The China Lover

by Ian Buruma

  When we made our tearful farewells from him, and Hanako, he kissed me and said that I was welcome to come back anytime. Even more precious to me were Hanako’s words in parting. She looked at me intently and said: “I know you’ll be back here soon.” I knew that I would, too. I knew I had found a home at last.

  8

  AFTER BEIRUT, I was utterly disgusted with the country of my birth. Sure, the streets were cleaner, and the trains ran on time; they always do in Fascist states. The millions of salarymen, teeming through the stations like gray-suited rabbits, returned every night to their little suburban hutches, where their wives tucked them into bed, safe and snug. This was a society addicted to security, where the salaried rabbits had learned to stop thinking; a society that prized mediocrity, without a sense of honor or higher purpose; a society grown soft and selfish; a place from which the only escape was the false consciousness of pornographic fantasy. And the rabbits looked content. That was the worst of it. They had exchanged their brains, and their souls, for— what? Comfort. Since political resistance was now useless in Japan, the few remaining revolutionaries who still retained some vestige of their souls had turned on one another, like rats trapped in a sack.

  Again, nothing in life occurs without purpose. Of that I remain firmly convinced. It all happened only a few weeks after our return to Tokyo: Twelve soldiers of the United Red Army murdered by their own comrades. Cops in a shoot-out with five survivors of the purge in a Karuizawa mountain lodge. Manager of the lodge taken hostage. Round-the-clock television coverage, watched by eighty-five percent of the Japanese population. Two cops killed. Hostage released. Five arrests. The “United Red Army Incident”!

  It was clear to me from the very beginning that Japanese TV had become the voice of the oppressors, making a sentimental melodrama out of the woman taken hostage, presenting the police as national heroes, and the Red Army as criminals. The people had been thoroughly brainwashed by the ruling class. But the way Japanese minds had been colonized by the authorities was interesting: it was done by turning news into spectacle. The Karuizawa shoot-out was just another cop show, with good guys triumphing over the bad guys. Politics had turned into soap opera, and armed struggle into a samurai drama. The Red Army warriors had played their parts to perfection, looking like stage villains, poking their guns through the windows of their mountain lodge.

  And I felt complicit. Wasn’t I working for the same TV station that licked its chops over the siege in Karuizawa? What was our program about the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people if not another kind of entertainment for the rabbits glued to their flickering shrines? To them, it was a travelogue, political porn, pictures for the armchair reveries of the petty bourgeois. Even so, after the United Red Army Incident, David Niven had got cold feet about broadcasting the show. He was afraid that the Red Army fighters for Palestinian justice were portrayed too sympathetically. He was right. They were. But he needn’t have worried, because the showbiz-hungry, brainwashed Japanese rabbits showed no interest in the Palestinians. All they cared about was the glamorous presence of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, in her miniskirts, her shiny white boots, and her keffiyeh, which she wore on the show. Her face was everywhere: on the covers of fashion magazines, on subway posters, in department stores, and on TV chat shows. She won a prize as Journalist of the Year. Yamaguchi Yoshiko’s star was reborn in Beirut. And I was disgusted.

  But I didn’t blame her. Her intentions were sincere. When we talked about her new fame, she told me, as she so often did, that I was being “too intellectual.” Her star status, tedious as it was, could only help to promote the matters we believed in. She even asked me to help her write a book about the Palestinian struggle. And there were other things we could do. She was brimming with ideas. What about a program about Colonel Gaddafi, Libya’s wonderful revolutionary leader? Or an interview with Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader of North Korea? And who knows, we might even get permission to go to China and meet Chairman Mao.

  I didn’t want to let her down. But the truth of the matter was that I was wasting my time in Japan. I felt so powerless there. I couldn’t wait to get back to Beirut, for that was where I was needed. There, everything felt real, important, vital. It was impossible to erase the images from my mind of the children’s faces in the refugee camp, the pride of Khalid’s parents, the resolve of the freedom fighters in the PFLP office, and Hanako, of course, Hanako with her sweet Madonna smile, her total dedication, her love of the poor and the oppressed. Hanako, who knew that I would soon be back.

