by Ian Buruma
Beirut reminded Yamaguchi-san of Shanghai. “This city smells of freedom,” she said, sniffing the air as we raced to our first appointment through a maze of streets in a suicidal taxi drive. The PFLP office was on the sixth floor of a white apartment building in West Beirut, an area that was policed by the Palestinians, so we felt quite safe. The first thing I saw, as we entered the PFLP office, was a large poster of Chairman Mao. I despise racial chauvinism, and I know that what I’m about to confess smacks of bourgeois sentimentalism, but this poster of the greatest Asian of the twentieth century gave me a sense of ethnic pride, as though something of the heroic Chinese revolution had rubbed off on me, as a fellow Asian. We were greeted by a stout man with a thick mustache and a friendly smile. His name was Abu Bassam. He kissed me on both cheeks in the Arab manner and took my hand into both of his, which were warm and soft. These were the hands of the man who had pulled off the hijacking of four planes, including a TWA plane full of Jews.
“You are my good friends,” he said in a deep, warm voice which made one feel at home at once. “What can we do for you?” We told him that we would like to interview Leila Khaled, the hijacker of the TWA plane. She had just been released by the British in exchange for a Zionist prisoner. Abu Bassam made a clucking sound. “That might not be so simple,” he said. “Look.” He pointed out the window, where a vapor trail was painting an elegant white streak in the clear blue sky. “The lives of our commandos are never safe. The Zionists are observing us all the time.” I heard a few shots outside and white puffs like bits of cotton wool drifted slowly upwards. “Useless,” said Abu Bassam. “Just for show, to boost our morale.” Yamaguchi-san looked disappointed. “We will be very careful,” she promised. Abu Bassam stroked his mustache and invited us to have some of the sweets presented on a round silver plate.
After taking one himself and slowly licking the sugar off his finger with a remarkably pink tongue, he pointed at Yamaguchi-san’s black and white Palestinian scarf. “You are wearing our keffiyeh.” He laughed. “We have many Japanese volunteers helping us in our struggle against the Zionists. Why don’t you make a film about them? That would be more interesting for Japanese television, no?”
We told him that the Japanese volunteers would surely be of interest, but what really interested us much more was the life of Palestinian guerrillas. Perhaps someone could show us around a refugee camp. The world should know about the heroism of the Palestinian people. Abu Bassam chuckled and said: “We are not heroes, but ordinary human beings. All we want is to live like other peoples, in freedom and peace.” He then told us that we should talk to one of the Japanese volunteers first. They could put us in the picture. We expressed our gratitude for his kind consideration. But what about Leila Khaled? “Comrades,” he said, “our home is your home. Your film will help us in our struggle. And I will help you to make it a good film. We will stage a military exercise for you. You can shoot that.” But what about Leila Khaled?
Yamaguchi-san was clearly not going to take no for an answer. She was turning into a first-rate reporter. I would never have dared to insist as she did. I don’t want to sound sexist, but she was also a beautiful woman. Who could refuse her anything, once those great dark eyes had cast their spell? Abu Bassam shouted something in Arabic and stood up from his desk. I had not even touched my coffee. He kissed me, turned to Yamaguchi-san, and touched his chest in a gesture of respect. “Patience, my friends,” he said. “If you can walk, why run?”
We found a message at the hotel. We were told to wait the next morning at the Café Balthus, in Jeanne d’Arc Street. After sitting there for about half an hour, a skinny young man in a light blue shirt came in, greeted us, and told us to follow him. We took a taxi to the outskirts of West Beirut, where we stopped, and after the young man had looked around to make sure we hadn’t been followed, he hailed another taxi to drive us to a white apartment block a little farther west. A man in aviator shades stood outside the door, greeted us, and took us round the back, where a battered blue Renault was waiting to take us to yet another place, about twenty minutes away. In the car, Yamaguchi-san told us stories about Harbin in the 1940s, how risky it was to get around the city. Japanese were always in danger of being kidnapped or killed by Chinese guerrillas. “We used to call them bandits,” she explained. “How stupid we were. Now I know that they were simply fighting for their country. Just like the Palestinians.”
