American Samurai: Captain L.L. Janes and Japan

by Fred G. Notehelfer

Overview

The book reveals how a man on the way to being a misfit in the United States became the heroic American samurai." It discusses Janes as one of the few Westerners allowed to live in the interior and as the "father" of the Kumamoto Band, which became the dominant wing of Japanese Protestantism and a significant modernizing force.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639635
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #400
Pages:	410
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

Read an Excerpt

American Samurai

Captain L. L. Janes and Japan

---

By F. G. Notehelfer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05443-8

---

CHAPTER 1

BOYHOOD IN THE OHIO HILLS

In 1837 the American brig Morrison sailed into Edo Bay carrying a missionary, a medical doctor, and an enterprising merchant. Ostensibly the ship's reason for violating Japanese seclusion was to return seven Japanese castaways. But the real purpose of those on board was to "open" Japan to trade and missionary activity. In this they were sorely disappointed. A few well-placed Japanese warning shots quickly convinced the Americans to withdraw. The first ship to bear the Stars and Stripes into the inner defenses of the land of the shoguns was summarily dismissed. Japan wanted neither trade nor the missionaries.

On March 27 of the same year, in a land that was described by the crew of the Morrison as lying "two months journey to the East," Leroy Lansing Janes was born in the small Ohio town of New Philadelphia.

Despite his later reluctance to extoll the virtues of his ancestors, Janes' family was not without its pedigree. William Janes, the family's North American patriarch, had emigrated to the New World as a charter member of the New Haven Colony, arriving from Essex, England, in 1637. A schoolteacher like his eighth-generation offspring two and a half centuries later in Japan, he was most admired for "molding and training the minds of the young" and "educating the rising generation of colonists to the fullest extent of their faculties."

Typical of the general movement that accompanied America's growth and expansion, the Janes family pushed westward from the Atlantic coast, across the Alleghenies, and into Pennsylvania and Ohio. Janes' father, Elisha Janes, was in step with the broader currents of the day. Born on an extensive farm near Canaan Center, New York, in 1802, he decided to seek his fortune in the West. In 1825 he moved to Akron, Ohio, where he worked on the construction of the Ohio Canal, and two years later he settled in New Philadelphia.

The New Philadelphia to which the young canal contractor came in 1827 was little more than a frontier village of less than 300 inhabitants. While it held promise as the county seat of a growing and expanding region, its promise still lay in the hopes and dreams of its founders, men such as John Knisely and Gabriel Cryder, who had hitched their wagons, if not to the proverbial star, to the future of the Tuscarawas River and the Ohio Canal.

And yet, as Leroy Lansing Janes was to write later in one of his unpublished novels, "realization followed upon anticipation with such swift footed attendance" in the region "that it was rational and prudent to live much in expectation." In retrospect, the reasons for this seemed clear to the Captain: "A happy climate, a teeming fertility of soil, a central location across every path of north-western settlement, multiplying facilities for communication and intercourse with the East," not to mention a "population gathering moral purpose and physical stamina and accumulating opportunities with ceaseless accession of numbers." All these "favored and justified heroic endurance of present privation as a condition of certain and early fruition."

To what extent Elisha Janes was willing to endure present privation for future prosperity is not entirely clear. What is clear is that his son, Leroy, identified the values of deferred gratification with the course of American development. It was men such as his father — farmers, merchants, and manufacturers — who were replacing, as he wrote, "the Indian fighter, trapper, and hunter as the builders of the new nation." Moreover, it was such men, he liked to point out, who had little time for the "diversions" and "luxury" of "home building" and "home adorning," tasks which Janes argued they had to defer to the "severer duties and responsibilities of organizing the physical foundations of empire." While Janes' views of American development, and the role that men such as his father played in it, were to strike a sympathetic chord among Japanese who possessed their own preoccupation with the physical foundations of empire in the 1870s, they were, like many of his later views, somewhat idealized interpretations of the past.

If deferred gratification was important to Elisha Janes, it was important within clearly defined limits. Home building and home adorning, in the physical sense of the stately houses that would eventually grace New Philadelphia, might have to await the fulfillment of other priorities, but home building in its marriage sense was another matter. In 1830 Elisha Janes, now in his twenty-eighth year, married Elizabeth Cryder, the daughter of one of New Philadelphia's most prominent men.

Gabriel Cryder was the personification of the local developer. A native of York County, Pennsylvania, he had emigrated to the valley of the Tuscarawas in 1808.9 Always sensitive to new opportunities, Cryder had successfully turned several wagonloads of bartered goods — acquired in exchange for his Pennsylvania house — into New Philadelphia's first mercantile enterprise, a general store. County commissioner from 1811 to 1817, he resided briefly at Dover and subsequently on a large farm five miles south of the county seat. In 1823, after having been elected county treasurer, an office he was to hold until 1836, he returned permanently to New Philadelphia. Gabriel Cryder's achievements were considerable, but, as his grandson later remarked, there were also less commendable sides to his role as a developer.

