The China Lover (2 page)

I read the book over and over until the cheap paper wore so thin that it began to fall apart. Alone, in the yard of our house, I wielded my bamboo sword in imaginary battles against wicked rulers, striking poses I knew from the pictures, putting myself in the roles of Nine-Dragon
Shishin or Welcome Rain, the dusky outlaw with his phoenix eyes. We Japanese prize loyalty and honor, but we copied these virtues from the ancient Chinese. Reading
All Men Are Brothers
made me wonder, even as a child, about the fate of that great nation. How could it have allowed its people to fall so low? I knew better than to ask my father, who had nothing but contempt for “the Chinks.” So I posed the question to Mr. Yamazaki, who tilted his head and sucked in his breath. “I don’t know about such difficult matters,” he said, and told me to study hard, so that one day I would know the answers to all my questions. But even though he was unable to enlighten me on the sad fate of China, he did make room for me in the front row, right under the screen perched on his bicycle, in spite of the fact that I was never able to buy any candy.

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I
FIRST SAW
Yamaguchi Yoshiko perform in the great city of Mukden in October 1933. Mukden, which we called Hoten, was the busiest, most cosmopolitan city in Manchuria, more modern even than Tokyo in its best days, before our capital city was turned into a smoldering ruin by the American B-29s.

It was her eyes that left the deepest impression. They were unusually large for an Oriental woman. She didn’t look typically Japanese, nor typically Chinese. There was something of the Silk Road in her, of the caravans and spice markets of Samarkand. No one would have guessed that she was just an ordinary Japanese girl born in Manchuria.

Before we Japanese arrived, Manchuria was a wild and terrifying place, located perilously in the border areas of Russia and China, which didn’t belong to anyone. Once the seat of the great Qing Dynasty emperors, Manchuria fell on hard times after the emperors had moved south to Peking. Warlords did as they liked, looting this vast region of its treasures, while pitting their bandit armies against one another, causing terrible misery to the impoverished people who were unfortunate enough to get in their way. Women were taken as slaves, and men were killed or forced to join the bandits, who swept through the villages like a swarm of locusts. The poor, long-suffering people of Manchuria ate nothing but bitterness for hundreds of years. Those few brave souls who tried to resist would end up hanging upside down
from the trees, their intestines spilling out like broken wires, as terrible examples to others who might have similar ideas. Order was eventually restored, however, and not a minute too soon, when the great state of Manchukuo was founded under our tutelage.

Manchukuo was a truly Asian empire, ruled by the last scion of the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Pu Yi. But it was also a cosmopolitan empire, where all races mixed and were treated equally. Each of the five main races, Japanese, Manchu, Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian, had its own color on the national flag: mustard yellow with stripes of red, white, black, and blue. Then there were Russians, in Harbin, Dairen, and Mukden, and Jews, as well as other foreigners from all corners of the world. Arriving at the port of Dairen, at the southern tip of Manchuria, to me felt like arriving in the great wide world. Even Tokyo felt narrow and provincial in comparison. Cosmopolitanism was in the very air. Apart from coal dust and cooking oil, you could pick up the pungent melange of pickled Korean cabbages, steaming Russian pierogis, barbecued Manchu mutton, Japanese miso soup, and fried Peking dumplings.

And the women! The Mukden women were the most beautiful north of Shanghai: the Chinese girls, lithe and nimble as eels in their tight
qi pao
dresses; the kimonoed Japanese beauties, perched like finely plumed birds in their rickshaws bound for the teahouses behind the Yokohama Specie Bank; the perfumed Russian and European ladies taking tea at Smirnoff’s in feathered hats and furs. Verily, Mukden was paradise for a young wolf on the loose. Since I was a fit young man, always well turned out, I had no reason to complain of a lack of female attention.

