SEE: Peace Treaty Events

Ryuichi Otsuka examined the wide-brimmed white bowl with a reporter’s careful eye. For a long time his spoon hovered just above the surface of the thick gray mixture flecked with pink. As the New York bureau chief of Yomiuri Shimbun -- "the world’s largest newspaper" – Otsuka had traveled far and experienced much. But he had never tasted clam chowder.

"Good!" he said at last, nodding in approval. "It is like an entire meal."

"When you come back," I told him, "I will make you the best clam chowder in New England myself."

This first trip was a fact-finding mission. Otsuka came to check out the buzz on the Portsmouth Peace Treaty celebration and report back to his 10 million daily readers in Japan. That’s a lot of newsprint. Every day Yomiuri sells as many newspapers our local daily distributes in two years. Otsuka is taking the pulse of Portsmouth now, and hopes to return to cover the key centennial festivities in August and early September.

One hundred years ago the Russo-Japanese War ended here. Some 600,000 men died in that conflict, nearly equal to our losses in the Civil War. For brokering the treaty, President Theodore Roosevelt earned the Nobel Peace Prize. The whole world watched the month-long negotiations play out in the newspapers of 1905.

Today, except in Japan and Portsmouth, the war and its treaty are largely unknown, eclipsed by two world wars. This year Portsmouth has gone slightly mad with nostalgia for what was, arguably, the best publicized event in the city’s history. The Japanese are curious about our little obsession with their war. There is a new theatrical play here about the Treaty of Portsmouth, four separate museum exhibits, a concert series, a fancy dress ball, a bell ringing ceremony and a gun salute, a formal tea and lots of lectures. I just finished writing the script for a walking tour and a bus tour sponsored by the chamber of commerce. There is a new map of key treaty sites, a treaty book, a treaty logo and two official treaty web sites. Although Teddy Roosevelt never came to Portsmouth in 1905, a guy dressed up like him will speak to crowds under a tent at the annual Chautauqua lecture series.

You can run from the treaty this summer, but you can’t hide. Five years ago it was a very different story. I got my first call from Yomiuri Shimbun back in 2000 after someone there Googled my web site. Then-bureau chief Masaomi Terada made a preliminary pilgrimage to Portsmouth to see how we were honoring the memory of this historic event. I toured him around town. We stood in the rain outside the ruins of the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel where both the Russian and Japanese delegates had stayed in 1905. The place was then a wreck. We found a few old books on the war in the attic of the Portsmouth Athenaeum. The only official notice of the event was a battered plaque high on the wall of the Piscataqua Savings Bank. With the exception of a small exhibit in the "Peace Building" at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard where the Treaty was signed in September 1905, it was a paltry showing. Since 9-11, the shipyard has been pretty much off-limits to outside visitors.

But back to reporter Otsuka who, by now, has polished off his first-ever bowl of chowder, plus a portabello mushroom sandwich, and is taking notes. I am rambling on about Jutaro Komura and Sergei Witte, the two foreign ministers who worked out the historic compromise. It was a cliff hanger, and the treaty very nearly failed.

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