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037 Sailortown
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Sailortown,
Titel:
Sailortown
Naam uitgever:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. - E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
Jaar van uitgave:
1997
Omschrijving:
Liedtekst en Liedtekst verklaring
Aantal pagina's:
360
Taal:
Engels
Plaats van uitgave:
London & Newe York
Auteur:
Stan Hugill
ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN SAILORTOWNS
to get accustomed to the Ketojin, or 'Hairy Chinamen' as they called Europeans, and their queer, to them, ways. Until the latter part of the sixties, and even later in more backward parts of the Island Em- pire, the two-sworded samurai still carried out his old-time preroga- tive of trying out the efficacy of a new sword on a helpless peasant. This license was known as Kirisute Gomen, 'permission to cut down and throw away'. Such a conservative character, on meeting a lialf- cut and often obstreperous sailor in the streets of Yokohama, would slice him down without thinking twice. Many such incidents occurred before the Japanese entirely relinquished their feudal ideas. W. E. Griffiths' writes that 'A sailor found dead drunk in the streets
was the signal for sending up the price of revolvers one hundred per cent.' Every foreign suicide was heralded as 'an assassination'. This was prior to 1866, when things were a bit 'touchy' in the Treaty Ports.
Apart from an occasional 'slicing-down', however, the Jack Tar
ashore in Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, or Nagasaki, had a marvellous time of it. The tea clippers, while awaiting the loading of tea in Foochow,
Canton, and Shanghai, often used to put in time by carrying freight of all kinds up and down the Far Eastern coastlines, from Singapore, Penang, Saigon, Bangkok and Rangoon to Japan and Korea, both these latter in those days being virtually terra incognita. In 1858 the British opium clipper Eamont was employed in the negotiations for the first commercial treaty with Japan. She ran into Nagasaki Harbour and dropped her anchor. Next morning one hundred and fifty boatloads of Japanese tried to tow her out to sea— against her anchor!—but no armed attack was attempted, and eventually she accomplished her mission. By the end of the sixties, however, things were better for foreigners in this mysterious country, and many sailors began to desert here—the wonderful women of Japan have always been a lure to Deep-water Johnny! In 1884 J. H. Williams deserted in Kobe—not for a woman's sake, however, al- though he did stay with Madame Otome, in the Kita Nagasa Dori. In the sixties the Japanese wished to learn all about the West as
quickly as they could, sometimes with surprising results. Sailors would pay off with the jib downhaul and get jobs ashore as school- teachers (!!) teaching the youth of the Rising Sun the English of a windbag's fo'c'sle. Such a 'teacher' was called in the Yokohama dia- lect Dammuraisu shito or 'Damn-yer-eyes Man', and, as he sat cross- legged in front of his pupils, he would curse and swear in fo'c'sle lingo, chew, spit, and smoke a filthy pipe, and in general must have been the most unteacherly sort of teacher that the world has ever seen. Such a character would probably have a native wife, and some of them kept regular harems. A resident in Japan in the 1870s writes: ' The Mikado's Etnpite (New York, 1876).
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