Every autumn since the early 1920s, Madame Ignatieva, who had once sung
Madama Butterfly
in St. Petersburg for the Czar and Czarina, would perform in the ballroom of the Yamato Hotel, a grand but rather forbidding establishment, whose turrets and castellated walls
had the air more of a fortress than a hotel. Madame Ignatieva and her husband, a White Russian nobleman, had fled from the Communists in 1917 and lived in Mukden ever since. The count, always impeccably dressed in his old army uniform complete with the Cross of St. George bestowed on him personally by the Czar, ran a boardinghouse near the railway station.

The highlight of Madame Ignatieva’s artistry was the “Habanera” from
Carmen
. She also sang arias from
Tosca
and
Madama Butterfly
, but
Carmen
was considered by music lovers to be her finest piece. The hall was packed. The crystal chandeliers cast a sparkling light on the gilded chairs and the medals pinned to long rows of uniformed chests. Everyone of any consequence in Mukden was there, and some people had come down especially from Shinkyo, the capital city of Manchukuo: General Itagaki of the Kanto Army, our garrison force in China, sat in front, with Hashimoto Toranosuke, head Shinto priest of Manchukuo, and Captain Amakasu Masahiko, president of the Japan-Manchukuo Friendship Association. I spotted General Li, chairman of the Shenyang Bank, looking martial in his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache; and Mr. Abraham Kaufman, head of the Jewish community, sitting in the back row, trying to stay out of the way of Konstantin Rodzaevsky, an ill-mannered ruffian who was always pestering us to “clean out” the Jews.

And there, bathed in the spotlight, was the splendid figure of Madame Ignatieva herself, dressed in a long black gown, with a shawl of black lace trailing along the floor. She smiled as she strode to the center of the stage, a red rose in her right hand, her chin held high, acknowledging the applause with curt little nods to all sides, like a haughty pigeon. “Strode” is actually not the right word; she undulated, voluptuously, in the way large Western women do. And right behind her was her star pupil, a sweet young Japanese girl in a long-sleeved purple kimono with a pattern of white cranes. She was like a delicate flower, just before its moment of bloom, radiating a childlike
innocence as well as a kind of exotic elegance not normally seen in Japanese girls. Perhaps she was a little nervous, for just as Madame Ignatieva was about to take her place at center stage, the girl stepped on the tip of the long black shawl, stopping her teacher in her tracks. For an instant the smile vanished from Madame Ignatieva’s face, but she immediately recovered and opened her throat for the “Habanera.” The girl’s dark eyes widened as if to plead for our forgiveness and she blushed most prettily.

It was, as I said, those wide eyes that left an indelible impression on me. Though not beautiful in any conventional sense, and rather too large for her small face, almost fishlike even, they nonetheless expressed a delightful vulnerability. There was no more trace of nervousness when she launched into her first song, following the per formance of Madame Ignatieva. I remember “Moonlight at the Ruined Castle,” a Japanese song which made us all weep; then Beethoven’s “Ich Liebe Dich,” then a folk song in Chinese, then a Russian song whose title I can’t remember, and finally a charming rendering of Schubert’s “Serenade.” It was quite clear, even at her tender age, that Yoshiko was not like the provincial warblers who can make concerts in Japan such a torment. Her command of languages and grasp of different national styles was extraordinary. Only the cosmopolitan soil of Manchukuo could have yielded such a treasure. I know it is easy to say in hindsight, but I knew then that Yoshiko, at the tender age of thirteen, was something very special indeed.

Yoshiko was born in 1920. Her father was the kind of adventurer we called
tairiku ronin
, or continental drifter, a Sinophile who roamed across the Manchurian plains in search of fortune. This, alas, remained elusive. For the most part, he made a precarious living teaching the Chinese language to Japanese employees of the South Manchurian Railway Company. Precarious, that is, not because he was especially poorly paid, but because he had a weakness for gambling. One of his
pupils, at one point, was me. Before she was adopted by a Chinese general, Yoshiko lived the typical life of a Japanese child on the continent, mixing freely with children of other races, even as she received the strict education of a proper young Japanese.

