Having got “The Soul of the Far East” off his hands, and into those of the public, in 1888, he sailed in December for Japan, arriving on January the eighth. As usual he took a house in Tokyo and on January 23 he writes to his mother about it. “My garden is a miniature range of hills on one side, a dry pond on the other. One plum tree is blooming now, another comes along shortly, and a cherry tree will peep into my bedroom window all a-blush toward the beginning of April. A palm tree exists with every appearance of comfort in front of the drawing room, a foreground for the hills.

“The fictitious employment by the Japanese has developed into a real one most amusingly—You know by the existing law a foreigner is not allowed to live outside of the foreign reservation unless in the service of some native body, governmental or private. Now Chamberlain got a Mr. Masujima to arrange matters. The plan that occurred to him, Masujima, was to employ me to lecture before the School of Languages of which he, Masujima, is President. It was thought better to make the thing in part real, a suggestion I liked, and the upshot of it is that I am booked to deliver a lecture a week until I see fit to change. Chamberlain and Masujima cooked up between them the idea of translating my initial performance and then inserting it in a reader of lectures, sermons and such in the colloquiae which Chamberlain is preparing—Subject—A homily to the students to become superior Japanese rather than inferior Europeans. Curious if you will in view of the fact that Masujima himself is madly in love with foreigners and as C. says is a sort of universal solvent for their quandaries.”

January 1889 proved a peculiarly fortunate time to arrive, for most interesting events were about to take place, as he soon wrote to his old college chum, Harcourt Amory, on February 21:

“Things have been happening since I arrived. Indeed I could hardly have lit upon a more eventful month—from doings of the Son of Heaven to those of Mother Earth—the transmigration from the old to the new palace, the ceremony of the promulgation of the Constitution, and the earthquake, and the assassination of Mori—and his burial the most huge affair of years. How he was murdered on the morning of the great national event just as he was setting out for the palace by a fanatic in the ante-chamber of his own house because two years ago he trod on the mats at Ise with his boots and poked the curtains aside with his cane—you have probably already heard—For the affair was too dramatic to have escaped European and American newspapers. The to us significant part of the story is the quasi sublatent approval of large numbers of Japanese. The whole procedure of the assassin commends itself in method to their ideas of the way to do it. The long cherished plan, the visit to the temples of Ise for corroboration of facts, the selection of the day, the coolness shown beforehand, the facing of death in return, the very blows À la hari-kiri etc., all tout-a-fait comme il faut. How he went to a joroya (house of prostitution) the night before, saying that he wished to have experienced as many phases of life as possible before leaving it, how the official who received him at Mori’s house (he introduced himself by the story that he had come to warn Mori of a plot to assassinate him) could recall no signs of nervousness in him, except that he lifted his teacup to drink once or twice after he had emptied it.

“The whole affair appeals to their imaginations, showing still a pretty state of society. They also admire the beautiful way the guard killed him, decapitating him in the good old-fashioned way just leaving his head hanging to his neck by a strip—Pleasing details.”

The story of the murder of Mori, and of the public festivities that were going on at the time, he told under the title of “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer” in the Atlantic Monthly for November 1890. It is perhaps the best of his descriptive writings, for the tragedy and its accessories are full of striking contrasts which he brought out with great effect. After a prelude on the danger of attempting changes too rapidly, he gives a brief account of the life of Mori Arinori; how in his youth he was selected to study abroad, how he did so in America, and became enamored of occidental ways, returning in time for the revolution that restored the Mikado. He threw himself into the new movement, rose in office, and, as he did so, strove to carry out his ideas. He was the first to propose disarming the samurai, which against bitter opposition was accomplished. As Minister of Education he excluded religion from all national instruction. He even suggested that the native language should be superseded by a modified English, the American people to adopt the changes also; but the plan obtained no support on either side of the Pacific.

The Japanese reformers felt that like almost all Western nations Japan should have a written constitution, and they set the date for its promulgation at February 11th, 1889. This Percival thought a mistake since it was the festival of Jimmu Tenno, the mythic founder of the imperial house. Nevertheless, the reformers, who had virtual control of the government, determined that the two celebrations should take place on the same day; and he describes the gorgeous decoration of the city as he saw it, the functions attending the grant of the constitution, and processions of comic chariots in honor of Jimmu Tenno. To a foreigner the strange mixture of native and partially imitated European costumes was irresistibly funny; but the populace enjoyed themselves. “The rough element,” he says, “so inevitable elsewhere was conspicuously absent. There is this great gain among a relatively less differentiated people. If you miss with regret the higher brains, you miss with pleasure the lower brutes. Bons enfants the Japanese are to a man. They gather delight as men have learned to extract sugar, from almost anything.... As the twilight settled over the city, a horrible rumor began to creep through the streets. During the day the thing would seem to have shrunk before the mirth of the masses, but under the cover of gloom it spread like night itself over the town. It passed from mouth to mouth with something of the shudder with which a ghost might come and go. Viscount Mori, Minister of State for Education, had been murdered that morning in his own house....

