The China Lover (17 page)

   4   

M
Y FIRST DAYS
in Japan were not promising. I was put up with other Americans in a gloomy office building that had once been the headquarters of a soy sauce company and now bore the grand name of Continental Hotel. Most of the inmates of this grim institution worked in one way or another for the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, also known as SCAP, or “The Old Man,” or “Susan,” in the less reverential coinage of my friend Carl. Carl was a fellow movie maven, whose knowledge of motion pictures was even greater than mine (he grew up in New York). “Susan” was a rather abstruse reference to a Joan Crawford movie, entitled
Susan and God
. Carl maintained that General MacArthur bore an uncanny resemblance to Joan Crawford in the title role of that picture. I can’t say I saw the likeness myself, but I was amused by the name, so it stuck, at least between us.

I didn’t yet have the benefit of Carl’s congenial company in those early days, however, so I felt lonesome in my billet, living on a steady diet of Spam and powdered potatoes. But since most Japanese would have given their left eyes to share this life of splendor, I knew I shouldn’t complain. When I wasn’t tap-tapping away in the typing pool of the Allied Removals and Transportation Division, I spent most of my time wandering around in the charred ruins of the Ginza. I’ve always regarded shyness as a vulgar vice. So I’d strike up conversations
in my few words of Japanese with young men on construction sites, and sometimes even traffic cops, if they looked approachable, or market traders. I spent endless time trawling through the black markets, where everything was sold from cigarettes to old bloodstained hospital blankets. Hawkers shouted themselves hoarse: “Fist-class American blankets! You’ll sleep like babies!” “Delicious pork meat! Just like mother used to make it!” Well, maybe it was pork. Old ladies stirred with long wooden chopsticks in great bowls of pig’s offal. Fights broke out over the price of a turnip or a pair of old socks. Young toughs in Hawaiian shirts and army boots kept a semblance of order in this pandemonium and took most of what they needed for free. I would love to have talked to them, but my fumbling attempts to do so did not, on the whole, meet with much encouragement. I once tried to talk to a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin to promote a picture featuring Deanna Durbin. He was friendly enough, in his toothless way, but our conversation ran dry rather quickly.

When I was tired of wandering, I would rest at various landmarks that stuck out of the ruins like rocks in a desert. At the Hattori Building, now the Wako department store, then the PX, I observed the sad transactions between large Americans in crisp uniforms, dispensing bars of soap or crackers or indeed anything remotely edible to the young men in Hawaiian shirts, who would no doubt make a handsome profit on these vital goods at the black markets. A crippled young woman sat in her usual place outside the PX with a little wooden box that served as a platform for American boots, which she polished to a perfect sheen, while repeating one of the few English phrases she had managed to pick up: “Japanese, no fucking good.”

Much of what I saw on my solitary walks made me feel embarrassed to be an American: the speeding jeeps forcing Japanese to jump out of the way; the laughing GIs throwing sticks of chewing gum at
emaciated street kids, shoeless and filthy, who followed every American around with pleas for more, “gimme more, gimme more”; the “pan-pan girls”
clip-clopping
in their wooden heels behind Yurakucho Station, puckering their crimson lips, throwing kisses at any foreigner with a few bucks to spare, or a packet of crackers, or a pair of stockings. Periodically, our MPs would round them all up, together with anyone else, female and Japanese, who happened to stray into their net, and transport them in trucks to an army clinic for compulsory VD checks. Perhaps the hardest thing to bear was the glum silence with which other Japanese observed these signs of their country’s degradation. I would swiftly move on, trying not to look any Japanese in the eyes. And yet, as I got used to these daily spectacles of collective humiliation, embarrassment gradually made way for something else. I grew to admire these stoic people who, no matter how impoverished, always retained their dignity. Nobody begged for food, or asked for our pity. They may no longer have had a decent roof over their heads, or enough money to feed their families, or proper clothes to wear, but respectability was still insisted upon. Men emerged from jerry-built hovels, in wooden sandals and frayed army surplus pants, but always with a clean white shirt and a tie. Even the homeless, bombed out of their homes, who had found a temporary shelter in the squalid subway stations, smiled at us, as though we were valued guests in their country instead of members of a conquering army.

