The China Lover (30 page)

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T
HE RAINY SEASON
of 1959 seemed never to end. Everything in my apartment, from the tatami floor to the clothes in my closet, had the rank smell of old mushrooms. My shoes in the hall had turned a gangrenous green. The covers of my precious books were bent out of shape, as though they had passed through the hands of a circus strong-man. Yet I had little desire to venture out into the gray drizzle, or the sheeting showers, or the never-ending
drip-drip
of warm spring rain. No wonder the Japanese have so many words for rain. I wish they had had as many words for principle, or spontaneity. I was bored with my job as a movie reviewer, tired of hearing my own voice, week after week, pronouncing verdicts on the work of others. I was trying to write a novel set in the occupation years, but realized with a steadily sinking heart that it was going nowhere. The words remained abstractions, without the smell of life. Opinions kept intruding. Perhaps I had written too many reviews. Frankly, I was getting bored with Japan.

Precisely the things that had delighted me when I first arrived, the strangeness, the childlike innocence, the courtesy, the attachment to form and ceremony, all these things had begun to grate on my nerve ends like a file. Now, instead of exoticism and formality I saw insularity, conformism, and narrow-mindedness. The obsessive politeness was really a form of social hemophilia, the terror of pricking a person’s self-esteem lest he or she bleed to death.

These moods can pass, I know, and the odd, unexpected encounter with a beautiful young man with a gap-toothed smile and sturdy thighs would lift my spirits, but never for very long. I should have rejoiced at the revival of Tokyo from a charred wasteland to a prosperous city. It was good to see the disappearance from the streets of young children fighting over cigarette butts and eating out of garbage cans. It was a blessing that millions of ordinary Japanese were beginning to lead civilized lives once again. Every new neon sign and concrete building was surely a sign of progress. And yet I couldn’t help feeling that the hope of something more inspiring than material comfort had been dashed. Thinking of the indomitable spirit of those defeated people gathered in the cinemas in 1946, their openness to new ideas, their honest stoicism, I felt a sense of loss, of promise unfulfilled and hope abandoned. Something great could have come from the catastrophe. What the Japanese acquired instead was the worst of the American way of life, imported wholesale with much greed and no understanding. We gave them democracy, and what did they do with it? They elected a prime minister who had been arrested for war crimes just a few years before.

I complain about the Japanese. But my own country was largely to blame. We had taught them to mimic us in every way, and they were our all too willing pupils. We instilled the idea of our superiority, and they believed us, poor lambs. We released Kishi Nobusuke, slave driver of Manchuria and wartime minister in General Tojo’s cabinet, from prison, just because he was an anti-Communist. Did anyone protest? Not a bit of it. The Japanese were willing to forget the past, and be corrupted by the promise of riches. More than willing. Like a submissive pan-pan girl, Japan spread her legs for us to impregnate her with the seed of our own shallow mediocrity. She got her chewing gum, her Hershey bars, her perfume, and her silk stockings, but she lost her soul. And now she hated us for it.

The loathing of the seduced for the seducer, of the hooker for the john; I saw it in the movies: the endless succession of sour-tempered stories set around U.S. military bases, or the films about Hiroshima, one of them featuring a group of gloating American tourists buying souvenir bones of their incinerated victims.

I am often tempted to see the election of Kishi, that weak-chinned, buck-toothed, scheming bureaucrat, as the beginning of everything that went wrong with Japan, but I should have seen the signs of rot much earlier, back in those days when I was blinded by the innocence of my ideals. Perhaps the transformation of Japan was doomed from the beginning, doomed by arrogance and false expectations. How could Americans ever have believed that they could take an ancient culture and remake it in our own image by waving General MacArthur’s magic wand? Only a people lacking any sense of history or tragedy could fall into such hubris. Perhaps Tony Lucca was right: our presence in Japan hadn’t amounted to a can of beans. The occupation was no more than a ripple in the ocean of Japanese history.

And yet, to my surprise, my old friend Nobuo Hotta, whose face was lined with all the sorrows of his country’s twentieth-century history, was strangely optimistic in those Red-baiting years of Kishi’s rise. Normally the most taciturn of men, he was actually quite animated when we met one night for drinks at the Paloma, his favorite little bar in Shinjuku, near the Hanazono Shrine. It was one of those magical Shinjuku nights. The air was hazy, like fine gauze, after the rains, and neon lights shimmered in the alleyways lined with bars. A strolling musician was strumming his guitar behind the public toilet. It was early still, and only one or two other people were sitting at the bar, chatting to Noriko, the Mama-san and keeper of many secrets.

“Kishi?” said Hotta. “I knew Kishi back in Manchuria. He was a member of the Ri Koran Fan Club, you know. A perfectly nice man, with beautiful manners, always smiling, and he had the softest of
hands, almost like a woman’s. You’d never have guessed that he was responsible for thousands of Chinese slaves being worked to death in the steel mills and coal mines of Manchukuo. But don’t you worry. He’s overplayed his hand this time. The Japanese people won’t be deceived again. You’ll see, the people will rise against him. You Americans may think you can get away with forcing a security treaty down our throats. You think we will allow you to keep all your bombers on our soil, and aircraft carriers in our ports. Well, think again. Kishi doesn’t seem to mind signing away our birthright for a pot of gold. He doesn’t care if Japan becomes one huge military base for Yankee imperialism. But the Japanese people won’t take it. Not this time. If Kishi signs this treaty, there will be a revolution. This is the most important moment in our history, the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life. We can be rebels too, you know. Just you watch, the revolution is finally going to come.”

