Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  Japan

  ‘An intensely emotional people, given to suicide’

  SIR FRANCIS RUNDALL, HM AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN, JULY 1967

  (CONFIDENTIAL) Tokyo

  6 July, 1967

  Sir,

  It was suggested in a policy planning paper recently in the Foreign Office that, in our dealings with the Japanese, we must always remember that their character is such that they require unusually careful and delicate handling. In this my valedictory despatch I have the honour to offer my own observations on this …

  … Whilst good manners demand an impassive exterior and concealment of one’s real feelings, the Japanese are an intensely emotional people, given to suicide and with at least their fair share of crimes of violence. They are a very hard working people with an ingrained sense of loyalty to their employers and to authority which has come down from feudal times. They are an Asiatic people and share the general Asian preference for the oblique rather than the direct approach to a problem. This is true also of their speech; many a visiting businessman has been misled by the polite Japanese agreement which has no firmer basis than a desire not to contradict the honourable foreigner. I do not myself feel that the Japanese can be described either as a militaristic or as a pacific people. They respect military power, certainly, and throughout their history effective power has always been sought and maintained by force of arms, but they are also the world’s greatest pragmatists and would adopt the means, military or otherwise, most suited to gain their ends … as a senior Japanese General said not long ago, ‘The war was wrong because we could not possibly have won it.’ …

  … The Japanese have many lovable characteristics; a genuine capacity for friendship once one is accepted; a code of politeness in social intercourse which, though confusing to the foreigner, is helpful and agreeable once one knows the rules; and an almost overwhelming sense of obligation for favours done. If one approaches them properly, with due politeness and without resorting to high-pressure tactics, they are often extremely co-operative. Above all, once a personal relationship has been established with them it brings with it the ethical obligation of an entirely different approach. No people are more inconsiderate to those they do not know – one need only drive in Tokyo traffic to discover this – but few are more considerate to their friends. It should therefore be the aim of every visiting businessman to reach this relationship; he will not achieve much until he does. We must furthermore seek to exploit this trait at national level. The Japanese will listen to their friends and they realise that they have still much to learn about how to conduct political and economic relations with other countries. If they see in us a friendly country, and if personal contact can be established amongst statesmen and officials at the highest level, we can exercise an influence beyond their estimation of our national strength. We can, at the least, enlighten their self interest.

  Though irrelevant to the subject at issue one is allowed to be subjective in the last paragraph of one’s final despatch. I have had nearly 37 very happy years in the Consular, Foreign and Diplomatic Services, with interesting work and excellent colleagues. Sitting in a comfortable and air-conditioned office I can contrast my last days in the Service with my first introduction to it, attempting to cope with an unruly mob of seamen in the earth-floored stable which served as a Shipping Office in the Consulate-General at Antwerp. We have come a very long way since those days and both our work and our conditions of Service have changed out of all recognition. But I feel that we have kept up with the times and I am confident that we shall continue to do so.

  I have, &

  F. B. A. RUNDALL

  ‘The general lack of a coherent philosophy of life’

  SIR HUGH CORTAZZI, HM AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN, FEBRUARY 1984

  JAPAN YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

  Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Tokyo to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  Tokyo

  8 February 1984

  Sir,

  I leave Japan on retirement shortly, I first came in contact with this country over forty years ago and I propose to comment in this despatch on some relevant aspects of Japan as it was, as I see it today, and as it may be in the future …

  I began to learn Japanese in London in 1943 as an aircraftsman. I am still learning about this country … All in all, I have spent some fifteen years of my life in Japan and much of my time in London has also been spent on affairs Japanese. During my time as Ambassador, I have travelled officially through all Japan’s forty-seven prefectures and tried through numerous speeches and articles in Japanese to put over our views.

  I was never directly involved with war crimes trials but I remember stumbling in Singapore in 1945 on some facts about one of the many unpleasant incidents in the Japanese occupation of Singapore. I also had relations who suffered on the Burma/Siam railway. So, I cannot ignore this side of Japanese life but Japan, like Germany where I have also served is a complex society and there is good as well as bad in every country’s history. In any case, Japan is a force of major importance in the modern world and it behoves us to get on with the Japanese. I am glad to think that we have got away from the era when, so story has it, whenever a paper about Japan was submitted to one of your predecessors he used simply to write on it ‘I do not like the Japanese.’ I confess, however, that I still have the impression that Ministers as a whole tend only to focus on Japan when a problem arises with it …

  The Japanese are much more diverse than they and the world at large like to think. But history, geography, ethnography and culture have induced certain general characteristics in their society. Japanese arrogance is matched by Japanese sensitivity and resentment of discrimination against themselves; Japanese language and culture, as well as their long history of seclusion, have meant that they were isolated from the rest of the world for too long. The contacts of the last hundred and thirty years have gone deep and have changed Japan beyond recognition, but have left the Japanese – at heart at least – less internationally-minded than the people of most of the advanced countries …

