A Tokyo Romance

by Ian Buruma

  This, at any rate, was the ending shown in cinemas in China, where the mawkish sentiments convinced no one. An alternative scene was shot especially for Japanese audiences, in which the heroine does indeed die by drowning herself in the canal, thus conforming to the romantic Japanese stereotype of the woman sacrificing herself for the love of her man.

  The movie is remarkable enough as a piece of propaganda. Even more famous than the film was the lilting theme song, warbled by Li Xianglan herself: “China nights, ah, China nights / a lantern softly swinging outside the willow window / a red bird cage / China girl singing love songs / sad love songs . . .” The melody is a pastiche of Chinese music, a piece of chinoiserie for Japanese consumption. Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran in Japanese pronunciation, may have been excoriated for her treachery in China, but she became enormously popular in Japan, setting off a kind of boom in Chinese music and fashion. Japanese girls wanted to look like Ri Koran. People queued around the block to hear her sing at the biggest concert hall in Tokyo. And this was in 1940, when the war in China was raging. Only three years before China Nights, the Imperial Japanese Army had murdered and raped possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Chinese capital of Nanjing.

  The main reason for Li’s, or Ri’s, popularity was not her acting ability, which was modest, or her singing, which was only a little better, but her exotic appearance, exotic in Japanese eyes. A small woman with large swimming eyes, a lotus flower stuck in her hair, always dressed in silk Chinese robes, Ri was not a conventional beauty. But to Japanese in the 1940s she represented continental glamour. She was the face of pan-Asian propaganda, of all the “yellow-skinned races” happy to submit to the beneficent power of the Japanese Empire. In short, Ri Koran was an erotic fantasy.

  If the movie itself was memorable, the story behind it was even more so. For Li Xianglan was not really Chinese at all. Her actual name was Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese born in Manchuria in 1920. Her father, a chancer looking for adventure on the continent, taught Chinese to Japanese employees of the South Manchurian Railway Company. He was also a gambler, and financial trouble forced him to ask a sympathetic Chinese general to adopt his daughter. Perfectly bilingual in Japanese and Chinese, Yoshiko acquired some Russian, too, from her voice teacher, a White Russian opera singer who had fled to Manchuria after the revolution.

  In the late 1930s, the Manchukuo Film Association, run entirely by Japanese and financed by the Japanese army, was looking for a Chinese actress to perform in propaganda pictures as the local girl who falls in love with brave Japanese soldiers or engineers, thus promoting the Japanese cause. It proved to be impossible to find a Chinese actress who was either willing or able to fit the bill. After more casting around, the studio boss heard a young singer on the Manchukuo radio singing in three languages. The lure of stardom sufficed to persuade the girl to do her patriotic duty. And so the young Yoshiko was swiftly transformed into a Chinese actress, named Li Xianglan. Her true identity remained a closely guarded state secret.

  After the Japanese defeat in 1945, Chinese patriots in Shanghai arrested her as a traitor. The only way she could save herself from certain execution was to prove who she was by producing the necessary Japanese documents. Luckily for her, she had a powerful protector who was more than a father figure to her, the Japanese movie producer Kawakita Nagamasa, the man I sometimes saw hovering around the corridors of the Film Center in Tokyo. Yamaguchi Yoshiko, as she became once more, was his mistress for a time. Donald Richie remembered seeing her breaking down in loud sobs at the funeral of Kashiko, Kawakita’s wife. “Mother! Mother!” she cried, perhaps a little too histrionically, as the woman she had cuckolded was being laid to her eternal rest.

  Yamaguchi’s career picked up again under the U.S. occupation. American intelligence officers knew all about her, because China Nights was one of the films most frequently used for their Japanese language instruction. The pseudo-Chinese theme song had become famous in OSS training centers. Renamed Shirley Yamaguchi, the actress soon appeared in Hollywood films, such as House of Bamboo (1955), starring Robert Ryan as an American gangster in occupied Tokyo. The movie poster shows her half naked, the perfect “geisha girl” in the male American imagination. In one notable scene, she softly massages the naked back of Robert Stack, while murmuring that “Japanese women are born to please their men.”

