Ladislau Batalha was a secondary school teacher and a journalist. Born in Lisbon on the 2nd of August, 1856, he died in Arruda dos Vinhos on the 26th of November, 1939. He had no university education but he was familiar with many languages both ancient and modern which he used in his travels from June, 1876 to 1887. He undertook his journeys in precarious circumstances working in a variety of jobs in order to pay for them. For instance, he worked as a sailor on ships such as the whaling ship Platena in which he travelled the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. He visited the most important cities in the United States and went to Hawaii, Japan, China, Ceylon, and Cape Verde where he stayed for a while working in the French Consulate. In the United States he worked as a glass engraver and in São Tomé he was employed by the public office responsible for people under public guardianship. He was a taxidermist in the forests of Africa with the explorer and naturalist José de Oliveira Anchieta and a sailor on a voyage from Nagasaki to Colombo.
Everywhere he went, he devoted himself to studying the local language and people. He was a cadre member of the Socialist Party and spread his political ideas in conferences, pamphlets and books. He preached the policy of a compulsory civic register, defended the usefulness of crematoria and laboured for progress in education for the working classes. He was an elected representative in the 1919 legislature in Portugal. He was a member of the Paris Astronomical Society and the Tokyo Ethnographical Society. He wrote about everything. He produced novels, books on philology (about African languages), historical works and works on the theatre. In the fields of biography and autobiography he wrote Gomes Leal na Intimidade, Teófilo Braga (Apontamentos Biográficos, and Memórias e Aventuras (Reminiscências Autobiográficas). Of his many travel books there are Através do Reino Unido, O Japão por Dentro, A Rússia por Dentro, Angola (Ensaio de Corografia), Costumes Angolanos and O Continente Negro. In addition to this, he also wrote some political works. He contributed to a huge number of newspapers in Portugal and abroad. "It was he who, in the later stages of his life, offered the shelter of his lowly home to the poet Gomes Leal who, half mad, wandered through the streets of Lisbon and slept on the benches of the public parks."(1)
In the preface to O Japão por Dentro, Teófilo Braga mentioned the war between Russia and Japan. He was impressed by the tremendous naval battles and the artillery attacks on Manchuria. He praised both sides: "The Russians and the Japanese are the two essential elements of the new civilization which is being born ". He noted the Eurasian character of the Russians, descendents of Gengis Khan and the Byzantines. Later he waxed lyrical about the Japanese: "The progressive genius of the Japanese amongst the apathy of the yellow races was noted by the Portuguese missionaries of the XⅥth century when they requested the Portuguese to provide not fervent priests but educated fathers who could answer the subtle arguments of the bonzes. To learn about this extraordinary people is not just a matter of passing curiosity, it is essential for all those who are interested in the fate of modern Civilization. It is in response to this need that we now have Ladislao Batalha's book O Japão por Dentro, full of novelties and a wealth of information".(2)Teófilo praised Batalha. In Braga's opinion, his was a soul shaped by the long journeys which he had undertaken from 1876 following a tradition inspired by the genius of distant adventures. He finished his preface: "This is the same race which gave the XⅥth century the courageous Fernão Mendes Pinto, the outstanding author of Peregrinação". He gave an outline of Batalha: "I met him when he was twenty when he had left home heading for Africa with his fate in his own hands. He was in São Tomé and in Luanda he worked with the naturalist Anchieta. He also visited Pretoria. Widening the net of his travels, he went to the United States where he lived in Boston, then San Francisco where he worked in whaling and cod fishing. He travelled throughout the Orient, the Sandwich Islands and Nagazu and had first-hand knowledge of Japan which he now speaks of with authority". (3)
According to Ladislau Batalha, there were around forty six million people living in Japan in 1906. The book opens with a description of the geography of the country. Right from the start the author expresses his admiration for the rapid development of the country. Although they were the product of the mixing of several different ethnic groups, the Japanese were a superior race. Japan, a mountainous country, was the garden of the Orient. Speaking of Kublai Khan's invasion, he repeated Venceslau de Morais' opinion: "While the Japanese are everything to be desired as far as hospitality and courtesy in times of peace and friendship, they are the most fearsome enemy of all the human races in times of war".(4)
The author mentioned the Portuguese contribution to Japanese culture, basing his argument on the Cartas do Japão written by the Jesuits (1549-1566). He discussed Fernão Mendes Pinto and his arrival in Japan and regretted, like others after him, the rampant ignorance about Japan in Portugal. "We have not only lost track of our great role in this part of the Orient, but we do not even realise the importance of the fact that the Japanese admire us for having been one of the strongest influences on the country to the extent that we influenced its historical development. The evolution of this great empire whose progress is leaving the rest of the world amazed was affected by little Portugal."(5)
He also recorded the suppression of the Christians, the isolationist policies of the Tokugawa Period and pointed out that, in his opinion, the 1868 Japanese Revolution was more important than the French one of 1789. He rejoiced in Mutsuhito's victory against the Shogunate: "1868 was a memorable year in the history of mankind. The Japanese consider 1868 as the starting point for their rise to power".
