The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  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 awkwar
d 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.

  7

  JUST AS RI Koran’s reputation as an exotic Manchurian singer began to spread in Japan, an actor at the top of his fame opened the door of his Packard on the lot of his studio south of Tokyo, and walked slowly toward his dressing room. Perhaps he was already rehearsing his lines, or maybe he had other things on his mind, having just moved to a new movie company, but Hasegawa never saw the gangster coming, who, quick as a flash, sliced his left cheek with a razor. It was as though a vandal had plunged a knife into a great painting. Hasegawa Kazuo, a former actor of women’s roles in the Kabuki theater, was famous for his great beauty, both as a woman on stage and as a young romantic male lead in the cinema. Now his celebrated profile would be scarred forever, courtesy of the bosses of his former studio, who did not take kindly to acts of disloyalty, especially among their most lucrative stars.

  In fact, however, the incident made Hasegawa into an even bigger star. It added an element of masculine panache to his persona (as well as his face, which was rather too sweet anyway), and women warmed to his vulnerability. Nonetheless, he tried to make sure, whenever he could, to present only his right profile to the cameras, and when he couldn’t, a thick layer of greasepaint was applied to cover the scar, which ran from the corner of his mouth to his earlobe.

  The reason I mention this is that Amakasu had the brilliant idea of bringing Hasegawa Kazuo over to Manchukuo to star with Ri Koran in a Japanese-Manchurian co-production. The romantic coupling of the most famous, most handsome, most dashing male actor in Japan to the most beautiful, most exotic female star in Manchukuo would do wonders for our cause. It was one of Amakasu’s most inspired schemes, a pairing made in heaven. But as with all schemes, the results were neither straightforward nor predictable.

  The story of their first collaboration was a simple melodrama, entitled Song of the White Orchid. He (Hasegawa) is a young Japanese engineer building an extension to the South Manchurian railway line. She (Ri) is a Mongolian music student in Mukden. They fall in love, even though the hero is expected to marry his boss’s daughter in Tokyo. Because of this unfortunate obligation, he tells the Mongolian girl that their love is impossible. She returns to her family of anti-Japanese bandits and threatens to blow up his precious railway line. Realizing that love cannot be denied, he goes back to her, and declares his true feelings. She melts into his arms. The railway line is preserved and our people are united.

  Some might call this cheap propaganda. So it was, propaganda, but it wasn’t cheap, for it was for a good, progressive cause. We all wanted to build a better world than the one we were living in, where millions of innocent, hardworking Asians were ruined by the ruthless competition of Anglo-American capitalism. Americans make films to show their way of life in the best possible light. Why shouldn’t we have done the same? Besides, how often do you see Hollywood films celebrating the love between people of different races? In their lily white entertainments, dark people perform only as servants or dancing clowns. In that respect, we were well ahead of them.

  While this picture was in production, I noticed something unusual about Ri. It was as if she had forgotten about her earlier resistance to being a movie star. She reveled in it now, like a child who suddenly finds herself being the most popular girl in school. I would even say she was growing addicted to the perquisites of the little diva’s life: the hotel suite, the chauffeur-driven car, the explosions of magnesium flash powder whenever she appeared in public. But in the presence of the great Hasegawa, she still looked overawed. She followed him around like an adoring puppy, begging him to teach her how to be a better actress. He teased her that a Chinese woman would never understand the ways of a Japanese. She would first have to become a Japanese, he said, before she could act like one.

  Much of Song of the White Orchid was shot on location, outside a village near the South Manchurian railway line. Security provided by Kanto Army soldiers had to be tight because of bandit activity in the area. Several times the shooting was interrupted by gunfire, and we had to rush for cover inside a brick barn. It was during these moments of enforced idleness that Hasegawa taught Ri the art of female seduction. Ri was all eyes, as Hasegawa transformed himself into a traditional Japanese beauty. He showed her how to glance coquettishly from the corner of her eyes, and reveal, just for an instant, the nape of her neck, by a subtle inclination of the head. In the murky light of our shabby place of refuge, his soft round face took on a sweet femininity that was quite uncanny. We all watched in awed silence as he moved his hands, and eyes, and neck, like a beautiful courtesan. Foreigners’ sex appeal, he instructed Ri, was frank and straightforward, while Japanese ways were always indirect, just hinting at sensuality without ever flaunting it. Ri would imitate the master’s womanly gestures over and over, the glances, the little pigeon-toed steps, like a man practicing his golf strokes, until she felt she had got it right. Hasegawa just smiled, like an indulgent parent, repeating that she would first have to become Japanese before she could fully master his art.

  8

  NOT LONG AFTER the success of “If Only,” Amakasu decided to start a Ri Koran Fan Club. He, Captain Amakasu, would be the president of this illustrious society, whose members included industrialists, bureaucrats, and Kanto Army generals. The fan club actually played an important role in the tragic history of Manchukuo, so I shall relate my few brushes with it.

  Once a month, the members met in a private dining room at the Yamato Hotel to discuss affairs of state, while listening to recordings of Ri’s songs. I can still picture the room, filled with heavy wooden chairs, set around a long oak table under a brass chandelier. Deer antlers were attached to the doorways, giving th
e place a vaguely Germanic air. The beige silk wallpaper was decorated with spring orchids. Amakasu was drinking his usual White Horse Whiskey. I recognized most of the people there. Who wouldn’t? Everyone knew these men in those days. They counted some of our top leaders, including Colonel Yoshioka, adviser to Emperor Pu Yi, and Kishi Nobusuke, the minister of industry. Kishi was not exactly good-looking. His suit was slack like a flag on a windless day, and his scrawny neck made the collar of his shirt look several sizes too big. His teeth stuck out and his eyes bulged. But they were the eyes of a shrewd man, and held a hint of menace. Amakasu often said that Kishi would go far, maybe one day as far as prime minister. Kishi bared his moist red gums when Amakasu talked like that, but he never made any attempt to contradict him.

  Yoshioka cut an equally unpleasant figure. Known as “the Wasp” for his trim physique, made to look even trimmer by the brown belt strapped extra tight around his waist, he laughed a lot without betraying the slightest evidence of humor. His face was marked by a prominent nose with wide nostrils, like dark holes, which widened when he was ingratiating himself with someone more powerful, or amused by the misfortunes of someone less powerful.

  One man in the room was unknown to me. Dressed in a blue suit, which accentuated his narrow, slightly pockmarked face, he looked unremarkable except for a pair of diaphanous silk socks, which revealed unusually thin ankles, protruding from a pair of shiny black lacquered pumps. Only later did I realize who he was: Muramatsu Seiji, boss of the Muramatsu gang, a much-feared outfit with branches in several Manchurian cities. Getting in trouble with them was like catching a death sentence, except that the victim never knew when it would be carried out. Sometimes the execution came long after the poor wretch had forgotten what he had done wrong. Muramatsu was not much seen in public and spent most of his time up north in Harbin.