The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  Amakasu sat on the tatami floor at the head of the long rosewood table, with a straight back, as though a steel rod had been inserted into his spine. Dressed in an olive green uniform, he gazed silently through his round spectacles, drinking his usual White Horse Whiskey. He barely touched the food, even as his guests, including a senior Kempeitai officer and a burly Kanto Army colonel, became increasingly merry on the saké, poured for them by several gorgeous actresses from Manchuria Motion Pictures, who made up for their linguistic deficiencies by being absolutely charming. However, Amakasu was not in a sociable mood. Something was bothering him. An occasional grunt was all that escaped from his lips when anyone addressed him directly.

  At one point a surgeon, by the name of Ozaki, an important figure in the Japanese-Manchukuo Friendship Association, raised his cup and proposed a toast to the harmonious relations between the five races. A fat, grinning, red-faced man, the type who fancies himself the life and soul of every party, Ozaki was an egregious example of those who spoke of harmony without sincerity. In any case, Amakasu raised his glass too, and Ozaki, who had a surprisingly mellifluous voice for such a coarse individual, launched into an army song, jerking his short little arms back and forth, like a tortoise turned on its back, and the others followed suit. Even though the actresses didn’t know the words, they humored the men by smiling and clapping along as well.

  Ozaki then proposed an egg race. Clambering down on all fours, not an easy thing to do for a corpulent man in his inebriated state, he ordered one of the actresses to do the same. When she hesitated to take part in the childish game of blowing an egg across the matted floor, a slap on her silk-clad bottom, provoking much laughter from the other guests, forced her onto her knees. One of the men slipped his hand up the skirt of MeiLing, then Manchukuo’s leading actress, and told her to top up his saké cup. Conviviality swiftly descended to lewdness, with cries to hold a “Miss Manchukuo” contest. The Kempeitai officer ordered one of the women to balance a saké bottle on her head, then made her drink from a cup on the floor, like a cat. When she failed to keep the bottle from falling off her head, the lecherous colonel demanded a striptease.

  I shall never forget what happened next. Amakasu, already ramrod-straight, stiffened even more. His face had gone very pale, like the moon outside, and his eyes glinted behind his spectacles as though they were catching fire. “Enough!” he rasped in that breathy voice of his, as though he had a permanently sore throat. “Enough! Actresses are not geisha, they are artists.” Nodding toward the girls, he continued: “I demand respect for the artists of the Manchuria Motion Picture Association, and hereby wish to apologize for the behavior of my boorish countrymen.”

  Although there were several men in the room who outranked Amakasu, his words had an instant effect. There was no need for him to shout. The fact that he had spoken at all was sufficient to impose instant obedience. The actresses bowed their heads and fixed their eyes on the floor. Ozaki realized he had overstepped a dangerous mark and kept quiet for the rest of the evening. The men started to pay respect to the Manchurian ladies, some even offering to pour saké for them. The reason I can still vividly recall this incident is that it showed another side of this much-feared and indeed maligned man that has not received its due attention. Amakasu may have strangled a family of Reds, but he was also a Japanese gentleman of the greatest sincerity.

  It was Amakasu, at any rate, who asked me to find a local singer who could speak sufficiently good Japanese to work with us on a new radio show to be called Manchukuo Rhapsody. “The independence and unity of our state cannot be taken for granted,” he told me. “Education through entertainment should be our motto. Our message must be sweet, even if our aims demand sacrifice, rigor and perseverance.” This is the way he usually spoke, when he spoke at all: in clipped sentences, like a man who has no time to waste.

  After giving this much thought, and conducting a few auditions in my office with some extremely attractive ladies, which produced nothing in the way of musical or indeed linguistic talent, but were perfectly agreeable otherwise, I hit upon an idea that was so obvious that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before: the girl singer at the Yamato Hotel. Her Chinese was fluent, and since she was in fact Japanese, she could obviously speak in her native tongue. In short, she was just what we were looking for. Age might be the only issue, but that could be accommodated. “Go and talk to the parents,” said Amakasu, whose thin lips curled into a rare hint of a smile. “I’m sure we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement.”