  After Beirut, even Tokyo, the city of my dreams, seemed flat. Banchan was away, making another pink film, something about sex and student politics in Kyoto. Talking to most of my old friends was impossible. Their eyes would wander when I told them about Beirut and the Palestinian struggle. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on them. They had their own lives to live and Beirut was far away. But wasn’t this just how the Japanese had behaved during the war? Pretending not to know, when innocent Chinese civilians were being massacred by our soldiers. Nanking must have seemed far away then, too. Why do people never learn the lessons of history? Do we never change? Is change impossible?

  I didn’t think so. I didn’t want to think so. And this is why I will always be grateful to Yamaguchi-san. Her enthusiasm was the one thing that kept my hopes alive. She was different from most Japanese, no doubt because she grew up outside Japan. Maybe Okuni was right, and the landscapes impressed on our minds in early childhood do shape our perspectives. Just think of the difference between growing up in the vast empty plains of Manchuria, and being trapped on a narrow little archipelago filled with rice paddies, volcanic mountains, and overcrowded cities. A child raised in Dairen or Harbin would have been exposed to people from all over the world, while we saw only other Japanese, just like us. Unless you happened to live near a base. Even then, the only foreigners I ever saw were Yankee soldiers, and they were country boys themselves, still reeking of cow dung.

  I finally took Yamaguchi-san round to meet Okuni. We went to see his latest play in the great yellow tent, pitched on a vacant spot beside the lily pond in Ueno. It was on one of those humid summer nights when the cicadas rasp and the fireflies set the pond alight. The tent was full, with no standing room left. A solitary electric fan valiantly displaced some warm air, and even that stopped when a fuse blew halfway through the play. Sitting on the dirt floor, packed together with hundreds of sweating young people, was uncomfortable. But I didn’t mind. Good theater shouldn’t be comfortable. People must sacrifice comfort for art. I noticed Vanoven, the American homo. When he spotted me, he smiled and held up his thumb. I felt rather sorry for him, though I don’t really know why. There was something sad about the crazy foreigner in the Japanese crowd. When I asked him whether he was staying for a drink later, he shook his head. “Another time,” he shouted.

  Yamaguchi-san, noticing my exchange with Vanoven, asked me how I knew that foreigner. I explained that I had met him in Okuni’s tent and asked her whether she had ever come across him. “I’ve not had the pleasure,” she said.

  The play was a fantasy based on the movie Lost Horizon. In Okuni’s version, the survivors from the plane crash in the Himalayan mountains were not British, of course, but Japanese, one of them a famous character from a popular movie about a detective with seven faces. Shangri-la was not part of Tibet, but Asakusa after the bombing raids. The Grand Lama was a popular singer of Japanese ballads, who was also a serial killer. In the last scene, the back of the tent opened up to reveal the entire cast singing a wartime ballad about kamikaze pilots. Their faces were white and streaked with blood, the ghosts of those who died in the Asakusa bombings.

  Yamaguchi-san said she didn’t understand the play at all, but loved it all the same. Okuni laughed and asked her why she hadn’t come to see The Ri Koran Story. She pulled a face and said: “I suffered too much in the past. I don’t want to remember. Ri Koran is dead.” Okuni’s eyes widened. I could tell he was fascinated. To him she was still Ri Koran
, whatever she said. She would always be Ri Koran. Yamaguchi Yoshiko didn’t interest him.

  “But we can’t just slough off the past,” Okuni said. “We are made of our memories. And besides, Ri was a great actress.”

  “But I’m no longer Ri, and I never wanted to be an actress in the first place. I wanted to be a journalist. An actress does as she is told. I was fooled. It’s different being a reporter. A reporter is free. An actress can’t do anything to change the world.”

  Okuni shook his head and said: “Journalism is just about facts. It’s the truth of accountants. We artists can show a higher truth.”

  “Well, I prefer reality.” Yamaguchi-san then talked about our trip to Beirut and the Palestinian struggle. I could tell that this bored Okuni. I could see it in his face. It was how most of my friends reacted when I spoke about these things. One detail, however, caught his imagination: Khalid’s mother asking Yamaguchi-san to raise her boy as a kamikaze. “Amazing,” he said, his little dark eyes shining. “Can you imagine such passion in Japan today? Here, when the students occupied the campus in protest against the Security Treaty, mothers threw candies over the wall, ha ha.”