Ladislau Batalha thought this was a unique and memorable period. A new educational system, new hospitals, modern roads and railways, new media and a formidable military force with an armed fleet comparable to the German army had all been established. The political task of moving from feudalism to a constitutional régime was an enormous undertaking and he admired the solutions adopted by the imperial powers. He praised the oligarchs of the Meiji Period, in particular Kuroda, Yamagata and, most of all, Hirobumi Ito: "It is to him that Japan owes her majestic transformation, the result of his influence, his prestige and his diplomacy... The country owes its political structure, the formation of its military forces, the Constitution, the declaration of the Korean protectorate and a host of other improvements to his influence. He lives for Japan alone and shall die in the embrace of the country to which he has become so accustomed, with which he experienced the pain of suffering and the joy of glory. Ito and Japan are one. Happy is the country which can give birth to such dedicated subjects!"(6)
The First Sino-Japanese War had made Japan into the leader of Asia. After having been forced to open up its ports by Commodore Perry's fleet, after having been forced to allow nationals of the western powers residence in the country, Japan was to react by acquiring a formidable military might. "This is the only fleet in the world built uniformly. Already in 1900, its army is superior to the German, French, Russian, Italian or English contingents in China and it is not in the slightest bit afraid of any confrontation."(7)
Moreover, in his book, Ladislau writes repeatedly of the Japanese intellect. Just like Morais, he thought Japan should be an example for the Portuguese: "Europe has no need to worry about this great Oriental nation, nor should it regard it as a danger just because its fanatical desire to remain independent is threatening, it would be better for us to admire the resolve and collective solidarity of the Japanese in carrying out their patriotic plans. We in Portugal have much to learn from the great example of civic pride which this country has shown to the rest of the world."(8)Behind the Japanese miracle, Ladislau found militarism taken to its extreme.
A large part of the book was devoted to an analysis of the educational system. In addition to Tokyo University, he paid great attention to the private universities such as Doshisha, Waseda and Keio. He also spent a lot of time on Yukichi Fukuzawa's career. During a lifetime which spanned from 1835 to 1901, this man was a prolific writer on all subjects, a propagator of Herbert Spencer's works, and the author of books on politics, philosophy and education. At the time, Fukuzawa's books were sold by the million. According to Batalha, this was due to the high level of education in the country. He commended the feverish restructuring of Japan, and the drawing up of the Penal and Criminal Codes and dismissed the idea of the "yellow peril" fashionable in the Europe of the day.
Ladislau Batalha seemed obsessed by the power of the army in Japan. He was delighted at the suppression of the Boxer Revolution in which Japanese troops participated. He examined the organization of the Japanese army in detail. Japan had absorbed the most up-to-date warring techniques of the period. The battles of the Franco-Prussian War and the Russo-Japanese War had been characterized by their violent use of artillery fire as an opener to the battles themselves. The infantry tried to gain the upper hand by thrusting forward in a bayonet attack. The reserve soldiers, still in relatively tight formation, then went onto the scene, giving the density needed for fighting man to man. The cavalry which had played such a magnificent role in the Franco-Prussian War saw no major activity in the Russo-Japanese War. Batalha was beside himself with the series of Japanese victories and the defeat of Tzarist imperialism. After denouncing the fever of Pan-Slavism and the greed of European capitalism, Batalha was to praise British imperialism which had found the perfect spot for its "colonizing skills" in India. In his opinion, British greed was of a superior nature to "Muscovite greed". And he believed that the victory over China had given Japan moral supremacy.