  3

  EVERY MAN HAS his weaknesses. Mine was young women, especially Chinese women, and most especially Chinese actresses. I say Chinese, but could have said Manchus. We Japanese liked to pretend that most Chinese in Manchukuo were Manchus. In fact, there was little distinction between the two races. Chinese or Manchu, I adored making love to them. They had none of that giggly, schoolgirlish coyness of Japanese women. Their erotic attraction was like Chinese poetry— refined, romantic, and elusive. There is something particularly alluring, too, about the Chinese body, which matches the Chinese mind in its subtlety and finesse: the long elegant legs, the pert, round bottom, the perfect breasts, not too small, not too big. Where the Western woman is large and coarse, like an overripe fruit, and the Japanese woman is small, shapeless, and bland, like cold beancurd, the Chinese woman is a banquet of flavors, spicy, sweet and sour, bitter; she is the finest specimen of a racial selection that found its perfect form after more than five thousand years of civilization. And the feeling that she was mine, all mine, afforded a pleasure that was more than just sexual. I would go so far as to say it was spiritual.

  Miss Yamaguchi’s father, Yamaguchi Fumio, had a different weakness, which was, as I mentioned earlier, gambling. To look at him, he was an inoffensive type, slight of build and sporting a pair of owlish spectacles. But he was actually a bit of a rogue. Once in a while we would visit a brothel in Mukden, stocked with fine Manchurian girls, but this wasn’t really to his taste; he would always be waiting for me, nervously sipping tea in the reception room, long before I was ready to leave. He much preferred the click-clack of mah-jong tiles, the rustle of playing cards, or even the chattering sound of fighting crickets, anything indeed that was worth a gamble. The problem with his particular vice was financial. He was always in debt, and relied on the likes of General Li of the Shenyang Bank to bail him out of trouble.

  To be frank, Li was a former warlord from Shantung, who took our side in the early 1930s, and was made chairman of the Shenyang Bank as a token of our friendship. The old warhorse had taken a liking to the Japanese gambler and proposed a fair exchange. The Yamaguchi family would have a free place to live in the General’s compound, if Mrs. Yamaguchi would teach the General’s concubine proper European table manners. A somewhat peculiar arrangement, perhaps, but Yamaguchi found the company of the General, with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, his dark blue Rolls-Royce, and his liking for mah-jong games, which he invariably lost, thus enabling Yamaguchi to recoup some of his debts, congenial. And instructing his number two wife in the art of eating green peas with a knife and fork, or lifting her little finger when drinking Indian tea, was not too strenuous a task for Mrs. Yamaguchi, who was a modern, educated woman with very fine manners, acquired at a first-rate Catholic school in Nagasaki.

  General Li’s compound was in the diplomatic quarter of Mukden, a quiet area with large brick mansions in the European style—Baroque, Renaissance, Rococo, or whatnot—standing in the shade of fragrant apricot trees and sweet-smelling acacias. Many wealthy Chinese, friendly to our cause, lived there. The poorer natives dwelled in the walled Chinese city, a lively but rather unhygienic place of dark alleys that reeked of charcoal, garlic, and human excrement. Japanese tended to congregate around Heian Avenue, a big wide boulevard leading to the main railway station, up-to-date and clean, lined with department stores that could stand comparison to the best stores in London or New York. General Li’s house, not too far from there, wa
s a modern structure in white stucco with a wide entrance flanked by a portico of lime-colored columns.

  The Yamaguchi family lived in a redbrick house that used to be occupied by one of the General’s older concubines. Before moving there, they had lived in a comfortable but less romantic part of the city, in the kind of clean, modest house designated for middle-ranking Japanese company men. Though Yoshiko was brought up to be a proper Japanese girl, her father made sure she spoke good standard Chinese, a highly irregular thing to do, but he was, after all, an admirer of all things Chinese, and sought to impart this to his daughter. Other Japanese did not always look kindly on such enthusiasms, so a certain discretion was in order, not only to shield little Yoshiko from teasing at school, but also Yamaguchi himself from the unwelcome attentions of our Kempeitai. He had the excuse of being a Chinese teacher, to be sure, but one still had to be careful not to catch “a case of jaundice,” as the Japanese in Manchukuo used to say.

