The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  Much of what I saw on my solitary walks made me feel embarrassed to be an American: the speeding jeeps forcing Japanese to jump out of the way; the laughing GIs throwing sticks of chewing gum at emaciated street kids, shoeless and filthy, who followed every American around with pleas for more, “gimme more, gimme more”; the “pan-pan girls” clip-clopping in their wooden heels behind Yurakucho Station, puckering their crimson lips, throwing kisses at any foreigner with a few bucks to spare, or a packet of crackers, or a pair of stockings. Periodically, our MPs would round them all up, together with anyone else, female and Japanese, who happened to stray into their net, and transport them in trucks to an army clinic for compulsory VD checks. Perhaps the hardest thing to bear was the glum silence with which other Japanese observed these signs of their country’s degradation. I would swiftly move on, trying not to look any Japanese in the eyes. And yet, as I got used to these daily spectacles of collective humiliation, embarrassment gradually made way for something else. I grew to admire these stoic people who, no matter how impoverished, always retained their dignity. Nobody begged for food, or asked for our pity. They may no longer have had a decent roof over their heads, or enough money to feed their families, or proper clothes to wear, but respectability was still insisted upon. Men emerged from jerry-built hovels, in wooden sandals and frayed army surplus pants, but always with a clean white shirt and a tie. Even the homeless, bombed out of their homes, who had found a temporary shelter in the squalid subway stations, smiled at us, as though we were valued guests in their country instead of members of a conquering army.

  I was longing to get closer. I wanted to see more Japanese movies, and visit the Kabuki, but such entertainments were still off-limits for Allied personnel. Instead, we could see Hollywood pictures at the old Takarazuka Theater, or the Ernie Pyle, as we then knew it. On Saturday nights there would sometimes be special theater performances on at the Ernie Pyle, and very peculiar some of them were, too. I recall with particular affection a Swan Lake with Japanese dancers in blond wigs baring their gums in show dancers’ smiles as they gamely produced a version of the ballet that left me feeling rather exhausted.

  The Japanese were not allowed inside the Ernie Pyle, but an exception was sometimes made for the people working for us. So I decided to take Nobu, the roomboy at the Continental Hotel, to attend a performance of The Mikado. Nobu was a pale youth, with longish black hair and the wiry body of a flyweight boxer. He cleaned our rooms and polished our shoes, always making sure they were deposited outside our doors first thing in the morning, but he was in fact a remarkable young man who had been studying French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, before joining a squadron of kamikaze pilots in the summer of 1945. Two of his best friends had already died in suicide attacks off Okinawa, so he felt he had no choice but to follow their example. His life was saved only by the Japanese surrender, a point we rarely discussed, for it made him feel awkward. Nobu much preferred to talk about our shared passion for Marcel Proust, whom he read in French.

  I had only seen The Mikado once before, in the movie version with Dennis Day as Nanki Poo. This was at the Luxor in Bowling Green, of course, which seemed awfully remote from the world of Gilbert and Sullivan. But nothing, I mean nothing in my wildest dreams, had prepared me for the lavishness of The Mikado at the Ernie Pyle. The Mikado himself, a tall and very stout British major, appeared against a backdrop of bright pink cherry blossoms dangling over a golden bridge, and was decked out in long trailing pantaloons made up of gold and blue panels. Pooh-Bah, Ko-Ko, and Pish-Tush, played by British and Canadian officers, were dressed in kimonos rented from the imperial court. Clearly designed for shorter men, the kimonos only reached down to their sturdy calves, revealing a rather long expanse of bright pink tights. The choruses were made up of men and women from the Japanese Bach Choir, who had never sung Gilbert and Sullivan in their lives before, and brought to The Mikado the solemnity of a Christian Passion, which was interesting, though perhaps not entirely appropriate. The leading players could barely sing at all, except for Nanki-Poo, who shrieked in an arresting falsetto, and the acting certainly failed to match the standards of their costumes. But the audience was ready to applaud anything from the moment the Japanese nobles dropped their outlandish fans and launched into “If You Want to Know Who We Are”:

  We are gentlemen of Japan:

  On many a vase and jar—

  On many a screen and fan,

  We figure in lively paint:

  Our attitude’s queer and quaint—

  You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, Oh!

