the Japanese bloodletting were thirty-six Chinese, to be used “in burying their dead comrades or as water-carriers for the [Japanese] troops. Their lives were protected by a slip of white paper stuck in their caps bearing the following inscription in Japanese characters: ‘This man is not to be killed.’”68
For his part, Creelman later expounded on his account in his book On the Great Highway, published in 1901. As a self-professed “witness for civilization,” Creelman, whom one contemporary described as a man “made of the clay from which spring crusaders, reformers and martyrs”69 , damned Japan for its gratuitous cruelty at Port Arthur, although qualifying it as “the only lapse of the Japanese from the usages of humane warfare.”70
Japan denied that any “massacre” had occurred, though it admitted some regrettable transgressions on the part of some lower-class soldiers and coolies. Accounts of the massacre were taken by many in the West as evidence of an atavistic and lingering barbarism beneath Japan’s civilized patina, while Japan’s denials were interpreted by some as evidence of a collective Japanese puerility. The Japanese, wrote Villiers, “like most young children . . . are very sensitive on being found out, and will tell the most deliberate and unblushing falsehoods to shield themselves.”71
De Guerville would have none of this. The details of the debate regarding the putative Japanese massacre, which raged intensely in the world press for the six months or so following the fall of Port Arthur, are too numerous to detail here. As a preliminary, suffice it to say that most studies have concluded that excesses did occur, mainly in the killing of Chinese men in the fallen city. However, the extreme accounts manifested best by Creelman were later revealed to be highly exaggerated.72
It is important to point out that the major points de Guerville made in his attack against the detractors of Japan is largely repeated in the final chapter of Au Japon. One point is worth making, however. In bold words printed in Leslie’s Weekly (words not repeated in Au Japon), de Guerville takes Western critics to task, posing the difficult question of how atrocities by British troops in India during the Sepoy Revolt of 1858, or American atrocities against Native Americans, differed from the alleged atrocities at Port Arthur, even supposing they had occurred. De Guerville even dared pose the question: “Can the Japanese be expected to be more civilized than the French, English, or—than ourselves?”73
De Guerville also took aim at Creelman’s integrity as a reporter.74 He criticized Creelman’s earlier account of P’yŏngyang, in which he had intimated he was an eyewitness to the battle when he was not, as well as his various misrepresentations of the size of the Japanese army and the dates of certain engagements.75 In one article, de Guerville recalled an episode with Creelman in Japan in the weeks before Port Arthur, and suggested that Creelman had arrived at Port Arthur with visions of a sensational story already half-written in his head:
One day I went to Yokohama with Mr. Creelman. He spent his time there calling on the heads of some banks and newspapers. While in the train returning to Tokyo he told me:
“I have found out why they won’t allow us to go the front. The first reason is . . . that the Japanese are being frightfully licked by the Chinese, and the other is that these people, not being yet quite civilized, must act in the battlefield like wild beasts. They must carve each other, prisoners and wounded, into pieces, and we would see the most disgusting sights in the world. On account of the treaty revision the government is anxious that we should not see such sights.”76
Such attacks against Creelman’s integrity and professionalism must have stung the New York World reporter to the quick, but perhaps especially so as they came from de Guerville.
De Guerville soon had more damaging, and personal, allegations to deal with. Not long after his return to New York, stories began to circulate, apparently originating with Creelman, that de Guerville had supplied Creelman’s name to the Japanese authorities as a spy for the Chinese. Such stories found especially wide coverage in the Japan Gazette but were published as well in Creelman’s New York World. The Japan Gazette also made damaging accusations that de Guerville had in fact been bribed by Japanese officials. Naturally, de Guerville denied the charges, and chose the Japan Weekly Mail to refute them. Though there was no evidence ever presented to corroborate such serious assertions, the damage was done. Though he would go on to briefly run The Illustrated American during 1897–1898, de Guerville never found work as a regular correspondent. According to a surviving letter by Creelman, de Guerville attributed his failures in this regard to the specious allegations of the New York World reporter. In 1897, Creelman encountered de Guerville in a Bologna train station while both were on their way to cover the Greek-Turkish War, de Guerville with his new red-haired bride in tow and still laboring as a freelancer. By Creelman’s account, not long into the train journey from Bologna to the port of Brindisi in southern Italy, de Guerville came knocking on his compartment door.
His voice was broken and his eyes were filled with tears as he told me that the story that he had sought to contrive my death by treachery had ruined him; it had damned his reputation and shut all avenues of journalistic employment.. . . He [de Guerville] told me that he had never insinuated that I was a Chinese spy in the Japanese army but admitted that he had made a remark which if badly translated . . . might have caused some suspicion.77
The precise truth behind such high jinx has been lost to history; in the end one is simply left with the distinct impression that Creelman had succeeded in spiking his competitor’s guns after all.
III. Au Japon Then and Now
The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.77
—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”
Au Japon defies easy categorization. It is part comic portrait, part nostalgic memoir, part apology, and part earnest analysis of political developments in the Far East. All of it is a product of A. B. de Guerville—the man and his environment.
For the first half of the book de Guerville’s role as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition is nearly superfluous, serving only to explain what he was doing in Japan to begin with. This portion of the book is taken up mostly with humorous portraits of people and events in Japan (though some of these should be taken with a grain of salt). Only in the second half does the work change tone as the author discusses his experiences in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. Then, Au Japon becomes more journalistic and analytical, examining such things as the Japanese Red Cross, the character of the Genro [elder statesman] Yamagata Aritomo, and the Japanese army’s conduct in the Sino-Japanese War, all the while refusing to forsake its sense of irony and somewhat salacious humor.
But if one were to indulge in the dubious exercise of placing Au Japon, then perhaps it belongs halfway between two genres: it is in small part a journalistic autobiography along the lines of Frederic Villiers’ Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, or James Allan’s Under the Dragon Flag. More than anything, Au Japon seems to echo that work by de Guerville’s fellow journalist, and erstwhile rival, Creelman, whose book of reminiscences On the Great Highway appeared in 1901. Indeed the lives of these two men seem to parallel one another to an uncanny degree. Creelman was ten years de Guerville’s senior, but their two lives were remarkably similar in their particulars: both men were naturalized Americans and self-made journalists; both wrote for a series of New York publications, including the New York Herald, and both at one point managed the The Illustrated American; both became foreign correspondents and then war correspondents during the Sino-Japanese War. Both men were also fond of boasting of their mutual successes, including interviews with Pope Leo XIII (Creelman beat de Guerville by three years) and kings (they interviewed Korea’s King Kojong weeks apart). In the pair’s contradictory assertions over the alleged “Port Arthur massacre” their lives
