The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  Niven, meanwhile, became steadily more inebriated and, despite my protestations, made sure I kept up with him all the way. Still no word about the program. Instead, he talked endlessly about himself, moving his head uncomfortably close to mine. He had been “very political” as a student at Waseda, he confided, “but, you know, 1960 and all that, we were young and innocent.” I indicated that I understood perfectly. He had had ambitions once to make serious films, serious art films, like that Frenchman. I tried to be helpful. Did he mean Jean-Luc Godard? “That’s the one. But, you know, in Japan, there is no chance of that. You’ll soon find out. We all start with fine ideals. Then you grow up, and you see just what the real world is made of. You’ll find out soon enough yourself. Before that, my advice to you: have a ball.” When he launched into a mawkish account of his recent divorce I nodded to show that I was still with him, while trying hard to think of other things, far removed from that dreadful bar.

  I left him at about two o’clock in the morning, slumped over the bar in a stupor, occasionally waking up with a jolt, murmuring “Mama” to the woman behind the counter. I felt depressed as I walked into the street. It had been raining and the asphalt under the expressway was giving off steam, which reminded me in a curious way of the Mountain of Dread. The idea of working for this hopeless producer, after my heady days with Ban-chan, was too awful to contemplate.

  But it turned out that I had underestimated him. A week after our drunken encounter, I was finally introduced to the presenter. Niven had organized a lunch in one of those stiff little French restaurants in Azabu Juban. In came a small, shapely woman in a yellow miniskirt. Her hair was puffed up in a permanent wave, like a luxuriant fur hat. She sat down. Niven explained my presence. She removed her sunglasses, and fixed me in her gaze. She had the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen in a woman: large and luminous, more Thai or Indonesian than Japanese. They looked so foreign that I assumed she had had them fixed by a plastic surgeon. “Meet Yamaguchi-san,” said David Niven, beaming, like a conjurer who has just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

  After I had been scrutinized, she turned to the producer and told him how excited she was about the show. “Do you know,” she said, bubbling over with enthusiasm, “I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, ever since I was a little girl in China. I always wanted to show people the real world, what it was actually like, what was really going on.” She sighed. “But . . . the movies intervened. I never wanted to be a movie actress. It was foisted on me against my will.” She brightened up, all smiles. “But now, at last, I’ll be able to do what I’ve always wanted, to be a real journalist. Are you a journalist?”

  She addressed this question to me. No, I said, alas not. I made movies. “Oh,” she said, with a note of disappointment. Niven quickly explained that I would be responsible for shaping the programs, writing the scripts, making everything coherent. She would be the reporter. “Yes,” she said, full of enthusiasm once again, “I’ll be the reporter. That’s the important thing. You take care of the rest.”

  I asked what precisely we were going to be reporting. Niven looked at Yamaguchi-san, who had taken a smart-looking black reporter’s notebook from her shiny white leather purse. She put it beside her plate, as though she were about to take notes of our conversation. Niven said: “The program, which will be aired in the afternoons, is aimed at the intelligent housewife, the housewife who wishes to be informed about important events in the world.”

  Yes, Yamaguchi-san confirmed, that was exactly right. Housewives were the perfect audience, for they represented the best hope for mankind. “You see, Sato-san,” she explained, “men are addicted to violence and destruction. They are forever going to war. But women are different, don’t you agree, Sato-san? Women have to protect their children. That’s why they are our best hope. I’m quite sure of that. Only the women can stop our men from blowing up our beautiful planet. Our first program will be about the Vietnam War.”

  David Niven nodded. “I couldn’t tell you this before,” he said, again with that air of the professional conjurer, “because we had to keep it confidential, but now I can divulge the full title of our new show: What a Weird World: Yamaguchi Yoshiko Reports from the Front Line.”

  7

  I HATED SAIGON on first sight. It was only May, but I felt as if I were being choked inside a warm wet blanket. Every time I stepped out of the hotel, I was accosted by Chinamen with gold teeth trying to sell me things: fake antiques, local currency, girls. The food tasted like soap, and there were Yanks everywhere, treating the city like their private whorehouse, big guys with red faces, like hogs, wrapping their fat pink arms around one or two or three girls, yelling and hooting to one another like savages. It brought back all the worst memories of my native town. But I was older now. I no longer admired these barbarians, not even secretly. I could see them for what they were, and I hated them for raping an Asian country, corrupting the people with their mindless greed. The sooner the Viet Cong took over this city and kicked out the foreign imperialists, the better.

