The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  I am often tempted to see the election of Kishi, that weak-chinned, buck-toothed, scheming bureaucrat, as the beginning of everything that went wrong with Japan, but I should have seen the signs of rot much earlier, back in those days when I was blinded by the innocence of my ideals. Perhaps the transformation of Japan was doomed from the beginning, doomed by arrogance and false expectations. How could Americans ever have believed that they could take an ancient culture and remake it in our own image by waving General MacArthur’s magic wand? Only a people lacking any sense of history or tragedy could fall into such hubris. Perhaps Tony Lucca was right: our presence in Japan hadn’t amounted to a can of beans. The occupation was no more than a ripple in the ocean of Japanese history.

  And yet, to my surprise, my old friend Nobuo Hotta, whose face was lined with all the sorrows of his country’s twentieth-century history, was strangely optimistic in those Red-baiting years of Kishi’s rise. Normally the most taciturn of men, he was actually quite animated when we met one night for drinks at the Paloma, his favorite little bar in Shinjuku, near the Hanazono Shrine. It was one of those magical Shinjuku nights. The air was hazy, like fine gauze, after the rains, and neon lights shimmered in the alleyways lined with bars. A strolling musician was strumming his guitar behind the public toilet. It was early still, and only one or two other people were sitting at the bar, chatting to Noriko, the Mama-san and keeper of many secrets.

  “Kishi?” said Hotta. “I knew Kishi back in Manchuria. He was a member of the Ri Koran Fan Club, you know. A perfectly nice man, with beautiful manners, always smiling, and he had the softest of hands, almost like a woman’s. You’d never have guessed that he was responsible for thousands of Chinese slaves being worked to death in the steel mills and coal mines of Manchukuo. But don’t you worry. He’s overplayed his hand this time. The Japanese people won’t be deceived again. You’ll see, the people will rise against him. You Americans may think you can get away with forcing a security treaty down our throats. You think we will allow you to keep all your bombers on our soil, and aircraft carriers in our ports. Well, think again. Kishi doesn’t seem to mind signing away our birthright for a pot of gold. He doesn’t care if Japan becomes one huge military base for Yankee imperialism. But the Japanese people won’t take it. Not this time. If Kishi signs this treaty, there will be a revolution. This is the most important moment in our history, the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life. We can be rebels too, you know. Just you watch, the revolution is finally going to come.”

  I didn’t like the way he said “you Americans,” and told him so. I was against the security treaty, too. I hated the arrogance of the Americans. First we preach peace and democracy and make the Japanese into a nation of pacifists, and now we tell them it was all a mistake, and we must be allies in another war, against the Communists. I was as outraged as Hotta. He immediately apologized. “I’m sorry, Sidney. I know you’re really one of us.” We drank another whiskey to that, and another, and another, until we walked into the velvety light of a Shinjuku dawn, arm-in-arm, like old comrades, singing the Internationale in Japanese.

  To dispel my gloom, I did what I always do when I’m depressed: I spent more and more time at the movies. I had discovered the charm of Japanese gangster pictures. Rather than face another sleepless night in my apartment, I would sit through the all-night shows, with the movie addicts and the drunken bums watching my yakuza heroes taking on the modern world. One night it was Kensuke Fujii in his Sword of Justice series. Fujii was handsome in a dark, brooding way (much later I found out that he was a gentleman of my persuasion with a liking for big American boys who would rough him up on his holidays in Honolulu; it was a good thing the fans never found out).

  The story line was always the same: the bad guys wore suits, like bankers or Chicago mobsters, and killed their enemies with guns. Fujii and his gang were kimonoed traditionalists, whose weapon of choice was the Japanese sword. The bad guys made their money in crooked real estate deals, financial scams, and the rough end of the construction business. The good yakuza deplored these practices. In the inevitable last scene, Fujii, provoked beyond endurance by the bad guys, set forth with his sword on the always suicidal mission to restore justice to this world by taking on the baddies alone. This was the moment when the fans, who had been slumbering in the stale air of cigarette smoke and clogged toilets, stirred in their seats and shouted their encouragements at the screen: “Go and get them, Ken-san!” or, “What a guy!” or, “Die for Japan!” But more and more, in the spring of 1960, I heard variations on these themes, which had little to do with Fujii’s yakuza stories, except perhaps in spirit: “Scrap the Treaty!” “Down with U.S. Imperialism!” “Go and get Kishi!”

