      A series of Chinese-Japanese squabbles over Korean politics in the 1880s led to a tense truce over Korea, by the terms of which China and Japan both pledged not to interfere in Korea’s internal affairs and agreed to quotas on their respective troop numbers there. Japan, however, was merely biding its time. It was still too weak to confront China over hegemony in Korea. But not for long.

      In