  … Despite all its success in producing a highly educated people capable of performing the tasks of a modern industrial society, the Japanese education system has a number of built-in weaknesses as well as strengths. The strengths include the fact that literacy (despite the complexity of the written language) and numeracy are among the highest in the world … Moreover, Japanese education, with its emphasis on performance, is highly meritocratic and thus provides incentives for success. The weaknesses, however, are equally real. The meritocratic emphasis puts a premium on getting on to the right escalator from kindergarten upwards. It also involves the ‘exam hell’ with its occasional suicides and the phenomenon of the ‘education mama’ whose task it is to force young Taro or Emiko to do their homework properly and, if necessary, to send the children to crammers. Those who do succeed are often exhausted by the time they get to University and regard their years at University as a welcome holiday. The ‘holiday’ may enable them to recharge their batteries for the next highly competitive step of getting a good job and then climbing the ladder. One danger in this process, however, is that the need to conform in order to get promotion (combined with the slog to pass examinations) could lead to a decline in creativity and independent thought. This will not matter if nevertheless Japan continues as hitherto to produce the sort of dynamic leadership which still marks its top companies. I suspect that such leaders will be found among those who rebel against the system and work up through medium and small scale enterprises.

  At the same time, however, smaller families with fathers frequently out late have led to a decline in parental discipline, while the general availability of what would at one time have been regarded as luxuries has resulted in a move away from the frugality of the past. One result has been a growth of juvenile pilfering. Another has been the development of the phenomena of school violence against teachers, as well as fellow pupils. There are also signs of an increase
in the numbers of drop-outs or opters-out. The temptations of the easy life – more leisure, more holidays, more luxury goods – have been a contributing factor. Drugs fortunately have not yet been a major problem, but gang revelry in noise, drink and way-out behaviour can all be found in Tokyo and other parts of Japan. The problems are compounded by the general lack of a coherent philosophy of life and the breakdown in or lack of ethical teaching.

  Vietnam

  ‘This is still a rugged country’

  TIMOTHY EVERARD, CONSUL GENERAL IN NORTH VIETNAM, NOVEMBER 1973

  In North Vietnam carefulness and patience are rugged qualities … An electrician testing for short circuits in the power supply is more likely to use damped fingers than a voltmeter. Those who test lorry brakes (in the pleasant but busy old avenue where our office stands, which is also used by turns for foxholes, football pitch, firewood supply and rifle-range) screech to a halt in the middle of the road, and emerge to measure and study the skid marks. Occasionally this is unnecessary, if the brakes pull unevenly and the lorry has already hit a tree or it is on its side. Yet they carry on, and we have, so far, seen many failed brakes but no casualties. This is partly a tribute to the agility and vigilance of Vietnamese pedestrians and cyclists. This is still a rugged country and its policies and practices, even when ‘peaceful’ and ‘patient’ have a vigour and rigour of their own.

  ‘The Viet-Namese … have, within the last five centuries, destroyed within their present territory two cultures … whose artistic achievements were vastly superior to their own’

  FRANCIS BROOKS RICHARDS, HM AMBASSADOR TO SOUTH VIETNAM, FEBRUARY 1974

  LAST THOUGHTS FROM SAIGON

  Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Saigon to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  (CONFIDENTIAL) Saigon,

  27 February, 1974.

  Sir,

  Claudel observed that five years in Asia are enough totally to inhibit a European from putting pen to paper. I have served in Saigon for little more than two, but that is enough to have bred at least a sense of caution. The complexities of this three-ways divided country, the limitations of what one does not, and cannot, know are daunting enough: what, one is bound also to ask, will anyone in London at present find time enough and light to read about a place which most of the world asks only to forget; and where policy is minimum commitment at minimum cost.

  Claudel’s cycle of Cathay and mine moved at different paces. I set about this attempt to round up valedictory impressions not in palanquin or sampan but in mid-air, at what my Air Attaché judges an altitude unlikely to tempt that revolutionary weapon, the hand-held heat-seeking missile. The sun is coming up out of the South China Sea, throwing the Annamite Cordillera into silhouette. Those lucky enough to move much about this spectacularly beautiful country by aircraft, and by helicopter in particular, see unexpected aspects of that beauty – the herring-bone patchwork of vegetables; the viridian of young rice; the cerulean of the sky reflected in flooded paddies – as well as the scars of defoliant and many millions of tons of ordnance …

  Cultural originality and, indeed, creative achievement in the broadest sense have not been strong suits with the Viet-Namese. The taste of the court at Hue was as curious, as eclectic and, to me, unsatisfactory as that of Ludwig of Bavaria, its contemporary. The Viets appear to have had no music and perhaps even no verse of their own before they absorbed from their contact with the Chams a non-Chinese instrumental tradition and a melancholy style of epic poetry … The Viet-Namese would find it difficult to rebut the charge that they have, within the last five centuries, destroyed within their present territory two cultures, the Cham and the Khmer, whose artistic achievements were vastly superior to their own. They appear, indeed, to have something of a bad conscience about the Chams: I have more than once been told by educated Viet-Namese that the present misfortunes can be considered punishment for their ancestors’ misdeeds in this respect …

  The women are important: though industrious and often decorative, they are mercantile and rapacious. Even three centuries ago, travellers noted their skill in business: they were used by foreign merchants as factors and it was normal for the wife of an aspiring mandarin to keep the family while he prepared for the triennial examination. Today, far too many of the wives of those in positions of public responsibility are feathering their nests on the grand scale. One hears it said that particular women drive their men hard to satisfy their lust for talismanic jade or gold or real estate.