  Perhaps wise old Hotta was right after all. Perhaps there really would be a revolution this time, staged from below by the Japanese people themselves. I welcomed it. God, how I welcomed it. In my excitement during those magical few weeks in May, I jotted the following notes in my diary.

  May Day: Workers and students demonstrated in a carnival spirit, carrying huge effigies of Kishi, an ogre with dragon eyes and monstrous fangs.

  May 19: Socialist members of the Diet barricade the entrance to the plenary session to stop Kishi and his fellow conservatives from voting for the new Security Treaty. Kishi orders the police to clear out his opponents with force. The speaker of the house is pushed toward the rostrum. The treaty is passed without the Socialists.

  June 10: Eisenhower’s press secretary James C. Hagerty and U.S. Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II are mobbed in their car on the route from Haneda Airport. They have to be evacuated by military helicopter.

  June 15: Students bearing long wooden poles, like medieval lancers, tried to break through the South Gate of the Diet Building, while others, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and ordinary citizens, streamed toward the Parliament from all directions. Some moved in a festival spirit, carrying banners and grotesque puppets of Kishi and Ike, chanting: “Washoi! Washoi! Scrap the treaty! Kishi out! Kishi out! Down with the foreign invasion!” Others were more like an army, marching in strict order of hierarchy, senior students before sophomores, sophomores before freshmen, with grim-faced officers of the Zengakuren student federation shouting slogans through their megaphones. Others still, linking arms, formed part of a great impenetrable snake dance, coiling through the avenues leading to the Diet, where the riot police were waiting for them, helmeted, like samurai warriors, with batons and shields.

  It was more exhilarating than any Shinto festival I had ever seen, more thrilling even than the naked festivals in the rural northeast. Here was a people on the move, their excitement kept from boiling over by a cultural talent for ceremony. Several hundred thousand delirious young people felt their power as they approached the rulers of their nation. This could so easily have erupted in massive violence. But on the cusp of total mayhem, the surging crowds were held back by a sense of discipline that made their show of power all the more awe-inspiring.

  I was dying to join in, to merge with the demonstrators, to lose myself in their collective delirium, my sweat mixed with theirs, my body submerged in the zigging-zagging dance of rebellion. Here, at this moment, in this crowd, I felt fully alive. There was no way I could have joined the snake dancers; they were as tightly packed as a football scrum. If you got in their way, you would be swept away as if by a tidal wave. I tried to join the marchers, but where could I fit in? With the sophomores, or the seniors? With the Tokyo University students, or those from Waseda, each with their own banners? On and on they went, marching right past me, shouting: “Foreign invaders, go home!” Individual faces, contorted not in rage but in ecstasy, got lost in a whirl of bodies and faces, but my eyes met, just for an instant, with those of a handsome university student, just as he was denouncing my country. He suddenly looked apologetic, even embarrassed, as he swept by me, and shouted over his shoulder: “I am sorry!”

  I should have gone after him. I desperate
ly wanted to tell him to stop feeling sorry. His cause was just. I was on his side. But he had already been swept along by the tide, to make way for the next churning wave of chanting, dancing, marching, running crowds. I tried to keep pace, by following the sea of people to the Diet, cheering them on all the while. I was excited by the force of this rebellion, which contained a real hope of change, of reviving that sense of limitless possibility that I felt when I first arrived in Japan. But I also felt a sense of impotence and frustration, like a lone spectator at a massive orgy.