  I was deeply struck by this double, or triple performance act, the Japanese woman pretending to be Chinese, acting in Japanese movies, the exotic pan-Asian and sultry geisha girl, the star who invited Japanese men to imagine fucking China, and Americans to fuck Japan.

  Yamaguchi’s bizarre story reminded me in a peculiar way of my own childhood. From an early age I was used to seeing cultural behavior as a kind of performance. With my maternal grandparents, themselves ultra-English children of German-Jewish immigrants, I acted the role of the perfect English boy, and reverted to being Dutch at home in The Hague, where I spent my early childhood playing cricket with Dutch Anglophiles putting on English airs, for entirely snobbish reasons, to set them apart from Dutch hoi polloi, just as a few generations before the smart set had spoken French in a lingering echo of aristocratic affectation. I fetishized Englishness long before I ever thought of Japan. Ri Koran spoke to me as a symbol, not so much of pan-Asianism, which obviously meant nothing to me, as of the ways we let our fantasies roam across national and racial borderlines, and of life as a continuing act.

  About ten years after seeing China Nights, I met Yamaguchi Yoshiko. She was a minister of parliament for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Hoping to improve relations with China, the party had recruited her as a kind of cultural diplomat. This was after she had reinvented herself once more, in the 1960s, as a television host, specializing in exclusive interviews with third-world dictators, such as Idi Amin and Kim Il-sung. The Palestinian cause, too, was one of her concerns, which brought her into the orbit of radical fringe groups on the far left, including some of the fellow travelers of the Japanese Red Army who had become directors of porno films.

  She spoke to me in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese, sometimes switching in midsentence. I can’t imagine that she would have done this when speaking to a Japanese. But I represented the outside world. We were sitting in her office near the Diet building. She still looked very much like a former movie star: not a wrinkle on her soft chalk-white face, large purple-framed spectacles, and jet-black hair with a lacquer-like sheen. An assistant in fluffy slippers poured us cups of green tea.

  “I still feel that China is my home,” she said. “I now look back at those films with shame. But I was young and did as I was told. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. You see, I saw myself as a bridge of friendship between Japan and the country of my birth.” Her eyes opened wide, in the helpless way I remembered from China Nights when she declared her love for the Japanese sailor, or in the way Princess Diana used to gain the sympathy of male journalists. I felt as if I was witnessing another well-practiced piece of theater.

  I asked her about meeting Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong, Yasser Arafat, and Kim Il-sung. “Ah, Kim Il-sung,” she said softly, “a much misunderstood man. He had the warmest handshake, and such piercing eyes. It was as if he could see straight through you.” And Chairman Mao . . . She appeared for a moment to be overcome with emotion. A light tremor went through her frame. “He was a great man, a great Asian man. And do you know what he said to me? He said that he had seen China Nights during the war and he thanked me for it. I felt as though a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”

  I didn’t quite know what to say. A better interviewer might have pushed her more. After a moment’s silence, she said: “I know I was once on the wrong side of things. That is why I want us all to be friends. I will be a bridge between peoples. That is my goal, my life’s work.”

  China Nights continued to haunt me through the years. I met Yamaguchi a few times afterward, but she remained an enigma. All I
ever got was a repeat performance. Her story had become a modern myth in Japan, celebrated in several movies, more than one ghosted autobiography, a play, a musical, and even a number of manga. She was never going to depart from the myth. I ended up writing a novel about her many years later, which is less a story about her actual life, the truth of which remains elusive, than a fictional account of her invented one.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE END, I had to leave my beloved apartment in Mejiro. The owners, a businessman with a crooked row of shiny gold teeth and his dreadful beady-eyed wife, wanted to tear the building down and build a modern apartment block, or perhaps a car park. I didn’t want to move, and neither did the anxious couple living downstairs. It is difficult to kick sitting tenants out in Japan, as long as they pay their rent in escrow at the local ward office. At first, the wife would drop by in an attempt to persuade us to move. I told her that I couldn’t afford to right now. Her eyes narrowed and a shrewd little smile cracked her powdery face: “We all know what gaijin are like. We know you gaijin are good at making money.”

  Always alert to an anti-Semitic slur, I thought of all the books I had seen at various stores in Tokyo explaining how Jews really ran the world. But I don’t think that is what she meant. Gaijin probably just meant gaijin: greedy, materialistic, crude.