  Nothing of the sort was called for in General Li’s compound, which is why Mr. Yamaguchi, though not necessarily his wife, was so happy to move there. He could indulge in his Chinese passions as much as he liked. The household routine proceeded like clockwork: twice a week the General would come down from the main house, lose a game or two of mah-jong with Mr. Yamaguchi, have Yoshiko prepare his opium pipes, and retire with his favorite concubine—a tiny woman hobbling around the compound in her tightly bound feet, who was probably relieved not to have to spear any more peas on her silver fork.

  According to my information, there were few visitors to the Yamaguchi family quarters. But there was a young Jewess, a school friend of Yoshiko’s, named Masha, who would come round regularly. It was she, I believe, who introduced Yoshiko to her singing teacher, Madame Ignatieva. Since she attended the same Japanese school as Yoshiko, her Japanese was fluent. I checked out her parents and found nothing remiss. Her father, who owned a bakery near the railway station, was a loyal member of the Japanese-Jewish Friendship Association.

  The General was so fond of Yoshiko that he decided to adopt her as his unofficial daughter. This would have been in 1934, round about the time of Emperor Pu Yi’s inauguration. Ceremony is very important to the Manchu mind. Particular care is taken over family rituals. So to be adopted by a Manchu family should be considered a great honor. And I was greatly honored to be invited to witness the ceremony in General Li’s compound.

  Kneeling in front of the Li ancestral tablets, Yoshiko was given her Chinese name, Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran in Japanese, and was officially received into her second family. The ceremony was attended by both her parents, as well as the General and his wife and five concubines, who were all dressed in splendid Manchu robes. The girl acquitted herself of her task quite beautifully. First she bowed to her new Manchu father, then to his ancestral tablets, and thanked the General in beautiful Chinese for the honor of bearing his name. This was followed by a banquet, attended by everyone in the household, including all the General’s concubines, who tittered charmingly behind their ivory fans. I was tempted to deepen my acquaintance with one or two of them, but knew better than to reach for these forbidden fruits. We were served at least one hundred dishes, including, this being winter, a superb dogmeat stew, a specialty of the Manchu cuisine.

  As his favorite daughter, Yoshiko spent most of her free time in the General’s rooms. Since he got ill-tempered whenever she was not on hand to serve him, she would rush to his villa as soon as she came back from school, to prepare his pipes and make sure he was comfortable. She could not leave to get on with her homework until he had fallen asleep, which, after a pipe or two, usually occurred with merciful swiftness.

  Mr. Yamaguchi was not best pleased with the suggestion of putting his daughter in a wireless broadcast. “We are a respectable family,” he protested, “and my daughter is not a showgirl.” Mrs. Yamaguchi served us Japanese tea and remained silent. Yoshiko looked up at me with those big luminous eyes of hers, pleading with me to help her out of her dilemma. She was not averse to singing but hated to upset her father. I asked her mother what she thought. “Well,” she replied after some hesitation, “Yoshiko does love to sing . . .” I added that it was “for the sake of our country,” thinking that a dose of patriotism might help. Besides, it would earn Mr. Yamaguchi some much-needed protection from prying officials. “Well, yes, that is as may be, but . . .” And so it went on for some time, until the question of gambling debts was carefully broached and the matter was concluded to the satisfaction of all, including General Li, who was tickled to have her perform under his family name. Henceforth, Yamaguchi Yoshiko would appear on the Manchukuo Rhapsody radio show as the young Manchurian singer Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran.

  4

  TIENTSIN COULD NOT have been more different from Mukden. First of all it was in China, not Manchukuo. A wide avenue cut right across the foreign concessions like an open sore, the symbol of China’s submission to Western colonial powers. On the south side of the White River (actually black with filth, carrying bits of rotten fruit in its sluggish stream, as well as driftwood, dead cats and dogs, and sometimes human remains) were the Americans, British, French, and Italians. The Russians and the Belgians were on the other side of the avenue, which changed its name as it passed through the various foreign concessions, starting off as Woodrow Wilson Boulevard, and ending as the via d’Italia by way of Victoria Road and rue de Paris.

