11 - The Tentacles of History: Shinjuku Incident’s Return of the Repressed

Summary

What a hive of industry is a Chinese town. No industry is so minute, constant, and infinitesimally divided.

Arriving in Hong Kong on 8 March 1859, the author of Two Years before the Mast cast an eye on the economic development of the recently acquired British colony. Richard Henry Dana Jr noted significant features such as Hong Kong's adverse summer climate, colonial business interests, the presence of coolies, and a hierarchical class structure strongly regulated on economic lines, as well as the presence of those lower-class girls from the ‘flower boats’. He commented, ‘If their lives are ever so polluted, they are decent and even completely modest in their dress and manners.’ Despite the well-regulated manner of that developing world of international trade, another darker realm of violence operated in uneasy co-existence. Dana observed the presence of a nearby river, ‘a scene of piracy, robbery and violence for years’. He also noted long narrow alleys not more than four feet wide that contained the presence of many local industries cramped together in limited spaces all contributing to an early Asian world of proto-capitalism. When Dana travels further into a China now the latest territory for western colonial incursion (a fact he, naturally, does not emphasise in his journal), he encounters a sign on the front door of a prosperous Chinese businessman: ‘Many rich customers enter here!’ He also recognises further contrasts between the prestigious decorum of mercantile prosperity and oppressive economic dominance of the less fortunate. Dana visits an Execution Ground, the scene of capital punishment throughout the centuries. ‘Tortures, the most frightful have been inflicted here, such as it can hardly enter into the mind to conceive, and the air has been rendered with shrieks and cries of the ultimate agonies of men.’ This traveller mentions a gothic description of Oriental violence to genteel readers but not the fact that it is an indispensable part of a political and economic order that is also part of American Manifest Destiny in the Winning of the West. America is already engaged in reversing Horace Greeley's dictum into ‘Go East, young man!’

By contrast, Japan is a much more regulated country with a strict currency exchange, meticulously controlling tourism and trade in a land whose inhabitants are ‘civil, yet remote’.