  Yamaguchi-san suggested that “maybe we don’t need heroes anymore.”

  “But we do,” said Okuni, “we do. In the movies.” He was still laughing, and asked one of the actors to bring his guitar. We clapped along as he sang a song from his latest play: “On the far side of the Sumida River is the Land of No Return, Where lovers roam and home fires burn, On the far side . . .”

  “Did you know,” said Yamaguchi-san, “that I was in the musical version of Lost Horizon? On Broadway, in New York.” Yo Kee Hee, who hadn’t said much all evening, asked her to sing a song from the musical. Yamaguchi-san swatted this idea away. No, she couldn’t possibly. It was all too long ago. She had lost her voice. But Yo wouldn’t be denied. After a bit more coaxing, Yamaguchi-san sang a song called “The Man I Never Met.” Her soprano voice was as beautiful as ever. Okuni wiped a tear from his eyes. “Ri Koran is still alive!” he shouted, giggling with excitement.

  “She is dead,” said Yamaguchi-san quite firmly. “That was Shirley Yamaguchi, anyway. And she’s no longer with us, either.”

  “What about singing ‘China Nights’?” suggested Yo, not without a note of malice.

  I froze, hoping Yamaguchi-san wouldn’t be offended. “Never,” she said, with a firmness that closed the matter at once. “I will never sing that song again.” Changing the subject, she asked Okuni where he was going to pitch his tent next. He mentioned Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto. Something extraordinary always happened in Osaka, he said. “We usually pitch our tent in Tennoji, near the Zoo. At night you can hear the wild animals howling, and once an escaped sea eagle flew right into the tent, just as Yo was singing a song about a ghostly captain roaming forever in his submarine.”

  “Perhaps,” said Yamaguchi-san, “you should think of going abroad, pitch your tent in other countries, become more international.”

  Okuni’s eyes lit up. “But not America or Europe,” he said. “What about Asia? That would be good. In Seoul. Or Manila, or Bangkok—” He reached for the saké bottle. His high-pitched giggle sounded almost like the shriek of one of those wild animals in Osaka Zoo. “Sato,” he roared. “What about Beirut? Why don’t we put up the yellow tent in the middle of a Palestinian camp?”

  “Too dangerous,” we all said in chorus. “Crazy.” “Never get permission.” “We don’t have the money” (Yo Kee Hee). “What about the food?” (Nagasaki). “And the language?”

  “We’ll do it in Arabic,” shouted Okuni, with a beam of madness in his eyes. “Next stop Beirut. The Existential Theater for the Palestinian guerrillas. That’ll be some situation!”

  Yes, I thought, and a tuna fish will one day climb Mount Fuji.

  9

  IF THE TARMAC hadn’t been melting in the heat on the day I arrived, I would have gladly kissed the ground of Beirut International Airport. A week later, I was in a training camp learning how to fire a Kalashnikov and throw hand grenades. The hand grenades, frankly, left me cold. But the gun was something else. I’m not a military type. So in the beginning my shoulder felt sore from the kick, and I burned my fingers on the gun metal. But there is nothing, nothing at all, more satisfying than holding a warm Kalashnikov and letting it rip. We used pictures of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir for target practice. I didn’t kill them that day, unfortunately.

  There were people from all over in the training camp, from Argentina and Peru, from Africa and the Philippines. At night, sharing the flatbread and hummus with our Palestinian instructors, we felt like an international family, a family of revolutionaries. My English was poor, and some of the South Americans spoke it even worse, but I loved listening to their stories, about fighting the white Fascists to liberate the peasants. I was embarrassed when they asked me about the Ainu or the Koreans in Japan, for I had never given them much thought. Sure, I had envied my schoolmates when they left for North Korea, but not for any political reason. Their lives just sounded more interesting than ours. I went along to the Korean bars with my friend Hayashi, because he liked going there and I quite liked the kimchi, but that was about the extent of my involvement with the Koreans. Hanako, who visited the camp from time to time, had lectured our comrades on the discrimination of minorities in Japan, so they may well have known more about the subject than I did. I had to be careful. I made sure to look serious and nod in agreement when they talked about racism in Japan. What else could I do, without looking like a complete hypocrite?

