Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (40 page)

As he dollops yoghurt on to his granola, I cut to the chase. How does such lofty economic ‘wisdom’ co-exist with his new-found celebrity, gossip-column status? ‘Celebrity has become a burden,’ he sighs, ‘there are more demands on your time. People think it is glamorous to fly places. But it is not – even if you travel business class and stay in wonderful hotels, you end 10,000 miles away from home.’ He reckons that he spends two-thirds of each year on the road; unsurprisingly, the new book was mostly written on planes.

I suggest that some of his rivals would struggle to feel much sympathy
with the ‘dilemma’ of having to stay in luxurious hotels. In fact, many might feel a twinge of jealousy, when they look at the money, fame and parties (he recently posted some pictures of a party that he attended in the Caribbean, thrown by Roman Abramovich). And what about all those glamorous women constantly surrounding the permanent bachelor Roubini?

‘I am just a normal human being – I am alive! Why is anyone surprised that I am human?’ retorts Roubini. ‘Like many New Yorkers, I have a multifaceted life. I collect art – I love modern art, film … in fact, soon I am going to Cannes because I am appearing in two films!’

I express surprise; the film stars who live in this part of New York might consider this entirely ‘normal’. Most egghead academics do not. However Roubini explains that both films – Stone’s
Wall Street
drama and the documentary
Inside Job
– are essentially highlighting the role he played in predicting the credit disaster.

I suddenly recall that I also gave an interview for the latter, talking about complex credit instruments, and am apparently appearing in it too. Our conversation and the location begin to take on a surreal quality; suddenly the starry grandeur of the Soho Grand does not seem such a strange place to be chatting about mortgage-backed securities after all. Three years ago, it was hard to imagine that such complex financial tools would ever attract the interest of Hollywood. Or that a man such as Roubini would be hailed as a prophet, or go partying in Cannes. Yet now that this bizarre plot twist has occurred, he is clearly determined to enjoy it – whatever fellow academics think.

I ask for the bill. Roubini has been so busy talking that he has barely eaten. He gathers himself up, and we stroll through the lobby,
surrounded by concrete, bottleglass and steel. ‘You must come to Cannes too! We can be a wonk and wonkette together!’ he says, laughing at such an odd thought. I laugh off his infectious enthusiasm. Then, as he leaves, find myself checking my diary; could I fit in a trip to the film premiere in Cannes? Should I? Sovereign debt crises and collateralized debt obligations never used to be this much fun.

19 FEBRUARY 2005

Certain Japanese politicians want to disenshrine the executed wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo. But his granddaughter insists that he deserves his divine status

By David Pilling

The first inkling Yuko Tojo had of what really happened to her grandfather was when she was in fifth grade at school. Gripping her small white hands around her neck, the 65-year-old re-enacts the classroom scene of more than half a century ago when a boy stood on a chair before leaping to the ground with the cry: ‘Tojo hanged.’

The young girl looked up the strange word,
kohshukei
, in the dictionary and found a description next to the picture of a hooded man with a rope around his neck. ‘Then I knew the meaning,’ she nods, releasing her grip to continue the dissection of her lamb fillet.

‘Until then I had always believed he had died on the battleground,’ she says, recalling her childhood fantasy about her grandfather, Japan’s prime minister in the Second World War, who had in fact been executed for crimes against humanity. ‘My mother had always told me he had fought vigorously for his country and died.’

Nearly 60 years after the armies Hideki Tojo marshalled perished on the battlefield or fled back to their devastated homeland, his ghost is still stalking Asia. He is the most famous of 14 Class A war criminals enshrined – along with another 2.5 million war dead – at the Yasukuni shrine, a quiet sanctuary in central Tokyo that has become a rallying point for the Japanese right.

Since Junichiro Koizumi became prime minister four years ago, he has made a point of visiting the shrine each year, provoking outrage in China, which likens the gesture to bowing at the tomb of Adolf Hitler.

Yasukuni has become a dangerous flashpoint in Japan–China relations, already poisoned by history and suffering anew as the two Asian giants jostle for influence. Some Japanese politicians, including former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, want to defuse the situation. They have urged the families of Class A war criminals to disenshrine their relatives’ souls from Yasukuni. (There are no bodies buried there.) In that way, the prime minister could honour Japan’s fallen soldiers without appearing to condone those who sent them on their suicidal mission.

Yuko Tojo, stalwart defender of her grandfather’s reputation, has chosen the Crown, a French restaurant overlooking the Imperial Palace, to discuss Tojo’s legacy. A tiny, straight-backed figure, dressed in a green woollen suit with large, gold-trimmed buttons, she arrives with bullet-train punctuality clutching a miniature trunk in eggshell blue. Prim and with an old-world politeness, she reminds me of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s straight-laced detective.

Almost as soon as she sits down, she starts disembowelling her little trunk, pulling out her grandfather’s memorabilia, including 161 postcards that Tojo sent to her father, then a young boy, from Europe. Next comes a ream of grainy photographs and a battered notebook, in which Tojo kept a neatly handwritten diary of his parental experiences.

‘There is one entry describing how my grandfather would hide behind a chest and tie a piece of string to a candy bar,’ she says as I thumb through the yellowing pages. ‘When the baby tried to grab it, he would pull it away.’

