I recently stumbled across one of history’s interesting meetings. Not so much because it had huge historical consequences – it wasn’t something like Yalta – but because the participants were interesting and diverse and went on, were already engaged in, interesting things.

First the context. I am writing what was  intended to be a book and is slowly turning into a lifetime project, on the Meiji Restoration in Japan and how it came about. This started with a tour of some of the major Shinto shrines in Japan and some places associated with the Restoration. My wife and partner Irene sketched and painted and I talked to few people and used my iPad to take notes and photographs. Irene, like the sensible person she is, developed her paintings and sketches (and photographs) into an exhibition which went well. But I wandered off into a maze of neo-Confucianism of various flavours, Shinto and National Studies, history, myth, genealogy  inter-clan feuds and alliances and on and on.

One central figure in all this was/is Yoshida Shōin, the ideologist, idealist, activist and martyr who before his execution at the age of 29 was the teacher of a group of young men, some of whom would go on to transform Japan rapidly and radically. One of the first things I read about him was an essay by the young Robert Louis Stevenson and first published in the Cornhill Magazine in March 1880. In the preface to the collection Familiar Essays of Men and Books, Stevenson claims that he was no more than the amanuensis: ’I wish to say that I am not, rightly speaking, the author of the present paper: I tell the story on the authority of an intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who told it me with an emotion that does honour tohis heart; and though I have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this can be no more than an imperfect outline.’ And Shōin, (or Yoshida-Torajiro as Stevenson has the name, from Yoshida’s name before a prophetic dream caused him to change it to its final form) is not a likely companion for the other essay subjects Hugo, Whitman, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of Orleans, Villon, Pepys and Knox.

Masaki’s editing seem to have left a lot alone, including the eccentric spelling (‘Nangasaki’ etc). Stevenson’s account, as he is so keen to acknowledge, is an outsider’s view of Japan but what it does do, and what subsequent Japanese hagiographies do not do, is describe a human being whose inspirational force was modulated by some unselfconscious eccentricity.

After his experience as  a thirteen year old young samurai at Shōin’s small personal school, the radical alternative conventional Confucianism housed in a simple wooden building of two small rooms capable of accommodating  perhaps twenty people and little to no furniture, Masaki went on to become a page to the clan head and a liaison between him and the  moderate and radical groups into which the  clan had split. In the next nineteen years, he and his fellow students played a significant role in overthrowing the shogunate, installing a young emperor, reforming the government on a western model, abolishing the social privileges of the samurai, founding a modern army. Travel abroad to study and learn was an essential part of this and Masaki, now an ex-samurai and junior member of the new government was sent  to London to study, first mintage and then, as his boundaries expanded, chemistry at  UCL. During this first visit, he recruited J. W. Atkinson to become Professor of Chemistry at the newly established Tokyo University. Atkinson is perhaps best known, if he’s known at all,  for his descriptions of the chemistry of sake brewing, specially the role of kōji. Kōji seems to have been all the rage for the last few years but I doubt if the miso fans bother with Atkinson’s paper On the Diastase of Kōji in the Proceedings of the Royal Society or his later The Chemistry of Sake Brewing. Pity really; we’ve British tofu, and sushi but no sake and the imported stuff is ludicrously expensive.

Anyway, back to the meeting. During his second stay in Britain, Masaki supervised Japanese students, a good number studying engineering in Scotland, and recruited Alfred Ewing, an up-and-coming Scottish engineer and physicist,

The three met in summer 1878, when Ewing was 23, Stevenson was 28 and Masaki was 32. Masaki had already been transformed from a young samurai, raised on warrior virtues and Confucian learning, into a chemist and academic.

Ewing, mentored by the future Lord Kelvin and the polymath Fleming Jenkin, had already shown his taste for overseas adventure by going on cable laying expeditions, including one to Brazil. Stevenson, another Edinburgh, graduate, was now dividing his time between the London literary scene and expeditions in France. He was between a canoeing trip (The Inland Voyage) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and was soon to set off on his health-wrecking journey to San Francisco in pursuit of his future wife.

Stevenson’s essay was published in the Cornhill Magazine in March 1880. At the time Stevenson making his mark with these essays in his prestigious magazine (edited by Leslie Steven, father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell). Another youngish writer published in this magazine in the same year was his future friend and neighbour Henry James (or Henry James Jr., as he styled himself), with Washington Square.

Back in Japan, Masaki  founded what is now the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Ewing spent five years in Japan during which he made contributions to the fields of electricity and magnetism, and jointly founded the Seismological Society of Japan. Back in Britain he was the first Professor of Engineering a what is now the University of Dundee and later professor at Cambridge and UCL, working on magnetism and electricity, with side ventures in steam turbines, codes, and cryptography. The last of these intersts led to his appointment as the head of Room 40, the Admiralty’s code-breaking unit, during the First World War. Under his supervision, Room 40 decoded the Zimmerman telegram, which revealed Germany’s attempt to persuade Mexico to retake the states of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona and, almost as an afterthought, to recruit Japan as an ally. This would enhance Germany’s new campaign of submarine warfare which would, they hoped, prevent arms being sent to Europe. The telegram, once decrypted and revealed, achieved the exact opposite. Mexico saw no chance of success in the proposed venture, Japan declined to change sides, the remaining isolationist opinion was quashed, and the U.S.A entered what H.G Wells had predicted would be promised would be ‘the war to end war’.

So an interesting conjunction between three young men from diverse backgrounds as they went onto different careers, each of great distinction. And all because of Yoshida Shōin, who failed in all his attempted actions but gave a group of young men a concept of what they had to do to make a radically new Japan and inspired them to do it.

I’ve been to Shōin’s old school in Hagi, relocated, preserved venerated and frozen in time as it is, and though there’s a lot to be learned from the school and his old home where he was kept under house arrest, and, the museum, the shrine and the various memorial stones, there is nothing that gives greater insight into his humanity and the influence that he had than this faraway meeting and Stevenson’s ignorant but intuitive essay. You wouldn’t know anywhere enough about Shōin from this essay but you would not know him without it.

Oh, and it’s also a fertile source of quiz questions e.g. Who or what links Yoshida Shōin, Long John Silver and Wendy Darling. Easy answer.