  I tried to convey this to Yamaguchi-san, but she warned me not to be “too political.” The program had to be suitable for television. Forget about all that “theoretical stuff,” she said. We had to find a way to get the Vietnamese people to communicate their feelings straight to the hearts of our viewers.

  This was typical of her approach. Although my first impression of Yamaguchi-san was of an airhead out of her depth, I soon began to regard her with more respect. On the flight from Tokyo to Bangkok, she told us about her experiences in China during the war. We Japanese should learn from the past, she said, and be on the side of the common Asian people against foreign aggressors. Her heart was clearly in the right place, even if she was politically naive. There was a purity about her that I hadn’t expected. All she needed was a bit of education.

  She was certainly a diligent reporter, going about in her light blue safari suit. Her first port of call was the Foreign Correspondents Club, where she interviewed Japanese journalists. But political or not, I felt it was vital to get some shots of the front lines, and an interview with an actual Viet Cong. She agreed. The Japanese Embassy, represented by a nervous little man named Tanaka, said it would be far too dangerous to leave Saigon. Especially at night, he warned us, the Viet Cong took control of the villages, and you never knew what might happen. Several Japanese reporters had already been shot. The Japanese government would not vouch for our safety. I thought this was rubbish. And Yamaguchi-san, bless her heart, wouldn’t take no for an answer either. We had to talk to ordinary Vietnamese, she insisted, and find out how they felt about the war.

  So in the end, after much protestation from Tanaka, a trip was arranged to a village about fifteen kilometers out of Saigon. The embassy provided us with an interpreter and we hired five security guards. I went ahead to organize the shoot, along with the cameraman, a silent type named Shino, and Higuchi, the soundman, who loved to talk. Yamaguchi-san followed in a separate convoy. She was dressed in a long silk Vietnamese dress and a straw rice planter’s hat. The children touched her sleeves, as though they were made of gold. The adults also looked as though they wanted to touch her, but were too shy to do so. I found it all rather embarrassing, but David Niven had insisted on the costume. “Good TV,” he said.

  As we were setting up our equipment, we were surrounded by children, who were gibbering at us like monkeys. “They think you’re Chinese,” explained the interpreter. Higuchi shook his head vigorously and said in English: “No, no, Japanese. Japanese!” He proceeded to fold bits of colored paper into bird shapes to distribute among the children, who immediately picked them apart. Yamaguchi-san confused matters further by speaking to the villagers in Mandarin Chinese. A toothless old woman in simple black pants was dragged out from one of the huts to meet us. She spoke a few words of some Chinese dialect. Yamaguchisan spoke to her very slowly. The old woman bared her betel-stained gums in a blood red grin and reported back to the villagers that we were Japanese. The
interpreter said, a little sourly, that she had told them that already.

  Villagers, all dressed in the same simple black clothes as the old woman, surrounded Yamaguchi-san. Whenever they spoke into her microphone, they turned solemn. No, there were no Viet Cong here, they insisted. The Americans? Yes, they saw the foreign soldiers sometimes. A thin man in glasses and a wispy beard—a schoolteacher perhaps?—spoke up: “Foreigners have tried to conquer our country for thousands of years. The Khmer, the Thai, the Chinese, the French, the Americans. What’s the difference? They always leave in the end. It makes no difference to us. This is our land, the land of our ancestors. We stay here. They will go.” But surely, said Yamaguchi, war was a terrible thing. The thought of all the innocent people getting killed, the women, the children . . . The man in glasses shrugged his shoulders, and quickly slipped away. Shino, the cameraman, stopped for a change of film. Yamaguchi-san waited until he was ready, took a little boy with holes in his shorts in her arms, and said: “I pray that this child will live in peace.”