  I soon sensed that poor Nobu was not sharing in the general merriment. His face was frozen in stony disdain, which turned to a kind of horrified bewilderment when the Lord High Executioner, a rather fetching Canadian lieutenant, sang about “our great Mikado, virtuous man,” decreeing that “all who flirted, leered or winked should forthwith be beheaded, beheaded, beheaded . . .”

  We returned to the hotel in a painful silence. I was half annoyed with Nobu and half embarrassed for having asked him to come along. It clearly had been a social error. Back at the hotel, he thanked me curtly for a wonderful evening, and made to go straight to his quarters. I couldn’t let him go like that, so I asked him what was wrong (as though I didn’t know). He turned round and said: “You think we are just joke?” I didn’t know what to say. My protestations that The Mikado was not meant to have anything to do with the real Japan sounded weak, and to him, no doubt, insincere. So I said: “We must seem very strange to you.” This made him even more furious.

  For a long time, relations with Nobu remained in deep freeze. He was perfectly polite, of course, and went about his daily round of polishing and cleaning, but there were no more late-night conversations about Baron Charlus and the Princesse de Guermantes. I slipped him extra rations of Ritz and Velveeta to take back to his family, which he only accepted because family obligation (and hunger) took precedence over pride. But all my attempts to thaw the ice invariably met with a sullen silence. Until one day, inexplicably, I found a note slipped under my door. It was a poem, translated into Nobu’s English. “For Sidney-san,” it read:

  If just a moment, my dear friend,

  I could have watched together with you

  The blossoms of the wild cherries

  On the mountain with the hills,

  I would not be so lonely like this.

  It was signed “Gentleman of Japan.” Only much later did I realize it was a famous poem from The Manyoshu.

  5

  GENERAL WILLOUGHBY’S OFFICE was unusually sumptuous for an Army officer’s. Not only was the floor covered in a thick Persian carpet, but there was a glass cabinet filled with rather delicate Meissen figurines of dancing ladies and shepherdesses. A small bronze bust of the German Kaiser stood on a brightly polished mahogany desk. I thought this was a bit odd, but put it down to the typical eccentricity of a professional military man.

  Willoughby spoke softly, with the trace of a foreign accent, like a European aristocrat in a Hollywood picture. He bore a certain resemblance to Ronald Colman. After enquiring after his friend, Mr. Capra, the General wished to know whether I was comfortable in Tokyo. I told him about my arrangements. “Ah, the Continental Hotel,” he said. “A trifle basic, I hear, but perfectly adequate, what? And what about your job? Satisfactory?” I told him the truth. Typing and stenography were all right for the time being, but I should very much like to be involved in something a bit more stimulating. “Oh, and what might that be, if I may be so bold?” I said I would like to be in cultural affairs. Perhaps it was the Meissen figurines, but I thought this might fall on sympathetic ears. A slight curl of his reddish lips suggested otherwise.

  “Stay away from cultural affairs, Mr. Vanoven. All this talk of giving the Japanese democracy, Mr. Vanoven. Quatsch, I say, quatsch! They have their own culture, an ancient culture. What is needed—and not only here, I might add—is discipline and order. We should be firm with them, and fair, firm and fair
!” Here his hand came down firmly on his desktop, as though giving the wooden surface a thorough thrashing. “But they have their own ways, you know. The Oriental mind is not suited to individualism, and all that sort of nonsense. Unfortunately, we have too many fellows in our midst who are bent on stirring up trouble. These clever Jews from New York, they think they can come here and tell us what to do. Well, I’m telling you, young man, the General will have nothing of it, nothing of it. He is sometimes too kind. He treats the Orientals like his children. But this revolutionary stuff must be crushed at the bud, crushed at the bud! So stay away from culture, Vanoven. That’s strictly for Jews and Communists. The Orientals have their own culture, a warrior culture. Perhaps we should do better to learn from them, instead of importing this Jewish rubbish from America.”