I didn’t like the way he said “you Americans,” and told him so. I was against the security treaty, too. I hated the arrogance of the Americans. First we preach peace and democracy and make the Japanese into a nation of pacifists, and now we tell them it was all a mistake, and we must be allies in another war, against the Communists. I was as outraged as Hotta. He immediately apologized. “I’m sorry, Sidney. I know you’re really one of us.” We drank another whiskey to that, and another, and another, until we walked into the velvety light of a Shinjuku dawn, arm-in-arm, like old comrades, singing the
Internationale
in Japanese.

To dispel my gloom, I did what I always do when I’m depressed: I spent more and more time at the movies. I had discovered the charm of Japanese gangster pictures. Rather than face another sleepless night in my apartment, I would sit through the all-night shows, with the movie addicts and the drunken bums watching my yakuza heroes taking on the modern world. One night it was Kensuke Fujii in his
Sword
of Justice
series. Fujii was handsome in a dark, brooding way (much later I found out that he was a gentleman of my persuasion with a liking for big American boys who would rough him up on his holidays in Honolulu; it was a good thing the fans never found out).

The story line was always the same: the bad guys wore suits, like bankers or Chicago mobsters, and killed their enemies with guns. Fujii and his gang were kimonoed traditionalists, whose weapon of choice was the Japanese sword. The bad guys made their money in crooked real estate deals, financial scams, and the rough end of the construction business. The good yakuza deplored these practices. In the inevitable last scene, Fujii, provoked beyond endurance by the bad guys, set forth with his sword on the always suicidal mission to restore justice to this world by taking on the baddies alone. This was the moment when the fans, who had been slumbering in the stale air of cigarette smoke and clogged toilets, stirred in their seats and shouted their encouragements at the screen: “Go and get them, Ken-san!” or, “What a guy!” or, “Die for Japan!” But more and more, in the spring of 1960, I heard variations on these themes, which had little to do with Fujii’s yakuza stories, except perhaps in spirit: “Scrap the Treaty!” “Down with U.S. Imperialism!” “Go and get Kishi!”

Perhaps wise old Hotta was right after all. Perhaps there really would be a revolution this time, staged from below by the Japanese people themselves. I welcomed it. God, how I welcomed it. In my excitement during those magical few weeks in May, I jotted the following notes in my diary.

May Day:
Workers and students demonstrated in a carnival spirit, carrying huge effigies of Kishi, an ogre with dragon eyes and monstrous fangs.

May 19:
Socialist members of the Diet barricade the entrance to the plenary session to stop Kishi and his fellow conservatives
from voting for the new Security Treaty. Kishi orders the police to clear out his opponents with force. The speaker of the house is pushed toward the rostrum. The treaty is passed without the Socialists.

June 10:
Eisenhower’s press secretary James C. Hagerty and U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II are mobbed in their car on the route from Haneda Airport. They have to be evacuated by military helicopter.

June 15:
Students bearing long wooden poles, like medieval lancers, tried to break through the South Gate of the Diet Building, while others, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and ordinary citizens, streamed toward the Parliament from all directions. Some moved in a festival spirit, carrying banners and grotesque puppets of Kishi and Ike, chanting: “
Washoi! Washoi!
Scrap the treaty! Kishi out! Kishi out! Down with the foreign invasion!” Others were more like an army, marching in strict order of hierarchy, senior students before sophomores, sophomores before freshmen, with grim-faced officers of the Zengakuren student federation shouting slogans through their megaphones. Others still, linking arms, formed part of a great impenetrable snake dance, coiling through the avenues leading to the Diet, where the riot police were waiting for them, helmeted, like samurai warriors, with batons and shields.

It was more exhilarating than any Shinto festival I had ever seen, more thrilling even than the naked festivals in the rural northeast. Here was a people on the move, their excitement kept from boiling over by a cultural talent for ceremony. Several hundred thousand delirious young people felt their power as they approached the rulers of their nation. This could so easily have erupted in massive violence. But
on the cusp of total mayhem, the surging crowds were held back by a sense of discipline that made their show of power all the more awe-inspiring.

I was dying to join in, to merge with the demonstrators, to lose myself in their collective delirium, my sweat mixed with theirs, my body submerged in the zigging-zagging dance of rebellion. Here, at this moment, in this crowd, I felt fully alive. There was no way I could have joined the snake dancers; they were as tightly packed as a football scrum. If you got in their way, you would be swept away as if by a tidal wave. I tried to join the marchers, but where could I fit in? With the sophomores, or the seniors? With the Tokyo University students, or those from Waseda, each with their own banners? On and on they went, marching right past me, shouting: “Foreign invaders, go home!” Individual faces, contorted not in rage but in ecstasy, got lost in a whirl of bodies and faces, but my eyes met, just for an instant, with those of a handsome university student, just as he was denouncing my country. He suddenly looked apologetic, even embarrassed, as he swept by me, and shouted over his shoulder: “I am sorry!”

I should have gone after him. I desperately wanted to tell him to stop feeling sorry. His cause was just. I was on his side. But he had already been swept along by the tide, to make way for the next churning wave of chanting, dancing, marching, running crowds. I tried to keep pace, by following the sea of people to the Diet, cheering them on all the while. I was excited by the force of this rebellion, which contained a real hope of change, of reviving that sense of limitless possibility that I felt when I first arrived in Japan. But I also felt a sense of impotence and frustration, like a lone spectator at a massive orgy.