Please Hello: Don't Touch The Coat!
Pacific Overtures' Russian Admiral 🇷🇺
Today we meet the fourth of Pacific Overtures’ Admirals.
The pattern in “Please Hello” has been growing clearer and darker. Each demand has been furnished with ideological wrapping — a story told about why each country’s presence is not only inevitable but, in some important sense, good. The USA arrived with progress: kerosene and grain elevators and that machine you can rent called a train. Britain arrived with civilization: letters from Her Majesty, the machinery of diplomatic process, the promise of permanent institutional representation. Even the Dutch Admiral, for all his desperation, arrived with at least the gesture of a gift — chocolate, windmills, tulips, a wooden shoe.
The Russian Admiral arrives with something different. He arrives with a clause — and, uniquely among the Admirals, he arrives already bleeding.
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“Are We the Fourth? I Feel Depressed”
Russia in the mid-nineteenth century was a peculiarly anxious empire: the largest by land mass on earth, expanding continuously across Central Asia and into the Pacific, and yet perpetually uncertain of its standing among the Western powers. The humiliation of the Crimean War (1853–1856) runs as a parallel timeline to the negotiations dramatized in “Please Hello.” Admiral Putyatin was conducting the talks that would result in the Treaty of Shimoda while Russia was losing a war to Britain and France in the Black Sea. He returned a count, lionized in St Petersburg, partly because the treaty was one of the rare Russian diplomatic victories of that era. The empire was winning on its eastern frontier because it was being battered on its western one.
This Admiral’s directional comedy — “Start looking East / Or closer West— / Well, farther North—” — points to a geographical truth. Russia’s relationship to Japan was structurally awkward. The two empires shared a border in the most contested possible sense: the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, the southern reaches of what would become Hokkaido — all of it unmapped, negotiated, disputed. Russia didn’t quite know where it stood in relation to Japan because the line between them hadn’t been drawn yet, and the Treaty of Shimoda’s attempt to draw it merely deferred the argument to future generations. The Northern Territories dispute that to this day clouds Russian-Japanese relations has its legal origin in that treaty — in the very clause the Admiral is, in this moment, working up the nerve to introduce.
Great Game anxiety is central here. Russia was always measuring itself against Britain, always chasing a warm-water port, always expanding but never quite arriving at the table with sufficient prestige to feel secure. “Are we the fourth?” is the question of a power that has been growing for centuries and still cannot shake the feeling that someone else has already claimed the best seat. Little wonder, then, that he feels depressed.
Extraterritoriality
The Russian Admiral introduces a nine-syllable word to “Please Hello.” (As far as I’m aware, there’s only one word in Sondheim’s canon that’s longer. Do comment below if you know what that is…)
Coming next
Is extraterritoriality.
Noting text
Say “extraterritoriality.”
You perplexed
By “extraterritoriality?”
Extraterritoriality, in the context of the nineteenth-century unequal treaties, meant this: a foreign national on Japanese soil was not subject to Japanese law. If a Russian sailor committed a crime — any crime — in a Japanese city, he would be tried by Russian consular authorities under Russian law. Japanese sovereignty was rendered formally incomplete over its own territory. The arriving power had carved out a permanent legal exception for itself, a mobile envelope of impunity that travelled with every one of its citizens wherever they went.
This was not Russia’s invention. Extraterritoriality had been extracted from China by Britain following the Opium Wars, and would appear in virtually every subsequent unequal treaty across East Asia. But the Russian Admiral, more than any of his predecessors, is willing to say, in plain language, what it means:
Just noting clause
(Don’t touch the coat!)
Which say your laws
Do not apply
(Don’t touch the coat!)
When we drop by
Not getting shot
No matter what—
A minor scrape
A major rape
And we escape
(Don’t touch the cape!)
That’s what is extraterritoriality
This might be the most naked statement of imperial logic in “Please Hello.” The Russian Admiral wants to be exempt from the law of the land he is visiting. He wants his countrymen, no less than his coat, to be untouchable.
The Paradox of the Most Honest Imperialist
There is a thread running through this series about honesty and ideology. Last month, we explored how the Dutch Admiral, in his commercial shamelessness, accidentally stripped away the ideological costume that the American and British Admirals had worn, exposing the skeleton of imperial demand underneath.
The Russian Admiral does something similar but differently. Where the Dutch Admiral’s honesty was commercial — empire is fundamentally just supply-chain management — the Russian Admiral’s honesty is legal-nihilist. He strips away ideology and reveals something more unsettling than commercial greed: the frank assertion that consequences, for his people, simply do not apply.