  I did what I always do when the topic of Jews comes up. I looked blank and tried to change the subject. My father’s family was Jewish, though all that was left of his Jewishness was his invariable grumpiness on Christmas Day. It meant nothing to me, and I had no intention of bringing my father’s background up in front of Willoughby. I told him I was certainly no Communist and would very much like to learn something from Japan. And I would be happiest to do something in culture and education, even if it meant starting at the bottom.

  The curled lip was now a picture of utter disgust, as though the General had discovered a cockroach scuttling across his polished desktop. I didn’t say so, but couldn’t help wondering how this philistine could possibly have been a friend of Mr. Capra. “Well,” he said, after rolling his eyes as if bracing himself for a disagreeable task. “If Frank sent you, you can’t be all rotten. I promise nothing, you understand, nothing.”

  Two weeks later, I was in the Civil Censorship Detachment. The official aim of SCAP’s new order in Japan was to see to it that the Japanese learned all about the benefits of democracy and free speech, but within certain limits. Our job was to make sure that those limits were observed. But since we didn’t like to be called censors, our department was rarely called by its official name. We were simply part of Civil Information. I don’t wish to leave the impression that we were cynical. General Willoughby was rather exceptional in his open disdain for the values we tried to impart. We were young in those days, and full of ideals. To lift this defeated nation from its feudal past seemed to us the noblest undertaking in the history of man. Instead of subjugating a conquered people, we would set them free. That is why we gave Japanese women the right to vote in elections, and why we let political prisoners, mostly Communists, out of jail, and encouraged the Japanese to organize trade unions, and made sure that school textbooks promoted democracy instead of militarism. It came as a great relief to the Japanese that we weren’t going around raping their wives and daughters, and we were just as relieved that they weren’t slashing us at every turn with their samurai swords. So, if we were keen to be their teachers, they were at least equally keen to be our students.

  6

  ALL THE BIG names in the Japanese movie establishment were there, in the main office of the Information Bureau at the General Headquarters of SCAP. I didn’t know any of them then, of course. They might as well have been a group of businessmen, except for one or two who wore floppy hats, as though about to embark on a fishing trip. But if a bomb had been dropped on the former Daiichi Life Insurance Building on that gray September morning, all the most famous directors and producers in Japan would have been wiped out in one blast. After a great deal of formality and smiling goodwill, the Japanese sat down in rows of uncomfortable wooden chairs in front of a desk placed on a kind of dais. From that elevated position, Major Richard (“Dick”) M. Murphy, a tall, ungainly man with red hair and pale Irish skin, went through the list of do’s and don’ts in the production of postwar Japanese motion pictures. The translator, George Ishikawa, later became a good friend of mine.

  The do’s included “showing Japanese in all walks of life cooperating to build a peaceful society.” Movies also had to reflect the new spirit of “individualism” and “democracy” and “respect for the rights of men and women.” Notes were diligently taken by studio secretaries, while their bosses made throaty noises that might well have signified assent, but one could never be entirely sure.

  Anything to do with the old spirit of “feudalism,” or “militarism,” was of course a no-no. Swordfight pictures, long a staple of the Japanese movie industry, were out, since they promoted “feudal loyalty.” When one of the directors asked for other examples of unacceptable “feudalism,” Murphy paused for a second, to ponder this question, and then mentioned images of what he called “Mount Fujiyama.” This caused a degree of confusion in the audience. “But Fuji-san,” growled one portly gentleman with oily hair, “is a symbol of our culture.” The Major smiled, and said very slowly, to make sure everyone understood, whether or not they had any English: “That is why we are here together, my friends, to change the culture, to foster a new spirit of democracy.” When another gentleman pointed out that the Fuji was his company crest, Major Murphy put it to him, with undiminished benevolence, that in that case perhaps the symbol should be changed to something else.