“What had happened was this:—

“While Viscount Mori was dressing, on the morning of the 11th, for the court ceremony of the promulgation of the new Constitution, a man, unknown to the servants, made summons on the big bell hung by custom at the house entrance, and asked to see the Minister on important business. He was told the Minister was dressing, and could see no one. The unknown replied that he must see him about a matter of life and death,—as indeed it was. The apparent gravity of the object induced the servant to admit him to an ante-chamber and report the matter. In consequence, the Minister’s private secretary came down to interview him. The man, who seemed well behaved, informed the secretary that there was a plot to take the Minister’s life, and that he had come to warn the Minister of it. Truly a subtle subterfuge; true to the letter, since the plot was all his own. More he refused to divulge except to the Minister himself. While the secretary was trying to learn something more definite, Mori came down stairs, and entered the room. The unknown approached to speak to him; then, suddenly drawing a knife from his girdle, sprang at him, and crying ‘This for desecrating the shrines of Ise!’ stabbed him twice in the stomach. Mori, taken by surprise, grappled with him, when one of his body guards, hearing the noise, rushed in, and with one blow of his sword almost completely severed the man’s head from his body.

“Meanwhile, Mori had fallen to the floor, bleeding fast. The secretary, with the help of the guard, raised him, carried him to his room, and despatched a messenger for the court surgeon.

“The clothes of the unknown were then searched for some clue to the mystery; for neither Mori nor any of his household had ever seen him before. The search proved more than successful. A paper was found on his person, setting forth in a most circumstantial manner the whole history of his crime, from its inception to its execution, or his own. However reticent he seemed before the deed, he evidently meant nothing should be hid after it, whether he succeeded or not. The paper explained the reason.

“Because, it read, of the act of sacrilege committed by Mori Arinori, who, on a visit to the shrines of Ise, two years before, had desecrated the temple by pushing its curtain back with his cane, and had defiled its floor by treading upon it with his boots, he, Nishino Buntaro, had resolved to kill Mori, and avenge the insult offered to the gods and to the Emperor, whose ancestors they were. To wipe the stain from the national faith and honor, he was ready to lose his life, if necessary. He left this paper as a memorial of his intent.”

In the meantime the messenger sent for the court surgeon failed to find him, for he was at the palace. The same was true of the next in rank, and when at last a surgeon was found Mori had lost so much blood that in the night of the following day he died.

Both by his opinions and his tactless conduct as a minister Mori had made himself unpopular and rumors that his life was in danger had been current for two or three days. “If Mori was thus a very definite sort of person, Nishino was quite as definite in his own way.” At the time of his crime he held a post in the Home Department, where he brooded over the insult to the gods. “He seems to have heard of it accidentally, but it made so much impression upon him that he journeyed to Ise to find out the truth of the tale. He was convinced, and forthwith laid his plans with the singleness of zeal of a fanatic,” as appears from his affectionate farewell letters to his father and his younger brother.

“But the strangest and most significant part of the affair was the attitude of the Japanese public toward it. The first excitement of the news had not passed before it became evident that their sympathy was not with the murdered man, but with his murderer.... Nishino was an unknown.... Yet the sentiment was unmistakable. The details of the murder were scarcely common property before the press proceeded to eulogize the assassin. To praise the act was a little too barefaced, not to say legally dangerous.... But to praise the man became a journalistic epidemic.... Nishino, they said, had contrived and executed his plan with all the old time samurai bravery. He had done it as a samurai should have done it, and he had died as a samurai should have died.... The summary action of the guard in cutting the murderer down was severely censured. As if the guard had not been appointed to this very end!... The papers demanded the guard’s arrest and trial.... Comment of this kind was not confined to the press. Strange as it may appear, the newspapers said what everybody thought.... There was no doubt about it. Beneath the surface of decorous disapproval ran an undercurrent of admiration and sympathy, in spots but ill hid. People talked in the same strain as the journalists wrote. Some did more than talk. The geisha, or professional singing girls of Tokyo, made of Nishino and his heroism a veritable cult.... His grave in the suburbs they kept wreathed with flowers. To it they made periodic pilgrimages, and, bowing there to the gods, prayed that a little of the hero’s spirit might descend on them. The practice was not a specialty of professionals. Persons of all ages and both sexes visited the spot in shoals, for similar purposes. It became a mecca for a month. The thing sounds incredible, but it was a fact. Such honor had been paid nobody for years.”

