The Silver Spoon

To Sondra
four decades later

Contents

Notes and Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE

PART TWO

Bibliography

Notes and Acknowledgments

In the notes, the following books may be cited by author's last name only:

In this book all Japanese names are given the Japanese way, with the family name first, except on the cover and on the title and copyright pages.

I started translating
The Silver Spoon
toward the end of the 1960s with Sondra Meadow Castile; ten of the episodes we worked on were then printed in the March 1972 issue of
Doshisha Literature: A Journal of English Literature and Philology.

I thank the late erudite scholar Kyoko Selden (1936–2013) for interpreting many expressions and passages of
The Silver Spoon
for me; the poet Ishii Tatsuhiko for information on the publishing history of the memoir from Iwanami Shoten and Hirata Shigeru and Kakizaki Shōko for acquiring necessary books.

The novelist Dianne Highbridge and the scholar Gustav Heldt read the translation and made suggestions. Jenefer Coates copyedited it with unusual meticulousness and thoroughness.

Hisako Fujishima designed the cover and Yano Sumiko worked out the many lovely illustrations.

I thank the late poet Robert Fagan (1935–2009) for reading my translations for nearly forty years and, above all, my wife Nancy, the primary reader of whatever I write in English.

H
IROAKI
S
ATO

Introduction

The Silver Spoon (Gin no saji)
of Naka Kansuke (1885–1965), first serialized in a daily newspaper in 1913, is the most admired childhood memoir ever written in Japan. As the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) wrote in his afterword to it in 1935, “the child's world is drawn in a magically vivid way.”
¹
Reading the story in China the following year in order to translate select passages into Chinese, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), the younger brother of Lu Xun (1881–1936), complimented Naka on being an author who “was not influenced by his predecessors, did not care about the fads of the world, simply looked at things with his own eyes, felt things with his own heart.”
²

Translating several passages from
The Silver Spoon
into English two decades later, the American student of Japanese literature Howard Hibbett called it “an extraordinarily beautiful evocation of the world of childhood, which retains its freshness today.”
³

In Japan more recently, the memoir has been affectionately called “a children's story for adults”
(otona no dōwa).
The characterization may stem from Naka's own term “children's stories for grownups”
(seijin no tame no dōwa)
for a group of his own fables gathered into a single volume in 1961,
⁴
which had been inspired by ancient Chinese legend, old Japanese poetry, the Bible, and so on, and required a certain amount of classical knowledge to understand.
The Silver Spoon
, in contrast, is a straightforward memoir with no overt intent to edify the reader.

Changing Japanese Society and Naka's Memoir

Much of the world of childhood that Naka conjures up in
The Silver Spoon
has to do with festivals, fairs, and fête days, daily rituals and games, with people taking part in them as a matter of course, their age-old beliefs and superstitions untouched—the descriptions of which are, one must add, greatly enhanced by the presence of the author's exceptionally good-natured and eternally patient aunt who, as a semi-permanent member of the Naka family, took it upon herself to look after him. (The aunt was the eldest sister of Naka's mother Shō, 1849–1934. But as her name has not been fully ascertained, she must remain nameless.)

Such a focus on “tradition” may strike some of those who know Japanese history as a little strange. After all, Naka was born and brought up a few decades
after
the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which, in putting the emperor back as ruler, had ended the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Tokugawa shogunate and its semi-isolationist policy. The new government did not just open Japan to international commerce and diplomacy but also sought to adopt all things Western. The nation's greatest goal for the period was emulation of the West.

So, in 1883, just two years before Naka was born, the government had completed, at exorbitant cost, the Rokumeikan, “Deer Cry Hall,” a large Italianate two-story building for balls and masques designed by the British architect Josiah Conder, with Minister for Foreign Affairs Inoue Kaoru proclaiming at its opening: “We have decided to make the Rokumeikan a place where from now on high officials and gentlemen from inside and outside Japan may meet and socialize, unaware that longitudes and latitudes ever existed, where they may form friendships and fellowships unlimited by national borders.”
⁵

In 1889, when Naka was four, the government, after years of deliberations, promulgated a new Constitution mainly modeled on that of Germany, thereby instituting constitutional monarchism.
⁶
In 1894, when he was nine, Japan, in its first open bid to compete with imperialist powers, went to war with China and won.

Yet most such epochal events did not affect Naka's childhood, at least as he remembered it—save the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War just mentioned. As Naka tells it in one episode of
The Silver Spoon,
the sudden rise of jingoism and the almost instant racial denigration of a people whom the Japanese had admired throughout their history provoked a deep sense of indignation in the ten-year-old boy. Zhou Zuoren, the Chinese writer quoted above, was particularly touched by this episode: by the mid-1930s, when he was translating passages from
The Silver Spoon
, Japan's imperialist approach to China following the start of its westernization efforts had created an intractable quagmire in his own country.