  I felt closest to the Germans, especially Dieter and Anke, commandos in the German Red Army Faction. Like me, they had had no military training before. Dieter was a philosophy major from Tübingen and Anke was a high school teacher. They were both tall and skinny. His bony face and thin blond wisp of a beard always reminded me of Don Quixote, a Nordic Don Quixote. Anke had straight dark hair and dreamy brown eyes. She loved German literature. She told me all about Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass. I hadn’t read either of them. We also talked a lot about the Second World War and the failure of our parents to resist fascism. I even talked about my father, but only because they went on about their parents so often. I felt I had to reciprocate, to be fair to them. Anke’s father had been a member of the Nazi Party, and she was terribly ashamed of him. Dieter’s father, like mine, had gone missing in the war, somewhere on the Russian front. Although they were foreigners, I felt closer to them than anyone, except Hanako, of course. We understood one another on a profound level, in our minds, but especially in our hearts. Our friendship went deeper even than my friendship with Okuni. There was no idle chatter among us. There was no time for that.

  The camp closed down early. The streets were too dark to hang around in. The electricity supply was limited and most people went to bed as soon as the streetlights were turned off. All you heard was the sound of crying children and, in the early morning, the call to prayers. Our instructors took little notice of this. They were socialists. The Arab revolution was their creed. Dieter, Anke, and I often talked until late at night, by candlelight, when everyone else was asleep, about history, politics, art, and literature. We agreed about almost everything and they opened up a whole new world for me of German writers. Apart from Böll and Grass, I learned about Novalis, Hölderlin, and Rilke.

  Just once did we have a serious quarrel. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a quarrel. It was more like a misunderstanding, about something I said, inadvertently, which put my friends in a rage. But I didn’t really argue with them. I didn’t have the words in English. We were discussing strategies in our armed struggle against Israel. I favored hijackings, while they saw more hope in bombing raids on Israeli targets. Dieter was convinced that “every Israeli citizen should be made to feel the pain of the Palestinian people.” I didn’t disagree, but added, rather matter-of-factly, “So here you are again, fighting against the Jews.”

  I thought Dieter was going to explode. His bony face wen
t horribly pale, making him look more than ever like a Nordic Don Quixote. He banged the hard mud floor with his fist and screamed something at me in German. Anke was shaking, and stared at me with a look of horror, as though I’d swallowed a live rat. Dieter was beside himself: “We are not fighting the Jews! That’s what the Nazis did! How dare you insinuate that we are like the Nazis!” I protested that I wasn’t doing anything of the kind, but with my stammer and my broken English, perhaps I hadn’t made myself clear. “You were clear,” shrieked Anke. “Quite clear!” Then she started to sob: “We thought you were our friend and comrade, so why do you have to insult us?”

  People sleeping around us were beginning to stir. A light was switched on. One of the Peruvians asked what was going on. “He insulted us,” said Dieter. “He called us Nazis.” An Italian Red Brigadist called Marcello, who had been woken up by the commotion, asked me why I said that. I suddenly felt very alone, and horribly misunderstood. I stammered something about fighting the Jews. Marcello, a peaceful, friendly guy, tried to calm the German comrades down. He said that as a Japanese I might not understand the historical nuances. We weren’t fighting the Jews, he said, only the Zionists. And I should apologize to our German comrades.

  So I apologized, bowing to my friends, asking them to forgive me. Dieter said okay, and accepted my handshake. Anke was still sobbing, tugging at her straight dark hair with both hands. But I wasn’t satisfied. Something wasn’t right here. I couldn’t leave the subject dangling like this. So, just as people were lying down to sleep, I said: “But what about Jewish capital?” “What about it?” said Marcello. Well, I said, clearly Jewish money was pressing the Western powers to support the Zionists. “Tomorrow,” said Marcello, “we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” No, said Dieter, who was very calm now, “we’ll talk about it now.” And he gave a typical Dieter-like lecture, concise, logical, about the subject at hand. “Jewish capital,” he explained, “is USA capital. We must resist the USA in our struggle against fascism. But that doesn’t mean we fight the Jews. On the contrary, the Jews were victims of fascism. Our resistance against fascism now is part of our solidarity with the Jews, to make up for the cowardice of our parents. Gute Nacht.”