Leila Khaled was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Rather petite, with delicate hands, she had the sweetest smile, pure, like a child’s. A keffiyeh was wrapped around her head, almost like a hijab. But her most striking feature were her eyes—dark, narrow, catlike, like those of a lynx. Even when she smiled, revealing a row of perfect white teeth, her eyes expressed a bottomless well of sorrow. Like all Palestinian refugees in Beirut, she had been expelled from her home by the Zionists. Her longing for home was so great that she forced the pilot of the TWA plane to fly low over Haifa, so she could see where she was born.
The interview did not last long. Leila’s time was limited and to linger put her in unnecessary danger. But Yamaguchi-san and I were so moved by her sincerity that we barely spoke a word on the way back to the hotel. There was a gentleness about her that made it almost impossible to imagine her as a commando, armed with hand grenades and a Kalashnikov. Leila talked to us about her hatred of killing and war. She didn’t hate the Jews, she said, just the Zionists, for they had taken away her home and expelled her people. Unfortunately, she explained, armed struggle was the only way to regain the freedom of her people. Yamaguchi-san asked her about the lives of innocent people. Was it fair to put them in danger? A slight frown swept like a shadow over Leila’s delicate features. “All death is terrible,” she said. “I even cry over the death of a bird. But unfortunately you cannot fight a war without casualties. We are weak. Our enemy is strong, with a large army, backed by the Americans. Still, we have to fight. For there is no other way to make the world pay attention to our suffering. You see, I’m prepared to die. I would even welcome it. Dying for your people is the most beautiful thing a person can do. Sacrifice for the sake of justice is what separates humans from the wild beasts.”
Her words made me feel unworthy. I had never been prepared to sacrifice myself for anything. Instead, I had fretted about my career in the movies, about my sex life, about money. While Palestinians were dying for their freedom, I was making pink movies for dirty old men in cinemas smelling of piss.
Yamaguchi-san appeared for dinner that night with her keffiyah wrapped around her head in Leila’s style. We had a Lebanese meal, with delicious red wine from the Bekaa Valley. I could see that she was still shaken by the day’s events. We spoke about Leila’s bravery. I told her about my sense of unworthiness. She looked away. I could see tears welling up in her eyes. “To lose your home is the worst thing that can happen to a human being,” she said. “I lost my home, too, you know. And I betrayed my people.”
I said: “But you are Japanese.”
“Yes, I’m Japanese, I know, but Japan was never my home. My home is in China. Once you lose your home, you’re a rootless wanderer. People call me a cosmopolitan. They say that the world is my home. I’ve often said so myself. I like to think that it’s true. But in fact, in my heart, I’m homeless, like a Jew. Which makes the suffering of the poor Palestinians even more astonishing to me. How could the Jews do something like that to another people, the Jews who have suffered so much from persecution themselves? How could they do it?”
I said that it wasn’t just the Jews. I tried to explain to her that it was the whole system of Western imperialism, led by America, and manipulated by the Jews. The Jews may have suffered in the past, but they had blown their suffering out of all proportion, as an excuse to behave just like the Nazis. This was their revenge. The question is whether they were manipulating the Western powers into carrying out their vengeance on an innocent people, or whether the Western powers were using the Jews to control the Middle East. Without Arab o
il, the capitalist system would collapse.
Yamaguchi-san was observing the other people in the restaurant while I spoke. She gently admonished me for being too much of an intellectual. “All that theory,” she said, “is too difficult for me. I just think of all the human suffering. The politics is for academics. A journalist must show the lives of real people, their bravery, their love, their dreams.”
I understood her feelings. That is the way I had felt myself. But was it enough? Wasn’t there a danger of lapsing into bourgeois sentimentalism? What are feelings, if they are not followed up by action? Leila Khaled had stirred something in me that I couldn’t quite put in words, but there was something in her manner that conveyed an accusation, not just of the Zionists but of all those, like myself, who refused to help, who turned their backs, who went back home to write their articles, or make their little TV programs, without the guts to help in a cause crying for justice. I knew this may have sounded impertinent, but I put it to Yamaguchisan that we Japanese had a special responsibility to fight against colonial oppression, since we had once been oppressors ourselves.