Every previous Admiral has gestured at reciprocity. Even their threats maintained the fiction of a transaction: you give us this, we do not fire our cannons. There is, in that fiction, at least the shadow of a negotiation.
The Russian Admiral’s “fair is fair” section abandons even that shadow:
Fair is fair—
You wish perhaps to vote?
What we care
You liking what we wrote?
Sitting there
Is finest fleet afloat
Fairness is is a concept he is dismissing in the act of naming it, not a principle he is appealing to. This is, in its way, the most intellectually honest thing any Admiral says. Britain was not fair. America was not fair. Neither was the Netherlands. The Russian Admiral is simply the only one who says so, even as his method of saying so is to fire the largest explosion yet and gesture at the fleet. The most nakedly nihilistic of the Admirals is also, in a strange sense, the most truthful.
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What Happens Next
Once the Russian Admiral has secured his clause, the other Admirals’ responses are revealing.
The British Admiral objects on the grounds of precedent: “The element / Of precedent / Imperils our neutrality.” The phrase “imperils our neutrality” is gloriously dishonest from a power anchored offshore with warships and a permanent ambassador in place — but the real content is clear enough. Britain does not object to extraterritoriality. Britain objects to Russia having it first.
The Dutch Admiral makes no actual argument: “We want the same / What the Russkies claim! / Why you let them came? / Dirty rotten shame!” The subjunctive is gone entirely, the grammar worse even than the American Admiral’s condescending pidgin, because this is a tantrum, plain and simple. The incumbent has watched the newcomer extract the prize and can only stamp his foot.
This is the hinge of the number. Everything before Russia is, however violent, sequential and structured. An Admiral makes his case; Abe signs; the next Admiral enters. Everything after Russia is simultaneous: the Admirals sing over each other, their competing demands dissolving into a general roar and Abe nearly buried under the accumulating paperwork. The Russian Admiral caused this chaos not through aggression, but by introducing a concept — legal immunity — whose logic, once inside the treaty framework, obligated every other power to demand the same, immediately, all at once. A clause that sounds procedural turns out to be a structural detonator.
The coat cannot be touched. And once that is established, everyone wants the same protection.
A Historical Coda
The aftermath bears this out with particular clarity.
The treaty that the Russian Admiral’s historical counterpart, Admiral Putyatin, eventually secured was in one respect unique among the unequal treaties of this period: it was, technically, reciprocal. The Treaty of Shimoda’s extraterritoriality provision extended to Japanese citizens in Russia as well as Russians in Japan. This was the only one of the Bakumatsu-era unequal treaties to contain such a provision.
Sondheim’s Russian Admiral offers no such reciprocity. He presents a one-sided immunity and doesn’t care whether Japan likes what he wrote. The gap between the technical legal fact (reciprocal extraterritoriality) and the dramatic representation of it (one-sided impunity) is itself instructive. Reciprocal extraterritoriality, on paper, sounds like equality. In practice, it meant something quite different: a Japanese citizen in Russia was in no position to invoke legal protections before a foreign consul in a foreign city; a Russian in Japan was in a very strong position to do exactly that, backed by a warship in the harbor and the threat of a larger explosion. Formal reciprocity and actual reciprocity are very different things.
Putyatin was celebrated on his return to St Petersburg, elevated to a count — and then criticized for failing to secure a commercial agreement, and sent back to Japan twice more, in 1857 and 1858, to extract further concessions. The first treaty was tentative, a foundation for the next demand — secured, as we will see in this week’s paid-subscriber essay, under circumstances almost impossibly dramatic.
The clause sat quietly in the treaty text, and the precedent it set — that foreign nationals in Japan were exempt from Japanese law — would not be fully revoked until 1899, after decades of Meiji-era legal reform specifically designed to demonstrate to Western powers that Japan’s legal system was sophisticated enough to be trusted with their citizens. The coat could not be touched for over forty years.
Next month, our “Please Hello” series will conclude with the French Admiral, Napoleon III, détente, and the number’s extraordinary collapse into simultaneous chaos.
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You wrote: ”(As far as I’m aware, there’s only one word in Sondheim’s canon that’s longer. Do comment below if you know what that is…)”
Could it be that impossibly long (but real) Welsh town name in “The Boy From…”? Its syllables are uncountable!