I was longing to get closer. I wanted to see more Japanese movies, and visit the Kabuki, but such entertainments were still off-limits for Allied personnel. Instead, we could see Hollywood pictures at the old Takarazuka Theater, or the Ernie Pyle, as we then knew it. On Saturday nights there would sometimes be special theater performances on at the Ernie Pyle, and very peculiar some of them were, too. I recall with particular affection a
Swan Lake
with Japanese dancers in blond
wigs baring their gums in show dancers’ smiles as they gamely produced a version of the ballet that left me feeling rather exhausted.

The Japanese were not allowed inside the Ernie Pyle, but an exception was sometimes made for the people working for us. So I decided to take Nobu, the roomboy at the Continental Hotel, to attend a performance of
The Mikado
. Nobu was a pale youth, with longish black hair and the wiry body of a flyweight boxer. He cleaned our rooms and polished our shoes, always making sure they were deposited outside our doors first thing in the morning, but he was in fact a remarkable young man who had been studying French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, before joining a squadron of kamikaze pilots in the summer of 1945. Two of his best friends had already died in suicide attacks off Okinawa, so he felt he had no choice but to follow their example. His life was saved only by the Japanese surrender, a point we rarely discussed, for it made him feel awkward. Nobu much preferred to talk about our shared passion for Marcel Proust, whom he read in French.

I had only seen
The Mikado
once before, in the movie version with Dennis Day as Nanki Poo. This was at the Luxor in Bowling Green, of course, which seemed awfully remote from the world of Gilbert and Sullivan. But nothing, I mean
nothing
in my wildest dreams, had prepared me for the lavishness of
The Mikado
at the Ernie Pyle. The Mikado himself, a tall and very stout British major, appeared against a backdrop of bright pink cherry blossoms dangling over a golden bridge, and was decked out in long trailing pantaloons made up of gold and blue panels. Pooh-Bah, Ko-Ko, and Pish-Tush, played by British and Canadian officers, were dressed in kimonos rented from the imperial court. Clearly designed for shorter men, the kimonos only reached down to their sturdy calves, revealing a rather long expanse of bright pink tights. The choruses were made up of men and women from the Japanese Bach Choir, who had never sung Gilbert and Sullivan
in their lives before, and brought to
The Mikado
the solemnity of a Christian Passion, which was interesting, though perhaps not entirely appropriate. The leading players could barely sing at all, except for Nanki-Poo, who shrieked in an arresting falsetto, and the acting certainly failed to match the standards of their costumes. But the audience was ready to applaud anything from the moment the Japanese nobles dropped their outlandish fans and launched into “If You Want to Know Who We Are”:

We are gentlemen of Japan:

On many a vase and jar—

On many a screen and fan,

We figure in lively paint:

Our attitude’s queer and quaint—

You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, Oh!

I soon sensed that poor Nobu was not sharing in the general merriment. His face was frozen in stony disdain, which turned to a kind of horrified bewilderment when the Lord High Executioner, a rather fetching Canadian lieutenant, sang about “our great Mikado, virtuous man,” decreeing that “all who flirted, leered or winked should forthwith be beheaded, beheaded, beheaded . . .”

We returned to the hotel in a painful silence. I was half annoyed with Nobu and half embarrassed for having asked him to come along. It clearly had been a social error. Back at the hotel, he thanked me curtly for a wonderful evening, and made to go straight to his quarters. I couldn’t let him go like that, so I asked him what was wrong (as though I didn’t know). He turned round and said: “You think we are just joke?” I didn’t know what to say. My protestations that
The Mikado
was not meant to have anything to do with the real Japan sounded
weak, and to him, no doubt, insincere. So I said: “We must seem very strange to you.” This made him even more furious.

For a long time, relations with Nobu remained in deep freeze. He was perfectly polite, of course, and went about his daily round of polishing and cleaning, but there were no more late-night conversations about Baron Charlus and the Princesse de Guermantes. I slipped him extra rations of Ritz and Velveeta to take back to his family, which he only accepted because family obligation (and hunger) took precedence over pride. But all my attempts to thaw the ice invariably met with a sullen silence. Until one day, inexplicably, I found a note slipped under my door. It was a poem, translated into Nobu’s English. “For Sidney-san,” it read:

If just a moment, my dear friend,

I could have watched together with you

The blossoms of the wild cherries

On the mountain with the hills,

I would not be so lonely like this.