She put her glasses back on. She didn’t like people to see when she had been crying. I felt a little guilty, like a trespasser of some kind. But then she said something that I’ll never forget: “I hate violence and war. I’ve seen enough of that when I was in China. All I’ve ever wanted was peace. I don’t understand why people want to kill each other. I’m a journalist, not an activist. But you’re young. You still have a whole life ahead of you. You’re right. We Japanese have to make amends. You must do what you think is right. Don’t just obey the authorities. Don’t be a frog in the Japanese well. You must think internationally. All the time we have been here, I’ve been thinking of China, the China of my student days in Peking, when my dearest friends were talking about resistance against Japan. It was all so confusing for me. I couldn’t see clearly what we Japanese were doing. Now I do. The Jews, who have suffered themselves, have become the new oppressors. But we Japanese, who were the oppressors once, must help the oppressed. This time, we must be on the right side.”
I don’t believe in coincidence. Everything in life happens for a reason. My meeting in Beirut with one of the Japanese volunteers came about because I was making a TV program with Yamaguchi Yoshiko, but this event had such important consequences for me that I know it was meant to be. As soon as I saw Hanako’s sweet round face, her silky black hair falling halfway down her back, her kind eyes, I knew that she was unlike any woman I had ever seen, even in the movies. If I had been a Christian I would have described her face as that of a Madonna. Like Leila’s, Hanako’s beauty came from her faith. Her strength was her beauty. She radiated a kind of inner glow that drew me to her instantly, like a helpless child.
Yamaguchi-san interviewed Fujisawa Hanako in the same office where we had met with Abu Bassam earlier. Indeed, Bassam was there, sipping coffee under the poster of Chairman Mao. “One day,” he said, shining with goodwill, like a roly-poly Buddha, “when we have reclaimed our beloved homeland, we will live in peace with everyone, Jews, Christians, Muslims. That’s the way it always was in our culture. People say we hate the Jews. They’re quite wrong. Hatred of the Jews is a European invention. We Arabs always treated the Jews with great respect, as a people of the Book.”
Yamaguchi-san nodded as he spoke. Then she sighed, as though burdened with a great sorrow. Why, she asked Hanako, why did she believe in armed struggle? Couldn’t we fight for our ideals without violence? This time it was Hanako’s turn to nod. She understood how Yamaguchi-san felt, but, she said with a warm smile, “guns are good.” Yamaguchi-san shifted uncomfortably in her chair. There was an awkward silence. Still smiling, Hanako continued: “Without guns, we can’t have real democracy.” Yamaguchi-san, astonished: “What can you possibly mean by that?” Hanako looked at Bassam. “Bassam, did I ever tell you the story of the guns of Tanegashima?” He shook his head.
“Let me tell you, then. In the middle of the sixteenth century, several Portuguese ships landed on the island of Tanegashima. They brought many things, Bibles, spices, sponge cakes, silk, wine, atlases, telescopes, and matchlock guns, two of which were presented to the Lord of Tanegashima, who was deeply impressed by these priceless weapons and promptly used them to go duck hunting. We Japanese were always good at copying and then improving foreign inventions. So it was with guns. Soon the smiths of Tanegashima were making better guns than the Portuguese. Europeans didn’t know how to make matchlocks work in the rain. We Japanese figured out a way to do it. The feudal lords started supplying huge armies of conscripted peasants with muskets and went to war against one another. Great land battles took place in the central Japanese plains. Soldiers from both sides marched into storms of gunfire, and died by the thousands.
“Swordsmanship didn’t count for anything anymore. For the first time in history, a peasant soldier had the means to kill the highest-ranking samurai. Even a general in full armor was helpless against a musket-wielding peasant. When the most powerful Shogun, Hideyoshi, unified our country, he decided to put a stop to this. All weapons not belonging to samurai were confiscated. Samurai went back to their swords. Guns became obsolete. In a few years, Japanese no longer even knew they had ever existed. We achieved a state of absolute peace in Japan, which only came to an end when the Americans arrived in the port of Shimoda two hundred years later on their notorious black ships, loaded with firearms and cannon. So innocent were the Japanese of such destructive force that they believed the American guns were a kind of white man’s magic.”
