The China Lover (5 page)

Until one day in the late fall of 1937. We were attending a function together at the mansion of Baron Mitaka, an amiable old nobleman, who represented our government as consul general in Tientsin. We didn’t actually arrive together, since we had to be discreet. Emperor Pu Yi was one of the guests, along with the ambassadors of all the major Western powers. Eastern Jewel and I kept apart for the most part, but she happened to be standing next to me when the baron was handed a scroll by one of his staff members, a nervous young man with thin red hands. The baron’s many decorations twinkled like stars in a bright winter night. He held the scroll in his outstretched arms, in the old-fashioned manner, and read his speech about our peaceful intentions in Asia. “His Imperial Highness, the Japanese Emperor,” he began, standing to attention as the words rolled off his tongue, “whose benevolent intentions have never been in doubt, desires nothing less than eternal peace and prosperity for all under his celestial roof . . .”

As the baron spoke in his pompous English accent acquired during a stint in London, I tried to read the expressions on the faces of our
guests. Emperor Pu Yi blinked his eyes without betraying any emotion. The foreign diplomats tried to look superior, as was their habit in the company of Asians, but I couldn’t read anything more in their inscrutable European faces. Our Chinese friends, including Emperor Pu Yi’s court chamberlain, and the governor of the Tientsin Bank, nodded as the baron spoke of “the common culture of our yellow races” and “our ancient spiritual traditions,” “China, our great teacher,” “samurai spirit” . . . “Sun Goddess” . . . “Peace . . .” But when the baron was still speaking forty-five minutes after he began, even the attention of our closest friends showed signs of flagging. “The zest for hard work and the natural sense of mutual cooperation nurtured by our rice-growing civilization,” went the baron, and I could see the British ambassador whispering in the ear of his French colleague, laughing in his supercilious European way, laughing at us, no doubt, for being “uncivilized,” I daresay. The baron, however, showed no sign of coming to a close. I tried to see how much more there was on his scroll. “Five thousand years of civilization . . . reinvigorated by the discipline and youthful energy of modern Japan . . . Asia will rise . . .”

As I listened to the words, I felt a hand lightly brush mine. Eastern Jewel looked into my eyes with a tenderness that made my heart leap. “You are one of us,” she whispered. I was so moved that I had to restrain myself from taking her hand into mine and kissing it. “Of course I am,” I whispered back. “We are one, you and I.”

“I always knew you were different from them,” she said softly.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m yours, only yours.”

“A glorious future for a New Asia . . .” went the baron.

“Come to our side,” whispered Eastern Jewel into my ear.

“I already am,” I replied. “I’ll always be with you.”

She nodded briefly and turned away.

“A toast to His Imperial Highness . . .”

   5   

I
N 1938, NOT
long after the Fall of Nanking, Eastern Jewel asked me to introduce her to her namesake, the other Yoshiko, who by that time had made quite a name for herself. Most Japanese in China knew Ri Koran’s songs by heart (“Ah, Our Manchuria!,” “Chrysanthemums and Peonies,” and so on) but no one knew that she was then also a student at a Chinese mission school in Tientsin. Her father, as always, had gotten himself into a financial scrape (too much money on the wrong horse at the Mukden Jockey Club), and had been obliged to put his daughter in the care of another of his Chinese friends. Her new surrogate father, Mr. Pan, was a businessman of immense wealth, who had studied in Tokyo, and was friendly to us. He had many concubines and a private army, and was high on the list of pro-Japanese Chinamen whom our enemies would like to dispose of. He called Yoshiko his favorite “daughter,” and had her painted by a celebrated Japanese artist as a typical young Chinese beauty in a silk dress.

Whenever I was in Tientsin, I kept an eye on Yoshiko, as I still called her, to make sure she was all right. I even gave her pocket money from time to time, pretending, for her sake, that it was from her father, who was in no position to provide for her in any way at all.