  The program was a great success. I wasn’t entirely pleased with it. Too many questions remained unasked. But it was better than most programs of this type, and that was entirely due to Yamaguchi-san. She was a professional actress, of course, who knew all the tricks of her trade—the costumes and all that. But she was sincere. Her feeling for the people she interviewed was real, and this, somehow, came across. I even managed to make a few political points about U.S. imperialism. We used some powerful newsreel footage of Americans bombing Hanoi. All in all, not too bad for a daytime TV show for housewives.

  I can’t remember who first suggested doing a program about the Palestinians. But I found it quite strange that everyone was talking about Vietnam, while ignoring the Palestinian struggle. This would have been round about the time that an old acquaintance from university came back into my life. His name was Hayashi, and he used to be in Okuni’s theater crowd. We lost touch after he dropped out of school. I heard rumors that he had become “political.” But I had no particular interest in his life, until we met again, by sheer coincidence, one night at Pepé le Moko’s.

  Ban-chan was treating me, as usual. He was holding forth about politics and art and life. There were three or four other people drinking at the bar. I didn’t recognize any of them. “Misawa,” said Banchan, already swaying on his barstool, “when are you going to do something big?” I protested that I was writing programs for a popular TV show. It was as if he hadn’t heard me. He simply repeated: “When are you going to do something big? If you don’t do something big soon, you’ll be old, fat, and finished before you know it. In fact, you’re well on your way already, wasting your time on rubbish. If you haven’t done something big before you’re thirty, you might as well be dead.”

  This was typical of Ban-chan. Perhaps he was just sour that I wasn’t working for him anymore, that I’d flown the coop. I sensed someone stirring at the other end of the bar. A man was lumbering toward us, holding a bottle. “Hey!” he shouted at Ban-chan. “This guy’s my old friend.” I didn’t recognize the man at first. His hair had grown very long, and he wore dark sunglasses, like a gangster. “What the fuck!” screamed Ban-chan, as the bottle crashed over his head. I was about to punch the guy, when he turned to me: “Sato, don’t you remember me?” It was Hayashi. I was furious, but had no idea what to do. Banchan lay on the floor with blood all over his face. I should have tackled Hayashi right there. But I was never any good at fighting. So I stammered that we had to get Ban-chan to the hospital. To his credit, Mizoguchi immediately took charge, carrying Ban-chan out of the bar, into a taxi, and to the nearest hospital, where he was quickly patched up. I felt useless, even a little treacherous. What saved my face was Banchan’s generosity. An hour later we were back at Pepé le Moko drinking from his whiskey bottle. “Loyalty to an old comrade should be rewarded,” he declared, and raised his glass to Hayashi.

  Hayashi liked drinking in the Korean bars in Asakusa. Though not, as far as I knew, Korean himself, he seemed to feel comfortable with Koreans. While drinking that thick milky saké they like, he told me that he had joined an action group fighting against police harassment of the Koreans. “Discrimination against the Koreans,” he said, “is the core of our rotten, oppressive Emperor System.” This was one of Hayashi’s favorite riffs: the Emperor System. “If we don’t smash the Emperor System, our country will never be free,” he said. I nodded my agreement, peering into his dark glasses. Not that I felt so strongly about the Koreans, or indeed the Emperor System, but I nodded to humor him, without wishing to give him too much encouragement to ride on this hobbyhorse. Hayashi finished his drink and locked arms with the Korean barman, who smiled indulgently and poured us another round of drinks. Hayashi assured the barman that the revolution would surely come.

  “You know,” he said, after we sat down on a park bench near the Kannon Temple, “I talk about the Emperor System in our country, but the problem is really much bigger than that.” His breath smelled of garlic, from all the kimchi we had just eaten at the Korean bar. A few homeless men were settling in for the night on the benches beside us. There was a distant murmur of traffic crossing the Azuma Bridge. One of the men was already snoring. A flickering streetlamp was reflected in Hayashi’s dark glasses. “We, too, are part of a discriminated minority.”

  “We?” I said, genuinely surprised.