I decide to order while there is still room on the table. She leaves the choice to me, smiling benevolently as I scour the menu. ‘Just something simple. Not so expensive The view is nourishing enough,’ she says, drinking in the imperial gardens, the verdant vacuum at the centre of Tokyo.

My eyes alight on Le Menu Affaire, a set lunch that requires only one decision. She opts for the wrapped fillet of lamb, I for the grilled sea bream. As the waiter brings our amuse bouche, a sliver of apple atop a quivering oyster, I ask if she can remember her grandfather. ‘Just
fragments,’ she says, her eyes wrinkling kindly. ‘I was six when the war ended.’

After Japan’s surrender, Tojo was imprisoned, awaiting trial. ‘I was a girl so I wasn’t brought so often, but my brother, who is two years older, remembers sticking his hands through the bars and touching my grandfather’s hand.’

Family anecdotes form the basis of her memoirs, later turned into a box-office hit called
Pride
, which portrayed Tojo as a patriot and the tribunal that executed him as a kangaroo court. A scene in the film shows prosecutors turning off the microphone as defence lawyers argue that the perpetrators of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be brought to justice. ‘It wasn’t a fair trial. It was the victors judging the defeated. To deem Hideki Tojo a villain would mean the war was bad and that all the soldiers who fought in the war were bad,’ she says, sipping the fluffy haricot bean soup through pursed lips. ‘I want to review the war and the actions of the soldiers so that their deaths are not meaningless.’

But isn’t the point that their deaths were meaningless, I say. Tojo’s campaign was barbaric and led to the near-annihilation of Japan. ‘It’s true that precious lives were lost and that Japan lost the war. But they fought desperately hard and stood proud,’ she says, her smile fading slightly. ‘As a result Japan is enjoying peace and an affluent life. I would be sorry to say they died in vain.’

We take to studying our main course intensely, before I venture to ask how exactly Japan’s aggressive expansionism, admittedly learned at the knee of the Great European Powers, brought about peace. ‘I think from the way you use the word “aggression”, your stance is totally different from mine,’ she says after a silence broken by the sound of her knife clinking against the plate. ‘You are looking at this from the standpoint that Japan was an invader. I say it was a defensive war. Japan did not have resources.’

After a discussion of the Nanking massacre, accounts of which she rejects as Chinese fabrication, and my suggestion that being short of resources does not justify grabbing them, she says, ‘I wish you had a deeper understanding of what happened. Please make it clear in your article that we have very different standpoints.’

I switch to what suddenly seems like the less controversial subject of
Yasukuni. ‘China has no business in this internal affair,’ she pronounces, revealing her dislike for that country with a sideswipe at its plumbing arrangements. ‘The Americans and the British haven’t complained. It is only China who is whipping the souls of the dead.’

Japanese politicians too should know better than to talk of moving the souls. ‘Once a soul is enshrined, you can’t tear them into bits and take them from the shrine,’ she says. ‘Once they are enshrined, whether they are generals or rank-and-file soldiers, they all become equal. They are all gods.’

As petits fours are brought to our table, she dips back into her trunk. Like a conjurer, she pulls out a succession of astonishing items: a little brown box that Tojo fashioned in prison while awaiting execution, pencil stubs he used to record his last thoughts, and even the ash from his final cigarette.

At one point she puts a little packet on the white tablecloth a few inches from a strawberry parfait I have been eyeing. She opens it to reveal a small clump of her grandfather’s hair as well as his nail clippings – a parting gift he had prepared for his family before a bungled suicide attempt.

‘He told his lawyer that he was living in shame because he failed to commit suicide,’ she says. ‘His whole purpose of continuing to live was to avoid the prosecution of the emperor,’ she adds, referring to his testimony – disputed by many historians – that the emperor was largely ignorant of the details of Japan’s disastrous war drive.

There’s an argument, I say, with a nervous back-glance at the imperial palace, that it would have been better if the emperor had been prosecuted. That way Japan might have made a cleaner break with its past. It seems ironic that Tojo, by being enshrined at Yasukuni, became a
Shinto god, while Emperor Hirohito, as the price of US exoneration, gave up his divine status to become a mortal monarch.

‘The emperor had wished for peace and had wanted to avoid war,’ she replies, echoing the testimony her grandfather took to the grave.

All of Tojo’s relics are now safely back in their case. But, through her, his voice still ripples through the air.

31 JANUARY 2004

Don’t feel guilty about coveting your neighbour’s wife, having plastic surgery or raising your IQ with gene therapy, says James Watson, the man who discovered DNA. After all, we are only human

By Christopher Swann

Don’t feel guilty about coveting your neighbour’s wife, having plastic surgery or raising your IQ with gene therapy, says James Watson, the man who discovered DNA. After all, we are only human. James Watson must rank as one of the world’s least recognizable famous people. Fifty years ago, aged just 24, he guaranteed his immortality when he and fellow scientist Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. The eureka-moment came in 1953 when Watson cracked the code, changed our perception of life, and dealt a deathblow to the idea that living cells were animated by some mysterious force. Today it is hard to think of a field of human study that has not been either revolutionized or coloured by his revelation.