You could say I was her official mentor, but I looked on her more as my daughter. One day, during her summer holidays, at one of our regular
lunches, she opened her heart to me. She was dressed simply in her light blue Chinese school uniform, looking adorable as usual, her eyes radiating young innocence, as she puckered her plump little mouth to receive a sweet dumpling from my chopsticks. But I could tell from a slight frown that something was troubling her on this occasion. We normally spoke in Japanese, but Yoshiko sometimes switched to Chinese, if the Japanese word did not come to her readily.

“I’m so confused, Uncle Sato,” she said.

“What about, my precious?”

“I keep hearing rumors at school about bad things we Japanese do to the Chinese.”

“What bad things, my sweet?”

“They say we are invading their country and killing many Chinese patriots.”

I tried to reassure her, explaining that rumors were not to be trusted. There were so many rumors, almost all untrue. A few had some basis in fact, to be sure. But how could I make this darling girl understand that painful medicine was sometimes required to cure serious ills? So I told her, in all sincerity, that we were in China to help the Chinese people, that we aimed to liberate Asia. But as I spoke, I realized that these words might have sounded hollow, like the slogans on Manchukuo Radio. She didn’t look entirely convinced. It was hard, she said, for her to know what was true. I felt for her, for it was indeed sometimes hard to tell truth from falsehood in China. Even I, whose business it was to find the truth, sometimes felt as though I were sliding along the icy surface of a lake in the middle of a moonless night.

“I love China,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Japan. But my Chinese mother scolds me for behaving too much like a Japanese. She tells me how to move like a Chinese, striking me when I bow in the Japanese manner. Then, when I go back to Mukden, my mother scolds
me for not behaving like a proper Japanese girl. Please, Uncle Wang, tell me what to do.”

She was both, I said, this time with more conviction. She was a child of Manchukuo. We were living at the birth of a New Asia, I explained. One day, in a better world, without stupid prejudices—a world without war and greed and imperialism, a peaceful world in which all races would be treated as equals—then and only then would people appreciate her for who she was.

However, the poor thing still looked confused. Why did she have to conceal that she was Japanese? How could she explain to her schoolmates that her Chinese stepfather, whom they called a traitor just because he had Japanese friends, was really a kind and decent man? How was she to behave when all the others went off to march in a demonstration against Japan? Her childlike purity of heart moved me profoundly. As I looked into her moist dark eyes, I wanted to do something to comfort her, dry her tears, and put her mind at rest. But how could she possibly understand adult society and its political complexities? She was, really, too good for this world.

So I counseled patience. History cannot be made overnight. Chinese wisdom tells us to take the long view. Future generations would understand our good intentions. We had to work together to overcome cultural misunderstandings. But I realized then that she should not be allowed to stay at her Chinese school for much longer, or indeed with her Chinese family. It was far too dangerous. She could easily end up being consumed by the anti-Japanese flames fanned by agitators.

And, besides, I wasn’t at all sure I liked the idea of the two Yoshikos meeting. My young protégée seemed too innocent of the ways of the world to be exposed quite yet to Eastern Jewel’s particular brand of sophistication. No one was more devoted to Eastern Jewel than I, but she was too complicated. Their meeting might lead to all kinds of misunderstandings.
Yoshiko knew so little, and Eastern Jewel so much. I sensed danger, and so I kept delaying my promised introduction. But I couldn’t watch her day and night. I was her minder, not her bodyguard.

I suppose it was inevitable. They were introduced by Colonel Aizawa, the military attaché, at a party in Eastern Jewel’s restaurant. Apparently, my Jewel, dressed on that particular night in one of her black mandarin robes, looked Yoshiko up and down approvingly, after they had been introduced, and said: “So, you’re Japanese after all. But how utterly charming.” She then took her arm, and said: “From now on, I want you to think of me as your big brother.”

Yoshiko received phone calls almost daily from then on, usually from one of the Chrysanthemums, to meet Eastern Jewel at the restaurant, or at some unsuitable nightclub in the foreign concessions. And the seventeen-year-old girl, no doubt flattered by the attention of this great seductress, became an adoring pupil. She was given several Chinese
qi pao
s by Eastern Jewel, who loved to dress her up as though she were a doll, made for her “brother’s” personal amusement. I was furious, for I still felt responsible for the child.