  If the Japanese were irritated, or perhaps a little nonplussed, they didn’t show it. On the contrary, most of them smiled back at the Major in the manner of grateful students. “Perhaps,” said a slim young man in a gray suit, “Major Murphy might be kind enough to suggest a few themes that would best suit the new age of democracy.” The Major, who had been a haberdasher in Black Foot, Idaho, in civilian life, was more than happy to oblige. “What about baseball?” he said, looking very proud of himself. “Now there’s a splendid theme. Baseball is a democratic sport. We play it, and now you play it too.” In fact, the Japanese had been playing it for many years before the war, but the Major wasn’t to know that. “Ah,” said the slim young man, whom I would soon get to know (it was the young Akira Kurosawa), “baseball.” “What did he say?” asked the balding producer. “Baseball,” Kurosawa replied, “films about baseball.” “Ah, yes,” said the producer, “baseball.” And everyone smiled.

  One of my happiest duties as secretary to Major Murphy was to visit the movie studios, where we spent many hours in smoky screening rooms vetting films for signs of “feudalism.” Watching endless reels of Japanese movies was a trial for the Major, who invariably used these occasions to catch up on lost sleep. For me it was an education. George Ishikawa would explain the action, in the way of a traditional storyteller, while I was all eyes. Gradually I began to see patterns in Japanese moviemaking. What had been baffling before started to make sense under George’s tutelage. It was a different way of looking, a different visual syntax, as it were: the discretion of Japanese camera angles, for example, keeping a distance even in scenes of great emotion, was actually more moving than the extreme close-ups which we are used to in the West. And stories meandered, following a poetic logic, instead of rushing from one scene to the next, tying up the narrative with a happy little knot. Japanese stories tended to be open-ended, like life.

  I’m afraid all this was lost on Major Murphy. Like so many Americans, he had fine ideals but no imagination. A born missionary, he never tired of lecturing the Japanese about great abstractions. I bet he even dreamed about “democracy” and “civic engagement.” Every so often, a new notion of how to implement these fine ideals would take hold of him, and become an obsession.

  One of these obsessions came to him when a script was submitted to our office about the romantic travails of a young woman. The story was unremarkable. It might have been a remake of many similar pictures. The girl’s father wants her to marry the son of his boss. She insists on marrying the man of her own choice. True love prevails. Murphy approved. Indeed, he was over the moon. “At last,” he cried, “the perfect expression of the new spirit of equality!” He loved the script so much that he summoned the filmmakers to his office for a special meeting. The director, Ichiro Miyagawa, was a veteran of some distinction. He listened patiently as Murphy
gave him advice on how to make the script even stronger. Why, said Murphy, whose face was shining with enthusiasm, did one never see Japanese men and women kiss in public? Wasn’t this a sign of feudalism? After all, he said, getting more and more agitated, “even the Japanese must kiss in private, so why be so sneaky about it? Why beat around the bush? Democracy is all about love, after all—open love, wholesome love, love of a spouse, love of family. That’s why it’s so important to include a scene of the couple kissing!”

  Miyagawa, whose previous work was less known for its romantic content than for its deftly staged scenes of fighting samurai, questioned whether the Japanese public was quite ready for such an unusual innovation. People might feel embarrassed and laugh. Murphy waved away these objections, as though addressing a stubborn child. “No, no, no,” he said, “it’s up to you to teach the public how to change their ways and build a democratic society.” Miyagawa’s producer, a small man with highly polished black shoes, patted the director on the knee and said something soothing in Japanese. “What did he say?” asked Murphy. George translated that they would do their best to make a democratic film. “Good,” said Murphy, “good, very good. Gentlemen, together we’ll get there. I just know we will. It’s been a pleasure to do business with you.”

  Less than a month later, Murphy and I traveled through the Tokyo suburbs in an Army car to see the movie actually being shot at the Oriental Peace Entertainment Company. The suburbs were slightly less ruined than the central parts of the city. But in many cases, white concrete storehouses were all that survived of what once had been fine mansions. The charcoal-burning buses were so full that people hung on the outside, like grapes to a vine. Men and women fluttered their paper fans to extract some coolness from the humid air, and swat away the insects that swarmed around the craters filled with stagnant water. Josephine Baker was singing somewhere on a radio set.