This in abstract is Percival’s account of a terrible national tragedy, and its amazing treatment by the public at large.

Before he had been long in Japan the old love of travel into regions unknown to foreigners came back. He had already visited some of the less frequented parts of the interior, and now scanning, one evening, the map of the country his eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic mystery, as he said, from the western coast. It made a striking figure with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands. Its name was Noto; and the more he looked the more he longed, until the desire simply carried him off his feet. Nobody seemed to know much about it, for scarcely a foreigner had been there; and, in fact, he set his heart on going to Noto just because it was not known. That is his own account of the motive for the journey he made early in May, 1889; which turned out somewhat of a disappointment, for the place was not, either in its physical features or the customs of its people, very different from the rest of Japan; but for him proved adventurous and highly interesting. Under the title of “Noto” he gave an account of it,—as usual after his return home in the following spring,—first by a series of articles in the Atlantic, and then as a book published in 1891. It is a well-told tale of a journey, quite exciting, where he and his porters, in seeking to scale a mountain pass, found their way lay along precipices where the path had crumbled into the gorge below. The descriptions of people and scenery are vigorous and terse; but the book is not a philosophic study like those on Korea and on Japanese psychology. Yet it is notable in showing his versatility, as is also the fact that he gave the F ? ? poem at Harvard in June of that year.

Hurrying home to deliver that poem, shortly after his return from Noto, he found himself busy for a year and a half, writing, attending to his own affairs, and to business, for he was part of the time, as Treasurer, the manager of the Lowell Bleachery. Meanwhile his hours of leisure were filled with a new and absorbing avocation, that of polo.

As a boy at Brookline, Patrick Burns, the coachman, trained at Newcastle, had taught him to ride bareback with a halter for a bridle—although he had never really cared for riding, just as in college he had run races without taking much interest in athletics. But on August 9, 1887, we find him writing that he has bought a polo pony, and that “Sam Warren, Fred Stimson, et al. have just started a polo club at Dedham, and have also in contemplation the erection of an inn there.” He adds that he is in both schemes; and in fact the plan for an inn developed into a clubhouse, where he lived in summer for some years when about Boston. During the remainder of the first season the players knocked the ball about—and rarely with a full team of four in a side—tried to learn the game on a little field belonging to George Nickerson, another member of the club. But the next year the number increased, and Percival with his great quickness and furious energy soon forged ahead, leading the list of home handicaps in the club with a rating of ten, and becoming the first captain of the team.

By the autumn of 1888 they had become expert enough to play a match with the Myopia club on its grounds at Hamilton, but with unfortunate results. At that time it was the habit to open the game by having the ball thrown into the middle of the field, and at a signal the leading player from each side charged from his goal posts, each trying to reach the ball first. Percival had a very fast pony, so had George von L. Meyer on the other side, and by some misunderstanding about the rules of turning there was a collision. In an instant both men and both horses were flat on the field. Percival was the most hurt, and although he mounted his horse and tried to play, he was too much stunned to be effective, and had to withdraw from the game.

In the following years he played as captain other match games with various teams; and, in fact, the Dedham Polo Club, which he came to regard as his home, was certainly his chief resource for recreation and diversion in this country until he built his Observatory in Arizona. Yet it by no means absorbed his attention, for with all the vigor he threw into anything he undertook he could maintain an intense interest in several things at the same time, besides being always ready for new ones, not least in the form of travel. So it happened that at the end of January, 1890, he sailed again for Europe, and with Ralph Curtis, a friend from boyhood and a college classmate, visited Spain—not in this case to study the people or the land, although he observed what he saw with care, but for the pleasure and experience. Like all good travellers he went to Seville for Holy Week and the festivities following; but, being sensitive, the bullfight was a thing to be seen rather than enjoyed. He had heard people speak also of the cathedral of Burgos as marvellous, in fact as the finest specimen in the world; so, at some inconvenience, he went there on his way to France, and on seeing it remarked that the praise bestowed upon it was due less to its merits than to its inaccessibility. Later he noticed that having taken the trouble to go to Burgos he never heard anyone speak of it again. So much for people’s estimates of things someone else has not seen.

On his way home he passed through London and enjoyed the hospitality he always found there.