One night, close and thundery, I found myself in one of my least favorite places, the ballroom of the Astor House Hotel, where foreigners pretended to be in London or Vienna, dancing in their stiff evening clothes and looking down their noses at the few Orientals who were no doubt supposed to feel privileged to be there. Well, I did not. My presence was entirely professional, to do with a small business matter with the German military attaché. And then I saw them, on the dance floor, in the midst of the Britishers and their powdered wives, who looked like shuffling white ghosts, as the lights flickered every time lightning struck in the skies outside. Eastern Jewel in a military uniform, a monkey on her shoulder, and dear little Yoshiko in a mandarin robe were dancing the waltz together. Round and round
they went, staring into one another’s eyes like two young lovers, oblivious to the foreigners, who sniggered quite brazenly.

I made up my mind there and then that this rot would have to be stopped. I would have to get Yoshiko back to Manchukuo, if only to protect her purity, which was, for some reason I barely understood myself, more precious to me than anything.

   6   

S
HINKYO, THE CAPITAL
of Manchukuo, was everything that Tientsin was not. Built from scratch on the foundations of a small Manchurian trading town which the Chinese used to call Changchun, it may have been lacking in pseudo-Western glamour, compared to Tientsin or Shanghai, but that was precisely its virtue. Wherever they go, Westerners impose their own architecture. Just look at the Bund in Shanghai. It’s nothing but a stage set, trying to resemble London or Chicago. Shinkyo was nothing like that. For Shinkyo was actually an anti-colonial city, a counter-Western metropolis, the capital of a multiracial Asian state. And there was nothing quaint about it, either. Planned by the most progressive architects and engineers from Japan, Shinkyo was a marvel of mathematical precision; its straight boulevards laid out like sun rays from Great Unity Square, in the center of town, which had perfect views of the Kanto Army headquarters with its traditional Japanese roof, the Kempeitai building and the head office of the Municipal Police. At one end of Great Unity Avenue was the Shinkyo Yamato Hotel, and at the other South Lake, with the brand-new Manchuria Motion Picture Association Studios on its shore. Shinkyo had the finest new department stores, first-class hospitals, and spacious new homes equipped with flush toilets which made even Japanese from Tokyo marvel at their modern efficiency. Shinkyo was spotless, the cleanest city in the world. Whenever a person was caught
littering or spitting, he would be arrested. This might seem a bit heavy-handed, and I confess that I sometimes missed the greater liveliness of Mukden, but civilization can only come as the result of education, and softhearted educators are seldom effective. I was proud of Shinkyo. We had achieved something unique there, the beginning of a modern Asian Renaissance.

But civilization is fragile, and there were many obstacles to overcome before such a Renaissance could be completed. Topping modern buildings with Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian roofs was not enough. Language, for example, remained a serious hurdle on the road to Asian unity. I spoke Chinese, but none of the Japanese directors, camera operators, art directors, or scriptwriters at Manchuria Motion Pictures did. Since the actors and actresses were all natives who spoke, as yet, very little Japanese, this was proving to be a difficulty. Some things, like the calisthenics at the beginning of each day led by Amakasu himself, in his capacity as studio chief, required no language skills. But Amakasu wanted the native staff to be instructed by Japanese experts in the art of film acting. This was proving to be an uphill task.

Endo Saburo, one of the most seasoned experts ever to work at the Shinkyo studios, had been a famous performer in Japan. Trained as a Kabuki actor, he switched as a young man to a Western-style theater, where he created a sensation in the 1910s with such bold modern innovations as playing Hamlet while riding a bicycle on stage. His most celebrated role in the cinema was that of General Ulysses S. Grant, whom he managed to resemble so perfectly that some people thought he had to be at least half foreign. Tired of playing foreigners in wigs and long wax noses, however, Endo had been persuaded to come to Manchukuo to establish a new, uniquely Asian style of acting.