It was signed “Gentleman of Japan.” Only much later did I realize it was a famous poem from
The Manyoshu
.

   5   

G
ENERAL WILLOUGHBY’S OFFICE
was unusually sumptuous for an Army officer’s. Not only was the floor covered in a thick Persian carpet, but there was a glass cabinet filled with rather delicate Meissen figurines of dancing ladies and shepherdesses. A small bronze bust of the German Kaiser stood on a brightly polished mahogany desk. I thought this was a bit odd, but put it down to the typical eccentricity of a professional military man.

Willoughby spoke softly, with the trace of a foreign accent, like a European aristocrat in a Hollywood picture. He bore a certain resemblance to Ronald Colman. After enquiring after his friend, Mr. Capra, the General wished to know whether I was comfortable in Tokyo. I told him about my arrangements. “Ah, the Continental Hotel,” he said. “A trifle basic, I hear, but perfectly adequate, what? And what about your job? Satisfactory?” I told him the truth. Typing and stenography were all right for the time being, but I should very much like to be involved in something a bit more stimulating. “Oh, and what might that be, if I may be so bold?” I said I would like to be in cultural affairs. Perhaps it was the Meissen figurines, but I thought this might fall on sympathetic ears. A slight curl of his reddish lips suggested otherwise.

“Stay away from cultural affairs, Mr. Vanoven. All this talk of giving the Japanese democracy, Mr. Vanoven. Quatsch, I say, quatsch!
They have their own culture, an ancient culture. What is needed—and not only here, I might add—is discipline and order. We should be firm with them, and fair, firm and fair!” Here his hand came down firmly on his desktop, as though giving the wooden surface a thorough thrashing. “But they have their own ways, you know. The Oriental mind is not suited to individualism, and all that sort of nonsense. Unfortunately, we have too many fellows in our midst who are bent on stirring up trouble. These clever Jews from New York, they think they can come here and tell us what to do. Well, I’m telling you, young man, the General will have nothing of it, nothing of it. He is sometimes too kind. He treats the Orientals like his children. But this revolutionary stuff must be crushed at the bud, crushed at the bud! So stay away from culture, Vanoven. That’s strictly for Jews and Communists. The Orientals have their own culture, a warrior culture. Perhaps we should do better to learn from them, instead of importing this Jewish rubbish from America.”

I did what I always do when the topic of Jews comes up. I looked blank and tried to change the subject. My father’s family was Jewish, though all that was left of his Jewishness was his invariable grumpiness on Christmas Day. It meant nothing to me, and I had no intention of bringing my father’s background up in front of Willoughby. I told him I was certainly no Communist and would very much like to learn something from Japan. And I would be happiest to do something in culture and education, even if it meant starting at the bottom.

The curled lip was now a picture of utter disgust, as though the General had discovered a cockroach scuttling across his polished desktop. I didn’t say so, but couldn’t help wondering how this philistine could possibly have been a friend of Mr. Capra. “Well,” he said, after rolling his eyes as if bracing himself for a disagreeable task. “If Frank sent you, you can’t be all rotten. I promise nothing, you understand, nothing.”

Two weeks later, I was in the Civil Censorship Detachment. The official aim of SCAP’s new order in Japan was to see to it that the Japanese learned all about the benefits of democracy and free speech, but within certain limits. Our job was to make sure that those limits were observed. But since we didn’t like to be called censors, our department was rarely called by its official name. We were simply part of Civil Information. I don’t wish to leave the impression that we were cynical. General Willoughby was rather exceptional in his open disdain for the values we tried to impart. We were young in those days, and full of ideals. To lift this defeated nation from its feudal past seemed to us the noblest undertaking in the history of man. Instead of subjugating a conquered people, we would set them free. That is why we gave Japanese women the right to vote in elections, and why we let political prisoners, mostly Communists, out of jail, and encouraged the Japanese to organize trade unions, and made sure that school textbooks promoted democracy instead of militarism. It came as a great relief to the Japanese that we weren’t going around raping their wives and daughters, and we were just as relieved that they weren’t slashing us at every turn with their samurai swords. So, if we were keen to be their teachers, they were at least equally keen to be our students.