In regard to “traditions,” another government policy deserves mention. To promote the “civilization and enlightenment” that the West embodied, it early on declared the Five Festivals
⁷
and other traditional observances outmoded and pernicious. Here, the purpose was not so much to promote westernization as to strengthen emperor worship that till then had barely existed, as was clear in the new national holidays introduced to replace the festivals and events. Among them were the Tenchōsetsu (“heavenly-son's-longevity-event”) to mark the Emperor's Birthday (November the third) and the Kigensetsu (“national-origin-event”) to mark the day Japan is supposed to have been founded (February the eleventh). That day, says the semi-mythological account of the
History of Japan
(
Nihon shoki
, compiled in 720), Jinmu ascended the throne as first emperor.

These high-handed impositions confused and puzzled the citizenry, and those who devised them knew it. In
Questions and Answers on Enlightenment
(
Kaika mondō
, 1874), one of the many books written to impress upon the populace the requirements of the dramatically new era, Kyūhei (or Dated Dave, we might say) is made to ask Kaitarō (Enlightened Ernest):

Dated Dave's reference to “beef pots” (
gyūnabe
; today's sukiyaki) is a wry comment on a dietary reversal. Buddhist Japan had not touched beef, but Westerners brought in the custom of eating it. Dated Dave is suggesting that he's been civilized and enlightened enough to eat meat, but he is not enlightened enough to comprehend the newly created holidays. He goes on to mock the Japanese flag, another new imposition on the people who did not have anything like a national emblem till then, with “lantern marches” now required on celebratory days.

Enlightened Ernest answers, with an air of authority, why the government's action is not at all unreasonable, and Dated Dave is made to appear persuaded. That, at any rate, is the setup of the book.

The “ordinary folks” were not so readily persuaded, of course. As is usually the case with any such period of upheaval, by the time of Naka's birth the pendulum had swung back and people had revived, even reinvigorated, many of the pre-Restoration customs and observances—assuming that they had ever abandoned them. As the professor and translator of English literature Baba Kochō (Katsuya: 1869–1940) noted as he fondly recollected what Tokyo was like during the Meiji period (1868–1912), they probably revived their old ways because the Meiji revolution was “a victory and conquest by an advanced few over the unadvanced masses” and those few in the vanguard did not give much thought to the fact that customs and similar festivities take a long time to take root.
⁹

Ancestors and Family

Naka Kansuke's lineage can be traced to a physician named Kansetsu in the seventeenth century in a small fiefdom called Imao, in Mino (today's Gifu)—although Imao was officially recognized as an independent fiefdom only in 1868 as the Meiji Regime started. Because of his special medical skills, Kansetsu was given a respectable annual income, measured in rice, of one hundred and fifty
koku
or nearly eight hundred bushels. But the stipends so measured were deceptive, with the actual take far smaller, and his descendants' stipends were further reduced. In addition, the social and political upheavals in the last phase of the Tokugawa shogunate severely squeezed the samurai's economic life. By the time of Naka's father, Kan'ya (1842–1906), the family had fallen on hard times, with his income put at thirteen
koku,
subsistence level for a samurai.

The new government also took steps to reduce the status of the samurai as a whole, and that didn't help, either. In 1869, samurai stipends were drastically cut by decree. In 1872, the existing four classes—samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants, in that order—were reclassified into three—nobility
(kazoku),
gentry
(shizoku),
and commoners
(heimin).
Although Naka Kan'ya belonged to the gentry class, which was made up of former samurai (except for those with an annual income of ten thousand
koku
or more, who were made to join the titled class), now there existed “no impassable barrier between the different classes,” as the early Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) put it.
¹⁰
That meant a greater easing of mobility among classes than had existed during the Edo period (1600–1867), although the sense of class remained strong until after Japan was defeated, in 1945, and the class system was abolished altogether. In 1876, the samurai were stripped of their sword-carrying privileges.

But Naka Kan'ya had a special relationship to the man he served, Takenokoshi Masamoto (1851–1910), the first (and last) lord-president of Imao, and that might have helped. Masamoto's wife was his adopted daughter. With the advent of the new regime, Kan'ya was given a high police rank of
gon-daizoku
, then
daizoku
. In 1872, he moved to Tokyo with his lord as his deputy house-administrator (
kafu
). The following year, Kan'ya and the house-administrator (
karei
) started an import company called Yōhakusha that dealt in German silver, nickel, and aluminum to help build the Takenokoshi family's finances. The company, with Kan'ya as its president, apparently did well.

When Kansuke was four, Kan'ya built a new house in the Yamanote, an area preferred by the gentry class, moving his family there for the health of his sickly wife Shō and his sickly son Kansuke. Much later, when Kansuke sold the house and other properties that Kan'ya had bequeathed, he made a sizable amount of money. Unlike many members of his former class, Kan'ya had the ability to deal with the profound social changes taking place at the time. His earlier poverty, in any case, had become part of family lore by the time of Kansuke's birth and was hardly a factor in his boyhood.

Naka Kan'ya Recalls His Past

In
The Silver Spoon
, Naka described how his father used to recall his past in the evenings, surrounded by his family and his carpenter—although, as we will see, he later revised his memoir extensively and in doing so, dropped the following passages along with many others.
¹¹
This scene occurs in the new house in the Yamanote.