The problem was that no one had a very clear idea as to what this style should be, except possibly Endo himself. But how was he going to convey it to Manchurian actors who didn’t even speak Japanese? Our
translators were not really up to the task. I was in the studio one day when Endo had assembled the full cast of a new film for a lesson in motion picture acting. He used various modern Japanese film scripts as his teaching material. Since his audience couldn’t understand the words, he acted out, with all the skill of his early Kabuki training, anger, sorrow, love, and so forth, while the translator did his best to explain. Endo acted female roles as well as male ones, which he did to brilliant effect. Alas, however, the translator failed to keep pace, so the translated words no longer matched the actor’s mimicry. Ferocious words of rage came through in translation just as the master was fluttering his eyes in the manner of a love-struck young girl, which made the Manchurians giggle—and me, too, if the truth be told, but I had to try and control myself, since it would not do to let such an illustrious person lose face. Our rude response to his artistry put him into a rage, which, though entirely genuine, was sadly mistaken by his audience as part of his act, while the translator, having just caught up with the previous scene, paraphrased words of sweet love.

And this is why, after a little scheming by my good self, dear little Yoshiko was met on a cold autumn evening at Shinkyo North Railway Station by Amakasu, surrounded by his bodyguards, and a military brass band of the Kanto Army playing the tunes she had made famous on the radio, with the yellow, red, blue, white, and black Manchukuo flag snapping proudly in the evening breeze. Amakasu made a speech on the spot, saying that Asians had proved their mettle in terms of military and economic power. Now it was time, as he put it, to show “Asian artistic power.” An odd choice of words, I thought, even though I entirely agreed with the sentiment.

Yoshiko was perfect from our point of view: a native who would appeal to the natives, and yet she was one of us. Besides, she had already proved her mettle on the wireless. The arrangement, carefully worked out by Amakasu, was that Yoshiko would receive a monthly salary of
250 yen, which was about four times as much as her Manchurian colleagues, but then she was to be the biggest star in Asia. A suite was prepared for her at the Shinkyo Yamato Hotel, on the same floor as Amakasu’s Room 202. Every morning, a chauffeur would pick her up to drive her to the studio, which was only ten minutes away. A Japanese chaperone was employed to take care of all her needs. But all this hinged on one condition, which could not be broken under any circumstances: Her Japanese nationality had to remain a state secret. From now on Yamaguchi Yoshiko was to be referred to only as Ri Koran, or Li Xianglan, Fragrant Orchid of Manchuria.

Persuading Yoshiko to go along with our plans had been a little trickier than anticipated. I had already told her in Tientsin that she would be very well paid. This made no impression. What about her poor father, I persisted, at the risk of being blunt. She would be able to help him pay off his debts. This just made her weep, the tender-hearted child. She had made up her mind to be a journalist, she said, with a firmness that surprised me in one so young. “I want to write the truth, and fight against all the stupid prejudices in this world. If only the Japanese and the Chinese understood each other better, they would no longer be enemies.”

I put it to her that we weren’t enemies. “But we are fighting a war,” she said. “Not a war,” I said. “Some people are trying to stop us from helping China. They don’t want us to succeed in making China free.” She asked me why those people should want us to fail. I tried to explain, but she fell into a sullen silence. Clearly my words weren’t having much effect.

“So was he one of those people?” she suddenly asked, with a flash of childish anger.

“Who was one of those people? What kind of people?”

“One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I heard people shouting outside our house in Mukden. I looked out the window and saw a Chinese man
tied to a tree”—at this point the poor girl started sobbing—“they were beating him with rods. Japanese soldiers were beating him with rods. There was blood all over his body. He was screaming. I hid under my bedclothes and cried myself to sleep. The next morning, I tried not to look out the window, afraid of what I might see. But I looked anyway, and he was gone. I thought I might have dreamed it all, that it was just a nightmare. I wanted to believe that. But when I went out, I noticed dried blood under the tree—” She started crying again, her little shoulders heaving. I patted her. She withdrew.