  Persuasion soon changed to pressure. The anxious young mother downstairs was in tears one day after the landlady had threatened her, and warned that the house would collapse in an earthquake and her child would surely die. The landlady then threatened to alert my university if I continued to refuse to comply with her wishes. And sure enough, I was soon summoned to the office of the president of the arts school, a smiling bureaucrat who told me that he had heard about a certain problem to do with housing. I should of course understand that the university should never be inconvenienced in this manner again.

  And so I moved to a one-room apartment in an old geisha district, next door to a couple of fervent believers in the Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement. They would leave a copy of their religious paper at my door every day, until the pile of unread journals became too high and had to be removed. I used my tiny lavatory as an improvised darkroom to develop film. Next door was an old-fashioned public bathhouse, where I would go for a wash every evening. My fellow bathers were very polite. They pretended that I wasn’t there.

  * * *

  • • •

  TO CLAIM THAT what happened later had anything to do with my odious landlady in Mejiro, or the pusillanimity of the Nichidai arts school president, would be disingenuous. There is simply no excuse for it. My behavior on New Year’s Eve in Kyoto was simply disgraceful.

  Five of us traveled down to Kyoto: my friend Tsuda, my flatmate Rob, an American student of Japanese history named Jim, a fellow Nichidai student we called Kin-san, and myself. Junko, a young avant-garde dancer who had attached herself to Rob, joined us later. We all stayed in one room at a rather dilapidated inn on the Kamo River. The inn, like similar places in the neighborhood, had once been a brothel. After prostitution was officially banned in the late 1950s, many of these old houses were converted into cheap inns, catering mostly to young foreigners. Japanese tended to stay away from them, worried about their disreputable associations. The kind old lady who ran the inn, named O-Kinu, had herself once worked there as a prostitute. She had fond memories of American soldiers during the postwar occupation.

  The first day of the year is the most important festive day in Japan. Families gather to eat sumptuous cold delicacies all day, carefully prepared long before the event. Friends are invited to drink sake and eat sticky rice balls in miso broth from the early morning, usually after visiting temples and shrines the night before. O-Kinu, who might have been a prostitute but was a proud stickler for Kyoto tradition, promised that we would wake up to a spread of Kyoto New Year dishes in the morning.

  Tsuda had also arranged something special for New Year’s Day. He had always been good at making an impression on old ladies, who saw him as a promising intellectual whom they could help on his way to an illustrious literary career. One of these ladies was a very refined person from an old Kyoto family. She lived in a beautiful traditional house with a well-kept Japanese garden, and a room for tea ceremonies. She had kindly invited Tsuda to bring his friends for a traditional New Year’s lunch.

  We didn’t give much thought to all these feasts to come, as we set out on the frosty New Year’s Eve, with the stars blazing brightly over the snow-covered temple roofs of Kyoto. The streets were filled with throngs of young Japanese, many of them dressed in kimonos for the occasion, slowly shuffling their way to the ancient religious places that had miraculously survived the war, since at the last minute Kyoto had been struck off the list of cities to be obliterated by an atom bomb. (The story goes that Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had visited Kyoto before the war and couldn’t bear the idea of destroying this historic city.)

  We had already drunk quite a lot of beer, and were now passing around a huge bottle of sake, which we drank straight from the bottle. Dizzy from drink and the freezing cold, we began to get a little boisterous. There would be no chance that these gaijin were going to be politely ignored this time. I cannot remember whether it was Jim or myself who decided that it would be a splendid joke to reverse roles and subject Japanese strangers to all the clichés that we had had to hear in our daily lives. Can you stomach raw fish? we would ask astonished passersby. What about chopsticks? How amazing that you can use them so skillfully. And could you tell us all about America? And so it went on, as we got steadily more inebriated and obnoxious. In any other country we would have received a fully justified thrashing. We can only thank Japanese politeness for the fact that we did not.