  Near the South Gate, the picture became fuzzier. Battering against police barricades, discipline appeared to be breaking down. Even as some of the students were crashing the gate with their battering rams, others were throwing their bodies at the riot police with a kind of recklessness that had to end badly. It was the first time that I saw fresh blood, washing down the young faces of people who had got too close to the police batons. One policeman, trapped in the midst of a group of students wearing headbands that read Victory or die, was in danger of being lynched. A young woman was trampled on, screaming for help. A new group I hadn’t seen before joined in the melee. Young men with thick peasant faces, dressed in army fatigues, hacked their way through the student ranks with wooden kendo swords. They did so with the angry relish of country boys who couldn’t wait to teach those pampered students a lesson. I didn’t know it then, but they were the “patriotic” hoodlums working for Yoshio Taneguchi, the same man who had helped Yoshiko with her visa problem.

  Whether it was one of Taneguchi’s thugs, or one of the students, I will never know. My memory is a blur of disjointed images. I remember the trampled girl screaming and I tried to reach out to her. I remember someone shouting, “Down with the Anglo-American devils!” I remember it because it seemed like a strange thing to say. Why Anglo-American devils? What did the British have to do with any of this? And I remember seeing a black car passing the demonstrators in the direction of Hibiya Park, away from the Diet. A woman, sticking her head out of the window, was calling out to the students. “Keep going,” she cried, “students of Japan, keep going! We are proud of you!” So many things were going on at the same time, and happening so quickly, that I can’t be sure of this, but I could swear that that woman was Yoshiko.

  The next thing I remembered was waking up with a splitting headache in the St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tsukiji. I hadn’t felt the blow to the back of my head. I must have lost consciousness instantly. Dr. Ivanov, a tall Russian doctor, smiled down at me, as though to a wayward child. “That’ll teach you never to get involved in Japanese business,” he said in a faint Russian accent. “You’ll end up being crushed.” I was hardly in the mood for lectures of this kind, and was disposed to dislike this Dr. Ivanov. But as I slowly recovered from the blow to my head, and he told me stories of his life, I began to like him. Born in Harbin, ten years before the Japanese took control of Manchuria, Ivanov had come to Tokyo as a medical student in 1940. “I’ve done very well in Japan,” he said, “but that’s because I’ve always known my place. I’ll probably die in this country, but I know I’ll always be a guest, an interloper, a permanent outsider. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way I like it. I don’t want to belong anywhere. I don’t bother others, and nobody bothers me. If you wish to stay here, you’d better remember that, my friend.”

  I thanked him for his advice. He laughed. “You’re an American, right?” I confirmed that indeed I was. He began to chuckle. “I was a kind of American once,” he said, laughing more loudly. “I died many horrible deaths as an American.” He was laughing so much, I thought he would choke. It turned out that he used to earn his school fees in Tokyo during the war by playing Americans in Japanese movies. “I was very good as a bad guy.” I asked him which films. “Oh,” he smiled, “you wouldn’t know. Even the Japanese have forgotten most of them.” I wanted to know whether any of them starred Ri Koran? “Ri Koran,” he shouted, “she was my idol, already in Harbin. Oh, I can tell you a lot of stories about Ri Koran. She had a Russian lover, you know?”

  I didn’t know and was about to ask him for more details. I wanted to hear all about the things she had refused to talk to me about. Whenever I mentioned the war, or China, or the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, she would say something about the need for peace and switch the subject. After several attempts, I simply gave up asking. But Dr. Ivanov was hardly more forthcoming. Instead of answering my questions, he started to sing, very softly, staring out of the hospital window at the tiled rooftops of the Tsukiji fish market. A blue neon advertisement for a cigarette blinked on and off on a tall building in the distance.

  “ ‘Shina no yoru,’” he sang in his Russian baritone, “ ‘China nights, ah China nights . . . the junk floating upstream . . .’ ” I recognized the words. It was one of my favorite Japanese songs, even though Yoshiko hated to sing it. So I joined in: “ ‘the ship of dreams, China nights, nights of our dreams, ah, China nights, I dream of my homeland, so far, so sweet, I dream of you . . .’ ”