Records of Tuscarawas County show that Cryder was responsible not only for the construction of the region's first grist mill, a $5,000 operation on the Tuscarawas River built in 1820, but also for the establishment of the district's first "still house," a contribution that, given its economic implications for the eastern part of Ohio, may have been of even greater significance. It was, of course, the latter that elicited the Captain's subsequent disapproval. A committed supporter of the temperance movement in his later years, Janes was hardly enthusiastic about this legacy. At the same time he was quite prepared to discuss even this aspect of the family's history within the mild disguise of a fictional character named Daved Holland, who constituted a composite portrait of Gabriel Cryder and Elisha Janes.

Writing of the motivation that typified Gabriel Cryder, Elisha Janes, and others of the new generation, Janes noted:

The leading difference between Mr. Holland and his predecessor is now easily pointed out. The former had been long employed in the construction and completion of adjacent sections of the great commercial artery, the Ohio Canal, which connects Lake Erie with the leading eastern tributary of the mighty Mississippi. His work had brought him into contact, however distant and by means of whatever of occult processes which mighty minds employ to communicate their thought and influence to far-off agencies, with the leading spirits of the age. He had been, all unconsciously, touched with the same ever unfolding purpose which sent forth Columbus and Degama and Magellan, and which has pushed the individual on and on until, in our day, its lines of electric intelligence, and of practical neighborhood, have "gone out into all the earth," and are seeking to make brethren and one family of every nation and tribe on the globe.

But if the Cryders and Janes' had been swept forward by the tide of national growth and expansion, Janes was quick to add that his composite hero, Daved Holland, "responded in his own way to the touch, and with a slightly more intelligent faith in the grand design." If he felt the push, he also possessed the courage to "bend it to the service of his individual propensities."

"In the first days of his occupancy of the re-christened log structure up on the dividing ridge," Janes writes in lines that remind one of the blockhouse in which his mother's sister, Aunt Polly, subsequently lived, and of which he grew particularly fond as a child, Daved Holland "sometimes stopped in the doorway and traced the silver line of the canal, 'my canal,' he would musingly call it, as, in close companionship with the beautiful river, and flashing in the autumn sunlight, both skirted the broad sweep of the Calumet Plains."

Janes' hero, Daved Holland, was, however, less moved by the aesthetic beauty of the silver ribbon that became so closely associated with the Captain's memories of his childhood home than with its economic implications. As the passage amplifies, "he easily calculated the inevitable bearing of that highway to foreign markets upon his own personal interests. It was only incumbent upon him to put his possessions in order, and keep them headed with the current to realize the purpose of his life — to become a proprietor of land, in baronial, ducal, or princely proportions."

Understanding the potential of the new canal and adjusting it to the limitations of local production were not necessarily as easy as Janes' fictional Daved Holland suggested. When Gabriel Cryder and Elisha Janes arrived in Tuscarawas County, agriculture was still the source of wealth and public standing, but cash crops were few. Tobacco, which showed considerable promise in the early decades of the century, had severely depleted the soil and by the 1830s had given way to corn and wheat. But corn and wheat retained limited marketing potential. Prices were generally low and unpredictable. In fact, Janes' narrative argues that the "good bavarian" (more likely German Moravian) who sold his land to Daved Holland sold out precisely because he had not been able to dispose of a two-year supply of grain that lay rotting in his ricks.

To one accustomed to taking risks and self-reliant in meeting them, as was the case with Daved Holland and Gabriel Cryder, the local abundance of grains suggested new possibilities. As Janes records,

the first of succeeding steps towards a distant purpose were quickly taken. ... It was a triple stroke of industrial and business policy which in a few short weeks made of the late constructive engineer, a producer, a manufacturer, and a manipulator of freights by the double and simultaneous process of diminishing their bulk while enhancing their value. Almost within that fragment of time, the energetic man had purchased and brought to this grotto all the paraphernalia of a still for the reduction, by distillation, of his bulky and superabundant grain crop. Partly embracing the old springhouse, utilyzing the crystal elements of its fairy fountain in many ways and spoiling by a different set of odors its pastoral perfumes, the wonder inspiring manufacturing establishment was soon in full running order, actually engaged in the "production of grog for the markets and navies of the distant sea-board!" as the intrusive little sheet of the county seat boastingly proclaimed.

While the portrait of Janes' fictional hero combined the entrepreneurial talent of his grandfather, Gabriel Cryder, with the cool, rational planning of his father, Elisha Janes, and in the process served to illustrate the way in which American society in the 1820s and 1830s was engaged in the transition from agriculture to nascent industry, the rosy prospects of an industrial career seem to have flashed across the mind of the historical Elisha Janes with less light and force than his son's fiction indicated. If realization followed anticipation with such swift-footed attendance, as the Captain suggested, and if New Philadelphia was resplendent with new possibilities — including Gabriel Cryder's still house — both anticipation and possibilities seem to have held little initial attraction for the young and newly married canal engineer. Swift-footed attendance seems to have been bestowed only on his departure from New Philadelphia. Waiting just long enough to pack up his bride, Elizabeth, he removed himself to the little town of Trenton, where he kept hotel, built a warehouse, and engaged in the shipping of grain for the next seven years.