“That man . . . I knew him. Mr. Cheng. He’d been our caretaker. He was always kind to me. When I asked my father what had happened to him, he said nothing. When I insisted, he said there were things I didn’t understand.”

I didn’t know what to say. Young children should never be allowed to be exposed to such scenes. So I stopped trying to explain politics to her. Instead I tried a different tack. I told her she was right. She did have an important role to play in fostering mutual understanding. That was precisely what the Manchuria Motion Picture Association was trying to do. We wanted to give the Chinese a favorable impression of Japan, and the Japanese a favorable impression of China. Friendship and peace were the whole point of the films we would produce. And she, Ri Koran, was the only person in the entire world who could do it, who could bridge the gap in mutual understanding. She should think of herself not just as an actress but as an ambassadress of peace. She would be famous, I said, not only in Manchukuo but in Japan, and all over China, and indeed in the rest of Asia, for being a peacemaker.

I could see that my words were having some effect. “Really?” she asked, gazing at me with a guilelessness that touched my heart. “Really,” I confirmed. And what is more, I meant it.

It is always easy to be a critic in hindsight. Maybe we were too naive, but one has to think of this in the context of the times we were
living in. To be sure, there were plenty of bad Japanese in China. We had made errors, and caused a great deal of inconvenience to the Chinese people. But that is inevitable in times of great historical change. Curing an ancient civilization of its ills is a tough enterprise, bound to be messy at times. The main thing to keep in mind is that our ideals were sound. Our principles were right. And if we don’t act according to the right principles, cynicism takes over, and life is no longer worth living. If we hadn’t stuck to our ideals, we would have been no better than the selfish Western imperialists. So I took pride in playing my humble part in launching the career of Ri Koran.

I wish I could say otherwise, but Ri’s debut film, called
Honeymoon Express
, was not a success. A hackneyed remake of a Japanese comedy, translated into awkward Chinese, directed by a man who could not speak to the actors in their own language, was bound to end in failure. It just wasn’t very amusing, no matter how much the director, Mr. Makino, screamed at his actors to bring out the humor. “Joke!” he would shout in the few words of Chinese he knew. “Act the joke, act the joke!”

The Manchurians failed to see the joke, and Ri was in despair. She would never do another film, she cried, stamping her tiny feet. The director had been an absolute beast, telling her in front of all her colleagues that she was no good. She had never wanted to be an actress anyway. And on, and on.

I did not witness this myself, but the commercial failure of
Honeymoon Express
had upset Amakasu so much that he went into one of his periodic drunken rages. Smashing his whiskey bottle on the table at the South Lake Pavilion, he raged at Makino, and at the scriptwriters, the cameraman, and the producers. While the Japanese staff listened in silence, heads bowed, Amakasu virtually ripped the room apart, crashing his fist through the paper screens, upsetting the rosewood table, and trampling the broken glass into the tatami floor. He raged on
about “sabotage,” about “Reds” trying to undermine Japanese policy, about “letting down the people of Manchukuo.”

And that might have been the end of Ri’s career in the movies, if it hadn’t been for one of those unforeseen consequences that so often change the world in ways we cannot possibly foresee. In one of the key scenes, on a railway platform in Shinkyo, Ri as the young lover, doubting her fiancé’s devotion, sings a song, entitled “If Only.” It isn’t a great song; she has done far better ones since. The melody is too cloying, like a sticky sweet. And so are the words: / “If only you would love me, if only you’d be true, / If only you would dream my dream . . .”

The popular imagination is as fickle as it is mysterious. But Ri’s song managed to catch it in a big way, heralding the China Boom. “If Only,” sung in Chinese and Japanese, became a surprise hit, first among the Japanese in Manchukuo, then in the Japanese homeland. Perhaps Ri’s voice had the exotic ring of distant lands. Possibly it was a light diversion in anxious times. Whatever the reason, it spread like a bush fire—or rather, given the gallons and gallon of tears it produced, a flood—in cafés, in dance halls, in the variety shows of Asakusa, indeed in any place where Japanese was spoken, from Harbin to Hokkaido. Ri Koran was now launched as a star.