  Tientsin was a city wreathed in smiles, most of them phony. The privileges enjoyed by the white race in their concessions were like dark stains on the honor of all Asiatics. They did as they liked and literally got away with murder. One of the most highly respected Chinese officials, in charge of Tientsin Customs, was assassinated in a cinema by gangsters hired by the British. Like me, he loved the movies, and was peacefully watching Gunga Din when he was brutally gunned down. Since the British refused to hand over their hired killers to the police, and Customs affairs were handled by us Japanese, we had no other choice but to blockade the concessions. For this brief period—until we restored full Asian sovereignty a few years later—we could feel proud of ourselves.

  Despite such outrages, some contemptible Japanese wished to behave like the Europeans, angling for invitations to the Tientsin Club, where they might be allowed in as “honorary whites” if accompanied by their British hosts. Such people, in my view, were not only contemptible but absurd, looking like monkeys in their ill-fitting tropical suits. You would see them, eating rich cakes at the Kiesling Café, hoping to catch the eye of the British consul, or some other long-nosed bigwig. The most they got, I believe, was a severe case of indigestion.

  As for myself, I always thought that Chinese dress was more becoming to my trim Asian physique. Most people took me for a Chinaman and that suited me fine. Indeed, I felt flattered, for I much preferred the company of Asians, who were so much more civilized than the Western riffraff that floated, like scum, on the surface of local society. Tientsin, to me, reeked too much of butter. Before we managed to bring him to his senses and remind him of his duties, Emperor Pu Yi, too, was part of that buttery world, frittering away his time on the tennis court and drinking tea with foreigners. He lived in an old Chinese mansion on Asahi Avenue, where we could watch him as he held court to a variety of European charlatans. One used to come across him also at the Empire Cinema, especially when they showed Charlie Chaplin films. He seemed utterly mesmerized by the little American tramp. I never once saw him laugh, but his fascination never waned. Even after we had restored him to the throne in Manchukuo, Emperor Pu Yi had to be kept entertained in his private cinema at the old Salt Palace with Chaplin movies. He sat through them no matter how many times he had seen them already until, finally, the films were worn out, and new copies had to be ordered from Shanghai. I recognized, in my humble way, a kindred spirit in him, even though I didn’t share his particular passion for Charlie Chaplin.

  There was one place in Tientsin where I was able to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the concessions, and forget
the shabby intrigues and general skulduggery that took place there. It was an unassuming establishment behind a crimson gate, on the edge of the Native City, named East Garden. They knew me so well there that my pipes were always prepared without a word needing to be said. All I required was a cup of green tea and my pipe, and I was off into a world of my own. Stretched out in that room filled with the smell of sweet dreams, I quite forgot the war-ravaged country with its stench of blood and excrement, its poverty and degradation, its humiliating submission to the rapacious imperialists. When I closed my eyes, I just let my mind drift, without imposing my will, and the inside of my skull would be filled with images of incomparable beauty. I saw Song Dynasty Chinese landscapes, with soaring mountains and rushing rivers, and boatmen fishing in the mist of dawn. I saw the roofs of Peking, glowing in the dusk of a late spring evening, red and gold and yellow, and I saw the blue hills of Manchukuo, stretching far into the horizon. And I saw my lover, Eastern Jewel, walking toward me, as though in a motion picture, against the backdrop of a garden in Hangzhou. She beckoned me to come to her, as the pan-pipes of a court orchestra keened on the sound track of my mind.

  To call Eastern Jewel pretty would be an injustice. She looked much too unconventional for that. Her pale moon face, radiating soft light, combined the fresh beauty of a young boy with the yielding loveliness of a young girl, like those Tang Dynasty sculptures of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Her body was that of a gorgeous woman, but she had the aristocratic bearing of a young prince. She lived in a handsome gabled villa in the Japanese Concession, not far from the Chang Garden. She, too, went by the name of Yoshiko, or Princess Yoshiko, to be precise. But to me she was always Chin, as in To Chin, or Eastern Jewel, and she called me not Sato, but by my Chinese name, Wang.