I sat on the right of the Minister and next to Baron Sanomiya, the Court Chamberlain, who had conducted our audience. I was greatly interested in Baron Sanomiya’s wife. She was an Englishwoman at least twice his size.
At Mr. Taft’s request the Minister had invited an old classmate of his, Baron Tajiri Inajiro. At Yale he was known as Tajiri, and the first two letters of both their names being “Ta” he and my husband had been brought together in the classroom, seated alphabetically, and had enjoyed a pleasant association. So Mr. Taft looked forward with great pleasure to renewing the acquaintance in Japan. Baron Tajiri, like most Japanese, was a little man, and his teeth were so formed that he was never able to master the pronunciation of English in such a way as to enable one to understand him easily. But he seems to have acquired at Yale a sound knowledge of business and finance since he became Assistant Minister of Finance under Yamagata and had taken an active part in the change of the Japanese currency from the silver to the gold standard, which was a great step in Japan’s progress toward a place among the world’s powers. He had been made a life peer and sat in the Upper House. At the luncheon he wore a frock coat which Mr. Taft felt confident he recognised as an old college friend of the ’seventies. In those days the Japanese wore their “foreign clothes” only on “foreign occasions” or at court. They kept them carefully folded up and put away, and they had not yet come to recognise the desirability of pressing them when they took them out for use. Also a silk hat once was a silk hat always; vintages didn’t trouble them, and they didn’t mind in the least which way the nap was brushed.
Baron Tajiri wanted to be appointed Minister of Finance when Yamagata retired, but he was put, instead, at the head of the Board of Audits, a life position. Marchioness, now Princess Oyama, wife of the Field Marshal, told my husband this on the occasion of his second visit to Japan, and said that the disappointment had made Tajiri very much of a recluse. In any case, Mr. Taft has never seen him again, although he has tried to seek him out and has made inquiry about him every time he has been in Japan.
We were very much interested in our Legation at Tokyo. It was the first one we had ever seen that the American government owned. The house was not what it ought to have been, but it was surrounded by spacious and beautifully kept grounds and was so much better than the nothing that we have in other countries that we liked to dwell upon it as an honourable exception to the disgraceful and miserly policy pursued by Congress in dealing with our representatives to foreign capitals.
Mrs. Wright, with her daughter Katrina, had decided to remain with us in Yokohama for the summer, so we took a cottage together on The Bluff, a high foreign residence section of the city, and prepared to make ourselves most comfortable.
Two days later the Commissioners and the rest of the party went aboard the Hancock and we waved them goodbye from a harbour launch as they steamed away toward Manila.
IV
In Japan
To be quarantined in a house too small for the number of its occupants, behind closed doors, each one of which bears aloft a sinister yellow placard across which is printed in large, black letters: “Diphtheria,” is no way to begin a visit to a strange and interesting country.
No sooner had Bessie, Charlie’s nurse, been released from quarantine by the doctors in Yokohama than our older boy, Robert, developed suspicious symptoms which, upon diagnosis, were pronounced to be diphtheritic. The sore throat began before Mr. Taft left for Manila, and he was loathe to go, but as the new serum treatment for diphtheria had robbed the disease of much of its terror, and as we were in the hands of an excellent American physician, Dr. Eldridge, I felt confident there was no cause for serious apprehension.
We sent Helen and the baby to be taken care of at the Grand Hotel, while Mrs. Wright, Maria and I resigned ourselves to a long and tedious period of isolation. Robert’s diphtheria did not develop to a dangerous stage, but the sore throat persisted and it was three weeks before we were released upon a none-too-welcoming world. Our long quarantine had marked us as objects to be avoided—in a social sense—even after the doctors had pronounced us safe.
Mrs. Wright and my sister and I spent that entire three weeks only wishing that we were in our own land where some friendly voice might at least shout an inquiry about us from a distance, and not in this faraway place where only strange and very foreign sounds came floating in to us from curious and crowded streets whose every nook and corner we were aching to explore.
Our house was charming. All the “foreign” houses in Japan seem to me to be charming. The solidity of Occidental construction, with the light touch of Japanese interior decoration, make a fascinating combination, especially in that environment. The Japanese landscape is—well, peculiarly Japanese,