For Elisha Janes, the years in Trenton were years of sacrifice and accumulation. Unlike Gabriel Cryder, who was quick to grasp the possibilities of the new age, and who readily moved from landed wealth to industrial enterprises, Janes' father seems to have been more concerned with the exploitation of new possibilities for traditional ends. "Land avarice," as the Captain was later to write, was still a leading passion not only of Daved Holland and many of his generation, but of Elisha Janes, who pursued his projects for its gratification with stubborn pertinacity. By 1837, the year in which his son Leroy was born, the elder Janes had acquired enough capital to purchase 122 prime acres in the New Philadelphia area. With a later addition of 60 more acres, the farm on which Janes grew up was respectable by all the standards of the day. While success had at last come to "Colonel Elisha Janes," as he now came to be known, Janes' father was a good enough Calvinist to recognize that the signs of election, which hard work and God's grace bestowed, also required reciprocation. Growing public trust was acknowledged by growing public involvement.

The official record shows this process quite clearly. From 1838 to 1842 Elisha Janes served as sheriff of Tuscarawas County. In the latter year he helped found the First Presbyterian Church, a church in which he was to remain active as a member and elder for much of the remainder of his life. By 1849 he was spearheading a new agricultural movement and serving as founding president of the Tuscarawas County Agricultural Society. And in 1851 city documents show him presiding over a citizens group that had raised $50,000 in an effort to bring the railroad to New Philadelphia. The first two decades of Leroy Lansing Janes' life were therefore to transpire not only in the "best period of a wonderful century," as he liked to remember it, but in a home that was rapidly achieving the hopes and dreams of its founder. Landed wealth was being combined with public status. Indeed, by all external standards Elisha Janes was well on his way to the position that history was to record for him: that of one of New Philadelphia's "oldest and most esteemed citizens."

While the official record provides the bone structure of Leroy Lansing Janes' family background, it does not offer extensive insight into the flesh and blood aspects of his childhood experiences and the effects that the inner life of the family had on his maturation. For one whose later years were to be filled with controversy, including allegations of mental instability, a more detailed exploration of these early years is in order.

In many ways Janes' childhood resembled that of other children living on the edge of what had recently been the frontier. It is obvious, from fragments of his projected autobiography, that the growing boy formed deep and lasting attachments to the physical environment of New Philadelphia and the family farm. The Janes home, lying halfway between the river and the hills on the eastern edge of the town, was ideally located. The sun, he recalled, rose over miles upon miles of wooded hills that flanked the farm's eastward approach, and it set beyond the river and canal to the west. The hills were a dense wilderness of oak, chestnut, maple, and beech, and in the lower sections walnut and hickory. In the westward valley there were splendid orchards of peaches, pears, grapes, and plums, and, to the delight of the child's heart, a superabundance of golden apples.

Within such a setting a child given to wandering and a search for adventure had ample opportunity to roam and explore. Janes' autobiographical notes indicate many of the usual childhood fascinations. An early interest in firearms was soon followed by hunting expeditions for squirrel, possum, and rabbits. Swimming and fishing ranked high on a list of childhood priorities, as did visits to Aunt Polly's blockhouse, playing indians, and breaking colts. Machines of all kinds appear to have been fascinating. "Taking apart father's watch" was followed in his notes by an entry that suggests a similar procedure for cases of clocks discovered in the family attic. There were, of course, also the usual chores: helping with the milking and butchering, harvesting fruits and nuts, and looking after the chickens.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from American Samurai by F. G. Notehelfer. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
• PREFACE, pg. xi
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
• CHAPTER I. BOYHOOD IN THE OHIO HILLS, pg. 11
• CHAPTER II. LIFE AT WEST POINT, pg. 36
• CHAPTER III. WAR, LOVE, AND CONVERSION, pg. 56
• CHAPTER IV. OREGON AND CALIFORNIA, pg. 75
• CHAPTER V. INVITATION TO JAPAN, pg. 94
• CHAPTER VI. YOKOHAMA, EDO, AND KUMAMOTO, pg. 111
• CHAPTER VII. THE KUMAMOTO SCHOOL FOR WESTERN LEARNING, pg. 130
• CHAPTER VIII. YANKEE INGENUITY AND INITIATIVE, pg. 151
• CHAPTER IX. CHRISTIANITY, pg. 179
• CHAPTER X. THE YEARS OF CONTROVERSY, pg. 210
• CHAPTER XI. JAPAN AGAIN: KYOTO AND THE D0SHISHA LECTURES, pg. 234
• CHAPTER XII. THE FINAL YEARS, pg. 257
• CONCLUSION, pg. 270
• NOTES, pg. 275
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 359
• INDEX, pg. 369