  Indonesia

  ‘A natural tendency towards violence’

  SIR JOHN FORD, HM AMBASSADOR TO INDONESIA, FEBRUARY 1978

  Sir John’s focus on the violent side of Indonesian (or ‘Javanese’) character was inspired by his ringside seat during the bloody seizure of East Timor in 1975. By the time the Indonesians withdrew in 1999, some 200,000 East Timorese had been killed. The UK government was in a bind over what line to take. In public London opposed the invasion, but behind the scenes the picture was more complicated. A 1975 telegram from Sir John had counselled tacit support for Suharto: ‘The people of Portuguese Timor are in no condition to exercise the right to self-determination … Certainly as seen from here it is in Britain’s interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible; and that if it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian Government.’ Today East Timor has achieved its independence from Indonesia. History was not, as it turned out, on the ambassador’s side.

  Like the Balinese volcano Gunung Agung which bottles up its energy until the pent-up force within breaks out, so within the Javanese it seems as if a natural tendency towards violence is pent-up; cruelty is ever near the surface; and all hell breaks loose when restraints collapse. There is something particularly repulsive about the propensity to cold cruelty of the Indonesian. This explains partly why firm government is so necessary if unchecked emotions are not to lead to a loss of control most horrible in its manifestations …

  … For the Javanese as for so many Orientals, feelings are so much more important than reasons. The Javanese is waiting almost expectantly for his feelings to be injured by the high and mighty foreigner. The Javanese smiles and resents and remembers and grudges. The Javanese is hide-bound and traditional, mystical and devious. The well-educated Javanese remembers Raffles with respect and regrets that Britain handed back the East Indies in 1816. And so a Britain which is no longer seen as high and mighty but yet as traditional and somewhat mystical in its attitude to [our] Crown and somewhat devious in its policies can have some appeal and exercise some beneficial influence. A special responsibility thus falls on all Britons – diplomats, technical co-operation staffs and businessmen – who serve out here.

  Part IV: WEST

  United States

  ‘One of the most egotistical men I have met’

  LORD HARLECH, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, MARCH 1965

  Lord Harlech (David Ormsby-Gore) was not a career diplomat, but a political appointee, which used to be common for the Washington job. A former Foreign Office Minister under Harold Macmillan, Harlech achieved a level of closeness to the White House unsurpassed by any other envoy before or since; a long-standing close personal friend of John Kennedy, with whom he dined at the White House once a week, Harlech also romanced the President’s wife. Harlech and the widowed Jackie Kennedy reportedly became lovers after the ambassador, who lost his wife in a car crash in 1967, stepped down from the Foreign Office. There was briefly speculation that the two might marry. Relations, however, were not quite so cordial with the Johnson White House. The new President, it is said, took a dislike to the ambassador’s patrician manner.

  Harlech’s valedictory deserves attention as a masterly and well-phrased thumbnail sketch of a particular president, his instincts, his capabilities and his shortcomings. A British Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary who took ten minutes to read this letter m
ight have gained a better grasp of the essential LBJ than might be imparted by reams of briefing papers. Time and biography have since rendered this the standard picture of Lyndon Baines Johnson, but at the time it was prescient.

  But the despatch also indicates the perils of forecasting. Lyndon Baines Johnson was not, in the event, to serve ‘eight more years’ as President. In March 1968, three years after Lord Harlech’s despatch, LBJ told a stunned nation: ‘I shall not seek, nor will I accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.’ Domestically, LBJ was caught between hawks, wanting total commitment to American military victory in the Vietnam War, and doves, wanting a peace settlement; both abandoned LBJ when their aims were frustrated.

  March 1965 saw the start of the aerial bombing campaign Operation Rolling Thunder. Harlech was mistaken in judging this to be only ‘temporarily more belligerent’ behaviour by the Americans, it was in fact a significant slither down into the quagmire. Belying his determination, as reported in this despatch, to avoid a ‘dangerous escalation’, Johnson in fact increased American troop numbers from 16,000 in 1963 to more than half a million in 1968.

  The Administration was indeed talking of limited war, but Harlech was perhaps listening too credulously: it was the disconnect between the Presidential speeches and the grisly reality on the ground in Vietnam – a disconnect which introduced the term ‘credibility gap’ to the political lexicon – that so fuelled public discontent.