The year of Yoshiko’s birth was just a decade before the birth of Manchukuo. Or perhaps one should say just eleven years before the conception of Manchukuo. For this happened with a big bang, on September 13, 1931, when a bomb exploded on the railway tracks just outside Mukden. Quite who the culprits were was not made clear at the time. Let us assume it was from a Sino-Japanese one-night stand that Manchukuo was eventually born. Our Kanto Army quickly secured all the towns along the South Manchurian Railway and the territory was effectively ours—except at night, when local bandits still made a safe passage along the railroad impossible. Less than a year later, the former Manchu kingdom, which had gone rotten like an abandoned old mansion and become a refuge for the worst ruffians in China, became a modern state.

But I’m a romantic, so I prefer an alternative date for the birth of Manchukuo. On the dawn of March 1, 1934, Pu Yi, the last scion of the Manchu Dynasty, dressed in the yellow silk robes of his imperial ancestors, prayed to the sun in the garden behind his palace in Shinkyo, and was officially reborn as the Emperor of Manchukuo. The moment he emerged from his audience with the sun, the new state had become an empire. I was obviously not allowed to attend this ceremony, which had to be carried out by him alone. But I shall never forget the sight of Emperor Pu Yi later that day, in his magnificent double-breasted uniform, with gold epaulettes streaming down his narrow but hallowed shoulders and a gold helmet sprouting red-tinted ostrich feathers. The band played the Manchukuo anthem, as the Emperor goose-stepped along a red carpet to his throne, escorted by Prince Chichibu, three officers of the Kanto Army, and ten Manchurian pageboys
from a local orphanage. His trousers were too long, his bespectacled head almost disappeared into his feathered helmet, and his goose steps made him look a bit like a puppet on strings. Frankly, the ceremony was not entirely devoid of comedy. And yet there was an unmistakable sense of grandeur about the occasion. People need spectacles to nurture their dreams, give them something to believe in, foster a sense of belonging. The Chinese and Manchu people, demoralized by more than a hundred years of anarchy and Western domination, needed it more than most. And—although people tend to forget this now—we Japanese gave it to them; we gave them something larger than themselves, a great and noble goal to live and die for.

It was altogether a good time to be alive, for those of us who had big dreams for Asia and Manchukuo. It was certainly the best of times for me personally. After years of drifting from job to job—a private teacher in Dairen, a researcher at the Manchurian Railway Company, during which time I studied the Chinese language, and an independent consultant on native affairs to the Military Police in Mukden— I had finally landed the perfect job. Quite frankly, in Japan I had been a failure. I failed as a student of economics in Tokyo, because I barely ever saw the sunlight. My life was spent in the cinemas of Ueno and Asakusa. This is where all my money went. The walls of my tiny room were covered with pictures of my favorite stars, which I stole from the local picture palace at night. I would love to have worked in the movies, even as a humble assistant director. But in Japan you needed connections, and I had none. For who was I? An obscure dreamer from a village in Aomori prefecture.

In Mukden, however, under the auspices of the Kanto Army, I, Sato Daisuke, was able to open my own office: the Sato Special Services Bureau for New Asian Culture. The services I offered were somewhat diverse, and subject to a certain degree of discretion. Let us say my
business was information, finding out things, some of them of a delicate political nature. This took a certain theatrical talent. To blend into the local scene, I had to learn how to speak and behave like a local. Luckily I am blessed with an excellent ear. Friends sometimes joked that I was a human parrot. When I’m with a stammerer, I stammer; with someone with a thick Kansai accent, I speak like an Osaka merchant. That is why I picked up Chinese with relative ease, astonishing other Japanese. To my compatriots I remained plain Sato Daisuke, sometimes dressed in Western suits, sometimes in Japanese kimonos, sometimes in a Kanto Army uniform. With the Manchus and Chinese, I was Wang Tai, and I chose the best Chinese clothes, made of the finest silk by the most reputable tailor in Shanghai. Politics was part of my job, but culture was my real domain; and by far the most pleasant task, certainly for me the most important, was to find local talent for Manchukuo broadcasting and motion picture companies. This is how my own modest gifts found their perfect application.