Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [201]
And he was in Paris, although he had arrived late, at the beginning of March. When Japan realized that Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando were leading their own delegations to Paris, its government hastily decided to send him, to compensate for not having sent their prime minister (whose political position was too shaky to risk the journey) or the foreign minister (who was too sick). Saionji’s appointment was an indication that Japan took the conference seriously. The government also hoped that, if Japan did not gain everything it wanted at the conference, his prestige would protect it from attacks from its enemies and from riots such as those that had followed the end of the Russo-Japanese War.6 In Paris, Saionji chose to remain in the background, facilitating his colleagues’ work through informal personal meetings much as he would have done in Japan.
On April 15 Bonsal paid a courtesy call on the elusive prince in his apartment near the Parc Monceau. He was renewing an old acquaintance, but his call was also an attempt to mend fences between Japan and its allies; relations had become rather strained. He was greeted by two formidable Japanese detectives, then led through a series of rooms to the inner sanctum. “A subdued, an almost religious light pervaded this room and some seconds elapsed before I caught sight of a tall, slim, and rather emaciated figure in Japanese dress advancing with outstretched hands toward me. . . . His countenance was as serene as that of the Great Buddha at Kamakura looking out to sea.” 7
The two men chatted amiably about past times in Japan and old friends. They touched on the problem of Russia and the Bolshevik government but they carefully stayed away from the tensions between Japan and the West—except for one oblique and highly telling exchange. Bonsal asked about an experiment that a Japanese foreign minister had conducted in the 1890s, when he had tried to graft cuttings from abroad onto a dwarf pine tree from the Ise shrine, the most sacred in the state-approved Shinto religion. The prince brought him up to date: “He grafted on the sacred stem shafts and cuttings of pines from Norway and from Scotland, from Russia and from California. As a result of these shocks there were temporary setbacks, but soon the noble Shinto type of pine from Ise prevailed.”8
The prince knew well what message he was conveying. In his lifetime he had seen his country transformed from an insignificant collection of islands in the north Pacific into a major power. It is still difficult for the Japanese, let alone outsiders, to grasp the magnitude of that change. What had been an inward-looking nation ruled by a feudal nobility had been made into a modern power with all the underpinnings: an industrial economy which by 1919 was fast coming to rival that of France; a military that had exchanged its steel swords and pikes for machine guns and battleships; and an infrastructure of railways, telegraphs, schools and universities. The feudal lords, like the prince himself, had become diplomats, politicians and industrialists; their retainers had joined the army or the police.
The prince was a complex, enormously subtle man, as much a hybrid as his nation. His journey to Paris had been one not just of miles but of centuries. He was born in 1849, into a Japan still largely isolated from the outside world. His long family tree, kept with the utmost care, showed marriages with the