Yamaguchi-san clapped her hands in delight. “But that’s a wonderful story!” she cried. “It shows that it’s possible to get rid of murderous weapons. That’s why we must support our peace constitution. We must show the world that there is a better way to solve our problems than going to war.”
Hanako shook her beautiful head. “Just a moment, Yamaguchisan,” she said, with a quick glance at Bassam, who was slipping a nugget of treacly baklava between his lips, “there is more to this story. Yes, the Japanese managed to get rid of firearms, it is quite true. But at the price of living for over two hundred years in a police state ruled by a military clique. We had peace at the cost of our freedom, of being at the mercy of any man of samurai rank who felt the urge to cut down a commoner, simply to practice his swordsmanship. Abolishing guns made us into a nation of slaves, and an easy prey for foreign imperialists.”
I was overwhelmed by the sharpness of her mind, the logic of her thinking, the purity of her conviction, the sound of her voice, so compassionate, and the sweetness of her manners. I loved this woman in a way I had never loved any woman before. I had always thought that the expression “love at first sight” was ridiculous, something in cheap novels for teenage girls. But I can’t think of another way to describe my feelings. That’s what it was. A spark had flown, a dart had penetrated my heart. I wanted to kiss her, hug her, hold her, there and then. I wanted to be with her forever.
Of course I didn’t kiss her. We were Japanese, after all. When she suggested, after the interview was over, that we should visit one of the refugee camps the following day, I was like jelly, stammering my thanks. I must have been perspiring. She asked me if I was all right and handed me her handkerchief. I thought I would melt from embarrassment, but also from the sheer delight at having encountered an angel.
The camp was really a slum of low brick houses with roofs made of plastic bags or, in the more fortunate cases, sheets of corrugated iron. There was uncollected garbage everywhere. A pack of filthy dogs was feeding on the refuse from an open bin. The camp had been targeted many times by the Israelis. Children dressed in rags were splashing around in filthy waterlogged craters where the Zionist shells had exploded. It looked, in fact, like hell on earth. And yet the people were smiling. Everyone we interviewed was convinced that victory would one day be theirs. The spirit of these people was so extraordinary that it put us to shame. Here, every man, woman, and child was a soldier. Women did t
heir laundry with Kalashnikovs stacked up against the wall behind the washtubs. Children from the age of five were trained to be freedom fighters. We saw these brave little souls practicing drills with wooden rifles.
Yamaguchi-san was taking notes in her reporter’s notebook when a young couple was brought over to talk to her. They were dressed very simply, and welcomed us in the formal Arab manner, asking where we were from. Hanako said we were all from Japan, which seemed to please them. Both had been born in a village near Tel Aviv, they told us. Although they were still children when they were brutally expelled, they had never forgotten their homes, and would pass on the memory to their baby boy, named Khalid. The father, Abu Mohammad, glowed with pride as he fingered his boy’s short dark hair. “He will fight for our freedom,” he said. When Yamaguchi-san asked the parents whether they weren’t worried that he might get hurt, they looked at their child with deep tenderness. The boy’s mother, Aisha, then handed him to Yamaguchi-san, who placed the infant on her lap. “Please accept our little boy as yours,” said Aisha. “You come from an ancient culture of warriors. Your blessing will ensure that he will grow up to be a kamikaze and bring honor to all of us.”
Yamaguchi-san, moved by their gesture, hugged the child before handing him back to his mother. “I will always be there when he needs me,” she said. They scribbled down their address in her notebook. Ten years later, the little boy and both his parents would be dead, murdered by the Christian Fascists doing the Zionists’ bidding. And by the time we got back to Tokyo, Abu Bassam, that smiling Buddha of a man, addicted to coffee and sticky baklava, would be blown to pieces by a car bomb in a quiet backstreet of West Beirut.