  Tsuda and Kin-san pretended to find all of this highly entertaining as well. One large bottle of sake followed another. After midnight, I literally could not stand on my feet any longer and had to be dragged back to our inn, where Kin-san fell straight through the glass window of our room, creating a cold draft that none of us noticed since we swiftly fell into a deep sleep, except for Jim, or Rob, and the young dancer. One of them, or perhaps both—no one could quite recall—had had sex with the dancer on the matted floor in the midst of shards of glass.

  We woke up late the next morning to find the beautifully prepared dishes laid out by O-Kinu on the table, with little bottles of sake for each of us. Just looking at food or drink was enough to make us feel sick. Rob and Kin-san rolled over moaning and fell into a kind of coma. When O-Kinu came in to wish us a happy New Year and ask whether we had enjoyed the meal, I had to make excuses and explain that we had had a rough night. Her eyes took in the scene of utter pandemonium in the room and she withdrew without saying a word.

  It was about two in the afternoon when we finally roused ourselves with pounding headaches and queasy stomachs to visit Tsuda’s kind and elegant patroness. We had been expected at noon. The square black table was covered in the daintiest dishes, beautifully prepared herring roe and chrysanthemum-shaped lotus roots in black lacquer boxes, plump red salmon roe and giant grilled shrimp brined in sugar. Our hostess, dressed in a graceful kimono of discreet pink and gray flower patterns, explained, without a hint of annoyance, that it would have been so much better if we had arrived on time, since the colors of the bowls and plates had been especially chosen to match the light shining through the rice-paper windows. As it was later now, she had been forced replace the utensils with a different set to match the time of day.

  As she was explaining this, and we were trying to pick at some of the dishes for the sake of politeness, Tsuda had withdrawn to the lavatory, emitting awful gurgling noises, which we were all studiously pretending not to hear. Despite our delicate physical condition, we managed to sit through the lunch making polite conversation. Jim picked up one of the lovely tea bowls, turned it around, and asked if it was from the Edo Period. Yes, said the kind lady, “you are quite right. Y
ou foreigners are so knowledgeable. We Japanese are quite ignorant in comparison. But it isn’t quite from the Edo Period, but a little bit older than that. Azuchi Momoyama, actually, late sixteenth century.”

  After Tsuda had finally emerged from his ablutions, it was almost time to leave. The sun was already sinking, casting a lovely glow onto the exquisite dishes we had left largely untouched on the table. We thanked our hostess profusely and apologized for having been late. “Never mind,” said the lady. “You are all most welcome to come back at any time.”

  I was the first to climb down from the wooden hallway into the stone entrance where our shoes were waiting for us in a perfect straight line. I bent over my shoes, about to put them on, facing the door, with my back to my friends and the lady of the house who was bowing them out. And out it came, I could not help it, like a short blast from a trumpet. There was a second of stunned silence. I stood up. We all pretended that we hadn’t heard or smelled a thing.

  Ono Kazuo dancing in his seventies

  SIX

  New Year’s Eve, 1977, at the Asbestos Studio. This two-story building in Meguro Ward was named after the poisonous insulation material manufactured there before it became a dance studio. Various people on the ground floor were taking turns pounding sticky rice with a heavy wooden mallet to produce traditional rice cakes for the New Year. I knew that many of them were famous. But I recognized only a few, and had little idea of how distinguished they actually were: Ikeda Masuo, the print artist and novelist, thin like a dandelion, with bushy curls sprouting from his narrow head, was sprawled on the floor fast asleep, despite the hubbub around him. Japan’s greatest modern poet, Tanikawa Shuntaro, was in deep conversation with Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, the pale-skinned essayist and translator of the Marquis de Sade. Shibusawa wore dark glasses and spoke formal eighteenth-century French in a soft halting voice. Hosoe Eikoh, the photographer, who once took pictures of Mishima posing naked as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows, pointed his camera at a group of male dancers with shaven heads like brown eggs, bobbing up and down in the melee. I noticed the architect Isozaki Arata, and Ono Kazuo, a refined-looking gentleman in his seventies, who was well known for his slow stylized tango dance performances in white-lace ball gowns, performances he would continue into his nineties, even though he could barely walk. Shiraishi Kazuko, the sexy poet and former lover of Muhammad Ali, was there. Yamashita Yosuke, the free-jazz pianist in steel-rimmed glasses, was pouring sake for Maro Akaji, an actor and a dancer.