  PART THREE

  1

  THE ONE THING I can’t stand is the coffee, that thick Arab coffee which sticks to the palate like liquid mud. Not that the prison food is much good in general, a dull routine of watery lentil soup and stale Arab bread, and, with luck, once a week, a kebab of skinny meat from who knows what animal; the Arab prisoners call it Roumieh rat, after our present abode in the fragrant pine-forested hills east of Beirut. We can’t actually see the city from where we are. We can’t in fact see anything at all from our cell. The window is too high, letting in just a tantalizing sliver of light which, late in the afternoon, casts a reddish glow on the ceiling while leaving us in the dark. If one were able to climb up and look through the window, one might catch a glimpse of the courtyard where they shoot the poor wretches from death row. You know when it’s about to happen when the cries echo around the prison: Allahu akhbar! Allahu akhbar! Sometimes you’ll hear the man about to be executed cry out, begging for his life. Then, a volley of gunfire, followed by silence, complete silence, one of the rare moments in this hellhole when there is no sound at all. One savors it, like a cigarette after a good meal.

  The food, as I said, is pretty miserable. But more than anything, I miss a decent cup of coffee, the weak tasty kind we call “American” in Tokyo, not the sweet mud that the Arabs like. I’m convinced that taste is a reflection of national character. And national character is shaped by the weather. Our crisp climate gives us Japanese a taste for limpidity and subtlety which foreigners often mistake for blandness. That’s why Japanese love the plain unadorned taste of tofu, soft and white, like a woman’s breast. It matches the mildness of our four seasons. The Arabs are a desert people, used to the pitiless sun beating down on them. They aren’t blessed with the clarity of our seasons, and so they find comfort in the opaque, the secretive, the cloying, just like their coffee.

  Still, I musn’t complain. After the first eight months, our conditions were much improved. Roumieh was built in 1971—one year before our triumph—to hold about fifteen hundred men, including the boys in the juvenile wing. We now share our temporary address with five thousand men. Being stuffed into a cell so full of guys that there is no room at night for everyone to lie down on the concrete floor is pretty unpleasant, especially if you’re a newcomer, or pissoir, as the new boys are called here. They are called that because they have to sleep sitting upright, knees drawn up, next to the toilet. This is actually just a stinking hole in the floor, which gets slopped out twice a week, by the pissoir of course. If it overflows, as it almost always does, the pissoir is held responsible by the cell boss and gets a beating. To avoid this punishment, the pissoir will have to mop up the slimy muck with his own shirt. Hence also, possibly, my allergy to Arab coffee; it reminds me of my first months in Roumieh. And my cell boss wasn’t as bad as some. Khalil al-Beiruti had murdered a family of eight in Saida—some matter of family honor. He wasn’t a bad sort, more the elder brother type who would take care o
f you, if you didn’t cross him, and did what he wanted, like washing his feet or massaging his hairy back at night. Other cell bosses were worse. Morioka’s boss used his underlings as footstools. Another notorious lifer, Mahmoud, insisted on having his ass scrubbed.

  They were a mixed bunch, the hundred-odd guys in my cell: professional hit men, drug smugglers, rapists, forgers, kidnappers, bank robbers, murderers; and then there were the “politicals,” revolutionaries of various stripes, some religious, some not, a few Palestinians, usually picked on by the other Arabs, an Australian of Lebanese descent who had hijacked a bus, and so on. The addicts were the worst, for they screamed at night. I was lucky in a way. Japanese were exotic, and as members of the Japanese United Red Army, the victors of the battle of Lydda Airport, we were treated with a certain respect. But rules were rules and we too had to pay our dues as pissoirs.

  Things are better now. I share my cell with three other Japanese commandos: Morioka Akio, Nishiyama Masaki, and Kamei Ichiro. We try to keep ourselves as clean as we can, picking the lice from each other’s hair, giving each other rubdowns with a wet rag. The scorpions can kill, so we take care not to lie down without careful scrutiny of the floor. The fleas are the worst. You just can’t get rid of them, however many you manage to kill. This takes a certain finesse: you maneuver the little pest between your thumbnails, and crack its hard little spine, producing a trickle of human blood. Satisfying, to be sure, but insufficient. Fleas resist extermination. My legs are red and swollen to twice their normal size because of the fleas, which drive me half mad. Strangely, Kamei and Nishiyama are plagued by lice, but are left alone by the fleas. I don’t know which are a greater torment. But catching the lice is a little easier.