  “Think of it this way,” he went on. “Oppression is a matter of concentric circles. Koreans are oppressed by our Emperor System, but all Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, and Arabs are oppressed by the capitalist American system. Our government is just a slave to American imperialism. That’s why it’s not enough to have a revolution in Japan. We must think like internationalists. To smash the American system, the revolution has to be international. We must stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the armed struggle with the oppressed peoples of the world.” Hayashi dropped his voice and drew closer, breathing more garlic into my face. “Sato,” he said, “even though we didn’t know each other very well at university, I always figured you were serious. You should join our struggle. Why don’t you come to our meeting next week?”

  Armed struggle. All the peoples of the world. This was heady stuff. I asked him what group he belonged to. He looked around, in case there were spies lurking in the bushes of Asakusa Park. There was nobody except for the sleeping men surrounded by empty bottles and broken glass, twinkling like diamonds in the neon light. “The Japanese Red Army,” he whispered, as he grabbed my hand in the same way he locked arms with the Korean barman. I was suddenly reminded of Muto, our school bully, squeezing the hand of his willing slave.

  I never went to that meeting. As usual, I chickened out. I guess I wasn’t ready for armed struggle. In fact, I was afraid of it and avoided meeting Hayashi for a long time, feeling mildly disgusted with my own timidity. But his words had had an effect on me. They kept churning in my head. What he said about internationalism made sense. At least Hayashi dared to think beyond the narrow confines of our island country. When he told me on a later occasion that he was born in Manchuria, I wasn’t surprised.

  Which brings me back to Yamaguchi-san. The more I saw of her, the more she impressed me. Perhaps it was she who suggested doing a program on the Palestinians. In any case, we discussed the idea as soon as we heard the news of the September hijackings in 1970. You had to admire the gumption of those guys who managed to take over four civilian aircraft, divert them to the Jordanian desert, take the Jewish passengers as hostages, and blow the planes up in front of the world press. The commandos were from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, an acronym I would get to know well.

  David Niven was not at all keen on our plan to interview the Palestinian freedom fighters. He told Yamaguchi-san that she would never be able to resume her movie career if she made such a program. Didn’t she know that Hollywood was entirely owned by Jews? Or that all the international film distributors were Jews? They would never forgive her. But she bravely stood
up to these pressures. “I don’t care,” she said. “My movie career is over, anyway. I’m a journalist, and a good journalist should go where the story is. We must get to the Palestinians.” She said this with an air of impatience, as though we had an immediate flight to catch.

  So off we went, to Beirut, three months after the hijacking. High above the clouds, Yamaguchi-san reminisced, as usual, about her China days. She had always admired the Jews, she said. In fact, her best friend at school was a Jewess from Russia, whose father ran a bakery in Mukden, but later turned out to have been a Soviet spy. “Didn’t the Jews really pull all the strings in Manchuria?” I asked. Her lips parted in astonishment. “No,” she said, “we did. Our Kanto Army was in charge.” I repeated what I had heard from Professor Sekizawa, that the Jews had manipulated the great powers behind the scenes. “Well,” she said. “They had to survive, didn’t they? The Jews suffered a lot, after all. The Germans even put pressure on us to arrest the Jews. But we didn’t.” I said that perhaps we should have. That would have spared the world a lot of trouble.

  The first time I stepped into the street from our hotel and smelled the heady melange of coffee, shwarma kebab, and popcorn, I fell in love with Beirut, this city of cities, where you ate the best food in the world and saw the most beautiful women: Maronite girls with olive skins and short skirts; long-haired Iraqi girls; Iranian girls in tight jeans; and Palestinian beauties in keffiyehs. Beirut belonged to the world. Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Europeans, Russians, and Asians freely mixed in the hotels and bars along Hamra, the main boulevard. But there was another city too, just under the surface glitter, and just as international, a revolutionary city where the future of the world was forged by men and women of all races. On any given day, you could meet Latin American comrades, freedom fighters from South Africa or Chad, French anarchists, Danish Maoists, German revolutionary Leninists, Iranian Marxists, Kurdish nationalists. But all the Marxist theory, which had always bored me in Japan, was just so much talk. The important thing was the Palestinian armed struggle. This was not just a local struggle, of no concern to others, but internationalist to its very core. By taking on the Zionists, the Palestinians had taken on the whole Western world and its capitalist imperialist system.