Ladislau wrote extensively about Japanese literature. He mentioned Kojiki, Nihonji, Manyoshi and Heike Monogatari. He praised Genji Monogatari, the classic Japanese novel and he firmly believed that the Japanese language would become widespread with "an auspicious future of domination and expansion",(9) This was to be facilitated by industrial and commercial progress, the moral influence of the "leader" country and, most of all, by the nature of the language itself. He touched on Hizakurige, the most beautiful modern Japanese novel according to Chamberlain, author of The Classical Poetry of the Japanese. He mentioned the influence of Buddhism and Shintoism. Batalha thought that Japanese was easy and sonorous, in fact, a truly musical language.
Ladislau Batalha made some rather daring estimates about how far the Japanese language would spread. He was proved wrong. He thought that Korea, Manchuria and even China would accept Japanese as their literary and commercial language. Indochina, however, was to accept Japanese after the French had been moved out from the region. He showed that Japanese was being learned in Europe at that time, citing a book by Leon de Rosny; Premières Notions de Langue Japonaise (Paris, 1884). He also believed that Chinese ideograms would remain in use in Japanese writing. What is more, he presented his idea that Japan would remain a hegemonous society in the future: "The Japanese display such superior breeding that neither their mental patterns nor their attitudes have been in the slightest bit affected by the vast European civilization: even their customs have hardly changed. Their language has not been at all bastardized, it has merely been enriched by the introduction of new words. On the other hand, Oriental civilization is putting Europe in second or third place because of the skills of this nation which is proclaiming a new hegemony and because of its numerical and territorial superiority. The whole of Europe is like no more than a province of Asia".(10)
Batalha paid great attention to Japanese economics. He mentioned both heavy industry and more traditional industries such as the production of sake, paper, ceramics, earthenware and cloisonné. He pointed out the importance of wooden architecture and described Horiu-ji and Kinkaku-ji Temples as well as other monuments such as the Daibutsu. He believed that Japan had its own civilization, geared towards Fine Arts. He praised traditional painting, including the Tosa and Kanu schools. He cited Hokusai as the greatest caricature artist. For Batalha, the most beautiful of the Japanese arts was lacquerware. He praised other aspects of Japanese culture such as the cremation of the dead. He also examined Japanese religion, in particular Shintoism. At that time, arranged marriages, omiai, were still the norm but there was a rather dark side to Japanese cities of the time: prostitution was widespread.
Batalha ended his defence of the Empire of the Rising Sun with the following words: "The hub of future developments in mankind has moved to the Pacific region. It is from there that a new civilization, shaped by influences of which we are yet unaware, will expand as far as the Russian Steppes and the jungles of the Dark Continent".(11)The new Japan was, in short, going to free Asia.
The book ends with a bibliography. It includes the Cartas de Japão written by the Jesuits, three works by Venceslau de Morais: Dai Nippon, Cartas do Japão and Culto do Chá, O Japão by Pedro Gastão Mesnier, a 1711 edition of Peregrinação and Lucena's Vida de S. Francisco Xavier. Specialist authors mentioned in the list include Chamberlain, Aston and Hans Haas.
Venceslau de Morais had a copy of O Japão por Dentro in his library in Tokushima. (12) Both writers shared a love of Japan. What they did not share was talent. Batalha was a mediocre journalist. His book demonstrated an admiration which was shared by many Europeans at the end of the Meiji Period. This view was to change radically during the next three decades. Ferreira de Castro's book A Volta ao Mundo written at the beginning of the forties reflected a strong sympathy towards Chinese culture in contrast to a more reserved attitude towards Japan.
Fernando Pessoa, Grafitti by Manuel Yeco over political slogans on a wall in Braga. Photo by the artist Nuno Barreto.
NOTES
(1)"Batalha, Ladislau, "Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira, IV, pp. 364-365.
(2)"Teofilo Braga, como introito" in Ladislau Batalha, O Japão por Dentro, Lisbon, 1906, p.14.
(3)Ibid., pp. 15-16.
(4)Batalha, O Japão, p.32.
(5)Batalha, Ibid., p.,37.
(6)Batalha, Ibid., p.54.
(7)Batalha, Ibid., p.63.
(8)Batalha, Ibid., p.86.
(9)Batalha, Ibid., p.147.
(10)Batalha, Ibid., pp.197-198.
(11)Batalha, Ibid., p. 421.
(12)Ângelo Pereira and Oldemiro César, Os Amores de Wenceslau de Moraes (Lisbon, Editorial Labor, 1937), p.110 Report by Kiichi Kunisawa.
Translated from the Portuguese by Marie Imelda Macleod
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